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Genetic-discrimination legislation scares me

The journal Nature had a news story about the bill prohibiting genetic discrimination that breezed through the Senate and that will undoubtedly become law very shortly. Since you’d have to have access to the full content of the Nature website to read it, I will paste the text of the article here:

Genetics bill cruises through Senate

Unanimous vote welcomed by personal genomics companies.

Meredith Wadman

The unanimous vote last week by the US Senate to outlaw discrimination against people on the basis of their genetic information is being celebrated by civil-rights groups, which have long campaigned for the safeguards. Personal-genomics companies are also cracking open the champagne — they have a lot to gain from the bill becoming law.

Once enacted, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) will forbid employers and health insurers from using people’s genetic information against them in decisions on hiring, firing, promotion and insurance coverage and pricing. The House of Representatives should pass the legislation this week, after which it is expected to be signed into law by President George W. Bush.

“This will help the notion of personalized medicine move forward more quickly,” says Linda Avey, co-founder of 23andMe, a personal-genetics company in Mountain View, California, that is trail-blazing a highly visible, and controversial, direct-to-consumer market. Avey says her employees erupted in cheers and applause when the bill’s passage was announced at a staff meeting the next day. “We were very happy.”

The bill is also likely to help other companies that trumpet the virtues of consumers’ access to their own genetic data in a way that presumes it won’t explode in their hands. “The customers of these new personal-genomics companies are able to download their genomes and share them electronically with others,” notes Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. “Until the passage of GINA, the sharing of that information actually put them at risk.

The bill bans US employers from collecting genetic information from their employees, and ensures that insurers can’t request or require people to take genetic tests. Sanctions include government fines and lawsuits in federal courts. The House passed a similar bill a year ago, by 420 to 3. It was then sent to the Senate, where it was stalled by objections from Senator Thomas Coburn (Republican, Oklahoma).

The last of those objections was resolved last month by the insertion of wording preventing companies that insure their own employees from being punished twice under the law: once as an employer, and once as an insurer. But the new language also prevents an employee from suing their employer under the act if both the employer and the insurer are culpable in the same situation.

The wording is ambiguous enough, however, that it “will almost assuredly lead to litigation once it’s passed into law”, says Jeremy Gruber, the legal counsel for the National Workrights Institute, an employee advocacy group based in Princeton, New Jersey. It will therefore be the courts, he says, that “will clarify which situations might be objectionable enough” for an employer to be sued even if an insurance issue is involved.

The United States is not the first to implement such a law — countries including Austria and France have laws forbidding genetic discrimination — but it has by far the largest private-insurance market.

The bill took months to get through the Senate and it still has its detractors. The Chamber of Commerce fought the bill on Capitol Hill, claiming that it would burden businesses with paperwork and expense, in part because it doesn’t pre-empt a patchwork of existing state laws. “The bill also includes excessive damage provisions that will invite frivolous litigation,” the Chamber continues to complain on its website.

But the bill’s supporters argue that, rather than burdening the US employers who largely pay for that insurance, it will help them by easing health-care costs. “If we provide these protections, individuals will have the incentive to increasingly avail themselves of medical knowledge,” says Senator Olympia Snowe (Republican, Maine), the leading sponsor of the Senate bill. “They may be able to take action as a result, preventing disease or premature death and also reducing the burden of high health-care costs.”

For researchers, the law may prove a boon. The next generation of studies to identify gene culprits associated with complex diseases will involve tens of thousands of willing participants as cases and controls. “The success of those kinds of studies, I think, was significantly threatened by people’s fears about genetic discrimination,” says Hudson.

I will have more to say about this once I read more and think more about it, but all I want to contribute now is: this legislation, more than your average legislation, scares me. It really, really worries me. It’s going to screw with the private choices that people and companies would have made and prevent the free market of voluntary exchange from working as it should. The results will all be bad. The law of unintended consequences will hit the genetic-testing and insurance industries hard. I am not knowledgeable or prescient enough to see exactly how yet, but when I’ve thought about it more and read what some actual economists have to say, I will offer further insight. It’s going to be a shame, though.

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Shoddy but equal

In the UK, hospital maternity wards have been rejecting pregnant women because they are full. Well, it’s something to look forward to here.

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Happy Mother’s Day

It was considered a pretty stupid idea back when it was introduced as a potential official holiday in the Senate.

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Coercion, not persuasion or enterprise, is the answer

for environmentalists, claims Ann Pettifor on the BBC website.

Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being, writes that “there are over one - maybe even two - million organisations (worldwide) working toward ecological sustainability and social justice”.

And yet… and yet… there is no real climate change movement. There is no organised effort leading society towards a legislative framework that would urgently drive down greenhouse gas emissions across the board, and begin to sequester carbon dioxide.

Not in the UK, or in the US, or internationally. The “movement” that Hawken refers to is, he notes, “atomised” and “largely ignored”.
[...]
The reason is that green organisations focus on individual (”change your lightbulbs”) or community (”recycle, reuse, reduce, localise”) action.

They fail to highlight the need for the kind of structural change that can only be brought about by governmental action.

Governments helpfully collude in this atomisation and fragmentation of action and reaction.

Throughout history, social movements have focused on the need for government action.

The anti-slavery movement sought to change laws that permitted slavery.

The suffragette movement only ensured votes for women once discriminatory laws had been displaced; the anti-apartheid movement was only successful once apartheid laws had been removed.

In the US, the black civil rights movement campaigned from 1947 until the introduction of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act to end discrimination in certain spheres.

As I wrote regarding Michael Young of Reason’s Hit and Run, State action most certainly is the preferred method of effecting change in society here in the West in the 21st century. Every national political campaign consists largely of politicians prescribing State solutions to State-caused problems and assuring the voters that they have the better tax-funded State plan to fix everything that ails them: housing crisis, gas prices, health care, education, homeland security, pollution, inflation, the recession, energy sustainability. This is what the voters want to hear, what they base their vote on, how they evaluate the success of a politician after his term has ended, and it’s exactly what the politicians keep feeding them.

It is difficult to comprehend how a professional activist can claim, with a straight face, that “governmental action is unpopular and out of fashion” and “minimal government is now ideologically dominant.”

What Ann Pettifor advocates is coercion, a greater expenditure of tax money, a greater intrusion into the functions of private businesses, and a great reduction in the quality of life of Westerners, with no real decrease in global temperatures or pollution. I think Ludwig von Mises was right when he said,

Government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

The way to improve the state of the environment is to get rid of layers and layers of bureaucratic inefficiency and special exemptions that result in large companies being unaccountable for the air and water they pollute, where such polluted air and water are used by other people, who have a right for their property not to be polluted (damaged) by others. A private-property-rights and homesteading framework could solve environmental problems better than a framework based on legislative and judicial fiat.

I wonder if all environmentalists imagine exactly how much violence, impoverishment, and debasing of values would be inherent in the enforcement of the environmentalist policies they advocate.

Ann Pettifor mentions suffrage and slavery as issues that spawned large-scale movements, much larger and more organized than the environmentalist movement. She herself says that issues such as those had to be remedied by repealing laws that permitted them. Exactly: the monopolistic governments in charge of the several states and the federal government explicitly enabled those injustices. Policies of the State had to be removed, not added to, for justice to emerge. Libertarians argue, quite convincingly, that environmental law enables private property rights to be aggressed against legally, and that the State’s ownership of so much land and water contributes to their deterioration more than if all land and water were privately owned. The government does, after all, ruin everything it touches.

I am disturbed by the mindset that for any issue you think is important, you and your political allies should band together to influence and/or control a large enough portion of the violent, deadly police power of the State that you can force others to behave as you wish. There is little or no defense of rights or protection of property involved in environmentalist activism. It all just seems like using State coercion to control others and prevent business and industry from progressing the way they naturally would.

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The economy is worse than you know

I must offer a small retraction and an apology to at least a small number of MSM-print journalists out there because apparently some of them still do some worthy political commentating and question the establishment on serious matters. Kevin Phillips of Harper’s Magazine wrote sort of an exposé on the Imperial Federal Government’s fudging of economic statistics to make things seem better than they are: The economy is worse than you know. He begins:

Ever since the 1960s, Washington has gulled its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics, the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured.

The effect has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed.

The corruption has tainted the very measures that most shape public perception of the economy.

It’s pretty scary and more than a little depressing. Raise your hand if you expect any more of the government.

(Oooh, this also creates a new and unexpected use for my Unrealistic category tag. I entered it as one of my original tags, to refer to Statist claims that libertarianism is crazy and unrealistic, when in fact Statism is based on nothing but unrealistic assumptions. Now it is also useful for this article about the State’s published lies, which led to unrealistic assumptions by everyone about the economy.)

Hat tip: Brad, Wendy McElroy’s husband/life partner/co-blagger.

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Defeating their own arguments

I’m surprised I haven’t blagged about any of the posts on one of my new favorite libertarian sites, Rad Geek People’s Daily, Charles Johnson’s blag. He wrote a long and entertaining post about three rural-Minnesota 8th-graders who were suspended for sitting during the Pledge of Allegiance. My favorite part of the post was some wonderful new terminology I picked up from Rad Geek: the Patriotic Correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade. These would be flag-waving “patriotic” Statolatrist boobs.

I don’t mean to take away from the excellent refutations and condescension he smacked the school administrators and their supporters with. Maybe he didn’t learn the same lesson Randall Munroe learned: pay no attention to the comments about news articles, blag posts, YouTube videos, etc., because they are some of the loudest and stupidest writings you will ever encounter. But it worked out well for him because he got an excellent blag post out of it.

One of the first insights the libertarian will garner from the thought processes of the Patriotic Correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade is: they violate the very things they purport to value and protect in their overzealous efforts to force other people to value and uphold them. Force is obviously the key word. A lot of supporters of the school’s decision to punish the children base their support on the belief that, since they have the privilege of living in the freest country on Earth (fuck yeah!), children should show their respect for the soldiers and generals who gave (!) them that right, and if the kids don’t show this gratitude to their enlightened and gracious government, then they should be punished and taught to respect the military and the government that have given them so much.

The reason, the patriotic correctness people claim, that our country (government) is so great is that it protects our freedom of speech, freedom of association, and other general human rights, whatever. (Some might even say the government and its Constitution “guarantee” or “grant” these things to its citizens.) These presumably include the right to do or say anything against the government itself, as long as you don’t hurt anyone or their property. And so, obviously, by teaching children that they are wrong to protest against their government because their government is so good and gracious that it allows them to protest against the government, they are being ignorant, stupid hypocrites. I doubt any of them sees this simple and un-subtle point.

This thought is nothing new. Anti-war Americans say the same thing about an aggressive foreign policy executed in the name of “protecting our freedoms”: we are violating our own freedoms and debasing our own values to defend ourselves against people who (supposedly) want to take away our freedoms and who have barbaric and un-humanitarian values.

These thoughts prompted me to comment on the life and times of Emma Goldman, an anarchist activist from Lithuania who did most of her writing, speaking, and activism in the United States. In 1893 Goldman was arrested and tried for the very dubious crime of “inciting to riot.” To my (limited) knowledge she didn’t actually succeed in inciting any riots and she certainly didn’t injure any people or property herself. According to Wikipedia, which is as far as I’ve gotten in my readings about Emma Goldman,

As she awaited trial, Goldman was visited by Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World. She spent two hours talking to Goldman, and wrote a positive article about the woman she described as a “modern Joan of Arc”.

Despite this positive publicity, the jury was persuaded by Jacobs’ testimony and scared by Goldman’s politics. The assistant District Attorney questioned Goldman about her anarchism, as well as her atheism; the judge spoke of her as “a dangerous woman”. She was sentenced to one year in the Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary.

Emma Goldman was also arrested completely unjustifiably in connection with the assassination of President McKinley by Leon Czolgosz:

Because he was an anarchist and had interacted several times with Goldman, authorities became convinced that she had planned the action. They tracked her to a residence in Chicago she shared with Havel and Abe and Mary Isaak, an anarchist couple. Goldman was arrested, along with Abe Isaak, Havel, and ten other anarchists.
[...]
Although Czolgosz repeatedly denied Goldman’s involvement, the police held her in close custody, subjecting her to what she called the “third degree”. She explained their distrust of him, and it was clear she had not had any significant contact with Czolgosz. No evidence was found linking Goldman to the attack, and she was eventually released after two weeks of detention.

Wikipedia says in 1906 Goldman and a group of activists were arrested for meeting to “reflect on Leon Czolgosz.” And, “in 1915 Goldman conducted a nationwide speaking tour in part to raise awareness about contraception options. Although the nation’s attitude toward the topic seemed to be liberalizing, Goldman was arrested in February 1916 and charged with violation of the Comstock Law. Choosing not to pay a hundred-dollar fine, she spent two weeks in a prison workhouse….”

Then, in 1917, she was arrested for opposing military slavery and “inducing persons not to register” for the draft.

Finally, in 1918, she was deported by the federal government for being an anarchist.

The US Department of Justice’s General Intelligence Division, headed by J. Edgar Hoover and under the direction of Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, conducted a series of raids to arrest radicals. In a memorandum prepared while they were in prison, Hoover wrote: “Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman are, beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country and [a] return to the community will result in undue harm.” Although her marriage to Jacob Kershner arguably provided her with legitimate US citizenship, the government invoked the 1918 Anarchist Exclusion Act and deported both Goldman and Berkman to the Soviet Union, along with over two hundred others.

Woodrow Wilson, whom my college libertarians club colleague described as the Antichrist, claimed he was dragging the U.S. into World War I “to make the world safe for democracy.” Presumably he meant safe to speak freely, assemble freely, and not be arrested, charged, convicted, or imprisoned for actions that don’t harm someone else. These are just a few freedoms that, we are constantly reminded, need protecting by soldiers and generals. These are the same freedoms that J. Edgar Hoover and Alexander Palmer officially were protecting when they forced two hundred radicals out of the country.

Hopefully, you know better than to buy the State’s official line. They were acting to protect the State’s own interests and insulate itself from radical opposition and protest. How just and enlightened.

The Statists who opposed Emma Goldman’s rhetoric and activism back then and who still support the federal government’s handling of her and her ilk today would claim that the interests of the State (order, peace, security) need to be protected and maintained, or else no one will have their basic rights protected. Those basic rights include writing, speaking, assembling, and demonstrating against the State and, yes, advocating revolution. It is kind of doubtful how innocent she was of promoting only peaceful activism and no potentially destructive and deadly activities, but given her at least three wrongful arrests and very wrongful deportation, she was perfectly justified in so fiercely opposing the very existence of the United States government. She was right to protest its transgressions against the rights of its subjects.

Then, as now, many cheerleaders for the State advocate State actions that go against the very reasons the Statists supported them. To use an overused phrase, they violate the freedoms they are meant to protect. In the very action of defending State interests over individual rights, the State proves that the individuals in question were right to be protesting the State—proves that the State itself is abominable and monstrous because it beats, terrorizes, imprisons, deports, and kills peaceful protesters while speaking of defending everyone’s rights, and furthermore it says the beating, killing, and imprisoning are essential to its protection of everyone’s rights!

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Libertarian lyrics

I think the Eagles, like most music artists, and particularly their main songwriters, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, have the reputation of being quite liberal. For instance, Don Henley founded the Walden Woods Project, a non-profit effort to buy land in and around Walden Pond to preserve it from development. He also touts his ardent environmentalism in general and his support for other conservation organizations. (However, I should point out that the Walden Woods Project uses very libertarian methods for preserving land: buying it to protect it, not lobbying for coercive legislation.)

Since the Bush regime responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks by not only continuing but expanding the military activities that spawned the hatred and terrorism in the first place, invading a non-threatening country, killing hundreds of thousands of innocents, destabilizing the region further, and attracting new terrorists, we have seen an outpouring of foreign-policy commentary in songs, movies, and television. For instance, the updating of Iron Man to take place in the context of the 21st-century War on Terrorism, that miserable and idiotic Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment “The Day the Earth Looked Stupid”, and the entire movie Team America: World Police. I don’t know of a political issue that was skewered so often, so thoroughly, by so many people in all segments of the entertainment industry as the neocons’ foreign policy.

The Eagles’ first full studio album since 1979, Long Road Out of Eden, doesn’t skimp on the political commentary. But, being a libertarian, I like to think the sentiments motivating the lyrics are more libertarian than left-liberal. They certainly sound like it, on the surface. The title track and gem of the album ends with these lyrics:

Bloated with entitlement,
loaded on propaganda
and now we’re driving dazed and drunk.

Been down the road to Damascus, the road to Mandalay,
met the ghost of Caesar on the Appian Way.
He said, “It’s hard to stop the binging once you get a taste.
But the road to empire is a bloody, stupid waste.”

Behold the bitten apple, the power of the tools.
But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools.

In the song “Business As Usual,” Don Henley sings:

Monuments to arrogance reach for the sky,
our better natures buried in the rubble.
We’ve got the prettiest White House that money can buy,
sitting up there in that Beltway bubble.

And when El Jefe talks about our freedom,
here is what he really means:
Business as usual
How dirty we play
Business as usual
Don’t you get in the way

And in one of my least favorite songs on the album, “Frail Grasp On the Big Picture,” Don Henley again:

Well, ain’t it a shame about our short little memory
We never seem to learn the lessons of history
We keep making the same mistake
over and over and over and over again
and then we wonder why we’re in the shape we’re in.

Good ol’ boys down at the bar—peanuts and politics
They think they know it all
They don’t know much of nothing.
Even if one of them was to read a newspaper cover to cover,
that ain’t what’s going on—journalism dead and gone.

The major shortcoming of the album is its too-literal lyrics, in the political and non-political songs. They don’t have much of a gift (or interest) for metaphors and subtlety anymore. But the gems like “No More Cloudy Days”, “I Love to Watch a Woman Dance”, and “Long Road Out of Eden” make it a very good album to an Eagles fan.

Posted in Entertainment, Foreign policy | Permalink
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Caleb Campbell is neither a hero nor a coward

This is the true lesson of our history: war, preparation for war, and foreign military interventions have served for the most part not to protect us, as we are constantly told, but rather to sap our economic vitality and undermine our civil and economic liberties.
—Robert Higgs

It was a national sports story, but maybe non-Michigan residents didn’t hear about West Point graduate Caleb Campbell, who played safety for the Army football team and was picked by the Lions last month in the seventh round of the NFL draft. He was part of West Point’s athlete-only track, where if they can enter a professional sports program after graduation, they won’t have to serve in the same capacity as regular graduates, meaning they can stay in the city of their sports team and work at a recruiting station in the offseason rather than be shipped overseas for combat duty. Campbell, the Lions, and just about everyone else who paid much attention to the NFL draft (or had it shoved down their throat) knew that if a team was nice enough to draft him, it would save him from being shipped to the Middle East.

This spurred some amount of discussion and debate on the radio and internet, some of which was, expectedly, critical, both of the Army’s program that gives athletes special treatment, which is a problem in our society from schoolchildren all the way up to professionals, and of Campbell himself for being a coward and taking the easy way out by serving the easiest, cushiest assignment possible—recruiting.

Take, for instance, radio host Bill Simonson, who hosts the Huge Show, an afternoon sports-talk show broadcast on a lot of stations across Michigan, and apparently also has a blag at mLive.com:

Caleb Campbell hopes to play in the NFL instead of join his fellow 2008 West Point grads in combat. Campbell is a hard-hitting safety who the Detroit Lions drafted Sunday in the seventh round of the NFL draft. He has chosen pro football before country.

What is puzzling about Campbell’s story is that West Point is centered on building leadership qualities. Yes, the rules are there to help market the academy’s sports programs by giving good athletes the opt-out early parachute.

If Campbell was a leader and a man of the highest character, wouldn’t he turn down the Lions and honor his duty to this country?

Even before the Lions picked him, the Army had stooped to using him in uniform as a military mascot during the NFL draft.

Is this duty, honor, country?

Campbell and the Army are spinning this as a great thing if he makes the Lions’ roster. That way he can recruit for the Army for two years in Detroit to fulfill his active-duty commitment.

Think a guy like Campbell looks good as a recruiter after taking the easy way out? How does a guy leave his cadet brothers at graduation at the academy knowing they could be in harm’s way and he is playing football for a living?

It is misguided and in fact very historically ignorant to conflate serving in the military with serving your country; commanding or fighting in the military is serving your government, not your home, your culture, your people, or (hopefully) your values. It is true that country (or nation-state) and government are the same thing in a lot of contexts, but rarely does anyone try to construe “serving your government” as anything good. Well, okay, maybe it isn’t rare, but they don’t phrase it like that, and it isn’t good despite what Statists say.

Therefore, referring to someone who abandoned a productive and lucrative life at home to fight and possibly die in his government’s war (e.g., Pat Tillman) as a hero is to place the affairs and goals of the State above the everyday lives and activities of individual private citizens. It is difficult to think of a better definition of nationalism than that.

I want to mention that I can’t take anything away from the fact that Pat Tillman and thousands of other enlisted men and women made sacrifices and decisions that were harder than any I’ve made, so they should be respected or admired or something, if not as heroes than at least as pretty courageous people. It reminds me of the time a Jewish acquaintance of mine explained why rabbis and priests commit themselves to a lifetime of celibacy: not because there is anything inherently special about abstinence in and of itself, but because it is a decision and a commitment that the ordinary person can’t make; it takes a special, dedicated mindset to commit yourself to that and stick to it your whole life, which is more difficult than the average person can manage, so it places them above us, in some sort of respectable, admirable position. I feel like that about people such as Pat Tillman, not because of the decision per se or because the result or objective of his actions were admirable, but because of the personal sacrifice involved in the decision and the (unfortunately) lifelong commitment.

That doesn’t make him a hero, though. Personal sacrifice doesn’t make any serviceman a hero. Using a sort of technicality to get out of life-threatening military service overseas doesn’t make you the opposite of a hero, either. It makes you wise and sensible. Caleb Campbell might very well be jaded like so many servicemen who donate money to Ron Paul and other anti-war political candidates. Or he might just have a lot of common sense.

A fair amount of ire was directed at West Point Academy for implementing this athletes-special-treatment program, which is okay—I don’t have a big problem with either West Point’s athlete-coddling policy or people who are critical of its athlete-coddling policy. Much ire was also directed at Caleb Campbell for sort of reneging on his promise to the Army by bolting for the NFL to get out of combat duty. Bill Simonson expressed this sentiment when he wrote, “Caleb Campbell chose West Point. He was not forced to go there. If he wanted pro football then there are a ton of colleges where you can chase your dream.” I.e., if he wanted to avoid military service and play football instead, he could have gone almost anywhere instead of to a school where it’s understood that you repay the Army for your education by serving in the Army. That would be a good argument except, to my knowledge, he knew about this opting-out policy before he went to West Point, or if he didn’t, then West Point offered him the option; it wasn’t like he lobbied for it or anything, so what’s wrong with taking what your school voluntarily gives you? Nothing.

The last point I wanted to make: Despite the typically shameful and depressing quality of the comments section of blag posts, YouTube videos, etc., the first few comments to Simonson’s blag post contained surprisingly intelligent, informed, sober opinions about Campbell, Simonson’s arguments, and the military in general. I didn’t read past the first few for fear of ruining this rare and good thing.

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Anarchy is workable, Statism is not

An entire month ago, Francois Tremblay wrote a blag post, Statism is Utopian that I blagged about here. In the comments, I told him I thought he was incorrect in his assertion that an unworkable situation can proceed from a workable situation but that a workable situation cannot proceed from an unworkable one. He was referring to the Statist argument that anarchy is unworkable, which is why a state needs to be implemented to make society workable. He provided an analogy, that a good carpenter can create a blunder but a poor carpenter can’t create a masterpiece. It’s probably just better if you read his post.

In the last comment, he asked me if I could elaborate on my doubt or objection to that claim. I’ve been meaning to for the last three or four weeks, and I finally will now. Though I don’t know how well I’ll do. I don’t really have much to say. I wrote that I could probably just as easily come up with a different analogy about how a workable situation could proceed from an unworkable one. I get the feeling all this revolves around one’s definition of “workable.”

Statists argue that an anarchist society without legislated law and monopolistic law-enforcement authorities is unworkable, and, therefore, a state needs to be imposed upon the society to make it workable. The unworkability consists of criminals going unpunished, the absence even of a semi-formal system for punishing them, widespread hedonism, the rich dominating the poor with little to no chance of breaking from one’s “caste,” terrible industrial working conditions, terrible schools, and chaos generally reigning in the streets (the all-time favorite cliché of Statists). They argue that to correct these conditions and improve the lot of the people at large, a government must be formed that is the only and final authority on punishing criminals and promoting the general welfare.

Anarchists, to make things brief, pretty much argue the opposite; that under a monopolistic state, with aggressive force (coercion/extortion) legitimately and legally wielded by people who not only suffer no consequences for their aggressions but whose job descriptions mandate that they exercise such aggression, the natural order of human society (peaceful cooperation and voluntary free-market transactions) is systemically disrupted and a less prosperous, less orderly, less enlightened society results.

If anarchy is workable and Statism is not, then anarchists advocate the evolution from an unworkable societal system to a workable one. This implies, contrary to what Francois argued (I think), that we can convert an unworkable situation into a workable one. Does that sound right? Am I correct in describing Statism with the adjective “unworkable”? I mean, we’re still alive and progressing in many ways, though regressing in others; Statism certainly works poorly and most definitely worse than anarchy; I think unworkable, especially in the long run, is an accurate term. When I asserted I could just as easily come up with an everyday analogy for why it’s feasible to go from an unworkable situation to a workable one, I was totally wrong because it’s kind of hard, but maybe I’ll think of a good one in the next couple of days.

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TANSTAAFSTVARS

BBC News claims, “A free satellite television and radio service backed by the BBC and ITV launches across the UK.” I hope even my non-libertarian friends aren’t fooled by any government’s claim that something is “free”; obviously it is funded by money that was taken at the point of a gun from people who earned it and given to people who didn’t. I thought it was shameful that the BBC News article didn’t mention this tax funding at all, but it isn’t surprising because Britons and especially BBC journalists are probably used to the BBC’s funding just being there, perfectly unquestioned and justified.

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Ecological and Austrian theory

I’m in more of a link-and-run mood than a quote-and-philosophize mood (read: I’m short on time lately), so here’s an interesting blag post from Liberty & Power: Ecological and Austrian theory, about the similarities between ecosystems and economic markets and the disconnect between people who advocate a “hands-off” or laissez-faire attitude towards one but who see no problem with intervention or dirigisme towards t’other.

People who are exquisitely sensitive to distortions generated in markets by external political intervention enthusiastically endorse central control or overriding of ecological processes.

For their part, many environmentalists who are well versed in ecological understanding are insensitive to the deep distortions arising from political intervention in the market. Sometimes they blame markets for what is really the result of political intervention. Sometimes they seek political intervention without appreciating how it is likely to backfire.

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Hillary and Obama differ on economics

So claims David Leonhardt of the New York Times. Well, obviously that is completely stupid. He writes,

For all the similarities between the two Democrats, there is also a core thematic difference between them. Mrs. Clinton tends to favor narrowly focused programs, like the gas-tax holiday, that speak to specific voter concerns. By suspending the tax and replacing it with a new tax on oil companies, Mrs. Clinton told a rally in Hendersonville, N.C., on Friday, she was standing with “hard-pressed Americans who are trying to pay their gas bills.”

Mr. Obama, on the other hand, leans toward broader programs meant to help nearly all middle- and low-income families. At a steel factory in Northwest Indiana on Friday, Mr. Obama called the tax holiday a “gimmick” and said he instead favored a cut in the payroll tax, which finances Social Security, of up to $1,000 for middle-class households “to offset the costs not only of gas, but also of food.”

The dueling instincts do not explain all the differences between the two Democrats. They also disagree about a health-insurance mandate (Mrs. Clinton favors one) and the capital-gains tax (Mr. Obama has indicated he would raise it more than Mrs. Clinton would). Mr. Obama is open to increasing the amount of income subject to the Social Security payroll tax; Mrs. Clinton has been critical of that idea.

But their contrasting approaches do extend to a range of issues, including the current economic slowdown, the mortgage crisis and retirement savings. The contrast has been present since before the primaries began—when Mr. Obama announced his middle-class tax cut, for example, and when Mrs. Clinton took out a whimsical television advertisement in which she was labeling Christmas gifts as if each were a specific policy proposal.

If I were going to write a satirical piece for The Onion exemplifying the qualities that lead intelligent and informed Americans to despise journalists so much, I couldn’t have dreamed of writing anything so perfectly vacuous. This mindless drivel is what passes for political analysis in the top newspaper in our country. Print journalists and the people who value their opinions are willfully ignorant morons who should have no input into the societal systems that govern anyone else’s life.

Neither one of the candidates wants to end taxation altogether; one wants to give consumers a gas-tax break (by shifting the tax to oil companies!) and the other proposes a broader but still tiny tax cut of another kind. Their plans for inflicting socialized medicine on innocent and defenseless Americans differ slightly in the details, with one leading more quickly than the other to complete State control of health care, but both agree that the State has a just and proper role in this industry that needs to be expanded, and soon. They both agree that Social Security is good and necessary, and should never be seriously reformed or abolished, but they disagree on how much of our income should be taken to fund it. This article tells us they differ on their plans regarding “the current economic slowdown, the mortgage crisis and retirement savings”; let me guess: they both propose government fixes that involve the government doing more of something, not less of everything.

Anyone who thinks Obama and Hillary seriously differ at the root of their economic philosophies should reflect for a minute and consider the multitude of drastically different positions that have been put forth, both recently and over the centuries. A little more of this type of government vs. a little more of that type of government consists of a difference in the details, not a difference in philosophy. Their philosophy is that the individual is subordinate to the State, and tax-funded State programs implemented by politicians and bureaucrats are the solution to everything. They both adore the State and they want to control it. There is absolutely zero difference in their philosophy. They are both complete socialist Statists.

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Young Americans aren’t angry enough about foreign policy

A high school student named Peter Fulham published an opinion column in USA Today complaining that young Americans are not demonstrably angry enough about the war in Iraq and the aggressive American foreign policy.

Young people are tired of hearing about Iraq, and they gave up getting angry about its steep death toll and mounting costs a long time ago.
[...]
Sad as all this is, it’s tough to blame anybody my age for this indifference. Why should we worry when we have no personal stake in the conflict?

I can’t help but imagine that the tone in high school was different in 1970, as the Vietnam War raged and 18-year-olds were sent into its deadly grinder. There must have been anger and no small amount of fear. The idea of a draft is almost laughable today. So we don’t worry. We live our lives.

With a few notable exceptions, the public has shown a remarkable placidity about the war in Iraq, an indifference that must be attributable in part to the absence of a draft. Students, the usual anti-war activists, have been largely silent. We don’t support the conflict, as polls show. Even so, we have done little to make our government uncomfortable, little to demonstrate our disapproval. Perhaps, as a nation, we have outgrown the antics of the Vietnam anti-war movement.
[...]
American students have an obligation to be outraged about the war in Iraq — not just disapproving of it. We need to make this administration and the remaining pro-war lawmakers start to worry.
[...]
[I]t’s difficult to summon outrage because we have not been asked to sacrifice anything. Is it possible to summon deep-rooted anger for a war for which we were never asked to sacrifice anything?

First of all, the idea of military slavery is not almost laughable today. As long as there is the distinct possibility that a maniac like John McCain or a psychopath like Hillary Clinton could be the most powerful person in the world, or that someone equally bad could take power in the near future, there is always the improbable but significant possibility that military slavery will return to America.

I make my prediction here and now that during my lifetime, there will be substantial talk and considerable fear of military conscription of United States citizens. I will not go so far as to predict it will happen (yet), but I think there will be a much greater danger of it. You can chastise me for making such a non-qualitative and therefore rather subjective prediction, but, fine, I still think we’ll hear talk about it sooner rather than later, from elected criminals. Furthermore, I predict that those politicians will be on record as opposing the draft before they made the suggestion that we reinstate it. (I’m aware of Sen. Charles Schumer’s suggestion that we enslave young adults in the Army in order to dissuade the neocons from continuing their aggressive foreign policy or expanding their wars of aggression.)

Outside of military slavery, how else do the absurd domestic and foreign policies of the Republocrats impact us directly? Why does this kid think “we have no personal stake in the conflict” and “we have not been asked to sacrifice anything”?

Perhaps he hasn’t heard of the Patriot Act, President Bush’s wiretapping executive order, his martial law executive order, the increasing militarization of police departments across the United States, the record incarceration rate of American citizens, the violent America-hatred the Republocrats have inspired abroad, the inefficiency and harassment we are subjected to by the TSA, the national ID card (Real ID) that will be forced upon us in a few years, the incredibly bloated budget the Republocrats justify by citing and distracting us with the War on Terrorism, or the fact that we have devolved so far as to debate whether the Supreme Court should hear a case on whether the Second Amendment applies to individuals. I seriously doubt this green and idealistic kid is aware of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, libertarians’ searing criticisms of the very existence of the Federal Reserve, or the arguments by a presidential candidate in favor of returning the dollar to a gold standard and abolishing the Fed. All these State-caused factors reduce our quality of life in important social, cultural, and economic ways.

All of these are direct or indirect results of the Imperial Federal Government’s aggressive foreign policy, its War on Terrorism, and its homeland security obsession.

The out-of control spending, inflation, and the State’s efforts to fix the economic problems it caused are the worst, and these are all facilitated by the existence of a war because domestic spending and intervention always increase in wartime, as the professional criminal class (and most of the public) are more prone to support governmental expenditures and interventions if “national security” (!) is at stake. The economic consequences of the last several decades and the Bush regime in particular should not be overlooked, especially by young people who are going to be left with these burdens by the Worst Generation. As Lew Rockwell said, “Crush an economy and you crush civilization.”

However, Peter Fulham makes some good points and I’m glad I read his column. Young people don’t do enough to show their anger, loudly and publicly, about the Imperial Federal Government’s foreign policy, specifically its wars of aggression and further incitement of terrorism. And our professional criminal class isn’t scared enough of the ire they raise among young voters, or old ones, for that matter. The government doesn’t fear the people; the people fear the government, and that is why there is tyranny.

I wonder if part of the insufficient-anger problem can be explained by a lack of strong, well-defined moral-political principles among young Americans. Now, it could be that I’m biased and I think anyone who doesn’t espouse moral principles based on self-ownership and private property rights doesn’t have really strong political principles. However, as I’ve written before and will write many times again, most liberals and conservatives seem to arrive at their political beliefs by envisioning how they want the world to be or what they want fixed, and then supporting political candidates who promise to use the coercive power of the State to achieve those ends. This is not morally principled. This is saying the ends justify the means, and the ends are good so the means must be.

Libertarians, on the other hand, have a very strong conviction that the State is evil always and everywhere, and its very existence should be fiercely opposed, and so we oppose its military adventures as a corollary to that. Our principle is that people have the innate right to do what they want with their lives, liberty, and property, and that this right applies equally to everyone at all times; and the form this takes regarding politics is that taxation and other activities of monopolistic states are evil and immoral.

Perhaps a lack of such clear, absolute, logical, and well-defined morals makes young Americans oppose Bush’s foreign wars specifically and not American foreign policy in general. How many young people spoke out in anger against Bill Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia and bombings of Iraq? How much principled opposition was there among youths to Madeleine Albright’s monstrous assertion that, even though the embargo on Iraq weakened Saddam Hussein very little and caused the starvation of millions of Iraqis, “the price is worth it”? How many young liberals who oppose the Imperial Federal Government’s pro-Israel policies would oppose a more pro-Palestine foreign policy equally as vehemently? How many young liberals who opposed the Bush regime’s invasion of Iraq would, equally as strongly, oppose an Obama administration’s intervention in Sudan’s civil war? How many young liberals who didn’t like the first president Bush’s “Blackhawk Down” fiasco in Somalia also think the United States should end all other murderous, militant intervention in Somalia?

My answer to all of these is that young “anti-war” Americans don’t take a very principled stand on American foreign policy; they just oppose certain activities by certain people, viz., Republicans. This isn’t to take away from the principled liberals and conservatives who have well-defined and well-understood reasons that this or that policy is harmful, or from those who have come to espouse a principled foreign policy based on their bad experience with the Bush regime.

I wonder what your take is on this, as a libertarian or non-libertarian reader. Am I way off base accusing a lot of young liberals of not having as strong and well-defined moral-political principles as libertarians? Am I misled about their level of opposition to those other foreign-policy fiascoes of the Clinton and pre-Clinton years (I really don’t think so)?

Lastly, Mr. Fulham didn’t mention any politicians by name, so I can’t chide him too much for failing to mention Ron Paul and his multitude of principled, enthusiastic, and self-organized supporters, but I will remind people of the popularity Dr. Paul enjoyed among young Americans, on the internet, on college campuses, at rallies, and even (to some, lamentably small, extent) at the ballot box.

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Market anarchist blag carnival

See the 14th monthly market anarchist blag carnival, at Radical Libertarian. I submitted my post about the abolition of government schools, from early in the month. There’s lots of other good entries, but I haven’t come close to getting through all of them.

Thanks to Francois Tremblay for introducing me to these. Thanks to Aaron Kinney at Radical Libertarian for hosting it this month. Thanks to anyone who reads my entry. Thanks for reading this web page period. Thanks for being a libertarian.

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Biofuels demonstrate Bastiat’s broken window fallacy

This seems to me an excellent example of the broken window fallacy, or the law of unintended consequences: U.N. expert calls biofuel a “crime against humanity” because of all the food it wastes and the price increases it causes, when there are already shortages and high prices of food in the Third World. Some food scientists released a report urging the cessation of biofuel production during this “world food crisis.”

The broken window fallacy was first coined by Frederic Bastiat, who explained that the immediate economic consequence of something was often different, opposite, and less important than the long-term effect. He called it the broken window fallacy because, in his first example, if a window is broken, then the need for it to be repaired generates economic activity, and the glazier receives a small amount of income for his services. That is the immediate effect. But the long-term effect is that there is that much less money to be spent on other things, productive things, so other economic activities are prevented from occurring. As Bastiat put it, “Let us take a view of industry in general, as affected by this circumstance. The window being broken, the glazier’s trade is encouraged to the amount of six francs; this is that which is seen. If the window had not been broken, the shoemaker’s trade (or some other) would have been encouraged to the amount of six francs; this is that which is not seen.” He urges us not to “come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it….”

It is safe to say that 100% of governmental interference in the economy falls under the broken window fallacy.

“That which is not seen” in Frederic Bastiat’s broken window fallacy is also the unintended consequence in the law of unintended consequences. It is safe to say that 100% of all governmental activities eventually succumb to the law of unintended consequences.

Libertarians contend that the reason the law of unintended consequences applies to all State actions is that all State actions are coercive, which is a disruption of the natural order of human society, that being voluntary transactions and cooperation. Subsidizing corn-based “biofuels” is coercive because it requires taking money from people who earned it and giving it to people who didn’t. It requires taxation, and all taxation is involuntary and coercive (extortive), making it theft.

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“But the State has to protect the children!”

“Or else stupid and negligent parents would cause all sorts of harm to them!”

It is an understandable position, one I used to take in my darker, minarchist days. However, it is hard to deny the reality that often, the harm that a parent does to a child is not even as bad as the solution the State implements.

Take Christopher Ratte, a Tigers fan who bought his son a Mike’s Hard Lemonade at Comerica Park. He asked the concession stand guy for a lemonade, and he was given a lemonade with liquor in it. He didn’t know that “Mike’s Hard Lemonade” had alcohol in it (he claims). So, maybe he’s dumb and a little out of touch.

Naturally, since I’m writing about it, someone who works for the State found out. What might be an acceptable punishment for giving your 7-year-old son hard lemonade? A fine? Banishment from Comerica Park? A class on how to be a better parent?

Oh. Kidnapping the child and placing him in foster care. I guess I don’t know anything about parenting and even less about appropriate law enforcement. I’m sure they are doing what’s best, though, since they work for mother government. They would never be stupid or negligent enough to do something that would obviously harm a child. Especially something as bad as giving him alcohol.

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Can anarchism save Somalia?

“Good government” is a paradox. Any people so decent as to be capable of implementing it would be better off without it, and any people so rotten as to need it would be incapable of implementing it.
—unknown

Somalia’s condition, its history, and the attempts by the U.N. and U.S. to impose an external, military, governmental solution to its problems fascinate me. I wish I could become a Somalia scholar. I just might. As it stands, however, my knowledge of the nation and its history is somewhat lacking.

That said, I have a strong desire to offer my input on the subject. This desire was triggered by two Newsweek articles I read recently: A familiar tragedy, about how a lot of Somalia resembles Baghdad now; and Dilemmas of the Horn, about how the United States military’s attempts to prevent Somalia from becoming another Afghanistan have turned it into another Iraq.

You’d probably be better off just reading the articles, but in case you don’t, I’ll start by quoting at length some important passages from them:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Girl suspended for not pledging to the flag

I give fascist neocon warmonger and all-around State lover Neal Boortz a hard time on this website, but he introduced me to (what he referred to as) libertarianism, and it led to my adoption of pure libertarianism, so I should give him a little more recognition. He has several solid libertarian tendencies that get overshadowed by his confusion of Republicans with something better than Democrats and his support for any and all aggressive military adventures, anywhere and everywhere in the world.

One of his strong libertarian leanings is about government schooling. I’m pretty sure he thinks it should be abolished altogether. I know he wants to abolish the Department of Education. Under that anti-government-school umbrella, he takes the very anti-State position that no one should be required or expected to pledge their allegiance to the United States flag (the central government), and furthermore that it shouldn’t even be done in schools. His reasons are the same you and I would give: it is wrong to indoctrinate children with an adulation of any state, and this seems to be the primary function (purpose?) of government schools, and he opposes feeding children the propaganda that government is good or that government has accomplished what is great about this country. His failure to apply this notion, in principle, to all State actions and neocon military actions in particular is what makes him spectacularly non-libertarian.

I think of this every time I hear anything about the Statist Pledge of Allegiance. A Chattanooga high school student was suspended for refusing to stand and say the pledge. It’s pretty stupid that administrators only reversed their decision and let her back in school after they found out her reasons were religious. I’m with Boortz: the entire pledge should be eliminated from schools, and the government along with it.

Hat tip: Wendy McElroy.

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Democracy disgraced

After the debate in Philadelphia between Obama and Hillary, ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson were widely and harshly criticized for the way they ran the debate; specifically, the questions they spent the first 45 minutes on. Viewers, writers, and Obama’s camp complained that voters did not hear anything terribly important or relevant to the candidates’ suitability as president until well into the debate. The first three questions asked were about Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s claim that Americans were bitter and turned to guns or religion as issues they could affect more than others; and Hillary’s lies about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia.

Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, wrote an open letter to Gibson and Stephanopoulos on his blag that conveyed the anger, exasperation, and shame that he felt towards the two TV journalists. I mean, he was almost beside himself because of the way a “debate” between two State-loving socialists, who have strikingly similar opinions about how all of us should be governed, was conducted.

He says the debate was “a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, ‘a shameful night for the U.S. media.’” Some more excerpts:

I am still angry at what I just witnessed, so angry that it’s hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking.

…your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods….

You asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues—trying to fill our gas tanks and save for college at the same time, our crumbling bridges and inadequate mass transit, or the root causes of crime here in Philadelphia. In fact, there almost isn’t enough space—and this is cyberspace, where room is unlimited—to list all the things you could have asked about but did not, from health care to climate change to alternative energy to our policy toward China to the deterioration of Afghanistan to veterans’ benefits to improving education. …

What I just watched was an outrage. As a journalist, you appeared to confirm all of the worst qualities that cause people to hold our profession in such low esteem….

My answers to those criticisms would be drastically different from those of Gibson or Stephanopoulos or virtually any other journalist, to whom Bunch directed his letter (it was really to journalists at large, not just to Gibson and Stephanopoulos), but I’ll write them here anyway. The reason it is pointless to ask the same two candidates the same old questions about the housing market, gas prices, education, gun control, taxes, and all the other things you mentioned, is that their answers are the same and they aren’t changing any time soon! “More government intervention in this industry, more government intrusion into this aspect of your daily lives.” More, more, more government is all they ever propose, all we ever hear, and all the voters want! Bunch and the rest of this country are fooling themselves to think it matters whose new New Deal is inflicted upon us. Statists might claim the devil is in the details, but I contend that the details of the form that our socialist punishment takes are inconsequential in the long run and probably in the short run.

The reasons the American people hold journalists in such low esteem are a mystery to me, but the reasons I hold you in such low esteem are: Most TV journalists are more concerned with who is going to win and why than with what is right and why; most radio show hosts simply spout biases, falsehoods, and vitriol that will increase ratings; print journalists think that examining an issue closely consists of covering both Democrat and Republican sides of the issue (!); and most journalists in general are either too scared or too stupid to ask politicians really tough questions that drive to the heart of the matter, such as how income taxes can be justified at all in a “free” society, how they can justify the existence of the Department of Education when it has failed so badly, why they continue to support an oppressive war on drug users when it has failed so miserably and resulted in the enslavement, rape, and murder of millions of innocent Americans, how a sane person could associate foreign wars with “defending our freedom” when increases in governmental activity and income-theft always come along with wars, and whether maybe it should be pretty obvious that a criminal justice system that is granted a legal monopoly and extra-societal status is going to accrue an unacceptable number of mistakes and abuses without any corrective action or recourse for the victims.

That is why I have such a low estimation of TV, radio, and newspaper journalists. If I had been so desperate for blagging material that I felt like watching a single second of a debate between those two frightening, power-hungry, megalomaniacal, State-worshiping socialists, then Gibson’s and Stephanopoulos’s performance would have been unlikely to lower my opinion of journalists any further.

Bunch’s open letter also said,

By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

Speaking of promoting democracy, the Dalai Lama, in his recent speech at the University of Michigan, said,

I am not against the Olympic Games. From the beginning I have expressed concern about individuals, human rights, religious freedom, in this case in the Republic of China. I’m fully committed to democracy.

de·moc·ra·cy (dĭ-mŏk´-rə-sē)— n. Mob rule.

Maybe when stupid Philadelphia journalists and enlightened spiritual leaders talk of “democracy,” what they mean is self-rule or self-governance. Somehow I don’t think they mean Might Makes Right or rule-by-others-you-vehemently-oppose-who-were-elected-by-people-other-than-you. That would be the opposite of self-governance. I know it’s easy to get one political concept and its complete polar opposite mixed up—I did for many years, when I was a child who went to government schools—but democracy is not self-rule or self-governance. Unless you think the only relevant political entity is the society at large, in which case there is no hope for you. I don’t think Bunch, most voters, or any of my non-libertarian readers think that. I just wish they would see that what I want for myself is more important than what they want for myself.

Two ABC journalists did not disgrace democracy. Democracy disgraces itself every day by giving us governance that is neither free nor voluntary.

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Bionic eye returns sight to blind

This bionic vision system consists of an ultra-thin electronic receiver implanted into the eyeball, which receives a signal transmitted by a special pair of glasses that the patient wears. Pfff, I don’t know who would want that; I’d much rather wear a gold, semicircular visor that looks like it came out of a vacuum cleaner or something.

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On escaping from cults

I guess I’m just a total and complete liar. This is my fourth consecutive post relating to the raid and kidnapping at the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints ranch in Eldorado, Texas. I seriously, honestly did not expect to make more than one post in the near future about the events, and now it’s four. Weird.

This post is about a comment made on William Norman Grigg’s blag post, which I linked to three posts ago. The commenter, anonymous, said,

are you serious?

as a former member of a cult in which i had NO choice to be in, i applaud the removal of people from this forced abuse.

A cult you had no choice to be in, eh? Hmmm, I’ve written about those before… What is the largest, most intrusive, most intolerant, most destructive cult ever known to man? Why, it’s the Cult of the State! And believe it or not, anonymous, you’re still a member and always have been. I am not exactly a member, I’m only a victim of its crazed system. I am not a willful participant. Neither is any libertarian.

Would you applaud the removal of people from this forced abuse? (Maybe abuse is a harsh word…extortion? Restriction of liberty? Millions of people certainly are abused, though, by any standard.) If you applaud the removal of some people from forced abuse but not others, why not the others? If you applaud the removal of people from any forcible system they disapprove of, then welcome to the light of libertarianism! You must agree with our assertions of our right to secede from any monopolistic State and form voluntary governing jurisdictions—jurisdictions of one, if need be. You must also, therefore, vehemently support the abolition of the state of Texas and its police force, as vehemently as you support the removal of the FLDS children from their families.

Somehow, I don’t think he would see it that way. That’s why Statism is such a pernicious cult and why it seems impossible to break free from its tyrannical grasp.

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Statolatry on the radio

A quibble I have with women, by and large, as regards their moral-political thought processes is that they are too hesitant to take a definitive side, to make a polarizing statement, to pronounce a strong (negative) judgment of people, ideas, or institutions. I made sure to say “by and large” because this is simply more true of women than men and doesn’t apply to everyone. I’m curious to know whether you agree with that assessment.

The particular woman who prompted me to write this today is Trudi Daniels, the news lady on the Drew & Mike show on WRIF-Detroit in the morning. It is easy to tell she is a pretty big State lover when they talk about news and politics, because the guys on the show are Ron Paul fans and they absolutely loathe Hillary Clinton, which they bring up every time they can. And they aren’t big fans of Barack Obama, either. One thing Mike Clark mentions probably more than any other political issue is socialized medicine, which frightens and worries him as much as it does me. The guys agree, and they all occasionally drop a Paulian opinion about the government or the candidates. But she’s always trying to interject her mitigating comments, or explain what Hillary or Obama meant by this or that statement, or tell one of the guys, “That’s not exactly true” or “There’s more to it than that” or something along those lines. What results is that the guys who actually run the show keep her more in check than she does them. If she were the news reporter for a show hosted by liberal wingnuts, she would probably go to town with her Hillary (or Obama) adulation and nanny-state socialism all the time.

I had her pegged as a typical wishy-washy liberal bed-wetter, but today I found out she is an ignorant and dim-witted Statolatrist. (Maybe there’s a difference, I don’t know. If there is, it’s only in degree.) In their discussion of the FLDS ranch raid in Eldorado, Texas, she said something to the effect of, “What I don’t understand is if their informant, ‘Sarah,’ was in Colorado, why wouldn’t they follow up on that? Aren’t they able to do that? Trace her number, find her address, or something? Why would they follow through with the raid if they knew or might have known the caller was far away, wasn’t making substantial accusations, and was probably pulling a prank?”

Are you fucking kidding me? Are you that naïve and gullible? Are you that brainwashed by the boobs in the MSM (you are one!) and the crooks and liars in the professional criminal class that you think neither local nor state nor federal cops would raid the compound of a cult, with tanks and full body armor and all kinds of extremely destructive (not defensive) weapons, on a pretense that was shaky at best? Why wouldn’t they go ahead with it even if the probable cause was not, in fact, all that probable? Have you lived this long in the 20th and 21st centuries without ever having the slightest inkling that maybe the types of people who are attracted to the higher levels of government, especially the law-enforcement branches, are the ones who enjoy and seek the exercise of power over others, especially by force—the more violent, the better?

The reason they raided the compound, kidnapped the children, and accused the adults of various violent crimes, without any real evidence, is because the cops and politicians will suffer little or none if they are wrong. What are the victims going to do? Sue them? Get money from them? No—get money from the taxpayers. What else could they do? Secede from that law-enforcement body and subscribe to a different service from a different entity? That’s what they sort of tried to do already, unofficially; that didn’t work!

But the adults were the ones who ran the cult and wanted to separate (hide?) themselves from Texas state law; this is about the children. The main legal justification for raiding a compound where hundreds of adults lived and kidnapping hundreds of children was that underage marriages and pregnancies may have been taking place, which is a violation of the children’s rights. The children are rightfully considered largely helpless by the State, and officials all think their rightful public duty is to protect children from crimes.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that most libertarians and other people who care about reducing State power (Constitutionally or revolutionarily) do not and would not justify the brainwashing, confinement, underage marrying, or underage impregnating that may or may not go on in this or any other cult. We do, however, have a very practical and utilitarian side to our moral and ethical reasonings—contrary to popular belief—and we assert loudly and confidently: MOST PARENTS KNOW BETTER HOW TO RAISE THEIR CHILDREN THAN ANYONE WHO WORKS FOR THE STATE DOES. We realize that whatever wrongs some neglectful, fundamentalist, evil, or stupid parents might inflict upon their children, the quantity and degree of such injustices pale in comparison to the injustices that will be inflicted upon child and adult alike by a state that is given enough power to combat such injustices. We realize that if you give a state the jurisdiction and power to decide unilaterally what is appropriate and inappropriate for a parent to do, that state’s power will grow such that the crimes it commits against the citizens at large will outweigh the crimes that would be committed by evil parents in both degree and number. If you are skeptical of that assertion, ask yourself: How many compounds did the FLDS cult members raid, with tanks and other destructive weapons, to kidnap other people’s children for the children’s own good? How many Branch Davidians did the polygamists in Eldorado murder? How many innocent drug users have the FLDS polygamists kidnapped, beaten, and enslaved in cages with serial murderers and rapists? How many 18-to-22-year-olds have the FLDS polygamists forced into military slavery and sent to die in a non-threatening country halfway across the world? How many other Eldorados and Wacos are there going to be, after the Imperial Federal Government and the state of Texas have broken their Constitutional limitations so many times and committed such injustices for the good of the people? You can’t give the State any power without it taking too much power. This is the utilitarian argument for libertarianism.

I try to keep in mind, as should you, Frederic Bastiat’s complaint, “[E]very time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.” I don’t know what, if anything, would be a good or right thing to do for the children who are born into the FLDS compound and remain there for all their lives; I know I would hate living there and would curse fate for giving me such a life (then again, if I were born into it, I might not know any better…). I don’t know what could have been done to help those children, those wives, or any other children and women in similar situations, in a free society; my guess is next to nothing. Certainly nothing forceful. Maybe there is no right answer for many of them. They’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Their lives will obviously be worse if they are forced into Texas’s foster-child system; there should be no argument over that. The only clear thing that emerges from this debacle is what should already be clear: State solutions are absolutely, positively always worse than the problems they purport to solve, and the governments of this country have too much power, and are too eager to exceed even that.

I never planned on writing three posts, much less three consecutive ones, on the FLDS compound raid, but I think I’m done with it, unless and until, of course, more State injustices occur in this case, which actually seems pretty likely.

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More rational thoughts on FLDS kidnapping

I have decided I am an inadequate blagger. This is because I don’t have enough time for writing and can’t focus and materialize my thoughts into excellent blag posts, unless I take a lot of time for it. So I just link to other, (semi)professional writers who do it much sooner than I can and much better anyway. Bob Murphy at Crash Landing has more insightful thoughts about the raid of the FLDS ranch by Texas state police.

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Insightful thoughts on the Eldorado polygamy compound raid

I felt the need to chime in about the potential rights and certain wrongs of the raid by Texas police of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints polygamist ranch in Eldorado, but I think Wendy McElroy expressed thoughts very similar to my own much better than I could have. If I have anything to add, I will soon, hopefully. Her two posts about the cult and the raid are here and here.

Also, Willian Norman Grigg is much, much more forgiving and non-judgmental of the FLDS adults, much more eager to give them the benefit of the doubt, than I ever would be, but his column on the matter is a compelling read, especially for my non-libertarian friends.

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I hate hippies!

On Chris Lander’s web page Stuff White People Like, there are primarily two types of blag posts: entries into the ever-growing list of stuff white people like, and news items that exemplify white people liking those things. So far, the most famous and well-liked entry in the list of stuff white people like is probably assists, incomplete and poorly presented though it is. (See the name John Stockton anywhere in his post? It isn’t mentioned until the twelfth comment. By far, the first and foremost person most white guys think of—including myself, who hates basketball—when they think of assists is John Stockton.)

A recent post about white people liking white-people things in the news was about these yuppie losers who use their iPhones in every conceivable social situation to look something up and verify a fact or win a bet or whatever, making themselves very annoying to their friends and colleagues.

The increased annoyingness the iPhone accords also extends to damn dirty hippies, who, you might have thought, could not get any more annoying. Lander picks out what he calls “the greatest passage in history”:

Wil Shipley, a Seattle software developer, uses his iPhone at the Whole Foods fish counter to check websites for updates on which seafood is the most environmentally correct to purchase. He quizzes the staff on where and how a fish was caught. Because he carries the Internet with him, “I can be super-picky,” he said.

Ahh, god, I hate these stupid hippies!

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The capitalist reformer of Estonia

Mart Laar, prime minister of the former Soviet republic of Estonia from 1992 to 1994 and from 1999 to 2002, won the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty from the Cato Institute. The Cato Institute’s description of him says,

Laar realized that the only way for Estonia to weather the crisis was to finally leave behind the legacy of its communist past. He announced deep cuts to paternalistic state welfare programs, slashed business taxes, and urged liberalization of international trade. By the end of his term, the government’s Bureau of Privatization was dissolved; more than 90 percent of the economy was in private hands. The economy was growing 7 percent annually, and Laar was widely credited as the force behind the creation of the “Baltic Tiger.”

Mart Laar believes in economic freedom because he believes in the Estonian people. As a young student of history, Laar braved Soviet arrest by researching Estonian resistance to the World War II occupation. In his first term of office, he negotiated the withdrawal of Russian troops from the country, introduced the highly stable Estonian currency, and implemented a flat tax that has decreased steadily since 1994.

It then quotes Dick Armey (of all people…couldn’t they find a more libertarian public figure who had heard of this guy?), who said of Laar and his reforms, “If Estonia is not a vindication of everything we believe in—from free trade to privatization to sound money to balanced budget—I am at a loss as to how else one could validate our ideas.”

Hat tip: Radley Balko.

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Emma Goldman

The subject of today’s featured article on the home page of Wikipedia.

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Obama’s wrong and so are (some of) his critics

Barack Obama created a little stir with two of his speeches recently, at least among those of us who still haven’t been bewitched by his ostentatious oratory. First, in San Francisco, he said,

“So it’s not surprising then that [when voters] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Then, he kind of made it worse by trying to spin and backtrack from those comments, in Indiana:

People don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody is going to help them. So people end up voting on issues like guns and are they going