Saturday, May 23, 2020

F-14 Tomcat ( US Navy ), Night Scramble! by coloured pencils


F-14 Tomcat ( US Navy ), Night Scramble! by coloured pencils


F-14 is definitely the legendary air-fighter which was designed to shot down enemy airplanes and ballistic missiles from the evil socialist empire!!

F-14 Tomcat is my most memorable one! Not only its specification but also its ultra innovative design with beautiful line are really attractive despite its massive cost for purchase, fuelling, and maintenance.

Sunday, March 29, 2020

How free can individuals be in liberalism under a rational expectation

The editor claims for liberating individuals and the motto of his project is spreading liberalism (In the U.S.A., it is referred as Libertarian or Classical-Liberalism). By contrast, there is another task to consider after liberating individuals to live in a liberalised world. The task is considering what kind of freedom individuals achieve in their aspiring liberalism.

It is also important to note that liberation means to free someone whereas its meaning contains a far more comprehensive concept than mere freedom. Generally speaking, freedom is considered to be the unconditional freedom and limited to a certain individual and a group meanwhile liberty promotes a conditional and comprehensive freedom for individuals and their living world. All the other political philosophies claim for unconditionally expanding their own freedom for their own interest and ego for a limited numbers of individuals belonging to their interest group. On the other hand, liberalism regards highly of expanding the comprehensive freedom sustainable in the long term for all individuals and their living environment by occasionally restricting some form of the short term freedom.

In another word, individuals are not allowed to be unconditionally free in liberalism, and the guiding principle of how freedom is distributed among individuals can be more complicated and restrictive than the other political philosophies. Liberalism attempts to maximise the aggregate freedom by reforming the flow of available freedoms among individuals. Then, as it is so complicated that there are different perspectives on how to achieve liberalism, and it has been debated among unique political philosophers to determine what form of liberalism should be and how individuals should sustain their aspiring liberalism in their living environment.

The firstly introduced concept is the liberalism guided by a philosophical guiding principle promoting as well as controlling the liberty among individuals. In this concept, individuals pursue liberalism as their political ideal where individuals voluntarily act to fulfil their freedom within the condition whilst allowing the others' freedom within the condition and establishing the long term sustainable liberty for all. Individuals are endowed with the right to be free meanwhile they have to fulfil the duty to obtain their right, and there is no authority cohesively enforcing them to do so that they are encouraged to voluntarily trade off between their right and duty. The duty includes the following two things. The one is the virtue where individuals work at something they are excel at to contribute for the others and their environment. The other is the moral and legal guide line which individuals are discouraged from deviating from in order to sustain the balance of their permitted freedom for each individual and their aggregate long term freedom for all individuals. This is considered as the idealistic liberalism because this is the ideal situation where individuals voluntarily pursue themselves for accomplishing their ideal.

The next introduced concept is the liberalism guided by more realistic needs and wants which are notably biological and psychological. Instead of aspiring for an ideal (the comprehensive philosophical and political meaning of freedom), this focuses on the matters concerning with biological survival competition and psychological interference among individuals. Individuals freely trade off their pleasures and pains directly related to their biological and psychological sensation instead of abstract concepts like right and duty. Their limitation of freedom is determined spontaneously at the equilibrium point where each parties of individuals agree on the spot. Furthermore, when it comes to the matter of fulfilling the interest of an institutional group of individuals, then it considers this institution as a big organic body of one individual where the individuals living within it are supposed to act as though they were biological cells and cogwheels of this institutional body. Within it, individuals may have to occasionally sacrifice their freedom in order to increase the freedom for their living institute. There are ongoing conflict between different institutes, between an institute and individuals living in it, and between individuals themselves. Instead of their shared principle, the power balance determines the stable outcome of the distribution of freedom. Therefore, there may need an authority powerful enough to accomplish it although this authority must be rational enough to promote the equitable fair trade among these conflicting parties.

These two concepts seem to be conflicting theories not philosophically agreeing with each other. The first idealistic concept seems to be the closest to the world succeeding in establishing liberalism although it is still unrealistic to expect all individuals living in this world to share one universal ethical principle. It may conversely require a moral entrepreneur autocracy to cohesively teach all individuals to implant this principle into them before enabling all individuals to voluntarily act themselves if requiring to establish in the relatively short term. In order to establish this idealistic concept, it will require time, effort, and perseverance of promoters of liberalism to gradually enable all individuals to be enlightened with the ideal. The second realistic concept may be far more effective to instantly establish the liberalism than the previously introduced idealistic one because the stimulus of inducing individuals are visible and immediately control-able variables. The problem of this realistic concept is that it induces to the state where liberalism gradually declines in the relatively longer term after the physically stronger individuals and institute survive to monopolise the power of the trade. All in all, both the former concept and the latter concept have advantage and disadvantage of establishing liberalism.

In order to keep insisting on liberalism, liberalist theorists and political activists ought to recall both the concepts and somehow synthesise them to create their own theory of form their own liberalist theory. On the spot, it had better refer to visible and understandable variables for majority individuals to settle their agreement for maximising the freedom of all parties simultaneously. At the same time, it ought to recall the abstract principle of liberty in their mind which promotes not only physical but also spiritual/philosophical aspirations of individuals to voluntarily sustain their liberal life and furthermore expand their liberty. Under the certain condition where individuals are rational to chose and their living environment provides them with the rational options, these two concepts are essential to take into consideration to think of liberalism. There are more other conditions of pursuing liberalism than these previously mentioned two concepts meanwhile these two concepts are most hotly debated topics of theories of liberalism. From the editor's point of view, these two concepts can be synthesised together under the condition where both individuals' choice and their living environment's options are rationally available.





Saturday, August 03, 2019

No More Economic Theories !



Currently, there does not seem to be any way to control the world economy. Regardless of the will of individuals, economic indices are volatile and the prediction hardly predicts any expected outcome. Economic theories seem to be excellent at explaining the nature of how various economic activities whilst they seem to be poor at predicting the outcomes caused by these activities. Individual agents in this world have become so interconnected with each other that small margin of errors and frictions is no longer insignificant to ignore. Any spontaneously matters of this world are now influencing economy simultaneously. In another word, predicting economic outcomes is like predicting any seismologic matters. Predicting and controlling when another recession strikes is like doing for when the next earth quake occurs.

I have never regretted having studied economics even in a postgraduate degree level. The subject economics helps to systematically understand the nature of how any trades, decision making processes, and power relationship are maintained in daily life, business, and politics. However, I have simply found out that professional economists are just adding up footnotes onto the already invented economic theories, and any brand new invention, surprising the mass in this world, seems to be unable to come up.

Adam Smith, the father of economics, has already summed up the fundamental principle of economics. Various classical economic theorists added up some unavoidable footnotes onto Adam Smith's work. Then, John Maynard Keynes introduced countermeasures against chaos causing economy deviating from the ordinary movement of what Adam Smith explained. All these economists admired Adam Smith and kept his idea as the fundamental criterion of their own theories. Market economy itself does not seem to fade out as long as trades are carried out in our daily life and the notion of private properties, which seems to be one of innate human natures, prevails to exist. Then, the free market principle explained by Adam Smith keeps prevailing, and only some minor reforms are adapted to it.

Karl Marx attempted to offer an alternative principle but his principle sounds suspicious. Marxian theory is that it claims for a very abstruct factor such as determining the value of labour which is often substantially undervalued in the market economy. The problem of this claim is that the scaling method of this value is utterly subjective and this is inconceivable as same as the quality of a faithful spirit. Despite materialist focus and atheist perspective, Marxian theory sounds more like a religious theology expecting for an absolute being and a universal morality judging human qualities. Furthermore, Marx's theoretical backgrounds are actually not so original. His basis economic principle highly relies on David Ricardo's theory. His philosophical foundation is based on his teacher Friedrich Hegel's dialectic philosophy. Marxist economics thus prevails as one form of culture meanwhile it seems to be difficult to categorise as a newly invented academic theory analysing economy.

Adam Smith said "Only fair is laissez-faire (Let it do)". This implies that there is no way economy can be manipulated and there is no universal principle of how economy should be operated. Economy nowadays is prone to be influenced and even messed up by any chaotic friction. In addition, reactions to any change and any economic policy in economy vary across different psychological mindsets of individuals and their culture codes. The mainstream modern economic theories excessively standardise market structures and the mindsets of individual agents. Only the solution seems to be just let the market move alone and let each individual agent to handle it with their own way.

The major financial institutions can be guilty for having messed up the world economy with their pseudo science called financial engineering. Even John Maynard Keynes had already warned that financial market is more psychological than natural-scientific so there is no legitimate answer and equation precisely tracking the market movement. Despite Keynes's warning, these financial elites and government aiding them ignores as though Keynes's original theories of investment had never existed. They have injected extraordinarily massive supply of cash and financial assets into the market against the natural level of the demand.

The extraordinary market stimulus propped up by the excess supply of cash and financial assets are causing the severe negative bounce back effects. Understanding of their financial engineering does not exist to solve problems of economy; It actually causes unnecessary problems caused by those using this engineering technique only for their own short term gain by sacrificing the majority others. As a matter of fact, those gaining the short term gain from this pseudo-science eventually lose out due to the negative impact of the bounce back caused by their reckless manipulation. It comes back to the point of the quote by Adam Smith "Only fair is laissez-faire".

It is the right point that the subject economics was originally introduced as one of philosophical theories by Adam Smith. Although economics nowadays tend to be considered as more physical scientific, Smith was more concerned about metaphysical matters like how the world is formed and how logic derives answers and is evaluated by its principle. Perhaps, there is no absolute answer in economics as same as metaphysics and other philosophical realms. Many economic theorists seem to pretend to be natural scientists claiming there shall be a solid answer for something they are pursuing and demonstrating some pseudo-natural scientific something.

In particular, nowadays, the world is dynamically changing and any already existed social scientific theories hardly prevail to solve the newly emerging problems and promote the newly emerging opportunities. It has already come to the point where it is necessary to start thinking in terms of metaphysical ways of thinking about the world functions including economy. Economy is a life style so it should be more free to think about economy and there should be various unique ways of conceiving it such as doing philosophy.

Thursday, May 02, 2019

The Political Compass by Country measured by Numerical Data



The Political Compass inevitably relies on the author's subjective sense of judgement to measure where politicians/countries are located on each spectrum. Its author still uses the objective analysis to the certain extent as he seems to be an educated and well-informed academic. There are also various many derivational charts of political compasses invented by various individuals. However, majority seem to rely on the subjective measurement to determine how the selected policies are categorised in their chart.

This project is inspired by the Political Compass, and attempts to create a chart based on less relying on an author's subjective sense of judgement. So, the numerical data set is used to create this chart. The data were downloaded from the following sites:

Data Source:
Economic Freedom: https://www.heritage.org/index/download (2019)
Political Freedom: https://freedomhouse.org/report-types/freedom-world (2018)

By following the Political Compass, the X variable (The horizontal axis) indicates the economic freedom i.e. friendliness to free market capitalism. The way the economic freedom is measured turns to be notably different from the perspective of the Political Compass because the Heritage.org regards of the economic freedom and the development of the global capitalism as the positive optimistic element meanwhile the Political compass regards of them as relatively more oppressive and something not favoured by the mass. Yet, the main objective is to measure how each country adapts the free market global capitalism on the horizontal axis so that this does not induce it to be a significantly different analysis.

As same as the Political Compass, this chart also indicates the top side of the chart denotes more authoritarian, i.e. less politically free, and the bottom side denotes more liberal, i.e. more politically free. So, the Y variable (The vertical axis) is created by diverging the political freedom index. This is also not quit identical as what the Political Compass attempts to indicates. This index from FreedomHouse.org only ranks the countries' policies only by means of the relative measurement to the other countries in the current world situation: It compares them with neither historical examples nor the non-existent but maybe possible policies introduced in political theories.

Each variable is calculated as follows:


Both indices are powered by 0.3 in order to balance the chart (Making the candidates on the chart comparable and the chart more visible). 0.3 is used for the power because the average and the median of the variables become close to 0.5 together and the gap between the minimum and the maximum is widened by this calculus.


This chart was created by Microsoft Excel but it is not equipped with the chart label shown on the map of the chart. So, a chart-labelor was installed from www.appspro.com/Utilities/ChartLabeler.htm.

The dots of these countries are shaped and coloured dissimilarly by means of various diverse geographic and cultural regions. Unlike the original categorisation for the referred data sources, this chart scattered the original regional categories into more detailed unique ones. Western English speaking countries are categorised as Anglo-Saxon and Celtic on this chart (Blue Dia). Those in Asia-Pacific which are heavily influenced by Confucianism (Red Circle) are distinguished from the rest Asia-Pacific (Purple Circle). Those in Europe are roughly divided into three groups, West (Yellow Dia), Central (Pale Green Dia), and East (Pink Dia) in order to clarify the difference caused by historical and ethnic characteristics and the past as well as the present political factors. (It is by means of this author's subjective sense based on his knowledge because it is difficult to clear cut with a pure objective measurement)

This may help to compare and understand the economic and political attribute of various countries in a macro perspective.



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