Internet uprising overturns Australian censorship law
February 5, 2010 – 2:31 am by JohnI don’t think this news story got enough attention: from Ars Technica I read that an internet uprising led to the overturning of a very Orwellian censorship law in Australia. The law, which had taken effect just weeks prior, banned anonymous political commenting online. Can you imagine the twisted set of morals and the creepy desire to control other people that led the Australian criminal class to pass such a law? It is small consolation that the government backed down to the popular pressure and revoked the law, but don’t let anyone fool you that “the system worked.” I consider it an indictment of the system that there exists any group of people who have the power to enact such restrictions on the behavior and speech of anyone else. The fact that they want such power is proof that they shouldn’t have any power over anyone. Yet they still do. The system is a heinous affront to the individual sovereignty and liberty of everyone, and it doesn’t work for anyone but the professional criminal class.
Campaign finance reform is pretty simple
January 25, 2010 – 1:34 am by JohnMany of my friends and millions of people in the blogosphere/social-mediasphere have expressed their outrage and indignation at the Supreme Court’s ruling that corporations can spend as much as they want to promote or oppose whatever political candidates or causes that they want. One of my friends said she was saddened and angered by it, and another described it as a “sad, sad day for democracy.”
To understand why corporations, unions, and lobbyists spend such vast sums of money on political contributions is to understand how campaign finance “corruption” could be done away with in a clear, easy, and fair way. The reason they spend so much is because they get so much in return! With every political campaign and every election, a huge amount of money is at stake for every business—and most individuals, for that matter—and especially for the largest corporations, whose success and riches depend upon the corporate-political establishment. They spend so much money because there is the potential to get so much in return. The fact that large corporations donate money to opposing candidates and their parties is proof of this: it isn’t ideology, it is just good business.
My liberal friends and seemingly the majority, or a large minority, of Americans interested in politics are neither outraged nor saddened at the affront to individualism and self-governance that our current fascist-corporatist political-economic system represents. The mob elects legislators and bureaucrats who rule over everyone, whether we voted for them or not and whether their plans are in our best interest or not. They take people’s money and do whatever they want with it without our consent, and they’ve proven their ineptitude at spending our money in every way and at every turn. Obviously very few people are upset about this, beyond occasionally booting out incumbents who didn’t redistribute enough wealth. But now people get outraged because corporations can donate and spend as much money (part of which is our confiscated money) as they want to influence how their/our money is spent and how the conduct of business is governed in this country, whereas before, corporations could only spend a limited amount for such purposes.
First of all, those people have picked an awfully odd point to become saddened or outraged. If they thought about this issue from a principled angle, they would have been outraged long before the dollar amount for political donations/promotions was uncapped. But, most importantly, if you want to end the undue influence that corporations have on politics, get politics out of business! If politicians didn’t have the power to govern so many aspects of our lives, including the economy, then corporations, unions, and lobbyists would have no chance to engage in rent-seeking. As P.J. O’Rourke quipped, “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” In summary, achieving a state of less democracy, with its idiotic wealth redistribution and its monopolistic enforcement of mob-rule, would greatly reduce the influence that corporations have on politicians because politicians would have less influence on everything.
One year of Obama crimes and failures
January 19, 2010 – 11:00 pm by JohnBarack Obama is already a terrible president, a war criminal who belongs in prison beside Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. He is an economic ignoramus who despises private enterprise, exalts the State over the individual, and dreams of a world in which the inert, gray, bureaucratic mediocrity of corporate-State socialism controls nearly every aspect of the education, finances, medical care, housing, parenting, transportation, employment, and behavior of everyone on Earth. We are only one quarter of the way through his sanctimonious presidency, and it is only going to get worse.
Barack Obama’s foreign policy should earn him the ire of self-described peaceful or anti-war liberals across the world, but all of the American liberals (at least, the supporters of the Democratic Party) love him and continue to defend him. Obama has continued the aggressive war, started by George W. Bush, in foreign countries that have not declared war on the United States. Civilians continue to be killed, retaliatory terrorism continues to kill many more, and young foreigners continue to become attracted to the terroristic, America-hating ideology that Obama and everyone else in Washington claim to be striving to quell. Libertarians predicted this would happen and routinely criticized Obama, Democratic politicians, Democratic voters, and the neocons for their imminent hypocrisy and warmongering, and we have been proven correct and justified in those attacks.
On January 23, 2009, Obama ordered air strikes against Pakistan by Predator drones, killing approximately 15 non-aggressing civilians, including 3 children in a country that had not attacked or declared war on the United States. This began Obama’s continuation of the bloody air-strike campaign carried out by CIA-operated drones (Predator aircraft) in Pakistan that was ramped up in September 2008 and continues unabated to this day. Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reports that 708 innocents (non-combatants) were killed by drone air strikes in 2009:
Of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians.
According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009.
For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.
You can find a list of CIA drone air strikes carried out in Pakistan in the Wikipedia article Drone attacks in Pakistan. I was going to list them all to emphasize how bloody and counterproductive Obama’s foreign policy has been, but, as you will note if you read the news articles cited therein, those articles rarely contain details or even estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by the drone attacks. Whatever the reasons, sinister or not, the important point is that these civilian deaths are not highlighted by the media, are not stressed to the public by CIA, Defense, or White House officials, and are apparently not much concern to most Americans. Least of all the liberal Democrats who voted for Obama, continue to defend him to this day, and therefore have the blood of innocent Pakistanis and Afghanis on their hands.
They are of concern to Pakistanis, Afghanis, and terrorists and civilians across the Middle East. There is much evidence that drone attacks are counterproductive regardless of how many terrorists they kill and of the support they might receive from Pakistani and Afghani officials. For instance, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani has said, “These (strikes) are counterproductive and not in the interests of the country. I think the Obama administration will have to reconsider this policy.”
Afghanistan is, of course, more deadly for both U.S. soldiers and local civilians. This U.N. report (pdf) says that approximately 310 (one-third) of the civilian casualties that resulted from combat in Afghanistan in the first half of 2009 were caused by international military forces, which means U.S.-led forces. It is probably easier to just read the Wikipedia article. (Hey, it’s the best source for a summary of this information.) The U.N. report also concludes that civilian deaths and injuries are probably significantly under-reported because of the lack of ability to confirm many of them.
True to his promises to expand and focus the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, Obama sent 30,000 more soldiers there in December. This is another example of counterproductive warmongering that will only continue to inspire hatred, kill innocent people, and waste billions of dollars that could be spent improving our own country, something the military cannot do. He says this is a precursor to the beginning of a withdrawal from Afghanistan in 18 months (say, July 2011), so while we’re on the topic, I’ll predict that a significant withdrawal will not begin on schedule, and after it does happen and Afghanistan is controlled by its own people, the war in Afghanistan will be shown to be largely a futile effort.
The most embarrassing part of this presidency so far was Obama’s acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize, which he should have rejected. That speech consisted mostly of a promotion of military force as a vehicle of peace and a justification of the aggressive interventions of the Imperial Federal Government. Chris Floyd covered it sufficiently.
Obama’s legacy will probably be written in terms of his economic policy, which has been abominable. The idiotically named American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was his huge $787-billion stimulus bill that aimed to increase consumer spending and lending when they both needed to be curtailed like never before. Reckless borrowing (debt), which fueled unwise consumer and commercial spending and industrial expansion into unsustainable projects, is exactly what caused so many people to default on their mortgages and credit cards, so many companies to go out of business, and such a high rate of unemployment. Obama’s myopic stimulus plan operated under the Keynesian assumption that the economy is static and circular, and that more consumer spending means more economic growth, and has only delayed a true recovery.
In the second-biggest economic fiasco to date (after the trillions of dollars given to undeserving, failing automotive and financial corporations), the Cash for Clunkers program was an economic failure to anyone who paid attention. Part of the problem is that the defined goals of the Cash for Clunkers program were harmful to the American economy, so by succeeding in promoting spending, raising prices, and destroying wealth (literally), the program failed horrendously.
As alluded to above, Obama’s Treasury and Federal Reserve have committed or printed a total of $11 trillion to forestall the Second Great Depression. This number is not mentioned frequently, and the individual sources or components of this total are hardly ever highlighted or discussed, even right after the funds are printed by the Treasury and given to the companies. It is possible that they actually believe printing money out of thin air and keeping failing, inefficient, unproductive, parasitic companies afloat will promote an economic recovery and economic strength in the foreseeable future. If Obama, his economic advisers, and the people in the Treasury Department and Fed believe that, then their ignorance of the basic principles of economics and even of common sense are astounding—Krugmanian, even. If they don’t believe it, which is a distinct possibility, then they are intentionally exacerbating the economic crash in order to buy some time, possibly in the hopes that another Democratic government can be elected in 2012. How ignorant and/or short-sighted. Bloomberg reported that the bailout and stimulus funds approach the total GDP of the United States.
Being too stupid and caught up in his own messiah complex to learn from the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, His Eloquence is hell-bent on pumping up bubbles in the automotive industry and “green” technologies as fast as he can. It is unlikely the automotive bubble will ever pop because American car companies are well on their way to becoming de facto arms of the Imperial Federal Government, which will not be subject to the pressures of the free market, such as it is (though they will, as everything governmental and private is, still be governed by the laws of economics and human action, meaning they will only impoverish dollar holders more). This month, Obama announced that $2.3 billion of his $787-billion stimulus package will be rewarded for clean-energy technologies in the form of tax credits. These will go to 183 companies in 43 states. This is one of a million examples of the government interfering in the economy by taking money from people who earned it (taxpayers) or simply printing it (impoverishing all dollar holders) and giving it to people or companies for political reasons, to achieve goals defined by politicians and bureaucrats. This is not how a free society functions. This is not how a man of the people treats his people’s money.
Contrary to popular belief, Obama is terrible on issues of civil liberties, and this was even obvious during the campaign, when he voted to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that spied on users.
The Obama regime’s Department of Justice [sic] sided with that of George W. Bush regarding the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and anyone else the State deems an “enemy combatant.” The D.C. Circuit Court had issued a ruling agreeing with the Bush DOJ that prisoners being held in American prisons outside of American soil did not count as legal “persons” and that they have no Constitutional protections against torture, and Obama’s lawyers urged the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal of that case, meaning they support the ruling.
On October 28, 2009, Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law, under the bizarre impression that hate crimes legislation protects people’s civil liberties. Oh, but the Democrats assure us the First Amendment–protection clauses in the bill will protect all of our Constitutional rights. People convicted of “hate crimes” will still be punished for their thoughts, and certain victim groups will be treated differently under the law than other victims of the same crimes, so, you know—civil liberties, Orwellian police state, it’s all the same to the Democrats.
Kinsella argues that Obama is actually worse than Bush on intellectual property.
A major indicator of Barack Obama’s ineptitude and corruption is the people he has chosen to surround himself with.
Most of my Democratic friends not only supported but lauded the selection of Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate. Presumably this was because it improved the chances of the Savior of America being elected president and was certainly not an indication of deep-seated, in fact fundamental, hypocrisy and amorality among liberal Americans. Joe Biden is a fantastic warmonger who voted to invade Iraq in 1998 and has been described as “perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration’s decision to invade” Iraq. He is a staunch opponent of civil liberties as well. Biden voted for the original PATRIOT Act, voted to reauthorize (!) the PATRIOT Act in 2006, and in fact bragged about having authored a predecessor to the PATRIOT Act in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh and another sweeping terrorism bill the year before that. This moran also supports a federal ban on smoking. Biden has a long, dirty history of supporting the Recording Industry Association of America and the FBI’s privacy-invading endeavors. He is also an ardent drug warrior who was instrumental in creating the National Office of Drug Control Policy and boasts about coining the term “Drug Czar”. Joe Biden is truly a despicable human being.
Among Obama’s cronies, Biden might only be surpassed by Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who is a creepy, slimy, vindictive, malicious politician of the worst sort. He seeks the political destruction even of fellow Democrats who have crossed him in the past, he believes the State can abrogate anyone’s right to bear arms at any time for whatever reasons it pleases, and of course he was involved in former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s pay-for-play schemes.
It was expected that Obama’s nominees for Secretary of Commerce would know nothing about business and less about economics, but it was a true sign of his ineptitude that he would nominate two who were ethically challenged hypocrites who actually, literally belong in prison under current state and federal law. Bill Richardson withdrew his nomination because he was under investigation by a grand jury for influence-peddling, meaning his political donors had received state contracts. The charges were eventually dropped, but, as you should know by now, that doesn’t mean he was innocent. (Judd Gregg, the second nominee, withdrew his nomination because of irreconcilable differences with Obama, and was a bad choice for Obama anyway because Gregg had actually voted to abolish the Department of Commerce in 1995, which makes him a great candidate from my perspective but underscores the ineptitude of Obama’s team.) The third and final nominee was Gary Locke, a money-laundering tax evader who repeated the crimes of the Clinton Chinese fundraising scandal and played the race card when he was scrutinized. This apparently made him a perfect fit for Obama’s cabinet. I’ll link to Michelle Malkin for the first time, only because she covered Locke when he was Governor of Washington and she worked for the Seattle Times.
Obama’s choices for Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chairman have also proven to be terrible. This should be self-explanatory. Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke have been the primary implementers of the corporate-State socialist doctrine that large investment banks (particularly Goldman Sachs) and the American automotive companies are too big to fail, must be bailed out with stolen (printed) taxpayer money at every turn, and will ultimately better serve Geithner’s and Bernanke’s ideal way of life by becoming de facto arms of the Imperial Federal Government. They desperately cling to the Keynesian fantasy that spending = economic growth, when Americans need to save and invest, not borrow and consume. This policy will only end as Mises and Hayek predicted: with crippling inflation and more government intrusion into the economy to fix the problems it created.
It is hard to imagine how Obama could have done better at surpassing George W. Bush in the stupidity and ignorance of his selections and nominations to fill various governmental posts, but history might show that he succeeded.
His Eloquence signed two bills requiring increased energy efficiency, following the all-encompassing Statist mantra of “if you want something, regardless of whether it is desired by the people it affects, simply mandate it,” during the worst economic period since the Great Depression.
The Savior of America also appears bound and determined to inflict cruel, crippling environmental and medical-insurance policies on the United States, as evidenced by his constant fear-mongering, his blatant patronizing, his demagoguery, his terrifying speech at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, and the passage of the politicized and ill-advised health care bill. However, the Green USA and Obamacare are not realities yet, so I’ll have to save those for next year (probably).
David Henderson: in defense of Avatar
January 12, 2010 – 3:53 pm by JohnIf you haven’t seen Avatar yet, you should; the plot might be incredibly predictable and, actually, almost identical to that of Poul Anderson’s novella Call Me Joe or Robert F. Young’s novella To Fell a Tree, but what you get out of it is the best visual, graphical, cinematic experience you are likely to experience any time soon. While it is a little bit unfortunate that the great screenwriter and director James Cameron couldn’t focus (or hire) some of his talent to enhance the plot during the last 10 years, it still has a great, libertarian, anti-war, pro–property rights message. It’s at least worth a viewing in the dollar theater, and if you want to see it in 3-D, as I did, I recommend waiting until you can sit as close to the back and middle of the theater as possible.
David R. Henderson writes about its pro-capitalist, anti-corporatist message, focusing largely on the inconsistent stance that one particular Objectivist, Edward Hudgins, takes:
But I don’t think Avatar is an attack on capitalism. One could leave the movie and have no idea, based on just the movie, about James Cameron’s view of capitalism. And while it did have some clichés (most movies do), I didn’t find it loaded. So what is Avatar? In fact, Avatar is a powerful antiwar movie—and a defense of property rights. For that reason, I found it easy to identify with those whose way of life was being destroyed by military might.
In fact, the defense of property rights in Avatar is so clear that, at one point in the movie, when the bad guys are justifying their war on the grounds that they need “Unobtainium,” I turned to a libertarian friend and said, “This is the Kelo decision.” Recall that the Supreme Court, in Kelo v. City of New London, decided that it was all right to take Suzette Kelo’s property from its low-tech use as a house so that a major corporation could use it for a “grander” project.
Which brings me back to whether this movie was an attack on capitalism. I think not. To the extent that it makes any statement about capitalism, Avatar is a defense of capitalism. Capitalism is based on property rights and voluntary exchange. The Na’vi had property rights in the crucial tree and various other properties surrounding it. Did they own it as individuals or as community tribal property? We can’t be sure, but probably the latter. They had refused to sell the property to the outsiders. There was nothing the outsiders could give them that would make it worth their while. What should we, if we are good capitalists, conclude? That, just as in the Kelo case, the people currently sitting on the land value it more than the outsiders. The land is already in its highest-valued use. Hudgins and Salam could argue that that’s implausible. Surely there would be some finite price that the Na’vi would take in return for the Unobtainium. Maybe, maybe not. But once the Na’vi have made it clear that they’re unwilling to exchange it, that should be the end of things, shouldn’t it?
Fish in a barrel 6
December 17, 2009 – 7:42 pm by JohnFor some combination of reasons, the main one probably being the coming of the Second Great Depression and the need of so many people to save money, the exorbitant price of a college degree is being criticized and questioned more loudly and frequently than I can remember. For instance, Peter Schiff has written and spoken a fair amount about college tuition prices. College tuition increases almost always surpass price inflation, I understand. This is terrible, and it’s a sign of how perturbed the economics of education is by the State. Think about any other expensive items that we buy—cars, computers, and a lot of other electronic devices. In the long run, they do more and cost less! I’m sure most of the price increases over the decades have been due to inflation, and I’d guess a thorough analysis of any particular industry would reveal many other governmental factors behind the rest of the price increases those products have experienced. But college tuition keeps going up and up, and I’m not sure the education is getting better and better. Is your college education so much better than your parents’? Is it 10 times better than your parents’? Given the complaints of grade inflation and other reports that college doesn’t prepare people for the real world very well (not that it ever excelled), a college education might not even be as good as it was in decades past. The world has discovered more facts, which are taught in college, and technology has provided us many advances, which are used by college students and faculty, but that doesn’t really make the education you receive so much better. College students receive something that ranges from worse to marginally better, at many times the price that it cost a generation earlier. This can only be explained by massive perturbation of the market. So when you’re looking for solutions to any education- or tuition-related problems, look first to the free market that has been prohibited from burgeoning in the provision of education.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suddenly skipped town for two days, so SF had no mayor. This is a problem? Let people run their own lives for a while without getting in their way, and see how well it works!
I think it is incredibly unfair to fire teachers or other public employees because of some supposedly scandalous but completely legal pictures of them on Facebook or mySpace or somewhere else on the internet. Sometimes, the victims were fired for things that weren’t even pornographic or illicit in any way. Ashley Payne, a 24-year-old teacher in Barrow County, Georgia, was fired because of non-pornographic pictures and supposedly profane comments posted to her Facebook page. “I wasn’t doing anything illegal, I wasn’t doing anything provocative,” she says. She had set everything in her profile to “private” and was not friends with any students or parents. She has no idea how the parent who brought the complaint gained access to her photos. Oh, and also, the parent complained of Payne’s holding an alcoholic drink in one of the pictures. The completely infuriating, despicable, wretched, reviled, pathetic, sanctimonious destructiveness of idiotic teetotaling motherfuckers aside, by what right does a school board fire a teacher for doing nothing illegal, pornographic, harmful, or even unadvisable by any standards? I wish I had the link to a story about another teacher who was fired over some photographs of her in provocative poses, taken either by her boyfriend or husband before she ever became a teacher. So if you have ever done anything that someone in the school system or related to someone in the school system wouldn’t have done herself, that is grounds for firing. This is so typical of the the overly intrusive nanny state and the fascist busybodies that run our stupid society.
It strikes me as a sign of technological impairment or old-fogey-cluelessness when people refer to blog posts as “blogs.” To me, the LRC contributors are the most prominent perpetrators of this transgression. They’ll write, “In reference to your blog from yesterday…” or “…which I wrote about in a previous blog.” Hey, guys, “blog” is short for “web log,” as in, a journal. You wouldn’t refer to an entry in a child’s diary or a starship catpain’s log as a “log.” You would call it an entry. The proper term is blog post or blog entry. You can shorten it to “post” without using any more keystrokes than you now use. Calling a blog post a “blog” is like Senator Ted Stevens calling an email “an internet.” (In case you were wondering, yes, this is the only type of situation in which I would use the conventional “blog” instead of the uber-|337 and irreverent “blag.”)
Ha! Some person at “Progressive Nation” writes of the “growing rift between Libertarians and Republicans. No, this is not a repeat from the 1970’s, the 1980’s, the 1990’s, or every year of the Bush regime.
The first-class moran who occupies Michigan’s lieutenant governor post wants to tax bottled water companies to rescue the flagging revenues of a college scholarship program. In the state with the worst economy in the nation. The one that’s been in a depression for a year longer than the rest of the nation. The one losing businesses in hordes. It is simply depressing that after all these years, liberals refuse to understand that taxes hurt businesses and employment, and that taking more and more money from the taxpayers to put into government programs only destroys wealth. If you want education to be more affordable, or you want to save the environment (as the rest of this idiotic tax would fund), get the government out of both, and let people, companies, and communities solve their problems for themselves.
Juice is as unhealthy as soda and contributes just as much to obesity and diabetes, say some scientists. Yeah, you know who else blamed juice for the world’s problems? HITLER.
Obama-bashing quote of the day
December 16, 2009 – 11:03 pm by JohnIn reality, the quote of the day is Chris Floyd’s entire post about Tony Blair’s warmongering glorification of the Iraq War and Obama’s warmongering glorification of any war the Imperial Federal Government embarks on—in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, no less! But since I know you all read Chris Floyd’s every word like the good boys and girls that you are, I’ll just remind you of the highest highlights that flowed Tuesday from Floyd’s acerbic keyboard.
…the intense, near-pathological self-regard in the speech was not Obama’s alone, of course; we must do him the credit of acknowledging that in this regard, at least, he was what we so often proclaim our leaders to be: the embodiment of the nation. His soaring proclamation of American exceptionalism, in a setting supposedly devoted to universal principles of peace, was breathtaking in its chutzpah—but entirely in keeping with the feelings of the vast majority of his countrymen, and the ruling elite above all.
[...]
Here is chutzpah—and hubris—raised to the level of the sublime. Obama has taken the words he used to instigate the certain death of thousands of human beings and the acceleration of hatred, extremism, chaos and brutal corruption around the world—and offered them as justification for the hideous, unabashedly Orwellian doctrine at the core of his speech: War is Peace. In this perverse inversion of values, Obama, as a warmaker, is actually a peacemaker, you see—and thus a legitimate heir to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who was evoked at several points in the speech.And here we come to what was for me the most revolting part of the speech. And perhaps the most significant too. All the cant about America’s altruism and “enlightened self-interest” in killing millions of people—Indochina was one of many convenient blank spots in Obama’s historical survey—for the sake of all the children of the world (red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in our sight) was just par for the rhetorical course. It was nothing that had not been said many times before, including the references—so lauded by Obama’s liberal apologists—to those inadvertent “mistakes” America seems to keep making; out of a surfeit of good intentions, no doubt. But I don’t think an American president has so openly and directly traduced the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi before. (And to do it while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, no less! Oh, that sublime brass….)
[...]
In any case, aside from the particulars of any real situation or hypothetical scenario, the speech is a glaring example of Obama’s deep-seated (and perhaps unconscious) contempt for the path of peace, and its practitioners. It is also a manifestation of his own inferno, of his desperate need to justify—to himself and to the world—his free, deliberate choice to follow the blood-choked “path of action” as the commander-in-chief of a bloated, brutal war machine.No one forced any of these decisions—or these specious, obscene justifications—on Obama or Blair. It is their own narcissism—their own lust for power, and their love for the system that gave them that power—has covered them with the blood and shame that now taint their every word and deed.
I skipped a lot of commentary on the specifics of his speech, and there is some great stuff (one of the primary focuses of the essay, actually) on the utility and success of non-violent resistance to bloodthirsty war machines and terrorists alike.
Monopolistic law-enforcement systems are a racket
December 16, 2009 – 2:55 am by JohnMy friend got a new car, a white Subaru Legacy, to replace his old white Subaru Legacy. Apparently, Michigan law lets you transfer your old license plates to your new car in some (all?) situations, so he just took his license plate off of his old Legacy and put it on his new one. Maybe this is allowed in many sates, but it surprised me.
A few days later, he was driving along doing nothing wrong, when a cop pulled him over and asked him where he got that license plate. He said, “The Secretary of State’s office.” (That’s Michigan’s stupid term for the DMV.) The cop asked him if he was trying to be a smart-ass or if he was being serious. Of course he was being serious. The reason the cop was asking, you see, is that this plate was registered to a much older car, and his was obviously very new. He asked him how this came to be. My friend told him the truth, that he simply had it transferred to his new car, and some paper or computer records must not have gotten changed yet.
So, naturally, the cop did what any officer of the law and protector of the people would do: He wrote him a ticket for running a red light, which my friend most definitely hadn’t done. He even had a friend in the passenger seat who could vouch for that with 100% certainty. As my friend pointed out to me while telling this story, the cop didn’t pull over the car that was behind my friend in the other lane and also drove right through the (green) light.
The reason, I suspect, that this clown-suited thug invented a bogus charge on the spot was because he was desperate for ticket revenue, since their tax revenue probably doesn’t cover all their expenses, and, possibly, he might have figured he got caught running my friend’s license plate through their police database, which shouldn’t be done unless there is a prior reason for doing so, meaning he needed a legitimate pretense for pulling my friend over, which function was filled by the red-light violation.
The ticket was for well over $100. I don’t remember the amount, but it is obviously completely irrelevant, and I’ll keep it in the mid-$100s to avoid unnecessarily trumping up the story. Naturally, my friend wanted to contest this ticket and explain to the judge that the officer had obviously made an “honest mistake” so that the ticket would just be thrown out and my friend could lose a morning of his life and go through a lot of hassle in exchange for keeping a small sum of his own money.
However, the judge told him that for some reason or another, possibly due to the nature of the violation or possibly because it was just his word versus that of the barbaric, primitive, parasitic waste of carbon and oxygen who issued the ticket, he couldn’t simply throw the ticket out or do anything else that would result in him not owing the money to the city, save filing an official appeal with the local DA’s office (or whomever). During the hearing, the clown-suited gangster submitted the bald-faced lie that he clearly remembered my friend running the red light and that that was the one and only reason he pulled him over.
My friend met with some attorney or attorney’s assistant and found out that to file an appeal itself would cost more than the ticket was for. This fee was non-refundable, win or lose.
So there you have it, folks. The government of the City of Ann Arbor is officially, proudly, patently, shamelessly a racket, and very little more. All the evidence I’ve ever encountered points to the “transfer theory of government” explaining, at least in large part, the foundation and continuation of every government in the history of mankind. The transfer theory of government, as, for example, Bruce Benson writes in The Enterprise of Law, posits that governments are formed primarily to take money, property, and other forms of wealth from one class of people (the citizens) to give it to another (the people who run the government).
In the future, just so you know: clown-suited thugs are apt to run your license plate in their database if they ever get a free second or two, in order to see if there’s any “crime” they can possibly pull you over for.
The auto bailout money will not be repaid
December 15, 2009 – 7:31 pm by JohnAnd there will be more of it. Probably multiple times. Until the automotive industry is a de facto arm of the Imperial Federal Government. If you think this is not an explicit goal of the Obama regime, leave your address in the comments so I can mail you a tall, conical hat.
As David Z. predicted a year ago and I predicted a couple times in the past year, the bailout money taken/inflated from the American public and given to Chrysler and GM will not be repaid. “Oh, but it’s not a bailout; it’s a LOAN!” Eat crow, you accessories to robbery.
But, at least we only lost $30 billion in this venture instead of the possible maximum of $44 billion.
The $30 billion isn’t the end of it because this is the way Obamanomics works. It’s the same way Bushonomics and every other socialist, dirigiste economy works: the rich and well-connected benefit at the expense of the common people, who don’t get bailouts and are impoverished by inflation.
Hat tip: David Z. at …no third solution
Robert Fisk: Obama is a disaster
December 15, 2009 – 1:25 am by JohnBritish Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk says Obama’s foreign policy is a disaster potentially worse than Bush’s, and that it is incomprehensible why Obama has taken on the Afghan war with such enthusiasm. I think it’s safe to say that the libertarian community in general predicted his continuation of neoconservative, interventionist foreign policy. For instance, in January I wrote,
…my impression is that he plans to increase American military presence in Afghanistan while doing nothing close to giving up or withdrawing in Iraq. This is a terrible foreign policy scarcely different from the neoconservative one. I hardly see how he could expect to gain or maintain much power in our Imperial Federal Government without those positions, though. I think there will be a significant American military presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq on the last day of Obama’s presidency, as will there be in most other countries where the Imperial Federal Government has military bases and personnel. I won’t be surprised if the numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan are almost as high as they are today.
I stand by those predictions, as Robert Fisk might.
Amanda Knox: guilty…or is she?
December 7, 2009 – 5:06 pm by JohnI was very intrigued by this short video featuring an Italian lawyer, who has practiced in the U.S. and in Italy, explaining the differences between criminal trials (specifically, the judges and juries) in the two countries. He was being interviewed in the context of the conviction of Amanda Knox, the University of Washington student who was found guilty of the murder of another study-abroad student, Meredith Kercher.
Since the computer programmers a CNN’s iReport.com are apparently as dense as everyone else employed by CNN, their videos cannot be embedded with the autoplay feature turned off (at least, by any means I know of), so here is the page with the video on it. Quoth the unnamed Italian lawyer:
In Italy we don’t have a jury system, like in the U.S…. You don’t have only laypeople that decide. You have a pool of two professional judges and six laypeople, and they sit together, they decide together… There’s always a risk that if one of the two professional judges thinks that the criminal defendant is guilty…it’s natural that she or he might have a lot of clout over the jurors.
[...]
The public prosecutors, together with judges, are not elected by the people, nor are they appointed by the political power, but they…have a law degree…they pass an exam. They’re only accountable to…a body formed by public prosecutors from everywhere in Italy. … There is not real accountability for magistrates in Italy. It’s a big problem. It’s probably one of the most serious problems that the Italian justice system has because when you have power, you must be accountable.
[...]
If we were in the U.S., who would decide about the admissibility of the DNA evidence? The judge. The jury would know nothing [about evidence that was thrown out]. It Italy, the judge decides on the admissibility of the DNA, but then that same judge also decides on the verdict. So, there’s something wrong about it.
He also explains that both the defense and the prosecution can appeal a verdict; in other words, there is no double-jeopardy protection in Italy.
Despite these procedural and technical differences, one similarity should stand out between the English common-law/American systems and the Italian system: the State arrogates to itself a geographic monopoly over criminal investigation, pursuit, prosecution, and punishment. The prosecutors and judges are not accountable to the people because the people have little to no say in the justice systems they are subjected to or the people who “represent” them.
Note this Italian attorney’s lament that juror-judges (and prosecutors) have power but are not accountable to the citizenry. This is what Albert Jay Nock opened his magnum opus Our Enemy, the State with: in any society there is only a certain amount of power, or influence, or ability to carry out your wishes, and this power, unfortunately, is divided between the State and its subjects. The more power the State has, the less its subjects necessarily have. Every single little thing the State is allowed to do takes from the people a proportional amount of ability to achieve their ends.
I am an outspoken opponent of juror conscription and proponent of professional jurors, just as we have professional lawyers and judges and janitors and teachers. It is clear from the (supposed) corruption and unaccountability in the Italian justice system that professional, non-conscripted jurors do not constitute the whole of the solution to corrupt, overzealous prosecutors and judges who think a good verdict is the verdict the State wants and that the verdict the State wants is “guilty.” The most important part of the solution to the problems that every criminal-justice system faces is to subject every part of it to the free market and to give the people more control over their legal protection.
Finally, the interviewer in this video points out the character assassination of Amanda Knox that the Italian mass media carried out. They labeled her a “sex predator,” a “little female devil,” and the “dark lady of Seattle.” This should make it clear that prosecutors and judges (and their easily influenced jurors) are not the only ones who seek the glorification of the State with convictions for everyone. The sycophants in the media and a large proportion of the populace also react to such criminal cases in sensational ways. Without any hyperbole, this is somewhat reminiscent of the Roman arenas with their gladiator battles. The root of the problem is not the State per se but rather Statism. Most of the world is guilty of Statism, and it will take a long and gradual shift in our core beliefs to effect the types of societal changes that are really necessary to eliminate not only the governments that inflict so many injustices upon people but the mindset that permits them to do so. I hope that this website plays some small, positive role in promoting those changes.
Get it straight: the military does not protect our lives or our freedoms
November 11, 2009 – 11:50 pm by JohnWar is the health of the State.
—Randolph Bourne
Today is Veterans’ Day, formerly called Armistice Day. But, our exalted warmongering Statolatrist congressmen and senators and presidents couldn’t have a holiday that celebrated the end of a colossal State endeavor, so in 1954 they renamed it Veterans’ Day.
The attention paid to Veterans’ Day and the misconceptions this holiday brings forth have annoyed me to the point of writing a short post about such misguided military-worship. ESPN is heavy into this spirit, broadcasting College Gameday from the site of the irrelevant Navy–Air Force game last Saturday and SportsCenter live from West Point Academy this morning. For the last week I’ve heard a seemingly constant stream of TV and radio commercials and discussions and interviews in which someone “salutes our troops” or thanks them for “protecting our freedoms” or says “they allow us to live the lives we do.”
Um, how? Who steals our money, kidnaps and imprisons us for harming no one, cripples businesses, dumbs down schools, devalues our currency, imprisons us for trying to use another one, violates our right to control our own bodies, outlaws self-defense, destroys families, rigs the court system to favor convictions and plea bargains over acquittals, deliberately and systematically enriches the powerful and well-connected at the expense of the common man, outlaws private protection and arbitration systems, and, oh, yeah, inspires hatred and terrorism across the globe? The Imperial Federal Government!
The military is not a sector of the market nor an extension of the populace; it is an arm of the State. It does what politicians and generals want it to. It is not possible for the military’s objectives to be in line with those of the public because the military wants what the State wants, and what the State wants is in direct opposition to what the people want. If this is not true, then why must the State institute a coercive monopoly and murder anyone who defies it?
The reality is that the exploits of the military result in less freedom for us because in every State in mankind’s history, military interests were used as justifications for expansions of State power; these powers, by their very nature, reduce the overall freedom of the State’s subjects. Second, the American military does not protect anyone’s lives but rather does quite the opposite. Noble though the intentions of the individual soldiers may be, the military endangers non-aggressing bystanders in foreign countries directly by its attacks on other people and indirectly by inspiring more military/insurgent activity; the Department of Defense kills thousands of soldiers and puts thousands more in danger with its military adventurism; and it endangers Americans by inspiring terrorism on our own soil. (Mark my words: America’s war on terra will bring suicide-bombing to the streets of American cities as exists in Israel and Iraq.) Lastly, the Department of Defense flat-out wastes literally hundreds of billions of dollars per year; this does immense harm to our economic and financial well-being, so, no, those servicemen and -women decidedly do not “allow us to live the lives that we do.”
A standard response might go like, “Well, yeah, but it could be even worse if a foreign power took over because our military didn’t protect us.” Not only is this not true for the United States, it has been true for very few countries in the history of the world. Probably some European countries in WWII, which was a direct result of the USA’s entry into WWI. Claiming a strong (enough) military is necessary to protect us against potentially terrible conquerors is typical Statist thinking: solve one problem caused by the State with more Statism: States exist solely to take power and money away from their subjects, so you want to strengthen the “defensive” arm of our State to protect us against other ones?
Sure, there could be a despotic foreign power that threatened the lives and freedoms of people living in North America, as other countries have been threatened occasionally throughout history. But the only thing that threatens to take the lives and freedoms of Americans today is the Imperial Federal Government. The military and all its brave soldiers, who go through a hell of a lot more hardship than I probably ever will, does not act in the interests of the American people and is used by politicians to justify further encroachments of our liberty.
Because in a free society, people would attack each other without provocation or fear of punishment from a higher legal authority
November 4, 2009 – 3:13 am by JohnA man returns home from drinking one night to find part of his house on fire. He warns everyone, wakes them up, helps them outside, then goes back inside to rescue someone who, he had just learned, was asleep upstairs. Do the police officers at the end of the driveway (A) Refuse to help him do anything, (B) Tackle and restrain him after he’s helped everyone out of the house, which is now burning down, (C) Tase him, (D) Arrest him for no apparent charge other than resisting arrest, (E) Confine him to a police car and police station, preventing him from receiving medical treatment for his first- and second-degree burns, or (F) All of the above?
Since I like directing this blag at Statists as much as at other libertarians, I’ll give some advice to the former group: Stop trying to convince yourselves that monopolistic law-enforcement entities are moral, just, or practical, and have the sense to end this embarrassing charade of pretending that you support monopolistic law-enforcement systems because they protect people’s rights or lives or property better than free-market systems in a libertarian society could. When you look deep down, you know that doesn’t make any sense, and you realize it’s foolish and absurd to suppose that people who are attracted to positions of authority and power would rarely abuse that power when they themselves hold the highest, ultimate legal authority in a particular region.
Could you imagine that, if it weren’t tragically true already?! A group of clown-suited thugs tases, arrests, and denies medical treatment to someone who probably hasn’t committed any offenses and certainly not any serious ones, and the only body to which the victim has recourse is the very one that employs those aggressors and imposes the laws that prevent him from seeking third-party arbitration! In fact, to even demand arbitration by a disinterested third party would automatically incur even more penalties on top of his original “crimes”! This is how the State wants it. This is by design; it’s how the holders of power want society to function. A monopolistic legislation, enforcement, and punishment system could not work any other way. Put simply, this type of incident is not a bug, it is a feature.
When competition is outlawed, the incentive to do good disappears, and punishment for doing bad is nearly impossible. The importance of this simple competitive mechanism in making the free market superior to socialism cannot be overstated. A libertarian society’s assortment of insurance, protection, investigation, pursuit, and arbitration systems provided on the free market would necessarily protect individual rights better and punish malfeasance more harshly, swiftly, and reliably than any monopolistic-Statist system could. If you disagree with this, please read The Enterprise of Law by Bruce Benson and The Market for Justice by the Tannehills and then get back to me. Please don’t be so stupid as to suggest Statist claptrap for me to read, because I already experience the reality of your socialist hellhole every day.
IP absurdities, part 23,984
October 30, 2009 – 6:43 pm by John“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” —Voltaire
Comic of the day
October 30, 2009 – 4:38 pm by JohnThis is three years old, but it is today’s comic in my Dilbert page-a-day calendar. It’s so appropriate for the real world of internet debating in general and political debates in particular.
Fish in a barrel 5
October 21, 2009 – 8:26 pm by JohnA Texas jury decided to sentence a murderer to death after consulting their Bibles during deliberation. People who lack a solid grasp of important socio-political issues (Statists) will use this revelation to distract from the real issue. The issue they will harp on is whether this represents some violation of the separation between religion and the State. It does not. The issue is irrelevant anyway. The more important fact is that no government has any authority to decide whether to take a person’s life, regardless of the crimes he really has committed. I don’t know how a freed Texas would handle murderers, and I don’t know what the best way to handle them would be, but a State that lacks all legitimacy and validity to begin with certainly has no prerogative to decide a man’s fate.
Sign of the times, I suppose: there’s a new gold rush in Californee. Sorry to burst your bubbles, guys, but Gus Chiggins already beat you to it.
The founder of the airline passenger advocacy group FlyersRights.org had her computer and email account hacked by Delta Airlines. How despicable. A woman wants to prevent airlines from endangering people’s health by imprisoning them on cramped airplanes for hours on end, so instead of getting off of their fat, lazy asses to serve their fucking customers for a change, Delta instead resorts to hacking into her account to…to what? Extort her? Blackmail her? Scare her? Currently I am presuming Delta guilty until proven innocent. As a reminder, there is no way in hell most of the large airlines would exist in their current form without State interference on their behalf. Corporate-State socialism FAIL.
The Canadian copyright-advocacy group Access Copyright wants the Canadian government to ban free format-shifting and time-shifting. As far as I can tell, format-shifting means burning, ripping, or copying anything from one location, medium, or file type to another, and time-shifting means fast-forwarding through commercials with your DVR. This group wants to threaten murder against people for format-shifting or time-shifting without paying for permission to do so. As Voltaire said, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”
Absent from most commentary on the strength of the American (and world) economy and especially from the reassurances that the American economy is recovering is an analysis of whether the trends that harmed the economy in the first place are continuing or ceasing. They are continuing, says Peter Schiff, and it’s only making the inevitable correction (depression) worse.
Target gave in to political-correctness hysteria and agreed to stop selling a pair of “illegal alien” Halloween costumes which consisted of a green extraterrestrial alien mask and an orange prison jumpsuit with “illegal alien” stamped on the front. If Target had any sense, guts, or character, it would have taken advantage of the free publicity and stood up to these crybabies. It was a nice surprise to read that several other stores have not and will not give in to the political correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade. The costume was a complete non-issue, until some PC-obsessed morans made it into one. It’s a hilarious pun! Now I have a good Halloween costume idea for the future!
The latest from the “It IS happening here” files: Cops take DNA sample from boy for throwing ketchup at McDonald’s. (Actually, it’s happening there, as it’s the UK, but that doesn’t make it any better.)
Quote of the day
October 18, 2009 – 3:47 pm by John“Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization’s history.”
—Steve Wynn, Fox News Sunday, October 11, 2009
Quote of the day
October 16, 2009 – 12:46 am by JohnCharles Johnson, October 14, 2009:
If you want a recipe for real disgust with the prevailing political establishment, and a real opening for radical critique, one of the things that has to happen is that dissidents need to begin to see that even the longed-for best-case scenario can’t possibly deliver what they want, because what they were promised just won’t fit through the political channels that they had put their hope in. An obvious tool like George W. Bush inspires a lot of fear and loathing; but he also inspires a lot of faith in the myth that if only someone who wasn’t such an obvious tool were in power, these problems would all get sorted out right quick. But when you have a ballyhooed reformer holding the reins of power, over-promising and under-delivering—and when it becomes increasingly clear that politics as usual will keep on keeping on—that’s often when you begin to see a real chance for a crack-up.
Excellent.
Fish in a barrel 4
October 14, 2009 – 8:44 pm by JohnSecretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner says Americans are just going to have to get used to saving more of their money. This is after his and Helicopter Ben’s policies have deliberately inflated the money supply and induced people to spend more money on cars, houses, and their credit cards. Unbelievable. (HT: Bob Murphy)
When my liberal-Democrat friends are wary and skeptical of Barack Obama’s being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, then you know it was ill-advised. As one of the Regular Guys on Atlanta’s Rock 100.5 said Friday, why not nominate Tommy Hanson for the Hall of Fame? Thomas DiLorenzo was right on the money:
So Obama joins Woodrow Wilson in the pantheon of American presidents who have won the Nobel Peace Prize (Wilson won it in 1919). I learned this morning that nominations for the prize had to be in by Feb. 20, about one month after Obama was inaugurated. That means that the prize went for his rhetoric during the campaign, not anything he could have actually accomplished. As I recall, his two most memorable foreign policy pronouncements during the campaign were 1) advocating that the U.S. bomb Pakistan; and 2) escalating the war in Afghanistan. He did order the murder of some people in Pakistan by bombardment shortly after taking office. I’m still surprised, though, that he won the prize after killing so few people. Usually, one must be a major league murderer like a Wilson or a Teddy Roosevelt to win such a prize.
Senator John Ensign (R-Nev.) received confirmation from Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold that under the current Senate version of the Obamacare bill, Americans would be penalized with jail time for failing to buy health insurance. Actually, as with all State mandates, the penalty is always death. (HT: David Z.’s Twitter feed on his web page)
A 6-year-old was suspended from his Delaware government school because he was so excited about being a new Cub Scout that he brought one of his new tools to school, a combination knife-fork-spoon-bottle-opener, and used it to eat his lunch. To bring this story up is to point out its stupidity. A 45-day reassignment to an “alternative school” for not hurting or threatening anyone is the latest of a million examples of “zero-tolerance” implying zero thought. Simply taking the tool away for the day and explaining that it could be dangerous, if not in his hands then in someone else’s, would have been an appropriate response. Tell his parents he can’t bring it again. Luckily his 45-day punishment was overturned by the school board in favor of a 3-day suspension. His mother, ignorantly, says she just wants to get her child back into this government indoctrination center as soon as possible. I liked one radio broadcaster’s take on this the most. He said the really alarming part about this and all the other government-school fiascoes you hear about is that our society is losing the type of person who will take a stand and say, “No, this is wrong, the literal interpretation of this zero-tolerance policy is ludicrous, and I will get fired before I punish this child for harming and threatening no one.” Government-school administrators are, by and large, incredibly dense, passionless underachievers who lack common sense or a commitment to any principles to ground their lives in.
Hmm, somehow Barack Obama’s socialized-medicine message sounds better when it’s this melodic.
Free-market medicine link of the week
October 11, 2009 – 11:17 pm by JohnHealth Care: A Future Free-Market Alternative by Ross Levatter, published in the October 2009 issue of The Freeman. It is a relatively detailed description of Dr. Levatter’s vision of the way the purchase and provision of health care would work in a free society: the way all other aspects of a free market would work. A lot of it is common sense and the application of simple economic trends and truths to this sector of the economy that is on the verge of being nationalized. One other thing that makes it so good is the links to related articles at the top of the page. Check those out for an entire morning or afternoon of libertarian-reading goodness.
An “up-or-down vote on health care”?!
October 10, 2009 – 12:55 pm by JohnSadly, we have yet another example of liberal short-sightedness and overall inability to understand the key part of an issue: this petition that the political action committee Progressive Change Campaign Committee is going to submit to Harry Reid. It reads, “Any Democratic senators who support a Republican attempt to block a vote on health care reform should be stripped of their leadership titles. Americans deserve a clean up-or-down vote on health care.”
An “up-or-down vote on health care”?! You want the Congress and the President to make a single, sweeping, incontestable, one-size-fits-all decision on a multi-trillion-dollar endeavor that will affect the financial and medical well-being of nearly every single living American and future Americans for generations to come? You think an entire industry that each and every one of us must make decisions about and interact with on a monthly or yearly basis should be reduced to an “up-or-down vote” by a few hundred politicians? You fought and argued and marched and pleaded against the unilateral, power-grabbing, hegemonic abuses of the previous corrupt Republican regime, and now you are urging the Democrats in power to make a similar, unilateral and incontestable decision that every single American must live under and deal with regardless of whether they wanted it? It is unilateral because it entails a single government issuing edicts and a single president signing bills that govern everyone else’s life. THAT IS THE PROBLEM! YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM! TAKING POWER FROM THE PUBLIC AND GIVING IT TO A FEW POLITICIANS IS THE PROBLEM WITH OUR WORLD! Why don’t you stupid liberal Democrats get a clue about something for once?
Anarchist Elliot Madison wrongfully arrested, robbed
October 6, 2009 – 6:46 pm by JohnIn a continuation of law-enforcement agencies’ general disdain for and dismissal of our civil liberties, Elliot Madison, a self-described anarchist, was arrested for using Twitter and a police scanner to help G20 protesters coordinate their efforts and avoid police officers.
The charges on which he was held don’t indicate any dangerous or harmful behavior, unless you consider thumbing your nose at the State and using perfectly legal technology to evade officers whose goal is to disrupt your rightful demonstrations harmful. I guess that’s the problem with the police who arrested him.
Madison had been found using a police scanner and Twitter to help numerous protesters avoid police during the Group of 20 summit and has now been charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime.
Madison was found in a hotel room by Pennsylvania State Police on September 24, armed with police scanners and computers so that he could disperse critical information to protesters. According to the FBI, Madison was “directing others, specifically protesters of the G-20 summit, in order to avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse.”
Those charges are totally bogus and remind me of the trumped-up charges that prosecutors use to railroad their innocent victims (e.g., “honest services fraud”) or to add to real criminal charges (e.g., conspiracy to do something-or-other, racketeering, money laundering).
The facts are that the police and FBI agents are the aggressors in this story and that Madison and his confederates are being victimized for attempting to avoid this aggression. The first charge, hindering apprehension or prosecution, refers to the police’s attempts to disperse and arrest the protesters, which strikes me as a clear violation of the First Amendment and our rights to free speech, association, and assembly that the First Amendment is based on. The fact that the demonstrators passively asserted these rights by communicating with each other and evading the police’s aggression, while the police responded not with peacefulness but with further aggression, highlights the distinction between the aggressors and the victims quite clearly.
The second and third charges, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime, lose all meaning when the absence of criminality in the first charge is understood. They are also the type of fabricated charges that only serve the purpose of getting more jail time or larger fines for the State’s victims. “Criminal use of a communication facility”? What was the crime? Charge him with the crime itself, not the use of a gadget or a medium that are perfectly legal! If he used them to harm someone, charge him with harming someone! “Possession of instruments of crime”? Why are they instruments of crime? Instruments themselves other than weapons of mass destruction cannot be dangerous or harmful; possessing some instrument cannot harm others. If he used the instruments to harm people, charge him with harming people!
What was even more appalling was the raid of his apartment and confiscation of his belongings, neither of which is justified by his actions or by the crimes he was charged with.
No matter: the FBI followed up on Madison’s arrest by searching his home late last week for evidence of other violations, such as rioting laws and whatever else they could dig up. Not only did investigators seize his computers, they also took books, clothing, gas masks, and apparently a photo of Lenin. As a self-described anarchist, Madison’s affiliations have undoubtedly contributed to police opinion of him and his activities, no matter how benign.
How fascist, how disdainful of civil liberties, how intolerant of dissent, how…neoconservative. Congratulations, Obama regime. You’re upholding the status quo about as well as any civil libertarians expected you to.
As mentioned in the above paragraph, we undoubtedly have Statists in and out of the media and law enforcement branding Elliot Madison as their archetypal “anarchist” who just wants chaos and disruption and to bring down whatever there is to bring down. Just as there are myriad types of Statists, there are myriad types of anarchists and most of us want everyone’s individual rights and moral equality to be held sacrosanct. This ideology precludes the existence of a monopolistic State because Statism puts some people in power over others, a power no one has by nature or by merit, a power to govern, regulate, confiscate, and threaten the person, liberty, and property of others.
This is what many people objected to regarding the G20 summit, and probably many actual protesters on the streets of Pittsburgh as well. Details are sparse on the specific policies and positions pushed by the protesters, but the general message they conveyed is that they wanted more jobs, affordable health care, and an end to American military interventionism in the Middle East.
I can’t speak for the merits of any individual group or its message, even the generally anarchist ones, but I know what a good libertarian denunciation of the G20 economic summit sounds like. At least the anarchists, if they deserve their categorization, couldn’t be accused of advocating government provision of jobs and affordable health care. Given Madison’s supposed possession of a photograph of Vladimir Lenin, his economic views and preferred social order over the American State might not jibe with mine very much, but don’t misinterpret my defense of his civil liberties for an agreement with his and every other anarchist agenda out there. His economic philosophy and adoration of Lenin are not relevant; his freedom to Twitter all he wants and help people march away from police officers are, and this is what has been violated by the Pennsylvania state police and Obama’s FBI. They are the aggressors and Elliot Madison is their victim.
Fish in a barrel 3
September 30, 2009 – 10:36 pm by JohnNate Anderson of Ars Technica wrote,
Licensed spectrum came into being for a reason. In the early days of radio, unlicensed radio stations in urban areas regularly got into “power wars” with rival stations, leading to plenty of static. Compared to this free-for-all, the licensing of radio stations in the US, and then the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, helped to solve such problems.
Actually, very little of that paragraph has even the ring of truth. As B.K. Marcus and Timoguapo van Swanson have detailed, the homesteading principle based on libertarian property-rights theory and common-law tradition was perfectly capable of resolving bandwidth disputes and remains the best way to resolve them. The Federal Communications Commission served the interests of wealthy, politically connected dinosaurs who didn’t want to keep up with new types of competition, and it continues to serve the interests of large, established companies at the expense of small businesses and consumers today.
David Z. at No Third Solution and many other blaggers have expressed their due outrage at the treatment of the Michigan woman who was threatened with fines and possibly jail time for looking after neighbors’ children while they waited for the school bus. I have nothing to add to this sorry affair except these brief things: 1. This is an expected outcome of Statism; this is not a bug but a feature. 2. Crap like this is probably not as rare as Statolatrists would have us believe. 3. I just want to log this in my long list of examples of State-created divisiveness, of the destruction of voluntary cooperation and community by monopolistic government.
Slate magazine ran a series of articles about the dentistry industry (I bet you never realized those two words rhymed before…me, neither), including this one about why dentistry costs so much. Unsurprisingly, since it appeared in Slate, it is devoid of any serious economic analysis. The only two explanations I could glean from the article were: because government doesn’t pay for it and because other people don’t pay for it. The former would be because of a lack of socialization by our benighted leaders, and the latter because of the way dental insurance operates. Now, while an analysis of dental insurance in America could be of interest and could produce not only suggestions as to how to bring dental costs down but also provide guidance for our medical insurance industry, we get none of that. As far as I know, any actual explanation of the high costs of dentistry must include State-mandated certification (barriers to entry), regulations that prohibit less-educated and therefore lower-paid dental technicians from operating a simple dental-cleaning business (reduced competition), and the fact that for some reason, people purchase insurance for things that are relatively cheap, routine, and totally expected! This increases costs in the same way as it does for medical care!
My friend’s Facebook status currently says, “is definitely a nerd and looking forward to hearing Paul Krugman speak on Friday.” Paul Krugman is a dolt. Now that I’m unemployed, looking to move to Virginia to get in-state residency status to apply to George Mason University and become an economist, I have made this a solid, official, un-renegable goal: I will write a book titled Paul Krugman is a Dolt, it will be published, and it will receive wide acclaim.
It must be embarrassing to be a Statist writing about economics these days. Thomas Woods quotes one Harold Meyerson, who shared the extent of his ignorance with us in his recent Washington Post column. This is gold, Jerry, GOLD!
The problem with contemporary economics, at least with the purer strain of free-market economics associated with the University of Chicago [sic], is not simply that it failed to predict the near-collapse of the world financial system last year. The problem is that it believed such a collapse could not happen, that all risk could be quantified by mathematical models and that these quantifications could help us correctly price just about everything.
[...]
[Economists told us] there really was no need to study such things as bubbles, which only a handful of skeptics and hopelessly retro Keynesians even considered possible. Under mainstream economic theory, which held that everything was correctly priced, bubbles simply couldn’t exist.The one economist who has emerged from the current troubles with his reputation not only intact but enhanced is, of course, Keynes.
Well, honestly, in the Austro-libertarian’s mind, yes, Keynes’s reputation is not only still intact, it has been augmented as never before.
Obama: More government school is the answer!
September 27, 2009 – 9:37 pm by JohnPerhaps you’ve heard that the Savior of America and his Secretary of Education are proposing rules (edicts backed with explicit threats of murder) that would add hours to the school day and days to the school year. This is so typical of the simple-minded Statism that pervades Washington that I’m kind of surprised it wasn’t proposed sooner. When these parasites see any problem in the world, they interpret it as an opportunity to add more government to everyone’s life and expand their own power and influence.
They are forever oblivious to the harm the State does to any child’s education, so they think simply requiring children to receive more of it will make them better-educated. This is similar to the imposition of new taxes to pay for things the people don’t want and the enforcement of new regulations to fix economic problems that the government caused in the first place. More rules, more requirements, more bureaucracy, more taxation, more coercion.
Children are subjected to an alarming amount of Statolatrist propaganda from the very earliest stages of schooling, which is proudly lauded by Obama maniacs but which detracts from the quality of their education. Statolatry itself doesn’t make people worse at math, reading, or writing, but it has obviously facilitated the continuing, government-mandated decline in those basic areas of education. The more people who are brainwashed into the peculiar belief that the State should educate people, the more people who will support its idiotic, bureaucratic impediments to good education. And it doesn’t matter how well Americans can do calculus, critique literature, or write eloquent presidential speeches; if they support the absurd socialist agenda that Obama is trying to force upon his subjects, they are doing more harm than good—more harm than they could ever do if they were ignorant, stupid, and not a cheerleader for the Almighty State.
I imagine most Obama maniacs will support these proposals because they are coming from our Savior himself but also because they love the State and anything that expands it. But the most important issue here is not the content of the proposals themselves; it’s the fact that they will be coming from a very few people who will force their ideas on the entire nation. The fact that any apparatus or infrastructure exists that would allow for a single edict to govern that many people’s lives is of primary importance—obviously the content of its edicts will serve only to enhance and enlarge it, so the existence of the Department of Education and the power given to a single president over so many people’s schooling should alarm everyone, with condemnation of the specific proposals following as a corollary. It will not alarm most leftists. They vehemently opposed No Child Left Behind because George W. Bush signed it into law, and then later they found rationales (all valid ones, I surmise) to support their knee-jerk reaction; they will undoubtedly support Obama and his Education Department’s proposals because they come from Obama, and then later they will find rationales to justify their continued support despite clear evidence that they are biased tools.
Notice my use of the term “school year” in the first paragraph. Does it bother you that we gloss over the singular, all-encompassing term “school year” as commonplace and obvious in meaning? There should be no “school year”! There should be no bureaucracy or secretary or president who decides what the school year is! That’s the problem: the unilateral power of the State to define the “school year” and do all the other things it does under the pretense of educating children!
If people want some solutions to the deficiencies in schooling, particularly class time, that children are given, they should look to the absence of family, community, and individual responsibility in children’s education. These are direct and predictable consequences of the State’s involvement in anything. I am not surprised that Obama’s proposals will put even more of the children’s time under the purview of governments and necessarily less in the company of family members—people who should (and would, in a free society) be more influential in their education. Children should be playing and exercising more, spending more time learning from their parents, more time with their siblings, more time in extracurricular music or sports lessons, more time learning how to make their own decisions, and less time in the vicinity of bureaucrats with education degrees.
The idea that more government schooling will educate children better smacks of the dim-witted Statism that also led people to advocate throwing more and more money at failing schools. Here are four easy solutions to America’s educational shortcomings: 1. Eliminate the monopolistic Department of Education (and the ability of any criminal, elected or unelected, in the federal government to make any decisions about any child’s education but his own). 2. Abolish all taxes everywhere that in any way fund any public school or public-education-related endeavor. 3. Abolish all laws that are in any way related to home-schooling. 4. Remove all restrictions, regulations, and barriers to entry for private schools.
Quote of the day
September 17, 2009 – 10:48 am by John“If the achievement of a free society is to require that a million bleeding heads of torturing tyrants, damnable dictators, pandering politicians, sadistic generals, privileged policemen, criminal soldiers and psychotic, irresponsible “servants” be hoisted on pikes to surround the palisades of the free cities, count me in for the headsman’s role, for I will not dwell in my ice-cream-and-flying-ponies fantasies so long as to preclude my own action toward the attainment thereof.”
—Mike Gogulski
Fish in a barrel 2
September 17, 2009 – 10:30 am by JohnCalifornia tax officials: legal pot would bring $1.4B. No, you still don’t quite seem to get it. If it is TAXED and REGULATED, both of which are restrictions or extortions backed with explicit threats of murder, then by definition it is NOT LEGAL. You mean, “Legal except only in the ways and quantities we specify, otherwise you’ll be harassed, threatened, beaten, kidnapped, enslaved, and/or murdered.” Decriminalization gives people actual legal freedom to do something peacefully without fear of punishment; legalization shifts the reason for punishment from one concocted “crime” to another.
Speaking of insatiable parasites, the government of Hawaii will now tax its residents on gross gambling income rather than net gambling income.
A Hawai’i resident who wins $10,000 in a year, for example, and loses $9,000 in the same year used to be taxed only on the $1,000 in net winnings. Under the new law, that resident would be taxed on the full $10,000 in winnings.
I imagine several other states already have similar laws, but it’s no coincidence that at least one state is enacting such a tax during the Second Great Depression. Many companies offer better deals to customers in an attempt to maintain revenues (…and, unfortunately, they also fire a lot of people to cut costs) to stay afloat. The first resort of governments is to take whatever they can from their captives. It is sad to read comments about this and other stories from people who probably claim to love freedom and justice and all those other things that, they’d say, made America great, but then when it gets down to specifics they bend over backwards to support anything and everything that helps the State at the obvious expense of its subjects.
It doesn’t matter that this is unenforceable. The intent and the attitude of these parasites in government is what should really boil your blood.
Y’see, gals, if you follow sports and know a little bit about them, then you can sail right through the interrogation about your cocaine-filled golf clubs without arousing any suspicion. Such efforts to traffic drugs would obviously be unnecessary if the drugs were legal, which would be better for everyone in society because their sale, distribution, and use would be safer and our civil liberties wouldn’t be the collateral damage of the War on Drugs.
A Maryland high-school softball coach was fired after parents drank beers that they brought to an end-of-the-year team party. Because underage high-schoolers were present, observing their parents imbibing alcohol. At the coach’s private residence. A firing over this probably wouldn’t happen in a free society. Hysterical teetotaling anti-alcohol crusaders are about as wretched as they come. Without a doubt, they are more to blame for society’s alcohol-related problems, such as underage binge-drinking and drunken driving, than any other factor. There is no way they could exert as much influence without the State enforcing their delusions upon society. All of this influence is harmful. A dead giveaway of a brain-dead Statolatrist zombie is that they suggest government school board members could rise to any position of importance in an educational system in a free society (or probably any other organization or business).
In a free society, family and community would be intimately involved in the education of children because it would be necessary and because there would be neither the inclination nor the opportunity to relinquish such responsibilities to State bureaucrats. Conversely, bureaucrats and other strangers would have no opportunity to claim authority over parents or their children. Idiotic teetotalers and other brands of moral busybodies would never be in a position to make decisions about other people’s children or, in this case, a coach who supposedly…let parents do something that was in some way bad to their own children.
In June of last year, a judge ordered Hatley to jail for failing to reimburse the state for public assistance that was paid to support his “son,” who, as the court was aware, is not actually his son.
[...]
For 13 years, Hatley made payments to the state until learning, in 2000, that the boy might not be his biological son. A DNA test that year confirmed that there was no chance he was the father, according to court documents.Hatley…was relieved of any future child support reimbursement but was ordered to pay more than $16,000 that he had owed the state before the ruling.
Anyone who wants to claim such absurdities as this could happen and carry on for a full year in a non-monopolistic, non-coercive legal system, and that the agency responsible could continue operating as usual after this came to light, simply doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Only coercive monopolies can get away with things like this; private, peaceful bodies cannot and would not.
The British socialized medicine system will ban private organ donations from dead donors. Basically the problem is that foreigners were paying top dollar (pound, euro, whatever) for the organs of dead Britons, and it horrified the busybodies in the UK government that scarce resources were being voluntarily allocated via the price system, and that such exchanges were taking place outside of the gentle governance of the NHS.
An independent report said the public needed to be confident that scarce donor organs were allocated fairly within the NHS.
Transplant surgeons said the ban would reassure the public that organs will go to those in greatest need.
Everything is scarce and the only sensible, practical, or remotely principled way to allocate those scarce things—yes, including body parts that their owners want to donate—is by the price system of the free market that matches supply to demand. No governing body or other self-anointed group of experts could ever allocate resources or direct people more efficiently or “fairly” than the free market’s price system does. It is simply not possible in the real world, even if the governing body had the best of intentions, and especially not when decisions will inevitably be made for political rather than economic reasons. Here is a much more logical and refreshing take on the U.S.’s screwed-up, government-run organ donor system.
Those Philadelphia cops who pulled three shooting suspects out of a car and beat them back in May 2008 have been cleared of any crimes by a grand jury. (Wow, that was almost a year and a half ago?!) The most surprising part of this case is that their chief, Charles Ramsey, fired four of the officers and suspended or demoted another four, and he’s not backing down from that decision. “I have 40 years of law enforcement experience. I kinda know what I’m looking at. In my opinion, all the actions were not justified.” Good for him.
A program that allows citizens to file anonymous complaints on the Illinois secretary of state’s website about people misusing handicapped parking spots received 114 tips in its first month and a half. People snitching on each other to punish them for disobeying laws that have no basis in natural law, no relation to right vs. wrong, and that attempt to force common courtesy on everyone? Sounds par for the course for governments. Wake me when you hear of an example of government promoting a sense of respect, community, and courtesy among its captives.
A Fort Myers Beach councilman was fired after other council members learned he was married to a former porn star. Terrible and unjust. They fire him in July 2009 “without cause” after he had been married since October 2008. The dolt who led the vilification said, “It’s a matter of how effective he becomes after this situation. How much disruption there is.” You stupid moron, there was no decrease in his effectiveness and there was no disruption until you got it into YOUR pathetic little brain to make an issue out of it. You can’t work with him and approve of his effectiveness for nine months and then decide his marriage might be disruptive to his job only after you learn of it! And soon, after his wrongful termination suit against the city, the idiots on the town council won’t have to pay for his settlement out of their pockets, oh, no; it will come from the town’s treasury, in other words, other people will pay for their stupidity directly or indirectly. Prudes are bad enough, but idiotic prudes are just depressing.
An Illinois millionaire didn’t like the $80,000 property tax bill on his mansion, so he had himself ordained by some online “church,” put a wooden cross on his house, and called it a church to get a property tax exemption. Good for him, I say! Not good for him or the rest of the taxpaying suckers, say idiotic Statolatrists everywhere. A man defends himself from a crime in a nonviolent and somewhat clever way, and the sanctimonious public responds with violence and derision. Everyone is pleased that this sham was found out and the guy will now have to pay back taxes, because nonviolent nonparticipation is a violation of their moral code. (I’ll conveniently gloss over the fact that this millionaire banker made his fortune off of the ultimate State racket, the monopoly on currency, because the principle of nonviolent nonparticipation remains the same.)
How the “buy American” attitude backfires: it spurs resentment and nationalism, whereas free, borderless trade engenders the respect, goodwill, mutual prosperity, and reciprocal interdependence that characterize true civilization. Libertarians at least as early as Frederic Bastiat have known this as a truism. Welcome to the 19th century.
Obama’s speech about socialized medicine
September 10, 2009 – 10:08 pm by JohnI didn’t watch the Savior of America’s speech to Congress about further socializing our health care and insurance industry because I already knew everything he was going to say. Why would I waste my time with it? He probably said our health care system is broken, that it’s too costly and denies too many people, left out the fact that this is entirely the fault of the thousands upon thousands of governmental perturbations in the market, and concluded that the answer is more government, but wise, just government.
I am flabbergasted by people’s complete ignorance of the laws and trends of economics. It is damn near impossible for the free market to make anything more expensive or worse in quality, in the long run. Only coercion and redistribution can do that. Most of the things we consume as necessities or luxuries in our modern lives—houses, cars, computers, food, even medicines—tend to become better, cheaper, and more abundant over time. This is despite, not because of, the interference by government in the free and voluntary exchanges of peaceable people. The fact that we are supposedly spending more on health care (health insurance) than we used to should raise a red flag that something is preventing the market from working as it always does and as we all want it to, and that this thing is the State!
I don’t know why other countries seem to spend a lower percentage of their GDP and a lower amount of money per capita on their health care than the U.S. does. It is definitely not because our health care system is the best in the world. It must be because of the nature of the federal government’s interference in the health insurance industry and its history of regulations and so forth. If the alleged success of other nations’ health care industries is any guide, it is possible that complete and total socialization will actually decrease per capita expenses on health care relative to the requisite decreases in the quality and quantity we will receive. On the other hand, if the history of our government’s interference in the health care market is any guide, Obamacare will end up costing many times more than expected. (According to Peter Schiff, in 1966 it was predicted that Medicare would cost the taxpayers $12 billion in 1990. Instead, it cost $107 billion in 1990, and it’s four times that now!)
Something about the Imperial Federal Government would have to change, drastically, for American taxpayers to evade a similar fate from Obamacare. It is very possible that a mixed economy is worse in some ways for this and other industries than a nearly completely socialized one. Maybe not in the long run, though.
One entertaining part of the speech that I heard on the radio was when he vehemently denied that Obamacare would ever cover illegal immigrants. Obama can say that all he wants, and he can hold true to that promise with flying colors during his regime, but I predict that taxpayer-funded health insurance will cover illegal immigrants and visitors who didn’t pay for it, sooner or later. Quite possibly, the Republicans will let it happen to pander to Hispanic voters.
I wonder how many non-libertarian-minded people considered this: One reason people oppose the coverage of illegal immigrants’ health care with taxpayer money is because the immigrants didn’t pay for it with their taxes, and we can’t have people coming here and bankrupting our treasury by, basically, stealing products and services from the taxpayers. (Perhaps the main reason people oppose giving health care and other things to illegal immigrants is because they suffer from the misconception that the place where your mother was lying when she gave birth to you has any bearing on your rights or your freedom or your character as a human being.) But the whole point of Obamacare is to take money from people who earned it and give it to people who didn’t! It is a wealth-redistribution program in the form of mandatory insurance policies and taxes! Millions of people, like me and probably you, do not want to be forced to pay for other people’s health care, or anything else, for that matter. It isn’t charity and it isn’t altruistic! It’s bald, shameless theft! The supporters of socialized medicine are being inconsistent and hypocritical by endorsing the theft of tax money from captive Americans to pay for other Americans’ health care but opposing the theft of tax money from captive Americans to pay for foreigners’ health care.
Misconceptions about libertarianism and Statism
September 1, 2009 – 12:48 am by JohnI find that correcting misconceptions about libertarianism amounts more to correcting misconceptions about the State than anything else. Statists don’t understand libertarianism because they don’t understand their own philosophy.
Libertarianism is individual liberty, personal sovereignty, voluntary association, and moral egalitarianism for all people. By “moral egalitarianism” I mean everyone is equally imbued with and bound by the same rights and the same moral obligation to respect the identical rights of others; no one has the right to do anything that anyone else may not also do. I think the existence of those rights and the non-aggression principle that follows from them come as close to epistemological certainty as they can get, and the burden is on Statists to explain why these principles are imaginary, illegitimate, or impractical and why they have the right to threaten murder on any who would assert these rights.
I doubt very many people oppose those beliefs in principle. What they oppose are their fantastical imaginings of what those beliefs would imply in practice. At the same time they remain willfully ignorant of how the State opposes those innate rights—is essentially the institutionalization of the negation of liberty. What they refuse to grasp is that the very existence of the monopolistic State implies threats of murder to anyone who secedes or doesn’t participate. As hard as it is to come to grips with, Statists must realize that peaceful abstention is a violation of their moral code, and that this is abominable.
It would be helpful to the blogosphere and to the worldwide discourse on political philosophy in general if a significant number of Statists would challenge themselves as far as they could with this question: “If the first principles that libertarians endorse are right and just, then why does (my vision of) their practical implementation strike me as so frightening, so horrific? What experiences, conditioning, or other principles make me either (a) reject the implementation of those principles anyway, and/or (b) insist that Statism and not freedom are the natural corollary of those principles?”
Most people’s experience with states, living their whole lives under one, never considering what true freedom can do for a society and not looking too closely lest their Statist foundation be shaken, causes them to believe that states are a force of good even when the balance of evidence is against them. So they lash out in ridicule at libertarians instead of focusing their skepticism on their own beliefs, which is where everyone’s skepticism belongs at first.
In the comments to Radley Balko’s very good, polite, short post about Ted Kennedy, a few peculiar Statist sentiments blemish an otherwise sensible discussion about the lack of merit in Ted Kennedy’s career and agreement with Balko that Kennedy shouldn’t be venerated simply because he’s no longer eligible for the census. On the other hand, they did provide me a good starting point for yet another instructional blag post.
As you could have guessed, the contentious comments concerned Balko’s opinion that we shouldn’t admire Kennedy’s “ability to use politics, as opposed to civil society, to solve problems” and that “Getting elected to political office in itself adds no value to society as a whole”.
One commenter began,
Huh? How would be have better effected change via civil society? Presided over the local kiwanis club? Written the Great American Novel? Become a pundit? Blogger (journalist)? CEO?
Always interesting to hear what libertarians value, how small-minded they are – I guarantee there’s total radio silence on the passing of major business figures, however they themselves used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests. However corrupt and crass they are within their own sphere.
Instead of living off of the labor of captive taxpayers and voting to take and spend more of their money every year, Kennedy could have spent his inherited wealth on charity, community organizations, and private businesses that provided goods and services to people who wanted them, voluntarily. The reason people donate to non-profit organizations and do business with private companies is (usually) because they want to, because they prefer the goods or services more than they prefer the money they part with and more than the goods or services they could get elsewhere. The reason the state and federal governments have to take your taxes upon threats of murder is because the government is not voluntary and people don’t want to give their money to it. Even Ted Kennedy himself didn’t want to give more of his money to the Imperial Federal Government than he had to…otherwise he would have. He could have worked for free, but he didn’t.
In this instance, we see that the commenter’s failure to understand that “civil society” is superior to government action results from his failure to understand what “government action” implies: Submit to their edicts and give them your money, or they will take the money plus penalties and they will enter your home or business to make you comply; insist on keeping your money and living your life how you please, as is your perfect right, and they will enslave you in a metal-and-concrete cage for five or ten years; resist their beatings, kidnapping, and enslavement, as is your perfect right, and they will shoot you. It is not possible to misunderstand that the State and all its agents are the aggressors in this scenario—in the real world, every day.
If committing the atrocious offenses of not sharing much of your money and behaving or doing business in frowned-upon ways is enough to warrant the death penalty, then surely actually threatening people with murder and interfering with their lives in myriad ways is a crime against humanity that removes all pretense of legitimacy from their operation. If you would claim the latter response is necessary and proper for the former offenses, then it still remains to be explained how non-violent non-participation ranks as criminal, or even dangerous, to the Statist. The laws and the infrastructure to make and follow through on the threats precede any act by any citizen; in fact, they predate even the birth of every citizen (except at the founding of a new state); so they cannot reasonably be passed off as a response to a preexisting danger.
Doubtless the true believer would respond, “But it is in man’s nature to be contentious and violent; the preexisting State with its threat-and-punish infrastructure keeps everyone civil, cooperative, and happy.” Glossing over the fact that this is simply false, it is obvious that elected and unelected officials are not angels; they are impaired by the same shortcomings as everyone else. Further, it is obvious that the types of people who are attracted to the violent, deadly police power of the State suffer from even greater hubris, intolerance, greed, and megalomania than the average person and in proportion to the power they aspire to attain.
I have stated what principles libertarians value and gone into a little detail about what we oppose in the State. So we’re “small-minded”? Believing in the strength of community, free exchange, voluntary cooperation, and the physical, emotional, and psychological independence from the controlling hubris of others—the conviction that the answer to many of our material and psychological problems is in ceasing to kill, threaten, and coerce each other—this is small-minded? You can’t possibly comprehend what is implied by our statement “peaceful action is a better way to effect change than is governmental coercion”—what’s implied is an all-encompassing, revolutionary conception of community, law, economics, war, peace, and everything else about human interrelationships—and still refer to it as small-minded.
The better libertarian thinkers (and those of us who follow them) rail against “major business figures” who “used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests” as fervently as we do against the government agents themselves. See, for instance, this masterful essay by Roderick Long, this Kevin Carson column, and this post of mine. Maybe my fellow libertarian blaggers can leave some more links in the comments; there must surely be 100 easily accessible anti-corporatist writings that I can’t think of off the top of my head.
The commenter continued,
You could say the same you said here about FDR or Lincoln: proper management of the state, and the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world – it’s oh-so-dirty. Libertarians would rather sit on a perch apart from it all, sometimes hiding their eyes, sometimes throwing peanuts, or pretending like all problems can be solved via a little Mill or communitarianism. And that there’s a nice clean wall between politics and everything else.
7/15/2050: Radley Balko dies, contributed not much of anything because he spent his life as a journalist, and on the basis of a little Rand and Econ 101 and utilitarian philosophy decided that it would be of some value to humanity or even his community to give the stock libertarian take on whatever was at the top of the news cycle. And what do journalists really do for us anyway?
Obviously you are not paying attention.
We could say the same about FDR or Lincoln? Child, much, much worse has been said about FDR and Lincoln, and deservedly so. They are more responsible for our corporate-military-socialist state than any other two people. The death and impoverishment they permitted to be visited upon innocent people is, quite possibly, incalculable.
It is almost unfathomable to me that anyone could think the State is “the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world.” I shall take the liberty of assuming this statement refers mainly to economics—the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy our needs. The claim is that the government can take care of any problem or need that arises in a community better than the free market—especially in the 21st century with technology making the entire world more connected than ever and the pace of business faster than ever. Though my libertarian readers are already familiar with Ludwig von Mises, Statists would benefit—if only to bring a little more knowledge and sophistication to the debate—from reading Mises’s seminal essay on why socialism can’t calculate and Murray Rothbard’s perspective on Mises, his opponents, and the calculation debate.
Without reading an entire economics essay, Statists could just answer me this: How is it that elected officials and coercive referendums voted for by “the people” are better able to govern society than the cooperative choices and economic exchanges made voluntarily by “the people”?
If the “collective action problems” he refers to are legal and court systems, his position is no less secure. Check out my posts about Anthony de Jasay’s masterpiece The State (here) and Bruce Benson’s masterpiece The Enterprise of Law (here and here).
Another commenter answered his smear that libertarians, journalists, and others outside of the professional criminal class do nothing for society:
MLK never had to get elected to spur social change.
And BTW, Radley helped get a guy off of death row because of his work. More than I can say for Ted Kennedy. Other journalists have also managed to force a president’s resignation over Watergate and bring to light the massacre at My Lai just to name a couple of things. I would say that journalists have done more to expose corruption and spur change than any politician ever has.
We don’t just sit on our perch either. Go check out the work that Libertarians have done at the Institute for Justice and FIRE. Real results that actually matter to every day people who are being mistreated by peaceful legislators and their good intention regulations.
The discussion was mostly downhill from there:
“Working as a legislator isn’t a peaceful way to make change. After all, the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance or else we would be imprisoned or fined. There isn’t anything peaceful about that at all.”
And here’s the reason folks, why libertarians will never have any serious chance as politicians in the country. Nutters.
Yes, it is “nutters” to insist aggression is wrong, that keeping the peace by threatening imprisonment and murder is wrong, that encouraging a sense of community by forcing everyone to live by your rule whether they voted for it or not is wrong. The part in quotation marks, which the commenter thought was “nutters,” is a perfectly accurate and admirably principled way of understanding the world; I am constitutionally incapable of imagining how anyone could be more succinct and correct about the role of a legislator or how someone could object to it. Unbelievable.
“the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance”
And he was elected to do so as public official by you, we, the people of the country, along with the other 99 senators. You’re acting like this is a dictatorship.
Ah, yes, the old Might Makes Right justification—″a majority voted your personal liberties and a large chunk of your money away, so don’t go spreading social discord and spewing hatred because you disapprove of our mob-rule. Sure, you voted against all the people in power, but the best thing about our enlightened system is that we force everyone to comply whether they agree or not.”
It is more common than I would have thought, though no less peculiar, for Statists to justify a rights-violation because multiple people commit it rather than one. What difference does the number of people committing it make? Seriously. Blags have comments for a reason. I like getting comments.
Referring to the same passage that the previous person thought was “nutters,” the original Statist commenter wrote:
This is childish. You need to grow up. It’s not different from me saying that prisons are bad because people get locked up against their will, but refusing to take on what to do about murderers.
What to do about power and how one should distribute power is the paramount question for any society at any time in history, and solutions are judged in terms of bad and less bad. If you can’t bring yourself to stare it in the face and maybe try to make the best of it, your opinion on anything to do with politics is worthless. You don’t get to complain and be taken seriously if you want to hide.
As a policy I only address things that make sense, so the last few sentences I will ignore. (I included them to give you a full appreciation of this person’s thought processes.)
What is childish is the Statist attitude that the majority should rule, that people who peacefully abstain are somehow doing some unspecified thing that endangers your person or property, and that everyone who disagrees with your grand vision of how to run the world should be punished and made to comply. I can think of nothing more childish in the political arena. You have made no effort to understand any theory of ethics or morality, nor anything like property rights or economics. Literally the only framework you go by is “majority rules.” You don’t appreciate that people have good reason to object to their freedoms being put to a vote and to complain after losing the vote. You refuse to see how pointing guns at, restricting the preexisting freedoms of, and taking property from people who haven’t harmed or even threatened anyone is worse than the hypothetical harm that they might have done; that the government agents are committing aggression even by their own standards. You are unable to understand how anyone could object to being lorded over by a charlatan with a bright smile and a fancy suit, nor have you shown any ability to grasp how rights or freedoms could exist prior to and independently from a monopolistic state. Your political philosophy begins and ends with “majority rule.” This is the single least nuanced idea in the history of the world since “woman submit to man because he is stronger.” You are a childish buffoon who should have NO SAY in how I or any other human being run our lives.
Our objections to the aggression that defines states are very different from objecting to locking real, actual aggressors up in prison (though you just said “people” and libertarians know that governments should lock up their own people before anyone else). Your analogy looks, to me, like this: illegitimacy of legislation : no alternative to legislation :: illegitimacy of prison : no solution to murder.
Okay, analogies weren’t your strong point in fifth grade. You are ignoring stuff YOU WROTE, in the same discussion thread. Our alternative to governmental legislation is offering a goddamned product to people and selling it to them for an agreeable price. Writing a book. Starting a charity. Educating your own children instead of leaving it to the State. Et cetera, et cetera ad nauseam. These are the things you ridiculed in your first post as being ineffective compared to coercive legislation. Libertarians have plenty of solutions to murder, and all crime. Eliminating the police state is a nice first step.
Distributing power is not the paramount question for all societies. It is protecting individual rights, which allows real community to develop voluntarily and “organically” and which allows for the material progress that has increased our standard of living over the centuries. When private property rights are protected and individuals have a sincere, personal, reciprocal interest in the well-being of their neighbors, then power and many other things will be distributed more heterogeneously. Surely you don’t think giving power to politicians and taking it away from the public will distribute power in any just way? If you’d like a scholarly but brief and accessible discussion on the distribution of power in society, read the first part of Our Enemy, the State by Albert Jay Nock.
You seem very dissatisfied with this country. There are plenty of other ones out there. Why don’t you try the libertarian oasis of Somalia? You won’t have to worry about the pesky ‘dictatorship of the majority against the minority” (also called Democracy) there! You’ll be free to do as you please. No pesky governments to get in your way (they won’t even bother to build your roads!)
If things get too tough, you can always try your luck in the socialist hellhole of Sweden or Norway :)
Seriously, most of you sound like Ruby Ridge wannabe’s under a guise of reading a few Ayn Rand books, which is why you won’t be taken seriously.
Personally, if I were going to compete for a Special Olympics medal on a political website, taking the contradictory stance from what I know most readers there take, I would go to some effort to gussy up my arguments and review my thought processes to make sure I was representing my ideology well. You know, being a good ambassador for libertarianism.
None of that for these Statists. Why don’t you try the Statist’s wet dream of North Korea, or Cuba, or Zimbabwe? You gave the worst example of (what you misunderstand as) anarchy; it isn’t fair to counter with the worst examples of your beloved monopolistic States? Oh, there’s only one type of anarchy but many varied and sundry types of states. I see. And that American and Ethiopian military force attempting to impose order but, somehow unsurprisingly, only supplying murder, terror, and destruction to Somalia—you gonna pin that one on the anti-military, non-interventionist libertarians, too? You haven’t made sense yet; you might as well shoot for the moon and hope some more of your hysterical mischaracterizations of libertarianism stick for your Statist brethren.
We have observed no fewer than two of the classic inane, ignorant dismissals of libertarians in a single comment thread about Teddy freaking Kennedy: “You’re always free to move elsewhere” and “Oh, you’re just a stupid Randroid.” Add a third item to the list of ideologies Statists don’t understand. OBJECTIVISM IS NOT LIBERTARIANISM! WE ACTUALLY DON’T LIKE EACH OTHER VERY MUCH!
Sorry for rambling. I got up on my soap box for the first time in a while and wanted to flesh out my thoughts thoroughly. It’s clear from reading the whole discussion thread that brief, pointed criticisms of their statements are insufficient to sway them in the least. I know this was old hat for my libertarian colleagues; this was written to any and all non-libertarians, so I hope they read it and find some sense in it, coming away with a better understanding of freedom and the State than Radley Balko’s commenters came with.
5 myths about health care around the world
August 30, 2009 – 11:08 am by JohnThis article by T.R. Reid in the Washington Post was pretty informative. It corrects five myths about provision of medical care and insurance in several developed countries, basically explaining how all of them are better or cheaper than ours. It doesn’t make me enthusiastic about adding even more government perturbations to our already government-bloated health care system, but it is a reminder that not all government policies are created equal and that there is a spectrum from unpreferable to bad to worse among government programs. I have a feeling that the book his article is based on will be a good source of information in the continuation of the battle over health care in the coming years. One thing I bet he leaves out: there is no such thing as a middle-of-the-road policy; government intervention always begets more government intervention. It’s just a matter of time.
Ted Kennedy, good riddance
August 29, 2009 – 6:41 am by JohnThe more gracious sensibilities inside me prevent me from ranting and raving about what a terrible scourge on humanity Edward Kennedy was, but he really was a terrible senator. I detest the common notion that we should focus only on the recently deceased’s good qualities or only say kind things about them for a while. On the contrary, the time of their passing is the best time to reflect on all their good and bad deeds to put their entire life in perspective. If he wanted only nice things said about him, he shouldn’t have done terrible things.
When I say Teddy Kennedy was a terrible senator, obviously what makes him so harmful in my mind is what made him a great senator in the minds of so many Statists. He did support liberalization of immigration laws, he didn’t seem to be an outrageous drug warrior, he seemed to oppose the death penalty in principle, he seemed to oppose some military interventionism, and he voted against attacking Iraq and further funding the war at at least one point. So I will commend him for all of that right here.
The problem with Kennedy, as with a great many senators and congresshumans, is that so many of his stances were so entirely political, not principled. For instance, he supported the murderous military adventures of a president who wrote a (D) after his name but not one who wrote an (R) after his name. I have the impression that he supported just about anything the big-government Democrats did and opposed anything with a Republican stench to it; that he loved big government for the power and prestige it gave him, his family, and their cronies, and not, originally, because he really felt it could help the poor or protect the innocent. He probably convinced himself of the latter in time, but so do most people who live a life of power and privilege at the expense of the innocent taxpayers.
Some people who have no conception of civics and government refer to Ted Kennedy as a “civil servant.” What a load of obsequious crap. He was born into extreme wealth, he never had to work a real job in his life, he lived off of stolen funds his entire career, and his work consisted of taking from some to give to others while keeping a large portion of the loot for the professional criminal class. The taxpayers served him, many of them unwillingly.
Kennedy had the reputation for being a great advocate of civil liberties, but he fervently fought against and helped weaken our most important civil liberty after free speech: gun ownership and use. This was his proudest stance, his most noble crusade, the object of as much adulation by Statist cheerleaders as anything else he did. Additionally, his neo-liberal attitude that society should be dominated by racial statistics and race-awareness is clearly an attitude that has retarded our progress in racial harmony over the last few decades as much as any residual racism or bigotry has. He was a collectivist through and through, an ideology entirely incompatible with individual rights of any kind.
Some of my friends who are incapable of seeing past the (D) that appeared after Ted Kennedy’s name scorned cable news networks for their presumed fixation on Kennedy’s murder of Mary Jo Kopechne. “Let me guess: it was all Chappaquiddick, all the time,” one said disdainfully. Well, did he kill her, or didn’t he? Did he try to save his political career, or try to save her? Should he have spent the last 40 years in prison, or shouldn’t he?
Suggesting that news programs should not focus on Ted Kennedy’s heartless and remorseless murder of Mary Jo Kopechne would be like suggesting that they discuss O.J. Simpson’s life and times without giving much attention to his murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.
After leaving someone to drown in your car and being solely responsible for her death, everything else you did in your life pales in comparison to that hideous act! O.J. Simpson’s irrelevant achievements on the football field (and tireless search for the real killers) don’t make up for his two murders in anyone’s mind. Mark David Chapman’s supposed religious conversion doesn’t make up for his murder of John Lennon in very many people’s minds. And Ted Kennedy’s dubious achievements as a “civil servant” don’t make up for his murder of Mary Jo Kopechne! Besides, he was a detriment to society in the Senate. It is indicative of our society’s backwardness that people regard his accomplishments in the Senate as a saving grace for his personal failings; they should be thought of as adding insult to injury!
I’ve largely grown out of the primitive attitude that revels in people’s deaths. Except in the more monstrous cases (like child molesters and people who talk at the theater), I will be content with my hatred of what the person did and everything he stood for without wishing for his death and celebrating it when it comes. I’ll just celebrate his absence from the Senate. I’m glad he is no longer a senator, that is all.
Socialized medicine links
August 27, 2009 – 11:09 am by JohnI really enjoyed the following writings about health care and the proposed socialization of it in the United States. They say it better than I am (currently) able to, and are all well worth taking the time to read.
Two posts from David Z. at No Third Solution: Is it “Un-American” to Disagree with Nancy Pelosi? and Does the NHS Provide Better Health Care?
Robert Wenzel distills the Twitter comments of Peter Fleckstein regarding the monstrous Obamacare bill in the House of Representatives: Shock: Inside the health care bill and Shock: Inside the health care bill part 2. Yeah, Fleckstein’s commentary comes off as a bit annoying and juvenile because it’s written in textese, but that’s how you write on Twitter. Too bad he couldn’t translate them into a normal blag post or two…
As a complement to David Z.’s blag post about the British NHS, read Sean Gabb’s Libertarian perspective on the National Health Service. It’s a little long but worth the time; very enjoyable, insightful, and easy to read fairly quickly. I can’t help but quote a few paragraphs:
At the most fundamental level of analysis, legitimacy and merits have no connection with each other. The NHS is funded by compulsion. I am forced, as a taxpayer, to contribute to a system that provides health care of a kind and at costings that, given any choice in the matter, I would never accept for myself and those who look to me. I am also forced to pay towards the health care of strangers. I have no objection to charity. I try to be generous to those I know. I am prepared to be moderately generous even to those I do not know, and whom I might dislike if I did know them. But so far as I am compelled, paying for the health care of others cannot be described as charitable. It is as much an act of theft as if I were to be robbed in the street. The whole present system, therefore, is illegitimate. If it were, as we are continually assured, the “envy of the world”,my opinion would not alter. It is in itself unjust. I resent its existence in my country. I join with Mr Hannan in warning the Americans not to accept it for themselves.
This, however, is the most fundamental analysis, and no discussion can be regarded as complete without some examination of its merits. And in examining these, I fell an obligation to be as fair as possible. I will begin with the quality of health care provided by the NHS.
Here, I must dissent from much of the American condemnation. There is no doubt that the NHS is inefficient, and that it rations health care by waiting list and by explicit refusal to provide certain kinds of treatment to anyone, or by refusal to provide certain kinds of treatment to those deemed unlikely to benefit from them given their cost. But rationing in one form or another is inevitable to any system of health care. …
In attacking the British system, these critics seem to argue that their own is based on individual choice and free from any taint of collectivism. I am not an expert on the American system, but it does strike me as so heavily regulated and cartellised as to have little connection to a free market. …
If I contrast what I am told about the American system with what I know from personal experience about the British, the NHS is not really that bad. [Gabb then goes into detail about the high quality of care he, his wife, and his friends have received from the totally State-run system.]
[...]
I will add that the NHS is probably not unsustainable in the long term. It costs about £90 billion a year to run. But this is about eight per cent of gross domestic product, and is about half the American level. There are more doctors per head of population in Britain than in America. British life expectancy is higher than American. …This should not be taken as a defence of the NHS. I am simply pointing out that is is no worse on balance than the American system. They are differently organised and differently funded. Each has specific advantages and disadvantages. neither has much connection with a free market. In both countries, however, the middle classes are able to get very good health care. In both, the poor and ignorant do not. The NHS is not a bad institution relative to the American system. It is bad for other reasons—and these may be bad reasons that apply in some degree to the American system.
What is so fundamentally bad about the British system—its compulsory principle aside—is that it nearly abolishes individual control over health care. Compared with the system with which we entered the twentieth century, all real power is centralised into the hands of the professional bodies.
[...]
These [State-run] institutions impose values of hierarchy and obedience on those within them that are hostile to liberty. People who are regimented in their working lives—and who do not rebel against this—will tend to accept regimentation in their private lives. They will accept it for themselves. They will vote for politicians who promise it for everyone. They will spread these values directly to others so far as they have contact with the public as providers of services.
[...]
I believe that the NHS should be dismantled and replaced with a more diverse, private system. This does not mean that I want to cut off health care for millions of older people who have made no alternative arrangements. It also does not mean that I want to cut off state funding and leave the current system of cartellised and regulated health care otherwise unchanged. I believe in a radical attack on all state involvement in health care, and this includes an attack on all state-created and state-upheld monopoly in health care.I believe that all drug patent laws should be repealed. … I believe that there should be no controls on who can practise medicine. … I believe there should be no controls on the development and provision of medical products. … I believe that everyone should have the right of self-medication. This means the right of any adult to walk into a pharmacy and, without showing any prescription, to buy whatever medical product he desires. …
These reforms would bring down health care costs at once. They would also clear the way for the information technology revolution to transform the market in health care. I will not try to predict how all this will be funded, though it strikes me as reasonable that it will fall into the same pattern of direct payment, charity and voluntary mutual assurance as was common before the State took over. And when I speak of mutual assurance, I mean both for-profit insurers and not-for-profit organisations. The idea that only profit-seeking organisations are consistent with libertarianism is to take a shockingly arid view of the ideology. What libertarians should like about commerce is not its taste for profit but its distaste for compulsion. …
I will repeat—cutting off state funding all at once, and leaving in place the present system of monopoly, would be cruelty and folly. It would easily result in a step away from liberty rather than towards it. But reducing this funding over several years, as part of a general attack on monopoly, would be a blessing, the fruits of which were plain even before it was complete.
It’s music to my ears.
Plaxico Burress shouldn’t be imprisoned
August 24, 2009 – 6:49 pm by JohnI am appalled and depressed at the nonchalance with which everyone on the TV and the radio reports the Plaxico Burress plea-bargain to accept two years in prison for shooting himself in the leg. How anyone can become so confused about rights and morals and crime and government that they don’t even think twice about the justice of laws that lock a man away for two years for neither harming nor threatening anyone? It isn’t the night club that’s suing him in a tort case; their bouncers are the ones who let him in knowing he had a gun, which was forbidden in there. None of the club’s patrons sued Burress for threating or terrorizing or endangering them, nor did they sue the club, that I’m aware of. This is because Burress did nothing to them to warrant a tort case. If he had, or if the patrons thought he had, then let them sue him and play it out in a court of actual justice. What we have instead is a crime (against the State), a violation of laws, despite no one’s person or property being harmed nor their liberty being restricted in any way. Accept Plaxico Burress’s.
Did you notice how everyone just calls the crimes “gun charges”? Or “weapons charges”? They just glide right past the “unregistered” and “illegal” handgun part with nary a word on the absurdity of jackbooted thugs and professional criminals with heavily armed bodyguards declaring other people’s guns to be illegal because they didn’t register them.
I like the Statist’s typical response to the audacious notion that people (well, most people, anyway) should be allowed to carry a gun wherever property owners permit them: “We have laws forbidding everyone from carrying a gun anywhere they like to protect the general populace from mass-murdering madmen! Unless you have a piece of paper signed by certain government bureaucrats, your gun is dangerous and could be used to threaten, terrorize, hurt, or kill defenseless people!” Oh, you mean, like terrorizing and threatening peaceful, non-aggressing homeowners and business owners, on their own property, to make them submit and obey to everything the State demands of them? You mean like kidnapping and enslaving a (relatively) peaceful man for two years because he did something to himself on someone else’s property that the professional criminal class disapproved of?
These are typical policies of a police state: restrict gun ownership and take away the guns and the freedoms of people who dare defy the glorious and beneficent State. Obviously no one else was harmed by Plaxico Burress’s actions, and obviously Burress and millions of others are harmed by the restrictions of freedoms implemented by governments, so the State of New York is the only party that appears to be in the wrong in this case (an aggressor) and looks mighty hypocritical to boot.
Medical contrarianism isn’t always right
August 12, 2009 – 6:37 pm by JohnA few years ago, for a stretch lasting a year or two, I boycotted LewRockwell.com because their all-too-frequent Creationist columns were embarrassing to the libertarian movement and I didn’t want to be associated with those types of people, nor reward the publication of such hokum with additional page hits. It wasn’t a complete boycott, because I did visit once in a while, and I continued to frequent Mises.org, but the point is that just because the State-funded and State-supporting majority take a certain position, it doesn’t make it wrong.
I am much more forgiving of what you might call medical revisionism because so much about mammalian genetics, biochemistry, and physiology is unknown—especially for humans because we can’t do the same types of studies on humans that we can do in rodents. However, some contrarianism just goes too far. See, for example, Dr. Ernest Curtis’s column at LRC today, The Healthcare Delusion. The relevant passages from his August 12 column:
…exercising and maintaining physical fitness certainly provide a sense of well-being for most people. There is no question that physical fitness provides one with a feeling of more energy and the ability to get around with less fatigue, sluggishness, etc. But there is not a scintilla of scientific evidence that exercise or fitness prevents disease or prolongs life despite the never-ending exhortations to the contrary.
Diet is an even greater source of misunderstanding and misinformation. The attempt to link diet to health and disease has a long and rich history. The only thing lacking is any scientifically credible evidence that the two are related. Most of the so-called “evidence” that is cited comes out of a pseudoscience known as epidemiology.*
The phrase “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” comes to mind. I’m sure Dr. Curtis would claim that, if not for bogus studies based on fraudulent or manipulated statistics, the claim that diet and exercise have nothing to do with health, disease, or longevity wouldn’t be the least bit extraordinary. However, as things stand in the scientific and medical communities, it is extraordinary, and I don’t believe it.
As a bit of layman’s evidence or simple common sense, though, consider what he’s saying: two of the most basic, essential elements of our being—our physical activity level and the food we eat—have absolutely nothing to do with how healthy, sick, or long-lived we are. He’s not saying, Well, you can exercise a lot and extend your lifespan a little, but genetics and luck are going to kill you around a certain age no matter what you do. He’s not saying, Exercising your muscles and getting your heart in good shape will only improve the last few years of your life a little and you’ll probably die of cancer or Alzheimer’s anyhow. He’s saying: Yeah, eating bon bons, drinking Kool-Aid and beer all day, and sitting on your butt might make you feel sluggish, but it isn’t actually bad for you.
I’ll give you one piece of concrete evidence against him: greater muscle use protects against osteoporosis, especially in women. Osteoporosis is a disease, which all women are at risk for because of menopause, and which some women are more predisposed to than others, and which exercise forestalls and mitigates. This is because of the all-too-obvious and commonsensical notion that if you use your muscles and the bones they’re attached to, they will be stronger.
There are many who, like myself, think there is much wisdom to be found in considering where man came from—our roots in the ice age and jungle, our more “natural” state—to understand what ails us in the modern world. This applies more to medicine and physiology than anything. For instance, maybe a lot of foot, ankle, and knee injuries are due to fancy running shoes that coddle our feet too much. Or that dirty city air contributes to asthma more than rural air. So to me it’s obvious that humans evolved to labor and to consume a diet substantially different from a typical Western diet. Physical activity—hunting, building, traveling, escaping from predators—is part of our “natural” way of life. Letting go of that is bad for you. Eating animals, fruits, and vegetables is our “natural” diet. Replacing them with high-fructose corn syrup and too calorie-dense foods (with the main culprit probably being carbohydrates) is bad for you.
How can two such integral parts of our nature and our evolution bear no relation to our physical health? True, there are other primal factors from our past that are clearly detrimental to human health and cultural progress. A philosophy of Might Makes Right, racism, sexism, and a lack of dentistry, for example. Those aren’t the same as exercise and diet, fortunately.
The more specific parts of his column, that I felt more qualified to comment on, were his claims about obesity and type 2 diabetes, which I have studied for the last five years. He wrote:
There seems to be a lot of hysteria about an “obesity epidemic” which is ruining our national health (whatever that is). But the critics have yet to confront the fact that life expectancy continues to rise despite this horrible affliction. Actuarial statistics show that moderate obesity (as currently defined) has no significant effect on life expectancy. It is true that the morbidly obese have significant health problems but these are most often due to mechanical factors such as extreme obesity that limits the ability to breathe normally.
There have been many attempts to link obesity with diabetes but this association is tenuous at best. There are literally millions of people who are obese but show no evidence of diabetes. Conversely, there are lots of thin and physically fit individuals who are severe diabetics. It is true that some people may show a diabetic-like pattern of glucose intolerance when they gain weight and revert to normal when they shed some pounds. These individuals may have a marginal genetic tendency towards diabetes where the anti-insulin effects of excess body fat may reveal a pattern of glucose intolerance. But they rarely suffer the severity or the secondary problems seen in the truly diabetic.
The idea that one can eat his way to diabetes is sheer nonsense. Some of the confusion arises because of fundamental misunderstanding about the disease process in diabetes. Because diabetics have either a relative or absolute lack of insulin, their blood sugar (glucose) level may rise quite high if they ingest a glucose load. In order to avoid the secondary metabolic effects of a high blood sugar (or, more accurately, a relative deficiency of intracellular sugar), diabetics need to pay close attention to the amount of carbohydrate in their diet. But the glucose level in the blood is really only a marker for the disease. The sugar itself does no harm other than dehydrating the individual due to the osmotic effect. There are many other effects which produce the typical diabetic syndrome (accelerated atherosclerosis, kidney failure, blindness, etc.). It has been shown that even near perfect control of the blood glucose level does little to prevent these complications in the truly diabetic. The underlying cause seems to be genetic and affects the insulin production and perhaps other factors as well. But one can eat all the sugar one wishes and never develop diabetes if the underlying genetic cause is not present.
So what is one to do in order to maintain health and well-being? It would be nice if we could do so by following a “healthy” lifestyle or diet. But, unfortunately, that is not consistent with biological reality. Most likely good health is a combination of genetics and pure dumb luck.
In response, I sent him the following email:
Dear Dr. Curtis,
I don’t know much about cardiovascular disease or your claims about the effects of cholesterol on it, nor do I want to challenge your statement that moderate obesity doesn’t affect health or life expectancy, but your insinuation that behavior and lifestyle have little to no effect on their incidence is wrong. One of the main theses of your LRC article was that behavioral factors (diet, exercise) have no effect on health and disease, and that genetic and stochastic factors are entirely to blame. Perhaps it would be fair to sum up this point with your sentence, “Most likely good health is a combination of genetics and pure dumb luck.”
Unfortunately, it is not possible to explain the dramatic increase in the incidence of obesity and type 2 diabetes by genetics alone (and certainly not luck). If your claim had any truth, then it would require a huge change in a small subset of allele frequencies in nearly every population across the world in about two generations. Such dramatic and peculiar evolution is absurd and impossible. Therefore, if genes aren’t the cause, external factors are. More people are obese and diabetic, it’s happening at younger ages, our diets have more fat, processed sugar, and calories than before, and we exercise less, especially in the West. But diet and behavior have nothing to do with either of those conditions?…
This is especially unlikely given the fact that the United States, the most obese and diabetic nation in the world, is also the most genetically heterogeneous nation in the world, and the fact that obesity, diabetes, and other non-infectious disorders have become more common in every ethnic group here. It isn’t just due to longer lives or genetics or bad luck or our State-infected medical system (as bad as that is).
I was also interested in your paragraph about the tenuous link between obesity and diabetes. This is certainly true. Many of my colleagues across the world have been searching for a causal link between obesity and diabetes and have found nothing very conclusive. The leading theory is that ectopic fatty acids/triglycerides, mainly in muscle, beta-cells, and liver, impair insulin sensitivity or insulin secretion in some way. As anyone familiar with the effects of TZD’s knows, it is not obesity per se that is bad for you, it’s the ectopic fat. Adipose tissue is good for you; the more fat it stores, the less spillover there will be to the blood and insulin-sensitive organs. There are a few mechanistic hypotheses for how ectopic fatty acids contribute to insulin resistance, and maybe some of them hold water.
This is another way diet comes into play. Our genetic capacity to expand our adipose tissue has not changed in 50 years, and likely not in 50 centuries. Our diets and our lifestyles have. We don’t have excess fat in our livers and muscles because of genetics and pure dumb luck, we have it there because we eat unbalanced diets, consume too many calories, and exercise too little.
When you wrote, “But one can eat all the sugar one wishes and never develop diabetes if the underlying genetic cause is not present,” you left out the inverse statement: But if the underlying genetic cause is present, gorging yourself with sugar will accelerate and worsen the diabetes when it does develop. To deny this seems to me to go far beyond healthy skepticism and well into the delusion you claim to rail against.
Since I don’t read very many clinical articles or treat patients, I’m not ready to argue your point that the increase in obesity and type 2 diabetes is nothing to get worked up about since they won’t kill you, at least not at a younger age than our ancestors died at. But to claim diet and behavior have exactly nothing to do with the onset of obesity or diabetes (or, I’d wager, cardiovascular disease) is irresponsible and nonsensical. It strikes me as akin to claiming that a person predisposed to alcoholism will become an alcoholic whether he ever consumes a drop of alcohol or not. When you peddle unsupported and nonsensical anti-establishment medical claims, it discredits your other contrarian arguments that do hold water and that could appeal to libertarians and non-libertarians alike. It also contributes to the (false) impression of libertarians as contrarian, revisionist nutjobs; we are contrarian, revisionist, smart, normal people. Maybe you can address these and other objections in a future column.
I would have been harsher or more detailed, but I’m working on being a little more professional and magnanimous. Besides, I think he’s right about a lot of other things, just not the parts I quoted. I haven’t heard back from him yet.
Damn dams
August 6, 2009 – 10:06 am by JohnYour humor du jour, from my friend’s Facebook page, one of my four libertarian friends in the world: this funny email exchange between an environmental bureaucrat and an innocent citizen.
GM’s bankruptcy and government control/ownership
July 13, 2009 – 11:32 am by JohnI also liked this post from the Coyote Blag:
Though it [General Motors] was able to shed some plants and employees, it will have most of the same stifling work rules on the shop floor. It did, however, manage to shed a lot of interest payments to creditors who entrusted their money to GM in return for claims on GM assets, only to be given the shaft by the Obama administration,
The main difference in the new GM is that it will have an ownership group whose primary concerns are NOT the financial success of the company. The UAW will be primarily concerned with keeping union members employed and happy and not shifting any manufacturing to lower-cost venues. The US Government will be primarily concerned with making sure the UAW is happy and promoting a number of its own goals, like “sustainable” plants and smaller cars, irrespective of whether these goals make business sense. It will be a company more concerned with whether plants have recycling programs and workers with American passports rather than cost or quality. Both the UAW and the US government can pursue such non-business goals secure in the knowledge that financial success is virtually irrelevant, as the US taxpayer can be counted on to make up any shortfalls.
The Obama administration has denied GM’s creditors the money that GM owed them and has assumed a majority ownership of GM. According to the Washington Post,
…the new GM will be an anomaly among American businesses because most of it will be owned by the U.S. and Canadian governments. The U.S. Treasury owns 60.8 percent of the new company’s common stock, the UAW retiree health trust has 17.5 percent and the governments of Canada and Ontario 11.7 percent.
…The company’s stock value would have to rise to unprecedented levels for the U.S. to break even on its investment [the bailouts].
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.
We are basically at the de facto nationalization stage. Obama said the government has “no interest” in running GM or any other car company, from which we can conclude he and his cronies have an interest in running GM or another car company.
Rahm Emanuel: we can cancel your right to bear arms at any time
July 12, 2009 – 10:58 am by JohnOne of the most telling, and disturbing, facts about Barack Obama was his choice of Joe Biden as VP and Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff. Both are creeps, both are criminals, both are frightening warmongers who are terrible on civil liberties. Here’s the latest appalling example from Rahm Emanuel. It is so outrageous I’d have a hard time believing it if not for all the precedent he and his ilk have given us:
“If you’re on that no-fly list, your access to the right to bear arms is canceled because you’re not part of the American family; you don’t deserve that right. There is no right for you if you’re on that terrorist list.”
See for yourself:
Hat tip: Warren Meyer
Pirates: orderly anarchists
July 11, 2009 – 4:56 pm by JohnLibertarian psychologist and Skepticblagger Michael Shermer has an interesting review of Peter Leeson’s new book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, in the July 9, 2009 issue of Nature. While neither Shermer, nor Leeson, nor I would defend pirate societies as the pinnacle of liberty and cultural progress, and would certainly not defend many of the actions of modern Somali pirates, it seems that the pirates of the olden days exhibited more good qualities than bad, especially when you compare them to the indefensible, plundering, murderous imperial governments of western Europe that bred the rise in piracy as we know it in the first place.
Since you might not be able to access the entire article from your home computer, I’ll paste it here. Shermer writes:
In recent years, economists have joined the ranks of high-profile scientist writers in publishing thoughtful books intended for both the general public and their colleagues. In works such as Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, seemingly every aspect of human life is examined from an economic perspective. Peter Leeson’s book is a good addition to the genre.
A major theme of such books is that behaviour that seems irrational is in fact rational when economic incentives are considered. Take piracy. In The Invisible Hook, Leeson, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, argues that acts such as flying the Jolly Roger flag, concocting code rules, and employing forms of punishment are rational responses to the pursuit of profits. Invoking Adam Smith’s powerful economic metaphor of the “invisible hand”, Leeson lays bare the structure of pirate societies. Along the way he offers one of the finest introductory courses in economics since Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.
The public, Leeson explains, view pirates as “liars, cheaters, and traitors” and pirate society “as orderly and honest as an asylum for the criminally insane … without a warden”. This attitude is older than the Pirates of the Caribbean films: in 1726, for example, King George I received a petition from “the General Officers of the Army” that pirates were “profess’d enemys to all Order and Government”.
This perception is wrong, according to Leeson. No community can succeed if it is utterly anarchistic. Adam Smith recognized this point a half-century after George I: “If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least … abstain from robbing and murdering one another.” Leeson argues that pirate life had to be “orderly and honest” to meet its economic goals. These were those of any corporate enterprise: to turn a profit.
Lacking the social structures and political tools of civil society, pirates invented their own. The Invisible Hook shows what pirate order looked like, how it worked, and the incentives needed to maintain it even as they disrupted order on the sea. It is also a lesson on how social structure forms naturally from the bottom up out of economic necessity, instead of from the top down by political fiat. Just as it has been shown that the Wild West of nineteenth-century America was a relatively ordered society, in which ranchers, farmers and miners came up with their own rules and institutions for conflict resolution long before the federal law could reach them, Leeson reconstructs from historical documents how pirate communities did the same thing. Benjamin Franklin allegedly said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Surely some pirate captain conveyed the same sentiments to his crew, perhaps as a warship was bearing down upon them with guns blazing.
Pirates employed forward-looking economic practices. Many pirate ships elected their captains and had a strict set of rules for everyone to follow, placing restrictions on problem activities such as drinking, gambling, sex, desertion and fighting. Pirate sailors were better paid than those in many marine navies, they were more tolerant of racial diversity among crews, employed clearer systems of corporal punishment, and divided the spoils with greater equanimity than their naval counterparts. Shirking one’s duties during battle was particularly worthy of punishment because it could lead to the “free-rider” problem where loot was divided evenly between uneven efforts, breeding resentment, retaliation and “an-arrgh-chy”. Pirate codes were specific in their laws and punishments for breaking those laws, to which pirate crews had to consent before sailing.
Leeson tracked down the sharing of contractual arrangements between captains, made possible by the fact that “more than 70 percent of Anglo-American pirates active between 1716 and 1726, for example, can be connected back to one of three pirate captains”, and thus the pirate code emerged from “piratical interactions and information sharing” not from one central pirate king.
Across history, merchant and military navies have themselves hardly been beacons of enlightened liberalism, engaging as they did in questionable practices such as the British, French, and Spanish pillaging of native American resources in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the heyday of piracy.
Sovereign governments may have legalized such plundering, but they were not necessarily more moral than the pirates who re-plundered that same wealth. Both used the threat of force, as Leeson reminds us. He does not argue for moral equivalency, rather he explains that pirates form their own versions of civil societies for the same reason everyone else does: economic success.
The Invisible Hook is a good addition to the genre of popular economics: a fun and enlightening read, and rock solid in its scholarly bona fides.
Matthew Martens is pure evil
July 9, 2009 – 10:49 am by JohnToday’s inductee into the Special Hell is Matthew Martens, the federal prosecutor who used illegal, underhanded, and downright evil tactics to railroad real estate attorney Victoria Sprouse in a travesty of a criminal trial. William L. Anderson sets the record straight with his usual excellence:
The prosecution, led by Martens, convinced a jury that Sprouse knowingly signed forged and fraudulent documents and other legal papers that had false information which would permit the buyers of houses and property to obtain those things without having the required income or down payments or other things that the lender required one must have. The buyers were planning to “flip” the properties, that is, sell them quickly and make a profit.
In bringing these charges, Martens and his staff agreed that Sprouse had received no payoffs or other quid pro quo compensation, her office receiving only the standard $500 fee for closing (with perhaps $40 to $50 actually accruing to Sprouse as income after she paid her staff and other office expenses). However, that fact did not stop Martens from repeatedly telling the jury and the press that Sprouse “made millions” from illegal sales, although even the most optimistic prosecution math did not come close to that figure.
[...]
It is important to understand, however, that the outcome was fixed long before the trial, and not by any criminal or regulatory violations on behalf of Sprouse. Martens arranged for the government to forbid Sprouse from selling, disposing, or mortgaging any of her property in order to raise money to pay for her attorney, Pete Anderson. Because all her assets were forbidden to be sold or mortgaged she did not have any other funds by which to pay, the judge declared her “indigent” and then permitted a maximum of $25,000 for her legal fees.The prosecution’s strategy was obvious. If Sprouse could be denied adequate counsel, as $25K is not going to buy anything more than an attorney who wants to plead out right away, then a conviction was as good as done.
What happened afterward is most important—and sealed the outcome. [Sprouse's original lawyer, Pete] Anderson told the judge at a hearing in which she petitioned to have one of her properties sold so she could raise legal fees that he still wanted to represent Sprouse, given his knowledge of the case. That is where Martens dropped a bombshell.
Martens told the judge that it would take four-to-six weeks to present the government’s case. Anderson argued that since it would take his firm five months to prepare for trial with another month to six weeks in a trial would mean his firm would have to spend six months for a relatively tiny fee, which the firm could not afford. Thus, he begged off the case and the judge appointed two attorneys who then tried to force Sprouse to plea to a deal that would have given her 20 years. Sprouse, believing she had not committed any crimes and wanting her Constitutional day in court, refused, and from then on, she and her counsel were at odds.
There are a number of reasons why this development was significant, and why Martens had orchestrated it. First, and most important, when Martens actually presented the “evidence” during the trial, he took less than four days. One does not boil four-to-six weeks of material into four days; instead, Martens—an officer of the court and one who is bound to tell the truth while carrying out his duties—had not told the judge the truth.
[...]
A key issue in this case was whether or not Sprouse knew the documents were fraudulent and that she was knowingly signed off on transactions that were different than what was on the paper. The only prosecution witness to declare that Sprouse “must have known” about the fraud stated in a deposition under oath in a civil case saying that he never told Sprouse about what he was doing because he believed she was honest and would have refused to sign anything she thought was fraudulent and stopped the closings.Now, one would think that this would be a key piece of evidence in the trial, and that is correct. The key was to make sure that this document never would be presented during trial, and Martens and Sprouse’s court-appointed attorneys did just that.
First, the man who made that original statement under oath was a key witness for the prosecution. In exchange for leniency (Martens offered him a plea bargain to serve two years in prison), the man gave very different testimony in Sprouse’s trial than what he had given before.
[...]
Why would [Sprouse's] attorneys be so passive, especially in the fact of a prosecutor who clearly was railroading someone? To fight would not be to seen as “cooperative” with the prosecution, and the opportunity to gain easy money by cutting future deals with Martens and his staff.There were other incidents of outright incompetence and worse. The counsel did not interview their own witnesses until just before trial, they rarely objected to anything, and they pretty much let Martens run the proceedings. During the breaks, Martens’ investigators harassed defense witnesses and threatened them, but Sprouse’s attorneys did not object or tell the judge.
[...]
In summary, the prosecution managed to make sure that Sprouse could not have the representation she wanted, an attorney who saw through the tactics of the prosecution and believed strongly in the innocence of his client. Martens falsely told the judge that the presentation of the evidence would take four-to-six weeks when it did not even take six days.Martens used a witness who had testified under oath in a civil case that Sprouse did not know that the documents in question that she signed were fraudulent. To get past this obvious problem, Martens was able to use the prospect of a lighter prison sentence to entice the witness to change his testimony. To put it another way, Martens suborned perjury and the jurors swallowed the lies whole, as did the local media.
[italics in original; bold mine]
What does this wretched creature that calls itself Matthew Martens get from ruining an innocent woman’s life by breaking the law and using every immoral tactic at its disposal? Does it get more money? More fame? A better chance to climb the ladder in the federal show-trial system? It is unnerving to fathom what depths a being’s soul must sink to and what darkness must cloud its mind that it would not only pursue the ruination of an innocent person’s life but do so repeatedly and derive immense satisfaction from it each time. There is no good left in such a being. It is nothing but a monster now. I was wrong in my past assertions that everyone is a mix of good and evil; Matthew Martens is 100% evil. There seem to be more and more like it every year.
But, on the bright side, Statists everywhere should be eminently proud of their Cardassian-like court system and this verdict in particular. A mere $25,000, which is only a single year’s after-tax salary for me, is not enough to acquit an obviously innocent person. And, even better, the local and national media, the jurors who convicted Sprouse, and future jurors in federal cases will probably remain completely ignorant of these underhanded dealings and of their commonplace nature! To put the icing on the cake, Martens and the wholly incompetent judge will never suffer so much as a difficult interview, an investigation, or a slap on the wrist! The system works!
But who could have predicted that? Create a single legislation/investigation/trial/punishment system whose monopoly status and ultimate authority are backed by violence; then conscript ignorant, uninterested, untrained, malleable citizens to serve as jurors in all your cases (a duty also ensured by explicit threats of murder); observe what travesties this system visits upon its innocent captives; and then brainwash everyone into believing that without our monopoly criminal-justice system, those injustices would be happening to people.
If Sprouse’s appeal is successful and a single Statist moran says, “See, the system worked, in the end,” I might hemorrhage and collapse in a vortex of boiling rage so large that it will endanger the entire planet.
Obama Defense Dept. advocates post-acquittal detentions
July 7, 2009 – 11:06 pm by JohnWe’ll see if this actually happens:
Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective. Asked by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) the politically difficult but entirely fair question about whether terrorism detainees acquitted in courts could be released in the United States, Johnson said that “as a matter of legal authority,” the administration’s powers to detain someone under the law of war don’t expire for a detainee after he’s acquitted in court. “If you have authority under the law of war to detain someone” under the Supreme Court’s Hamdi ruling, “that is true irrespective of what happens on the prosecution side.”
Yes, you read that right: If a “terrorist” suspect is acquitted in a United States court, the Obama DOD will consider detaining that person indefinitely anyway.
Hat tip: Radley Balko
Government health insurance, Social Security, private mortgage lenders
July 5, 2009 – 10:31 pm by JohnAt this site and others you might have come across the libertarian argument that State-provided medical insurance will out-compete private medical insurance because the State has the privilege of coercing ever-increasing tax revenues out of its captives. For instance, I blagged about Sheldon Richman’s recent column putting forth this and other solid arguments.
In response to this line of reasoning, I have come across a counter-argument from Statists that goes, “Yeah, government medical insurance will crowd out private insurance just like Social Security did away with private retirement funds and Fannie Mae made private mortgage lenders obsolete.”
Ha! If you want to compare the future of your beloved government health insurance to the other governmental failures of Social Security and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, go right ahead! What does their impracticality, their inefficiency, and indeed their criminality, together with the fact that they continue to exist in our society, tell you about the nature of private vs. “public” ventures? If you think the taxpayer-funded health insurance will do just as well for its subscribers and for the rest of the country at large, you can assert that all you want!
File this under the “Statists are hopelessly stupid and so is their worldview” category.
Quote of the day
July 5, 2009 – 5:52 pm by John“Minarchy is the theory that free market capitalism is best protected by a socialist monopoly.”
—Less Antman, in response to Sheldon Richman’s post
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.
Group builds $10,000, functional R2-D2’s.
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.