[Berkeley conservation biologist Justin] Brashares teamed up with ecologist George Wittemyer of UC Berkeley to get the big picture. They analyzed United Nations population data for the areas surrounding 306 rural nature reserves in Africa and Latin America. In 245 of the reserves, population growth was higher in the 10-kilometer swath outside the reserve borders than it was in equivalent rural areas elsewhere, the team reports in the 4 July issue of Science. On average, population growth rates were almost double those in other rural areas. “Parks have become magnets for human settlement,” Brashares says.

What’s attractive about living near a park? The researchers note that international conservation grants often have a development component that aims to improve the lives of local residents, providing schools, roads, clinics, and other services. Indeed, population growth near the reserves was positively correlated with the amount of international conservation funding received. The local job market may play a role, too: People tend to move preferentially to parks that have relatively more employees. “The message comes through pretty loud and clear,” says tropical ecologist S. Joseph Wright of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama. “Parks are attracting and improving the life of people.”

But the immigration doesn’t improve the situation for wildlife in the parks. Brashares and Wittemyer cite other studies that show higher rates of logging, mining, hunting, and fires inside protected areas surrounded by humans.

In my amateur opinion, I lean towards believing this is all explained by the concept of the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons means that if a space is open to the public, if it isn’t owned by any one private entity, the general public will act irresponsibly towards it because there is no monetary incentive to preserve it and there is monetary incentive to exploit it until its ruin. Here are the Mises.org pages that come up when you search for “tragedy of the commons.” Here is the Wikipedia article on it.

Though, I should admit that it’s not apparent that the public has anything approaching legally “free access” to these nature preserve lands, so their access might be as limited as if the lands were privately owned. It does seem that State protection of the lands isn’t being very effective, though.

Either way, the two conservation biologists mentioned above probably don’t have the right solution:

One solution, Brashares and Wittemyer propose, might be to invest development dollars in towns farther away from nature reserves to give an incentive for people to move away from parks. “The edge of parks have become battlegrounds for control of resources,” Brashares says. “These battles are only going to intensify over the next decades, and we have to plan for that.”

If I read that right, they are suggesting that if they just divert enough tax dollars into central-planning and social-engineering schemes, they can combat the poaching/logging problem without killing or starving too many people in the process. Such dirigiste economic plans are exactly what enabled governments to kill nearly 200 million of their own subjects in the 20th century alone. When Statists cite African nations and villages as examples of why anarchy doesn’t work and why the State is necessary to provide things to its subjects, I’ll remind them of fascist central-planning debacles like this and reiterate my point that central planners, even Ph.D.’s employed in Berkeley, California, can’t engineer prosperity or independence in African people.

A natural-rights perspective on land and natural resources, the supremacy of private property rights, and recognition of the homesteading principle are far better foundations for protecting natural resources and preventing the emergence of “battlegrounds for control of resources” than socialism is.

If economic history and especially the history of the 20th century have shown us anything, it is that expansion of private property, shrinkage of “public” property, and abandonment of central planning are what any society needs to grow and prosper.

Ironically enough, Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay in which he popularized the concept of the tragedy of the commons appeared in the journal Science. Read that essay in its entirety here; I can access the full article at Science’s website without logging in or anything, but if anyone can’t access the whole thing, just leave a comment and I’ll copy and paste it somewhere.

In the Applications to future technology section of the Wikipedia article, this passage prompted me to write this post:

Modern roboticists and specialists in robotics agree that, as of 2006, Asimov’s Laws are perfect for plotting stories, but useless in real life. Some have argued that, since the military is a major source of funding for robotic research, it is unlikely such laws would be built into the design. SF author Robert Sawyer generalizes this argument to cover other industries, stating:

The development of AI is a business, and businesses are notoriously uninterested in fundamental safeguards—especially philosophic ones. (A few quick examples: the tobacco industry, the automotive industry, the nuclear industry. Not one of these has said from the outset that fundamental safeguards are necessary, every one of them has resisted externally imposed safeguards, and none has accepted an absolute edict against ever causing harm to humans.)

That paragraph comes from Robert Sawyer’s homepage, in his random musings on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Before I go into my mini-tirade about the anti-business bias and State-apology that pervades all of our society, I will give Sawyer credit for writing this, immediately following the above-quoted paragraph:

Indeed, given that a huge amount of AI and robotics research is underwritten by the military, it seems that there will never be a general “law” against ever harming human beings. The whole point of the exercise, at least from the funders’ point of view, is to specifically find ways to harm those human beings who happen to be on “the other side.”

He clearly realizes the military’s goals are only destructive and offensive, not protective or in any other way concordant with those of most of the rest of mankind. However, he also clearly (to my super-sensitive libertarian mind, anyway) conveys an anti-capitalistic bias that hundreds of millions of people, himself apparently included, hold.

It is the bias that a company can in any way survive, much less thrive, with practices and goals that are clearly dismissive of its own customers’ safety, and that they are incapable of seeing that that’s a bad idea, and that no profit motive exists to protect the safety of their customers or the public, and that in a free and unfettered market no honest and customer-friendly businesses would emerge as competitors, and that these forward-thinking, safe, customer-friendly, and general-public-friendly companies wouldn’t hold an immense competitive advantage over their backwards, irresponsible predecessors.

It belies his ignorance of history and economics that Sawyer uses the tobacco, automotive, and nuclear-energy industries as examples of unsafe and dangerous private enterprises, as these are three of the most heavily regulated and protected industries in the history of the United States. Statists might argue that they needed to be regulated heavily because they were harming the public; that isn’t a bad debate to have, and many have had it. I won’t go into it here except to remind you that many libertarians argue that regulatory (coercive) safety standards actually retard the process of safety improvements in a given industry because everyone (from customer to business executive) just assumes the government is the be-all and end-all of safety decisions and so the companies only do enough to meet (or finagle out of) government requirements, which is not the point the industry might be at if competition, supply and demand, and customer-pleasing where the driving forces behind such improvements.

Also, I’ll remind you of the point made by so many libertarians, which was best expressed by Frederic Bastiat (and, yes, I am trying to set a record for the most times one blagger quotes one passage):

…every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

Fortunately for my point, I don’t need to prove that public safety is first and foremost in the business executive’s mind, because, to be sure, a lot of them are pretty irresponsible, criminally so. (Does our justice system punish them? Does it allow for them to be punished? Goodness no. That’s exactly why they lobby Congress and the various agencies of the executive branch so much.) My point is that regardless of how cruel, heartless, and irresponsible you want to fantasize private companies are, the State is far worse.

Let’s rephrase the offending paragraph, replacing Sawyer’s exaggerations and misconceptions about businesses with the reality about the State:

The development of AI is a funded mainly by governments, and governments are notoriously uninterested in fundamental safeguards—especially philosophic ones. (A few quick examples: the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch of every local and national government in the history of the world. Not one of these has planned from the outset to pay attention to fundamental safeguards, every one of them by definition is immune to externally imposed safeguards*, and they have each specifically and unequivocally rejected any edicts against ever causing harm to humans. This is because the monopolistic nature of governments makes competition and secession illegal, and the existence of government is based on forcing people to obey and forcibly extracting taxes from them.)

That is a much more historically and philosophically accurate paragraph. If you disagree, please leave a comment explaining which statements are inaccurate. Again, Robert Sawyer notes the more-dangerous nature of militaries compared with private companies, but he and hundreds of millions of other people fail to appreciate that the State in general inflicts more harm on the human race than private companies ever have or could, and they are reluctant to acknowledge it.

*Well, except foreign conquest, but I don’t see how that’s any better for a people than being victimized by their own government.

Also shockingly, the affidavit that the officer wrote contained completely fabricated symptoms in the driver—bloodshot and watery eyes, flushed face, and the strong smell of alcohol on her breath. The reason he arrested her for drunk driving is because she refused the field sobriety test. She refused it because it is her right and because the officer had no reason to suspect her of drunk driving. You’d better submit to the police state or you’ll be punished for your disobedience.

In a final, bizarre twist to a totally unpredictable story, the officer is not going to be punished in any way. The policies of the Arizona state and local police that make everyone out to be a suspect and lead to the wrongful arrest many drivers (according to the Phoenix New Times column) will not be changed.

Some detractors and police-state apologists will claim that the occasional wrongful arrest, which gets corrected and dropped from the drivers’ records in due time, is a small price to pay for saving people’s lives from drunk drivers. It is hard to argue with that, and the State does own the roads, however wrongfully, but as long as you admit a few things, I’ll call it a good start: (1) a body that is unaccountable to the people and, in fact, to the law will misjudge where that happy medium between Draconian DWI laws and safety from drunk drivers is, and they will always err on the side of giving themselves more power to arrest, harass, terrorize, and imprison; (2) this tendency of the police state to take more powers over its subjects and apply them more vigorously and arbitrarily will necessarily be implemented in many facets of government, not just life-saving efforts; (3) all of the wrongful arrests won’t be corrected and dropped from the records, an injustice against which the victims have no recourse, because of the fact that the law and its courts are the sole, final arbiters of justice in society; and (4) police officers do often get overzealous in their enforcement of the law, leading to injustices that cannot simply be called errors or misjudgments, and they often go completely undisciplined while their captains and spokesmen defend their actions and blame the victims, and this lack of accountability and consequences is a major problem with all types and levels of law enforcement in our society.

I’m not trying to persuade people to renounce monopolistic government with every post I write; I’m just trying to find common ground with Statists and get them to admit there are problems with things that they wouldn’t have acknowledged before, which might lead them to regard the utility of the libertarian position with less aversion than before.

OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. …

Microsoft is doing some of the most creative thinking along these lines, with something it’s calling “Digital Manners Policies.” According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast “orders” limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.

He then brings up many of the concerns anyone should have about such frightening technology and the desire to use it. However, he makes a puzzling mistake for someone who is (I presume) thought of so favorably by so many libertarians, and for someone who understands the dangers of such Orwellian technology so well, otherwise. He says,

How do we prevent this from being abused? …Do the police get “superuser” devices that cannot be limited, and do they get “supercontroller” devices that can limit anything? How do we ensure that only they get them, and what do we do when the devices inevitably fall into the wrong hands?

Obviously their hands are the wrong hands. The universal availability of “supercontroller” devices would make this type of technology almost completely worthless in everyday electronic devices, which seems to me would be a good thing. If state legislatures or the Congress make such devices legally available to government agents only, then we will know one huge reason that we become victims to this technology. It will be interesting to follow the development of these technologies and the legislation pertaining to them.

So it would appear that Mr. Chan was prosecuted not for what he was doing, and absent a charge that he was conspiring to take actions that would impose himself upon the persons of one of these young ladies it is clear he was not prosecuted for what he was about to do, or intended to do at a later time. He was prosecuted for what he might have been thinking.Or, if one wishes to quibble about the benefit of what appears in this case to be a very small doubt implied by the word “might,” it does no violence to a position that attacks this prosecution as manifestly unjust to say “what he was surely thinking.” In either case, at issue are thoughts and thoughts only, and it is staggering to observe that an argument against punishing people for their thoughts is one that requires elaboration.

McDonald’s! (fuck yeah!)
Wal-Mart! (fuck yeah!)
The Gap! (fuck yeah!)
Baseball! (fuck yeah!)

NFL! (fuck yeah!)
Rock ‘n roll ! (fuck yeah!)
The internet! (fuck yeah!)
Slavery! (fuck yeah!)

Starbucks! (fuck yeah!)
Disney World! (fuck yeah!)
Porno! (fuck yeah!)
Valium! (fuck yeah!)

Reeboks! (fuck yeah!)
Fake tits! (fuck yeah!)
Sushi! (fuck yeah!)
Taco Bell! (fuck yeah!)

Rodeos! (fuck yeah!)
Bed, Bath & Beyond…

Liberty! (fuck yeah!)
White slips! (fuck yeah!)
The Alamo! (fuck yeah!)
Band-Aids! (fuck yeah!)

Las Vegas! (fuck yeah!)
Christmas! (fuck yeah!)
Immigrants! (fuck yeah!)
Columbine! (fuck yeah!)

Democrats! (fuck yeah!)
Republicans! (…fuck yeah…)
Sportsmanship!
Books!

I don’t have much to say about the Horn incident, just these quick thoughts: I kind of think the dispatcher was right to discourage Horn from confronting them and certainly from shooting them, because deadly force should (ideally) be used only as self-defense when your well-being is directly threatened. I understand that a free society needs private citizens to protect their property and protect each other, but fatally shooting two people in the back who were robbing your neighbor, when your neighbor wasn’t home, seems excessive to me. But, on the other hand, I’ve never been in a burglary situation, and I don’t know how I’d react knowing that burglars were right next door and could come to my house next. I’d rather shoot too early, before they came close to my house and started directly threatening me, than shoot too late after they had already broken in, or shot at me, or attacked me with their crowbar or something. Or, before they had gone to another neighbor’s house, where everyone was asleep and owned no firearms to defend themselves.

Secondly, the two criminals were Colombian immigrants who were on parole…from previous drug charges. What a surprise: the Drug War ruins two immigrants’ lives by causing them to be arrested for drug possession/trafficking, a completely victimless crime that only harms anyone because it is made illegal by the monopolistic State, and it makes them desperate enough to resort to a life of real crime. But, I don’t know their whole story, they might be legitimately shady characters who have committed real crimes like burglary before. It sounds just typical of the life-ruining character of the War on Drugs, though.

Third, read this exchange between Joe Horn and the 911 dispatcher, after he had shot the burglars:

Dispatcher: “Put that gun down! There’s officers out there without uniforms on. Do not shoot anybody else, do you understand me? I’ve got police out there…”

Horn: “I understand, I understand. I am out in the front yard waving my hand right now.”

Dispatcher: “You don’t have a gun with you, do you?

Horn: “No, no, no.”

Dispatcher: “You see a uniformed officer? Now lay down on the ground and don’t do nothing else. Lay down on the ground, Mister Horn. Do what the officers tell you to do right now.”

They have special uniforms, so they are exempt from the actions and considerations that you might apply to ordinary citizens. I’m not stretching this to make an issue out of nothing, here. I know that the reason the cops were there is because they were called there and, proper or not, it’s their job to protect us against and investigate crimes. These particular circumstances are not what I’m focusing on; it’s the attitude that police officers are held to a different set of standards and (oftentimes) laws because they are official agents of the State and their uniforms prove it. The dispatcher is saying, You may have been right or wrong to shoot those burglars, but you aren’t of the same legal status as these uniformed officers, so you can’t walk around with a gun like they can; you can’t address them standing up and armed like they will be. (The dispatcher could also have realized that at the scene of a crime where two people had already been shot, the cops were likely to be prepared to shoot, too, so Horn better do all he can to avoid provoking their trigger-happiness.)

What do you think that 911 dispatcher (and millions of others) would have thought about this scenario: Two police officers had a house surrounded because there were burglars in it, and when the burglars came running towards the cops, the cops shot them dead, and then a few more police officers come to the scene. Do you think anyone would expect the two original cops to put their guns down, come out from behind their cars or from the vicinity of the bodies with their hands up, and then lie down with their hands behind their head, waiting for the new cops to tell them what to do? Obviously not. They are not considered ordinary citizens and are not held to the same standards that we are in many situations—in any situations involving crimes and shootings. (If you think police officers are unlikely to exhibit so little restraint and shoot people unjustifiably, please read this blag more often, as you have a lot to learn.)

Consider one other scenario: What if, instead of Joe Horn, the next-door neighbor had been an off-duty police officer, and he had shot the burglars just as Horn did? Do you think he, or the police who came to the scene, would have thought the off-duty cop needed to leave his gun in the house, come out with his hands up, and lie down waiting for instructions? Don’t be foolish. He would have said, No, it’s okay, I’m a cop! Or, if he lived in the same city he worked in, his own police force would probably be the one coming to his house, so they’d know him… Either way, he wouldn’t be treated the same as an ordinary citizen. You might say that’s fine and that’s the way it should be because the cops should be held to different standards, but I’d say, one, there is no moral or philosophical basis for such a double-standard, and, two, as long as you admit this is true, that’s a good start.

The point of this longer-than-expected early-morning post was to relate the story that Chris, a 47-year-old caller to WRIF FM, told on the air this morning. He was out in his back yard grilling when he heard something weird in the woods behind his and his neighbor’s houses. It sounded like lumber being moved or loaded or something. He got his bright-orange hunting gear on and took his handgun out into the woods, and saw three young men loading up a bunch of lumber and wheels and other equipment from his neighbor’s shed into their van!

When one of them noticed him (I guess he wore his bright-orange to protect himself against hunters or trigger-happy criminals or something…I don’t know, but they saw him when he got 40 or 50 feet away), the guy started walking towards Chris. Chris asked them what the hell they were doing, and they said they knew Mr. McMahon, his neighbor, and they had permission to be there and take his stuff. When the guy walking towards Chris got pretty close, like 5-10 feet away, Chris pulled his handgun out and told him to back off and continued asking them why they were there. The guy stopped walking towards him and started listening then. Chris kept the gun pointed at all of them, and told them they could all come back to the shed later that night or the next day when its owner was home, because there should be no problem if they have his explicit permission, should there? They didn’t agree to that, so Chris made them unload all of the stuff from the van back into the shed, and they drove off.

About an hour later, cops showed up in Chris’s driveway, confiscated his gun, handcuffed him, put him in the back of their police car, and locked him up in a jail cell for 24 hours.

What had happened was one of the guys he encountered in the woods had called the police to report what Chris had done to them—threatened them with a gun even though they had a right, had permission, to be there and take Mr. McMahon’s stuff. The police immediately and by default assumed that the man with the firearm was in the wrong, and so arrested him without an investigation and took his gun even though it was his property. (If ordinary citizens did this, it would be called kidnapping and theft.) Next, the police went back to the shed in the woods to meet up with these people and supervise their taking of this lumber and other equipment from Mr. McMahon’s shed.

Perhaps you can tell by the fact that I’m relating this story on my blag and by the way I’m telling it that, of course, these were criminals and the cops were completely wrong. I guess it was after Chris got home from jail, he talked to his neighbor McMahon, who called the police and said he had no idea who any of those guys were and in no way, shape, or form did they have permission to even be there, much less take his stuff!

The police released Chris after 24 hours—maybe because that’s how long they keep someone while an “investigation” is ongoing or maybe because they found out he was completely in the right—and it took Chris several months and $1500 to get his gun back, which belonged to him, was stolen by people who had no place to take it, and which wasn’t used in the commission of a crime.

Oh, and it turns out two of the three criminals were on parole.

A few closing thoughts: The police assume by default that the person with the gun was in the wrong, but the police will always have guns and they never assume one of their own is in the wrong. They stole Chris’s gun and held him in a cell for 24 hours, but not only will they not be charged with theft or kidnapping, Chris had to pay them fifteen hundred freaking dollars to get his own perfectly legal and justified property back. Third, if he did charge them with wrongful arrest or theft, they would never be convicted and would probably not be brought to trial. If he brought them to small-claims court for his $1500 in fines and fees, he would never win (the courts are part of the same monopolistic justice [sic] system as the police department!). The cops were negligent in failing to ascertain who these criminals were and whether they had any legitimate reason to be there taking stuff out of someone’s shed. (By the way, what balls those criminals have, calling the cops and then taking equipment out of this shed right in front of them!) And, lastly, do you think Chris or his neighbor would choose to subscribe to these police-protection and adjudication systems in the future, if they had the choice? Do you think many people would, after they heard about this?

B.K. Marcus writes about “putting the BIG in Big Business”. There was a recent article in the New York Times about the fact that no venture capitalist–backed business went public in 2008 Q2, the first time since 1978 that the United States has gone an entire quarter without one going public. Marcus’s friend (or friend of a friend…it isn’t clear) commented thusly:

The ginormous costs inflicted by Sarbanes-Oxley have killed going public for many startups. Companies now face a couple million bucks a year in new compliance costs and pervasive controls over just about everything they do on top of all the other headaches of going public. That increases the temptation for going the buyout route and lessens interest in initial startup funding. Surely the last couple years’ changes in stock option accounting rules have hurt startups’ ability to pull talent, too.

B.K. says,

This is the pattern with all such regulations. The bigger corporations support them, quietly or not, because they can bear the costs and thereby eliminate competition from “below.” And the Marxoids say that unregulated capitalism has a natural tendency toward monopoly…

The Left loves small markets, small merchants, small businesses, but then does everything they can to promote the bigness of business — in the name of fighting Big Business.

This is exactly what Karen De Coster was saying Sarbanes-Oxley would do, back when it was a recent development.

The system is designed to reward the powerful and connected and screw the little guy.