Weekend links
June 20, 2009 – 6:43 pm by JohnNot much time to blag; here are my favorite readings from the last couple weeks (apologies for not including something good that you wrote; I don’t have much time for reading, either).
Will the American auto industry fail? at No Third Solution.
How zoning rules would work in a free society by Ben O’Neill.
Is peak oil the solution to global warming? by Kevin Carson.
What’s wrong with the financial regulation white paper by Arnold Kling.
Charles Johnson reminds us: we are the “market.”
Police beat by Charles Johnson.
Hypocritical, censoring leftists (or do I repeat myself?) by Stephan Kinsella.
Non-political:
The Voynich manuscript is fascinating.
Obama’s impossible healthcare reform promises
June 20, 2009 – 10:24 am by JohnAnother excellent column by Sheldon Richman. He quotes Obama:
If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.
Then Richman explains how this cannot remain true under any medical-insurance plan like Obama’s:
Obama will not be able to keep his promise if he gets the “reform” he wants. He favors a “public option,” which is a euphemism for a government insurance plan. Obama says a government plan will keep private insurers “honest” through competition. But what will keep it from being a predatory competitor? After all, it will have a guaranteed source of revenue that no private insurer has: captive taxpayers. So the public option would be able to price its policies below market level and put the squeeze on the private companies.
…government is the only entity that can truly price predatorily because it can hold down explicit prices to consumers while recouping its costs implicitly through taxation or Fed-monetized debt.
Let’s not forget that Obama favors having a government bureau define the contents of the basic insurance coverage—that is, the state will dictate to insurers what services they must sell to their customers. Plus, the emerging reform plan would outlaw a premium schedule based on risk or existing illness. People who are sick or more likely to get sick could not be charged more than healthy people. (By that logic, the owner of a simple wooden house would pay the same fire-insurance premium as the owner of a brick house.)
Moreover, people would be compelled to have insurance (and then pay taxes on their employer-originated coverage). This will give the government the incentive to impose price controls—“guidelines,” no doubt—to keep insurance “affordable” and “universal.”
If the private insurers protest that these terms make profitable operations impossible, Obama and his allies will accuse them of profiteering and proclaim that the free market has once again failed to deliver medical care.
At that point insurers may choose to leave the medical policy market. Meanwhile, when reimbursements to doctors and other providers shrink in the name of cost-cutting and red tape mounts, doctors may choose to take early retirement or find other ways to make a living. (Some doctors have stopped accepting Medicare patients.)
Obama says the public option is needed to “inject competition into the health care market so that [we can] force waste out of the system and keep the insurance companies honest.” But who is limiting insurance competition today?
Government, of course.
Interstate competition in medical insurance is illegal. There is no national market. Americans living in Texas are not free to buy coverage from a firm operating in Maine. …
One reason interstate competition is not allowed is that states throughout the country, to different degrees, force insurers to provide coverage for all kinds of services that most people might never buy on their own. Mandated coverage results from service providers’ lobbying state legislatures – a truly corrupt rent-seeking system. (See John Seiler’s Freeman article here.) Interstate competition could nullify the mandate system, as people bought policies from companies in states with fewer requirements. Opponents of interstate competition say this would set off a race to the bottom. What they mean is that it would permit people the freedom to tailor policies to their personal requirements.
[...]
When Obama promises to make health care and insurance “affordable,” he means he will impose price controls, overt and covert, on providers and insurers. Promises of cost-cutting should get the same credit as past such promises: exactly none. Cost-cutting is not a bureaucracy’s strong suit.We know where price controls lead: to shortages, decline in quality, queues, rationing, and regimentation. Welcome to healthcare reform.
It scares me. Socialized medicine and increasingly State-run banking systems will be the major forces that turn the United States into a second-class society. I wish it scared more people.
This just in: Americans are stupid
June 19, 2009 – 12:19 pm by JohnNo, this isn’t just stupid. It’s stupid and evil and inhumane.
As if electing complete idiots with no economic knowledge and no regard for individual rights to the presidency every four years for the last several decades weren’t proof enough: A jury ruled in favor of the RIAA, against the Minnesota woman it sued, requiring her to pay the RIAA $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song she downloaded “illegally.” Those jurors will never suffer karma as bad as they deserve. Neither will anyone who works for the RIAA (mainly, their executives and attorneys). They are going to burn in a very special level of hell, a level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.
Fish in a barrel
June 19, 2009 – 8:03 am by JohnHere are a few issues or news stories that I’ve come across recently that I could offer easy and obvious solutions or objections to, or that libertarianism has already provided an easy and obvious answer to:
Philip Morris supports new FDA regulations on cigarettes. Why, when they’ve opposed previous interventions in their industry?
The bill, already passed by the House of Representatives, will change the face of the tobacco industry by giving the FDA the authority to restrict tobacco product ingredients, impose nicotine caps and limit advertising campaigns. It solidifies the position of the producer with the greatest market share—Altria—which makes 50% of all cigarettes in the U.S. [and which owns Philip Morris].
[...]
“Bringing new products to market will be extremely difficult,” says Maura Payne, a spokeswoman for Reynolds America….
The system is designed to help the rich and powerful and screw the little guy. True, no one cares about cigarette smokers or tobacco companies anymore, but this is simply an example of the wealth-concentrating socialist system that we live under.
Obama’s drug czar claims the DEA will be scaling back the war on marijuana users and focusing more on treatment. While that article points out some good changes the Obama regime has already made and should be congratulated for, I am skeptical that we’ll see any substantive change in drug policy in the next eight years. Call me out and remind me to issue a retraction of this prediction if it’s wrong, but our freedom over our bodies will not increase under Obama’s rule and nonviolent drug users will still spend absurd amounts of time in federal prisons. No one with any power will allow that to change any time soon because the drug war gives them too much power over their subjects.
Joseph Carnevale, the NC State student who created the famous orange barrel monster, has been arrested for larceny for pilfering the barrels from a construction site and tearing them up to build the statue. His arrest is completely illegitimate because he has as much right to those barrels as any other taxpayer. (Well, you could argue not as much as someone who pays much more in taxes, but you get the point.) The hardcore Statist might say his “theft” and “vandalism” are harmful to taxpayers because now the state of North Carolina will just have to buy more barrels with more taxpayer money, but that is obviously the fault of the thieves in government, not the non-thief Carnevale. (It should be noted that no pun was intended with the use of the word “barrel” in this paragraph and the post’s title, as the post was titled before I ever heard of the orange barrel monster.)
The Las Vegas branch of the U.S. Attorney’s Office requested personal information about two people who left “threatening” comments on a story on the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s website, and the Review-Journal is complying. The comments in question happen to be completely innocuous:
One called jury members “12 dummies” and said they “should be hung” if they convict Las Vegas business owner Robert Kahre on charges of defrauding the Internal Revenue Service with a scheme involving gold and silver U.S. coins.
The other, since deleted from the newspaper Web site, offered a bet that one of the federal prosecutors in the case wouldn’t reach his next birthday.
Wow, really scary. Funny, I don’t notice the U.S. Attorney’s Office investigating the feds who ACTUALLY AND CREDIBLY THREATENED MURDER against Kahre for not paying proper penance to the Imperial Federal Government, to the commenters and the rest of the American citizens for the same, and to those same jurors lest they decide to stay home or go to work and live their lives as they please instead of acquiescing to jury conscription.
A good way to spot pathetic pro-State trolls: they mention Bernie Madoff or Sir Allen Stanford without bringing up the professional criminals in Congress or their largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world, Social Security.
You know, instead of proposing to legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana to mitigate budget shortfalls, why doesn’t anyone propose to ABOLISH THE DEA? Is that so hard to understand? Do they not realize how many billions upon billions of dollars that would save the federal government every year? And similar drug-fighting tax drains in state budgets? Is it because they are pathetic leeches who have no conception of individual rights and just support the predatory State whatever it does?
Conservatism is fatally flawed
June 14, 2009 – 6:47 pm by JohnIs capitalism fatally flawed? asks Paul McDonnold in the Christian Science Monitor.
Recessions, like hurricanes, leave wreckage behind—bankrupt businesses, high unemployment, and sometimes even tattered philosophies.
No, they don’t. Inflationary booms leave bankrupt businesses and unemployment, not to mention devalued currency, behind. Recessions correct those mistakes. The only “tattered philosophy” I’ve noticed is semi-small-government “conservatism,” whose proponents have decided they actually love big government. Two other camps, the one that’s been saying all along that big government is great and the one that’s been denouncing all government activities, are still going pretty strong and consistent.
The philosophy of economic conservatism has long been one of unquestioned deregulation. Conservatives have considered it as a way of unhooking government leashes that the economy strains against, setting it free to run at full speed and lead us to wealth.
Well, that’s certainly how the story goes, and I’ll grant that many economists and politicians labeled as conservative once railed against the tax-and-spend-and-regulate policies of the Democrats. But their influence in the conservative movement has been waning for a good many decades now. I mean, I don’t know of any conservatives who have been calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, numerous cabinet departments, or federal agencies. They still seem to oppose tax increases, but they don’t oppose the spending or the regulation.
But this philosophy seemed to collapse in the moral and financial wreckage of today’s recession. Like many conservatives, I was left facing uncomfortable questions, chiefly: Is capitalism itself fatally flawed?
Obviously he is not paying attention. Since McDonnold, similar to Kel and I, seems to be using the word “capitalism” to refer to a generally free economy, how could he possibly confuse 21st-century America with a free-market society? Regulations, spending, and devaluation of the dollar are at greater levels than they have ever been. Maybe you’ve read statistics about how many pages are added to the United States Code every year or every decade. It isn’t slowing down. It was increased dramatically during the reign of George W. Bush. So was the funding to dozens of executive and regulatory agencies. Those laws mean something and those parasitic bureaucrats are doing something. They reduce the freedom of people to work, trade, and live as they please within the borders defined by the Imperial Federal Government. It isn’t freedom and it’s been getting less free with each passing year.
McDonnold then goes over some of Karl Marx’s theories about why capitalism is fatally flawed. From what I know, it is an accurate representation of Marx’s theories and I’ll give him credit for citing some ideas of Marx other than “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” I think my objections to Marx here would be standard libertarian assertions: the concentration of capital into few hands comes along with the concentration of power into few hands, which is facilitated by Statism and hindered by libertarianism.
As recently as 1980, the US was a nation of mostly small- and medium-sized banks. Employees knew, often on a personal basis, both the depositors and the borrowers. Deposits that were not loaned out had to be kept in low-risk investments such as government bonds.
People who claimed the mantle of conservatism dismantled the regulations behind this system. This shook the industry. Through mergers and acquisitions, resources were centralized. The number of banks declined. Huge conglomerates arose and created the complex world of global finance that later collapsed. This is capitalism’s dark side of impersonal corporations, recessions, and class conflict.
I really don’t buy it. And not because I have this need to object to any and all blame that anyone places on smaller government/more freedom; it’s because we don’t have smaller government and we aren’t more free. This should be obvious to anyone. The president has more powers than ever and the number of laws governing business is ever-increasing. I will always consider the possibility that the particular governmental function that was eliminated or the order in which interventions were eased can yield negative consequences—for instance, I’ve read that some type of tax break relating to home ownership might have induced more people to buy homes they couldn’t afford. However, the correct response to such problems is to keep increasing our personal and economic freedom or to return as many freedoms as possible to us at once, because the government intervention was the problem in the first place.
The problem with conservatives is that they very obviously don’t see government intervention as a problem and they don’t see personal or economic freedom as a solution to anything. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or ignorant. Stop listening to what they say and look at the facts. Their record speaks for itself.
Another famous thinker, Adam Smith, saw a different side of capitalism. Seven decades before the “Manifesto,” he wrote “The Wealth of Nations,” about the capitalism of his day. It was one of small, decentralized firms—butchers and bakers. The driving force was not blind greed but a healthy interest in improving one’s own lot by helping others. It was a capitalism that looked a lot like the banking sector before deregulation.
Oh, I must have missed that historic sea change in global monetary policy where the Federal Reserve was abolished, along with the SEC, the FTC, and the FDIC, free coinage was decriminalized, and former Goldman Sachs executives were barred from holding positions in the Federal Reserve and the United States Treasury. Our “deregulated” system also, unfortunately, doomed large investment banks to failure by forbidding them from receiving $800 billion of inflated money, created out of thin air. It is bad that our evil “deregulated” banking sector would visit such atrocities upon us.
Is that the “free market” and the “deregulated” banking sector you’re talking about? The one that’s done so much damage?
Capitalism itself is not fatally flawed. But a hyperconservative approach to it is.
Capitalism, as in, a free market, is either complete or it isn’t. Since neither McDonnold nor I apparently know what the word “conservative” means anymore, I will do him one better by saying that a “hyperlibertarian” approach to capitalism is a free market and it is the goal any advocate of the free market should aim for.
Regulations that promote decentralized competition on a human scale are regulations that conserve Smith’s side of capitalism. These regulations should not be the enemy of conservatives; they should be our aim.
Please allow me to be the first blagger ever to quote Ludwig von Mises’s essential insight: The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.
When you hear what passes for conservative punditry nowadays, it’s no wonder Republicans are losing power and influence faster than ever. What a stupid, vacuous, hypocritical “ideology.” What an embarrassing collection of misogynist, racist xenophobes, fundamentalist Bible-fetishists, third-rate shysters, and authoritarian police state apologists.
Robert Heinlein said, “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” Libertarians have known for decades, since before Rothbard’s time, that conservatives not only fit nicely into the former group but lead the charge, all while claiming (naïvely or deviously) to champion freedom. After 8 years of both stupid and evil efforts to control others, it’s good to see mainstream conservatives are finally realizing and admitting that libertarians were right about them.
Quote of the day
June 11, 2009 – 7:00 pm by JohnFrom Chris Floyd, as incisive and unforgiving as usual, RE: the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009:
What kind of country passes such a law? Why, a cheap, corrupt, third-rate junta state, which has elevated war and militarism into its supreme value, its “ultimate concern,” its divinity—that’s what kind of country. What other kind of country did you think was skulking there between Mexico and Canada these days?
Read the whole thing. It’s short by Floyd’s standards.
Quote of the day
June 10, 2009 – 9:41 pm by JohnFrom Roderick Long’s chapter in Anarchism/Minarchism:
The confused assumption that a legal framework must (or even can) be external to what it constrains tends to make political structure invisible except insofar as it is realised in familiar state-monopoly institutions. And this in turn helps to explain what anarchists often find puzzling: namely, the tendency among non-anarchists to treat a single unsuccessful or undesirable instance of a stateless society as a refutation of anarchism per se—whereas nobody regards a single unsuccessful or undesirable instance of a state as a decisive objection to the state as such. The reason for this puzzling double standard is that while people generally recognise that states can come in a variety of different political structures, so that the failure of one type proves nothing against another, it is implicitly assumed that anarchies are all alike in structural terms—that is, that they are all structureless—and so the failure of one counts against all. But in fact mere statelessness is compatible with a variety of different institutional and cultural arrangements, and one would expect differences in such arrangements to have a significant impact on a stateless society’s viability.
I read this passage at his blag, not in the book. It brings me a little bit closer to buying the book, but it’s still way too expensive for me and I have a long enough reading list that I’m not getting through as it is.
Obama’s next terrible idea: Cyber Czar
May 31, 2009 – 11:35 am by JohnThere is no possible way this can end well. Obama continues to reveal his true authoritarian colors for all to see with his announcement of a new cyber security office to be headed by a “Cyber Czar”. Like everything else the government touches, this will be bad for everyone involved except the criminals who get to wield the new powers that fall under the purview of this office. Censorship, political favoritism, higher costs of using the internet, and threats of murder for peaceful activities (regulation) are in our future thanks to the totalitarian fascist whom the idiots of this country elected as criminal-in-chief.
Proposals for Baltimore’s vacant lots
May 26, 2009 – 8:18 pm by JohnUm, it’s called squatting. Libertarianism took care of this issue more than a century ago.
The Chrysler takeover and the rule of law
May 25, 2009 – 11:34 pm by JohnJoshua Claybourn summarizes why the Obama regime’s management of the Chrysler bankruptcy is worse than just more government intervention. It violates the most important aspects of a sound legal system: the sanctity of contracts and the rule of law.
Under these long standing bankruptcy laws—enacted and enforced by the federal government under the Constitution—a secured creditor is entitled to first priority under the “absolute priority rule.” Other nonsecured creditors have “junior” priority. The purpose of this rule should seem clear. When you offer credit to some one or some thing, and do so on the condition that it is secured by an asset, you should be first in line to collect before those providing credit without such security. Unfortunately President Obama’s actions throughout the Chrysler bankruptcy have trampled over these well worn bankruptcy laws, contract rights, and even the rule of law.
One of Chrysler’s secured creditors was the State of Indiana, or more particularly, pension funds administered by the state. But now that Chrysler has filed for bankruptcy, Indiana and other secured creditors are being forced to the back of the line so that unions can proceed to the front. For every dollar of secured creditors’ claims, they’re receiving only 30 cents. Compare that the the United Auto Workers union, an unsecured junior creditor, who will get 50 cents on the dollar.
Why? It’s not because any contract, agreement or bankruptcy law calls for it, but because the federal government decided it was politically convenient. Of course, we’ve become far too familiar with the government robbing Peter to pay Paul, but in this instance the government is violating the rule of law to do it. The arbitrary whims of Obama’s administration threaten the very foundation of capitalism.
I don’t know what else anyone expected from this Marxist opportunist.
Henceforth lenders will hesitate to provide credit, and eager entrepreneurs and businessmen will struggle to find it, because any credit can now apparently be confiscated by government greed regardless of the law or the existence of a binding contract. Simply put, the price of borrowing will now go up because lenders must account for a new risk—government intervention.
This reminds me of something Wendy McElroy wrote a year or two ago: there is a difference between risk and uncertainty. In a free economy, everything has a certain level of risk and the people who play their risks and rewards right will profit more than those who don’t or who don’t risk much. But government intervention introduces uncertainty, not exactly extra risk, which complicates matters and makes otherwise good decisions turn out unprofitable. The new uncertainty in government perturbations also makes political conniving and political decision-making more important and economic decision-making correspondingly less important.
Hat tip: Radley Balko
Obama stimulus plan fomenting trade war
May 24, 2009 – 12:10 pm by JohnThe Obama regime’s short-sighted but typical “buy American” stimulus policies are beginning to foment a trade war between the United States and other countries.
Ordered by Congress to “buy American” when spending money from the $787 billion stimulus package, the town of Peru, Ind., stunned its Canadian supplier by rejecting sewage pumps made outside of Toronto. After a Navy official spotted Canadian pipe fittings in a construction project at Camp Pendleton, Calif., they were hauled out of the ground and replaced with American versions.
[...]
This week, the Canadians fired back. A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts—the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.
[...]
Take, for instance, Duferco Farrell Corp., a Swiss-Russian partnership that took over a previously bankrupt U.S. steel plant near Pittsburgh in the 1990s and employed 600 people there.The new buy American provisions, the company said, are being so broadly interpreted that Duferco Farrell is on the verge of shutting down. Part of an increasingly global supply chain that seeks efficiencies by spreading production among multiple nations, it manufactures coils at its Pennsylvania plant using imported steel slabs that are generally not sold commercially in the United States. The partially foreign production process means the company’s coils do not fit the current definition of made in the USA—a designation that the stimulus law requires for thousands of public works projects across the nation.
In recent weeks, its largest client—a steel pipemaker located one mile down the road—notified Duferco Farrell that it would be canceling orders. Instead, the client is buying from companies with 100 percent U.S. production to meet the new stimulus regulations. Duferco has had to furlough 80 percent of its workforce.
“You need to tell me how inhibiting business between two companies located one mile apart is going to save American jobs,” said Bob Miller, Duferco Farrell’s executive vice president. “I’ve got 600 United Steel Workers out there who are going to lose their jobs because of this. And you tell me this is good for America?”
The Democrats’ goals of winning more votes and securing more power over economic affairs has led them to force policies on American individuals and businesses that limit their trading partners, pit people of different nations against each other where mutually beneficial trade would normally take place, replace self-interested and more-informed decisions with political edicts from on high, and reduce economic efficiency by punishing the increased division of labor that necessarily emerges in a free (global) economy. The number of correct policy decisions made by this bumbling idiot in the White House remains steady at one: to close the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, and that’s just a promise at this point.
Raise your hand if your economic philosophy openly and proudly promotes mutual prosperity, complete freedom of trade, and a worldwide division of labor, with all the peace and cooperation that come along with it.
If another recession follows, then the economy never recovered
May 23, 2009 – 10:02 pm by JohnRobert Gordon of the Business Cycle Dating Committee says our recession has just ended. He bases his proclamation on some pretty strong precedent, as Donal Luskin explains in the linked article. Gordon looked at the statistics for claims for unemployment benefits during the last several recessions and noticed that, historically, the peak in unemployment claims overlaps perfectly with the end of the recession (as eventually decided upon by the Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is part of the National Bureau of Economic Analysis).
Why does Dr. Gordon think unemployment claims have reached their maximum this time around? Luskin explains:
How do you really know when there has been a “peak” in claims? Just because the four-week moving average turns down for a couple weeks, how do we know it won’t just turn up again and go to new highs?
Gordon himself takes on this criticism. Writing more than two weeks ago, when the four-week moving average was already 3.1% off its early April peak, he noted that the pattern of the decline in magnitude and timing nearly perfectly matched all the previous instances in which no subsequent higher peak developed.
So far he’s right. Looking at the data as of May 14, the four-week moving average of claims (pre-adjustment) was down 4.3%, so the early April reading is looking more and more like a real peak. (The Labor Department on Thursday said the number of newly laid-off Americans requesting unemployment insurance dropped slightly last week after spiking due to auto layoffs.)
The weekly claims data released May 14 did show a modest rise in the number of claims after two weeks of declines, causing the four-week moving average to tick higher. That’s no reason to throw out Gordon’s big idea. No one expects numbers like this to move only in one direction week after week.
Employment might continue to go up, and stocks might, too. Bankruptcies will slow down and banks will probably start lending more money sometime soon, since they supposedly aren’t lending much now. But, I say, if another recession follows that “recovery” in a few years, then the economy never really recovered at all. It just looked like it. It was just fluff, just inflated numbers with no sound production and profit to back them up. Government jobs, government investment, government bailouts/takeovers of automotive companies and investment banks—none of that is real growth and none of that can stop the market from having its way in the end.
The entire crux of the issue of business cycles is that the boom is the poison and the recession is the cure, so if another recession follows within, say, five years, there were too many unprofitable endeavors in our economy that had to be flushed clean by the market, which means our economy will never have experienced an actual, i.e., sustainable and productive, recovery at all. Don’t let easy credit and government numbers fool you.
Quote of the day
May 20, 2009 – 9:16 pm by JohnThe law? Commander, laws change depending on who’s making them. Cardassians one day, Federation the next. But justice is justice.
—Odo, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “A Man Alone”
Toy guns aren’t weapons
May 16, 2009 – 12:01 pm by JohnI have difficulty believing anyone actually supports zero-tolerance policies and extreme political correctness anymore—anyone, that is, except government bureaucrats. By “extreme” I mean atrocities such as this, which any sensible person would be outraged at:
NEWTON COUNTY, Ga. — The latest case of zero-tolerance at the public schools has a 10-year-old student sadder and wiser, and facing expulsion and long-term juvenile detention.
“I think I shouldn’t have brought a gun to school in the first place,” said the student, Alandis Ford….
Alandis’ gun was a “cap gun,” a toy cowboy six-shooter that his mother bought for him.
“We got it from Wal-Mart for $5.96,” Tosha Ford said, “in the toy section right next to the cowboy hats. That’s what he wanted because it was just like the ones he was studying for the Civil War” in his fifth-grade class at Fairview Elementary School.
Tosha said that Wednesday afternoon, after school, “six police officers actually rushed into the door” of their home. “He [Alandis] opened the door because they’re police. And then they just kind of pushed him out of the way, and asked him, ‘Well where’s the gun, where’s the real gun?’ And they called him a liar…they booked him, and they fingerprinted him.”
[...]
Lt. Mark Mitchell said Thursday that Alandis had used the toy gun to threaten other children on the school bus and in his neighborhood, which Alandis denies.Alandis was charged with possessing a weapon on school property and with terroristic acts and threats.
[emphasis added]
Let’s compare the accusations and police-state-speak of the thugs in clown suits to the child’s account of the incidents:
“On the school bus,” on Tuesday, Alandis said, “when I dug into my bookbag trying to get my phone out, the boy beside me, he reached in my bookbag and got it [the toy gun] and started telling everybody, ‘He’s got a gun, he’s got a gun,’ and spread it around the whole bus. So I put it back in my bookbag.”
But he said the students kept shouting, “He’s going to shoot all y’all, he’s got a gun, he’s going to bring it to school and shoot all y’all.” Did Alandis ever say anything like that or make any threatening moves with his toy gun? “No!”
In police states of the past, all it took was a rumor, an accusation, a vindictive psychopath wearing a clown suit, or a disgruntled bureaucrat to ruin a peaceful, innocent person’s life. Here the worthless pieces of trash who work for this child’s government school and the jack-booted thugs who probably at some point mouthed the words “serve and protect” take the incidents that the child described above, on the school bus, and report them as having happened in exactly the opposite way. The other children took his toy and taunted him with wild and obviously false accusations; if his account is correct, he clearly wasn’t going to (pretend to) threaten anyone with his cap gun, or else the one bully wouldn’t have had to take it out of the child’s backpack, against the child’s protests. This complete misrepresentation of the accused child’s account of what happened is a characteristic of totalitarian police states: you’re guilty until proven innocent, and don’t question the government’s authority figures.
Oh, yeah, I forgot: children don’t have rights at school.
The next day, the kid went to his neighbor’s house to ask him if he wanted to come out and play cowboys and indians or something. Read the neighbor kid’s reaction to the sight of—gasp!—a toy cap gun, and weep:
“He saw the gun that I had. So he ran in the house and called 911.”
Alandis said he found out later that his friend had never before seen a gun and thought it was real, and thought Alandis might shoot it. Alandis insists he never said anything to the friend other than inviting him to come out and play.
“The 911 call that we received” on Wednesday, Lt. Mitchell said, “was that a 10-year-old male was outside of a residence with a gun threatening to shoot another child.”
Mitchell was referring to the incident report from the Newton County Sheriff’s investigators who write that deputies “responded to a 911 call from a ten-year-old [neighbor of the Fords] who said there was a boy outside of his house with a gun trying to kill him.”
This probably isn’t the strongest evidence of my theory, but I think much of the Statist rot that has infected our minds during the last few generations has led to the self-hatred, disrespect for life, externalizations of blame, and vindictive attitudes that lie at the root of so many youth shootings. Guns are not the problem, and even lack of proper training with firearms, like many children from hunting families receive, is not the problem. This paranoia about weapons, the knee-jerk reaction that anyone with a weapon is a criminal and should be turned over to authorities, and the suspicion that a 10-year-old with a cap gun is a potential murderer are all part of the Statist malaise that either causes or certainly doesn’t help prevent school shootings. In other words, this kid’s paranoia and the weapon-hating, authority-kowtowing, State-worshipping mindset are more to blame for public killings than kids having access to guns.
Alandis’s mother sounds like a sharp woman:
“Someone heard that Alandis had a toy gun in his bookbag and said, ‘Oh, Alandis is going to bring a gun, he’s going to shoot everybody.’ He [Alandis] was wrong, he should never have taken it to school. And I told him that. And he’s being punished” at home. “But also on the other side of the coin, I think it’s a travesty what’s happened to him…. For them to say that’s he’s made terroristic threats is just ridiculous. We’ve taken it and changed what ‘terroristic threats’ was meant to be for.”
Perhaps another good measure of the extent of your police state is the increasing frequency with which the word “terrorism” is used, especially regarding actions that are clearly not terroristic in nature. Yeah, I think this story demonstrates three characteristics of our society that make it more or less a police state: ordinary actions are considered crimes that weren’t in the past; these actions and actual crimes that could only be considered threatening to a small number of people are labeled “terroristic” to trump up the perceived gravity of the matter and therefore the leeway of the clown-suited gangsters; and “public” is conflated with “the State,” at least in the minds of the law-enforcement officials. (Maybe this last one is more implicit than explicit in this incident, but I usually interpret this type of incident in that way.)
The public relations officer of the school system hides behind rules and procedures and political correctness like any useless drain on the human race would:
Sherri Viniard, the Director of Public Relations for the Newton County School System, emailed a statement to 11Alive News Thursday that reads, in part:
“Student safety is our primary concern, and although this was a toy gun, it is still a very serious offense and it is a violation of school rules. We will not tolerate weapons of any kind on school property.”
A toy gun is not a weapon. You acknowledge this yourself. You are too blinded by your irrational hatred of all guns (not wielded by someone wearing a clown suit) that you think a toy like this could actually be dangerous. What is dangerous is your Statolatrist, police-state-enabling, guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude towards AN INNOCENT CHILD!
The main police officer quoted in this article is similar: he has some vague idea in the back of his mind that what they did was wrong, but they can’t quite grasp the concept that following politically correct zero-tolerance policies could ever lead them astray:
“A toy gun is a toy gun,” Lt. Mitchell said, “to be played with and for kids to have fun with. But when kids use it the wrong way, just like anything, then it can be scary.”
It wasn’t used in the wrong way, unlike your gun and your position as monopoly law-enforcement official. And you ought to be an authority on scary.
The only people in this entire matter who have demonstrated the slightest bit of common sense, compassion, or social intelligence are the accused child, his mother, and the reporter. Unfortunately, Alandis still wants to be a police officer when he grows up. I hope that changes. I hope he works hard and goes into a field where he can add something to society instead of parasitizing it, like business or science or medicine. Or maybe a political activist (the good kind). I hope this sad saga alters him in a fundamental way such that he develops a healthy distrust of authority and hatred of the State. That could be a very bright silver lining to this atrocity.
And, you know, I could say all I’ve said before about government schools and monopolistic law-enforcement systems—how no one would ever freely choose to be victimized by their school and the police like this, how monopolies will never get better, how competition would go a long way to preventing such stupidity from ever happening and completely prevent it from continuing. But who is going to listen? Every Statist who hears about this story is going to blame everyone but himself and blame every way of thinking but his own. They think that the extent of their involvement in the government is to vote for politicians who are the lesser of two evils and maybe serve on a jury. It doesn’t occur to them that their explicit and repeated acts of support for this entire Statist system are exactly what allow bureaucrats to commit wrongs against people without fear of punishment. They are scared to death of letting us run our own lives and freeing ourselves of their Statist nightmare, so they will never let the freedom of association flourish that would punish and prevent these rights-violations. As evidence that I’m right, that libertarianism would promote peace, respect, and common sense where government monopolies currently forbid them, consider how few people actually support zero-tolerance policies that lead to the arrest and fingerprinting of a 10-year-old with a cap gun. These animals in clown suits and the lifeless pieces of sludge that populate school boards would either demonstrate some intelligence or become jobless and penniless in a real hurry.
I try to show my outrage and frustration at these injustices as passionately as possible in posts like this, but it’s hard. It’s tiring. You all agree with me, and you’ve heard all this before. Probably because these are far from isolated incidents, which makes it harder to evoke outrage at any particular incident either in ourselves or in others, but their commonplace nature is exactly what should outrage us the most!
Inequality is fatal?
May 14, 2009 – 10:55 pm by JohnIn the April 30 issue of Nature, the new book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett is reviewed. Some excerpts from the review:
Why are our chances of reaching a great age so affected by wealth and status? The obvious answer is that more income buys better health. But it is a lot more subtle than that, as shown three decades ago by the Whitehall Study, in which epidemiologist Michael Marmot examined the death rates of British civil servants. To the surprise of many, he found that his subjects—all in continuous paid employment and with equal access to health care—were more likely to die in any given year if they were in a lower-grade job than a higher one. Marmot concluded that the employment hierarchy itself created status-dependent stress that affected the workers’ health.
In their new book, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett extend this idea with a far-reaching analysis of the social consequences of income inequality. Using statistics from reputable independent sources, they compare indices of health and social development in 23 of the world’s richest nations and in the individual US states. Their striking conclusion is that the societies that do best for their citizens are those with the narrowest income differentials—such as Japan and the Nordic countries and the US state of New Hampshire. The most unequal—the United States as a whole, the United Kingdom and Portugal—do worst.
Many measures of the quality of life, including life expectancy, are correlated with the degree of economic equality in each country. A variety of problems such as mental illness, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unwillingness to engage with education, misuse of illegal and prescription drugs, teenage pregnancy, lack of social mobility and neglect of child welfare increase with greater inequality. Violence, from murder to the bullying of children at school, follows the same pattern. These trends are tied up with issues of trust: the authors chart a profound decline in trust in the United States from the 1960s to the present, which matches rising inequality during the long Republican ascendancy.
First of all, while I am far from defending Republicans, the authors’ and/or the reviewer’s assertion that Republicans carry most of the blame for inequality and mistrust is absurd and puts the rest of their arguments under suspicion. Anyone who has paid the slightest bit of attention knows Republicans have been growing more and more left-liberal over the years, to the point that we have neocons that resemble Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt more than Eisenhower or Goldwater or any other politician associated with conservatism in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Second, what “long Republican ascendancy”? And what exactly did the idiots in the Democratic Party do to stem this rising tide of inequality? Tax and spend and inflate and ruin schools and destroy families and wage a war on drugs? Which was different from Republicans…how?
The review continues:
How can inequality affect such a diverse set of social problems so profoundly? The authors make a compelling case that the key is neuroendocrinological stress, provoked by a perception that others enjoy a higher status than oneself, undermining self-esteem. This triggers the release of the hormone cortisol, which raises blood pressure and blood sugar levels, from which myriad health and social problems unfold. This seemingly hard-wired response has been well studied in social hierarchies of monkeys; low-status animals become predisposed to atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. Humans experiencing chronic stress exhibit similar symptoms, accumulating abdominal fat under the influence of a part of the brain associated with addiction.
Cortisol overrides ‘feel-good hormones’ such as oxytocin, involved in establishing trust, and dopamine, the reward signal that reinforces memory, attention and problem-solving ability. Cortisol-induced stress predisposes some individuals to mental illness or violent behaviour. It can hasten the arrival of puberty, which may prompt premature sexual adventures, providing a plausible explanation of the high prevalence of teenage pregnancies in the most unequal societies. Cortisol also transmits stress to a fetus, with lasting consequences for physical and emotional development.
I have heard about some of that research, and it is probably all valid as far as it goes. The only problem is: cortisol doesn’t know why it is released or what situations it is acting in. It only increases our perceived stress level, whatever that means; it’s a broad term. These authors would have us believe that success (wealth and high-level job status) necessarily and systematically involves less stress than mediocrity and even poverty. I don’t believe it for a minute. That sounds like the tendency, driven by class-envy and class-warfare, of liberals to refer to poor people as the “working class,” as if wealthy, educated people earned their status by privilege and conniving. The opposite is usually true. Successful people typically work harder and longer than others to get there, and get rewarded with more stress, more responsibility, and less free time. Smart, industrious people, who are more often “successful” than others, I think, experience plenty of stress during high school, college, graduate school, and after. The cortisol doesn’t know the difference; it doesn’t know whether it’s being released because of the pressures of succeeding or the stresses of not succeeding. Neither, I’d wager, do our bodies or our lower-level neural functions.
The research with primates showing that animals lower in their social hierarchy are less healthy than the higher-status animals offers one good argument against mine, namely, that monkeys might not have the higher cognitive functions and psychology that allow humans to differentiate between, and fret over, different types of stress like socioeconomic stress, the pressure to succeed at a difficult job/school, the stress of having little free time, raising kids, your country descending into a poverty-ridden police state, etc.—but the monkeys still suffer from their hierarchy-related stress, which I think has been shown to be correlated with (maybe caused by?) cortisol. This would at least partially invalidate my notion that cortisol affects our organs and nervous systems the same regardless of what our higher-level (uniquely human) psychologies perceive as the causes of our stress, because if monkeys, with their sub-human brains and incapacity for understanding subtle differences between stressors, are still harmed by the stresses of being lower on the totem pole, then maybe different stressors affect humans differently in some fundamental way, even though the hormone (cortisol) is the same and all of our other organs, including the brain, are basically similar across a large population. (If there were some fundamental, neurological differences between people who end up wealthy and those who don’t, which is absurd, then those would likely be the causes of their bad health, not the inequality.)
(Then again, maybe we should give primates more credit because maybe they can differentiate between different stressors about as well as we can.)
One aspect of the primate studies that might make them invalid to be compared with human societies is: I don’t know that higher-status monkeys experience all that much stress, the way higher-status people do. Do wealthy humans in executive-level jobs have lower cortisol levels than others? Does this relate to the higher-status monkeys in any meaningful way? Probably not.
The book also addresses the impact of inequality on the hormone oxytocin, dubbed the “trust hormone.” Cortisol reduces the effectiveness of oxytocin, which the authors skew to imply that mediocrity- and poverty-induced stress makes humans less trustful of others and exacerbates their psychological, and therefore physiological, problems. Same thing for dopamine.
Not surprisingly, libertarian social and economic theory offers solutions to both the problems addressed by the book and the problems with its analysis. Libertarians have explained extensively how certain Statist policies increase inequality. Four such things are inflation, government schooling, dependence-inducing social-welfare programs, and outlawing of vices (prostitution and the War on Drugs, which keep urban minorities poor and in a state of war with police and each other). Libertarianism also explains that nations that extend their welfare states to such an extent that these inequalities are mitigated (France, Scandinavia) make everyone poorer, not everyone richer. Wilkinson and Pickett would argue that the greater good is evidently served by making society poorer but equaler rather than making everyone richer but some more than others. That isn’t a metaphysical impossibility, but the problem is that this can only be true in the short run; as Mises and Hayek showed, a middle-of-the-road policy must lead to totalitarian socialism.
To dispense with the odd claim that a massive welfare state can make people more trusting and friendly towards each other, one only needs to peek out of his ivory tower and look at the world for a minute or two. Almost everything the State does causes demonstrably more strife and divisiveness among its subjects, as political instead of economic decision-making pits factions against each other and each new interference with our freedoms of exchange and association lead us to seek more of the pie, more control over others—lest they take our slice along with our control over ourselves.
Lastly, libertarians of all stripes assert that true market anarchism would reduce the sizes of the upper and lower classes, putting more people into the middle class while making everyone richer in the long run. I have never seen anything in any Statist theory or governmental program that would reduce the influence of the power elite while enlarging the economic pie for everyone. Government takes and redistributes; it doesn’t create wealth or facilitate the growth of wealth. It rewards the rich and powerful by giving favors, protection, and barriers to entry into most industries; it limits the options of the poor by insisting on running their schools and providing for them while turning our cities into police states; and it squanders everyone’s wealth by inflation and immeasurable waste.
Star Trek can’t calculate
May 11, 2009 – 8:51 am by JohnI like Star Trek a lot despite its absurdly unrealistic vision of the future of humanity. In what is probably the funniest drama ever made, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Admiral Kirk goes out to lunch with a woman in 20th-century San Francisco, and when the waiter brings the check and Kirk just kind of looks at it, she asks, “Let me guess: you don’t have money in the future?” to which Kirk responds, “Well, we don’t!”
Then in at least one episode of The Next Generation, Captain Picard explains to some visitor from the past or something that, here in the United Federation of Planets in the 24th century, they don’t use money or do things for personal wealth accumulation; they work for their own enjoyment and for the betterment of human society. Now, Gene Roddenberry created a pretty visionary TV show and obviously founded a spectacularly successful TV/movie franchise, which has produced some amazing television and cinema over the years by attracting some sharp science-fiction-writing minds. But he knew little about sociology and less about economics.
Prices on the market in terms of money, not the absence of both, are a manifestation of the cooperation of mankind. The more people provide goods and services that others need, the more they trade in a peaceful manner according to their subjective preferences, desires, and goals, fulfilling each other’s wants and needs even as they satisfy their own. Prices reflect the subjective relative-preference scales of all the individual people in the economy. Only by the spontaneous and dynamic price system can a large number of people’s desires be known and satisfied by others, cooperatively and selfishly at the same time. Without prices to let customers and businesses know how much of something there is and how much things are desired, no rational allocation of resources can take place. It is not impractical or improbable; it is literally impossible.
(The recent J.J. Abrams movie, which I highly recommend to non-fans and which I don’t need to recommend to current fans, is what reminded me to write this post. There is no economics and not much philosophy or sociology in the movie, so don’t expect the socialist-calculation absurdities to come up.)
Obama stimulus plan provides bubble for green jobs
May 7, 2009 – 8:46 am by JohnMSNBC reports, “Stimulus plan provides boost to green jobs” and Obama’s “green adviser” has said, “Everyone is predicting growth in this sector.”
See? It’s happening! The green bubble is expanding! The Imperial Federal Government is diverting resources from one bubble and pushing them into another. The Obama regime thinks it can and should stimulate economic growth, and it thinks it can and should make the United States energy-independent. It is already in the process of printing money and taking money from people who earned it to give to people who will satisfy the regime’s political/environmental criteria. Additionally, a lot of people believe in this crusade and are fooled into thinking this politically driven allocation of resources represents real growth and wealth-creation. It does not. The savings do not exist to fund these new technological endeavors, nor do the fundamentals of profitability that will make these businesses worthwhile. This is inflation- and politics-driven “investment” in a sector that the free market does not deem worthy of such investment right now, and the market will have the last word.
Because of Barack Obama’s short-sighted and politically motivated inflation of the green bubble, we will see rising energy costs in the long run, stifling of potentially sound and viable energy technologies, more centralization and government control of energy resources, propping up of unprofitable companies, and more bankruptcy, unemployment, and government plans to “help” when this bubble bursts.
Greatest. Bumper sticker. EVER.
May 4, 2009 – 7:00 am by JohnWith semicolony goodness.
Austrian business cycle theory in action
May 3, 2009 – 9:25 am by JohnThe comments in this thread were pretty funny. In response to the video of half-built homes being demolished so that the building company could cut its losses in post-inflationary-boom California, commenter RWW said:
A commenter in the YouTube thread says:
wouldn’t destroying homes help the housing market? the banks can take the hit on their defaulted assets and then prices on houses can hit bottom sooner since they are taking excess inventory off of the market. what is causing the problem in the market is no regulation, they should have regulated the amount of homes they built based on the real demand that is out there, and im not talking about demand for pizza delivery guys looking for 300k homes.
Later, the same commenter quotes verses from the Bible and (apparently) the Koran against “usury.” This is the level of intellect that is permitted to have a say in public policy. This is democracy, laid out bare for all to see.
Here were some others:
josh
But the extra business for the crane operator means a boom for the economy *ducks*Matt
i think we’re missing a real chance here for the government to help. They should buy these assets from the bank, then finish them (employ carpenters), decorate them (employ furniture manufacturers, interior designers etc.), landscape them (employ landscapers etc.). they should then sell them back and forth between various government agencies (realtors fee anyone?), THEN they should destroy them (employ demoltion experts). We could keep a couple hundred people in continual employment just in this one subdivision.Haas
Mr Obama “TEAR DOWN THESE HOMES”J Cortez
The video and some of the comments posted on the video are depressing on many levels.
Haven’t you learned? Never read the comments to a YouTube video.
Political quizzes
May 2, 2009 – 9:36 pm by JohnI recently took this political-spectrum quiz that actually seemed somewhat worthwhile and substantive, unlike a few quizzes of the same type that I’ve taken before. The same site has several more political quizzes that I haven’t taken and don’t plan to, but some of them also looked like they had potential to be non-idiotic.
Despite my relative approval of most of the questions and the answer choices in that quiz, its placement of me on its political grid seemed a bit discordant with several of my answers and from their own labeling of my politics as culturally liberal:
My Political Views
I am a far-right social libertarian
Right: 9.5, Libertarian: 9.74
Political Spectrum Quiz
They labeled me “far-right libertarian” despite the presence of few, if any, questions that self-described left-libertarians would say satisfactorily delineate left-libertarians from…other libertarians. (I’d wager.) I don’t think anarcho-libertarians who don’t describe themselves as left-libertarian typically call themselves “right-libertarian”; I don’t think left-libertarians typically call them that, either (at lease I’ve only seen it a few times, and only recently); and I sure as hell don’t think an online political quiz written by non-anarchists could reliably distinguish between the two.
That being said, if, as I suspect, the authors’ political philosophies are not much more refined than “Democrat = Liberal, Republican = Conservative…and, oh, yeah, there are those Libertarians, and Greens, and other weirdos,” then how the hell could their quiz simultaneously give “far-right” and “culturally liberal” results? I mean, you can quibble about the historical origins and literal meanings of these words all you want, but to everyone I know here in 21st-century Amerika, those two are mutually exclusive. It fails by its own unrefined standards.
My Foreign Policy Views
Score: -8.32
My Culture War Stance
Score: -5.23
I have a feeling many left-libertarians would get a similar result to mine, because that algorithm just doesn’t know what it’s talking about when it refers to “left-libertarian” and “right-libertarian.” (In all fairness, sometimes I don’t, either!) I think if it were more accurate, it would classify me as a middle-libertarian, or, as FSK says, an “up-libertarian.” I find it hard to believe I could agree with so much of what Professor Long or Mike Gogulski say, and get so annoyed and incensed by Kinsella and De Coster some of the time, without having a healthy mix of left- and right-libertarian in me.
Perhaps I refused to take a “side” in the libertarian-philosophy debate because I’m wishy-washy and passive in most aspects of my life, or perhaps it’s because my training in science makes me more acutely aware that few things in the universe are as clear-cut and absolute as anyone asserts, at least at first. I know for sure that one reason is that both types of societies, organizations, neighborhoods, and companies could and probably would exist in a free society. No, I don’t know enough about law or running a business to assert whether limited-liability incorporation would or should exist in a free society.
On a related note, I still like the first political quiz I ever heard about, which was advocated by fascist, neocon warmonger and all-around State lover Neal Boortz: the World’s Smallest Political Quiz. I am, of course, 100% libertarian on that.
I recall at least two instances where liberals complained about that quiz, saying it’s too skewed towards libertarianism—that it’s too simplistic and short to get a good sense of what political ideology someone really holds, so it’s too likely that non-libertarians will give answers that are interpreted by that quiz as being libertarian. I disagree. I think most libertarians would say a consistent application of universal principles of morality and human relationships inexorably results in anarchist libertarianism. Anthony Gregory agrees.
Hat tip: Cork
Other people’s thoughts on chaos and anarchy
April 22, 2009 – 7:29 am by JohnDepends on what you mean by “chaos” and “anarchy”…
There are two words that really separate us hard-core libertarians from small-government Republicans and civil-liberties-focused Democrats: Chaos and Anarchy. Libertarians love chaos and anarchy, while most Americans still cringe from these words. For most folks, chaos is some Road Warrior-style dystopia and anarchy is Molotov cocktails sailing into passing cars.
But chaos and anarchy are in fact the hallmarks of a free society. They imply a bottom-up society where the shape and pattern of everything is driven by the sum of individual decisions, each decision made with that person’s own optimization equation of his or her best interests, constrained only by the requirement they interact with other people without use of force or fraud. Our wealth, our technology, our modern economy are all born out of this chaos.
—Warren Meyer
Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. Chaos always defeats order because it is better organized.
—Terry Pratchett
[A]narchy is order, whereas government is civil war.
—Anselme Bellegarrigue
Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together.
—Thomas Paine
On murder rates in Stateless societies
April 21, 2009 – 9:58 pm by JohnProfessor Long is pretty much awesome. I would say that of all living political philosophers, his ideas and conclusions about liberty, government, economics, and society match my own (and, in fact, have helped me enunciate my own) more than any other. I don’t consider myself very much of a cultural leftist, though—but that fact, combined with the fact that overall I still concur with and admire his ideas to a greater extent than all or most other philosophers, underscores the perfection with which he enunciates notions that had formed only vaguely in my mind, matches my philosophy in almost every way, and introduces me to entirely new ideas, arguments, or ways of thinking about them.
One example of this is his exposition of his stances on children’s rights. It is very difficult to talk in absolutes about children because their intellectual, moral, and social development is not very mature until they’re, well, not children, and this happens at different rates, at different times, and in different ways for all children. What this really means for owning property, consenting to sex, and suchlike is hard for honest people to conclude definitively. He analyzes and explains his positions, which I think should be regarded as the general libertarian positions, expertly.
The latest example and impetus for this post is Peace through Statism?, about the tired claim that anarchy breeds violence, combat, blood-feuds, warlord-led gangs, and a resultant higher murder rate than exist in Statist societies, even accounting for wars. I recall a Rad Geek post about this same claim, from Jared Diamond, that was also unconvincing. Roderick Long makes the best argument I’ve heard against the “Statism-is-peace” position:
On states and violence, though, I’ve got to disagree – I think it’s confusing cause and effect.
States are a luxury good (well, a luxury bad from my point of view – but a luxury commodity in any case); they fund themselves out of the social surplus. So a society needs to achieve a certain level of prosperity before it can have much in the way of a state; and it can’t achieve that level of prosperity if it’s racked by constant tribal warfare. So it’s no surprise that the societies that are racked by tribal warfare tend to be the stateless ones – but it’s the violence that explains the statelessness, not vice versa. As Thomas Paine noted, states piggyback on autonomously arising social order and then claim to have created it.
I think this is because states are essentially parasitic and don’t contribute to social order at all – rather the contrary, when they arise they hinder the further advance of cooperation and economic development more than they help it. (Certainly when states are imposed, or attempted to be imposed, on violent tribal societies it tends to exacerbate the violence, since there’s now a big gun in the room – the state apparatus – that each tribe needs to seize lest some other tribe seize it first.) But even if one thinks states are a good thing, they’re still an expensive thing, and so require a pre-existing attainment of a fair degree of peaceful commerce and productivity before they can get going.
Moreover, when large states consolidate their power and displace a previous more decentralised and more peaceful state situation, the result is often genocide (as the history of the 20th century demonstrates). That’s another reason for thinking that states are the effect rather than the cause of peace.
If some degree of peace and prosperity is needed to make states possible, then we’re going to get misleading data when we compare economically undeveloped, culturally tribal, relatively stateless societies with economically advanced state-ridden societies; the latter will often be more peaceful, and so we’ll be tempted to think that the state is what’s making the difference, but that inference just doesn’t follow.
Thus a more interesting comparison is to compare relatively stateless and relatively state-ridden society that are otherwise at comparable levels of economic development and cultural mores.
When we do that, I think we get a very different picture. Ben Powell’s research, for example, shows that stateless Somalia, while undoubtedly a crappy place to live, has been both more peaceful and more prosperous than either its earlier state-ridden self [argh, I actually wrote “earlier stateless self” but then corrected in a subsequent post] or its economically and culturally comparable neighbours. I would also point to the research of Bruce Benson and David Friedman on how relatively stateless medieval Iceland and the relatively stateless American frontier were far less violent than comparable state-ridden societies of the time.
Quote of the day
April 21, 2009 – 7:18 pm by JohnRoderick Long, on the recent anti-tax tea parties:
Whichever party is out of power always begins to emphasise its libertarian-sounding side in order to divert anti-government sentiment toward support of that party rather than toward genuine radical opposition to the entire establishment.
By the same token, the party that’s in power employs alarmist rhetoric about the other side’s supposed anti-government radicalism in order to drum up support for its own policies.
Discrimination is usuallly fine!
April 21, 2009 – 12:18 am by JohnSome people are so sensitive to political correctness that they behave way too sensitively and believe some stupid things. They see racial or sexual discrimination everywhere, underlying nearly all of society’s ills, and therefore conclude that if only people were prohibited from making choices and taking actions that exhibited “discrimination” (according to the gun-pointers’ definition, of course), then society would be much more fair and peaceable. For instance, I remember a Fark.com discussion thread from two or three years ago about a Texas couple who were sued because they refused to hire a home landscaping company (or some such) owned by homosexuals. These hateful, bigoted (probably true) Texans didn’t want to do business with, or in any other way interact with, homosexuals, so after they learned the owners were gay, they stopped hiring them or canceled an upcoming appointment. It was completely innocuous. It only became a news story because the company sued the couple for sexual discrimination.
Now, as harmful as the consequences of bigotry and prejudice can be, what did this homophobic couple do that was so harmful or threatening to these or any other homosexuals? Did they…oh, I don’t know…threaten to apply the full force of the police power of the State to their hated foes if the latter didn’t spend their time and money in a manner pleasing to the homophobes? Did they threaten violence against anyone? Extortion, beating, kidnapping, enslavement, murder? No, it was the gay landscapers who threatened exactly that against the bigots. This is always what government action implies: the use or threat of deadly force. By the very definition of its nature and its existence, the State can only take, injure, kill, punish, or threaten to do so. Liberals who favor political correctness laws should keep this in mind when they advocate social-engineering laws to weed out discrimination and prejudice. This type of discrimination might not be nice, classy, or thick-libertarian, but it isn’t nearly as bad as threats of murder against people who don’t share your values. Far worse than feelings that lead people to treat some groups differently from others are coercive actions that actually violate people’s rights.
Besides, we discriminate every day, even sexually and racially and in other seemingly unfair ways, but that’s human nature and it’s perfectly legitimate some of the time. It is illegitimate, and should be frowned upon, repudiated, or worse, when the discriminatory action violates someone’s rights or treats someone in a hateful, threatening, collectivizing manner. Most of the discrimination we commit in our everyday lives is completely innocuous. I don’t go to gay bars or hit on men because I’m heterosexual, not because I’m a homophobe. I didn’t take any women’s studies or African-American studies classes in college because they are a complete waste of time and money and (supposedly) perpetuate policies and stereotypes that actually do real damage in the world, not because I am sexist or racist. I’ve noticed that with the notable exception of country music (which I loathe), most of the music I dislike could be considered largely “black” music: blues, jazz, R & B, rap, and hip-hop. I don’t dislike it because it’s made by black people; I dislike it because it sucks. That probably only counts as “discrimination” in the original, literal sense of the word, but I get the feeling that the political-correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade would consider such an innocent thing evidence of racism.
This reminds me of another example that occurred to me recently. When entering my lab building after-hours, you have to swipe your ID card and the electronic sensor thing will unlock the door for you. I don’t like letting anyone in who came up behind me and didn’t swipe their card, but let me ask you something: if a 22-year-old college girl tried to grab the door before it closed behind you, or a middle-aged black man in a hooded sweatshirt and raggedy-looking clothes tried to grab it before it closed, would you react slightly differently? How would you think differently and how would you act differently? I’d confront any seedy-looking character (which, let’s face it, would usually be a male) and ask them where they work and where they’re going, but I would—and have—let plenty of people who looked like students or researchers into the building without authentication.
That’s not racism, that’s common sense! But most PC nazis are blinded from common sense! They can only think in terms of groups and collectives and victims and oppressors, and everyone and everything has to fit into those notions of discrimination and oppression, so they ignore the particulars of the situation! Common sense is all you need to determine if someone was acting fairly or not, not political correctness and certainly not legislation, police, and lawsuits.
Consumer and tourist spending
April 15, 2009 – 10:06 pm by JohnOne of the many fallacies I hear people on TV and radio repeat is that anything that increases consumer spending should be lauded because it’s good for the economy. Tourism spending, sports-event-related spending, and the like are presented as being healthy and a great boon to the host city or state’s economy. Well, true, it results in dollars being reallocated from one group of people to another group who live in a different locale. But ever since I was a child, I was skeptical of the virtues of simple tourism- or event-related spending. I remember hearing sports commentators or maybe team executives extol the virtues of a playoff series being hosted in a certain city because it will drive spending in that city during the series because both residents and visitors will come in, buy tickets, buy paraphernalia, stay in hotels, dine out, and “boost the economy” of that city. And I also seem to recall the criminally incompetent commissioner of the NHL, Gary Bettman, bemoaning the NHL lockout because, among other reasons, the absence of consumer spending surrounding hockey games was hurting (or, failing to help) the economies of many NHL cities.
But now that I’ve learned more about economics and understand a little bit about the structure of wealth-creating production in an economy, I realize my skepticism of such consumerism was well founded. I knew that just spending money wouldn’t produce anything new or good or increase the total value in the system. It would just redistribute wealth (or, at least, dollars) from one place to another! I’m proud my childhood instincts were so good, on this matter.
Cost of freedom at all-time high
April 15, 2009 – 7:14 pm by JohnMy Onion page-a-day calendar contained this news-in-brief article a couple days ago:
WASHINGTON, DC—According to a report released Monday, the cost of American freedom has soared from its previous 1779 high of bravery, sacrifice, fighting for what’s right, and 25,071 human lives, up to a record bravery, sacrifice, fighting for what’s right, 321,932 human lives, personal privacy, peace of mind, honor, liberty, comfort, and $14.2 billion. Even as it reaches unprecedented levels, most Americans have no choice but to pay for the intangible commodity.
“I suppose you need freedom,” said Nancy Holstrom, who was forced to send her two eldest sons to Iraq last month to help defray rising freedom costs.
Government officials said they are committed to exploring all viable alternatives to freedom, including converting to a military dictatorship.
The Krugman Depression
April 13, 2009 – 7:00 am by JohnThis economics blagger asks: What name would you give to this econo-geddon? The Great Recession? Global financial meltdown? The Bush–Obama Depression?
My answer: the Krugman Depression. I want to start calling the depression of 1929-1945 the Keynes Depression and the current one the Krugman Depression. Oh, our professional criminal class bears more responsibility for the State’s creation of bubbles and interference with corrections than do their court economists, but Keynes and Krugman are so-called economists who should know better. Paul Krugman is as relentless in his insistence that the Fed inflate, inflate, inflate and Congress spend, spend, spend as he is stubborn in his refusal to listen to contrary theories. He and his confederates already have the economic equivalent of blood on their hands due to all the malinvestments and anti-corrective measures they have championed, and the mountain of wealth whose destruction they will have urged will only continue to grow as the depression deepens.
Quote of the day
April 12, 2009 – 2:24 pm by JohnIn light of all the gun-control talk that’s out there in response to recent public shootings:
Please get this through your head once and for all: regarding the individual right to own and carry weapons, there is no “allowed”. Government has nothing to say about it. This basic human right predates the Second Amendment (which only offers to protect it). It predates the Constitution. It predates the United States. It predates the British and the Roman empires. It predates civilization itself.
—L. Neil Smith
Obama starts inflating the auto bubble
April 11, 2009 – 11:17 pm by JohnI don’t believe it. Well, of course I do, because I predicted it: The Obama regime has begun inflating the automotive bubble by purchasing 17,600 “green” automobiles from GM, Ford, and Chrysler as part of its counterproductive $787 billion stimulus plan. It will spend $285 million on the automobiles by June 1, 2009. The secondary purpose of the purchases is to replace older, lower-tech, less fuel-efficient cars in the federal government’s fleet with newer cars that use less gas and expel less carbon. The primary purpose, as stated by the White House’s official press release, is “to increase demand for American auto companies during these difficult economic times.”
I know a quarter of a billion dollars is small beans compared to the twenty or so billion dollars the federal government recently gave—oh, sorry, “loaned”—to GM and Chrysler, but these purchases will only increase the calculated demand of Detroit vehicles (or, at least, the “green” ones), which will only push up their prices, just as the federal government and the Federal Reserve did with real estate earlier this decade.
Perhaps you’ve heard about the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save (CARS) bill, a.k.a. “cash for clunkers,” introduced in the House by Betty Sutton (D-OH). It would give a $3000 to $5000 tax credit to anyone who traded in an eight-year-old vehicle for a car that met certain fuel-efficiency standards. This U.S. News and World Report article gives some details about which American-made or American-assembled cars are expected to qualify for a tax credit under that program. (Note that they aren’t all Big Three products.) It hasn’t been signed into law, but I predict something like it will be.
Also, don’t forget that the federal government will throw more money at the Big Three; it is unrealistic to assume they can remain profitable for long, if at all; artificial stimulation of sales will constitute a small portion of Obama’s interference with their restructuring and refocusing. More money, more incentives, more subsidies, more edicts from on high.
It is far from over. This is only the beginning of the auto bubble. It will be inflated while the Big Three stagger on the inadequate legs provided by the government, and when the bubble bursts because demand isn’t high enough and Americans can’t afford to keep buying cars—de facto or de jure nationalization.
Non-cooperative tax havens
April 11, 2009 – 9:21 am by JohnThe Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published a blacklist of countries that it considers “non-cooperative tax havens” in an attempt to call them out, shame them, and sanction them into compliance with the more enlightened, tax-happy governments of the world.
On Thursday, G20 leaders agreed to take sanctions against tax havens using the OECD list as its basis.
In their communique, they agreed, “to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens”.
“We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems. The era of banking secrecy is over.”
[...]
“I am pleased that Uruguay joins a growing number of nations willing to co-operate in fighting tax evasion and other tax abuses,” said Mr Gurria [Secretary-General of the OECD].
[...]
“[Non-cooperating countries] will move because they know the question of sanctions, however ill-defined that was, is going to affect them somehow.”The Philippines is already reported to be taking steps to remove itself from the blacklist.
“The Philippine government would take the necessary steps to ensure we meet their expectations,” Trade Secretary Peter Favila told the Associated Press news agency.
“It is really up to us to prove them wrong.”
Oh, you can prove them wrong, all right, but cowering and apologizing for your delayed compliance is not the right way.
This creeps me out. The growing importance and power held by international organizations like the OECD portends a shift in governing powers from nation-states to a world government sooner rather than later. Lest you dismiss this as undue conspiracy-theorizing, the efficacy of the OECD’s sanctions and the craven compliance of practically every government in the world are concrete evidence of the de facto authority possessed by such supra-national bodies. From de facto to de jure has historically been a small leap.
Freedom-loving people should be alarmed at the intolerance that powerful nations have for governments that don’t fall in lock-step behind their mandates. Sadly, freedom-loving people are a small minority anymore, and the majority of human beings want more, larger, grander government! The more global the government, the more effectively the wishes of the organizers can be forced on more people (or so they think). This reminds me of an old but forever-apt libertarian saying: The difference between libertarianism and socialism is, a libertarian society will tolerate the existence of a socialist society, but a socialist society cannot tolerate the existence of a libertarian society.
As for the publication of this “blacklist,” I’m glad I now know that Costa Rica and Malaysia, at least, are considered tax havens who don’t cooperate with the draconian tax laws of other nations! Not that I have any intention of moving there or moving my money there; I just like those governments a little more now. Good for them!
Obamaism is Statism
April 10, 2009 – 11:35 pm by JohnOut of some strange curiosity I decided to peruse The New Yorker, probably because it is supposed to be a source of good artistic criticism, cultural-political commentary, and humor. One of the first things that caught my eye was "Obamaism" by George Packer. It is supposed to be a commentary on what, if anything, Obama’s "philosophy" is and how we can distill it and label it based on the first ten weeks of his presidency. I expected to find good blagging fodder in it, and I was not disappointed. Packer says,
Well short of Obama’s first hundred days, the dominant characteristic of his Presidency is clear: activist government, on every front. It’s harder to make out the contours of the philosophy at the core of this dazzling blur of action. Given the early and ample track record, there’s surprisingly little agreement over the nature of Obamaism.
There is among libertarians. He is a Statolatrist in the extreme, dominated by envious class warfare on the one hand and unadulterated Keynes-Krugmanism on the other.
Obama’s signature projects defy grouping under a single heading, and, as a result, he has been criticized for inconsistency.
Corporate-State socialism. Or economic fascism. Okay, that’s two headings, but they mean about the same thing. (If only "inconsistent" socliasm were his problem! That was the problem we had with the Bushies, and that was bad enough!)
What underlies so many of Obama’s decisions is an attachment to the institutions that hold up American society, a desire to make them function better rather than remake them altogether.
No critique of the notion that Obama or any other president should feel the need or have the power to either make "American institutions" function better or remake them altogether—oh, no, don’t question the very basis of the awesome power of the unitary executive.
Allowing the auto industry to die would create social havoc in communities around the country, and anything less than de-facto government control seems inadequate.
I don’t understand the American public’s inability to understand this. First of all, allowing unprofitable companies to lose money and be bought out, change their niche in the world, or make room for competitors would not result in the death of the auto industry. The increased profit motive, heightened susceptibility to competition, and necessary re-focusing on foreign over domestic sales would make the American auto industry stronger, as anyone who thought about it longer than was required for a knee-jerk patriotic-socialist reaction knows. Second, not allowing those things to happen to the automotive and other industries is precisely what has created the economic havoc we witness in the world slowly deteriorating around us. Companies must make profit to survive, hire workers, and improve their products over time, and for an economy to be healthy it must slough off the unprofitable endeavors to allow for those resources to be allocated in more desired (more profitable) ways. Just because something exists (is an "American institution") doesn’t mean it must continue to, and the longer the re-allocation of money, labor, and equipment is delayed, the more resources will have been wasted and the more difficult it will be for workers, managers, and entrepreneurs to find the most profitable enterprises.
As we can see and as pro-auto-bailout (or pro-de-facto-government-control) commentators are so quick to point out, failure of the automotive industry would create a domino effect of failure throughout the economy, so this "havoc" from unprofitability would not be confined to one or a few industries. On this they are right. But the auto industry is already failing. The unprofitability of thousands of companies is already wreaking economic havoc around the world. Unprofitability is our biggest enemy outside of the State, so to restore order and sustainability to our economy, we must allow unprofitable allocations of resources to fade away and profitable ones to take their place. Prevention of this punishment of unprofitability, to say nothing of a substantial level of direct control by the government, retards or outright prevents this economic calculation from taking place. But I wouldn’t expect that level of thought and analysis to appear in a rinky-dink magazine like The New Yorker. After all, Obama is the Savior of America, so let’s get back to praising Him and demonizing the conservatives who are virtually indistinguishable from Him and His cronies:
Obama may not see a similar need to put the government in charge of the big banks, but he has also shown that he has no taste for such a disruption of the system—even if it were politically possible, and perhaps even if it were the most direct route back to financial health.
Obviously you are not paying attention. This is exactly what "the system" is! Protect the rich and powerful and screw the little guy. This "egalitarian" Obama is debasing the dollar for the benefit of Wall Street millionaires and continuing the corporate-State socialist swindle of privatizing profits and socializing losses. He and his subordinates do not hide this. I don’t know what purpose the clause "even if it [nationalizing the banks] were the most direct route back to financial health" serves if not to suggest the possibility that it is. To type that into a sentence is to display its utter absurdity. No further refutation is (should be) necessary.
Obama seems to recognize that nothing has shredded the civic fabric in recent years more than the harsh inequalities of finance capitalism and the market ideology of a generation of American politics.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines capitalism (among other, similar definitions) as, "An economic and political system characterized by a free market for goods and services and private control of production and consumption." The Treasury Department and its central bank control the money supply and have outlawed freely competing currencies. The SEC and FTC (purport to) govern and regulate trading on financial markets and the conduction of business under their jurisdiction. The central bank’s manipulation of interest rates below where the free market obviously would have placed them led directly to sub-prime mortgage stupidity and hyper-leveraging of mortgage-backed securities. The Community Reinvestment Act played no small role in widespread mortgage defaults. The Imperial Federal Government’s explicit guarantee of mortgage loans purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (government-created and -sponsored enterprises) also permitted undue risks to be taken. The Internal Revenue Service takes a goddamned quarter or more of most people’s earnings and tells them it’s for their own good! Did I mention the currency is totally and completely controlled by the State, with literally no input of any kind from the free market? What free ownership and exchange of goods and services are you talking about? What "market ideology" are you confusing with our thoroughly socialist boobocracy? Do you even know what interest rates are for or what inflation means?
But modern conservatism has grown into exactly the opposite of its origins, in Burke’s respect for tradition and Madison’s promotion of countervailing checks on concentrations of power. Instead, like any revolutionary creed, it is abstract, hard-edged, and indifferent to experience and existing conditions.
That sounds exactly like left-liberalism. They both became Statism, as Mises, Rand, and Rothbard predicted. It became increasingly clear at this point that George Packer never had a point or had lost the ability to make one, so he resorted to bashing the Republicans, which any idiot with a keyboard can do by random accident, they’re such an easy target.
Most of the remaining congressional Republicans seem content to adhere to this creed, and to allow banks, car companies, and homeowners to be crushed under the invisible foot of the market—all that matters is the consistent application of principle.
Congratulations: you’re the first person ever to accuse neocons of being principled or consistent.
Last week, the House Republicans released a shadow budget that would repeal much of the stimulus package and impose a domestic-spending freeze in the middle of what some economists are beginning to call a depression. While claiming to be fiscally responsible, it would also create new optional tax brackets and cut or eliminate taxes of every kind, from capital gains to the estate and alternative minimum taxes, tilting the benefits sharply toward—you guessed it—the wealthy.
Maybe the wealthy would get the tax cuts because they’re the ones who pay the most taxes! A government-spending freeze in the middle of what some economists are calling (and what libertarians have been calling) a depression would be a godsend. To even insinuate that curtailing government spending would be harmful is the epitome of Statolatrist ignorance and destructive barbarism, bordering on Krugman-like stupidity.
After quoting some doom-and-gloom selections from conservatives about fascism and tyranny and 1984 coming to our lives, Packer concludes:
This is what the historian Richard Hofstadter has called “the paranoid style in American politics.” In the world of intelligence, it’s known as mirror-imaging: in this case, seeing in an enemy’s mental structure a reflection of one’s own feverish simplifications. Conservatives will not be able to understand the elusive nature of Obamaism and counter its formidable appeal until they remove the impediment of their own insular, rigid ideology.
Again, I am simply constitutionally incapable of understanding the complete and utter self-blinding exhibited by liberal Democrats: you are championing in Obama exactly what you would have demonized—and did, in fact, demonize for eight years!—in his Republican counterparts. If John McCain were president and had replicated Obama in every single, last policy proposal and official position and bill signed, liberal Democrats would vilify him as a fascist and a corporatist with every self-righteous breath and every furious keystroke.
The ideology of the Republicans is identical to that of the Democrats: gain and maintain political power. The only relevant group with a “rigid ideology” is the libertarians, whose radical ideas of peace, private property rights, individual sovereignty, sound money, and free exchange put us in the unique position of being able to understand and criticize Obama’s actions that directly clash with every one of those ideals. We understand the (not so) “elusive nature of Obamaism” just fine—a hell of a lot better than his apologetic idolaters: Enrich the powerful and well-connected at the expense of everyone else, and grow the State at every possible turn. This is Obamaism and unbiased observers with an interest in liberty saw it four years ago. It’s no different from Statism of any other stripe from any other time in our history.
Obama DOJ: Government officials are above the law
April 10, 2009 – 8:03 am by JohnLiterally. This is the legal doctrine the Obama regime’s Department of Justice [sic] is invoking in its recommendation that Jewell v. National Security Agency be dismissed. Kevin Carson, in his column National Security: The Last Refuge of Scoundrels is incisive:
If the Obama Justice Department’s legal doctrine is allowed to stand, there will be absolutely no way of holding government officials civilly or criminally accountable for violating the rights of American citizens, short of a foreign power conquering the United States and putting its officials on trial. Barring a new Nuremberg trial, the officials of the United States government are above the law when it comes to “National Security.”
[...]
That claim, the bald assertion that the government can’t be called to account for violating our rights because IT’S THE GOVERNMENT, rivals Nixon’s claim that “if the President does it, it’s not illegal.” Such sheer executive chutzpah hasn’t been matched since Charles I met writs of habeas corpus with the reply that the prisoner “is being held at the King’s good pleasure.”
F. Lee Bailey once said, “Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn’t even get out of committee.” I wonder how all those Obama maniacs out there feel about the fact that their Democratic Congress, supposedly better on civil liberties than the evil neocons, would never pass the Bill of Rights today, or about the fact that if somehow Congress did pass it, Barack Obama would never sign it into law.
Hat tip: Sheldon Richman
Books
April 8, 2009 – 11:41 pm by JohnWhen I leave my career in science research to produce something useful for the world, I want writing to be at the center of my professional endeavors (and still a major hobby as well). Analyzing policy, or economics, or science, or something else for some think tank, media outlet, biotech or pharmaceutical company, or some other company is along the lines I’m thinking of. Getting paid to write for an online and/or print publication would be ideal, but even if I couldn’t be described as a professional “writer” I would still continue writing up a storm on my website(s).
But, the purpose of this post is to reflect on some ideas for books I’d like to publish. I am really good at coming up with premises for books, but I don’t know how well I can fill the gaps in between the covers with something substantive, unique, and salable. However, I am quite confident that with my passion for libertarianism, my enjoyment of almost every kind of writing, and the various types of training and experience I’ve picked up over the years, I can excel at it.
Anyway, some of the books I really want to write would be titled:
Science and the State
Health Care and the State
Health Care in America
Economic Equilibrium
The Market Always Wins
The last two would obviously be more about general economic theory and policy than medicine or science (which are closer to my current area of expertise), but I think with a lot of good advice and a few years of work, the latter could turn out pretty well. Economic Equilibrium would be all about how markets use the price system to adjust to new situations quickly, efficiently, and justly, and stabilize the general financial/economic situation. They reduce volatility to a great extent. Kind of like a pH buffer in chemical or biological systems: markets adjust and respond to every input in a sensible, predictable way that promotes stability and benefits the entire economy in the long run. Of course, a major theme throughout the book, with every lesson and every example, would be how government interventions that seek to undermine, alter, ignore, circumvent, or outright abrogate the workings of the free market will fail and will only distort the healthful adjusting and equilibrating of the market system. Further, the ways in which the economy adjusts to the government interventions can, almost axiomatically, only cause the opposite of the intended result.
Along those lines, The Market Always Wins would have the same thesis as my recent post The eternal truth of market principles, viz., the principles that govern human action cannot be adjusted or suppressed, and will always act on everyone and everything in the economy, regardless of how free the economy is. These principles explain why all State action fails, why certain State interventions fail in certain ways, and why State endeavors to fix this or promote that can only fail. They fail not because they prevent markets from working, but because the principles of the free market always apply to everything, even the State, and always act in opposition to State coercion. There is only the market, and there is only one set of economic truths, and these truths do not allow for coercive monopoly. If something is coercive, it is because the market doesn’t allow it, so even though the monopoly exists and the coercion is all too real, the principles of economics will not allow its schemes to work. The market opposes the State’s actions and the State opposes the market’s actions, but there is only one set of economic truths and they are constant and eternal. The market will always win. It might be next year, or it might be next decade, but it must win. It wins either with a black market, a recession, or a total political collapse. There are hundreds of good examples from the United States alone of how, after a time, the desires of the populace and the laws of the price system rendered futile the grand aims of the State and corrected its errors. I want to write an entire book applying these principles to dozens if not hundreds of specific State economic policies, directly linking cause (State interference) to effect (market rejection and correction of the perturbation). Hopefully this will help enlighten some people to the truth that the State can’t work because the market always works.
There is only one set of market principles, and they might apply a little differently in different cultures, but these differences are all part of the constant and eternal truths of economics, whatever those might be and however well we might understand them (naturally, I think the Austro-libertarians understand them the best, though their theory is doubtless flawed in some ways).
Blagnet.net’s quiz of the day
April 7, 2009 – 10:44 pm by JohnWho said the following?
It must be understood that toil alone makes for accomplishment and advancement, and righteous possession is the reward of toil, and its incentive. There is no progress except in the stimulus of competition.
When competition—natural, fair, impelling competition—is suppressed, whether by law, compact or conspiracy, we halt the march of progress, silence the voice of inspiration, and paralyze the will for achievement. These are but common-sense truths of human development.
…Mark you, I am ready to acclaim the highest standard of pay, but I would be blind to the responsibilities that mark this fateful hour if I did not caution the wage-earners of America that mounting wages and decreased production can lead only to industrial and economic ruin.
[...]
No party is indifferent to the welfare of the wage-earner. To us his good fortune is of deepest concern, and we seek to make that good fortune permanent. We do not oppose but approve collective bargaining, because that is an outstanding right, but we are unalterably insistent that its exercise must not destroy the equally sacred right of the individual, in his necessary pursuit of livelihood. Any American has the right to quit his employment, so has every American the right to seek employment. The group must not endanger the individual, and we must discourage groups preying upon one another, and none shall be allowed to forget that government’s obligations are alike to all the people.
[...]
Gross expansion of currency and credit have depreciated the dollar just as expansion and inflation have discredited the coins of the world. We inflated in haste, we must deflate in deliberation. We debased the dollar in reckless finance, we must restore in honesty. Deflation on the one hand and restoration of the 100-cent dollar on the other…. We will attempt intelligent and courageous deflation, and strike at government borrowing which enlarges the evil, and we will attack high cost of government with every energy and facility…. We promise that relief which will attend the halting of waste and extravagance, and the renewal of the practice of public economy, not alone because it will relieve tax burdens, but because it will be an example to stimulate thrift and economy in private life.I have already alluded to the necessity for the fullness of production, and we need the fullness of service which attends the exchange of products. Let us speak the irrefutable truth—high wages and reduced cost of living are in utter contradiction unless we have the height of efficiency for wages received.
[...]
Let us call to all the people for thrift and economy, for denial and sacrifice, if need be, for a nation-wide drive against extravagance and luxury, to a recommittal to simplicity of living, to that prudent and normal plan of life which is the health of the Republic. There hasn’t been a recovery from the waste and abnormalities of war since the story of mankind was first written, except through work and saving, through industry and denial, while needless spending and heedless extravagance have marked every decay in the history of nations.
Answer in first comment.
Accidental SEO
April 7, 2009 – 10:21 pm by JohnUh, somehow my post of the Debt Star picture that I yoinked from David Z. is the number-1 Google search result for “debt star”. Somehow it isn’t anywhere near the first Google image search result, though… No wonder that post has been getting so many hits lately. This website really doesn’t get a lot of traffic at all, but that post has been generating a lot of visits.
Blagnet.net’s link of the day
April 5, 2009 – 9:35 am by JohnDespite the fact that I hardly have time to read and write as much as I want about political economy and philosophy, I am trying to make an effort to frequent my less-frequented blags, find new blags worth frequenting, and read about something other than economics (in both web pages and books). Well, at the risk of disappointing our visitors who are tired of seeing posts about economics, money/banking, the current recession, the Obama regime’s worsening of it, etc., this post is also about our global economic meltdown.
Via nostate.com, I came across Strange Blue Planet, an occasionally updated blag of which I like what I’ve seen. In fact, I enjoyed his recent post Recession Demystified so much that it’s my link of the day. It provided me with yet another detailed layman’s explanation of the irresponsibility and ignorance in the State–banking complex that caused our financial crisis and deepening recession. I recommend the entire thing, but this was my favorite part, from the end of the post (the hypothetical entities Linda and PUKEBONDS will make a lot more sense if you read the whole post):
But we are not done yet. As we saw, Linda’s shady bonds were being packaged and sold, and again leveraged, repackaged and resold, in an ever rising pyramid, till the total money involved probably touched trillions of dollars! Since most of these transactions were being done on borrowed money, this would surely have created a great demand for money. We know from Econ 101, higher demand leads to higher prices. In case of loans, higher demand for money would lead to higher interest rates. Till a point would be reached where the interest rates would be so high that buying PUKEBONDs on loan would make the risk not worth the returns from the bonds. Surely this should have put the scam to an end before it reached trillion dollar figures?
Well, no actually. Thanks to the Central banks of the world, the total amount of credit available in the market is in theory unlimited. When demand for credit increases, Central banks just print some more money and lend it out. The self-regulating system of demand and supply fails in case of money, because central banks have the Govt given authority to counterfeit money and lend it out at any arbitrarily low rate they think fit.
So finally we have our answer: The two factors we discussed above [bond-rating monopolies, centrally controlled money supply], both creations of Govts, led investors to have an incorrect perception of risk involved in PUKEBONDs. They also allowed the Ponzi scheme to run as long as it did. The market did not self-correct in time, because Govt intervention did not allow it to self-correct. It’s not unsupervised free-market, but Govt supervision that’s a mortal danger to the stability of global finance.
Final thoughts: Markets are self-regulating, even when they are not free. Always. There are no exceptions. What we are seeing today is a much delayed, but vicious self-correction of the market. The more delayed a correction is the more vicious it gets, and the more people are hurt. It’s best for Govt to leave markets alone, not try to supervise it, or make it better. It only interferes with the self-regulating mechanisms of markets and delays the self-correction. “Stimulus”, “bailouts”, and other shenanigans of Govts worldwide is a last ditch attempt to postpone the self-correction to another day. It’s better for Linda to lose her bar today, than for the whole world to lose their shirts tomorrow. [emphasis added]
Facebook “thoughts” of the day
April 4, 2009 – 12:25 pm by JohnA friend’s Facebook status: “…says its about time the government passes some serious gun control laws. to hell with the right to bear arms.”
Her friends’ responses: “hear hear!” “No guns and arms? That settles it, no more gym.” (admittedly, kind of funny) “But then what the hell am I going to do in Texas? Ah well at least I can still drink and drive.” “True dat!”
No kidding! We should probably also make murder illegal—that would really dissuade demented psychopaths from murdering anybody!
This country sucks because its citizens suck, and it’s only going to get suckier in my lifetime. I am more afraid of fascist police-state advocates like these than I am of gun-wielding maniacs. Mainly because the government will always have guns.
Do these people ever notice that the frequency of maniacal public shootings like the one in Binghamton, NY, has only increased in recent decades along with the increase in police-state measures like gun-control laws? Correlation does not prove causality, but it sure as hell doesn’t prove that the measures prevent mass murders! Get it through your head: We already have somewhat strict gun-control laws, no additional number or severity of gun-control laws will keep guns out of the United States, murderous psychopaths are never swayed by the existing laws against murder or against owning the guns, they will simply turn to bombings or something else if they can’t get ahold of a gun easily, the government will ALWAYS have guns and that is a bad thing (which was the entire point of the Second Amendment), a society would be better off trying to keep people from wanting to shoot 30 people instead of preventing anyone from owning a gun, and the increasing influence that the State has had in our lives during the last century is most definitely a significant source of the strife, hatred, poverty, desperation, isolation, and psychosis that drives people to public mass murder.
Quote of the day
April 2, 2009 – 6:58 pm by John“Perhaps the President or Fed Chair or SecTreas could answer why, if these assets are so terrible that the banks (who bought them voluntarily) shouldn’t hold them, why the American public should be forced to.”
—Tim Kern, in a comment on this article at Mises.org
The next two bubbles
April 1, 2009 – 11:34 pm by JohnBased on the Obama regime’s policies, both implemented and proposed, I think there is good reason to expect the American economy to experience unsustainable bubbles in the automotive industry and the “green” technology fields. There is ample reason to believe neither one is justified in receiving as much investment or enthusiasm as Obama and his cronies are giving them, and the direct subsidies they are primed to receive from the government, combined with nearly everyone’s conviction that saving the automotive industry and investing in energy independence and “green” bullshit are fundamental to a thriving economy in the 21st century, will blow these bubbles up as much as our feeble economy can stand to. I don’t know how much that will be, but Obama and his cronies seem determined to inflate, spend, and micromanage us into another false boom.
Our Savior announced that the Imperial Federal Government will guarantee the service warranties on new GM and Chrysler cars, if GM or Chrysler can’t! Can you believe that! That reminds me of what it did with mortgages bought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac! It seems too easy to predict that the exact same thing will happen with automobiles in the next few years, but it sure looks similar. This isn’t nearly the same as guaranteeing the payment of the car loan itself, they way the government explicitly guaranteed payment of Fannie/Freddie mortgages in case of homeowner default, but don’t call me crazy for believing more, not less, State involvement in the automotive industry is in our future.
The point behind Obama’s guarantee that the government (the taxpayers and all Federal Reserve note holders) will pay for GM and Chrysler service warranties is that he doesn’t want car owners to suffer if the auto companies are financially unable to honor the warranties, and he doesn’t want Americans to be afraid to buy cars from bankrupt or potentially-bankrupt companies.
Two of Obama’s completely ignorant but oft-trumpeted aims are: to increase consumer spending to get that Keynesian-Krugmanian circular economy turning again; and to increase our energy independence by decreasing our energy usage and energy expenses. To foretell the ways in which our economy will be perturbed and wealth will be destroyed, all you have to do is look at the stated goals and look at the ways in which the State will attempt to achieve them, and then apply the invariant lesson of history that it will fail utterly. In fact, it is a high-probability venture to predict that the exact opposite will be achieved.
“Follow the money” is the common mantra you hear when attempting to discern why a bill was passed, why a policy was implemented, why someone supported this or opposed that, who is at the center of a scheme or a conspiracy and who expected to benefit. This also applies to sectors of the economy that the State is going to screw up: follow the money. Where government money goes, wealth is destroyed. (It’s also destroyed where money was diverted from, making it easy for a libertarian to throw a dart at a board and hit something the State screwed up.)
When the State tries to lower the cost of basic schooling by providing it to everyone and paying for it with taxes, it ends up costing more to society (and the poorest get the worst of it) because coercion, bureaucracy, and monopoly don’t work. When the State tries to make college more accessible to everyone, by directly loaning millions of students billions of dollars, it raises the costs of college because demand skyrockets and the college-education industry exists mostly outside of the free market, meaning there are few checks on price increases. When the United States government tries to increase home-ownership by the various means it has used in the last 60 years, it actually makes home prices increase like we observed in the recent bubble and then even after home prices fall, people can’t really afford the homes the government tried to make affordable to them. (Additionally, the State–banking complex has so monopolized this process that very few people actually own their homes; the banks own the homes, so again individuals’ home-ownership is reduced by State involvement.)
Likewise, the government’s subsidizing of the automotive industry will almost certainly make cars less affordable because their prices won’t decrease by enough and/or their quality will suffer thanks to government decision-making and protection from competitors (not that this is a change from the status quo). The government’s subsidizing of green technologies will almost certainly increase our total expenditure on energy because it will be politics, not the pursuit of profits and the pricing mechanism of a free market, that will determine what technologies succeed and get implemented. When money is just magically there for research or development of this or that energy technology, it won’t matter if more money gets spent than is saved by the technology, and it won’t matter if more energy is spent in producing a product than is gotten out of it (corn-based ethanol might be an example of this)—what will matter is that the companies and their products are politically favored and subsidized by those who wield the violent, deadly force of the police power of government.
I just don’t see any way around it. The criminal economic ignorance of Barack Obama and every single one of his advisors convinces them that American car companies must be saved at all costs, that Americans must buy their cars, that we must innovate new ways to produce our own energy more efficiently ASAP, and that government funding and decision-making are the only way to accomplish this. Follow the money: money is going there, and so is coercive, bureaucratic, political decision-making, so we will get less for more money. Perhaps the passage of time and the commission of further blunders by the Obama regime will enable me to make more concrete predictions and criticisms, but right now it looks like the government’s meddling in these two industries will increase perceived demand for them, attract an undue amount of investment to them, and make them vulnerable to a bust once the unrelenting forces of the market make the economic realities obvious.
One major problem with this is that Obama and his successors might increase the State’s grip on these (and other) industries so much that there won’t be any private companies or private decision-making left to burst the bubble—the complete socialism will remove all question of economic calculation—the Imperial Federal Government will so thoroughly control automobile manufacturing and energy production that it will keep throwing good money after bad and making one bad decision after another, and investors, executives, managers, and consumers will have no recourse, no ability to burst those bubbles any time soon. Collapse becomes the only option after bubbles aren’t allowed to burst and economic reality—which can never be suspended and never stops acting—is ignored, denied, or covered up.
Safety regulations screw the little guy
March 30, 2009 – 10:10 pm by John…and help the rich and powerful. Kevin Carson wrote an excellent article with lots of good details about food-safety regulations (proposed and existing) and children’s toy and clothing regulations, which I blagged about previously.
The system is designed to screw the little guy and help the rich and well-connected.
Rothbard on inflationary booms
March 30, 2009 – 9:38 pm by JohnFrom Chapter 3 of What Has Government Done To Our Money?, originally published in 1964. (This is from the 1980 version, so I’m not 100% positive this passage appeared verbatim in the 1964 edition—either way, it provides yet another example of the ability of free-market economists to predict and explain the assault on our quality of life by inflation. Observe the accuracy of Rothbard’s predictions about downgrading of quality, the prosperity-without-sacrifice mentality, and the boom and bust of real estate and other capital-intensive industries in the decades since this was written.)
Inflation has other disastrous effects. It distorts that keystone of our economy: business calculation. Since prices do not all change uniformly and at the same speed, it becomes very difficult for business to separate the lasting from the transitional, and gauge truly the demands of consumers or the cost of their operations. For example, accounting practice enters the “cost” of an asset at the amount the business has paid for it. But if inflation intervenes, the cost of replacing the asset when it wears out will be far greater than that recorded on the books. As a result, business accounting will seriously overstate their profits during inflation—and may even consume capital while presumably increasing their investments. [Footnote inserted at this point: This error will be greatest in those firms with the oldest equipment, and in the most heavily capitalized industries. An undue number of firms, therefore, will pour into these industries during an inflation.] Similarly, stock holders and real estate holders will acquire capital gains during an inflation that are not really “gains” at all. But they may spend part of these gains without realizing that they are thereby consuming their original capital.
By creating illusory profits and distorting economic calculation, inflation will suspend the free market’s penalizing of inefficient, and rewarding of efficient, firms. Almost all firms will seemingly prosper. The general atmosphere of a “sellers’ market” will lead to a decline in the quality of goods and of service to consumers, since consumers often resist price increases less when they occur in the form of downgrading of quality. The quality of work will decline in an inflation for a more subtle reason: people become enamored of “get-rich-quick” schemes, seemingly within their grasp in an era of ever-rising prices, and often scorn sober effort. Inflation also penalizes thrift and encourages debt, for any sum of money loaned will be repaid in dollars of lower purchasing power than when originally received. The incentive, then, is to borrow and repay later rather than save and lend. Inflation, therefore, lowers the general standard of living in the very course of creating a tinsel atmosphere of “prosperity.”
How are Mondragón co-ops handling the recession?
March 29, 2009 – 4:58 pm by JohnAn interesting and far too short article in The Economist.
Hat tip: David Z.
The eternal truth of market principles
March 28, 2009 – 10:33 am by JohnAs I understand it, one of the great philosophical contributions that Ludwig von Mises made to the world was not simply to explain why governmental perturbation of market forces doesn’t work, but to explain that it can’t work—he explained how the things that the State can achieve are limited by the nature of reality just as market forces are bound by the nature of reality.
I think this insight, which hardly seems revolutionary, helps libertarians understand the problems with government stimuli, job-creation programs, and bailouts better than someone who simply thinks less government is better than more. I think the typical semi-free-marketeer/Chicago-style/conservative objection to government interventions is: Socialism doesn’t work, we are already too socialist and attempting to apply more socialism is only going to make our economy worse, and we need a return to more laissez-faire economics. That’s true as far as it goes and nothing about it is incorrect, but the Austro-libertarian can make a stronger or at least slightly different statement: The truth of free-market libertarianism is constant, permanent, eternal; regardless of what type or degree of interventionism an economy suffers from and regardless of what policies are proposed, discarded, or implemented, the truth of market forces is always acting on every entity in the economy, be it an individual, a business, or the State. The extent that socialism has been implemented in an economy is not equal to the extent that capitalism has been eliminated or obstructed; the principles of free-market capitalism are always present and are always acting on everyone. Socialism isn’t unfeasible simply because “it doesn’t work”; it works exactly as the principles of human action dictate that it must work. State-directed economies don’t fail because they prevent the principles of economics from acting; they fail precisely because the principles of economics are always and forever acting on everyone and everything.
Refutation is simple
March 23, 2009 – 1:17 pm by KelAll you have to do is just state something as a fact! Don’t believe me? Watch how simple it is!
When I saw his list of questions that he would supposedly refute, I was very interested in number 3: “Isn’t having to work for a boss in capitalism the same as having to work for a living in nature?” This question was often my initial reaction to people who tried to drag out the wage-slave nonsense. After all, it only seemed obvious to me that in order to consume, you must produce. Thus, if you don’t work for a wage, it’s only necessary that in order to eat, you must farm your own land. In order to have shelter, you must build you own house. In other words, if you’re not a “wage-slave”, then your only alternative is to be a “labor-slave”. However, mr1001nights here simply refutes that Capitalist Myth with his simple answer, transcribed by me:
“No. The unavoidable subjection of man to nature, that is having to work to gain one’s substinance, is not the same as the subjection of man to man. That is, having to work for a boss.”
That’s it. That’s his whole refutation. I’m glad he cleared that up for me so easily.
Maybe he goes into further detail, but I stopped watching shortly after that point. You can make all the bold claims you want, but I prefer a little more thought in my arguments than just statements presented as fact. If anyone else would like to explain why working the land to eat and be sheltered is so different from working for another man, I’m all ears.
Debt Star
March 19, 2009 – 5:54 pm by John
John’s thought of the day
March 17, 2009 – 9:25 pm by JohnMaybe if Americans weren’t so stupid and/or willfully ignorant of important political and economic issues, they wouldn’t be as outraged at AIG executive bonuses as they were at the government taking all that money from people who earned it and giving it to people who didn’t in the first place.
Libertarian lyrics 4
March 8, 2009 – 10:31 pm by John“My Prerogative” by Bobby Brown. Yeah, I went there.
Everybody’s talking all this stuff about me
Why don’t they just let me live?
I don’t need permission
Make my own decisions
That’s my prerogativeThey say I’m crazy
I really don’t care
That’s my prerogative
They say I’m nasty
But I don’t give a damn
Gettin girls is how I live
Some ask me questions
Why am I so real
But they don’t understand me
I really don’t know the deal
About a brother
Trying hard to make it right
Not long to go
Before I win this fight
…
I can do what I wanna do (It’s my prerogative)
Truly live my life (It’s my prerogative)
I’m doing it just for you (It’s my prerogative)
Tell me, tell me
Why can’t I live my life
Without all of the things that people say
…
What is this, a blizzard, that I can’t have money in my pocket
and people not talk about me? This world is a trip.
I don’t know what’s going on these days.
Got this person over here talking about me, this person…
Hey listen, let me tell you something.
This is my prerogative. I can do what I want to do.
I made this money, you didn’t….
My bank gives bailout money back
March 7, 2009 – 7:16 pm by JohnWell, it’s trying to. The bank I put my non-shiny currency in, TCF Bank, has filed paperwork to give its $361 million of bailout money back to the Imperial Federal Government. It’s hard to imagine a libertarian advocating giving money to the government, but the executives at TCF know it is wrong for them to have it, and, hopefully, this will contribute to lower deficit spending and more money in the pockets of taxpayers in the near future.
The short video below contains several quotable nuggets from Bill Cooper, the chairman and CEO of TCF Financial:
TCF never really needed the money in the first place. The regulators suggested that we take it, and strongly suggested. … And subsequently, the deal has kind of changed in connection with the regulations and so forth, the rules they want to apply to companies that take the TARP money, and there’s a lot of reasons why it doesn’t work for us. …We don’t need those additional rules and regulations…. We never did any of the sub-prime lending or all the other kind of things that people do, we have 50 consecutive quarters of regular earnings.
Three important things to get from this interview with a real banking executive who can speak from a businessman’s personal experience:
1. If you run your bank intelligently, you have a very good chance of succeeding and earning profits consistently.
2. It sounds more like TCF took the funds only somewhat reluctantly, and is only giving them back now that the conditions from the government have changed. Not so noble, but they wouldn’t have taken it unless it was “strongly suggested” that they do, so I’m proud of them. They are an example of how you can shun a little bit of Statism even though the State is pervasive in our lives.
3. The “regulators” from the government were already heavily involved in the daily operations of banks, and now that it is directly supporting banks by giving them money, it naturally wants even more of a say in what they do, when they do it, and how they do it. Banks, hospitals, and other businesses will not be nationalized by one stroke of the pen from the Savior of America (de jure nationalization); it will be de facto nationalization, gradually. Bank bailouts constitute another huge and important step towards their becoming socialized arms of the government, nationalized in fact if not in name. This is not capitalism, it is socialism or fascism: privatized gains, socialized losses.
Hat tip: Briggs Armstrong
Taxes shouldn’t pay for stem cell research
March 7, 2009 – 6:02 pm by JohnTo compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
—Thomas Jefferson
Because they shouldn’t pay for anything. Associated Press reports:
Eight years of frustration are close to an end for scientists seeking ways to use embryonic stem cells to combat illness and injury.
On Monday, President Barack Obama plans to reverse limits imposed by President George W. Bush on using federal money for research with embryonic stem cells.
[...]
But it stirs intense controversy over whether government crosses a moral line with such research, and opponents promptly denounced the move.
The moral line is crossed not when the State decides to fund some controversial or questionable endeavor, but when it forces anyone to pay for anything he finds objectionable. The pertinent part of the matter is not how useful the stem cell research will be (probably moderately) or whether there is some objective ethical standard that the State is adhering to or violating (there probably isn’t). The most important issue is that the State makes one rule for everyone and forces everyone to fund its decisions, no matter how unethical or immoral some people find them.
I was proud to say I voted against my state’s ballot initiative that would allow already-available tax money to be spent on stem cell research in my state. The issue was not whether I approved of the research that would be permitted; the issue was whether any single person whose tax dollars would fund it opposed it. There are many such people, and I stick up for them by siding with them in their fight to keep the government from taking their money against their will and funding things they abhor with it.
Most people don’t think that way. They think, “If you support it, vote Yes; if you oppose it, vote No. That’s what a ballot proposal is for. The side with the most supporters wins, and by the way you should think like me.” How abominable. How monstrous. How barbaric. It is by propagating that type of attitude that democratic governments secure their power over their subjects: pit the citizens against themselves and condition them to believe the good of the society lies in securing the police power of government and forcing their way of life on the minority. Democracy is mob-rule. It is Might Makes Right. Invoking the right of the majority or the authority of the State (when it happens to be on your side) automatically and instantaneously puts you in the wrong.
Keynesianism in The Fifth Element
March 7, 2009 – 2:57 pm by JohnZorg: “Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder, and chaos. Now, take this empty glass. Here it is, peaceful, serene, boring. But if it is [knocks glass off table] destroyed… [robots come to clean it up] Look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how each one is useful. What a lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color.
“Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people who will be able to feed their children tonight so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny weeny children of their own and so on and so forth, thus adding to the great chain of life. …You see, Father, by encouraging a little destruction, I’m, in fact, encouraging life.”