As usual, the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains why this bill is a dangerous threat to privacy and why everyone should oppose it (everyone who isn't a large company in bed with the government, that is).

The bill purports to allow companies and the federal government to share information to prevent or defend from cyberattacks. However, the bill expressly authorizes monitoring of our private communications, and is written so broadly that it allows companies to hand over large swaths of personal information to the government with no judicial oversight—effectively creating a “cybersecurity” loophole in all existing privacy laws.
[...]
Under CISPA, any company can “use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property” of the company. This phrase is being interpreted to mean monitoring your communications—including the contents of email or private messages on Facebook.

Right now, well-established laws, like the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, prevent companies from routinely monitoring your private communications. Communications service providers may only engage in reasonable monitoring that balances the providers' needs to protect their rights and property with their subscribers' right to privacy in their communications. And these laws expressly allow lawsuits against companies that go too far. CISPA destroys these protections by declaring that any provision in CISPA is effective “notwithstanding any other law” and by creating a broad immunity for companies against both civil and criminal liability. This means companies can bypass all existing laws, as long as they claim a vague “cybersecurity” purpose.
[...]
CISPA has such an expansive definition of "cybersecurity threat information" that many ordinary activities could qualify. CISPA is not specific, but similar definitions in two Senate bills provide clues as to what these activities could be. Basic privacy practices that EFF recommends—like using an anonymizing service like Tor or even encrypting your emails—could be considered an indicator of a “threat” under the Senate bills.
[...]
After collecting your communications, companies can then voluntarily hand them over to the government with no warrant or judicial oversight whatsoever as long is the communications have what the companies interpret to be “cyber threat information” in them.

I suppose President Obama should be lauded for criticizing the bill, assuming this means he also will veto it when it passes. But the practice of violating the civil liberties of uncharged Americans without any trial, hearing, or other due process is par for the course for the Obama administration, so any opposition Obama registered on Constitutional grounds would understandably sound hollow.

Declan McCullagh and Leigh Beadon wrote thoughtful articles about the potential dangers of CISPA. For instance, McCullagh echoes the EFF by noting that the bill's word "notwithstanding"

would trump wiretap laws, Web companies' privacy policies, gun laws, educational record laws, census data, medical records, and other statutes that protect information....

Beadon presents a scenario I haven't read about elsewhere:

Government networks are protected by a network security system called Einstein, which is being steadily expanded to do things like analyze the content of communications. Such software meets all the criteria of a "cybersecurity system" under CISPA, and there is serious concern that the bill would permit the government to offer Einstein or a similar system to private cybersecurity companies. By CISPA's definitions, everything collected by such a system would qualify as "cyber threat information" and thus be open game for sharing with the government—and nothing in the bill would prevent these private systems from being connected live to government databases, effectively uniting them with the government's own security network.

McCullagh also notes that CISPA authors Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) cite cybersecurity threats from Russia and China as a major impetus for the bill. Rogers and Ruppersberger, of course, claim that CISPA actually "protects privacy by prohibiting the government from requiring private sector entities to provide information." I don't buy it for one minute, and neither should you. How many imagined, overblown, or manufactured threats from abroad have been invoked to justify encroachments of liberty by governments throughout history? How many measures did those governments take in the name of protecting and helping their citizens, only to prove that those were so many empty promises at first chance? When the government comes to help, we should fight it back with all we've got.

The internet and all its freedom of exchange, communication, and association are the least regulated domains of our lives, so it isn't surprising that the parasites in big government and big business see them as prime targets for overdue legislation. Our currency, our schools, our business, our labor, our agriculture, our health care, and now our private online communications—all restricted and regulated and controlled by a professional criminal class that invokes the public good in order to attack it, that promises to protect our rights so that it may violate them.

I wrote in January about the success and fervor of the SOPA protests:

I don’t think it will last long, unfortunately. Our ardor and stamina in defending our rights just don’t exist. Our quality of life will have to be severely, immediately, and clearly impacted by a law for widespread protests and backlash to defend us against our corrupt political system for long. There will be another SOPA/PIPA, and it will pass the House and Senate and be signed by the president, probably President Obama. It won’t be egregious and alarming to most people, but it will be bad enough. Liberal and conservative voters will pat themselves on the back for being reasonable, realistic, and bi-partisan and defending themselves against the horror of SOPA, and the professional criminal class will chuckle to themselves saying, “Stupid, gullible SOPA protesters. That’ll teach ’em what standing up to our authority will get them.”

In his four articles about unschooling, he introduces what unschooling is, summarizes the responses from his international survey, and provides many quotes from the respondents. The first article, introducing the concept of unschooling and inviting unschooling families to respond, was published back in September 2011 (all bold text is my emphasis):

Unschooling is a movement that turns conventional thinking about education upside down.
[...]
Defined most simply, unschooling is not schooling. Unschoolers do not send their children to school and they do not do at home the kinds of things that are done at school. More specifically, they do not establish a curriculum for their children, they do not require their children to do particular assignments for the purpose of education, and they do not test their children to measure progress. Instead, they allow their children freedom to pursue their own interests and to learn, in their own ways, what they need to know to follow those interests. They also, in various ways, provide an environmental context and environmental support for the child's learning. Life and learning do not occur in a vacuum; they occur in the context of a cultural environment, and unschooling parents help define and bring the child into contact with that environment.

All in all, unschoolers have a view of education that is 180 degrees different from that of our standard system of schooling. They believe that education is something that children (and people of all ages) do for themselves, not something done to them, and they believe that education is a normal part of all of life, not something separate from life that occurs at special times in special places.

Nobody knows just how many kids in the United States are currently unschoolers. For official record-keeping purposes, unschoolers are lumped in with homeschoolers. State laws don't allow parents to just take their kids out of school; parents have to somehow prove that their kids are being educated at home, and that puts them into the homeschooling category.
[...]
All in all, unschooling is a very significant educational movement, because it involves such a large number of kids and it violates so sharply the standard view that kids must be forced to learn an imposed curriculum if they are going to succeed.

Academic researchers have steered clear of any serious study of unschooling, just as they have steered clear of Sudbury model schools and all other innovations in education that deny the value of an imposed curriculum.

Gray then provides links to several unschooling resources and summarizes what each one offers.

The second post, which was the first of three summarizing the results of the unschooling survey, was about the benefits of unschooling as reported by the respondents.

Essentially all of the respondents emphasized the role of their children in directing their own education and in pointing out that education is not separate from life itself.
[...]
By our coding, 100 (43%) of the responses fell into Category 1. These were the responses that most most strongly emphasized the role of the child and did not describe parental activities conducted specifically for the purpose of the child's eduction, other than being responsive to the child's wishes or the child's lead. As illustration, one respondent in this category wrote: "Unschooling equals freedom in learning and in life. We push aside paradigms and established regulations with regards to schooling and trust our children to pave their own way in their own educations. Everything they want to experience has value. We trust them." Another wrote: "Unschooling, for us, means there is absolutely no curriculum, agenda, timetable, or goal setting. The children are responsible for what, how, and when they learn."

By our coding, 96 (42%) of the responses fell into Category 2. These differed from Category 1 only in that they made some mention of deliberate parental roles in guiding or motivating their children's education. As illustration, one in this category wrote: "We define unschooling as creating an enriching environment for our children where natural learning and passions can flourish. We want our life to be about connection—to each other, to our interests and passions, to a joyful life together....As a parent, I am my children's experienced partner and guide and I help them to gain access to materials and people that they might not otherwise have access to. I introduce them to things, places, people that I think might be interesting to them, but I do not push them or feel rejected or discouraged if they do not find it interesting...."

Finally, 35 (15%) of the responses fell into Category 3. These were responses that might be considered as falling at the borderline between unchooling and what is sometimes called "relaxed homeschooling." The parents in these cases seemed to have at least some relatively specific educational goals in mind for their children and seemed to work deliberately toward achieving those goals. As illustration, one in this category wrote: "We believe that, for the most part, our daughter should be encouraged to explore subjects that are of interest to her, and it is our responsibility as parents to make learning opportunities available to her... I usually ask her to learn something or do something new or educational every day (and I explain to her why learning something new every day is such a cool thing to do!)."
[...]
The most common categories of benefits were the following:

1. Learning advantages for the child. ... Many in this category said that because their children were in charge of their own learning, their curiosity and eagerness to learn remained intact.

2. Emotional and social advantages for the child. ... They said that their children were happier, less stressed, more self-confident, more agreeable, or more socially outgoing than they would be if they were in school or being schooled at home. Many in this category referred to the social advantages; their children interacted regularly with people of all ages in the community, not just with kids their own age as they would if they were in school.

3. Family closeness. ... They wrote that because of unschooling they could spend more time together as a family, do what they wanted to together, and that the lack of hassle over homework or other schooling issues promoted warm, harmonious family relationships.

4. Family freedom from the schooling schedule. ... They said that freedom from the school's schedule allowed the children and the family as a whole to operate according to more natural rhythms of their own choice and to take trips that would otherwise be impossible. Some also mentioned that because of the free schedule, their kids could get jobs or participate in community projects that would be impossible if they had to be in school during the day.

To avoid an overly long post that would kind of defeat the purpose of linking to and excerpting from Gray's article, I'll just paste a few brief snippets of the survey responses that Gray quotes:

"More time together, less arguing, watching our daughter spend hours absorbed in things that she is pursuing on her own, seeing her getting enough sleep and not coming down with viruses that she used to catch at school, exploring museums and other community resources together...." [I will note that a lower exposure to viruses and bacteria is actually a negative side effect of avoiding schools, because germs are good for you; they make you stronger. What if that child gets chickenpox as an adult instead of as a child? Then it becomes deadly instead of just painful and annoying. —JTP]
[...]
"Children who are full of joy, full of love for learning, creative, self-directed, passionate, enthusiastic, playful, thoughtful, questioning, and curious."
[...]
"Our kids learn all the time, instead of being trained to learn one subject at a time, in 50-minute increments bookended by bells."
[...]
"So we don't have the kind of power struggles that other parents seem to have over bedtimes and homework. ... After all, happy relationships should ideally not be based on power issues."
[...]
"The children can delve deeper into subjects that matter to them, spend longer on topics that interest them. . . . The children can participate in the real world, learn real life skills, converse with people of all ages. They do not have to waste time with endless review, boring homework, having to work above or beneath their abilities, or in unpleasant power dynamics with adults with whom they have no connection. They can be themselves, and learn about themselves, and become who they truly want to be."

The second article was about what leads the parents to unschool their children.

...the child's experience in school led them to remove the child from school. In their explanations, 38 of these families referred specifically to the rigidity of the school's rules or the authoritarian nature of the classroom as reason for removing the child; 32 referred to the wasted time, the paltry amount of learning that occurred, and/or to the child's boredom, loss of curiosity, or declining interest in learning; and 32 referred to their child's unhappiness, anxiety, or condition of being bullied.

Here is a selection of quotes from the parents explaining why they and their children chose unschooling:

"The school principle threatened to have [my son] prosecuted for bringing a 'weapon' to school. The 'weapon' was a can of silly string."

"I saw kids punished for being inquisitive and talkative, which is something I thought most young kids were, naturally."

"We were tired of our children being labeled and tired of them coming home exhausted and quite frankly full of nastiness. They weren't the nice people we remembered them to be. Once we brought them all home, they became 'people' again."

"After I put them in public school for a time, it became extremely clear to me that being forced to follow someone else's idea of a curriculum was counterproductive, to the point of making them 'hate' learning...."

"We hated the blue ribbon public school our oldest attended. He had 1 hour of homework (reading comprehension and math worksheets) every night, for a 6 year old!"

"I worked in the classrooms a lot and saw a LOT of wasted time during which my kids were stuck sitting still and doing absolutely nothing."

"Too many hours in school and then working on homework. He said to me, 'Mom, when is my time?' It was breaking my heart."

"We ... found that increasing levels of homework and projects left us slaves to the school's schedule even after school hours and on weekends. Additionally, we found that our oldest child was losing his love of learning, and our 2nd child did not have enough time for her passion and gift - the performing arts."

"The faculty repeatedly ignored situations where other kids attacked my son physically and verbally. and after two years of taking it he pushed one of his bullies back and was suddenly in trouble (the bully was not in trouble even though it was witnessed by several teachers him being a bully toward my son) The school repeatedly set my son up to fail and ignored my requests and demands for change. Then they called a meeting to discuss what to do 'about my son' instead of what they could to FOR HIM... I told them that there would be no such meeting...."

"Eventually she stopped even doing maths and went from top of the class to bottom. This was due to a maths teacher who used to mock her and make her feel small."

"In the beginning of grade 2, my daughter told me one evening of how one of her friends had been verbally threatened (the term used was 'YOU'RE DEAD MEAT') by another classmate, pushed up against a wall, and told that the classmate's older cousins were going to get her. I was appalled that this was happening to 8 year olds and that, upon talking to my daughter's teacher about this incident, this type of interaction was not considered alarming by the teaching staff. I never want my children to accept and numb themselves to think that treating other humans horrendously, unloving, and unkindly is normal!"

"When we first started homeschooling my oldest, at age 11, had been so emotionally damaged from his school experiences that we were shocked to see how quickly his personality rebounded within a month or two."

The third article details the families' difficulties in transitioning to unschooling and the challenges with maintaining that lifestyle:

As a first step in the analysis, we coded the challenges that people described into several relatively distinct categories. The most frequently cited of these categories is the one that we labeled "Social Pressure." It includes negative judgments and criticism from other people, from relatives, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers, and unschoolers’ perceived needs to justify their choice repeatedly to people who don’t approve or don’t understand.
[...]
The second most frequently cited category of challenge is the one that we labeled Deschooling the Parent’s Mind." This category has to do with parents’ difficulties in overcoming their own, culturally ingrained “schoolish” ways of thinking about education.
[...]
Both of these two most often mentioned categories of challenge have to do with the power of social norms. We are social creatures, and it is very difficult for us to behave in ways that run counter to what others perceive as normal. In the history of cultures, harmful normative practices or rituals may persist for centuries at least partly because of the stigma, or perceived stigma, associated with violating the norms. ... School is the most predominant cultural ritual of our time. It is a practice ingrained as normal, even necessary, in the minds of the great majority of people. To counter it, one must overcome not just others’ negative judgments, but also the judgments that rise up from one’s own school-indoctrinated mind.

Several of the quotations about social stigma reveal how truly indoctrinated, obstinate, dogmatic, and downright religious people are about schooling and education.

“By far the greatest challenge is with other people. It is such a radical concept, I think it feels so easy for people (especially family members) to criticize it. I get tired of feeling like I need to wait until my children are adults so I can finally say, ‘See, it’s all right!’”

“I would say the only real challenge we have is dealing with others’ (mostly strangers') prejudices and misunderstandings. When we say we homeschool (because ‘unschooling’ is met with blank stares most of the time) they assume I have little desks set up in my living room. They assume we have no social life. It just gets really, really tiring hearing those comments all the time (from people we meet out in public). Then a program comes on mainstream TV about unschooling and people think that is our life (these programs are usually sensationalized and edited in such a way as to portray us as neglectful, ignorant parents who don’t care about their kids). I’m sick of answering questions like ‘Well, that’s fine for art and music, but what about math?’ or ‘How will your kids function in the Real World.’" [Ha! As if forced government schooling is more like the real world or prepares them for it! —JTP]

“My daughter’s father and stepmother were so opposed to it that they literally kicked her out of their house because they felt she was setting a bad example for their younger children.”

“My MIL stopped asking about her grandchildren, unwilling to try to understand what we were doing or why…so they essentially lost a grandparent.”

"I learned very quickly that most people can’t (won’t?) understand, and some are downright disapproving."

"Others don’t understand and look down on what we’re doing. Most people are stuck in the school paradigm and feel like it really is necessary for kids to go to school in order to be successful adults. They see things like bullying and doing work that has no meaning for you as necessary rights of passage to the ‘real world,’ which they see as boring, scary, and uninviting in general.”

“My son instinctually knows how to do this [learn at home on his own], but we [my husband and I] have had to unlearn a lot!” [Structured schooling is unnatural to children in a lot of ways, and home-schooling and unschooling simply open their minds and their lives up to what learning should be. —JTP]

“Something in us rebels at the thought of kids ‘getting away’ with not having to do math and spelling drills, homework, or having something forced upon them ‘because they’ll need it.’ It’s hard to see them spending so much time doing unstructured learning and having to fight the feeling that they’re not learning effectively even when we can see that they are.

"Learning to see learning everywhere, and understanding that learning has no connection to teaching.”

“Refraining from pushing and coercing kids into things that I think are good for them. It never works out well and undermines the trust inherent in unschooling. At its root is worry that I’ve made a terrible mistake and they won’t get what they need."

“I have found that the biggest hurdles so far all self inflicted...Sometimes it feels too easy and that there must be a catch. Am I just being lazy? For the love of God, what about the workbooks!"

“For us the main issues are the travel required for socializing –- this can be tiring. We have to travel further to find girls my eldest daughter’s age.”

“Because our son is an only child, and the other children who live in our neighborhood attend school and then after-school care, we have had to make sure to provide plenty of opportunity for him to get together and play with other children, as he really enjoys being with other kids. Until we found a couple local(ish) unschooling/homeschooling networks with which we connected, it was challenging to find him children to play with as often as he wanted to get out and socialize."

I imagine both home-schooling and unschooling are much more daunting to the parents than to the children. The reasons for this are obvious: We have been indoctrinated with the society-wide paradigm of structured schooling and all that comes with it, but this is unnatural to many children, who might instinctively know (or, at least, could figure out soon enough) that schooling does not equal education.

I would love to know how the average unschooled student or the majority of unschooled students turn out socially, in college, and in their careers. Do they have a hard time dealing with the idiot douchebags who populate the Earth, whom they haven't had to deal with frequently as children? Do they have a hard time coping with entry-level jobs they might not like so much but which they need in order to pursue their career interests, because they aren't used to biting the bullet and doing unenjoyable things for a while? Are they more or less well-rounded, given that they weren't "forced" to learn subjects that didn't interest them but, at the same time, were allowed to pursue all of the subjects that did?

All I know is that the government near-monopoly on education across the world has so thoroughly prevented a free market in learning and education for so long that, as that monopoly starts to break and individual people and families free themselves from it and more people start learning how to teach themselves and communities evolve more dynamic, less structured ways of teaching all of their children and entrepreneurs develop new schooling systems for those who want them, we are going to see how truly restrictive compulsory government schooling has been to our children and how devastating it has been to society as a whole. Schooling is not education, and the freedom to grow our intellect and creativity to their fullest potential requires eliminating all government from all education forever.

Do you have any experience with home-schooling or unschooling, or do you wish you did? What is your first-hand or second-hand take on it and on the adults that home-schooled or unschooled children grew into?

At 5:25, Woods asked Murphy, "How is it possible that somebody like Krugman can look at the crisis that we've just endured and are still going through and feel like he and Keynesianism in general have been vindicated, and yet at the same time, the anti–Federal Reserve Austrians and 'austere' Austrians feel like they've been vindicated? Does that just go to show that economics is a whole lot of bunk?" Murphy responded,

You're right, I have been very embarrassed just being an economist for the last few years. I keep making jokes to my colleagues, saying, "You'd better get something else going on because people are going to come out with the pitchforks, they're going to string us up pretty soon. You know, maybe right after the lawyers.
[...]
I think a lot of it is the nature of economics, and this is stuff that Mises and other Austrians have been stressing... This is why the methods of the natural sciences—you can't just carry them over blindly into the social sciences. In particular, it's because you can't have a reproducible experiment, a controlled experiment. We can't roll back the clock to early 2009 when Obama came in and say, "Well, what if he had done a stimulus of the size that Krugman recommended? Or what if they did what the Austrians said and they just cut the government's budget drastically and cut taxes and tied the dollar to gold or just got rid of the Federal Reserve, and then what would have happened?

... Just looking at one particular episode, nobody can say. Just like the Great Depression, economists still are in disagreement over that. So from our point of view, the Austrian point of view, we're going to say, "Yeah, see? Hoover raised spending a lot, he put in a lot of New Deal light, even though FDR's own advisers after the fact admitted that what we did under the New Deal, the Hoover administration actually started the ball rolling and we just extended it.

So you would think, from our point of view, what better evidence could you see? The closest the U.S. has ever come to a command economy, absent war time, was the 1930s, and clearly that was the worst economy we ever had. And so, "Duh, what more do you need to see that we're right?" But of course, Krugman's going to say, "Well, if you looked at hospitals, you'd see people getting medicine were really sick, and you wouldn't want to just conclude, therefore, that medicine makes people sick. And the reason FDR had to do all that stuff was because of how bad the economy was since Hoover didn't do enough."

It just shows the importance of having an antecedent economic theory that you use to parse the world with, because otherwise, you can always after the fact come up with some ad hoc explanation as to why your theory's been vindicated.

Woods: ... People will say, "Well, the Austrians don't care about empirical evidence and they're just dogmatists." But the point is, in the real world, when you're looking at the same empirical evidence, people are drawing exactly the opposite conclusions. And that goes to show, the Austrian point is that obviously, empirical evidence in and of itself in the social sciences, when it's not clear when you've got mere correlation or causality, can't in and of itself settle the debate anyway. ...

Murphy: Just to follow up on that, Russ Roberts, an economist at George Mason—he's not an Austrian per se but I think a fellow traveler... On his blog, within the last three months or so, came out and said something like... "There's all these econometric estimates of the multiplier...and I go with the ones that are low or negative because of my prior beliefs, not because I'm weighing the evidence." And he was just being honest because his point was these apparently scientific guys who just say let the data speak for themselves—some people come up with a negative number, and some people say government stimulus has a multiplier of double what the government says.

So his point was, this isn't like we're measuring the charge on an electron. These estimates are all over the place. And he said, "Isn't it funny that the people who are politically in favor of Keynesian remedies tend to believe the studies that come up with a high number, whereas I, who am a libertarian personally, I tend to like the studies that come up with a low number?" So he's just being honest.... And people were jumping all over him, saying, "Ah! See, he admits he's an ideologue." When in fact, he at least acknowledged what the situation was.

At 15:30, they start talking about insider trading, the justice of laws against it, and the economic effects surrounding the issue. It was slightly more interesting than I expected.

Woods: This week in 2004, Martha Stewart was convicted of lying to Congress in the course of an insider trading investigation. Libertarians in general believe that insider trading is basically a victimless crime, and they are willing to defend it as a perfectly acceptable practice. And yet it sometimes comes off sounding like the person is an apologist for evil and wicked people in our society. ...

Murphy: The official justification for these laws against insider trading is that it's allegedly unfair if somebody who works in a Wall Street firm or somebody who deals with certain companies and has access to information that's not in the public realm...and they're allowed to personally trade on that and, in a sense, take advantage of the person on the other side of the trade who didn't have access to that information. Some people say that's just unfair, end of story, it should be illegal. And other people try to make a utilitarian justification and say, "Well, that's going to make regular people afraid to invest in the stock market...and we need some assurance that's not going to happen."

There's the libertarian argument to just say, "Hey, it's property rights, no one's sticking a gun to your head, if you want to trade with somebody and they happen to know more information, so be it." But even beyond that, just economically, that's a silly objection to raise [the ones mentioned above].

In any other context besides financial stocks, we want people to trade who are experts. Like when it comes to baseball scouting, can you imagine if somebody said, "No, we don't want the sports teams hiring guys who actually know baseball and can identify talent. We should just randomly grab people off the street and say, 'Hey, get me my next pitcher.' We think that the Major Leagues would be better that way." That would be crazy.

Or when it comes to art, would anybody get mad if at an auction, people actually went there who were experts in the art that was being auctioned off and were making bids based on their own knowledge about how valuable the thing was instead of grabbing random people off the street and saying, "What do you think this particular painting is worth?"

In any other context, we want experts with so-called insider information profiting from their trading so that the prices are accurate. And that's what happens with stocks and the financial sector: If somebody has information, they know there's going to be a court ruling that's going to come out tomorrow and make the stock go way up, we want them out there buying the stock now because that makes prices less volatile. So when the news breaks, the price doesn't jump 50%, maybe it only jumps 10% because the so-called insiders have already been bidding the price up. So us, like Joe six-pack on the outside who has no clue about these things, that actually makes the stock market less risky for us. We know day to day there's not going to be these massive bombshells of news getting released that'll make our portfolio go way up or way down. ...

Woods: ... I don't agree with it, but I understand the complaint that somebody gets some inside information that makes them think that this stock is going to plummet because he knows something about the company, and so he unloads it. And you've got a good argument as to why that's actually socially very useful.... But what if he gets inside information saying, "I think this company's going to get better, I think this stock's going to rise," so his inside information leads him to hold on to his stock [when he otherwise might have considered selling]? Would we throw him in jail for insider non-trading?!

He [the mayor of the narrator's "district"] tells the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games.

The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins.

Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch [on television]—this is the Capitol's way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. "Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there's nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen."
[...]
"It is both a time for repentance and a time for thanks," intones the mayor.

That certainly gets the story off to a chilling start, and I've heard it only gets darker.

Pretty much all of my friends have read the novel and/or seen the movie. Those who haven't probably will soon. How has it affected them? What lessons will they get out of it? Will they apply the lessons and warnings and morals of Collins's story to the world we live in? Will they ever see the similarities between the totalitarian nightmare of Panem and the real government they put in power, with its constant manipulation, its spinning of violent intrusion as benevolent helpfulness, its use of aggression as a matter of course, its dehumanizing and divisive influence, its separation of the mighty government from its subjects, and the complete immunity with which its leaders commit atrocious crimes? Or will they (more likely, in my opinion) conclude that because they sympathize with the protagonists and hate the villains, their own democratically elected government and its president must, for the most part, reflect their righteousness? They could never imagine the United States devolving into such a brutal, oppressive nightmare (unless, of course, Republicans had their way). I mean, a television show where children are forced to kill each other, and everyone cheers as they watch it at home? Is that really even useful as an allegory or a forewarning for our society?

That got me to thinking: How unrealistic is a totalitarian government like Panem and its Hunger Games? Is it really so radically different from the oppressive regimes that much of humanity has suffered under for much of its history? We've all read about the unthinkable, unspeakable, heinous, inhuman atrocities committed by governments from ancient times to modern. We know humans are capable of barbaric things.

Which is more unthinkable: the Hunger Games or the Holocaust? Which society is more barbaric and uncivilized: the Panem that has not only lived under but celebrated and reveled in the televised Hunger Games for decades, or the world that perpetrated the Holocaust, the Stalin purges, the Great Leap Forward, the Killing Fields, and numerous other genocides all within a span of a few decades? If you were living 100 years ago and read about two alternate dystopian futures, one with a government whose oppression included the Hunger Games (disregarding whatever incredulities you would have about the science-fictional concept of television at that time) and one with genocide after genocide after genocide, most of them perpetrated by thousands of willing soldiers and officials of supposed governments of the people, which would you consider more absurd? (One of them is only in North America and the other includes the whole world, but close enough.)

Our parents and grandparents lived through a brutal time, unprecedented and hopefully never to be repeated, but we are living in a more brutal age than we might care to admit. Governments across the world kill their own citizens every day for crimes far less egregious than murder (sometimes no crimes at all). The president of the supposed freest nation on Earth kills thousands of foreigners a year who are not soldiers, terrorists, or any other type of threat, and the supposed freest nation on Earth imprisons a higher proportion of its citizens than any other nation by far. Every communist or fascist country of the 20th century was a dystopia. We would do well to remember that real humans with previously normal lives committed mass murders only recently, and that genocide is made much easier by a powerful government, a single powerful executive, a large military, and an unarmed populace.

Naturally, because it's the EconTalk podcast and Russ Roberts is an economist, they focused more on the microeconomics that Davidson learned in his visit to Standard Motor Products and also to factories in China, rather than on the human-interest aspect of his Atlantic article, although the latter wasn't ignored. Here are some segments of the podcast that especially piqued my interest from either an economic or other point of view:

From about 6:50 through about half of the podcast, Davidson and Roberts talk about "skilled blue-collar workers" and less skilled entry-level machine operators whom we usually think of as typical factory workers. The skilled blue-collar workers probably have a high-school diploma and a two-year associate's degree but are fairly smart and have gained a lot of knowledge about metallurgy, computer programming, electronics, chemistry, and even calculus. In contrast, the basic, low-level machine operators learn their menial jobs in a day, are unlikely to advance their careers much, and their jobs are almost guaranteed to be replaced by machines before they retire. The latter are people like Maddie, whom he focused on in his Atlantic article, and Davidson's own grandfather, who populated assembly line floors in factories in the 1920s–1960s. Davidson muses, "I think there's no question—certainly for me, I think for most people—you'd rather be a skilled worker now than an unskilled worker when there were lots of jobs. It's just much more interesting. You're doing lots of different things every day, you're using your brain, you probably will not get carpal tunnel."

Davidson says those low-level machine operators, who used their muscles more than their brains to perform menial, repetitive tasks, were often replaced by the hundreds by a single robot and a computer, which are only operated by one person now. Considering the output that this one person and his machine are responsible for, the labor of this skilled blue-collar machinist is now hundreds of times more productive than a single low-level machine operator was. This comes at the expense of hundreds of jobs, but that labor is now freed up to do other work that serves some other of humanity's infinite set of unsatisfied wants and needs.

Russ Roberts reminds us that this is called "creative destruction" and that this is an important foundation of economic progress and our material well-being. This is nothing new, but old truths often seem to need frequent repeating. He summarizes the four major benefits of this creative destruction: increased productivity/labor ratio; more and better products for lower prices for all of society; freeing people from having to do menial, back-breaking work and instead making machines do it (faster and with less wear and tear); and enabling the displaced labor to do different work that serves other unsatisfied human wants and needs. This is the very essence of wealth creation and should be celebrated at every chance. One place that that displaced labor (not the actual laid-off machine operators, but the potential or hypothetical labor that would have filled their spots in the future) can go is, of course, to making the machines and computers that replaced the machine operators of old. This is higher-level work requiring more education, more critical thinking, more mathematical reasoning, more creativity, and less physically taxing labor than manual labor does. Such replacement and progression is considered absolutely crucial to the advancement of human civilization and the creation of new and additional wealth.

When mercantalists, protectionists, and other economic ignoramuses decry the loss of jobs to inanimate machines that serve the heartless profit motive of evil industrialists and greedy shareholders, they forget about the jobs of the robot manufacturers and computer engineers and programmers who make those robots and computers. What about those jobs? What would they say if the robot makers all lost their jobs? Should those jobs just not exist? Should those companies never have been founded and their employees just gone into menial manual labor instead? What sense does it make to protect a less productive job over a more productive one? The 100 lost machine operator jobs are that which is seen, the gained robot/computer maker jobs are that which is less often seen, and the yet uncreated or unsaturated job niches that an additional 100 people can now fill are that which is very rarely seen. The increased wealth and well-being that we enjoy as a result of advances in technology that make labor more productive and make menial, dangerous jobs unnecessary can be seen everywhere all the time, yet we don't always take notice of what we see.

(As I quote below, Roberts later says, "I'm extremely excited about my job getting destroyed by technology.")

The skilled blue-collar workers are represented by Standard Motor Products' Luke Hutchins, whom Davidson also highlights in his Atlantic article. He is no mere machine operator but rather a machinist. He has a lot of math ability and says calculus is particularly helpful for his job. I loved it when, after Davidson said that, Roberts interjected, saying, "That's so wild, though! I gotta stop there! Because I read that. It got like a sentence...part of me wanted the entire article to be about that. My wife teaches high-school math, and we talk all the time about the value of various skills and who can use them, and...is it just good for your brain to learn these skills in math or does it actually come in handy? And certainly if you were going to be an engineer, then it's good to know math, but a machinist needs to know calculus? Why?!" Davidson then explains how Hutchins has to deal with three sets of x-, y-, and z-coordinates to make adjustments to the machine, typing them into a DOS-like command-line interface. He likened it to string theory, thinking in nine dimensions all the time. I also got a kick out of that segment. This has nothing to do with politics or economics; it's just fascinating how beneficial math is and how crucial calculus is to almost everything about our lives. The world runs on calculus.

At about 34:00, Davidson explains why he chose Standard Motor Products over some newer, perhaps more cutting-edge manufacturing company that makes high-end technological products and uses even more machines per human than Standard does, or offshores all of its labor. "I wanted a firm that wasn't trying to squeeze every penny of profit out...because I thought it would make for a more interesting, compelling story.... You know, all the stuff about Bain Capital and Mitt Romney—I just didn't want to get into that debate. I wanted a company that almost anyone would look at and say, 'Alright, those are decent people. They would love to hire more people. They would love to justify keeping everyone on and never laying anyone off. But they can't because the market won't let them.' To do that would mean just going bankrupt."

But Roberts and Davidson go on to agree that regardless, Standard basically does have to squeeze every penny of profit out, or at least squeeze every penny out of their production costs, because if another company makes fuel injectors (and other products that Standard makes elsewhere) for a few cents cheaper, then the after-market auto parts retailers aren't going to sell its products anymore, and then it'll have no customers. Standard makes a net 5% profit margin in a great year. It's usually closer to 2% or 3%, which Roberts notes is probably the norm for everyone in that industry, even those trying to squeeze every penny out (and I think probably just about everyone in all of manufacturing).

Roberts then notes that they can't stand still, they have to keep improving, keep lowering the cost of every little input, keep reducing the time it takes to switch a machine over from making one type of fuel injector to another, all in the name of staying afloat and avoiding bankruptcy.

That reminded me of the old adage that liberals and a lot of other leftists never acknowledge: The profit motive is the single strongest driving force keeping prices low, not high.

Taking this drive, this necessity to continue improving little by little into consideration with the improvements in labor productivity and wealth creation exemplified above, this discussion also reminds us that the competition of a free market is not a dog-eat-dog competition to take a piece of the static economic pie from others; rather, it is a competition to create new and additional wealth for the consumers who are your ultimate raison d'être.

However, it can't be denied that there is more than one way to make profit and more than one way to stay competitive, in any industry. Germany has gained a reputation for "making money by making stuff", and I think it also has a reputation for treating its employees a little better and paying them a little more than factories in other countries do or than the German companies could probably get away with. (That's what I gather from reading one of the top comments at Davidson's Atlantic article and hearing things around the radio and internet, anyway.) For some companies, paying employees more actually improves their profits. The story is certainly different in some ways for the retailers profiled in that article than it is for manufacturing companies, but it must be similar in some ways, also. I wish I knew more about their successes and failures and what makes them similar and different. I bet a lot of economists do, too.

At around 48:15, after Davidson and Roberts have discussed the reasons there might be an apparent shortage of skilled labor in the manufacturing industry (the Luke Hutchins types), such as ignorance that the high-skill and medium-skill jobs exist, some sort of snobbery that sours people's opinions of manufacturing and/or small Southern cities, inadequate education to prepare young people for such jobs, and insufficient pay scales, Roberts pontificates on the educational and labor changes that the U.S. might see soon or is in fact already seeing:

I think there's a lot of changes going on in the American labor force that are brought on by this recession, where people are opening their eyes to all kinds of things, especially in what they study in school and where they study it. If we can make our education market a little more flexible, which I think is coming, I think there's going to be a lot of changes in how these worlds work. I'm extremely excited about my job getting destroyed by technology. I think there's a tremendous opportunity for the American college experience and the American high-school experience to be replaced by something that's different. I'm not exactly sure yet what that will be, but it's going to involve technology and online learning and different ways of learning.

... I think we have a crisis in education. A lot of people look at foreign countries and say, "They do it differently and better." Rather than us trying to figure out from the top down what we ought to be doing, I'd allow a little more chaos in the education industry. I'd get government out of it and let private entrepreneurs come up with things that would make the Maddies of the world better prepared for the future.

At about 57:00, Davidson and Roberts got into a very interesting discussion, mostly hypothetical musing on Roberts's part, about how low-skill workers can improve their skills, get higher-level training, make themselves (more) irreplaceable, learn to use their brains instead of their muscles, and add a lot more value to their company in a decision-making, critical-thinking kind of way:

Let's think creatively for a minute. ... I'm going to have a little thought experiment.

You have people in the factory who are bright, but through either the choices they've made or bad luck or unawareness of what's going on outside... You'd think there'd be an opportunity to do the following. You'd think the factory could bring in some training into the factory that the workers would pay for, not the factory. Workers might pay for it not out of pocket, but in the form of lower wages. So if you offer $10 an hour or $11 an hour, you don't get those workers to do your job, but you might if you said, "Look, I'm only paying 10, my competitor, I know, is offering you 13...but if you come to work for me for 10, your life's going to be tough for a while, but I've got this program where we're going to take a break for an hour or two a day...and we're going to help you get the skills that you might be able to use elsewhere in our factory....

And I [speaking as a factory owner] realize that maybe many of the workers who'd like to have those skills aren't going to have the capability of acquiring them, and I'm uneasy about bearing that risk, so I'll let the worker bear the risk, in the form of lower wages, and we'll have an in-house training program as one of our fringe benefits. We'll bring in a local community college to teach a class on site, or we'll partner with them to make it easier for you to get off work at certain times. You'd think those kind of things would be desperately helpful to folks who are either eager to get ahead or worried about the fact that they're not going to stay where they are.

I think this sounds like a great idea that could be entirely feasible in more than one manifestation. This could not only help workers get training while still earning money but also would make employees and employers more invested in each other. It would allow employers to train their future higher-skill blue-collar workers for free or very cheaply, while still making relatively sure that the employees would stay at the company for a certain length of time (through a contractual agreement), and it would also make the employees more of an invested, interested partner in the future success of their workplace.

Davidson agrees with me and Russ Roberts about these potential benefits and responded that the CEO of Standard Motor Products was inspired by Davidson's article to start taking training much more seriously.

Davidson notes that this worker training program could be mostly self-selective, meaning each employee would decide for himself whether he wants to enter such a training program. This self-selection would increase the likelihood of each employee finishing the training and actually succeeding in learning the skills required for higher-level employment. He also mentions the German companies in Greenville, particularly the BMW plant, which have inherited the German model of apprenticeships, which helps employees who start at the lowest levels learn valuable skills, make themselves more valuable to the employer(s), and move up in the world.

Davidson then explains that larger companies like Bosch and Michelin do have training programs for their low-level employees via partnerships with the community college, Greenville Tech:

Greenville Tech...will work with the bigger multinationals, like the BMW or Bosch or Michelin, who will say, "We need 50 people who can do blank...." And the school will take care of teaching those people, and those people are guaranteed, "If you finish this course, you will get a job at Michelin."

I'm sure Greenville Tech would love to do what you just described as well. A criticism I've heard is that it's in the company's interest to train people more narrowly than it might be in their interest.

Roberts notes that then it returns to being a question of getting the people to pay for it and invest in their education and future employability themselves.

Putting more of the cost on the employee sounds like one way to strike a balance, although they're already probably suffering financially as it is, so a lot of them might not be willing to sacrifice those wages for one or two years. Maybe another possibility is for the employer to pay much of the cost of the training or pay them a full wage while they aren't working a full workweek, but only in exchange for (in addition to a contractual guarantee that the employee will stay at the company for X number of years) paying the newly trained employee a slightly lower wage than others in that higher position for the first few years.

Davidson summarizes this segment of the podcast nicely:

What I really like is the creative thinking. You know, thinking that the only way to advance does not need to be: you have to leave the workforce or you have to go to night school and go to a two-year technical college and spend money while you're not earning money. I do like that proposal to think more creatively and destroy some of the old models.

I hope new, different, and creative education/training models like those do emerge and flourish, but I wonder why they haven't already. Too much of a government monopoly on education? Too few practical skills taught in high schools? Too much entrenchment in the old student loan/student debt/traditional college model of education and subsequent employment? Too little on-the-job training for manufacturing workers of all kinds (which Davidson laments earlier in the podcast)? Too much pure number-crunching/profit-seeking by corporations and not enough investment in human capital or sort of seeking good karma for fostering good employer–employee relations? Too many corporations and not enough worker-owned collectives? (Note that all or at least most of the cost–benefit trade-offs that impair these non-traditional employee training programs in manufacturing corporations would also exist in any other employment/ownership model.)

Near the very end, Roberts says something that perfectly summarizes what I think about the intersection of labor and education in the United States today:

There are people who struggle to apply those intangible skills [that they have acquired in school, such as with a generic high-school diploma or their liberal arts major], and they'd like some tangible ones. Rather than trying to create that educational system, I'd like to let it emerge. And we need, I think, a lot more creativity in how we let that system run.

Some other interesting aspects of Davidson's article and the podcast, that don't relate too closely with economics but maybe they do with politics, were the story of the founder of Standard Motor Products and the story of Maddie the level-1 worker.

Elias Fife, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, founded Standard because he saw a demand that wasn't being filled back in the early days of car ownership: "many people were frustrated with Ford and the other car manufacturers because they never made enough replacement parts" and "The tiny aftermarket auto-parts industry was a mess: countless mechanics and hobbyists made parts by hand in their garages, and many of these parts didn’t fit or would break." So "Fife decided to build a trustworthy, reliable brand whose products met or exceeded the quality of the original parts." That's the epitome of the American dream, right there: come to the land of opportunity and seize upon the first good one you find, even if you know nothing about that market beforehand, and create a company that will grow and profit for decades!

Maddie's story, in contrast, is quite sad in many ways. It's a powerful exemplary warning against teenage pregnancy. In both the article and the podcast, Davidson describes her as smart, quick, young, pretty, and hard-working, but because she graduated high school 6 months pregnant and could never sacrifice potential wages for schooling after that, she is stuck in a low-level job with no future career prospects in which she is completely interchangeable with any other worker and will soon be replaceable with a machine. She was good at math and other subjects in high school and got good grades. She was planning to go to a four-year university and major in criminal justice. But she had to make money immediately to support her baby as a single mother, and there are numerous obstacles to Standard (or any other company) paying for her to go to technical college or some kind of training/certification program to enable her to move up in the future. (Two of them being: How does Standard know her abilities and interests will match those required for a higher-level decision-maker? and, How do they know she won't then be lured away by another company offering higher pay? I wonder how Japan and Germany, which supposedly treat their factory workers better and pay them more and treat them like human beings instead of numbers, would handle a case like hers.)

I have little doubt that Maddie would stand a good chance of benefiting from a technical education program (organized, promoted, or sponsored in some way by her employer) that doesn't fit the mold of any currently existing education/training models, and I have little doubt that eliminating the State-caused regimentation of education and labor markets would give Maddie multiple money-earning and job-training options that aren't available to her (and her employer) now.

Maddie's story also brings up the sad but true fact that while her career prospects were ruined by her teenage motherhood, the father's were not. The father left after high school and is nowhere to be seen. He could go on about his life like any other 18-year-old man. It seems clear that Maddie should have done everything she could and used every resource she could to track him down and force him to pay child support. With all the misguided and unjust laws that pervade our society, it's hard to argue against child support payments when a father just leaves the mother alone to raise both of their child. Maybe she did try, and maybe she still could try.

I wonder why Maddie's family couldn't help raise her child and support her through at least two years of technical school; it seems almost a given that they had no money to do so. This just provides more support for the libertarian position that a wealthier and freer society benefits everyone, particularly the poor and downtrodden. A world of more and cheaper goods, no inflation, no impoverishing government regulations, no wasteful government bureaucracy, more labor mobility and bargaining power, more unconventional employment options, no trillion-dollar defense budget, no wasteful welfare programs, no wasteful stimulus packages, and no pitiful Social Security program might have allowed Maddie's parents and other relatives to save more money and be in a better position to help raise her child. Many economists have argued that extensive government assistance programs make families and communities weaker, an argument I find nearly irrefutable. Absent an overbearing and wasteful State, perhaps Maddie's family, church, and local charities could have helped provide for her child while she spent two years in school. (Maybe in the deep South, they would shun her more than help her, but I would guess not. They would probably shun her a lot more for having an abortion than having a baby.)

Maybe liberals would ask why Maddie didn't claim some type of welfare or other assistance benefit from the state and federal governments. I wonder that, too. Maybe she is against it, maybe her parents persuaded her not to because they're against it, maybe she didn't know about it, maybe she was too caught up with everything else to get around to it, maybe she tried and couldn't get much money. Maddie sounds like exactly the type of person the government "safety net" is supposed to help, yet where was it for her? I'd like to know the whole story.

Maddie's story might also be a good example of how a crappy life in the U.S. today isn't actually all that bad by historical standards. Humanity would be nothing if we didn't always strive for something better and dream about improving our lot in the future, so I would hate for a bright young woman like Maddie to be complacent (which she isn't), but that shouldn't stop us from recognizing that the more productive the world economy is and the more free everyone is to be the master of their own lives, the more life improves for each successive generation. It is not a benevolent State or its welfare programs but rather the exponential increase of wealth, the continuous expansion of the worldwide division of labor, and the continuous creation of economic opportunities that raise the standard of living of the poor. (Besides, without the excesses of a free-ish economy, there would be no welfare to give.) Despite the aforementioned restrictions of her own economic opportunities, Maddie's children will have a great chance to be better off than either she or her parents were, and they already seem to have a decent life in inexpensive Easley, SC. It's just that her job won't last forever, and there's little she can easily do to improve her career prospects now. That's the really sad part.

Ron Paul has only won 47 out of the 745 GOP delegates so far. He hasn't won any state. He's won 11% of the popular vote so far, well up from last time but not enough to force Statist sycophants in the mainstream media to talk about him. At least Jon Stewart gave him lots of love when other talking heads wouldn't.

Maybe 11% of (some subset of) voters is good progress, though. In 2008 Ron Paul wasn't running for president; he was running against the presidency. I don't think he had the same clearly stated goal in 2012, but I also didn't think he had a realistic shot at the GOP nomination, so as far as a campaign against the presidency goes, 11% is actually pretty good, in my opinion.

The reason I don't think voting is a bad idea for libertarians and anarchists of any stripe is that people pay attention to presidential races and poll results, so using that platform to spread libertarian or anarchist ideas is a good, legitimate strategy. Jon Stewart didn't interview Ron Paul the congressman from Texas. Jay Leno didn't interview Ron Paul the congressman from Texas. Glenn Greenwald and Charles Davis didn't write about Ron Paul the congressman from Texas. (Probably.) Average Republican and Democrat voters don't say, "Gee, I don't love any of these candidates, so I wonder if there are any anti-establishment, different-thinking congressmen or senators from other states whose press releases and speeches on the House or Senate floor I should pay attention to. I'll take half of my Sunday afternoon to see if I can find any." People pay attention to presidential debates, primaries, and candidates, so if I and any other libertarians can promote our philosophy by supporting a largely libertarian candidate, then I'm all for it.

I know a lot of libertarian- and anarchist-leaning people don't support Ron Paul because of his policy positions, such as opposing immigration and supporting the Constitution too strongly. I must admit agreement with them on the first point, but I would note that any shift towards strict Constitutionalism in our country today would be a great improvement in our legal, economic, and social lives. If you take the incrementalist approach or admit that it has any validity, a move towards Constitutionalism can only be a move in the right direction. Should anarchists who oppose Ron Paul's presidential campaign for philosophical reasons also never praise any writer or thinker who holds a single disagreeable position? I know this is an unsatisfactory analogy because mere writers and blaggers hold no legal power over others to enforce supposedly objectionable policies; but Ron Paul was never going to get elected president, so there was no need to worry about your vote contributing to, enabling, or sanctioning evil acts.

(I have also wondered whether some strongly anti-incrementalist anarchists, i.e., those who think agorism and black-market living is the only way to achieve freedom in this world, consciously or subconsciously oppose Ron Paul's candidacy because they don't want incrementalism to gain any more ground, a development that they would consider ultimately harmful to the cause of liberty. That could hold some water, but I remain firm in my current opinion that agorism is sort of incrementalism and that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive.)

All in all, I can't refute any specific point anti-Paul anarchists or libertarians offer for opposing him, because it ultimately comes down to personal feelings, preferences, and predictions about what's best, but I will mention that Ron Paul is, in fact, very strongly libertarian and hasn't backed down or capitulated on a single policy issue since I've heard about him. He is therefore an excellent public representative of big-tent libertarianism and a presidential candidate whose ideas and exposure seem only to do good for the cause of shrinking government and improving individual liberty in the United States.

It seems likely that the mainstream media's ignoring of Ron Paul has had something to do with his unpopularity, but his numbers are still very low in states where I thought more people would/should support him. My home state of Georgia, for instance, which I once considered one of the most libertarian states in the nation based on their distrust of government and the popularity of semi-libertarian radio show host Neal Boortz, voted overwhelmingly for Georgian Newt Gingrich, with Ron Paul in a distant fourth behind maniacal fundamentalist theocrat Rick Santorum. So there's certainly reason for pessimism.

If you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer.

The information I have just provided — about a constitutional doctrine called “jury nullification” — is absolutely true. But if federal prosecutors in New York get their way, telling the truth to potential jurors could result in a six-month prison sentence.

Earlier this year, prosecutors charged Julian P. Heicklen, a retired chemistry professor, with jury tampering because he stood outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan providing information about jury nullification to passers-by. Given that I have been recommending nullification for nonviolent drug cases since 1995 — in such forums as The Yale Law Journal, “60 Minutes” and YouTube — I guess I, too, have committed a crime.

The prosecutors who charged Mr. Heicklen said that “advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without constitutional protections no matter where it occurred.” The prosecutors in this case are wrong. The First Amendment exists to protect speech like this — honest information that the government prefers citizens not know.

Laws against jury tampering are intended to deter people from threatening or intimidating jurors. To contort these laws to justify punishing Mr. Heicklen, whose court-appointed counsel describe him as “a shabby old man distributing his silly leaflets from the sidewalk outside a courthouse,” is not only unconstitutional but unpatriotic. Jury nullification is not new; its proponents have included John Hancock and John Adams.

(And John Jay.)

The doctrine is premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished. As Adams put it, it is each juror’s “duty” to vote based on his or her “own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”
[...]
Nullification has been credited with helping to end alcohol prohibition and laws that criminalized gay sex. Last year, Montana prosecutors were forced to offer a defendant in a marijuana case a favorable plea bargain after so many potential jurors said they would nullify that the judge didn’t think he could find enough jurors to hear the case. (Prosecutors now say they will remember the actions of those jurors when they consider whether to charge other people with marijuana crimes.)

There have been unfortunate instances of nullification. Racist juries in the South, for example, refused to convict people who committed violent acts against civil-rights activists, and nullification has been used in cases involving the use of excessive force by the police. But nullification is like any other democratic power; some people may try to misuse it, but that does not mean it should be taken away from everyone else.

How one feels about jury nullification ultimately depends on how much confidence one has in the jury system. Based on my experience, I trust jurors a lot.

(Well, I don't trust juries a lot, but I trust them far more than politicians and lawyers.)

I first became interested in nullification when I prosecuted low-level drug crimes in Washington in 1990. Jurors here, who were predominantly African-American, nullified regularly because they were concerned about racially selective enforcement of the law.

Across the country, crime has fallen, but incarceration rates remain at near record levels. Last year, the New York City police made 50,000 arrests just for marijuana possession. Because prosecutors have discretion over whether to charge a suspect, and for what offense, they have more power than judges over the outcome of a case. They tend to throw the book at defendants, to compel them to plead guilty in return for less harsh sentences. In some jurisdictions, like Washington, prosecutors have responded to jurors who are fed up with their draconian tactics by lobbying lawmakers to take away the right to a jury trial in drug cases. That is precisely the kind of power grab that the Constitution’s framers were so concerned about.

In October, the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, asked at a Senate hearing about the role of juries in checking governmental power, seemed open to the notion that jurors “can ignore the law” if the law “is producing a terrible result.” He added: “I’m a big fan of the jury.” I’m a big fan, too. I would respectfully suggest that if the prosecutors in New York bring fair cases, they won’t have to worry about jury nullification.

Bring these points up to any of various stripes of authoritarian and they will delve into their standard stock of apocalyptic warnings about inconsistency and unpredictability in the law, as if people today always know exactly what is legal anyway and the Statist criminal code protects people from overzealous prosecution or from criminals who were let off the hook by underzealous juries. The American and British common-law tradition, which includes jury nullification, tends to maintain more constancy, predictability, and fairness in the law, whereas Statist law subjects ever more people to the depredations of the State under ever more petty and aggressive laws. Statist law is also likely to change faster and be less predictable because it need only be accepted and implemented by a powerful minority, whereas customary law (which must usually or always embrace jury nullification) changes more slowly and is more predictable because each law must be accepted by an entire community in order to reach any substantial level of permanence or solidity.

The idea that science is a driver of prosperity is one of the few things on which the United States’ bitterly divided political parties still agree.

Oh, please. Don’t make me laugh. Since about the 1970’s, the Democrats and Republicans haven’t been bitterly divided over anything except how to direct their control over our social and economic choices.

The harder the cuts bite, the more those agencies will have to streamline their operations and merge or terminate programmes.

This week’s budget proposal, which contains many references to “tough choices”, shows that this process is already well under way. The Department of Energy (DOE), for example, wants to discontinue funding of several dozen projects that have not met their research milestones, or that seem otherwise unpromising. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is likewise cutting back on some $66 million in lower-priority education, outreach and research programmes. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been ordered to pursue “new grant management policies” to increase the number of new grants by 7%. And NASA is being obliged to make drastic cuts to its Mars exploration programme so as to finish building its flagship James Webb Space Telescope.

Conceivably, this process could get even more drastic. Last month, Obama asked Congress to give him the authority to consolidate and streamline agencies on his own initiative — and suggested that one early application would be to transfer the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from the Department of Commerce to the Department of the Interior. If Congress were to give Obama that power, it is possible to imagine him — or some future Republican president — sending all of the NSF’s science-education programmes to the Department of Education, or merging the DOE’s particle and nuclear physics research into the NSF, under the guise of making management of science more efficient.

White House officials insist that no one in the administration is even contemplating such a wholesale restructuring. But the arithmetic of the deficit is unavoidable. Individual researchers, scientific societies and science funding agencies can no longer afford to be purely reactive, responding to each cut as it comes along. They need to be part of the debate, thinking systematically about how programmes and even whole agencies could be restructured to make them more efficient at using the scarce funds available, and more effective at promoting the best science.
[emphasis added]

Gee, there’s a problem with efficiently allocating scarce resources? If only there were an entire centuries-old scientific discipline that could inform this problem. This is a classic resource allocation problem in a politically (socialistically) run industry. Almost all basic science research and much translational and clinical research in the United States is funded by the Imperial Federal Government, and neither Republicans nor Democrats see any problem with that. Neither do most scientists, either because they can’t bear the thought of leaving science-funding decisions to the citizens who supply the funds or because they can’t bear the thought of leaving any decisions to ordinary citizens. Politicians decide how much money will be available for each agency or department, and bureaucrats and scientists within each agency or department decide how their money will be divided. Research funding is so insulated from market forces that it’s hard to even imagine it in a free-market context.

The funding, organization, and streamlining of scientific research should not be a political or bureaucratic problem. Because it is, scientific research experiences all the problems characteristic of socialist industries: apparent funding shortages despite mostly continual budget increases, funding that is subject to the tug and pull of political power, its zero-sum nature of resource allocation, decisions that are out of the hands of the people who have to pay for them or implement them on a daily basis, a tax base that questions the worthiness of the endeavors it has funded, the nonexistence of saving and reinvestment in profitable endeavors, imbalances in the distribution of goods or labor, and a complete inability to make economically sound decisions based on the price system of a free market.

I know from first-hand experience that basic research funded by the NIH and other agencies is entirely merit-based, highly competitive, and requires results to secure further funding. The questions almost no one asks are: Merit in accomplishing what? Competitiveness in attaining what? What good are the results? Should we even reward the particular things the scientists exhibit merit in? Should they even be competing for what they’re competing for? How has it been determined that what they have accomplished is desirable and that what they are competing for is worthwhile?

In other sectors of an economy to the extent that it is permitted, the consumers who ultimately pay for the end products decide whether and how much to spend on them, and their decisions determine how much is spent on the higher-order goods that go into the production of the consumer goods. The fact that basic research itself produces no consumer goods is irrelevant because the principles of economics apply everywhere to all resource allocation problems.

Absent government involvement in scientific research, individuals in businesses, non-profit organizations, and philanthropic organizations would decide how much money, land, labor, and capital to devote to a particular avenue of research on the basis of their estimated profit (economic and psychal) from it. CEOs, investors, stockholders, philanthropists, research team leaders, and low-level lab workers would respond to some combination of their life’s goals and the market’s prices to determine how to spend their time and money. Profitable (desirable) endeavors would flourish, and unprofitable (undesirable) ones would fade away, to be replaced by new and different ones or more of the old, proven ones. The enterprises that produced the most new and additional wealth for society would be reinvested in, to both continue producing wealth in the same ways and devise new, more risky, but potentially more beneficial avenues of research.

A short-term doubling of the research budget, assuming it could even happen, would not result in untenable expansion and a failure to plan for even the near future, or if it did, the people and businesses responsible for such waste and short-sightedness would be replaced with less clueless ones. Exceptional growth during one period would be followed not by crisis and uncertainty but by swift, smooth, natural adjustments to new prices, as always. Imbalances between the supply of lower-level researchers and their job prospects would not last long because people would respond to incentives according their perceived best interest; in other words, the demand for certain types of researchers would determine their supply, instead of political funding decisions determining how many graduate students and post-docs universities can afford.

People would, largely, make the decisions that affected their own jobs and their own companies, instead of making do with the money politicians allocate for them. Consumers, the funders and supposed beneficiaries of the research, would also have a say in the direction that research takes by means of their purchasing decisions. And instead of competing for a piece of the government pie at the expense of others in a zero-sum game, scientists would engage in a competition to produce new and additional wealth and constantly increase the size of the pie. It is a metaphysical impossibility for government action itself to produce new wealth; by definition, government can only destroy wealth or rearrange existing wealth. Government-funded research and development can produce wealth, but by restricting science research to the public sphere and insulating it from the constraints and benefits of the free market, it is greatly limited in its ability to add completely new wealth to the world.

Many scientists and advocates of government funding of research might say all of these decisions and adjustments and resource allocations already happen in largely the same way, it’s just that a different type of infrastructure handles the money, the ultimate funders are actually taxpayers who decide how to fund research in the ballot box instead of the marketplace, and the scientists are insulated from nefarious private interests. This would be a complete misinterpretation of the facts. The fact is that the free decisions and private ownership that allow the more free sectors of the economy to operate smoothly, respond to price signals, allocate resources efficiently, and produce new and additional wealth are completely absent in the arena of government-funded research, and the result is that virtually nothing about scientific research today resembles a free market.

All for the better, most people would say. If scientific research were subjected to the constraints of the market, many different types of people would have to decide, voluntarily and apolitically, whether a research project is economically worthwhile to society and not just whether it has scientific merit per se. A much larger proportion of research would be focused on producing profitable, salable goods and services. I say: What of it? If the supposed beneficiaries and funders of the scientific research have different goals from the researchers themselves, who are you to say their goals lack merit? Who are you to say you know better than they how to spend their money? Who are you say they would be wrong if they wanted to spend less money—even significantly less—on basic research from which they do not benefit directly?

Contrary to the desires of most people and nearly all scientists, the research sector would benefit greatly from a replacement of socialism with laissez-faire. Scientists would not find their level of funding at the whims of politicians and bureaucrats. Avenues of research would not face the danger of being cut off because a new faction that’s politically opposed to the implications or goals of their research gained power. Younger researchers would not (typically) find their job prospects dried up after they entered the field during a great boom. Competition for all products and services would make research cheaper to conduct while simultaneously allowing for more of it. Researchers wouldn’t find themselves toiling for years in fruitless projects with questionable societal value. The career paths available to researchers wouldn’t be so limited, structured, and predetermined, as they are in academia. Endeavors that provided real, measurable value to the populace and to the economy would make a profit and secure funding in the future—but only so long as they continued to provide value. The regular consumers, the investors, and the philanthropists who funded the projects would be more encouraged and rewarded by seeing the actual benefits of their investments.

The problem with advocates of government funding of research is that they want it to be funded by government but don’t want politics to influence the funding. They want continually increasing budgets but cry “foul!” when the deficits they helped create result in a smaller budget increase than they’re used to. They want to take hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers but don’t want taxpayers who object to such uses of their money to be able to withdraw the funding. They want to fund research in a completely socialist manner but don’t want to suffer the consequences of the inefficiencies and price-blindness of socialism. They complain about politicians who dare to propose budget cuts when the entire economy is suffering, but it never occurs to them that the problem is the political funding of research to begin with, not the politicians themselves.

Everything that humans do in a social context is governed in some way by the laws of economics. Funding by taxation and allocation by politicians or funding by sales and allocation by businessmen are at the mercy of economic reality, even if politicizing the process distorts the effects of economic law. Therefore, scientists don’t have a choice between politics and economics; they have a choice of either economics or both politics and economics. Currently, research funding is, first, at the mercy of economics, which says all governments will be inefficient and face frequent funding crises, and, second, at the mercy of politics and all the uncertainty, pettiness, and dirtiness that come with it.

Aside from the economic problem of research funding is a moral one:

To do that, and to address the increasing demands from politicians and voters for evidence that fundamental research is useful, scientists must also find better ways to measure the effectiveness of the nation’s investments in science. The usual technique is to insist that principal investigators produce more and more reports, which tends to be a waste of everyone’s time. A consortium of six universities called Star Metrics, launched in 2010 and headquartered at the NIH, has shown that it is possible to do better by using natural language processing and other tools to mine the data and reports that the agencies already collect. But even that is just a beginning. Researchers and research institutions need to help to devise still better measures — because if they don’t do it themselves, politicians and others who know much less about science may very well do it for them. And who knows where that would end.

This touches on the moral problem of petitioning the government for more funds: those funds are taken by force from people and used to pay for things they might not have wanted to pay for. Scientists will religiously repeat the mantra, “But scientific research benefits the entire world and drives the innovation that improves everyone’s well-being.” That is obvious, but this completely ignores the immorality of forcing people to pay for something merely because it is supposedly good for them. (How many scientists, 99.99% of whom are hardcore leftists, would have liked to divert their tax dollars away from the Department of Defense and into, say, the NIH? Yet they would never allow such a choice to be extended to everyone’s tax dollars and would raise hell if a lot of people made the opposite choice. I’d bet anything that if all Americans were allowed to specify what their tax dollars funded and this resulted in increased military funding but decreased NIH funding, the vast, vast majority of scientists would say, “Well, we obviously need to raise taxes or rescind this offer, because Science is Good and the people clearly don’t know what’s good for them.”)

A good example of the morality of allowing people the freedom to spend their money how they want vs. the immorality of political funding decisions is any socially controversial research topic, say, global warming. In a simplified example, say that 51% of legislators at a given time (or over a substantial period of time, such as an entire presidential term) think global warming is not mostly anthropogenic and that even if it is, the material consequences of restricting economic activity based on global warming data are far too severe given the relatively small environmental benefit they would allow. Therefore, they vote to cut funding for research on global warming. In a free society, if 20% of the population supported global warming research and wanted to fund it, they could, and the other 80% couldn’t do anything about it. In a Statist society where politics determines funding, it doesn’t matter if 20% or even, in some cases, over 50% of the population wants to fund global warming research; if the politicians vote no, then those people’s tax dollars will go elsewhere.

Another thing about that concluding paragraph: It is almost comical how far scientists and policymakers will go and how convoluted their solutions will get, all because they insist on keeping science funding socialist. What a shining example of how one bit of government interference begets more and more government interference. The effectiveness of government-funded science is uncertain, so let’s form committees and write software to better analyze data, and if that’s not enough, we need to gather more input from more scientists to determine how to measure the benefits of all our research funding! And we also need to decide how to reorganize our bloated and inefficient bureaucracies that only exist because of historical peculiarities, but we need to make sure we get input from scientists and bureaucrats and policymakers alike! Or, you could subject your results to the true test of the free market, like all actually beneficial sectors of the economy, and the inexorable justice of the price system would constantly drive all resources in the direction of their most efficient and desirable uses.

Scientists also don’t take into account the opportunity cost of forcing people to fund the research that scientists deem worthy of funding. It is a basic fact of history that the self-interested choices of free people have enabled the explosion of wealth, technology, and productivity that have increased billions of people’s well-being astronomically, and the same voluntary choices of free people would enable a similar increase in the economic efficiency and societal value of basic scientific research. To deny this is simply to deny economic and historical fact. Free markets and freedom of choice aren’t just optimal in every sector of the economy except basic research; they are optimal always and everywhere because freedom of exchange and the resultant price system and profit-and-loss system allow people to make choices that are in their own best interest (economic and psychological), which is far better than politicians or scientists can do, regardless of the amount of data they have.

Because Red Hat is a pure open source company, its culture is something between a democracy and a commune. This comes from the nature of open source, where writing software is always a collaboration.

With that kind of culture “you might be arrogant in believing that open source is the way to go,” she [Executive Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Marketing Jackie Yeaney] says, but this prevents people from becoming arrogant themselves—including executives.

“If you believe in open source, you know you don’t know best. There’s all these other people around that can provide input and make it better,” Yeaney says.
[...]
“It’s not that people think they are going to take a vote, or that all of their ideas will get in. But they want to be part of the process and be heard,” she says. “You have to build credibility and respect at a place like Red Hat, and it really doesn’t matter what your title says. It’s more what you say and do who is going with you.”

“It’s one of the only places I know where the CEO can say ‘I’d like XYZ to happen’ and it may or not happen,” she jokes.

This type of work environment is coming to every company, too, Yeaney is convinced.

“A lot of what Red Hat faced because of the open source culture all companies are starting to face because of millennials in the workplace and social media. Companies are becoming more open whether they like it or not,” she says.

I hope Yeaney is right and that this type of cooperative, collaborative work environment will spread, and fast. In such a work environment, it seems to me that people can only succeed and advance based on merit and value added, their ideas must be deemed worthy by several coworkers and collaborators for them to be implemented, ideas are more likely to be improved by collaboration before being implemented, people have to earn the respect of others instead of respect being forced on underlings, and they will have a much harder time rising to the level of their incompetence, as the adage goes.

That’s not to say other, more traditionally structured companies don’t strive to exhibit these characteristics to some extent, but my guess is that Red Hat’s advantages stem directly from its exhibiting these characteristics to a much greater extent. Red Hat seems to have a hierarchy without much hierarchy. Maybe some people would call their work culture left-libertarian. Either way, the existence (and, in fact, abundance) of non-traditional work cultures, business models, and employment situations, aside from the actual nature of any specific work environment, is libertarian because a free society would obviously have more companies structured like Red Hat because it would have more variety in all societal institutions and structures. In a free society it would be legal and feasible to at least try many business models that are either outlawed or made impractical by State regulation, and if they are profitable and attractive to employees, then all libertarians would say let them flourish.

First, this controversy provides a delightful contrast to the Obama administration’s decision to force all Americans to purchase contraceptives and subsidize abortions.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation chose to stop providing grants to Planned Parenthood. Lots of people didn’t like (and/or don’t believe) Komen’s reasons. Some declared they would stop giving to Komen. Others approved of Komen’s decision and started giving to Komen. Many declared they would start donating to Planned Parenthood to show their disapproval of Komen’s decision.

Notice what didn’t happen. Nobody forced anybody to do anything that violated their conscience. People who don’t like Planned Parenthood’s mission can now support Komen without any misgivings. People who like Planned Parenthood’s mission can still support it, and can support other organizations that fight breast cancer. The whole episode may end up being a boon for both sides, if total contributions to the two organizations are any measure. Such are the blessings of liberty.

Contrast that to Obamacare, which forces people who don’t like Planned Parenthood’s mission to support it.

Second, there seems to be a bottomless well of delusion from which supporters of Planned Parenthood draw the idea that this decision shows Komen has injected politics into its grant-making.

Assume for the sake of argument that the Susan G. Komen Foundation has been hijacked by radical abortion opponents who forced the decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood. Even if that is true, that decision did not inject politics into a process previously devoid of politics.

Millions of Americans believe that Planned Parenthood routinely kills small, helpless human beings. Believe it or not, they have a problem with that. When Komen gives money to Planned Parenthood, it no doubt angers those Americans (and makes them less likely to contribute). When Komen decided that the good it would accomplish by funding Planned Parenthood’s provision of breast exams outweighed the concerns (and reaction) of those millions of Americans, Komen was making a political judgment.

Perhaps Planned Parenthood’s supporters didn’t notice the politics that was always there, since Komen had been making the same political judgment they themselves make. But if Planned Parenthood’s supporters are angry now, it’s not because Komen injected politics into its grant-making. It’s because Komen made a different political judgment and Planned Parenthood lost, for now anyway. (Then again, if donations to Planned Parenthood are the measure, the group may be winning by losing.)

I must confess to a little bit of Schadenfreude here, as those who are complaining about Komen’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood are largely the same folks who applaud President Obama’s decision to force everyone to fund it (and, without a trace of irony, describe themselves as “pro-choice”). I predict that when a future president reverses Obama’s decision, supporters of Obama’s policy will likewise delude themselves that the future president has “injected” politics into the dispute.

UPDATE: The Susan G. Komen Foundation has again adjusted its grant-making policies, and Planned Parenthood will once again be eligible for funding. A reporter asks me: “So what does it mean now that Komen’s reversed itself?” My reply:

It does not mean that politics has been banished from Komen’s decisions. It just means that Komen has again made a political decision that more closely reflects the values of Planned Parenthood’s supporters than its detractors. But that is how we should settle the question of who funds Planned Parenthood: with vigorous debate and by allowing individuals to follow their conscience. When Obamacare ‘settles’ the question by forcing taxpayers to fund Planned Parenthood, it violates everyone’s freedom and dignity.

That was a hell of a lot more thoughtful than the reactions of all my liberal friends and acquaintances, which all boiled down to “Stop supporting Komen for the Cure because they caved in to right-wing political pressure!”