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The left believe lies and propagate misconceptions, too

I was not impressed by this blag post by Timothy Egan, even though several of my friends were (according to Facebook). I mean, all of his points were good and worth making, but the immense hypocrisy of the blag post and liberal Democrats in general makes me skeptical that any of his good points will get through to them and prompt them to question, or even recognize, their blind loyalty to anyone whose name is followed by a (D).

Egan’s point is that a large proportion of the Rebublican rank-and-file unquestioningly believe half-truths and blatant lies fed to them by right-wing media. For instance, that Obama is a Muslim, he was born in Kenya, he signed the TARP bailouts into law, and Michelle Obama and 40 friends recently vacationed in Spain on the public’s dime. He’s right, this is pretty alarming. Plenty of voters of all stripes believe things that are wrong, but I’m sure many of them are topics of debate or are not extremely easily disprovable. But to believe things that are objectively, undeniably, obviously wrong, immediately and easily disprovable, is indicative of willful ignorance that should alarm everyone.

But how about the things that liberal Democratic voters never bother to look into or question? For instance, how Obama voted on the aforementioned TARP legislation. (No, Egan didn’t bother mentioning that Obama voted Yea or that he has willfully continued and done nothing to reverse any effects of TARP.) How many Democratic voters know about Obama’s vote on a warrantless wiretapping program or how his regime feels about Bush’s warrantless wiretap policy? (Admittedly, these made bigger headlines than other crimes, failures, and broken promises of Obama’s.) How about the cost of Obama’s failed stimulus vs. the cost of almost 6 years of the Iraq War under President Bush? How about the number of Pakistani non-combatants killed by Predator drone attacks under President Obama in only a year and a half? How many Democratic voters would even be in the ballpark if asked to guess about those numbers? How many liberal blaggers care about the willful ignorance of Democratic voters on these issues? On the other hand, how many gladly avoid railing against Obama for things that, if (when) Republicans did them, they would rant about until they were as blue as Tobias Fünke?

Posted in Democracy, Foreign policy, Media, Obama crimes, Obama failures | Permalink
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Another perspective on small business in the era of Big Government

I liked this blag post by Philip Greenspun about how his small business suffers, both in absolute terms and relative to the competition, in the face of more government, more regulations, and more lobbyists. One reason I liked it might be because it fits in with our original goal in founding this blag: writing about real-world, everyday experiences that show how more government hurts people and how we’d be better off without it.

Federal and state governments offer a lot of subsidies and incentives for businesses, or so we’re told, but we never have more than one admin person working the front desk at any given time. We don’t have qualified staff ready to go looking for government programs to tap into. We know how to serve private customers, but not how to get money from the government. This puts us at a disadvantage compared to big companies that can afford to spread the cost of a full-time “getting money from the government” employee.

A government that consumes a larger percentage of the GDP is a government that makes lobbying more fruitful. In a lobbying war, however, the small will inevitably lose out to bigger enterprises.
[...]
You might think that we’d be doing well because the government has decided to put more money into education. The new funds, however, generally can only be used at degree-granting institutions. Once enrolled in a “bachelor’s of aviation” program, the spigots open up for the student’s tuition, housing, and food. This is great for established large colleges and universities because, even though they may charge 50% higher prices than our school, it works out to be cheaper for the student. Our prices are lower and our instructors are more experienced, which gives us a competitive advantage when dealing with privately-funded students. In a world where most of the new students are government-funded, however, we are inevitably out-competed by the big schools.

One commenter pointed out that you don’t have to be a big business with legions of administrators and lobbyists to get the government grant money; you can hire private businesses or independent contractors who know how to get the government money for you, and in this way, it’s one private business helping another private business get government money that was going to be spent anyway. That’s not a terrible argument for the practical debate about who suffers and benefits under corporate-State socialism, but as it does so often, Ludwig von Mises’s calculation argument comes into the forefront: how do we know the free market would have allocated the government grant money to the places it ends up? How do we know that was best? What did we miss out on because it was allocated thusly? When and how would those allocations of resources have been deemed inefficient and been modified or replaced altogether with some opportunity that someone anticipated or took a chance on, and then gained a competitive advantage and transformed the market in some important way? It is impossible to know or even guess.

Even if, as I doubt, small governments are or could become as capable of getting tax dollars as large businesses, and even if the endless government regulations that big businesses lobby for and small businesses have no resources to oppose or support could help some small businesses as much as some large businesses, there is absolutely no way to determine whether the ultimate allocation of tax money (and labor, capital, land) was the way it would have been without State interference. Because the State can’t calculate but markets can, it is clear that the free market’s allocation of that grant money would be more efficient for the whole society and in the long run than the government’s.

Posted in Economics, Power elite | Permalink
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Great insight from John Taylor Gatto

LewRockwell.com reprinted the preface to The Underground History of American Public Education by John Taylor Gatto, and it had some quote-worthy passages:

I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive.
[...]
Law courts and legislatures have totally absolved school people from liability. You can sue a doctor for malpractice, not a schoolteacher. Every homebuilder is accountable to customers years after the home is built; not schoolteachers, though. You can’t sue a priest, minister, or rabbi either; that should be a clue.

If you can’t be guaranteed even minimal results by these institutions, not even physical safety; if you can’t be guaranteed anything except that you’ll be arrested if you fail to surrender your kid, just what does the public in public schools mean?
[...]
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
[...]
There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen—that probably guarantees it won’t.

How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it.
[...]
Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling.
[...]
What is “proper” social order? What does “right” social growth look like? If you don’t know you’re like me, not like John Dewey who did, or the Rockefellers, his patrons, who did, too.

Somehow out of the industrial confusion which followed the Civil War, powerful men and dreamers became certain what kind of social order America needed, one very like the British system we had escaped a hundred years earlier. This realization didn’t arise as a product of public debate as it should have in a democracy, but as a distillation of private discussion. Their ideas contradicted the original American charter but that didn’t disturb them. They had a stupendous goal in mind. The end of unpredictable history; its transformation into dependable order.

From mid-century onwards certain utopian schemes to retard maturity in the interests of a greater good were put into play, following roughly the blueprint Rousseau laid down in the book Emile. At least rhetorically. The first goal, to be reached in stages, was an orderly, scientifically managed society, one in which the best people would make the decisions, unhampered by democratic tradition. After that, human breeding, the evolutionary destiny of the species, would be in reach. Universal institutionalized formal forced schooling was the prescription, extending the dependency of the young well into what had traditionally been early adult life. Individuals would be prevented from taking up important work until a relatively advanced age. Maturity was to be retarded.

During the post–Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people didn’t stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. The intention was ultimately to draw all work into the school net. By the 1950s it wasn’t unusual to find graduate students well into their thirties, running errands, waiting to start their lives.
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If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it’s biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it’s nature’s way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature’s way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it’s evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.

The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn’t real.

Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed. To idealists they represent a challenge, reprobates to be made socially useful. Either way you want it, hundreds of millions of perpetual children require paid attention from millions of adult custodians. An ignorant horde to be schooled one way or another.
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[I]t isn’t difficult to find various conspirators boasting in public about what they pulled off. But if you take that tack you’ll miss the real horror of what I’m trying to describe, that what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century. I think what happened would have happened anyway—without the legions of venal, half-mad men and women who schemed so hard to make it as it is. If I’m correct, we’re in a much worse position than we would be if we were merely victims of an evil genius or two.

If you obsess about conspiracy, what you’ll fail to see is that we are held fast by a form of highly abstract thinking fully concretized in human institutions which has grown beyond the power of the managers of these institutions to control. If there is a way out of the trap we’re in, it won’t be by removing some bad guys and replacing them with good guys.

In the future, I would like to read more of John Taylor Gatto, perhaps by actually buying one of his books. Other than promoting a free market of schooling and more family involvement in children’s educations, I don’t recall him offering very many concrete solutions, but that’s probably because, as he said, there are as many ways to educate a child as there are fingerprints, and families, communities, private companies subject to profit and loss, and even (maybe especially) the children themselves should decide how they each should gain an education. I think the most important point about compelled schooling is that it absolves parents, and therefore children, of most of the responsibility that they would otherwise have in children’s education, and it is impossible to really gauge how much human value is lost by the absence of such a vested interest.

Posted in Education, Power elite | Permalink
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It’s not your fucking business

Roger Clemens has been indicted for “obstruction of Congress” because he lied to them in 2008 when he told them, “Let me be clear. I have never taken steroids or hGH.” The Imperial Federal Government has decided it can take people’s lives, liberty, and property for putting certain substances into their bodies, and it has also arrogated to itself the power to do the same to people who lie to the government about anything. That abominable, despicable, wretched, pitiful excuse for a man Henry Waxman said, “When a witness, such as Roger Clemens, lies, as I think he did, he should be held accountable.” What a worthless piece of trash. I wouldn’t give Henry fucking Waxman the time of day if he were dying in a ditch. Hey, Waxman and all you other wastes of carbon and oxygen:

IT IS NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS WHAT ROGER CLEMENS INGESTED OR WHETHER HE LIED TO YOU ABOUT IT. YOU HAVE NO MORAL AUTHORITY TO DEMAND ANYTHING FROM HIM, INCLUDING THAT HE TELL YOU THE TRUTH ABOUT ANYTHING.

Any person who thinks any member of any government is in any way remotely justified in demanding the first thing from Roger Clemens or any other athlete regarding performance-enhancing drugs is an enemy of freedom who should be called out as such.

Posted in Drugs, Fascism, Police/law enforcement, Sports | Permalink
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Victims

In Atlanta last Wednesday and Thursday, 30,000 people crowded the streets on foot and in their cars to hand in their applications for a voucher for free Section 8 housing to the East Point Housing Authority.

More than a thousand people [as I mentioned, it was actually 30,000 in the end] gathered Wednesday outside a metro-Atlanta shopping mall in hopes of being placed on a waiting list for federal housing assistance.

Fights broke out, children were reportedly trampled, and police had to stop the crowd from storming a nightclub being used by the East Point Housing Authority in East Point, Ga….

[T]the line for Section 8 housing vouchers formed two days ago and grew into the hundreds Tuesday night. People even slept outside the nightclub despite repeated assertions from the housing officials that the line was unnecessary and everyone would receive an application.

By Wednesday morning, the crowd had grown so large that East Point police began patrolling the area in riot gear and first responders were tending to people who were overheating in the sun.

People became frustrated when officials, feeling overwhelmed, did not open the doors at 9 a.m. as they had planned, reports CBS Atlanta. Those waiting in line were told by officials to move from one location to another before riot gear-clad police and housing officials handed out applications.

“I find this amazing,” Ed Schultz said on “The Ed Show” Wednesday night. “One can only imagine watching this videotape … how many other cities have it like this across America. And I think we have to ask ourselves the moral question, aren’t we better than this?”

Indeed. But when a welfare-statist government arrogates to itself the function of providing anything to its subjects, especially some basic necessities like housing or food, the subjects will naturally become dependent on the government, expecting it to provide things for them and thinking of those handouts as their right, instead of becoming self-sufficient adults like they ought to.

The Regular Guys show, which broadcasts on an Atlanta rock station and which I frequently listen to online, sent someone out to the scene of this travesty on Thursday, knowing that chaos and pitifulness would ensue again and hoping to get some good audio from some of the handout seekers. One of the Regular Guys interviewed an aspiring rapper/producer/mixer/whatever, who was in line to get rent-free housing mainly so that he could raise his young son with slightly less hardship than if he had to pay for housing. He was less pathetic and clueless than you might expect, and probably less so than the Regular Guys were hoping for. Naturally, the radio guy turned the issue to where the money was coming from to pay his rent and who would be providing this money. The interviewee said something like, “The government, I guess,” and might have understood the radio guy’s point by the end: all of the tax-paying citizens were going to be paying for this housing, not some magical fund from “the government” or “Obama”.

This was predictable and uninteresting, quite depressing, actually, but I suppose that’s the best they could do with only audio at 6:30 in the morning.

I think it would have been much more interesting, though admittedly too heavy for a brief segment on morning entertainment radio, to discuss how those people in their cars in the 85° heat braving a chaotic crowd of 30,000 angry, unemployed people and waiting in line for not hours but days, in some cases, were the victims of our welfare state to a much greater degree than white, suburban, tax-paying radio show hosts. They are the victims of Obama and Bush and Clinton and Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt and the Federal Reserve. The Imperial Federal Government with its impoverishing wars and debt and inflation have made it harder to get a job. The insidious social programs of the 20th-century welfare state have destroyed the families of inner-city black people. The Drug War has wasted almost as much money and lives as aggressive foreign wars. The endless regulations on housing, labor, education, farming, et cetera ad nauseam have made all of those things more expensive and less attainable for everyone, most of all the people who were born into poverty or bad families or bad neighborhoods where success in anything other than rap or basketball is now considered selling out or shameful.

Before anyone goes lamenting their own woes and their victimhood under the heel of the modern welfare-warfare state, consider the people who never even got a chance to succeed because the United States government made their families poor and their neighborhoods poor and enforces thousands upon thousands of policies that are sure to keep them psychologically dependent on the government and therefore poor as well. This might not excuse them for much blame for their situation in life, but it certainly goes a long way to explaining why they are there, and this is a travesty we should oppose with as much vigor as we oppose anything our government does to its own citizens.

Posted in Democracy, Obama failures, Political correctness | Permalink
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What the government tells you to eat may be killing you

I really liked this post by Radley Balko. Nothing needs to be added to it:

Over at City Journal, Steven Malanga looks at the recent history of federal dietary guidelines and finds they may well be killing us.

As a recent review of the latest research in Scientific American pointed out, ever since the first set of federal guidelines appeared in 1980, Americans heard that they had to reduce their intake of saturated fat by cutting back on meat and dairy products and replacing them with carbohydrates. Americans dutifully complied. Since then, obesity has increased sharply, and the progress that the country has made against heart disease has largely come from medical breakthroughs like statin drugs, which lower cholesterol, and more effective medications to control blood pressure.

Researchers have started asking hard questions about fat consumption and heart disease, and the answers are startling…

According to Scientific American, growing research into carbohydrate-based diets has demonstrated that the medical establishment may have harmed Americans by steering them toward carbs. Research by Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard, concludes that diets rich in carbohydrates that are quickly digestible—that is, with a high glycemic index, like potatoes, white rice, and white bread—give people an insulin boost that increases the risk of diabetes and makes them far more likely to contract cardiovascular disease than those who eat moderate amounts of meat and fewer carbs. Though federal guidelines now emphasize eating more fiber-rich carbohydrates, which take longer to digest, the incessant message over the last 30 years to substitute carbs for meat appears to have done significant damage. And it doesn’t appear that the government will change its approach this time around. The preliminary recommendations of a panel advising the FDA on the new guidelines urge people to shift to “plant-based” diets and to consume “only moderate amounts of lean meats, poultry and eggs.”

My colleague Jacob Sullum wrote last week about how the dietary guidelines have been reluctant to embrace overwhelming scientific research showing the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption.

I think my favorite example of self-proclaimed nutrition expert oopses was a campaign run by the Center for Science in the Public Interest in the late 1980s and early 1990s to get restaurants to switch from animal fats to trans fats. From a 1988 CSPI newsletter:

“All told, the charges against trans fat just don’t stand up. And by extension, hydrogenated oils seem relatively innocent.”

Of course, CSPI now wants to ban the stuff outright.

As the government takes over more of the health care system, expect to see more calls for more government “nudges” to help us eat healthier in order to save the government money. It’s worth remembering that like everything else government does, the government’s dietary recommendations are susceptible to all sorts of pressures and influences, which may or may not have anything to do with nutritional science.

Posted in Medicine | Permalink
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H.R. 5741: Universal National Service Act

Perhaps you have seen the text of this House bill introduced by Chuck Rangel: the Universal National Service Act. Yes, a draft: military (or some other form of) slavery. Here is the summary sentence of the bill:

To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, and for other purposes.

I remember Chuck Rangel saying he would support a military draft in 2003 or 2004 to dissuade politicians from starting more wars and expanding our military efforts because, presumably, they would be more hesitant to send unwilling soldiers to die, especially when their sons or relatives were among them. Maybe, but that’s not how everyone would take a draft bill. Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel openly favor compulsory national service of some kind, not necessarily military. In that context, the Obama regime seems quite likely to pass a bill like Chuck Rangel’s in order to implement their national community-service dream, not necessarily to send thousands of boys to the Middle East as cannon fodder. However, as anyone could predict, “community-service” slavery could easily be transmuted into “military-service” slavery by other politicians or by “national emergencies” caused by those politicians.

Posted in Fascism, Foreign policy, Obama predictions | Permalink
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Driver error, not Toyota defects

To the surprise of absolutely no one who was paying attention, the data recorders in the Toyota vehicles that supposedly accelerated out of control indicate that the drivers were responsible, not the accelerators, brake pedals, or electronics. I remember the Regular Guys radio show in Atlanta predicting, when these faulty Toyota stories were big news, that almost all of these accidents were actually the drivers’ fault, not Toyota’s. I concurred, and I think we were all right.

Remember the CEO of Toyota standing in front of Congress and, in broken English, apologizing profusely and practically begging for America to give them another chance and believe in Toyota again? And how some congressmen, I don’t remember which, berated him and his company and basically tried to start a nationwide smear campaign against them? We won’t be hearing any apologies from them, nor can they undo the damage they helped cause to a perfectly responsible company that makes cars that are apparently about as safe any other company’s.

I think it’s safe to say that, in the minds of many senators, congressmen, and bureaucrats, the desire to bolster American car companies at the expense of the suddenly vulnerable Toyota played no small part in their attacks on Toyota before any solid evidence was available. Do you doubt that such favoritism will become commonplace and even more shameless as the Imperial Federal Government gains more influence, control, and eventually ownership of nominally private businesses? Of course government agents will make decisions based on politics and not necessarily economics, justice, good business sense, or even common sense. This kind of dishonesty, this disregard for the facts, the complete lack of importance placed on efficiency or fairness are characteristic of government-run economies when decision-making is political, so we can expect a lot more of this in the future, not less.

Posted in Media, Socialism | Permalink
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Competing currencies being accepted across mid-Michigan

This story about many people and businesses in Michigan exchanging alternative forms of currency instead of U.S. dollars was pretty interesting. It’s from a local news station, so it includes a video of the evening news segment, in addition to some excerpts from the news segment:

Right now, you can buy a meal or visit a chiropractor without using actual U.S. legal tender.

They sound like real money and look like real money. But you can’t take them to the bank because they’re not made at a government mint. They’re made at private mints.
[...]
[Dave] Gillie also accepts silver, gold, copper and other precious metals to pay for food.

He says, if he wanted to, he could accept marbles.

“Do people have to accept dollars or money? No, they don’,” Gillie said. “They can accept anything they want or they can refuse to accept anything.”

He’s absolutely right.

The U.S. Treasury Department says the Coinage Act of 1965 says “private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash, unless there is a state law which says otherwise.”
[...]
A chiropractic office in Lapeer County’s Deerfield Township allows creativity when it comes to payment.

“This establishment accepts any form of silver, gold, chicken, apple pie, if someone works it out with me,” said Jeff Kotchounian of Deerfield Chiropractic. “I’ve taken many things.”

I think this is pretty neat and pretty encouraging. The U.S. dollar as we know it might not last our lifetimes, and if it does, it might have to undergo hyperinflation to stay in existence, but that’s just the beginning of the end anyway. I know there are problems of practicality with even two (gold and silver) forms of currency, but free people making free choices can and will develop better solutions to any economic problem, including monetary ones, than any amount of legislation.

Posted in Economics | Permalink
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Obama regime’s refusal of Dutch help for the BP oil spill

I might be a little late posting about this, but it doesn’t make it any less infuriating:

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.
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In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with “Thanks but no thanks,” remarked Visser, despite BP’s desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer –the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment –unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.
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The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer — but only partly. Because the U.S. didn’t want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berns to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berns. According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy in Washington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the U.S. companies awarded the work.

This doesn’t prove the impossibility of governments doing something efficiently or effectively, because the Dutch government (and those 12 other governments whose help the idiots in the Obama regime refused) apparently have fairly fast and effective ways to mitigate an oil-spill catastrophe. And while it’s true, as Sheldon Richman reminds us, that environmental catastrophes are more accurately attributed to government failure than market failure, all the governmental failures involved in allowing the BP spill to happen and delaying the cleanup efforts do not prove that freedom can permit no catastrophes and no environmental damage. This sorry episode does prove, however, that Obama’s hopelessly incompetent and union-cozy minions are no better than any other regime’s bureaucrats and will bring us nothing resembling “hope” or “change”.

Posted in Environmentalism, Obama failures | Permalink
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Anthony de Jasay: socialism has made the European worker impotent

Somehow I came across this article written by Anthony de Jasay for the Library of Economics and Liberty, which I know best as the site that publishes EconLog, the blag of Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, and David Henderson. Jasay’s article was written in 2006. It details some consequences of socialist economic policies on the labor market, specifically labor unions, rendering workers and worker unions powerless to make many demands because they are so desperate for more jobs and more job security.

An ever more elaborate system of ‘workers’ rights’ was promoted until the labour code grew to several thousand pages—a happy hunting ground for labour lawyers, a minefield for enterprises. Trade union power came to be based, not on workers recognising that union membership may serve their interests, but on legislation, government sponsorship and the patronage afforded by the immense administrative machinery of the various social insurance schemes.
[...]
The future historian of these apparent triumphs over economic reality will very likely single out two phenomena that loomed more and more ominously and in fact began to signal that no matter how the battles went, the war was beginning to be lost. One was the growing severity of job protection policies that made firing employees so difficult and expensive that employers were frightened away from hiring them in the first place. New job creation fell to levels last seen in the Great Depression, for offering employment except on short-term contracts has become an act of reckless audacity. (One small but significant breach in job protection came just the other day when the highest French court of appeal ruled that terminating employees may be permitted not only when the enterprise is making losses threatening its survival, but also when terminating employees is necessary to prevent such losses).

The other ominous phenomenon was that the high level of unemployment, which would have seemed abnormal a decade ago, has come to be seen as a fact of life. It has resisted the multitude of attempted therapies governments of both Right and Left tried to apply to it. The diminishing band of diehard defenders of the ‘European social model’ still mutter that unemployment is high because the model is not ‘social’ enough, or not European enough, and all will be well when it is made more social and more ‘harmoniously’ European. Meanwhile, it is starting to be noticed that chronically high unemployment has almost wholly drained away the bargaining power of labour in the private sector. Union militancy is now confined to the public sector—essentially, to public transport workers, teachers and government clerks. Thirty-odd years of socialist economic policies have reduced the mythical, red flag waving ‘working class’ to passive impotence.

An anecdote bears eloquent witness to how workers ‘benefiting’ from the ‘special model’ now stand compared to those who are exposed to the ‘caprice of the market’. Two years ago Toyota set up a car assembly plant in the industrially derelict region of Northeast France. More recently, the president of Toyota visited the plant, expressed his satisfaction and explained that the company has chosen to locate in France rather than in England (which was the runner-up candidate location) because ‘English workers can afford to talk back, but French workers cannot’.

I wish Anthony de Jasay was a more active, or at least more high-profile, writer or even blagger today because his magnum opus The State is so good that more people need to read about him. He still writes articles for the Library of Economics and Liberty, so I guess I should actually read them regularly and accept that as good enough for an 85-year-old.

Posted in Economics, Socialism | Permalink
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The Great Material Continuum

Star Trek presented a notoriously bad conception of economics because of creator Gene Roddenberry’s insistence that humans and all other races belonging to the United Federation of Planets would use no money. Science-fiction author Gardner Goldsmith explained why this economic ideal was not only fantasy but would result in material deterioration to a state of primitivism.

In a further affront to free enterprise and an indication of where Roddenberry et al.’s biases lay, the most prominently featured businessmen were the Ferengi, a caricature so unrealistic as to be useless as an instrument of social commentary. However, they did give us some useful nuggets of wisdom on occasion, like this miniature economic lesson from Nog to Chief O’Brien in the last season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:

[T]he Great Material Continuum… It’s the force that binds the universe together. …You see, there are millions upon millions of worlds in the universe, each one filled with too much of one thing and not enough of another. And the Great Continuum flows through them all, like a mighty river, from have to want and back again. And if we navigate the Continuum with skill and grace, our ship will be filled with everything our hearts desire.
—Treachery, Faith, and the Great River
 

It’s quite simplistic, but if you replace “worlds” with “people”, it isn’t a bad starting point for an introductory lesson on economics.

It is fitting that such a good example of the interdependence of all people on each other’s material well-being could be articulated only because Starfleet couldn’t simply buy what it wanted: Nog was explaining to Chief O’Brien why he had to set up a string of barters with two middlemen in order to obtain an item they could trade for what they ultimately needed. With currency, the transaction would be consummated between only the first and fourth parties: Deep Space Nine and the ship that had the part they needed. (Or, since they’re all part of a single military organization, I guess Starfleet could have just ordered the other ship to donate the part to Deep Space Nine, but that would have eliminated half the plot of the episode and cost us a good lesson in Ferengi philosophy.)

Posted in Economics, Entertainment, Unrealistic | Permalink
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Link of the day

Charles Johnson details how clean-water regulations actively prevent citizens and organizations from cleaning up water on their own. An important component of libertarian theory is that the State stifles private, community-based, voluntary efforts to keep the environment clean and encourages/allows companies to simply follow the letter of the law instead of striving to innovate and take responsibility for the environment. This is yet another concrete example in support of this position.

Posted in Environmentalism | Permalink
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Fish in a barrel 7

I’ve been a little depressed about how little time I have/make for blagging and reading about politics and economics this year, but it’s because I’m working a lot, exercising five or six times a week, and watching things obsessively on DVD, like Star Trek and Futurama and True Blood. I get paid more or less by the hour as an independent contractor and not as a salaried employee, so the more I work, the more I earn, and I wants me a fancy plasma TV this summer.

The Obama regime has been up to some heavy justice-trampling entirely aside from planting the seeds for takeovers of both the health care and financial trading industries. Glenn Greenwald details Obama’s authorization of the assassination of U.S. citizens. While it’s true that this has become old news and I have even written a few blag posts since this Greenwald post, the quotes are no less juicy:

Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the “right” to carry out such assassinations.
[...]
Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield.
[...]
No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.

Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist.

In more Orwellian news, the Supreme Court ruled that some convicted sex offenders can be kept in prison indefinitely by federal officials (presumably the Department of “Justice”), after they have completed their prison sentences. It is terrifying how broadly sex crimes are defined, how aggressively they are pursued, and how remorselessly people who have only been accused, much less convicted, of sexual crimes are treated. There are people whose lives are ruined because they had oral sex as teenagers or because they walk around naked in their kitchens and their wannabe-tyrant neighbors have some twisted appetite for punishing others for anything they can. This ruling will soon extend to terrorism and all other crimes that some lawyer or judge can construe as being related to “national security”, if it doesn’t already.

The RIAA and MPAA want the government to force all computers to contain software that automatically deletes alleged copyright-infringing material. The best arguments against the RIAA and MPAA anymore are quoting them verbatim and reporting their behavior. As Voltaire quipped, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” The RIAA and MPAA could not exist in their present form or commit any of the violations they have become infamous for without a monopolistic state and, particularly, a powerful central government backing them up. By the way, did you know there is an “Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement”? My god, they might as well rename it MiniIntelProp.

We are coming up on Presidential Candidate Obama’s original proposed date (summer 2010) for withdrawing (or at least beginning to withdraw) most American soldiers from Iraq. While I don’t believe he ever actually had any intention of scaling down the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or reducing the U.S.’s military presence in the Middle East to any considerable degree, my skepticism and his duplicity are not even necessarily the most important issues about his promises/plans to withdraw troops. Most important is any well-intentioned president’s inability to divert our military’s path from one of aggression and expansion to one of defense and contraction. There are too many people and too many industrial interests opposing such a sea change for it to ever happen, except that I think America’s impending financial collapse will force the military to contract and withdraw, which side effect will be nothing but good.

You don’t have to be remotely libertarian-ish to be outraged at this: Novartis sales rep who alleges she was raped by a client was subjected to “disciplinary action” by HR, and the managers showed no interest in pursuing the case or bringing the alleged rapist to justice. I don’t have anything to add; the heinousness of it all is self-evident.

I think it’s sad how many people want more nationalization/centralization of all kinds of laws and regulations. An alarming percentage of people think national or even worldwide standards for businesses, behaviors, and just about everything else would make our lives better, but this is exactly the wrong attitude. More diversity of options, as a general rule, makes just about everything better in the long run, mainly because freedom is good for people and more innovation occurs when we can try different things and succeed or fail based on merit. The latest example that prompted me to write this is a comment I read in a discussion thread about stupid alcohol sales laws, commonly called blue laws. The comment read, “i hate the variation in alcohol laws from State to State. this shit needs to be modernized and made uniform across the Nation. i think it’s absurd that in my state, PA, i can’t buy liquor/wine from ANYWHERE but a State store.” Yes, since it is obvious that government and only government has created your problem, then the best solution is MORE government and MORE concentrated power in the hands of people who are EVEN FARTHER removed from your home and your life and who care about you individually EVEN LESS than the people who passed the current laws, if that’s possible. I’m sorry to end on an arrogant or haughty note, but Statists are stupid.

Posted in Constitutionality, Democracy, Elections, Foreign policy, Intellectual property, Obama crimes, Obama predictions, Police/law enforcement, Property rights, Stupid | Permalink
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Misguided Tea Partiers, misguided Tea Party haters

You know, I actually think it’s a shame the Tea Party gatherings receive nothing but ridicule and not discussion or engagement from the liberal Democrats. Really, what’s more of a shame is that they deserve a lot of the ridicule, from libertarians and libertarian-ish people, because the movement has become saturated with neocons and other sad people who think the Republican Party has or will have an interest in individual freedom, economic freedom, civil liberties, or that famed “government accountability” at any point in our lifetimes. They actually delude themselves that there’s a major difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, and that they can therefore sway the Republicans to return to their imagined roots of limited government, individual liberty, and support of free markets. There are too many Sarah Palin fans (1+) and not enough Ron Paul fans. The membership of America’s two best-known politicians of libertarian bent, Ron Paul and Peter Schiff, in the GOP only bolsters this misconception, but that’s another topic for another time.

My current concern is the misguided vitriol directed by liberals at Tea Partiers and the former group’s lack of any position to be criticizing anybody’s politics.

Perhaps the rare liberal who visits our little blag will take issue with the loaded language I used in the title: “haters”. My word choice was deliberate and accurate. Most liberals hate the Tea Parties and every single little, last thing that they stand for. Most liberals seem to have nothing but ridicule and scorn for the embarrassing Tea Partiers and their benighted selfishness and racism. Most liberals would not listen to half of what any Tea Partier had to say except to use it as ammunition for their rants about how horrible Tea Partiers have to be to object to all the plans that the liberals have for everyone. I do not say liberals hate Tea Party participants themselves, because I would not put words that personal into other people’s mouths, and most people at least recite the empty, semi-Christian defense “I don’t hate the person, I hate the act.” On the internet, on Facebook, on TV and radio, the sentiment is clear and almost universal: liberals hate the Tea Parties’ ideas and demonstrations the way any group with power hates protestations against and threats to that power.

Consider the most recent Tea Party gatherings, the anti-tax protests on April 15th. Obviously I strongly sympathize with their message on that day and agree wholeheartedly with their goal of reducing taxes. What sentiment therein do liberals find so objectionable? “Leave us alone,” “Stop taking our money,” “Stop spending our money on things we don’t want,” “Stop threatening and imprisoning people for keeping their own money”? These messages, at least, are completely defensive. “Stop doing this, stop doing that, let us govern our own lives.” There is no inherent malice, violence, or any type of aggression behind a defensive message like that, yet liberal Democrats find it worthy of scorn and hatred. Contrast that with the messages almost every Republocrat politician campaigns on: “These are my plans for everyone,” “This is what I will do with your money,” “This is what I will force everyone to do,” “This is what’s good for the whole nation.” Please don’t pretend the plans and promises of politicians require no coercion and carry no threats of punishment for non-compliance, and please don’t try to twist anti-tax protests into something the slightest bit coercive. Leave such bald dishonesty for the politicians.

While it’s true that I’m probably inserting my own ideas of what I would be protesting at an anti-tax (or other anti-government) rally and not considering the full scope of what various neocons and other dupes have said at other rallies over the past year (for example, here is an issue I agree with liberals on and that does, in fact, make Tea Partiers an embarrassment), I’d wager that the whole of the Tea Parties’ message is no more violent than the ideas of their detractors.

I came across a column about the April 15th anti-tax Tea Party in my very own town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was written by a liberal named Rick Keith who made some good points and several bad ones. He attended the April 15th Tea Party on the University of Michigan’s campus and reported on the hypocrisy he saw in the Tea Partiers. The worst part, which could have been turned into quite a humorous column, was that Rick Keith pretended to give half a flying fuck about the United States Constitution. Being much more of an adherent to Lysander Spooner’s position on the Constitution than to the strict Constitutionalism of someone like Ron Paul (whom I still openly supported in 2008 and would support again in 2012), I would not be too interested in defending the Constitution too vigorously. Keith’s purpose in arguing Constitutional points with the Tea Partiers was not, I imagine, to convince them that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are defending the Constitution much better than the Tea Partiers’ ideal politician, nor to convince them that he loves the Constitution more than they; rather, he was trying to expose their hypocrisy by showing them that many of the things they want and the things they benefit from are unconstitutional. I don’t imagine he was successful, especially at that anti-tax rally, as there was no income tax in the original Constitution and the central government functioned just fine for 125 years without one (excepting Lincoln’s war taxes).

He is well informed but misinterprets many things with typical liberal-Democrat bias, so I’ll give a brief summary of the lukewarm attacks he managed to make on the hypocrisy of the Tea Partiers and assume he speaks for most liberals:

They recited the Pledge of Allegiance, for some reason, and Keith probed the speaker to tell the socialist, Statolatrist history of the Pledge. He got no response. That’s a good point, and I commend him for knowing his history and speaking up about it.

A doctoral student spoke out against government spending and praised private enterprise, even though though the student engages in federally funded cancer research in federally funded buildings at a federally funded university.

Some local conservative talk-radio host confused the TARP bank-bailout program with Obama’s stimulus spending package. This conservative “didn’t mention the Stimulus’s $140 billion tax cuts to the ‘We’re Taxed to Death’ audience, nor the hundreds of billions to create jobs in rebuilding a crumbling infrastructure, increase efficiency and advance new technologies.”

Needless to say, Keith disagrees with the Tea Partiers’ preferences about what they would like to do with their own money, and he points out that Exxon paid no income taxes to the Imperial Federal Government last year by funneling taxes through offshore subsidiaries. See, Exxon’s taxes are relevant because in the liberal Democrat’s mind, if one company weasels out of its taxes, that means all companies are rolling in profit and no one is being overtaxed, so the Tea Partiers’ complaints about being “taxed to death” are hypocritical and based entirely in fiction!

The Tea Partiers’ idol, Ronald Reagan, cut taxes and simultaneously over-spent, and Reagan and G.H.W. Bush bailed out banks and created soaring debt, all of which these Tea Partiers supported or would have supported.

The Tea Partiers are also apparently hypocritical because the federal government subsidizes all kinds of industries but the Tea Partiers don’t want this to extend (further) into health care. According to Keith, federal government subsidies = subsidies that the Tea Partiers support, so suddenly opposing Obamacare makes them hypocritical?…

Either way, I’m sure there are inconsistencies in there, and I’m equally as sure that Keith’s exposure of them involved a little bit of reaching and no small amount of hypocrisy of his own. Luckily for me, I am not hampered by any association with conservatism, support of any political party, attendance at any Tea Party rallies, or misunderstanding of history, economics, or political philosophy, so I can tear into Rick Keith’s pathetic delusion of American politics at will:

Rick Keith, by your assistance in putting both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in power, you are an accomplice to murder like every other Democratic- and Republican-voting American in the last century. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Koreans, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, Africans, Arabs, Serbs, Croats, Kosovars, Afghanis, Pakistanis, and Americans is on your hands. All of you. Every president you have supported is a war criminal who belongs in prison next to the ones you’ve hated, and you are an accomplice to their crimes.

The Clinton-led NATO bombings of Yugoslavia/Serbia were unconstitutional and murderous, as are Barack Obama’s continuing airstrikes on Pakistan. The Drug War and the very existence of the Federal Reserve are unconstitutional as well. While it is legitimate to bring up the Tea Partiers’ inconsistencies in their support of strict Constitutionalism solely to point out their errors, even if you don’t support strict Constitutionalism yourself, the politicians you so idolize do swear to uphold the Constitution and are bound by the laws of their office, so by their own rules, they are criminals. Very few of the trillions of dollars your president and your Congress have spent have any remote justification in the Constitution, anywhere.

The boring, lame argument that people who receive or benefit from government money are hypocritical to oppose government spending is simply lazy. It is not possible to avoid government-provided products or services, but we can still point out the injustice of funding them coercively and promote their more efficient provision by companies and communities, privately and voluntarily. It might surprise you to learn that that cancer research student is not solely responsible for the state of public and private education and does not control the sources of funding that pay for biomedical research in this country today. On the contrary, it is your fault that no one can do privately funded research or get a privately funded education in the sciences.

Obama’s stimulus plan will have proven to create mostly government jobs and government debt, exactly as Herbert Hoover and FDR did. If you really wanted to improve the economy and unemployment in the long run, you would have supported tax cuts and spending cuts, so that people can spend their money as they see fit and not as politicians see fit.

You fail to mention that Barack Obama voted for the TARP bailouts, making him a contributor to that inflationary, impoverishing debacle. Conservatives are hypocritical (or at least dumb) for supporting Reagan’s cut-and-spend policies, debts, and bailouts, so all of the present-day liberals are, too, for calling out the Tea Partiers on it while simultaneously supporting the exact same things when Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Ben Bernanke do them.

Rick Keith’s and every other liberal’s idolization of Bill Clinton, saying he brought us “prosperity (with tax increases), based on emerging technologies, a new infrastructure and the Information Age,” belies a strong bias, something that will probably, unfortunately, survive through Obama’s deficits and unemployment. Your misunderstanding of economics is not surprising, so let me tell you a little something about the business cycle and the federal reserve. The “good times” of the 1990′s weren’t so good, because much of that growth you liberals love to extol was fueled by debt enabled by the federal reserve, which came back to hurt the economy when the tech and dot-com bubbles burst. Inflation enriches people in the finance industry temporarily and impoverishes everyone in the long run, and that’s what we’ve been seeing throughout the existence of the federal reserve, including during the Clinton administration. Government spending can only be wasteful in the long run because those expenditures are not subject to the price system or the profit and loss of the free market, so that spending and investment that made us so rich in the 1990′s is one of the hundreds of things that made us poorer now. I repeat: the “good times” of the 1990′s weren’t so good, just like the “good times” of the housing bubble weren’t so good.

Lastly, we come to Obamacare, liberals’ standard for all that is great about the Savior of America and Congress’s wise spending under the guidance of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. This is disgusting power grabbing and vote buying at its worst. “Debacle” will not begin to describe this when my children are grown up. “Debt” will scarcely mean anything anymore when the printing presses inflate the money supply constantly to give stuff away for free when all the Baby Boomers and unemployed stiffs don’t have to pay for anything and health care providers don’t have to make any economic decisions. Medical charity, which used to provide for the indigent, has already all but disappeared and will, in fact, be outlawed. The price competition that improves quality, increases number, and decreases price will also be outlawed. In his column, Rick Keith accuses conservative Tea Partiers of working to “tear down excellence” by “elevating mediocrity.” The more government controls medical care, the more this becomes true: equality is increased by bringing everybody down to a common level. Outlawing economic calculation on the free market absolutely cannot and will not make anything better or cheaper for the masses. (Not that the market hasn’t already been screwed up by decades of government interference.)

The Tea Parties have been infiltrated by neocons, anti-immigration flag waivers, bland supporters of a little less government but only domestically, and straight anti-Democrat simpletons because those are the types of people who predominate in the non-Democrat American populace. Similarly, the April 15th anti-tax Tea Party rallies were so strongly ridiculed because the type of people who predominate in the Democratic ranks are blind Statolatrists who oppose any and all governmental cuts (non-military, of course) and despise the idea of people keeping more of their own money that should be the government’s. If this were inaccurate, then liberal Democrats would have something nice to say about the anti-tax protests and would have opposed some of Barack Obama’s and Congress’s spending/stimulus/bailout actions. But they haven’t, and they won’t, because they are blind followers of just about anyone with a (D) after their name, especially when those Democrats propose to take more money from people who earned it and give it to others.

Posted in Constitutionality, Democracy, Medicine, Obama crimes, Obama failures, Rants, Statolatry, Taxes | Permalink
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Comedian Larry Miller on politicians

Larry Miller, of Ten Things I Hate About You and general stand-up comedy fame, was interviewed on the Regular Guys show, the Atlanta morning radio show that I used to listen to in college and still listen to online regularly. Among other things, they got to talking about government and politicians. Until April 5, it’ll be available online to listen to, but here’s the money quote of his interview:

Every time I see someone in politics, I seriously think—You know how we’re supposed to be the lunatics of life, people like you and me, anyone in show business…comics, writers, directors, dancers, musicians, announcers, actors, we’re supposed to be the lunatics of life. But you know who is, really, to me? Anyone who gets up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and thinks, “Maybe I’ll lead! Yes! I’ll be the leader! Everyone will be following me!” Serious maniac…seriously unwell people.
[...]
I mean, think about it: any city council in any city in the United States, any school board in any city—does anyone seriously think they mean anyone well?!

Posted in Democracy, Entertainment, Humor | Permalink
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My jury duty experience

I’d like to relate my limited experience as a potential juror and use this as a starting point for some thoughts about our criminal justice system. It might be a little anti-climactic, but it might also be worth the read. I’ll leave out a lot of specifics because it is technically illegal to give very many, and there’s no reason not to honor this government’s wish for secrecy in this case. I wasn’t selected as a juror, so I don’t know any specifics of any crimes, suspects, or charges, anyway.

Some unspecified time in my past, I received a potential-juror questionnaire that I was required to fill out and mail back to the courthouse to determine whether I was suitable to serve as a juror. I ignored it and threw it in the trash. “Fuck that, they can come and get me,” I said. It wasn’t a summons; if I didn’t return anything, what difference would it make to them? The threats of enslavement and murder were not entirely explicit, so I decided to ignore it. Then two or three months later, I got an identical letter, except I think it said “Second notice” on it or something similar, so I thought I’d better fill it out and return it. I did and received an official notice of conscription shortly thereafter.

Much to my surprise, I was being conscripted to serve in a federal district court 45 minutes away. How ridiculous, stupid, and impractical. It should be pretty widely agreed-upon, among libertarians and non-libertarians alike, that no free society would conscript innocent citizens to do anything, especially something they aren’t particularly qualified for or enthusiastic about, and especially for which they would be inconvenienced and made poorer by an hour-and-a-half commute on several dozen occasions. This was not a one- or two-day, local criminal or civil trial or anything; it was an 18-month commitment for which the jurors would be required to meet three or four Wednesdays per month every single month. That’s because this wasn’t your typical jury duty; one of the few things I do respect about this process and its requirements is the oath of confidentiality I took, but you might say this jury could be described as “great, dignified, exalted, majestic, illustrious, or eminent.” (Not that I would.)

You might be appalled at the level of situational or medical burden that jury duty must impose upon a person before he can be excused from this involuntary obligation. “Eight months pregnant? Yeah, and your point is? You live an hour and a half away and your commute would therefore be three hours every time? Cry me a river. You’re a student who has mandatory Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes? Next.” Absurd and appalling. I won’t say anything about my observations in particular, but I have heard that if you’re unable to drive and you have five adopted special-needs children for whom you are the primary caregiver, the judge and prosecutor must have a private huddle to determine that, yes, that qualifies as a legitimate excuse to preclude you from juror conscription.

I have to admit a certain admiration and almost liking of the judge who explained the whole process to us and its importance and our function in the criminal justice system. The judge spoke like someone who truly believed that a jury’s most important purpose was protecting fellow citizens against the government. S/He vehemently opposed the notion that any jury simply did the bidding of the judge and prosecutor, or that the jurors were simply an arm of the prosecutor’s office, carrying out its wishes, agreeing with it, and kowtowing to its expertise in complex matters. S/He brought this up several times and didn’t strike me as the politician-type who would say one thing and mean another.

On the other hand, s/he did not believe jurors had the right or the position to judge right vs. wrong, only the facts of the case and their relationship to the letter of the law. This was brought up only because of comments and concerns that I voiced. I felt, probably correctly, that I was alone in the room in my conscientious yet subversive objection to agreeing to submit a judgment of wrongdoing for actions I don’t believe were wrong. Maybe I can be more of a rabble-rouser than I thought (except, I guess, that no one else was roused, save by confusion and indignation at the first expression of anti-authoritarianism they’d heard in a long time). Prompted by prior mentions of drugs and guns by the judge and/or another juror, I brought up my objection to gun laws and drug laws and my inability—nay, refusal—to judge someone in the wrong for violating them, if they hadn’t harmed someone in the process.

Later during the voir dire, when jurors were asked to raise their hands and offer their stories of prior run-ins with the law that might bias them in the cases they might hear, one juror mentioned that his business was audited and he was kind of harassed by the IRS a decade or two ago. I hadn’t thought of the potential of hearing a case of tax evasion, but I realized then and there that I would never, ever, under any circumstances, whether they include other wrongdoings on the part of the defendant or duress (short of jail time) applied to me, vote in favor of the IRS. Never. Tax evasion is a noble act, and if people can get away with it, I say more power to them. The IRS is the aggressor and the defendant is the victim in any case of tax evasion, and I would not punish a victim of the IRS’s predations. If jurors are supposed to consider only the facts of the case, then please don’t blame me for taking all the facts into account, including that all taxation is theft and tax evasion represents an act of self-defense.

Don’t worry; I didn’t say nearly all that. I was not eloquent, forceful, or convincing in my comments. But I made points that many reasonable people agree with.

The other jurors came from all walks of (American) life, and most seemed smart, reasonable, and common-sensical enough. I think they’d make a fine jury, save their sheep-like attitude towards following orders and obeying the law even if they believe them to be wrong.

Because of my expression of support for the principles of jury nullification and eventually mentioning the words “jury nullification,” the judge explained that it was actually illegal, wrong, subversive of the rule of law that binds society, and not backed by any English common-law or American legal tradition. This could be true, but juror conscription, sex-discrimination, and the Three-Fifths Compromise are also part of American legal tradition, and that doesn’t make them right.

The judge clearly believed firmly in the separation of powers by the system of checks and balances in our Constitution, and s/he supported the jury’s position as defender or buffer of fellow citizens against the State. This is why s/he believed it was not the place of jurors to make law; that’s for the legislative branch. (I could mention that it is most certainly the function of the justice system to judge the law; that’s exactly what judicial review is!) On either four or five separate occasions, not in one long speech or un-separated by other matters, the judge stated in no uncertain terms that it was totally and completely illegal, wrong, inappropriate, and un-American for a jury to arrogate to itself the power of deciding on the validity of the law in addition to the facts of the case. It doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter what you want, it doesn’t matter if anyone was harmed—the jury should decide on whether the facts of the case indicate a violation of the law, and vote “objectively” in accordance with those facts.

I find this disgusting and abominable.

I cannot and will not vote against my conscience, and I cannot and will not violate my conscience to avoid breaking the law or to send someone else to prison for actions that I don’t believe warrant it. There is nothing about any legislator, governor, president, or any other elected official, or lawyer, or judge, or Department of Justice official, or their position, or any other regular citizen like myself, that makes them suited to outlaw something but makes me unsuited to deem that law unjust and invalid. The fact that legislators were voted in by other people, even a majority of voters in a given region at a given time, or the fact that a majority of citizens in this region at this time agree with the law, does not make any law the slightest bit more just, nor does it make it just to imprison someone for violating it. Might does not make right, and the majority should not rule. Six billion people vs. one does not make the one any less justified in his opinion. If I am to judge someone’s guilt, I will make that judgment using my own sense of justice and my own conception of right vs. wrong, and no other criteria.

The easiest and, unfortunately, most prevalent example of the propriety of judging the law instead of the facts is drug laws. I believe most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal, and I won’t participate in adding to that harm by punishing someone for violating them. I shouldn’t have to remind anyone of the monstrous crimes against humanity that have been committed by people who were “just obeying the law.” Right and wrong exist prior to and independent of legislation.

So after the voir dire, before we were dismissed for lunch at 1:45, a few pairs of people were told to switch seats. Apparently our order had some meaning or function. I ended up being the last “alternate” juror, as opposed to one of the first-string jurors originally. It doesn’t seem like there should be anything wrong with this, but really I think there is. The jury system is set up to weed out people who will vote with their own mind and in a way that is subversive to the State’s wishes. I’m sure you’ve heard this before. I experienced it first-hand.

To tell you the truth, I felt a little guilty for saying things that would rub the judge and prosecutor the wrong way and set off alarms in their head that I was not suitable to implement the State’s laws. And I felt bad about feeling bad about that. I felt ashamed all around. But I shouldn’t have; I didn’t “get out” of jury duty; I didn’t say 10% of what I thought about monopolistic government, monopolistic law enforcement systems, juror conscription, and a society that shuns people who would vote their conscience instead of kowtowing to objectionable laws.

I possibly could have had a chance to help put corrupt politicians behind bars, and when I heard that was one of many possibilities, I wanted to leap at the opportunity and keep my mouth shut. Instead I was honest. I’m not going to feel bad about being honest, and I’m not going to feel bad about demurring at the idea of serving the State mostly involuntarily for a year and a half. It was probably one of the more convenient times in my life to undergo such an endeavor, but I would either hate myself for it or come under some kind of stress for promising to uphold the (potentially objectionable) law and then blatantly violating that promise on day 1. Then again, if you want jury-duty advice for the future, know this: you can vote exactly how you want and voice any objections you want, without fear of judgment or repercussions, because no one besides the other jurors—not the prosecutor, not the judge, not even the stenographer or interpreters or anyone else—can know how you voted on anything, ever. At least not in that type of jury.

I’ve heard the reasons why regular, lay citizens should be extracted from their normal lives and forced into jury duty; they sound like good reasons on the surface. But why shouldn’t laymen be conscripted to serve as judges? As lawyers? Oh, are those too specialized positions to leave in the hands of laymen? How about serving as courthouse janitor once every few years? How about substitute teachers or DMV workers or receptionists? There is nothing about jurors that precludes them from being professionals, educated and specialized, just like there’s nothing that precludes every function of the government from being privatized (or abolished!). I know it’s hard to put myself in other people’s mindset sometimes, but I honestly think this is one issue where wacky libertarians like me and others can find common ground. Juror conscription is a violation, it’s impractical, and it has facilitated a State-serving function of the courts, which is the opposite of how juries should be and certainly the opposite of what the founding fathers wanted.

That said, in the future, if I’m conscripted into regular jury duty, I might see if I can swallow my abhorrence of the monopolistic court system and help fight the State from somewhere other than my computer chair. It probably won’t be such a terrible thing. Just think: if you were the sole person responsible for a hung jury on a drug trafficking or gun possession charge, you’d be a minor hero for a day. I don’t know how much you’re told about the particular case before you start serving, but if I can keep an innocent person out of prison, if only temporarily, I will lie to the State to stab it in the back.

Posted in Constitutionality, Democracy, Philosophy, Police/law enforcement, Rants, Statolatry | Permalink
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Alicia Keys: “I am an anarchist”

Alicia Keys classifies herself as an anarchist. I’m not sure I agree with her conspiracy-like theories and certainly not her donation to the Democratic Party, but for someone famous and unexpected to call herself an anarchist and appear to actually know what it means is pretty cool. Maybe she’s considered herself one for years, even longer than I (early 2004), but I’ll tell her anyway: Welcome to the philosophy of freedom and progress, of individual liberty and true moral equality.

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Let the Canadian women celebrate how they want!

Rarely have I been so pissed off in recent memory as I was at the outcries that the idiotic Olympic committee and the “international community” gave to the Canadian women’s hockey team for its celebration following its gold medal victory, but what nearly made me yell at my TV was the spineless, gutless apology that the Canadian Olympic PR monkeys released to try to suck up to the politically correct powers that be like a bunch of whimps. The women’s hockey team received its gold medals and came back out onto the ice to celebrate more publicly, by drinking beer, smoking cigars, and pouring champagne in each other’s mouths. Big fucking deal. Tragedy of tragedies. It’s pathetic that anyone would see anything other than awesomeness or a whole lot of fun in this.

I know that Canadians, both from my personal experiences in getting to know several pretty closely during my time in Michigan and from their reputation, are easy-going, friendly, non-confrontational people. But I also think they’re pretty down-to-earth and proud people, and they certainly know how to drink and have a good time late into the night. Man, can they drink. A proper response from the Canadian women’s hockey team to the IOC and the rest of the political correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade would have been to tell them, in true Patrick-Royian fashion, “I’m sorry, we can’t hear you because we’ve got our gold medals clogging our ears.” Oh, no! They’re drinking alcohol! (Perfectly harmless, despite the *gasp!* 18-year-old on their team!) Oh, no! They’re smoking cigars! How un-ladylike! (Perfectly harmless.) Oh, no! They celebrated in public, on the rink! Won’t they think of the children! (Nobody should care how they celebrate. If anything it’s good to show kids how to celebrate peacefully and composedly, I think. It’s also good to show girls that women who like sports are cool.)

Political correctness pisses me off. The IOC and anybody who batted an eye at the Canadian women’s hockey team celebration are a bunch of craven, whiny pansies.

Posted in Political correctness, Rants, Sports | Permalink
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Health care is not a right

Health care is not a right. No one has a right to health care. This has been said before and explained in better, more detailed terms than I’m going to here, but it bears repeating and needs explaining plainly and frequently.

As difficult as it is to define abstract ideas like rights, this much is certain: for anything to be a human “right,” it must apply fully and equally to all people in all possible times, places, and situations. Rights are universal and eternal and can never change. For rights to apply equally to everyone, and for one person’s “right” not to imply an entitlement or an aggression or an asymmetric demand of any kind with respect to another person, all rights are negative. Positive rights are not, in fact, rights, but desires or privileges. This means, for instance, that we don’t have a right to property, but rather we have a right for no one to take our rightfully owned property; when we say we have a right to free speech, this simply means no one can stop us from saying what we want on our own time and our own place, not that society must provide us with a microphone and a podium and pay any attention to us. We don’t have a right to certain things; we have a right for no one to forcibly prevent us from doing the things that everyone else may also do. Rights have an awfully strict definition, especially when you consider they must be identical from the days of the earliest cavemen to the distant, unimaginable future of the human race. That’s why there are so few of them.

Implicit in the idea that everyone has a right to health care is a deeply insidious morality. If it were true that health care were a right, then when an airline passenger had a heart attack mid-flight, or one member of a group of hikers or mountain climbers got injured, or a group of vacationers got stranded on an island and one fell ill, then despite the absence of any medical knowledge among the other people nearby, the person in need of medical care could demand that others treat him. He has a right, after all, to receive medical care from other people, free of charge, and their failure to provide it would be a violation of his rights.

“Health care” consists of expertise, labor, and products supplied to patients from medical professionals and manufacturers. It takes several years of advanced schooling and hard work, facing stiff competition, to even become a doctor, nurse, PA, etc. Turns out treating patients is a full-time job and for most doctors is, in fact, much more stressful and grueling than what most of us consider a “full-time” job. As we all know, you don’t just put on a ring, say, “Wonder Twin powers, activate! Form of: health care,” and receive treatment. Labor is required not only to treat you but also to train for years. With our economy becoming more integrated and the worldwide division of labor increasing all the time, millions of people’s labor goes into treating every patient in developed countries.

To claim health care as a right is to claim ownership not only of other people’s property but of the time and effort spent examining you, treating you, and training to become competent to treat you. To claim health care as a right is to claim jurisdiction over the actions, decisions, knowledge, time, and the very bodies of the people whom you are demanding treatment from. To claim health care as a right means the health care professionals and companies forfeit all of their rights to set their own prices for their goods and services—in fact, abrogates their right to charge any price for anything they give you, because you have a right to health care, and society must therefore provide it. No principled ethic of human relationships could permit such wholesale subjugation of one group of citizens by another. Medical care, like all goods and services, can only be provided via mutual agreement, an exchange or contract. Anything beyond that is either charity or slavery.

So now we see that most people do not, in fact, mean health care is a “right” at all, but rather something that they wish everyone could get for a low price. Most people who claim that health care is a right also wish no evil private companies would ever make money off of something needed so badly by so many people, or off of anything else, for that matter. Yeah, and it’d be nice if we could fly around on unicorns and Firefly had never been canceled, but we libertarians live in the real world, despite tiresome claims to the contrary. The next time you start to think anyone has a right to health care, or you hear someone else say health care is a right, remember what monstrous violations of actual human rights this entails and remind yourself or others that health care is only something you wish everyone had easy access to and weren’t overburdened with government inefficiency and regulations.

Posted in Medicine, Property rights, Unrealistic | Permalink
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Quote of the day

All government is, after all, nothing more than an absurdity, a usurpation, and a crime, inflicted on the vast majority of peaceful people, without their consent, by the dictation of a select few men who have neither the wisdom, nor the virtue, nor the right to presume to rule over anyone other than themselves.
—Charles Johnson, in a letter to the Secretary of State of South Carolina

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Stupid census commercial

Have you heard that radio commercial encouraging people to participate in and cooperate with the census because it allows local, state, and federal governments to allocate money for schools and determine how many teachers a town needs and so forth? The narrator says there are four science teachers in this one school because there are this many schools and such-and-such number of students, but if people don’t participate in the census, then governments won’t know how many students there are and how many teachers are needed. See, if the government’s micro-managers just have enough data and enough computing power, they can wisely decide when, where, and how much of everything is needed!

This is the type of crap that will dominate our lives if people don’t stop trusting politicians and start realizing the free market’s price system is what allows resources to be allocated the most efficiently, where they are needed, with minimal waste. This type of bureaucratic calculationism has impoverished hundreds of millions of people in socialist countries since the early 20th century—for example, in the Soviet Union, where people stood in bread lines and factories produced millions of huge nails and screws in order to meet their production-mass quotas more quickly and easily.

In a free society, the price for labor would be highest where it is needed the most, and it would decrease when it is less needed. No government program or bureaucracy can crunch enough numbers to make decisions anywhere nearly as well or as fast as the price system of the market. If the government weren’t screwing education systems up and then offering more of itself as the solution, the need for science teachers would be signaled by high wages and other attractive perks of the job. The need for more schools or more students at a particular school would also be signaled by greater profits or lower prices. This is a microcosm of the State-vs.-liberty argument, in which Statists claim certain things would never work fairly or resolve themselves justly without the benevolent, monopolistic State to make it so. The economy is simply one major facet of human action and interaction, and no facets are immune to the laws of human nature that make liberty more just and efficient than Statism.

Posted in Democracy, Economics | Permalink
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Economics link of the day

I really liked this article that I found from Reddit: Economics In Four Dimensions. Here are two good passages to entice you:

The most complex factor in the study of economics is time. Because liberal and statist economic theory does not properly account for the fourth dimension, it rarely predicts economic development accurately.
[...]
Banks and credit-card companies invest hard capital at a substantial risk of default, to earn money in the future through interest and fees. If they believe their ability to profit from this risk and expense is threatened, and they’ve been demonized to the point where they have no effective means to influence politics to their advantage, the only logical move is to reduce risk, and increase the price of the loans they feel confident in making. This hurts new businesses and low-income consumers the most, because they have the least impressive credit ratings.

Posted in Economics, Socialism | Permalink
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Internet uprising overturns Australian censorship law

I don’t think this news story got enough attention: from Ars Technica I read that an internet uprising led to the overturning of a very Orwellian censorship law in Australia. The law, which had taken effect just weeks prior, banned anonymous political commenting online. Can you imagine the twisted set of morals and the creepy desire to control other people that led the Australian criminal class to pass such a law? It is small consolation that the government backed down to the popular pressure and revoked the law, but don’t let anyone fool you that “the system worked.” I consider it an indictment of the system that there exists any group of people who have the power to enact such restrictions on the behavior and speech of anyone else. The fact that they want such power is proof that they shouldn’t have any power over anyone. Yet they still do. The system is a heinous affront to the individual sovereignty and liberty of everyone, and it doesn’t work for anyone but the professional criminal class.

Posted in Computers/technology, Constitutionality, Democracy, Fascism, Media | Permalink
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Campaign finance reform is pretty simple

Many of my friends and millions of people in the blogosphere/social-mediasphere have expressed their outrage and indignation at the Supreme Court’s ruling that corporations can spend as much as they want to promote or oppose whatever political candidates or causes that they want. One of my friends said she was saddened and angered by it, and another described it as a “sad, sad day for democracy.”

To understand why corporations, unions, and lobbyists spend such vast sums of money on political contributions is to understand how campaign finance “corruption” could be done away with in a clear, easy, and fair way. The reason they spend so much is because they get so much in return! With every political campaign and every election, a huge amount of money is at stake for every business—and most individuals, for that matter—and especially for the largest corporations, whose success and riches depend upon the corporate-political establishment. They spend so much money because there is the potential to get so much in return. The fact that large corporations donate money to opposing candidates and their parties is proof of this: it isn’t ideology, it is just good business.

My liberal friends and seemingly the majority, or a large minority, of Americans interested in politics are neither outraged nor saddened at the affront to individualism and self-governance that our current fascist-corporatist political-economic system represents. The mob elects legislators and bureaucrats who rule over everyone, whether we voted for them or not and whether their plans are in our best interest or not. They take people’s money and do whatever they want with it without our consent, and they’ve proven their ineptitude at spending our money in every way and at every turn. Obviously very few people are upset about this, beyond occasionally booting out incumbents who didn’t redistribute enough wealth. But now people get outraged because corporations can donate and spend as much money (part of which is our confiscated money) as they want to influence how their/our money is spent and how the conduct of business is governed in this country, whereas before, corporations could only spend a limited amount for such purposes.

First of all, those people have picked an awfully odd point to become saddened or outraged. If they thought about this issue from a principled angle, they would have been outraged long before the dollar amount for political donations/promotions was uncapped. But, most importantly, if you want to end the undue influence that corporations have on politics, get politics out of business! If politicians didn’t have the power to govern so many aspects of our lives, including the economy, then corporations, unions, and lobbyists would have no chance to engage in rent-seeking. As P.J. O’Rourke quipped, “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” In summary, achieving a state of less democracy, with its idiotic wealth redistribution and its monopolistic enforcement of mob-rule, would greatly reduce the influence that corporations have on politicians because politicians would have less influence on everything.

Posted in Constitutionality, Democracy, Economics, Elections, Fascism | Permalink
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One year of Obama crimes and failures

Barack Obama is already a terrible president, a war criminal who belongs in prison beside Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. He is an economic ignoramus who despises private enterprise, exalts the State over the individual, and dreams of a world in which the inert, gray, bureaucratic mediocrity of corporate-State socialism controls nearly every aspect of the education, finances, medical care, housing, parenting, transportation, employment, and behavior of everyone on Earth. We are only one quarter of the way through his sanctimonious presidency, and it is only going to get worse.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy should earn him the ire of self-described peaceful or anti-war liberals across the world, but all of the American liberals (at least, the supporters of the Democratic Party) love him and continue to defend him. Obama has continued the aggressive war, started by George W. Bush, in foreign countries that have not declared war on the United States. Civilians continue to be killed, retaliatory terrorism continues to kill many more, and young foreigners continue to become attracted to the terroristic, America-hating ideology that Obama and everyone else in Washington claim to be striving to quell. Libertarians predicted this would happen and routinely criticized Obama, Democratic politicians, Democratic voters, and the neocons for their imminent hypocrisy and warmongering, and we have been proven correct and justified in those attacks.

On January 23, 2009, Obama ordered air strikes against Pakistan by Predator drones, killing approximately 15 non-aggressing civilians, including 3 children in a country that had not attacked or declared war on the United States. This began Obama’s continuation of the bloody air-strike campaign carried out by CIA-operated drones (Predator aircraft) in Pakistan that was ramped up in September 2008 and continues unabated to this day. Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reports that 708 innocents (non-combatants) were killed by drone air strikes in 2009:

Of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians.

According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009.

For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.

You can find a list of CIA drone air strikes carried out in Pakistan in the Wikipedia article Drone attacks in Pakistan. I was going to list them all to emphasize how bloody and counterproductive Obama’s foreign policy has been, but, as you will note if you read the news articles cited therein, those articles rarely contain details or even estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by the drone attacks. Whatever the reasons, sinister or not, the important point is that these civilian deaths are not highlighted by the media, are not stressed to the public by CIA, Defense, or White House officials, and are apparently not much concern to most Americans. Least of all the liberal Democrats who voted for Obama, continue to defend him to this day, and therefore have the blood of innocent Pakistanis and Afghanis on their hands.

They are of concern to Pakistanis, Afghanis, and terrorists and civilians across the Middle East. There is much evidence that drone attacks are counterproductive regardless of how many terrorists they kill and of the support they might receive from Pakistani and Afghani officials. For instance, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani has said, “These (strikes) are counterproductive and not in the interests of the country. I think the Obama administration will have to reconsider this policy.”

Afghanistan is, of course, more deadly for both U.S. soldiers and local civilians. This U.N. report (pdf) says that approximately 310 (one-third) of the civilian casualties that resulted from combat in Afghanistan in the first half of 2009 were caused by international military forces, which means U.S.-led forces. It is probably easier to just read the Wikipedia article. (Hey, it’s the best source for a summary of this information.) The U.N. report also concludes that civilian deaths and injuries are probably significantly under-reported because of the lack of ability to confirm many of them.

True to his promises to expand and focus the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, Obama sent 30,000 more soldiers there in December. This is another example of counterproductive warmongering that will only continue to inspire hatred, kill innocent people, and waste billions of dollars that could be spent improving our own country, something the military cannot do. He says this is a precursor to the beginning of a withdrawal from Afghanistan in 18 months (say, July 2011), so while we’re on the topic, I’ll predict that a significant withdrawal will not begin on schedule, and after it does happen and Afghanistan is controlled by its own people, the war in Afghanistan will be shown to be largely a futile effort.

The most embarrassing part of this presidency so far was Obama’s acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize, which he should have rejected. That speech consisted mostly of a promotion of military force as a vehicle of peace and a justification of the aggressive interventions of the Imperial Federal Government. Chris Floyd covered it sufficiently.

Obama’s legacy will probably be written in terms of his economic policy, which has been abominable. The idiotically named American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was his huge $787-billion stimulus bill that aimed to increase consumer spending and lending when they both needed to be curtailed like never before. Reckless borrowing (debt), which fueled unwise consumer and commercial spending and industrial expansion into unsustainable projects, is exactly what caused so many people to default on their mortgages and credit cards, so many companies to go out of business, and such a high rate of unemployment. Obama’s myopic stimulus plan operated under the Keynesian assumption that the economy is static and circular, and that more consumer spending means more economic growth, and has only delayed a true recovery.

In the second-biggest economic fiasco to date (after the trillions of dollars given to undeserving, failing automotive and financial corporations), the Cash for Clunkers program was an economic failure to anyone who paid attention. Part of the problem is that the defined goals of the Cash for Clunkers program were harmful to the American economy, so by succeeding in promoting spending, raising prices, and destroying wealth (literally), the program failed horrendously.

As alluded to above, Obama’s Treasury and Federal Reserve have committed or printed a total of $11 trillion to forestall the Second Great Depression. This number is not mentioned frequently, and the individual sources or components of this total are hardly ever highlighted or discussed, even right after the funds are printed by the Treasury and given to the companies. It is possible that they actually believe printing money out of thin air and keeping failing, inefficient, unproductive, parasitic companies afloat will promote an economic recovery and economic strength in the foreseeable future. If Obama, his economic advisers, and the people in the Treasury Department and Fed believe that, then their ignorance of the basic principles of economics and even of common sense are astounding—Krugmanian, even. If they don’t believe it, which is a distinct possibility, then they are intentionally exacerbating the economic crash in order to buy some time, possibly in the hopes that another Democratic government can be elected in 2012. How ignorant and/or short-sighted. Bloomberg reported that the bailout and stimulus funds approach the total GDP of the United States.

Being too stupid and caught up in his own messiah complex to learn from the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, His Eloquence is hell-bent on pumping up bubbles in the automotive industry and “green” technologies as fast as he can. It is unlikely the automotive bubble will ever pop because American car companies are well on their way to becoming de facto arms of the Imperial Federal Government, which will not be subject to the pressures of the free market, such as it is (though they will, as everything governmental and private is, still be governed by the laws of economics and human action, meaning they will only impoverish dollar holders more). This month, Obama announced that $2.3 billion of his $787-billion stimulus package will be rewarded for clean-energy technologies in the form of tax credits. These will go to 183 companies in 43 states. This is one of a million examples of the government interfering in the economy by taking money from people who earned it (taxpayers) or simply printing it (impoverishing all dollar holders) and giving it to people or companies for political reasons, to achieve goals defined by politicians and bureaucrats. This is not how a free society functions. This is not how a man of the people treats his people’s money.

Contrary to popular belief, Obama is terrible on issues of civil liberties, and this was even obvious during the campaign, when he voted to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that spied on users.

Glenn Greenwald and the New York Times article he cites sum up Obama’s hypocritical and not-so-stellar civil-liberties record quite well.

The Obama regime’s Department of Justice [sic] sided with that of George W. Bush regarding the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and anyone else the State deems an “enemy combatant.” The D.C. Circuit Court had issued a ruling agreeing with the Bush DOJ that prisoners being held in American prisons outside of American soil did not count as legal “persons” and that they have no Constitutional protections against torture, and Obama’s lawyers urged the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal of that case, meaning they support the ruling.

They also decided to revamp, rather than reject, the system of military tribunals established by the Bush regime.

On October 28, 2009, Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law, under the bizarre impression that hate crimes legislation protects people’s civil liberties. Oh, but the Democrats assure us the First Amendment–protection clauses in the bill will protect all of our Constitutional rights. People convicted of “hate crimes” will still be punished for their thoughts, and certain victim groups will be treated differently under the law than other victims of the same crimes, so, you know—civil liberties, Orwellian police state, it’s all the same to the Democrats.

Kinsella argues that Obama is actually worse than Bush on intellectual property.

A major indicator of Barack Obama’s ineptitude and corruption is the people he has chosen to surround himself with.

Most of my Democratic friends not only supported but lauded the selection of Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate. Presumably this was because it improved the chances of the Savior of America being elected president and was certainly not an indication of deep-seated, in fact fundamental, hypocrisy and amorality among liberal Americans. Joe Biden is a fantastic warmonger who voted to invade Iraq in 1998 and has been described as “perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration’s decision to invade” Iraq. He is a staunch opponent of civil liberties as well. Biden voted for the original PATRIOT Act, voted to reauthorize (!) the PATRIOT Act in 2006, and in fact bragged about having authored a predecessor to the PATRIOT Act in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh and another sweeping terrorism bill the year before that. This moran also supports a federal ban on smoking. Biden has a long, dirty history of supporting the Recording Industry Association of America and the FBI’s privacy-invading endeavors. He is also an ardent drug warrior who was instrumental in creating the National Office of Drug Control Policy and boasts about coining the term “Drug Czar”. Joe Biden is truly a despicable human being.

Among Obama’s cronies, Biden might only be surpassed by Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who is a creepy, slimy, vindictive, malicious politician of the worst sort. He seeks the political destruction even of fellow Democrats who have crossed him in the past, he believes the State can abrogate anyone’s right to bear arms at any time for whatever reasons it pleases, and of course he was involved in former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s pay-for-play schemes.

It was expected that Obama’s nominees for Secretary of Commerce would know nothing about business and less about economics, but it was a true sign of his ineptitude that he would nominate two who were ethically challenged hypocrites who actually, literally belong in prison under current state and federal law. Bill Richardson withdrew his nomination because he was under investigation by a grand jury for influence-peddling, meaning his political donors had received state contracts. The charges were eventually dropped, but, as you should know by now, that doesn’t mean he was innocent. (Judd Gregg, the second nominee, withdrew his nomination because of irreconcilable differences with Obama, and was a bad choice for Obama anyway because Gregg had actually voted to abolish the Department of Commerce in 1995, which makes him a great candidate from my perspective but underscores the ineptitude of Obama’s team.) The third and final nominee was Gary Locke, a money-laundering tax evader who repeated the crimes of the Clinton Chinese fundraising scandal and played the race card when he was scrutinized. This apparently made him a perfect fit for Obama’s cabinet. I’ll link to Michelle Malkin for the first time, only because she covered Locke when he was Governor of Washington and she worked for the Seattle Times.

Obama’s choices for Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chairman have also proven to be terrible. This should be self-explanatory. Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke have been the primary implementers of the corporate-State socialist doctrine that large investment banks (particularly Goldman Sachs) and the American automotive companies are too big to fail, must be bailed out with stolen (printed) taxpayer money at every turn, and will ultimately better serve Geithner’s and Bernanke’s ideal way of life by becoming de facto arms of the Imperial Federal Government. They desperately cling to the Keynesian fantasy that spending = economic growth, when Americans need to save and invest, not borrow and consume. This policy will only end as Mises and Hayek predicted: with crippling inflation and more government intrusion into the economy to fix the problems it created.

It is hard to imagine how Obama could have done better at surpassing George W. Bush in the stupidity and ignorance of his selections and nominations to fill various governmental posts, but history might show that he succeeded.

His Eloquence signed two bills requiring increased energy efficiency, following the all-encompassing Statist mantra of “if you want something, regardless of whether it is desired by the people it affects, simply mandate it,” during the worst economic period since the Great Depression.

The Savior of America also appears bound and determined to inflict cruel, crippling environmental and medical-insurance policies on the United States, as evidenced by his constant fear-mongering, his blatant patronizing, his demagoguery, his terrifying speech at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, and the passage of the politicized and ill-advised health care bill. However, the Green USA and Obamacare are not realities yet, so I’ll have to save those for next year (probably).

Posted in Economics, Elections, Foreign policy, Medicine, Obama crimes, Obama failures | Permalink
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David Henderson: in defense of Avatar

If you haven’t seen Avatar yet, you should; the plot might be incredibly predictable and, actually, almost identical to that of Poul Anderson’s novella Call Me Joe or Robert F. Young’s novella To Fell a Tree, but what you get out of it is the best visual, graphical, cinematic experience you are likely to experience any time soon. While it is a little bit unfortunate that the great screenwriter and director James Cameron couldn’t focus (or hire) some of his talent to enhance the plot during the last 10 years, it still has a great, libertarian, anti-war, pro–property rights message. It’s at least worth a viewing in the dollar theater, and if you want to see it in 3-D, as I did, I recommend waiting until you can sit as close to the back and middle of the theater as possible.

David R. Henderson writes about its pro-capitalist, anti-corporatist message, focusing largely on the inconsistent stance that one particular Objectivist, Edward Hudgins, takes:

But I don’t think Avatar is an attack on capitalism. One could leave the movie and have no idea, based on just the movie, about James Cameron’s view of capitalism. And while it did have some clichés (most movies do), I didn’t find it loaded. So what is Avatar? In fact, Avatar is a powerful antiwar movie—and a defense of property rights. For that reason, I found it easy to identify with those whose way of life was being destroyed by military might.

In fact, the defense of property rights in Avatar is so clear that, at one point in the movie, when the bad guys are justifying their war on the grounds that they need “Unobtainium,” I turned to a libertarian friend and said, “This is the Kelo decision.” Recall that the Supreme Court, in Kelo v. City of New London, decided that it was all right to take Suzette Kelo’s property from its low-tech use as a house so that a major corporation could use it for a “grander” project.

Which brings me back to whether this movie was an attack on capitalism. I think not. To the extent that it makes any statement about capitalism, Avatar is a defense of capitalism. Capitalism is based on property rights and voluntary exchange. The Na’vi had property rights in the crucial tree and various other properties surrounding it. Did they own it as individuals or as community tribal property? We can’t be sure, but probably the latter. They had refused to sell the property to the outsiders. There was nothing the outsiders could give them that would make it worth their while. What should we, if we are good capitalists, conclude? That, just as in the Kelo case, the people currently sitting on the land value it more than the outsiders. The land is already in its highest-valued use. Hudgins and Salam could argue that that’s implausible. Surely there would be some finite price that the Na’vi would take in return for the Unobtainium. Maybe, maybe not. But once the Na’vi have made it clear that they’re unwilling to exchange it, that should be the end of things, shouldn’t it?

Posted in Entertainment, Objectivism, Property rights, Statolatry | Permalink
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Fish in a barrel 6

For some combination of reasons, the main one probably being the coming of the Second Great Depression and the need of so many people to save money, the exorbitant price of a college degree is being criticized and questioned more loudly and frequently than I can remember. For instance, Peter Schiff has written and spoken a fair amount about college tuition prices. College tuition increases almost always surpass price inflation, I understand. This is terrible, and it’s a sign of how perturbed the economics of education is by the State. Think about any other expensive items that we buy—cars, computers, and a lot of other electronic devices. In the long run, they do more and cost less! I’m sure most of the price increases over the decades have been due to inflation, and I’d guess a thorough analysis of any particular industry would reveal many other governmental factors behind the rest of the price increases those products have experienced. But college tuition keeps going up and up, and I’m not sure the education is getting better and better. Is your college education so much better than your parents’? Is it 10 times better than your parents’? Given the complaints of grade inflation and other reports that college doesn’t prepare people for the real world very well (not that it ever excelled), a college education might not even be as good as it was in decades past. The world has discovered more facts, which are taught in college, and technology has provided us many advances, which are used by college students and faculty, but that doesn’t really make the education you receive so much better. College students receive something that ranges from worse to marginally better, at many times the price that it cost a generation earlier. This can only be explained by massive perturbation of the market. So when you’re looking for solutions to any education- or tuition-related problems, look first to the free market that has been prohibited from burgeoning in the provision of education.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suddenly skipped town for two days, so SF had no mayor. This is a problem? Let people run their own lives for a while without getting in their way, and see how well it works!

I think it is incredibly unfair to fire teachers or other public employees because of some supposedly scandalous but completely legal pictures of them on Facebook or mySpace or somewhere else on the internet. Sometimes, the victims were fired for things that weren’t even pornographic or illicit in any way. Ashley Payne, a 24-year-old teacher in Barrow County, Georgia, was fired because of non-pornographic pictures and supposedly profane comments posted to her Facebook page. “I wasn’t doing anything illegal, I wasn’t doing anything provocative,” she says. She had set everything in her profile to “private” and was not friends with any students or parents. She has no idea how the parent who brought the complaint gained access to her photos. Oh, and also, the parent complained of Payne’s holding an alcoholic drink in one of the pictures. The completely infuriating, despicable, wretched, reviled, pathetic, sanctimonious destructiveness of idiotic teetotaling motherfuckers aside, by what right does a school board fire a teacher for doing nothing illegal, pornographic, harmful, or even unadvisable by any standards? I wish I had the link to a story about another teacher who was fired over some photographs of her in provocative poses, taken either by her boyfriend or husband before she ever became a teacher. So if you have ever done anything that someone in the school system or related to someone in the school system wouldn’t have done herself, that is grounds for firing. This is so typical of the the overly intrusive nanny state and the fascist busybodies that run our stupid society.

It strikes me as a sign of technological impairment or old-fogey-cluelessness when people refer to blog posts as “blogs.” To me, the LRC contributors are the most prominent perpetrators of this transgression. They’ll write, “In reference to your blog from yesterday…” or “…which I wrote about in a previous blog.” Hey, guys, “blog” is short for “web log,” as in, a journal. You wouldn’t refer to an entry in a child’s diary or a starship catpain’s log as a “log.” You would call it an entry. The proper term is blog post or blog entry. You can shorten it to “post” without using any more keystrokes than you now use. Calling a blog post a “blog” is like Senator Ted Stevens calling an email “an internet.” (In case you were wondering, yes, this is the only type of situation in which I would use the conventional “blog” instead of the uber-|337 and irreverent “blag.”)

Ha! Some person at “Progressive Nation” writes of the “growing rift between Libertarians and Republicans. No, this is not a repeat from the 1970′s, the 1980′s, the 1990′s, or every year of the Bush regime.

The first-class moran who occupies Michigan’s lieutenant governor post wants to tax bottled water companies to rescue the flagging revenues of a college scholarship program. In the state with the worst economy in the nation. The one that’s been in a depression for a year longer than the rest of the nation. The one losing businesses in hordes. It is simply depressing that after all these years, liberals refuse to understand that taxes hurt businesses and employment, and that taking more and more money from the taxpayers to put into government programs only destroys wealth. If you want education to be more affordable, or you want to save the environment (as the rest of this idiotic tax would fund), get the government out of both, and let people, companies, and communities solve their problems for themselves.

Juice is as unhealthy as soda and contributes just as much to obesity and diabetes, say some scientists. Yeah, you know who else blamed juice for the world’s problems? HITLER.

Posted in Computers/technology, Democracy, Economics, Education, Stupid, Taxes | Permalink
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Obama-bashing quote of the day

In reality, the quote of the day is Chris Floyd’s entire post about Tony Blair’s warmongering glorification of the Iraq War and Obama’s warmongering glorification of any war the Imperial Federal Government embarks on—in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, no less! But since I know you all read Chris Floyd’s every word like the good boys and girls that you are, I’ll just remind you of the highest highlights that flowed Tuesday from Floyd’s acerbic keyboard.

…the intense, near-pathological self-regard in the speech was not Obama’s alone, of course; we must do him the credit of acknowledging that in this regard, at least, he was what we so often proclaim our leaders to be: the embodiment of the nation. His soaring proclamation of American exceptionalism, in a setting supposedly devoted to universal principles of peace, was breathtaking in its chutzpah—but entirely in keeping with the feelings of the vast majority of his countrymen, and the ruling elite above all.
[...]
Here is chutzpah—and hubris—raised to the level of the sublime. Obama has taken the words he used to instigate the certain death of thousands of human beings and the acceleration of hatred, extremism, chaos and brutal corruption around the world—and offered them as justification for the hideous, unabashedly Orwellian doctrine at the core of his speech: War is Peace. In this perverse inversion of values, Obama, as a warmaker, is actually a peacemaker, you see—and thus a legitimate heir to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who was evoked at several points in the speech.

And here we come to what was for me the most revolting part of the speech. And perhaps the most significant too. All the cant about America’s altruism and “enlightened self-interest” in killing millions of people—Indochina was one of many convenient blank spots in Obama’s historical survey—for the sake of all the children of the world (red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in our sight) was just par for the rhetorical course. It was nothing that had not been said many times before, including the references—so lauded by Obama’s liberal apologists—to those inadvertent “mistakes” America seems to keep making; out of a surfeit of good intentions, no doubt. But I don’t think an American president has so openly and directly traduced the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi before. (And to do it while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, no less! Oh, that sublime brass….)
[...]
In any case, aside from the particulars of any real situation or hypothetical scenario, the speech is a glaring example of Obama’s deep-seated (and perhaps unconscious) contempt for the path of peace, and its practitioners. It is also a manifestation of his own inferno, of his desperate need to justify—to himself and to the world—his free, deliberate choice to follow the blood-choked “path of action” as the commander-in-chief of a bloated, brutal war machine.

No one forced any of these decisions—or these specious, obscene justifications—on Obama or Blair. It is their own narcissism—their own lust for power, and their love for the system that gave them that power—has covered them with the blood and shame that now taint their every word and deed.

I skipped a lot of commentary on the specifics of his speech, and there is some great stuff (one of the primary focuses of the essay, actually) on the utility and success of non-violent resistance to bloodthirsty war machines and terrorists alike.

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Monopolistic law-enforcement systems are a racket

My friend got a new car, a white Subaru Legacy, to replace his old white Subaru Legacy. Apparently, Michigan law lets you transfer your old license plates to your new car in some (all?) situations, so he just took his license plate off of his old Legacy and put it on his new one. Maybe this is allowed in many sates, but it surprised me.

A few days later, he was driving along doing nothing wrong, when a cop pulled him over and asked him where he got that license plate. He said, “The Secretary of State’s office.” (That’s Michigan’s stupid term for the DMV.) The cop asked him if he was trying to be a smart-ass or if he was being serious. Of course he was being serious. The reason the cop was asking, you see, is that this plate was registered to a much older car, and his was obviously very new. He asked him how this came to be. My friend told him the truth, that he simply had it transferred to his new car, and some paper or computer records must not have gotten changed yet.

So, naturally, the cop did what any officer of the law and protector of the people would do: He wrote him a ticket for running a red light, which my friend most definitely hadn’t done. He even had a friend in the passenger seat who could vouch for that with 100% certainty. As my friend pointed out to me while telling this story, the cop didn’t pull over the car that was behind my friend in the other lane and also drove right through the (green) light.

The reason, I suspect, that this clown-suited thug invented a bogus charge on the spot was because he was desperate for ticket revenue, since their tax revenue probably doesn’t cover all their expenses, and, possibly, he might have figured he got caught running my friend’s license plate through their police database, which shouldn’t be done unless there is a prior reason for doing so, meaning he needed a legitimate pretense for pulling my friend over, which function was filled by the red-light violation.

The ticket was for well over $100. I don’t remember the amount, but it is obviously completely irrelevant, and I’ll keep it in the mid-$100s to avoid unnecessarily trumping up the story. Naturally, my friend wanted to contest this ticket and explain to the judge that the officer had obviously made an “honest mistake” so that the ticket would just be thrown out and my friend could lose a morning of his life and go through a lot of hassle in exchange for keeping a small sum of his own money.

However, the judge told him that for some reason or another, possibly due to the nature of the violation or possibly because it was just his word versus that of the barbaric, primitive, parasitic waste of carbon and oxygen who issued the ticket, he couldn’t simply throw the ticket out or do anything else that would result in him not owing the money to the city, save filing an official appeal with the local DA’s office (or whomever). During the hearing, the clown-suited gangster submitted the bald-faced lie that he clearly remembered my friend running the red light and that that was the one and only reason he pulled him over.

My friend met with some attorney or attorney’s assistant and found out that to file an appeal itself would cost more than the ticket was for. This fee was non-refundable, win or lose.

So there you have it, folks. The government of the City of Ann Arbor is officially, proudly, patently, shamelessly a racket, and very little more. All the evidence I’ve ever encountered points to the “transfer theory of government” explaining, at least in large part, the foundation and continuation of every government in the history of mankind. The transfer theory of government, as, for example, Bruce Benson writes in The Enterprise of Law, posits that governments are formed primarily to take money, property, and other forms of wealth from one class of people (the citizens) to give it to another (the people who run the government).

In the future, just so you know: clown-suited thugs are apt to run your license plate in their database if they ever get a free second or two, in order to see if there’s any “crime” they can possibly pull you over for.

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The auto bailout money will not be repaid

And there will be more of it. Probably multiple times. Until the automotive industry is a de facto arm of the Imperial Federal Government. If you think this is not an explicit goal of the Obama regime, leave your address in the comments so I can mail you a tall, conical hat.

As David Z. predicted a year ago and I predicted a couple times in the past year, the bailout money taken/inflated from the American public and given to Chrysler and GM will not be repaid. “Oh, but it’s not a bailout; it’s a LOAN!” Eat crow, you accessories to robbery.

But, at least we only lost $30 billion in this venture instead of the possible maximum of $44 billion.

The $30 billion isn’t the end of it because this is the way Obamanomics works. It’s the same way Bushonomics and every other socialist, dirigiste economy works: the rich and well-connected benefit at the expense of the common people, who don’t get bailouts and are impoverished by inflation.

Hat tip: David Z. at …no third solution

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Robert Fisk: Obama is a disaster

British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk says Obama’s foreign policy is a disaster potentially worse than Bush’s, and that it is incomprehensible why Obama has taken on the Afghan war with such enthusiasm. I think it’s safe to say that the libertarian community in general predicted his continuation of neoconservative, interventionist foreign policy. For instance, in January I wrote,

…my impression is that he plans to increase American military presence in Afghanistan while doing nothing close to giving up or withdrawing in Iraq. This is a terrible foreign policy scarcely different from the neoconservative one. I hardly see how he could expect to gain or maintain much power in our Imperial Federal Government without those positions, though. I think there will be a significant American military presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq on the last day of Obama’s presidency, as will there be in most other countries where the Imperial Federal Government has military bases and personnel. I won’t be surprised if the numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan are almost as high as they are today.

I stand by those predictions, as Robert Fisk might.

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Amanda Knox: guilty…or is she?

I was very intrigued by this short video featuring an Italian lawyer, who has practiced in the U.S. and in Italy, explaining the differences between criminal trials (specifically, the judges and juries) in the two countries. He was being interviewed in the context of the conviction of Amanda Knox, the University of Washington student who was found guilty of the murder of another study-abroad student, Meredith Kercher.

Since the computer programmers a CNN’s iReport.com are apparently as dense as everyone else employed by CNN, their videos cannot be embedded with the autoplay feature turned off (at least, by any means I know of), so here is the page with the video on it. Quoth the unnamed Italian lawyer:

In Italy we don’t have a jury system, like in the U.S…. You don’t have only laypeople that decide. You have a pool of two professional judges and six laypeople, and they sit together, they decide together… There’s always a risk that if one of the two professional judges thinks that the criminal defendant is guilty…it’s natural that she or he might have a lot of clout over the jurors.
[...]
The public prosecutors, together with judges, are not elected by the people, nor are they appointed by the political power, but they…have a law degree…they pass an exam. They’re only accountable to…a body formed by public prosecutors from everywhere in Italy. … There is not real accountability for magistrates in Italy. It’s a big problem. It’s probably one of the most serious problems that the Italian justice system has because when you have power, you must be accountable.
[...]
If we were in the U.S., who would decide about the admissibility of the DNA evidence? The judge. The jury would know nothing [about evidence that was thrown out]. It Italy, the judge decides on the admissibility of the DNA, but then that same judge also decides on the verdict. So, there’s something wrong about it.

He also explains that both the defense and the prosecution can appeal a verdict; in other words, there is no double-jeopardy protection in Italy.

Despite these procedural and technical differences, one similarity should stand out between the English common-law/American systems and the Italian system: the State arrogates to itself a geographic monopoly over criminal investigation, pursuit, prosecution, and punishment. The prosecutors and judges are not accountable to the people because the people have little to no say in the justice systems they are subjected to or the people who “represent” them.

Note this Italian attorney’s lament that juror-judges (and prosecutors) have power but are not accountable to the citizenry. This is what Albert Jay Nock opened his magnum opus Our Enemy, the State with: in any society there is only a certain amount of power, or influence, or ability to carry out your wishes, and this power, unfortunately, is divided between the State and its subjects. The more power the State has, the less its subjects necessarily have. Every single little thing the State is allowed to do takes from the people a proportional amount of ability to achieve their ends.

I am an outspoken opponent of juror conscription and proponent of professional jurors, just as we have professional lawyers and judges and janitors and teachers. It is clear from the (supposed) corruption and unaccountability in the Italian justice system that professional, non-conscripted jurors do not constitute the whole of the solution to corrupt, overzealous prosecutors and judges who think a good verdict is the verdict the State wants and that the verdict the State wants is “guilty.” The most important part of the solution to the problems that every criminal-justice system faces is to subject every part of it to the free market and to give the people more control over their legal protection.

Finally, the interviewer in this video points out the character assassination of Amanda Knox that the Italian mass media carried out. They labeled her a “sex predator,” a “little female devil,” and the “dark lady of Seattle.” This should make it clear that prosecutors and judges (and their easily influenced jurors) are not the only ones who seek the glorification of the State with convictions for everyone. The sycophants in the media and a large proportion of the populace also react to such criminal cases in sensational ways. Without any hyperbole, this is somewhat reminiscent of the Roman arenas with their gladiator battles. The root of the problem is not the State per se but rather Statism. Most of the world is guilty of Statism, and it will take a long and gradual shift in our core beliefs to effect the types of societal changes that are really necessary to eliminate not only the governments that inflict so many injustices upon people but the mindset that permits them to do so. I hope that this website plays some small, positive role in promoting those changes.

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Get it straight: the military does not protect our lives or our freedoms

War is the health of the State.
—Randolph Bourne

Today is Veterans’ Day, formerly called Armistice Day. But, our exalted warmongering Statolatrist congressmen and senators and presidents couldn’t have a holiday that celebrated the end of a colossal State endeavor, so in 1954 they renamed it Veterans’ Day.

The attention paid to Veterans’ Day and the misconceptions this holiday brings forth have annoyed me to the point of writing a short post about such misguided military-worship. ESPN is heavy into this spirit, broadcasting College Gameday from the site of the irrelevant Navy–Air Force game last Saturday and SportsCenter live from West Point Academy this morning. For the last week I’ve heard a seemingly constant stream of TV and radio commercials and discussions and interviews in which someone “salutes our troops” or thanks them for “protecting our freedoms” or says “they allow us to live the lives we do.”

Um, how? Who steals our money, kidnaps and imprisons us for harming no one, cripples businesses, dumbs down schools, devalues our currency, imprisons us for trying to use another one, violates our right to control our own bodies, outlaws self-defense, destroys families, rigs the court system to favor convictions and plea bargains over acquittals, deliberately and systematically enriches the powerful and well-connected at the expense of the common man, outlaws private protection and arbitration systems, and, oh, yeah, inspires hatred and terrorism across the globe? The Imperial Federal Government!

The military is not a sector of the market nor an extension of the populace; it is an arm of the State. It does what politicians and generals want it to. It is not possible for the military’s objectives to be in line with those of the public because the military wants what the State wants, and what the State wants is in direct opposition to what the people want. If this is not true, then why must the State institute a coercive monopoly and murder anyone who defies it?

The reality is that the exploits of the military result in less freedom for us because in every State in mankind’s history, military interests were used as justifications for expansions of State power; these powers, by their very nature, reduce the overall freedom of the State’s subjects. Second, the American military does not protect anyone’s lives but rather does quite the opposite. Noble though the intentions of the individual soldiers may be, the military endangers non-aggressing bystanders in foreign countries directly by its attacks on other people and indirectly by inspiring more military/insurgent activity; the Department of Defense kills thousands of soldiers and puts thousands more in danger with its military adventurism; and it endangers Americans by inspiring terrorism on our own soil. (Mark my words: America’s war on terra will bring suicide-bombing to the streets of American cities as exists in Israel and Iraq.) Lastly, the Department of Defense flat-out wastes literally hundreds of billions of dollars per year; this does immense harm to our economic and financial well-being, so, no, those servicemen and -women decidedly do not “allow us to live the lives that we do.”

A standard response might go like, “Well, yeah, but it could be even worse if a foreign power took over because our military didn’t protect us.” Not only is this not true for the United States, it has been true for very few countries in the history of the world. Probably some European countries in WWII, which was a direct result of the USA’s entry into WWI. Claiming a strong (enough) military is necessary to protect us against potentially terrible conquerors is typical Statist thinking: solve one problem caused by the State with more Statism: States exist solely to take power and money away from their subjects, so you want to strengthen the “defensive” arm of our State to protect us against other ones?

Sure, there could be a despotic foreign power that threatened the lives and freedoms of people living in North America, as other countries have been threatened occasionally throughout history. But the only thing that threatens to take the lives and freedoms of Americans today is the Imperial Federal Government. The military and all its brave soldiers, who go through a hell of a lot more hardship than I probably ever will, does not act in the interests of the American people and is used by politicians to justify further encroachments of our liberty.

Posted in Foreign policy, Political correctness, Statolatry | Permalink
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‘V’ as anti-Obama social commentary?

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Because in a free society, people would attack each other without provocation or fear of punishment from a higher legal authority

A man returns home from drinking one night to find part of his house on fire. He warns everyone, wakes them up, helps them outside, then goes back inside to rescue someone who, he had just learned, was asleep upstairs. Do the police officers at the end of the driveway (A) Refuse to help him do anything, (B) Tackle and restrain him after he’s helped everyone out of the house, which is now burning down, (C) Tase him, (D) Arrest him for no apparent charge other than resisting arrest, (E) Confine him to a police car and police station, preventing him from receiving medical treatment for his first- and second-degree burns, or (F) All of the above?

Since I like directing this blag at Statists as much as at other libertarians, I’ll give some advice to the former group: Stop trying to convince yourselves that monopolistic law-enforcement entities are moral, just, or practical, and have the sense to end this embarrassing charade of pretending that you support monopolistic law-enforcement systems because they protect people’s rights or lives or property better than free-market systems in a libertarian society could. When you look deep down, you know that doesn’t make any sense, and you realize it’s foolish and absurd to suppose that people who are attracted to positions of authority and power would rarely abuse that power when they themselves hold the highest, ultimate legal authority in a particular region.

Could you imagine that, if it weren’t tragically true already?! A group of clown-suited thugs tases, arrests, and denies medical treatment to someone who probably hasn’t committed any offenses and certainly not any serious ones, and the only body to which the victim has recourse is the very one that employs those aggressors and imposes the laws that prevent him from seeking third-party arbitration! In fact, to even demand arbitration by a disinterested third party would automatically incur even more penalties on top of his original “crimes”! This is how the State wants it. This is by design; it’s how the holders of power want society to function. A monopolistic legislation, enforcement, and punishment system could not work any other way. Put simply, this type of incident is not a bug, it is a feature.

When competition is outlawed, the incentive to do good disappears, and punishment for doing bad is nearly impossible. The importance of this simple competitive mechanism in making the free market superior to socialism cannot be overstated. A libertarian society’s assortment of insurance, protection, investigation, pursuit, and arbitration systems provided on the free market would necessarily protect individual rights better and punish malfeasance more harshly, swiftly, and reliably than any monopolistic-Statist system could. If you disagree with this, please read The Enterprise of Law by Bruce Benson and The Market for Justice by the Tannehills and then get back to me. Please don’t be so stupid as to suggest Statist claptrap for me to read, because I already experience the reality of your socialist hellhole every day.

Posted in Philosophy, Police/law enforcement, Socialism | Permalink
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IP absurdities, part 23,984

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” —Voltaire

Apparently hosting a Harry Potter–themed dinner party for charity around Halloween is an infringement of Warner Bros.’s copyrights.

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Comic of the day

This is three years old, but it is today’s comic in my Dilbert page-a-day calendar. It’s so appropriate for the real world of internet debating in general and political debates in particular.

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Fish in a barrel 5

A Texas jury decided to sentence a murderer to death after consulting their Bibles during deliberation. People who lack a solid grasp of important socio-political issues (Statists) will use this revelation to distract from the real issue. The issue they will harp on is whether this represents some violation of the separation between religion and the State. It does not. The issue is irrelevant anyway. The more important fact is that no government has any authority to decide whether to take a person’s life, regardless of the crimes he really has committed. I don’t know how a freed Texas would handle murderers, and I don’t know what the best way to handle them would be, but a State that lacks all legitimacy and validity to begin with certainly has no prerogative to decide a man’s fate.

Sign of the times, I suppose: there’s a new gold rush in Californee. Sorry to burst your bubbles, guys, but Gus Chiggins already beat you to it.

The founder of the airline passenger advocacy group FlyersRights.org had her computer and email account hacked by Delta Airlines. How despicable. A woman wants to prevent airlines from endangering people’s health by imprisoning them on cramped airplanes for hours on end, so instead of getting off of their fat, lazy asses to serve their fucking customers for a change, Delta instead resorts to hacking into her account to…to what? Extort her? Blackmail her? Scare her? Currently I am presuming Delta guilty until proven innocent. As a reminder, there is no way in hell most of the large airlines would exist in their current form without State interference on their behalf. Corporate-State socialism FAIL.

The Canadian copyright-advocacy group Access Copyright wants the Canadian government to ban free format-shifting and time-shifting. As far as I can tell, format-shifting means burning, ripping, or copying anything from one location, medium, or file type to another, and time-shifting means fast-forwarding through commercials with your DVR. This group wants to threaten murder against people for format-shifting or time-shifting without paying for permission to do so. As Voltaire said, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”

Absent from most commentary on the strength of the American (and world) economy and especially from the reassurances that the American economy is recovering is an analysis of whether the trends that harmed the economy in the first place are continuing or ceasing. They are continuing, says Peter Schiff, and it’s only making the inevitable correction (depression) worse.

Target gave in to political-correctness hysteria and agreed to stop selling a pair of “illegal alien” Halloween costumes which consisted of a green extraterrestrial alien mask and an orange prison jumpsuit with “illegal alien” stamped on the front. If Target had any sense, guts, or character, it would have taken advantage of the free publicity and stood up to these crybabies. It was a nice surprise to read that several other stores have not and will not give in to the political correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade. The costume was a complete non-issue, until some PC-obsessed morans made it into one. It’s a hilarious pun! Now I have a good Halloween costume idea for the future!

The latest from the “It IS happening here” files: Cops take DNA sample from boy for throwing ketchup at McDonald’s. (Actually, it’s happening there, as it’s the UK, but that doesn’t make it any better.)

10/19/09: Never forget.

Posted in Economics, Fascism, Political correctness, Religion | Permalink
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Quote of the day

“Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization’s history.”
—Steve Wynn, Fox News Sunday, October 11, 2009

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Quote of the day

Charles Johnson, October 14, 2009:

If you want a recipe for real disgust with the prevailing political establishment, and a real opening for radical critique, one of the things that has to happen is that dissidents need to begin to see that even the longed-for best-case scenario can’t possibly deliver what they want, because what they were promised just won’t fit through the political channels that they had put their hope in. An obvious tool like George W. Bush inspires a lot of fear and loathing; but he also inspires a lot of faith in the myth that if only someone who wasn’t such an obvious tool were in power, these problems would all get sorted out right quick. But when you have a ballyhooed reformer holding the reins of power, over-promising and under-delivering—and when it becomes increasingly clear that politics as usual will keep on keeping on—that’s often when you begin to see a real chance for a crack-up.

Excellent.

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Fish in a barrel 4

Yeah, I’m not too worried about those Scandinavian socialist utopias leaving the United States in the dust in terms of wealth, technology, and quality of life any time soon.

Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner says Americans are just going to have to get used to saving more of their money. This is after his and Helicopter Ben’s policies have deliberately inflated the money supply and induced people to spend more money on cars, houses, and their credit cards. Unbelievable. (HT: Bob Murphy)

When my liberal-Democrat friends are wary and skeptical of Barack Obama’s being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, then you know it was ill-advised. As one of the Regular Guys on Atlanta’s Rock 100.5 said Friday, why not nominate Tommy Hanson for the Hall of Fame? Thomas DiLorenzo was right on the money:

So Obama joins Woodrow Wilson in the pantheon of American presidents who have won the Nobel Peace Prize (Wilson won it in 1919). I learned this morning that nominations for the prize had to be in by Feb. 20, about one month after Obama was inaugurated. That means that the prize went for his rhetoric during the campaign, not anything he could have actually accomplished. As I recall, his two most memorable foreign policy pronouncements during the campaign were 1) advocating that the U.S. bomb Pakistan; and 2) escalating the war in Afghanistan. He did order the murder of some people in Pakistan by bombardment shortly after taking office. I’m still surprised, though, that he won the prize after killing so few people. Usually, one must be a major league murderer like a Wilson or a Teddy Roosevelt to win such a prize.

Senator John Ensign (R-Nev.) received confirmation from Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold that under the current Senate version of the Obamacare bill, Americans would be penalized with jail time for failing to buy health insurance. Actually, as with all State mandates, the penalty is always death. (HT: David Z.’s Twitter feed on his web page)

A 6-year-old was suspended from his Delaware government school because he was so excited about being a new Cub Scout that he brought one of his new tools to school, a combination knife-fork-spoon-bottle-opener, and used it to eat his lunch. To bring this story up is to point out its stupidity. A 45-day reassignment to an “alternative school” for not hurting or threatening anyone is the latest of a million examples of “zero-tolerance” implying zero thought. Simply taking the tool away for the day and explaining that it could be dangerous, if not in his hands then in someone else’s, would have been an appropriate response. Tell his parents he can’t bring it again. Luckily his 45-day punishment was overturned by the school board in favor of a 3-day suspension. His mother, ignorantly, says she just wants to get her child back into this government indoctrination center as soon as possible. I liked one radio broadcaster’s take on this the most. He said the really alarming part about this and all the other government-school fiascoes you hear about is that our society is losing the type of person who will take a stand and say, “No, this is wrong, the literal interpretation of this zero-tolerance policy is ludicrous, and I will get fired before I punish this child for harming and threatening no one.” Government-school administrators are, by and large, incredibly dense, passionless underachievers who lack common sense or a commitment to any principles to ground their lives in.

Hmm, somehow Barack Obama’s socialized-medicine message sounds better when it’s this melodic.

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Free-market medicine link of the week

Health Care: A Future Free-Market Alternative by Ross Levatter, published in the October 2009 issue of The Freeman. It is a relatively detailed description of Dr. Levatter’s vision of the way the purchase and provision of health care would work in a free society: the way all other aspects of a free market would work. A lot of it is common sense and the application of simple economic trends and truths to this sector of the economy that is on the verge of being nationalized. One other thing that makes it so good is the links to related articles at the top of the page. Check those out for an entire morning or afternoon of libertarian-reading goodness.

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An “up-or-down vote on health care”?!

Sadly, we have yet another example of liberal short-sightedness and overall inability to understand the key part of an issue: this petition that the political action committee Progressive Change Campaign Committee is going to submit to Harry Reid. It reads, “Any Democratic senators who support a Republican attempt to block a vote on health care reform should be stripped of their leadership titles. Americans deserve a clean up-or-down vote on health care.”

An “up-or-down vote on health care”?! You want the Congress and the President to make a single, sweeping, incontestable, one-size-fits-all decision on a multi-trillion-dollar endeavor that will affect the financial and medical well-being of nearly every single living American and future Americans for generations to come? You think an entire industry that each and every one of us must make decisions about and interact with on a monthly or yearly basis should be reduced to an “up-or-down vote” by a few hundred politicians? You fought and argued and marched and pleaded against the unilateral, power-grabbing, hegemonic abuses of the previous corrupt Republican regime, and now you are urging the Democrats in power to make a similar, unilateral and incontestable decision that every single American must live under and deal with regardless of whether they wanted it? It is unilateral because it entails a single government issuing edicts and a single president signing bills that govern everyone else’s life. THAT IS THE PROBLEM! YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM! TAKING POWER FROM THE PUBLIC AND GIVING IT TO A FEW POLITICIANS IS THE PROBLEM WITH OUR WORLD! Why don’t you stupid liberal Democrats get a clue about something for once?

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Anarchist Elliot Madison wrongfully arrested, robbed

In a continuation of law-enforcement agencies’ general disdain for and dismissal of our civil liberties, Elliot Madison, a self-described anarchist, was arrested for using Twitter and a police scanner to help G20 protesters coordinate their efforts and avoid police officers.

The charges on which he was held don’t indicate any dangerous or harmful behavior, unless you consider thumbing your nose at the State and using perfectly legal technology to evade officers whose goal is to disrupt your rightful demonstrations harmful. I guess that’s the problem with the police who arrested him.

Madison had been found using a police scanner and Twitter to help numerous protesters avoid police during the Group of 20 summit and has now been charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime.

Madison was found in a hotel room by Pennsylvania State Police on September 24, armed with police scanners and computers so that he could disperse critical information to protesters. According to the FBI, Madison was “directing others, specifically protesters of the G-20 summit, in order to avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse.”

Those charges are totally bogus and remind me of the trumped-up charges that prosecutors use to railroad their innocent victims (e.g., “honest services fraud”) or to add to real criminal charges (e.g., conspiracy to do something-or-other, racketeering, money laundering).

The facts are that the police and FBI agents are the aggressors in this story and that Madison and his confederates are being victimized for attempting to avoid this aggression. The first charge, hindering apprehension or prosecution, refers to the police’s attempts to disperse and arrest the protesters, which strikes me as a clear violation of the First Amendment and our rights to free speech, association, and assembly that the First Amendment is based on. The fact that the demonstrators passively asserted these rights by communicating with each other and evading the police’s aggression, while the police responded not with peacefulness but with further aggression, highlights the distinction between the aggressors and the victims quite clearly.

The second and third charges, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime, lose all meaning when the absence of criminality in the first charge is understood. They are also the type of fabricated charges that only serve the purpose of getting more jail time or larger fines for the State’s victims. “Criminal use of a communication facility”? What was the crime? Charge him with the crime itself, not the use of a gadget or a medium that are perfectly legal! If he used them to harm someone, charge him with harming someone! “Possession of instruments of crime”? Why are they instruments of crime? Instruments themselves other than weapons of mass destruction cannot be dangerous or harmful; possessing some instrument cannot harm others. If he used the instruments to harm people, charge him with harming people!

What was even more appalling was the raid of his apartment and confiscation of his belongings, neither of which is justified by his actions or by the crimes he was charged with.

No matter: the FBI followed up on Madison’s arrest by searching his home late last week for evidence of other violations, such as rioting laws and whatever else they could dig up. Not only did investigators seize his computers, they also took books, clothing, gas masks, and apparently a photo of Lenin. As a self-described anarchist, Madison’s affiliations have undoubtedly contributed to police opinion of him and his activities, no matter how benign.

How fascist, how disdainful of civil liberties, how intolerant of dissent, how…neoconservative. Congratulations, Obama regime. You’re upholding the status quo about as well as any civil libertarians expected you to.

As mentioned in the above paragraph, we undoubtedly have Statists in and out of the media and law enforcement branding Elliot Madison as their archetypal “anarchist” who just wants chaos and disruption and to bring down whatever there is to bring down. Just as there are myriad types of Statists, there are myriad types of anarchists and most of us want everyone’s individual rights and moral equality to be held sacrosanct. This ideology precludes the existence of a monopolistic State because Statism puts some people in power over others, a power no one has by nature or by merit, a power to govern, regulate, confiscate, and threaten the person, liberty, and property of others.

This is what many people objected to regarding the G20 summit, and probably many actual protesters on the streets of Pittsburgh as well. Details are sparse on the specific policies and positions pushed by the protesters, but the general message they conveyed is that they wanted more jobs, affordable health care, and an end to American military interventionism in the Middle East.

I can’t speak for the merits of any individual group or its message, even the generally anarchist ones, but I know what a good libertarian denunciation of the G20 economic summit sounds like. At least the anarchists, if they deserve their categorization, couldn’t be accused of advocating government provision of jobs and affordable health care. Given Madison’s supposed possession of a photograph of Vladimir Lenin, his economic views and preferred social order over the American State might not jibe with mine very much, but don’t misinterpret my defense of his civil liberties for an agreement with his and every other anarchist agenda out there. His economic philosophy and adoration of Lenin are not relevant; his freedom to Twitter all he wants and help people march away from police officers are, and this is what has been violated by the Pennsylvania state police and Obama’s FBI. They are the aggressors and Elliot Madison is their victim.

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Fish in a barrel 3

Nate Anderson of Ars Technica wrote,

Licensed spectrum came into being for a reason. In the early days of radio, unlicensed radio stations in urban areas regularly got into “power wars” with rival stations, leading to plenty of static. Compared to this free-for-all, the licensing of radio stations in the US, and then the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, helped to solve such problems.

Actually, very little of that paragraph has even the ring of truth. As B.K. Marcus and Timoguapo van Swanson have detailed, the homesteading principle based on libertarian property-rights theory and common-law tradition was perfectly capable of resolving bandwidth disputes and remains the best way to resolve them. The Federal Communications Commission served the interests of wealthy, politically connected dinosaurs who didn’t want to keep up with new types of competition, and it continues to serve the interests of large, established companies at the expense of small businesses and consumers today.

David Z. at No Third Solution and many other blaggers have expressed their due outrage at the treatment of the Michigan woman who was threatened with fines and possibly jail time for looking after neighbors’ children while they waited for the school bus. I have nothing to add to this sorry affair except these brief things: 1. This is an expected outcome of Statism; this is not a bug but a feature. 2. Crap like this is probably not as rare as Statolatrists would have us believe. 3. I just want to log this in my long list of examples of State-created divisiveness, of the destruction of voluntary cooperation and community by monopolistic government.

Slate magazine ran a series of articles about the dentistry industry (I bet you never realized those two words rhymed before…me, neither), including this one about why dentistry costs so much. Unsurprisingly, since it appeared in Slate, it is devoid of any serious economic analysis. The only two explanations I could glean from the article were: because government doesn’t pay for it and because other people don’t pay for it. The former would be because of a lack of socialization by our benighted leaders, and the latter because of the way dental insurance operates. Now, while an analysis of dental insurance in America could be of interest and could produce not only suggestions as to how to bring dental costs down but also provide guidance for our medical insurance industry, we get none of that. As far as I know, any actual explanation of the high costs of dentistry must include State-mandated certification (barriers to entry), regulations that prohibit less-educated and therefore lower-paid dental technicians from operating a simple dental-cleaning business (reduced competition), and the fact that for some reason, people purchase insurance for things that are relatively cheap, routine, and totally expected! This increases costs in the same way as it does for medical care!

My friend’s Facebook status currently says, “is definitely a nerd and looking forward to hearing Paul Krugman speak on Friday.” Paul Krugman is a dolt. Now that I’m unemployed, looking to move to Virginia to get in-state residency status to apply to George Mason University and become an economist, I have made this a solid, official, un-renegable goal: I will write a book titled Paul Krugman is a Dolt, it will be published, and it will receive wide acclaim.

It must be embarrassing to be a Statist writing about economics these days. Thomas Woods quotes one Harold Meyerson, who shared the extent of his ignorance with us in his recent Washington Post column. This is gold, Jerry, GOLD!

The problem with contemporary economics, at least with the purer strain of free-market economics associated with the University of Chicago [sic], is not simply that it failed to predict the near-collapse of the world financial system last year. The problem is that it believed such a collapse could not happen, that all risk could be quantified by mathematical models and that these quantifications could help us correctly price just about everything.
[...]
[Economists told us] there really was no need to study such things as bubbles, which only a handful of skeptics and hopelessly retro Keynesians even considered possible. Under mainstream economic theory, which held that everything was correctly priced, bubbles simply couldn’t exist.

The one economist who has emerged from the current troubles with his reputation not only intact but enhanced is, of course, Keynes.

Well, honestly, in the Austro-libertarian’s mind, yes, Keynes’s reputation is not only still intact, it has been augmented as never before.

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Obama: More government school is the answer!

Perhaps you’ve heard that the Savior of America and his Secretary of Education are proposing rules (edicts backed with explicit threats of murder) that would add hours to the school day and days to the school year. This is so typical of the simple-minded Statism that pervades Washington that I’m kind of surprised it wasn’t proposed sooner. When these parasites see any problem in the world, they interpret it as an opportunity to add more government to everyone’s life and expand their own power and influence.

They are forever oblivious to the harm the State does to any child’s education, so they think simply requiring children to receive more of it will make them better-educated. This is similar to the imposition of new taxes to pay for things the people don’t want and the enforcement of new regulations to fix economic problems that the government caused in the first place. More rules, more requirements, more bureaucracy, more taxation, more coercion.

Children are subjected to an alarming amount of Statolatrist propaganda from the very earliest stages of schooling, which is proudly lauded by Obama maniacs but which detracts from the quality of their education. Statolatry itself doesn’t make people worse at math, reading, or writing, but it has obviously facilitated the continuing, government-mandated decline in those basic areas of education. The more people who are brainwashed into the peculiar belief that the State should educate people, the more people who will support its idiotic, bureaucratic impediments to good education. And it doesn’t matter how well Americans can do calculus, critique literature, or write eloquent presidential speeches; if they support the absurd socialist agenda that Obama is trying to force upon his subjects, they are doing more harm than good—more harm than they could ever do if they were ignorant, stupid, and not a cheerleader for the Almighty State.

I imagine most Obama maniacs will support these proposals because they are coming from our Savior himself but also because they love the State and anything that expands it. But the most important issue here is not the content of the proposals themselves; it’s the fact that they will be coming from a very few people who will force their ideas on the entire nation. The fact that any apparatus or infrastructure exists that would allow for a single edict to govern that many people’s lives is of primary importance—obviously the content of its edicts will serve only to enhance and enlarge it, so the existence of the Department of Education and the power given to a single president over so many people’s schooling should alarm everyone, with condemnation of the specific proposals following as a corollary. It will not alarm most leftists. They vehemently opposed No Child Left Behind because George W. Bush signed it into law, and then later they found rationales (all valid ones, I surmise) to support their knee-jerk reaction; they will undoubtedly support Obama and his Education Department’s proposals because they come from Obama, and then later they will find rationales to justify their continued support despite clear evidence that they are biased tools.

Notice my use of the term “school year” in the first paragraph. Does it bother you that we gloss over the singular, all-encompassing term “school year” as commonplace and obvious in meaning? There should be no “school year”! There should be no bureaucracy or secretary or president who decides what the school year is! That’s the problem: the unilateral power of the State to define the “school year” and do all the other things it does under the pretense of educating children!

If people want some solutions to the deficiencies in schooling, particularly class time, that children are given, they should look to the absence of family, community, and individual responsibility in children’s education. These are direct and predictable consequences of the State’s involvement in anything. I am not surprised that Obama’s proposals will put even more of the children’s time under the purview of governments and necessarily less in the company of family members—people who should (and would, in a free society) be more influential in their education. Children should be playing and exercising more, spending more time learning from their parents, more time with their siblings, more time in extracurricular music or sports lessons, more time learning how to make their own decisions, and less time in the vicinity of bureaucrats with education degrees.

The idea that more government schooling will educate children better smacks of the dim-witted Statism that also led people to advocate throwing more and more money at failing schools. Here are four easy solutions to America’s educational shortcomings: 1. Eliminate the monopolistic Department of Education (and the ability of any criminal, elected or unelected, in the federal government to make any decisions about any child’s education but his own). 2. Abolish all taxes everywhere that in any way fund any public school or public-education-related endeavor. 3. Abolish all laws that are in any way related to home-schooling. 4. Remove all restrictions, regulations, and barriers to entry for private schools.

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Quote of the day

“If the achievement of a free society is to require that a million bleeding heads of torturing tyrants, damnable dictators, pandering politicians, sadistic generals, privileged policemen, criminal soldiers and psychotic, irresponsible “servants” be hoisted on pikes to surround the palisades of the free cities, count me in for the headsman’s role, for I will not dwell in my ice-cream-and-flying-ponies fantasies so long as to preclude my own action toward the attainment thereof.”
—Mike Gogulski

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Fish in a barrel 2

California tax officials: legal pot would bring $1.4B. No, you still don’t quite seem to get it. If it is TAXED and REGULATED, both of which are restrictions or extortions backed with explicit threats of murder, then by definition it is NOT LEGAL. You mean, “Legal except only in the ways and quantities we specify, otherwise you’ll be harassed, threatened, beaten, kidnapped, enslaved, and/or murdered.” Decriminalization gives people actual legal freedom to do something peacefully without fear of punishment; legalization shifts the reason for punishment from one concocted “crime” to another.

Speaking of insatiable parasites, the government of Hawaii will now tax its residents on gross gambling income rather than net gambling income.

A Hawai’i resident who wins $10,000 in a year, for example, and loses $9,000 in the same year used to be taxed only on the $1,000 in net winnings. Under the new law, that resident would be taxed on the full $10,000 in winnings.

I imagine several other states already have similar laws, but it’s no coincidence that at least one state is enacting such a tax during the Second Great Depression. Many companies offer better deals to customers in an attempt to maintain revenues (…and, unfortunately, they also fire a lot of people to cut costs) to stay afloat. The first resort of governments is to take whatever they can from their captives. It is sad to read comments about this and other stories from people who probably claim to love freedom and justice and all those other things that, they’d say, made America great, but then when it gets down to specifics they bend over backwards to support anything and everything that helps the State at the obvious expense of its subjects.

It doesn’t matter that this is unenforceable. The intent and the attitude of these parasites in government is what should really boil your blood.

Y’see, gals, if you follow sports and know a little bit about them, then you can sail right through the interrogation about your cocaine-filled golf clubs without arousing any suspicion. Such efforts to traffic drugs would obviously be unnecessary if the drugs were legal, which would be better for everyone in society because their sale, distribution, and use would be safer and our civil liberties wouldn’t be the collateral damage of the War on Drugs.

A Maryland high-school softball coach was fired after parents drank beers that they brought to an end-of-the-year team party. Because underage high-schoolers were present, observing their parents imbibing alcohol. At the coach’s private residence. A firing over this probably wouldn’t happen in a free society. Hysterical teetotaling anti-alcohol crusaders are about as wretched as they come. Without a doubt, they are more to blame for society’s alcohol-related problems, such as underage binge-drinking and drunken driving, than any other factor. There is no way they could exert as much influence without the State enforcing their delusions upon society. All of this influence is harmful. A dead giveaway of a brain-dead Statolatrist zombie is that they suggest government school board members could rise to any position of importance in an educational system in a free society (or probably any other organization or business).

In a free society, family and community would be intimately involved in the education of children because it would be necessary and because there would be neither the inclination nor the opportunity to relinquish such responsibilities to State bureaucrats. Conversely, bureaucrats and other strangers would have no opportunity to claim authority over parents or their children. Idiotic teetotalers and other brands of moral busybodies would never be in a position to make decisions about other people’s children or, in this case, a coach who supposedly…let parents do something that was in some way bad to their own children.

Frank Hatley of Cook County, Georgia, was imprisoned for one year for failing to make child support payments for a child who, as the court was aware, was not his.

In June of last year, a judge ordered Hatley to jail for failing to reimburse the state for public assistance that was paid to support his “son,” who, as the court was aware, is not actually his son.
[...]
For 13 years, Hatley made payments to the state until learning, in 2000, that the boy might not be his biological son. A DNA test that year confirmed that there was no chance he was the father, according to court documents.

Hatley…was relieved of any future child support reimbursement but was ordered to pay more than $16,000 that he had owed the state before the ruling.

Anyone who wants to claim such absurdities as this could happen and carry on for a full year in a non-monopolistic, non-coercive legal system, and that the agency responsible could continue operating as usual after this came to light, simply doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Only coercive monopolies can get away with things like this; private, peaceful bodies cannot and would not.

The British socialized medicine system will ban private organ donations from dead donors. Basically the problem is that foreigners were paying top dollar (pound, euro, whatever) for the organs of dead Britons, and it horrified the busybodies in the UK government that scarce resources were being voluntarily allocated via the price system, and that such exchanges were taking place outside of the gentle governance of the NHS.

An independent report said the public needed to be confident that scarce donor organs were allocated fairly within the NHS.

Transplant surgeons said the ban would reassure the public that organs will go to those in greatest need.

Everything is scarce and the only sensible, practical, or remotely principled way to allocate those scarce things—yes, including body parts that their owners want to donate—is by the price system of the free market that matches supply to demand. No governing body or other self-anointed group of experts could ever allocate resources or direct people more efficiently or “fairly” than the free market’s price system does. It is simply not possible in the real world, even if the governing body had the best of intentions, and especially not when decisions will inevitably be made for political rather than economic reasons. Here is a much more logical and refreshing take on the U.S.’s screwed-up, government-run organ donor system.

Those Philadelphia cops who pulled three shooting suspects out of a car and beat them back in May 2008 have been cleared of any crimes by a grand jury. (Wow, that was almost a year and a half ago?!) The most surprising part of this case is that their chief, Charles Ramsey, fired four of the officers and suspended or demoted another four, and he’s not backing down from that decision. “I have 40 years of law enforcement experience. I kinda know what I’m looking at. In my opinion, all the actions were not justified.” Good for him.

A program that allows citizens to file anonymous complaints on the Illinois secretary of state’s website about people misusing handicapped parking spots received 114 tips in its first month and a half. People snitching on each other to punish them for disobeying laws that have no basis in natural law, no relation to right vs. wrong, and that attempt to force common courtesy on everyone? Sounds par for the course for governments. Wake me when you hear of an example of government promoting a sense of respect, community, and courtesy among its captives.

A Fort Myers Beach councilman was fired after other council members learned he was married to a former porn star. Terrible and unjust. They fire him in July 2009 “without cause” after he had been married since October 2008. The dolt who led the vilification said, “It’s a matter of how effective he becomes after this situation. How much disruption there is.” You stupid moron, there was no decrease in his effectiveness and there was no disruption until you got it into YOUR pathetic little brain to make an issue out of it. You can’t work with him and approve of his effectiveness for nine months and then decide his marriage might be disruptive to his job only after you learn of it! And soon, after his wrongful termination suit against the city, the idiots on the town council won’t have to pay for his settlement out of their pockets, oh, no; it will come from the town’s treasury, in other words, other people will pay for their stupidity directly or indirectly. Prudes are bad enough, but idiotic prudes are just depressing.

An Illinois millionaire didn’t like the $80,000 property tax bill on his mansion, so he had himself ordained by some online “church,” put a wooden cross on his house, and called it a church to get a property tax exemption. Good for him, I say! Not good for him or the rest of the taxpaying suckers, say idiotic Statolatrists everywhere. A man defends himself from a crime in a nonviolent and somewhat clever way, and the sanctimonious public responds with violence and derision. Everyone is pleased that this sham was found out and the guy will now have to pay back taxes, because nonviolent nonparticipation is a violation of their moral code. (I’ll conveniently gloss over the fact that this millionaire banker made his fortune off of the ultimate State racket, the monopoly on currency, because the principle of nonviolent nonparticipation remains the same.)

How the “buy American” attitude backfires: it spurs resentment and nationalism, whereas free, borderless trade engenders the respect, goodwill, mutual prosperity, and reciprocal interdependence that characterize true civilization. Libertarians at least as early as Frederic Bastiat have known this as a truism. Welcome to the 19th century.

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Obama’s speech about socialized medicine

I didn’t watch the Savior of America’s speech to Congress about further socializing our health care and insurance industry because I already knew everything he was going to say. Why would I waste my time with it? He probably said our health care system is broken, that it’s too costly and denies too many people, left out the fact that this is entirely the fault of the thousands upon thousands of governmental perturbations in the market, and concluded that the answer is more government, but wise, just government.

I am flabbergasted by people’s complete ignorance of the laws and trends of economics. It is damn near impossible for the free market to make anything more expensive or worse in quality, in the long run. Only coercion and redistribution can do that. Most of the things we consume as necessities or luxuries in our modern lives—houses, cars, computers, food, even medicines—tend to become better, cheaper, and more abundant over time. This is despite, not because of, the interference by government in the free and voluntary exchanges of peaceable people. The fact that we are supposedly spending more on health care (health insurance) than we used to should raise a red flag that something is preventing the market from working as it always does and as we all want it to, and that this thing is the State!

I don’t know why other countries seem to spend a lower percentage of their GDP and a lower amount of money per capita on their health care than the U.S. does. It is definitely not because our health care system is the best in the world. It must be because of the nature of the federal government’s interference in the health insurance industry and its history of regulations and so forth. If the alleged success of other nations’ health care industries is any guide, it is possible that complete and total socialization will actually decrease per capita expenses on health care relative to the requisite decreases in the quality and quantity we will receive. On the other hand, if the history of our government’s interference in the health care market is any guide, Obamacare will end up costing many times more than expected. (According to Peter Schiff, in 1966 it was predicted that Medicare would cost the taxpayers $12 billion in 1990. Instead, it cost $107 billion in 1990, and it’s four times that now!)

Something about the Imperial Federal Government would have to change, drastically, for American taxpayers to evade a similar fate from Obamacare. It is very possible that a mixed economy is worse in some ways for this and other industries than a nearly completely socialized one. Maybe not in the long run, though.

One entertaining part of the speech that I heard on the radio was when he vehemently denied that Obamacare would ever cover illegal immigrants. Obama can say that all he wants, and he can hold true to that promise with flying colors during his regime, but I predict that taxpayer-funded health insurance will cover illegal immigrants and visitors who didn’t pay for it, sooner or later. Quite possibly, the Republicans will let it happen to pander to Hispanic voters.

I wonder how many non-libertarian-minded people considered this: One reason people oppose the coverage of illegal immigrants’ health care with taxpayer money is because the immigrants didn’t pay for it with their taxes, and we can’t have people coming here and bankrupting our treasury by, basically, stealing products and services from the taxpayers. (Perhaps the main reason people oppose giving health care and other things to illegal immigrants is because they suffer from the misconception that the place where your mother was lying when she gave birth to you has any bearing on your rights or your freedom or your character as a human being.) But the whole point of Obamacare is to take money from people who earned it and give it to people who didn’t! It is a wealth-redistribution program in the form of mandatory insurance policies and taxes! Millions of people, like me and probably you, do not want to be forced to pay for other people’s health care, or anything else, for that matter. It isn’t charity and it isn’t altruistic! It’s bald, shameless theft! The supporters of socialized medicine are being inconsistent and hypocritical by endorsing the theft of tax money from captive Americans to pay for other Americans’ health care but opposing the theft of tax money from captive Americans to pay for foreigners’ health care.

Posted in Economics, Medicine, Obama failures, Obama predictions, Socialism, Taxes | Permalink
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