Government: The Demotivator
August 4, 2008 – 4:15 pm by KelBecause I love those zany demotivator posters:
Courtesy of Despair, Inc.
The Onion on the invasion of Iraq
August 1, 2008 – 12:05 am by JohnThe geniuses at The Onion put together an atlas of the world, Our Dumb World, and just about every page of it is hilarious. It must have taken a ton of time and manpower and research to make it. Every country of the world is profiled and summarized, with an average of a country a page (except for the United States section—each state got its own paragraph or two).
Basically, they took one stereotype or joke about every country and ran with it for the entire profile, pretty much beating it into the ground. This takes away from some of the other various and sundry things that could be joked about with some countries, but it’s still amazing how funny, clever, and subtle this book is. I was disappointed they didn’t have a page-a-day calendar for 2008 (I think), but I am so glad I got this instead.
I just read Iraq’s profile last night, and, of course, it was hilarious. The title of the profile is “They Had It Coming.” The introduction to the profile reads:
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq in retaliation for countless atrocities committed by the nation, including the gassing of Kurdish villages, the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the events of 9/11, the sinking of the Titanic, the Hindenburg explosion, and the Holocaust.
Although Iraq–U.S. relations became strained in 1963 when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein assassinated John F. Kennedy, tensions reached a head on Sept. 11, 2001. On this day, the nation of Iraq flew two commercial airliners into the World Trade Center, killing thousands of Americans in the worst attack on U.S. soil since Iraqi fighter pilots bombed Pearl Harbor.
Despite criticism for its ensuing invasion, the U.S. claimed that stabilizing Iraq was the only way to prevent another nuclear attack like the one carried out on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Iraq.
The U.S. plans to continue occupying the nation until Iraq either returns the kidnapped Lindbergh baby, or admits to all the acts of unjust violence for which it is responsible, including the Boston Massacre, a series of shark attacks in the summer of 1998, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Here is a hilarious Point–counterpoint op-ed published in the Onion that is surprisingly accurate, though still satirical. Libertarians often say the Onion publishes more truths, or at least more pointed truths and commentaries on our society, than any mainstream newspaper or news magazine.
Rights don’t need limiting by the State
July 25, 2008 – 10:42 pm by JohnFor the life of me I can’t find the blag post where I read this, but I’m pretty sure it was a post that Bob Murphy at Crash Landing linked to. Anyway, it was some Statist economics blag, and a commenter gave what he thought was a perfect example of why complete and unmitigated freedom (i.e., what those crazy libertarians advocate) is harmful and impractical and needs to be checked by prudent government restrictions, lest other people suffer rights violations or damages to their well-being. He wrote something like this: Freedom of speech is a basic right that everyone has, but sometimes it can be used for harm, like shouting “Fire!” in a movie theater. So, clearly, complete freedom of speech can be used to violate the rights and safety of others, so that’s why we have prudent limits placed on our freedoms by the wise government—so that “too much” freedom doesn’t end up violating the rights and freedoms of others.
If my vague and idiocy-stunned memory serves me correctly, I am doing that Statist a huge favor by paraphrasing him with even that level of eloquence, clarity, and grammatical correctness.
But the point is that, once again, an actual understanding of the libertarian view of private property rights answers this dilemma perfectly. The answer is: The owner of the property can decide what behavior is allowed on the property, and if they forbid shouting “Fire!”, then you can’t do it! It’s that easy, people.
It is also easy to pick out the particular brand of Statist who has never read a single essay or column about libertarian moral or property-rights theory, but who excretes lame attacks on his concocted libertarian straw-man on web pages read by other Statists who are too lazy, ignorant, or dishonest to call him out on it.
Shouting “Fire!” in a theater should be and would be forbidden by the owners/managers of the property, who obviously make rules that benefit them and their paying customers; the State has no business sticking its nose into the private affairs of individuals and businesses. It has no business sticking its nose into whether people shout “Fire!” because private property rights take care of the issue just fine. You can shout “Fire!” all you want in your own home, and you can shout it all you want in the homes or other properties of people who allow it. You can’t shout it where the owner doesn’t allow it. Their property, their rules. The property rights you have in your own body and the liberty you have to make decisions about what to do with your body extend only to the equal right of others to do what they wish with their property. Just as you can throw stones all you want until they go onto someone else’s property, you can shout “Fire!” all you want until your voice reaches the property of someone who doesn’t allow the shouting of “Fire!” on his property.
How much freaking clearer could it be? Your property rights extend only to the property of others. You have no more right to do anything to/on their property than they have to do to/on your property. You can’t shout “Fire!” in their theater; they can’t prevent you from shouting it in your home. The issue is not the First Amendment or freedom of speech. It is private property rights. In this way we can see how the universally equal and mutual expression of private property rights solves issues of safety, decency, and common sense just fine and obviates the need for State interference into the matter.
What libertarianism isn’t 2
July 24, 2008 – 10:04 pm by JohnIn summary: It isn’t democracy, with good reason.
In my last post I quoted an anti-libertarian commenter on some Statist blag who thought that libertarians wanted to do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted whenever they wanted, and that no law or police force should stop them. I’ll remind you of his wording:
All libertarian arguments boil down to the same thing - they do not wish to abide by any rules that they personally don’t like.
In other words, we tailor our “moral” code to provide justification for actions and policies that benefit ourselves at the expense of other people’s well-being and their rights, either because we don’t care that we are immoral or because we are so far removed from reality that we don’t realize our code is immoral.
Astute readers might object that I am being lazy and taking the easy way out by attacking such a primitive, baseless objection to libertarianism, but I’d counter that such objections are so common, on both a conscious and subconscious level, that Statists who are curious and kind enough to read this need to be set straight. Previously I refuted this anti-libertarian sentiment by showing why that statement does not describe libertarian morality and why the libertarian moral code is a just, consistent, and universal moral code; today I’ll explore what is wrong with the Statist’s moral justification for democratic government, which is that democracy is good (Might Makes Right).
If you believe that I am over-simplifying this particular Statist’s opinion of democracy by reducing it to a denigrating slogan, read for yourself why he loves democratic government so much:
[T]hey [libertarians] fail to understand how democracies work. The people select their government and tell it what tasks they want it to perform. Then the will of the majority gets carried out and those who don’t like the limitations just have to take their lumps.
Opting out of those rules you don’t like is not a choice. If you don’t like some law or other you are free to campaign to have it changed or run for office yourself.
I should inform you that we understand how democracies work far, far better than you do.
Many Statists might not have phrased their belief in democracy and opposition to individual freedom that way, but the (only) good thing about this guy is that he got that part exactly right. (The bad part is that he thinks this is a good thing!) The reality is that democracy is not self-government; democratic governments (republics) operate by mob-rule; they elect their representatives, and the representatives force their will on the entire populace, including the people who voted specifically against them and the ones who object to such a monstrous method of determining right and wrong altogether.
Why do we object to majority-rule as monstrous and immoral? I mean, it seems obvious to us, but perhaps we need to state it in more direct and basic terms more often. A bunch of people decide what is legal and illegal, and how certain aspects of our lives should be run even though we are capable of running them ourselves, and they declare themselves to have jurisdiction over a certain plot of land, with a legal monopoly on the use of coercion/aggression/criminal prosecution, and if we say, “No, thank you, I’ll govern my life, my money, and my affairs differently, but I won’t bother you,” then we are arrested, imprisoned, enslaved, and/or murdered by the ruling agents the majority selected for us, whose authority we don’t recognize.
But, we don’t really try to opt out of Statist governance, because, as I said, we know the penalty is death. Always keep that in mind when thinking about why libertarians object to democracy or other types of monopolistic government: we can’t even try to opt out of the taxes, the harmful regulations, the transfer payments, the government-run health care, the inflationary central bank, the drug wars, and the inefficient and corrupt legal systems.
The Statist response involves assertions of a social contract or a need for societal harmony, the reasoning behind which is the following: Left to their own devices, without a single, definitive legal authority and the contract enforcement, private property rights recognition, civil liberties guarantees, crime prevention, and criminal-punishment framework that come along with such an ultimate legal authority, the people on the whole would be unable and/or unwilling to recognize each other’s rights, establish rightful property ownership, enforce contracts, adjudicate disputes, deter and punish criminals, and generally distinguish right from wrong and protect themselves from hedonists and nihilists. In other words, chaos would reign in the streets.
However, we are to believe that, even though the people on the whole can’t accomplish those things via private transactions, entrepreneurship, profit-seeking, individual decision-making, and voluntary cooperation, the people on the whole can accomplish them by voting for politicians who will pass laws, create agencies, extract funds from both the people who voted for them and the people who didn’t, assign tasks to bureaucracies, and make sure no competing bodies arise that challenge the State’s monopoly status.
I have never heard a very good explanation for why these and other governmental (coercive) activities can yield peace and prosperity but businesses, charities, free individuals, and community organizations can’t. Society as a whole acting one way (voluntarily) or society as a whole using other means (voting and State fiat). Perhaps your politicians of choice are needed to govern and nurture us great unwashed because they are spun from a finer clay than the rest of us? Perhaps they (and, of course, the wise voters who delegate power to them) do not suffer from the shortcomings that befall us freedom-seeking individuals who dare to suggest we can govern ourselves?
Think about what would happen if I came to the secretary of the treasury’s house and demanded twenty or thirty thousand dollars from him, assuring him that a lot of people supported my demand and that they all approve of the uses the money will be put to, and then I pulled a gun on him when he refused. Imagine the objections and the outrage we would witness if a gang broke into a police station and confiscated the drugs the police had previously confiscated from innocent potheads and crackheads. What would you say if I kidnapped you and eleven of your neighbors to arbitrate a dispute between me and a company I did business with?
Individuals can’t do those things because they are wrong, but the State can. Why does it matter?! Why does majority support make its actions acceptable? What is the difference? Why is it not an option for me to opt out of your rules, but it is perfectly okay for you to ignore my rules? Why is it that not only can I not force my moral code upon you, I can’t even peacefully abstain from participating in yours and let you go your merry way? What makes you right and me wrong? What is the fundamental difference between your preferences and those of libertarians that makes your type of government the proper one to govern all of our society and makes ours not even appropriate for us, much less all of society (upon whom we would force nothing)?
For that matter, who is to decide when there is a difference and when there isn’t? It can’t be the people, remember, because if they were allowed to decide for themselves, chaos would reign in the streets. The Statists never fail to remind us of that. So an oligarchy? An autocracy? Oh, that’s right, the people can make good decisions when coercion is involved, but not cooperation or private transactions.
Perhaps it is the enforced organization and concentration of power and decision-making unique to Statism that makes the people’s will acceptable when it comes to voting and coercing, whereas the people’s will is not acceptable in a free and differently structured society. I vehemently insist that the exact opposite is true: the divisive, embittering, coercive nature of democratic government brings out the worst in people, programs them to seek coercive instead of cooperative solutions to most problems, and leads them to battle for control of the State to impose their will on the minority, since the State’s fiats are absolute and incontestable throughout its entire jurisdiction.
Furthermore, it becomes clearer and clearer the larger our governments grow, that the State’s monopoly status as crime-prevention/law-enforcement authority makes it a completely unfair judge of its own wrongdoings; and the State’s unique ability to initiate force against every single one of its subjects with impunity makes it a far too dangerous tool to be controlled by people who are attracted to the coercion and subordination of others. (As Friedrich Hayek said, “In government, the scum rises to the top.”)
In short, the entire existence and justification of the State—every action it ever undertakes—embodies the very thing Statists fear would rule the libertarian society: unchecked force by unaccountable criminals.
Do you want to keep the money that you or your business earns and spend it on what you think is best? Do you want to go live and work in a territory where some government has arbitrarily decided you can’t live or work because you weren’t born there? Do you want to create or spend an alternative currency that is backed by gold, or silver? Do you want to take drugs in your home, or someone else’s home, or a club, without harming anyone else? Do you want to out-compete other applicants to your job by offering to work for less money, less than that which some disinterested politicians thousands of miles away declared to be the minimum wage? Do you want to educate your children, and maybe children from the neighborhood, they way you and their parents prefer, without State-approved syllabi and without still paying taxes for schools you don’t patronize and don’t approve of? Do you find the police and court systems woefully corrupt, inefficient, and unjust, and wish to seek the protection of a more-just crime-prevention and adjudication system? Or systems? Do you want to settle a dispute with the State in a court that isn’t part of the State itself?
Then you will be killed for your insubordination. Oh, they won’t start with murder. First you will be warned, then fined. And then fined some more. And then summoned to court for not paying. And then arrested for not appearing in court. And then murdered for resisting arrest.
This is the reality of democratic government, like it or not. Rationalize it, reject it, or embrace it, but don’t deny it. The government will always have guns, and they will always be pointed at anyone who wants to opt out. Not paying taxes is not violent and it does no harm to anyone else. Ingesting taboo substances is not an act of aggression and it does no harm to anyone else. Printing and trading with currency that isn’t insidiously inflated are not immoral and don’t prevent anyone from printing their own money or using whatever currency they want to use. Going to another part of the world to buy or rent a home and work for a mutually agreed-upon wage is not dangerous or subversive. Running your business, running your family, running your life the way you want while letting others do the same are not violent activities and they do no harm to anyone.
But if anyone tries to do any of them, out come the guns of the people who tout social harmony and non-violence. Without the democratically elected, properly checked and balanced State, violent gangs would prowl the streets, people would be mugged and terrorized, no one’s home would be safe from the criminals, giant businesses would fleece their employees and the public, the rich would get richer and the poor would get poorer, and the police and courts would serve only the rich and powerful.
This is exactly what the State does! It breaks into people’s home on the mere suspicion of drug use or even lesser offenses! It robs people of their earnings every day! It robs businesses of their earnings every day! No one’s home is safe from the armed agents of the State! The national and local governments of nearly every country that has ever existed favor the rich and powerful and screw the little guy! The ridiculous regulation, the staggering incompetence, the unfathomable waste, the incalculable opportunity costs of State bureaucracies and legislatures impoverish all of society far more than any private company ever could. And politicians are largely unaccountable, bureaucrats are almost completely unaccountable, and the State never comes close to going away—it doesn’t even shrink.
The State is entirely unaccountable because whatever change you say we can vote for, the State stays basically the same and its basic framework doesn’t go away. All the democracy and all the Congressional investigations and all the legislation and all the actions and intentions of the brightest, most well-meaning, most honest politicians will never disarm the State. The guns still stay pointed at everyone, warning us that we’d better not try to live any part of our lives outside of the State, or it’s the death penalty for us. Show me a government that isn’t pointing its guns at people who want to secede, and I’ll show you something that isn’t a monopolistic government at all.
Based on the fact that keeping your own money, printing your own money, treating your body the way you want, going where you want, settling disputes the way you and your foe want, and making the transactions that you want, in defiance of the State’s decrees, earn you the death penalty, I can make one of two conclusions. Either: (a) Under the Statist moral code, the use of violent, deadly force against someone who has violated no rights, committed no wrongs, and threatened no one is not only justified, it is a necessary component of the implementation of said moral code; or, (b) the simple act of non-participation in the Statist system constitutes an act of aggression, or a threat, or an injury or trespass or violation of some kind against Statists, and therefore non-participation must be prevented and prosecuted by the violent, deadly force of the police power of the State. Option (a) is completely monstrous; option (b) has never been explained to me. Anyone and everyone is free to leave a comment on every post on this website. Comments are, in fact, encouraged. Enlighten me.
While you’re leaving your comments, can you also take a couple sentences to answer this question? How does it make you feel that libertarians wouldn’t so much as raise their voice to you, much less raise a gun to you, if you didn’t want to live your life the way we lived ours, as long as you just left us be while we left you be; but, on the other hand, you don’t afford us the same respect, the same decency? “Live and let live” is such a grave offense that kidnapping, beating, terrorizing, enslaving, and killing is the only suitable line of corrections?
I wanted to bring this long post full-circle, whatever that means, and return to what I said libertarianism isn’t in the first sentence: democratic. Democracy means rule by the people, or government of the people, as the ancient Greeks and modern English-speakers mean it. But individualist anarchism is rule-by-the-people of an entirely different variety: individual self-rule, or rule-of-each-person-by-himself, as contrasted with democracy’s majority-rule. Majority-rule, oligarchy, monarchy, and totalitarian dictatorship are, to varying degrees, very opposed to individual self-rule. Participation in government does not lead to self-governance by any particular person. Participation in the democratic process does not lead to libertarians or any other minority getting a fair shake at what they want. The only thing democratic government give us is mob-rule, “Might Makes Right.” Is that really what you believe in?
Keep thinking about this. Why is the government exempt from the rules that govern the rest of us? Why is a majority vote an acceptable justification for violating people’s rights and preempting the existence of other options? Why is it a violation of the Statist moral code to non-violently abstain from participating in State functions? Why does voting for coercion and arbitrary fiat make the people at large wise and responsible, but voting with their wallets, their feet, and their other voluntary choices make them reckless and dangerous?
What libertarianism isn’t
July 21, 2008 – 1:35 am by JohnDavid Z. at …No Third Solution wrote a post that I really liked called The truth about what anarchists want. In response to some immature, lazy, and ignorant blaggers who really don’t know what libertarianism is, or at least don’t know what libertarians envision that libertarianism is (”They want to get together and tear shit up”), David writes:
We don’t want to “get together and tear shit up.” We want to get together and live our own lives! The second people stop pointing their guns at us, is probably the last time they’ll ever hear from us.
The author attempts to sympathize with the political cause, but renounces thusly:
I can understand why people get upset when they feel underpowered from politics. But I see this tearing up as a bad solution to social problems. It’s not a mature way to respond to anything.
And he thinks pointing a gun at people is a mature way to respond to things? He’s off his fucking rocker.
[...]
Let me set the record straight:We don’t want to “tear shit up” with reckless abandon. We don’t want to destroy all the good things, all the plentiful wealth that man has created through the ages, by virtue of his intellect. What we want to destroy is the systematic enslavement of masses of people, by their governments or others. We want to destroy imperialism and war. We want to destroy slavery. We want to destroy class-warfare, legitimized theft and murder at the hands of the State and its agents. We want to destroy the source of the single, greatest threat to humankind.
We don’t want to ruin all the good things that make life worth living: friends, family, leisure, good health, peace and prosperity. We want community to thrive. We want to see mutual aid, benevolence, free exchange of goods and services, free migration of people.
[...]
Nobody has even attempted to explain why I can’t disagree, without ultimately getting shot.
What the author is telling us to do, is what we’re asking him to do! Judge for yourself. Don’t impose violently upon others who’ve done no harm. We’re trying to demonstrate that the State is a piss-poor solution to any problem. And if he, or others, think it’s a perfectly reasonable solution; let them have it all to themselves.Just have the decency to leave me out of it.
Have the decency to leave us be. If libertarians had their way, all you Statists could either subscribe to the same insurance, crime-prevention, and adjudication/arbitration services that some us us would, or you could subscribe to different ones. You could run your businesses the way some of us would, or you could run them the way you run them under Statism. You could educate your children the way some of us would, or you could have completely different types of schools. You could spend your money on what you wanted, or you could agree to let disinterested crooks whom you voted specifically against take a certain percentage of your money and spend it on things you wouldn’t have spent it on. You could submit compliantly to all the retirement pyramid schemes, health-insurance rackets, and Orwellian police-state abuses that you wanted, and we wouldn’t stop you, until we were directly threatened.
Why is it that you do not give us the same privileges, the same respect? Does it bother you that you treat libertarians so differently than we would treat you? Or do you not think we would treat you the way we want to be treated? The way we fantasize about being treated on our websites and in our opinion columns every day?
What is it about your morality that makes non-violent non-participation—secession—abstinence—a violation of your moral code?
According to the libertarian moral code, the principle of non-aggression is supreme: no one may in any way harm, violate, or limit another’s person, liberty, or property. No one may force someone else to do anything against his will. In this way every human is an equal moral agent; no one may do to another what may not be done to him.
But, under the Statist moral code as it is revealed in our Statist reality, the majority rules, or at least its “government” does, and its word is the final word. Might makes right. There is no right or wrong, only legal and illegal, permitted by the State or forbidden by the State. And, here’s the kicker: Statists claim that it harms them if anyone peacefully abstains. It is a violation of the Statist “morality” to not submit to the State’s decrees. If they don’t claim they are injured or violated by non-participation, then why is it forbidden? Upon penalty of death?
Along those lines, I recently encountered a comment on some Statist blag that read:
All libertarian arguments boil down to the same thing - they do not wish to abide by any rules that they personally don’t like.
Mmm, almost. We do not wish to be forced to abide by rules we don’t “like,” and conversely we would not force others to abide by any rules that they don’t like. That is the key point, which makes the principle of voluntarism and non-aggression mutual among all humans, and which many Statists don’t appreciate because they don’t care to learn about the ins and outs of libertarian philosophy or the philosophy isn’t stated clearly enough for them. (Fair enough; it is often stated in very abstruse and overly philosophical terms, and why should they care, because they’ve got the guns and will continue to for the rest of our lives?)
Let’s use two simple examples to illustrate how libertarianism is not “everyone following only the rules they like.”
If you have a bunch of stones in your yard, and you like throwing them around, you are perfectly free to throw them wherever, whenever, and however you wish. This is because you are the complete and rightful owner-controller of your property, your body, and your liberty.
Does this give you the right, then, to throw them through the window of your neighbor’s house? They are your stones, after all; it is your arm and hand throwing them, after all; and it is your liberty allowing you to choose where to throw them, after all. The libertarian straw man that unknowledgeable Statists present is perfectly justified in throwing his stones through any and all windows that he pleases. Is this correct?
Don’t be silly. Just as you have rightful ownership of the stones on your (rightfully acquired) land, your neighbor has rightful ownership of his window. He can do exactly what he wants with his window, which for him consists of having the window intact. Your right to throw a stone ends where another man’s window begins.
As a second example: a manager in a business fires one of his workers. The worker doesn’t want to be fired. It is involuntary for him, that’s for sure. Under libertarian philosophy, taken to its fullest extreme, its logical conclusion, is this involuntary situation immoral?
Of course not, because it would be involuntary for the decision-makers in the company to be forced to pay their money to someone they don’t want to pay. The employee wants to work for the manager in exchange for wages, but the manager doesn’t want to pay him, and each condition is undesirable to one or the other party, but undesirable doesn’t mean coercive. It doesn’t mean involuntary. (When I stated above that “It is involuntary for him, that’s for sure,” I was using involuntary in the broad, everyday-English usage, meaning “unwanted, undesirable,” not the more properly constrained usage of libertarian philosophy, in which it means non-coercive.) The fired employee is perfectly free to work elsewhere, or negotiate with the manager, or do anything else that doesn’t involve force or threats of force; the manager has not threatened to use force against the ex-employee, he has simply ended a mutually agreed-upon, voluntary exchange, and absent any violations of contract, he is free to do so. (I’m not going to get into the issue of whether the company’s money is actually “their” money if they don’t own the means of production; I’ll let Charles Johnson and Kevin Carson and others philosophize about that; it is at best tangential to my point.)
I can’t think of a way to run those two simple examples into the ground any more, but I would if I could because apparently it is necessary. Statists just don’t get it. They don’t understand what we want or what a voluntary society would be like. (Or they don’t think a libertarian society would actually be the least bit “free” or “voluntary”; I am much more open to discussions about how well this or that would work in a free society than I am about what libertarians want, or what we mean, or what we do and don’t understand, or what’s right and wrong with the libertarian moral code.)
Maybe you’ll say I don’t understand what a voluntary society would be like; well, just as a free society would be far from perfect but its problems would be fewer, milder, and easier to solve than in the Statist world, my understanding of the nature a truly free society might be far from perfect but it’s a hell of a lot better than any Statist’s conception of it.
What David Z. and I have gone through is what all libertarians believe. No one may do to another what may not be done to him. All humans are on equal moral standing, equally freed and constrained by a sphere of liberty surrounding all of us. Libertarians not only want to abide only by the rules that we “like,” we acknowledge everybody else’s perfect right to abide only by the rules that they “like.” This mutual-nonaggression code results in everyone being obligated to follow the same rules—actually, the same rule: “First, do no harm”—and results in a much clearer, absolute system of moral conduct, not the moral nihilism and other straw-man positions that ignorant Statists ascribe to libertarianism. Therefore, libertarians are the last people you need to worry about ignoring right and wrong and treating others and their property however they please, without regard to others’ rights. As Anthony Gregory has explained, the State is the main entity in our world that follows no consistent or coherent rules and violates peoples rights, in addition to its own constraints and bylaws, at the whims of its controllers. Libertarianism prescribes consistent and absolute laws—natural laws—and libertarians are their utmost adherents.
The commenter who inspired this lesson in libertarianism had a fair bit more to say, all of which was far more depressing and confused than that first sentence. I expected to be able to come back to his excretions several days after first reading them, maintain my composure, and ignore the homicidal/suicidal thoughts that overwhelmed me when I first read them, long enough to refute every last word, but I was wrong. I can’t type much more after reading them again. Misery loves company, so I’m pasting them for you and then curling up into the fetal position and crying myself to sleep:
They like the idea of private property (no matter how obtained), so generally support a government-run police/military/prison structure to enforce ownership. They see no problem with raising taxes from non-property holders to pay for the police who protect the property holders in his case.
In the case of the rest of the regulations they don’t like, for example zoning restrictions, they fail to understand how democracies work. The people select their government and tell it what tasks they want it to perform. Then the will of the majority gets carried out and those who don’t like the limitations just have to take their lumps.
Opting out of those rules you don’t like is not a choice. If you don’t like some law or other you are free to campaign to have it changed or run for office yourself.
If a democracy is imperfect, so that the will of the majority is being thwarted by a powerful minority, then the cure is not to get rid of the democracy but to make it more democratic.
The cure for bad democracy is more democracy, not anarchy.
Paul Craig Roberts on the “terrorist watch list”
July 20, 2008 – 4:13 pm by JohnPaul Craig Roberts violates Godwin’s Rule but still manages to make excellent points in a good column about the ludicrous terrorist watch list and no-fly list maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. That’s real talent. Money quote:
The ACLU says that “putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel of innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources on bureaucratic wheel-spinning.”
It is worse than that. What the “watch list” or “no-fly list” is doing is training Americans to submit to warrantless searches, to abandon their constitutional rights, and to submit to humiliation by thugs and bullies. A Gestapo is being trained to have no qualms about searching and intimidating fellow citizens, using any excuse to delay or arrest them. Americans are being taught to use arbitrary power and to submit to arbitrary power. In the false name of “safety from terrorists,” Americans are being made the least safe people on earth.
African nature preserves and the tragedy of the commons
July 8, 2008 – 12:22 am by JohnIn the July 4, 2008 issue of Science, there was a news & views article about over-hunting and poaching of animals on nature preserves in Africa, due to the large increase in human populations surrounding the preserves. It seems the establishment of nature preserves attracts people to settle around them, and subsequently they hunt the animals in the preserve to dangerously low levels.
[Berkeley conservation biologist Justin] Brashares teamed up with ecologist George Wittemyer of UC Berkeley to get the big picture. They analyzed United Nations population data for the areas surrounding 306 rural nature reserves in Africa and Latin America. In 245 of the reserves, population growth was higher in the 10-kilometer swath outside the reserve borders than it was in equivalent rural areas elsewhere, the team reports in the 4 July issue of Science. On average, population growth rates were almost double those in other rural areas. “Parks have become magnets for human settlement,” Brashares says.
What’s attractive about living near a park? The researchers note that international conservation grants often have a development component that aims to improve the lives of local residents, providing schools, roads, clinics, and other services. Indeed, population growth near the reserves was positively correlated with the amount of international conservation funding received. The local job market may play a role, too: People tend to move preferentially to parks that have relatively more employees. “The message comes through pretty loud and clear,” says tropical ecologist S. Joseph Wright of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama. “Parks are attracting and improving the life of people.”
But the immigration doesn’t improve the situation for wildlife in the parks. Brashares and Wittemyer cite other studies that show higher rates of logging, mining, hunting, and fires inside protected areas surrounded by humans.
In my amateur opinion, I lean towards believing this is all explained by the concept of the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons means that if a space is open to the public, if it isn’t owned by any one private entity, the general public will act irresponsibly towards it because there is no monetary incentive to preserve it and there is monetary incentive to exploit it until its ruin. Here are the Mises.org pages that come up when you search for “tragedy of the commons.” Here is the Wikipedia article on it.
Though, I should admit that it’s not apparent that the public has anything approaching legally “free access” to these nature preserve lands, so their access might be as limited as if the lands were privately owned. It does seem that State protection of the lands isn’t being very effective, though.
Either way, the two conservation biologists mentioned above probably don’t have the right solution:
One solution, Brashares and Wittemyer propose, might be to invest development dollars in towns farther away from nature reserves to give an incentive for people to move away from parks. “The edge of parks have become battlegrounds for control of resources,” Brashares says. “These battles are only going to intensify over the next decades, and we have to plan for that.”
If I read that right, they are suggesting that if they just divert enough tax dollars into central-planning and social-engineering schemes, they can combat the poaching/logging problem without killing or starving too many people in the process. Such dirigiste economic plans are exactly what enabled governments to kill nearly 200 million of their own subjects in the 20th century alone. When Statists cite African nations and villages as examples of why anarchy doesn’t work and why the State is necessary to provide things to its subjects, I’ll remind them of fascist central-planning debacles like this and reiterate my point that central planners, even Ph.D.’s employed in Berkeley, California, can’t engineer prosperity or independence in African people.
A natural-rights perspective on land and natural resources, the supremacy of private property rights, and recognition of the homesteading principle are far better foundations for protecting natural resources and preventing the emergence of “battlegrounds for control of resources” than socialism is.
If economic history and especially the history of the 20th century have shown us anything, it is that expansion of private property, shrinkage of “public” property, and abandonment of central planning are what any society needs to grow and prosper.
Ironically enough, Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay in which he popularized the concept of the tragedy of the commons appeared in the journal Science. Read that essay in its entirety here; I can access the full article at Science’s website without logging in or anything, but if anyone can’t access the whole thing, just leave a comment and I’ll copy and paste it somewhere.
Artificial intelligence is dangerous in State, not private, hands
July 7, 2008 – 4:05 pm by JohnI was reading about the Three Laws of Robotics at Wikipedia, and for anyone who hasn’t read any Isaac Asimov, I highly encourage you to start with I, Robot and go all the way through Foundation and Earth. That’s 12 books altogether: five robot novels and seven Foundation novels, which he manages to connect to each other. Most of the robot short stories are fascinating or at least intriguing logic puzzles about the robot mind and the things that can go wrong when the Three Laws of Robotics are either not followed or followed too faithfully.
In the Applications to future technology section of the Wikipedia article, this passage prompted me to write this post:
Modern roboticists and specialists in robotics agree that, as of 2006, Asimov’s Laws are perfect for plotting stories, but useless in real life. Some have argued that, since the military is a major source of funding for robotic research, it is unlikely such laws would be built into the design. SF author Robert Sawyer generalizes this argument to cover other industries, stating:
The development of AI is a business, and businesses are notoriously uninterested in fundamental safeguards—especially philosophic ones. (A few quick examples: the tobacco industry, the automotive industry, the nuclear industry. Not one of these has said from the outset that fundamental safeguards are necessary, every one of them has resisted externally imposed safeguards, and none has accepted an absolute edict against ever causing harm to humans.)
That paragraph comes from Robert Sawyer’s homepage, in his random musings on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Before I go into my mini-tirade about the anti-business bias and State-apology that pervades all of our society, I will give Sawyer credit for writing this, immediately following the above-quoted paragraph:
Indeed, given that a huge amount of AI and robotics research is underwritten by the military, it seems that there will never be a general “law” against ever harming human beings. The whole point of the exercise, at least from the funders’ point of view, is to specifically find ways to harm those human beings who happen to be on “the other side.”
He clearly realizes the military’s goals are only destructive and offensive, not protective or in any other way concordant with those of most of the rest of mankind. However, he also clearly (to my super-sensitive libertarian mind, anyway) conveys an anti-capitalistic bias that hundreds of millions of people, himself apparently included, hold.
It is the bias that a company can in any way survive, much less thrive, with practices and goals that are clearly dismissive of its own customers’ safety, and that they are incapable of seeing that that’s a bad idea, and that no profit motive exists to protect the safety of their customers or the public, and that in a free and unfettered market no honest and customer-friendly businesses would emerge as competitors, and that these forward-thinking, safe, customer-friendly, and general-public-friendly companies wouldn’t hold an immense competitive advantage over their backwards, irresponsible predecessors.
It belies his ignorance of history and economics that Sawyer uses the tobacco, automotive, and nuclear-energy industries as examples of unsafe and dangerous private enterprises, as these are three of the most heavily regulated and protected industries in the history of the United States. Statists might argue that they needed to be regulated heavily because they were harming the public; that isn’t a bad debate to have, and many have had it. I won’t go into it here except to remind you that many libertarians argue that regulatory (coercive) safety standards actually retard the process of safety improvements in a given industry because everyone (from customer to business executive) just assumes the government is the be-all and end-all of safety decisions and so the companies only do enough to meet (or finagle out of) government requirements, which is not the point the industry might be at if competition, supply and demand, and customer-pleasing where the driving forces behind such improvements.
Also, I’ll remind you of the point made by so many libertarians, which was best expressed by Frederic Bastiat (and, yes, I am trying to set a record for the most times one blagger quotes one passage):
…every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.
We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
Fortunately for my point, I don’t need to prove that public safety is first and foremost in the business executive’s mind, because, to be sure, a lot of them are pretty irresponsible, criminally so. (Does our justice system punish them? Does it allow for them to be punished? Goodness no. That’s exactly why they lobby Congress and the various agencies of the executive branch so much.) My point is that regardless of how cruel, heartless, and irresponsible you want to fantasize private companies are, the State is far worse.
Let’s rephrase the offending paragraph, replacing Sawyer’s exaggerations and misconceptions about businesses with the reality about the State:
The development of AI is a funded mainly by governments, and governments are notoriously uninterested in fundamental safeguards—especially philosophic ones. (A few quick examples: the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch of every local and national government in the history of the world. Not one of these has planned from the outset to pay attention to fundamental safeguards, every one of them by definition is immune to externally imposed safeguards*, and they have each specifically and unequivocally rejected any edicts against ever causing harm to humans. This is because the monopolistic nature of governments makes competition and secession illegal, and the existence of government is based on forcing people to obey and forcibly extracting taxes from them.)
That is a much more historically and philosophically accurate paragraph. If you disagree, please leave a comment explaining which statements are inaccurate. Again, Robert Sawyer notes the more-dangerous nature of militaries compared with private companies, but he and hundreds of millions of other people fail to appreciate that the State in general inflicts more harm on the human race than private companies ever have or could, and they are reluctant to acknowledge it.
*Well, except foreign conquest, but I don’t see how that’s any better for a people than being victimized by their own government.
Female bishops
July 5, 2008 – 7:46 pm by JohnFrom ifeminists.net I saw a link to this column advocating the ordainment of female bishops in the Church of England and, in principle, the Roman Catholic Church too. Well, I don’t know, I think allowing women to become bishops won’t help them move forward, only diagonally.
DWI arrest at BAC 0%
July 5, 2008 – 1:20 pm by JohnRadley Balko blags about an Arizona designated driver who was arrested for DWI with a blood-alcohol content of 0%. Balko and the newspaper columnist he cites both thought the arresting officer might have been getting back at the designated driver’s husband, a lawyer who defeated the officer in a DWI court case recently. Shockingly, the police department denies this.
Also shockingly, the affidavit that the officer wrote contained completely fabricated symptoms in the driver—bloodshot and watery eyes, flushed face, and the strong smell of alcohol on her breath. The reason he arrested her for drunk driving is because she refused the field sobriety test. She refused it because it is her right and because the officer had no reason to suspect her of drunk driving. You’d better submit to the police state or you’ll be punished for your disobedience.
In a final, bizarre twist to a totally unpredictable story, the officer is not going to be punished in any way. The policies of the Arizona state and local police that make everyone out to be a suspect and lead to the wrongful arrest many drivers (according to the Phoenix New Times column) will not be changed.
Some detractors and police-state apologists will claim that the occasional wrongful arrest, which gets corrected and dropped from the drivers’ records in due time, is a small price to pay for saving people’s lives from drunk drivers. It is hard to argue with that, and the State does own the roads, however wrongfully, but as long as you admit a few things, I’ll call it a good start: (1) a body that is unaccountable to the people and, in fact, to the law will misjudge where that happy medium between Draconian DWI laws and safety from drunk drivers is, and they will always err on the side of giving themselves more power to arrest, harass, terrorize, and imprison; (2) this tendency of the police state to take more powers over its subjects and apply them more vigorously and arbitrarily will necessarily be implemented in many facets of government, not just life-saving efforts; (3) all of the wrongful arrests won’t be corrected and dropped from the records, an injustice against which the victims have no recourse, because of the fact that the law and its courts are the sole, final arbiters of justice in society; and (4) police officers do often get overzealous in their enforcement of the law, leading to injustices that cannot simply be called errors or misjudgments, and they often go completely undisciplined while their captains and spokesmen defend their actions and blame the victims, and this lack of accountability and consequences is a major problem with all types and levels of law enforcement in our society.
I’m not trying to persuade people to renounce monopolistic government with every post I write; I’m just trying to find common ground with Statists and get them to admit there are problems with things that they wouldn’t have acknowledged before, which might lead them to regard the utility of the libertarian position with less aversion than before.
Kill switches and remote control
July 4, 2008 – 5:05 pm by JohnBruce Schneier, the computer-security guru whom Brad at WendyMcElroy.com often links to, wrote a pretty chilling post on kill switches and remote control. This type of technology is an example of why government is not your only enemy, but its creation of the national-security state enables private companies and individuals to violate your rights more easily.
OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. …
Microsoft is doing some of the most creative thinking along these lines, with something it’s calling “Digital Manners Policies.” According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast “orders” limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.
He then brings up many of the concerns anyone should have about such frightening technology and the desire to use it. However, he makes a puzzling mistake for someone who is (I presume) thought of so favorably by so many libertarians, and for someone who understands the dangers of such Orwellian technology so well, otherwise. He says,
How do we prevent this from being abused? …Do the police get “superuser” devices that cannot be limited, and do they get “supercontroller” devices that can limit anything? How do we ensure that only they get them, and what do we do when the devices inevitably fall into the wrong hands?
Obviously their hands are the wrong hands. The universal availability of “supercontroller” devices would make this type of technology almost completely worthless in everyday electronic devices, which seems to me would be a good thing. If state legislatures or the Congress make such devices legally available to government agents only, then we will know one huge reason that we become victims to this technology. It will be interesting to follow the development of these technologies and the legislation pertaining to them.
Lynch mobs, stones, and glass houses
July 4, 2008 – 7:14 am by JohnI urge you to read this column published at Wendy McElroy’s website ifeminists.net, written by one WolfmanMac, about the increasing criminalization of being male: Lynch mobs, stones, and glass houses. The nuanced insight and analysis of one man’s child-porn charges in particular and society’s attitude about sexual predators in general are very impressive. Ignoring all the bad typos, it is a fantastic column. I’ll paste just one paragraph:
So it would appear that Mr. Chan was prosecuted not for what he was doing, and absent a charge that he was conspiring to take actions that would impose himself upon the persons of one of these young ladies it is clear he was not prosecuted for what he was about to do, or intended to do at a later time. He was prosecuted for what he might have been thinking.Or, if one wishes to quibble about the benefit of what appears in this case to be a very small doubt implied by the word “might,” it does no violence to a position that attacks this prosecution as manifestly unjust to say “what he was surely thinking.” In either case, at issue are thoughts and thoughts only, and it is staggering to observe that an argument against punishing people for their thoughts is one that requires elaboration.
America! Fuck yeah!
July 3, 2008 – 10:18 pm by JohnThe Onion’s AV Club has a funny list of the most hilariously hyperbolic pro-America songs. Of course, the most hilariously hyperbolic pro-America song of all time is “America! (Fuck Yeah!)” from the movie Team America: World Police, but, then, it was trying to be hyperbolic. I love the list of things he rattles off that are supposed to represent America:
McDonald’s! (fuck yeah!)
Wal-Mart! (fuck yeah!)
The Gap! (fuck yeah!)
Baseball! (fuck yeah!)NFL! (fuck yeah!)
Rock ‘n roll ! (fuck yeah!)
The internet! (fuck yeah!)
Slavery! (fuck yeah!)Starbucks! (fuck yeah!)
Disney World! (fuck yeah!)
Porno! (fuck yeah!)
Valium! (fuck yeah!)Reeboks! (fuck yeah!)
Fake tits! (fuck yeah!)
Sushi! (fuck yeah!)
Taco Bell! (fuck yeah!)Rodeos! (fuck yeah!)
Bed, Bath & Beyond…Liberty! (fuck yeah!)
White slips! (fuck yeah!)
The Alamo! (fuck yeah!)
Band-Aids! (fuck yeah!)Las Vegas! (fuck yeah!)
Christmas! (fuck yeah!)
Immigrants! (fuck yeah!)
Columbine! (fuck yeah!)Democrats! (fuck yeah!)
Republicans! (…fuck yeah…)
Sportsmanship!
Books!
Moderate voters tough for both McCain and Obama to win
July 3, 2008 – 10:51 am by JohnThe AP reports that self-described “moderate” voters will be hard for both McCain and Obama to win in this presidential election. It reminds me of the line from Brian on “Family Guy”: “Undecided voters are the biggest idiots on the planet.”
An anecdotal story about incompetent police and gun control
July 3, 2008 – 8:53 am by JohnOn the WRIF-Detroit morning show I heard a story from a caller about a ridiculous ordeal he went through as a result of his attempts to protect his next-door neighbor’s property. He called in response to the show’s discussion about Joe Horn, a 61-year-old Texas man (not an Atlanta Falcons wide receiver) who fatally shot two burglars after they robbed his neighbor’s house. Horn shot them after they had come into his own yard. Read that CBS News story, which has the very intriguing transcript of the phone call between Joe Horn and the 911 dispatcher. The dispatcher repeatedly urges Horn to stay in his house, not bring his gun out of the house, and not shoot them.
I don’t have much to say about the Horn incident, just these quick thoughts: I kind of think the dispatcher was right to discourage Horn from confronting them and certainly from shooting them, because deadly force should (ideally) be used only as self-defense when your well-being is directly threatened. I understand that a free society needs private citizens to protect their property and protect each other, but fatally shooting two people in the back who were robbing your neighbor, when your neighbor wasn’t home, seems excessive to me. But, on the other hand, I’ve never been in a burglary situation, and I don’t know how I’d react knowing that burglars were right next door and could come to my house next. I’d rather shoot too early, before they came close to my house and started directly threatening me, than shoot too late after they had already broken in, or shot at me, or attacked me with their crowbar or something. Or, before they had gone to another neighbor’s house, where everyone was asleep and owned no firearms to defend themselves.
Secondly, the two criminals were Colombian immigrants who were on parole…from previous drug charges. What a surprise: the Drug War ruins two immigrants’ lives by causing them to be arrested for drug possession/trafficking, a completely victimless crime that only harms anyone because it is made illegal by the monopolistic State, and it makes them desperate enough to resort to a life of real crime. But, I don’t know their whole story, they might be legitimately shady characters who have committed real crimes like burglary before. It sounds just typical of the life-ruining character of the War on Drugs, though.
Third, read this exchange between Joe Horn and the 911 dispatcher, after he had shot the burglars:
Dispatcher: “Put that gun down! There’s officers out there without uniforms on. Do not shoot anybody else, do you understand me? I’ve got police out there…”
Horn: “I understand, I understand. I am out in the front yard waving my hand right now.”
Dispatcher: “You don’t have a gun with you, do you?
Horn: “No, no, no.”
Dispatcher: “You see a uniformed officer? Now lay down on the ground and don’t do nothing else. Lay down on the ground, Mister Horn. Do what the officers tell you to do right now.”
They have special uniforms, so they are exempt from the actions and considerations that you might apply to ordinary citizens. I’m not stretching this to make an issue out of nothing, here. I know that the reason the cops were there is because they were called there and, proper or not, it’s their job to protect us against and investigate crimes. These particular circumstances are not what I’m focusing on; it’s the attitude that police officers are held to a different set of standards and (oftentimes) laws because they are official agents of the State and their uniforms prove it. The dispatcher is saying, You may have been right or wrong to shoot those burglars, but you aren’t of the same legal status as these uniformed officers, so you can’t walk around with a gun like they can; you can’t address them standing up and armed like they will be. (The dispatcher could also have realized that at the scene of a crime where two people had already been shot, the cops were likely to be prepared to shoot, too, so Horn better do all he can to avoid provoking their trigger-happiness.)
What do you think that 911 dispatcher (and millions of others) would have thought about this scenario: Two police officers had a house surrounded because there were burglars in it, and when the burglars came running towards the cops, the cops shot them dead, and then a few more police officers come to the scene. Do you think anyone would expect the two original cops to put their guns down, come out from behind their cars or from the vicinity of the bodies with their hands up, and then lie down with their hands behind their head, waiting for the new cops to tell them what to do? Obviously not. They are not considered ordinary citizens and are not held to the same standards that we are in many situations—in any situations involving crimes and shootings. (If you think police officers are unlikely to exhibit so little restraint and shoot people unjustifiably, please read this blag more often, as you have a lot to learn.)
Consider one other scenario: What if, instead of Joe Horn, the next-door neighbor had been an off-duty police officer, and he had shot the burglars just as Horn did? Do you think he, or the police who came to the scene, would have thought the off-duty cop needed to leave his gun in the house, come out with his hands up, and lie down waiting for instructions? Don’t be foolish. He would have said, No, it’s okay, I’m a cop! Or, if he lived in the same city he worked in, his own police force would probably be the one coming to his house, so they’d know him… Either way, he wouldn’t be treated the same as an ordinary citizen. You might say that’s fine and that’s the way it should be because the cops should be held to different standards, but I’d say, one, there is no moral or philosophical basis for such a double-standard, and, two, as long as you admit this is true, that’s a good start.
The point of this longer-than-expected early-morning post was to relate the story that Chris, a 47-year-old caller to WRIF FM, told on the air this morning. He was out in his back yard grilling when he heard something weird in the woods behind his and his neighbor’s houses. It sounded like lumber being moved or loaded or something. He got his bright-orange hunting gear on and took his handgun out into the woods, and saw three young men loading up a bunch of lumber and wheels and other equipment from his neighbor’s shed into their van!
When one of them noticed him (I guess he wore his bright-orange to protect himself against hunters or trigger-happy criminals or something…I don’t know, but they saw him when he got 40 or 50 feet away), the guy started walking towards Chris. Chris asked them what the hell they were doing, and they said they knew Mr. McMahon, his neighbor, and they had permission to be there and take his stuff. When the guy walking towards Chris got pretty close, like 5-10 feet away, Chris pulled his handgun out and told him to back off and continued asking them why they were there. The guy stopped walking towards him and started listening then. Chris kept the gun pointed at all of them, and told them they could all come back to the shed later that night or the next day when its owner was home, because there should be no problem if they have his explicit permission, should there? They didn’t agree to that, so Chris made them unload all of the stuff from the van back into the shed, and they drove off.
About an hour later, cops showed up in Chris’s driveway, confiscated his gun, handcuffed him, put him in the back of their police car, and locked him up in a jail cell for 24 hours.
What had happened was one of the guys he encountered in the woods had called the police to report what Chris had done to them—threatened them with a gun even though they had a right, had permission, to be there and take Mr. McMahon’s stuff. The police immediately and by default assumed that the man with the firearm was in the wrong, and so arrested him without an investigation and took his gun even though it was his property. (If ordinary citizens did this, it would be called kidnapping and theft.) Next, the police went back to the shed in the woods to meet up with these people and supervise their taking of this lumber and other equipment from Mr. McMahon’s shed.
Perhaps you can tell by the fact that I’m relating this story on my blag and by the way I’m telling it that, of course, these were criminals and the cops were completely wrong. I guess it was after Chris got home from jail, he talked to his neighbor McMahon, who called the police and said he had no idea who any of those guys were and in no way, shape, or form did they have permission to even be there, much less take his stuff!
The police released Chris after 24 hours—maybe because that’s how long they keep someone while an “investigation” is ongoing or maybe because they found out he was completely in the right—and it took Chris several months and $1500 to get his gun back, which belonged to him, was stolen by people who had no place to take it, and which wasn’t used in the commission of a crime.
Oh, and it turns out two of the three criminals were on parole.
A few closing thoughts: The police assume by default that the person with the gun was in the wrong, but the police will always have guns and they never assume one of their own is in the wrong. They stole Chris’s gun and held him in a cell for 24 hours, but not only will they not be charged with theft or kidnapping, Chris had to pay them fifteen hundred freaking dollars to get his own perfectly legal and justified property back. Third, if he did charge them with wrongful arrest or theft, they would never be convicted and would probably not be brought to trial. If he brought them to small-claims court for his $1500 in fines and fees, he would never win (the courts are part of the same monopolistic justice [sic] system as the police department!). The cops were negligent in failing to ascertain who these criminals were and whether they had any legitimate reason to be there taking stuff out of someone’s shed. (By the way, what balls those criminals have, calling the cops and then taking equipment out of this shed right in front of them!) And, lastly, do you think Chris or his neighbor would choose to subscribe to these police-protection and adjudication systems in the future, if they had the choice? Do you think many people would, after they heard about this?
Sarbanes-Oxley: helps big businesses, stifles small ones
July 2, 2008 – 11:19 pm by JohnThis is my second post in one night about how, (1) governmental regulations that were meant to help and protect…someone, presumably…actually only help big, wealthy businesses, and, (2) their supporters never actually expected them to do any good for the general public, to begin with.
B.K. Marcus writes about “putting the BIG in Big Business”. There was a recent article in the New York Times about the fact that no venture capitalist–backed business went public in 2008 Q2, the first time since 1978 that the United States has gone an entire quarter without one going public. Marcus’s friend (or friend of a friend…it isn’t clear) commented thusly:
The ginormous costs inflicted by Sarbanes-Oxley have killed going public for many startups. Companies now face a couple million bucks a year in new compliance costs and pervasive controls over just about everything they do on top of all the other headaches of going public. That increases the temptation for going the buyout route and lessens interest in initial startup funding. Surely the last couple years’ changes in stock option accounting rules have hurt startups’ ability to pull talent, too.
B.K. says,
This is the pattern with all such regulations. The bigger corporations support them, quietly or not, because they can bear the costs and thereby eliminate competition from “below.” And the Marxoids say that unregulated capitalism has a natural tendency toward monopoly…
The Left loves small markets, small merchants, small businesses, but then does everything they can to promote the bigness of business — in the name of fighting Big Business.
This is exactly what Karen De Coster was saying Sarbanes-Oxley would do, back when it was a recent development.
The system is designed to reward the powerful and connected and screw the little guy.
California’s ban on individual genetic risk assessment
July 2, 2008 – 10:44 pm by JohnThe state of California is attempting to shut down direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Now, this is just bizarre. I don’t even know what to say about it, but I felt I had to condemn it on my web page because it is just so stupid. It is also so typical of monopolistic governments and their powerful, connected, establishment supporters. Here are a few excerpts from the Wired article that might help you or me make some sense out of this nonsensical policy:
“We [are] no longer tolerating direct-to-consumer genetic testing in California,” Karen Nickel, Chief of Laboratory Field Services at the health department, told members of the Clinical Laboratories Advisory Committee on June 13.
…These services are seen as the leading edge of a new type of health care in which consumers can use their genetic profile to tailor their medical and lifestyle choices. The established medical community, however, is wary of the technology arguing that the medical utility of some tests is unproven. Doctors also complain that direct-to-consumer services bypass them as the gatekeepers and analysts of medical information, which they worry could confuse consumers, not to mention cost them a billing event.
[...]
Nickel added that the state had talked with the state of New York, which sent similar letters, and looked forward to federal regulation.While Nickel took issue with the testing business, she said that “public interest in personalized medicine” was driving the use of genetic information.
Though the health department has stated that the investigation of genetic testing companies came as a result of “multiple” consumer complaints — no specific incidents were mentioned in the call.
[...]
“If we could find out who put the bee in their bonnet, my guess it’s the medical community,” Greenspan said. “I think that the medical community doesn’t want to lose control of who orders the test.”
Well, I mean, obviously this is a blatant and counterproductive power-grab by state health regulators and “the established medical community.” They are scared of a new industry and wary of losing their long-standing control over the health care industry. So instead of offering a better product or service to the public, lowering their prices, adopting new technology, or adapting to the changing times, they lobby the State to use its violent, deadly police power to force their competitors to stop competing with them. It should be obvious that this has no relation to the general welfare of the public or the government’s concern that people’s rights are being violated. It is entirely about power and control.
People don’t know what’s best for themselves, but malinformed and disinterested politicians do… Right…
Libertarians talk a lot about the “establishment” benefiting the “power elite” and “special interests” lobbying the State to help the powerful and connected at the expense of the little guy, with the “mainstream media” cheering on the process the whole time. I often wonder if both libertarians and Statists alike get little frustrated—skeptical, even—of such slogan-riddled rhetoric and vague proclamations. “How exactly does this ‘estabishment–power elite–government’ cartel work?” they might say. “What laws benefit which people and how much, and when, and where?”
Well, here is a perfect, concrete example. One of the first and foremost reasons I started this web page with Kel was to expose such State activity as propping up the rich and powerful at the expense of the average citizen, and to explain how such oppressive regulation by the State impoverishes people by restricting mutually beneficial transactions, without actually helping or protecting anyone…except the “power elite.”
Brave Statists on Mises.org
July 2, 2008 – 5:24 pm by JohnAs wrong as they are, I am quite impressed with several of the non-libertarians—and in fact outright socialists—who frequent the Mises blag discussion threads and offer their input as to why a Mises columnist or blagger was way off and why government is actually not so bad, and is necessary, besides.
I have no interest in trolling liberal, neocon, or other non-Austro-libertarian discussion threads, mainly because I don’t have the time. It’s also because I prefer recording my thoughts and feelings on my own web page to raising my blood pressure and clouding my mind with anger for a few hours by competing for Special Olympics medals with Statolatrists who have no interest in morals, philosophy, principles, or applying their imagination to potential benefits of libertarianism.
Several Statists do visit Mises.org and comment often, though. I think it’s great because they are usually civil and so are the libertarians who mop the floor with them. It’s great because these people are stepping out of their comfort zone of self-reinforcing homogeneity and reading the ideas of people who drastically disagree with them about the very nature of freedom, rights, and government.
Yesterday I observed this from a fellow named Tom Ritchford, who commented on Jeffrey Tucker’s post about the “informal sector” of the economy (gray market) and how taxation and regulation would prevent those mutually beneficial transactions from occurring, not facilitate them. I should start by crediting Tom Ritchford for admitting that government is evil (”a necessary evil”), but it’s all downhill from there. For one, he knowingly and openly supports evil. Here are some gems from his comments:
Sure, most of your taxes go on killing strangers and arresting people for smoking pot but that’s just because Americans are determined to destroy themselves and everyone else. In a civilized country, in a country where the government wasn’t going out of its way to prove that the government is only good for oppressing people and starting wars, you might actually see some good from your taxes, things like “health care” and “bridges that don’t fall down”…
If you look at your commie pinko welfare state countries, it’s amazing how well - and how long - they live relative to Americans, how much better educated they are. What’s particularly amazing is how much less they worry than Americans - they actually have a life outside of work and they don’t have those nightmares of suddenly falling off the bottom rung.
Public roads? Taxes. Clean drinking water? Taxes. Remember all those plagues? Polio? Even measles? What happened to them? Well, the government immunized all the kids - with your taxes. Education? Remember when kids came out of school being able to read and write? …
So ha ha ha you people don’t pay taxes, you’re SOOOO much smarter than the rest of us! Glad to have you responsible, ethical, honest people on board with us! I’m sure we can rely on you when the shit really hits the fan.
It is kind of depressing but no less amazing how many people assume unequivocally that if the State didn’t do something, it could never, ever get done. I’ll actually give credit to the United States government, the Soviet Union, and the WHO for eradicating smallpox and nearly eradicating polio and other diseases that struck children and lowered life expectancy so much. It’s funny that he brings up education because the State is precisely the reason Western education systems are so poor (not just in the U.S., obviously). But he will go on thinking that only the stupid Republican education reforms are bad and that just the right amount of government would solve all of those problems.
It’s also really weird that he thinks we “don’t pay taxes.” Our income tax rate has gone almost nowhere but up since the passing of the 16th Amendment. He probably hasn’t gone to any effort to learn anything about inflation (or he ignores what he has learned, since he is a Mises.org reader), but inflation is the most insidious tax and has also increased astronomically for the dollar since the founding of the Federal Reserve. Inflation is constant, debilitating, and used by the State to increase its domestic and foreign spending, just like income taxation.
Great public goods like “trucking” (where we get all this fresh food) can only exist because of a standardized system of roads, and that could only have been built with public money.
If you don’t believe it, please name a country - any country you might want to live in - where most of the roads were built with private money.
What an idiot. How about you name a country where the free market was allowed to flourish and enter the road-building enterprise. Name a country where purchase, use, and allocation of land was based entirely on freedom, property rights, and homesteading and not at all on government fiat.
I understand that the concept of “a living wage for regular work” is foreign to people here, that you want to have a few Randian superheroes and everyone else living as peasants…
The “living wage,” also known as the minimum wage, is an immoral violation of contractual rights, and not surprisingly the result is higher unemployment, not higher employment or more comfortable livelihood for people earning it.
I think his allusion to Ayn Rand on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website belies his misunderstanding of real libertarianism as espoused by the LRC/Mises group (generally, “right-libertarians”) and also of that espoused by all the left-libertarians out there (Roderick Long, Charles Johnson, Sheldon Richman, thousands of others). Anarcho-capitalists are the only consistent and convincing debunkers of Objectivism, because only the philosophy of true private property rights and true freedom from government can expose the fallacies of Objectivism with philosophical consistency.
[quoting another commenter] “It is not taxes that make the world go round and provide the infrastructure of society, but rather private individuals.”
No, it’s both, clearly. Some things are obviously better done on a “for profit” basis. Other things, like roads, are better done by a government.
But, according to your own admissions, tax money is often wasted by American politicians, on things like wars and No Child Left Behind (we assume that no politician with a “D” after his name has ever wasted a significant amount of tax dollars). Therefore, good governance and wise voting and a healthy dose of public skepticism are necessary to keep government in check and make sure it taxes people at the right rate and spends its stolen money on Good Things.
Gee, it’s a good thing we have people like Tom Ritchford around, or else none of us would know what to do with our own money! We wouldn’t know if ten, twenty, thirty, seventy-five percent of it should be graciously given to our State overlords, or what! We wouldn’t be able to build roads or sanitize the water without Tom Ritchford and his wise politicians! We’d just be throwing money into pyramid retirement schemes and terrible schools and corrupt court systems and incompetent bureaucracies without him allocating our own money for us! It’s a good thing you know what that proper income-theft rate is, you arrogant, intolerant, amoral, bullying, and willfully ignorant State lover. It’s a good thing you and your liberal socialist politicians of choice are spun from a finer clay than the rest of us, because while we would make publicly harmful decisions with 50% of our own money, you and your ilk do not suffer from such a shortcoming. How nice it must be up on your pedestal of arrogance and enlightenment, looking down on the rest of us ignorant, irresponsible freedom lovers.
That attitude makes me sick. It is a pretty common attitude.
Government is a necessary evil. Am I trying to claim that governments don’t rip the people off? Of course not. …
But a lot of good things come from government as well - just spend some time in Africa to see what happens in a country where government provides no services. I would say that there’s literally no place in the world you’d want to live without a strong government providing billions of dollars worth of services every year.
I have an idea: Let’s try one country or one state without a monopolistic government, and one with, and I can live in one and you in t’other, and we’ll just agree to trade but not bother each other outside of that.
Oh, what? Your moral code doesn’t work that way? You can force me to submit to your State and your morality, but I can’t do the same to you—I can’t even refrain from adhering to yours and leave you alone? Yeah, excuse me for not acting surprised at the fact that such an amoral and antisocial code of interpersonal relations has created most of the death, misery, and poverty the human race has ever known.
We’ve just seen what happens after eight years of a government that doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of government - the rich loot the government.
Right, that only happened during the last eight years of neocon rule. I see how in touch you are with reality. This is going downhill even faster…
When you’re a teenager, you have polarized emotions: “soldiers are evil”, “government is bad”, “save the planet”. When you grow up, you realize that the world is a more complex place and cannot be summed up in a few slogans; that government can sometimes be good and sometimes bad but is inevitable and essential and that you should try to make it work in the most efficient manner rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.
His bizarre accusations that libertarians, of all people, rally behind slogans and simple emotion-based positions tells me this might be his first visit to Mises.org. I hope it isn’t his last.
For several years I have thought of Statism as a very childlike, if not downright primitive, social structure. Think of how many impulsive and irresponsible actions the State shares in common with a child. We want something someone else has—just take it! The law of supply and demand says this will never work as intended—I don’t care, I want it so let’s do it! Other people don’t want this government program—it doesn’t matter what they want, we want it so we’re going to force them to comply! That law is completely unjust; people who broke it shouldn’t be punished—I don’t care, we made the law and we’re going to enforce it, even if it means enslaving people in cages with real criminals for several years!
But, y’know, I’m sure Tom Ritchford’s wise and moderate (imaginary) government would never go to those extremes.
In well-run countries…
Ha! You lose.
I think what we have here is another Statist who fails to appreciate two facts: the aforementioned reality that Frederic Bastiat expressed so eloquently:
We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
and the fact that even in the world of government, even in the world of “well-run, minimalist” government, trade-offs exist and you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Let me illustrate his failure to understand this by expounding upon a few of my own refutations above.
Tom Ritchford claims that a “living wage” is necessary for the people to live happy, comfortable, healthy, long lives. I think he would be right in that statement. What he really means, though, is a State-enforced prohibition of voluntary contracts between two parties—business and worker. I’m sure he is aware that there is an immense body of anti-socialist literature debunking every argument for the coerced minimum wage. The fact that he acts unaware of it proves either his lack of desire to understand reality or his inability to grasp the simplest economic concepts. What I’m sure he’s never considered is that you can’t have coercive minimum wages without the wasteful bureaucratic regulatory network that comes along with it—related and completely unrelated to labor law. The alphabet soup of federal agencies and their bloat and waste are always going to exist in any socialist-regulatory state. The “unnecessary” taxes, “unnecessary” programs, and “unnecessary” regulations are a huge strain on economies and bank accounts everywhere in the world. They raise prices and restrict job growth. They keep small businesses small or out of business. The wasted money and restriction of growth that governments are responsible for are so staggering as to be nearly unfathomable. He appears to claim that with the right politicians (i.e., left-liberals) in charge, the mostly-helpful State activities will still exist and the mostly-harmful ones will be abolished. He is a helpless Utopian dreamer.
He harps on public roads in his two comments. He claims that this necessary part of national infrastructure would never, ever have been remotely imaginable without bloated federal bureaucracy and massive income theft. (Oh, sorry, moderate federal bureaucracy and appropriate income theft.) He doesn’t appreciate the public waste that they represent and the inhibition of the development and flourishing of alternative societal structures that they cause. Alternative things like actual public transportation (railroads, short-range airplanes, who knows what else) and less-spread-out communities. Many libertarians have addressed public vs. private roads, and quite well. I’m not going to harp on it.
He also insinuates that he is enamored of State health care. Look, I think all the vaccinations and eradication efforts that governments organized were great, but Frederic Bastiat’s point still applies. The problem is that any State interference leads to total State management of health care. This is already turning into a disaster in Western Europe and Canada, and America will follow a few decades behind. This is still the one political issue that scares me more than any other, though expansion of warfare and institution of military slavery by a crazed Bush or McCain is gaining fast.
In my Biology of Aging class my senior year of college, we learned about a British doctor, Thomas McEwen, who wrote two books about the causes of the population explosion and increase in life expectancy that the United Kingdom experienced starting in the late 19th century. He concluded that medical innovation played a very small role in the increase in life expectancy, but that nutrition and improved living standards contributed the most to higher childhood (and adult) survival rates. This is largely because people were healthy enough to survive childhood infections, whereas they weren’t before.
Now, given Tom Ritchford’s propensity to ignore the obvious and tell outright lies, he will probably claim this is all due to the wisdom and beneficence of the glorious British mixed economy. Every bit of economics knowledge that has ever existed tells us that free-market capitalism lowers prices, increases the supply of goods to the common man, and raises everyone’s standard of living, especially the poor. Socialist road systems probably played a role in transporting food across the country; I don’t know how many roads there were or how they were funded in Victorian England; but the socialism part was not necessary to get the transportation part. It takes a special kind of ignorance to claim that capitalism can bring food, housing, clothing, automobiles, computers, and every kind of service industry to the common man, but it fails miserably at water, education, and roads and the government does better.
The government did not and does not make people healthier, nor does it facilitate the private sector making people healthier. It only takes and destroys, it doesn’t produce or create. Even if some magical middle ground in State regulation of health care did exist, it would be absolutely impossible for the State itself to discover it and settle there. The State will keep growing (it always has, after all), and the unintended consequences and the waste and the restrictions will accumulate, all while politicians and their gullible voters call for more State fixes to solve the problems the State caused in the first place. This has been gone over before.
I have a personal question for people like Tom Ritchford. Maybe I should have posted it on the Mises blag last night, but I read it really late and I had to go to bed and wasn’t going to let myself get sucked into writing about politics. But this is a simple question. It isn’t about political, philosophical, or pragmatic details. I just want to know: How do you feel about the fact that, whereas libertarians want to fight for a world where we would be unable to impose our will upon you (and you upon us), the very basis of your entire Statist system is that we are unable to even defend ourselves against you and your agents, much less opt out entirely? What do you think about that difference in goals and moralities?
One last question, again personal: How do you feel about the fact that in order to accomplish all the glorious things that, supposedly, only governments can accomplish, it has to take the funds from peaceful people by force, upon penalty of death if they don’t submit obediently?
David Z. on District of Columbia vs. Heller, Second Amendment
July 1, 2008 – 6:00 pm by JohnDavid Z. at No Third Solution had some excellent commentary on the recent ruling by the Supreme Court that (as I understand) Washington, D.C.’s gun-control laws were unconstitutional. It is the type of in-depth and thoughtful commentary that has been missing from our web page for a few weeks, which I hope to remedy soon.
I particularly enjoyed the passage he quoted from Lysander Spooner, which explains that any arguments concerning guns and self-defense against criminals or hunting are completely irrelevant in an discussion about Constitutional law—in a discussion about what the Second Amendment really means.
[T]he object of all bills of rights is to assert the rights of individuals and the people, as against the government, and not as against private persons. It would be a matter of ridiculous supererogation … [I]t would be unnecessary and silly indeed to assert, in a constitution of government, the natural right of individuals to protect their property against thieves and robbers…The legal effect of these constitutional recognitions of the right of individuals to defend their property, liberties, and lives, against the government, is to legalize resistance to all injustice and oppression, of every name and nature whatsoever, on the part of the government.
“It would be unnecessary and silly [for a constitution] to assert…the natural right of individuals to protect their property against thieves and robbers.” It would be unnecessary and silly for a constitution to do that because it isn’t the remotest concern of a constitution to talk about crimes and criminals and the particulars of criminal law. The purpose of a constitution is to elucidate the relationship (contract, if you want to think of it that way, which I don’t and neither did Spooner) between a government and its subjects. Is murder outlawed by the U.S. Constitution? Is embezzlement? Is rape? Is armed robbery? No. Those things don’t belong in a constitution any more than poetry or sheet music.
Furthermore, consider the content and the purpose of the other 9 amendments of the Bill of Rights. They all specifically and unequivocally restrict the permissible actions of the central government toward its citizens. Their purpose is to restrict the government even further and more specifically than the rest of the Constitution does. But, gun-hating liberal Republocrats would have us believe that one out of the ten, which James Madison and the other Framers ranked as the second most important, gives a power to governments (state militias) and limits the power of individuals (by claiming it is a collective and state-approved “right”).
Therefore, since it is not possible that the U.S. Constitution has this one clause concerning our right to defend ourselves against criminals, and it is wilfully ignorant or maliciously dishonest to assert that only the Second Amendment out of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights gives a power to government and limits the power of individuals, we can conclude what everyone before about 1960 already knew, viz., that the entire purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individual citizens to defend themselves against their governments. Not to hunt with, not to store on shelves, not to defend against armed robbers. To shoot, injure, and kill despotic politicians and their armed agents. The only justification anyone ever needs for unrestricted gun ownership among the American populace is that the government will always have guns.
Huzzah for the SCOTUS
June 26, 2008 – 10:23 am by KelIf I’m to understand http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/ correctly, it would seem that the Supreme Court just recently released their ruling on Heller vs. The District of Columbia which has decided that the second amendment protects an individuals right to bear arms. This is outstanding news. Therefore, I hereby declare today Second Amendment Day here at Blagnet.net.
Though the majority opinion was written by that horrible pro-torture, anti-Habeas Corpus, fascist judge Scalia, you can find it here.
Two Mises columns that expose economic follies
June 24, 2008 – 11:57 pm by JohnThomas DiLorenzo exposes the moranic follies and the total immorality contained in a ludicrous article in Time magazine about how the next president should fix our economy. I have a feeling that if I had read the vacuous Time article without knowing where it came from, without knowing it was published in a once-serious publication, I would have guessed it was by a libertarian blagger or columnist who was trying to parody and ridicule the wholly ignorant and immoral proposals put forth by socialist politicians and beloved by millions