Skeptical Politics

The Ron Paul 3rd Place Finish--What Will It Mean for the Future of His Goals?

2012-01-04T16:29:00.000-08:00

Venture Beat talks about Why the Internet Was Wrong in predicting a bigger vote total in Iowa:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/04/why-the-internet-was-wrong-about-ron-paul/

Good points. These were noted beforehand; the vote seems to have illustrated the problem of predicting elections from just counting the tech savvy. Not surprising.

OTOH see Reason's "The Bright Side of Ron Paul's Third-Place Finish."

http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/04/the-bright-side-of-ron-pauls-third-place

Lemonade.

But I hope Point 2, especially, is true, and Paul gains influence in that party via his delegates; we badly need his messages to continue to be pushed, even on a reluctant Republican leadership.

Likewise, Point 7) "Ron Paul, and more importantly his ideas, are in it for the long haul."

Finally, I hope this year segues into a Rand Paul future..... The Kid is awesome!

Mac McCarthy

Author of "Wine Tasting 101"

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Ron Paul vs. The Warmongers

2011-12-16T21:29:00.000-08:00

Photo MachtErgiefen

Ron Paul was terrific in the Dec 14, 2011 Republican candidate’s debate -- the Fox News hosts actually asked him more questions and let him speak more than ever. The result was a strong statement of his positions.

The hosts, stung perhaps by widespread carping at their blatant ignoring of Paul in previous debates, did what journalists always do when put on the spot in such circumstances: We go into "You want attention? How about this!" mode, where we throw trick questions at you, hammer you on points we don't hammer others on, express a level of incredulity not visible elsewhere, and other debate tricks.

None of these had much effect on Paul, who's spent two decades putting up with ignorant media grilling and supposedly trick questions designed less to explore your positions than to force you to alienate some large interest group.

But where candidates typically hedge like mad when pushed into such stupid corners, Ron Paul is not afraid to take strong stands that make some voters mad. His strength is in his key, foundation points: Less war, less aggressive foreign policy, more paying attention to the Constitution, and more awareness that it's not a choice between property rights and civil rights.

WHAT?? YOU DON'T WANT WAR? ARE YOU NUTS?

The strangest set of reactions to Ron Paul came in response to Paul's forceful insistence that the U.S. should not threaten war with Iran.

The Fox hosts kept demanding to know what Paul is going to "do" about Iran, and kept balking at his refusal to declare war. Paul pushed back at the assertion, as fact, that Iran is close to having a bomb (Paul quoted Israeli officials skeptical of that claim), ignored assertions that Iran will attack Israel once it has such a bomb, and kept insisting that we engage in diplomacy.

He also made the mistake of acting like a statesman -- pointing out perfectly good reasons why an Iranian government would want an atomic bomb aside from wanting to attack Israel. He pointed out, twice, that we had talked Libya out of its bomb, then attacked Khadafy and he ended up dead -- hinting that the only people we invade are those who don't have a bomb. He pointed out that neighboring countries, and the US, have the bomb, so it's hardly surprising Iran would want one for defensive reasons.

This willingness to consider how things look from the point of view of other countries earned Paul contempt from the hosts and from his rivals.

Each of the other Republican candidates in turn announced their readiness to "get tough" with Iran -- Paul had provoked a most shocking display of red-meat warmongering tough talk from the other candidates.

It's clear to any American with open eyes that if any Republican other than Ron Paul is elected President, the US will go to war with Iran.

During one of the debate breaks, when commentators evaluated the "performance" of the candidates thus far, in terms exactly as if they were talking about a football game at halftime, one said Ron Paul had hurt himself with his pacifist talk -- the reason being, a majority of Americans believe Iran will soon have an atomic bomb -- which implicitly means that they would reject Paul for not talking tough on Iran.

This is inane, on many levels.

The public is being sold a bill of goods on the threat of Iran, as Paul himself pointed out several times on stage; this is exactly the kind of bullshit the administration fed the public in the lead up to the Iraq war -- exactly the same.

That should worry anyone - again, Paul pointed this out: Haven't we learned any lessons from the Iraq war?

In addition, there was that odd, automatic expectation by these experts that the job of candidate Ron Paul is to find out what the public thinks, and then pretend to attack that problem, even if the public is wrong or misled -- is this really the way they prefer the country to be run? Did John F. Kennedy have 'Profiles in Courage' ghostwritten for nothing? Pandering is apparently the obligatory strategy as recommended by the journalist experts!

The next day, analysts on NPR again raised this issue of Paul's 'pacifism' playing against the natural instincts of the Republican electorate -- a position which owes much to the reflexive belief among Democrats that all Republicans are warmongers. Then several interesting things happened.

One of the commentators disagreed, though: He said that Iowa Republicans have traditionally been the most noninterventionist in the country: He pointed to its noninterventionist Congressmen prior to World War II, and said that Iowa was one of the first states to come out against the Vietnam War.

Photo JohnWalsh2

HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING?

Then they turned the discussion to the previous day's big event: The formal 'ending' of the war in Iraq, with the withdrawal of most US troops. The question was put: Was it worth it? The first commentator said no, considering what it cost us. The second said only time will tell, because it will depend on how Iraq evolves in the coming years.

But the third guy became quite heated in disagreeing: The Iraq war was undertaken under a cloud of lies: Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, they weren't harboring Al Qaida, they didn't have weapons of mass destruction, they were no threat to the United States. The war was sold to the public under false pretenses, and 'the generals' didn't support it, he said: This wasn't the Pentagon's war, it was a war pushed entirely by civilians: Bush II, his VP, and members of Congress.

I listened in amazement: The guy is, of course, right. But further: Of all the Republican candidates in the previous evening's debate, every candidate excepting only Ron Paul talked about Iran in exactly the same way they had all talked about invading Iraq only a decade go. Only Ron Paul thought the country should have learned a lesson from the mistakes of Iraq. Only Ron Paul claimed we are once again being sold a bill of goods -- just like the last time. Only Ron Paul wanted to halt the rush to war. Only Ron Paul was willing to question the claims about Iran's threat to us and to Israel.

One thing should be clear to everyone: If you want an end to the endless march to war, the constant saber-rattling by blowhards talking tough with the blood of your sons and daughters, learning nothing and believing anything -- you will only get that with a Ron Paul presidency. Every one of the other warmongers will have us heading off to war as if this were World War I all over again.

As if Flanders Fields never happened - nor Iraq, nor Afghanistan, nor Pakistan -- nor Somalia, nor Yugoslavia, nor any of the rest of our militaristic jingoistic warmongering.

This is perversity of the first water: Pols more afraid to lose an election than interested in the good of their country. And, worse, a press corps urging them on.

Disgusting.

After the Supercommittee?

2011-12-02T18:29:00.001-08:00

Cato scholar Daniel J. Mitchell discusses sequestration and the aftermath of the supercommittee’s collapse in an op-ed for National Review Online:

Taxpayers just dodged a bullet. Even though Republicans on the so-called supercommittee were willing to break their promises and support a tax hike, a 1990-style budget deal was not possible because Democrats demanded too much and offered too little in exchange. This is good news for fiscal responsibility. Simply stated, any agreement would have been a typical inside-the-Beltway pact featuring real tax hikes and empty promises of future spending cuts. And if the 1990 tax-hike deal is any indication, that would have resulted in more red ink rather than less…. For fiscal conservatives there is no possible compromise with either the hard Left or the rational Left. Both of those camps want bigger government. Both want higher taxes. And both oppose real entitlement reform. The only real debate on the Left is how quickly to race in the wrong direction.

Mitchell is the co-author of Global Tax Revolution: The Rise of Tax Competition and the Battle to Defend It.

Democats, Republicans--both the same. Ron Paul would be a real kick as President, wouldnt' he?

2011-11-30T11:06:00.001-08:00

Friends discussing the current administration's assaults on the U.S. Constitution (provoked by the proposed new law to allow takedown of Web sites on mere allegation of copyright infringement), wondering what ever happened to the Constitution. The subject of detainees in Guantanamo arose.

One says of Obama: "This is a professor of constitutional law, now a US President. He knows damn well that Guantanomo is a cesspit of bad prior POTUS behavior, but one rooted in extra-territorial precedent. My altruism says: free them."

Another replies, "Mine too. But my inner soldier says, "...and have a firing squad greet them the second they step through the exit."

This is, indeed, a difficult situation. But two observations:

One: If, as Ron Paul points out, we weren't sticking our military noses in every corner of the world, we'd have fewer of these Constitutional sticky bits to deal with. When you act badly, your good choices become limited. I have a whole rant about this, but never mind for now.

Two: As a Libertarian, I was not interested in which pol won the last presidency, but I hoped that with a liberal Democrat in office, we'd at least get some of the things Dems like to consider themselves good at (and blast the Repubs for being bad at), like: less war; more respect for freedom of speech and other civil liberties. it would almost be worth paying the price in taxes and limits on property rights to back away from our many wars and our many assaults on our liberties.

Instead, we get more of the same. It might as well be Bush II up there.

The ironies abound: When the Bushes were in charge, we got all the taxes, regulations, and gigantic new government agencies the Dems are supposed to do, and none of the restraint on the growth of government the Republicans claim to favor. And of course we got the Republicans' wars. With their predecessor, Clinton, similarly, we got the best Republican president the Democrats have ever had -- lower taxes, reduced regulatory intrusion, plus a Democrat benefit of few/limited military nosiness. We didn't know how good we had it.

So you get foreign-policy adventurism, growth in government power, growth in government spending regardless of ability to pay for it, and continued assaults on our liberties, with a general annoyance at the notion the Constitution might limit any of this -- from whichever major party you vote for. Or stay home and not vote for.

It would sure be a hoot if Ron Paul got nominated and then, even more improbably, elected. The likelihood of that guy, based on his history, voting for more spending, more taxes, more invasions, more civil-liberty assaults, and so on, is very low. It would be fun to watch D.C. turn upsidedown.

But unlikely all around: If he makes much more progress in the polls, they'll have to start mentioning him in every race roundup instead of only occasionally in passing, and when he gets too far up there, they'll go try to find a way to do a Herman Cain on him -- the political press's nuclear option when they want to get rid of somebody but don't want to acknowledge their complicity.

[end rant][God I hate politics]

Mac McCarthy

Watch out, Ron Paul is Leading in the Polls

2011-11-20T13:34:00.001-08:00

November 2011

Keep one thing firmly in mind as the election season rolls along: Now that Ron Paul is rising so high in the polls that they can no longer completely ignore him (he's number 2 in some polls), expect the media to switch from pretending he doesn't exist to paying all too much attention, of all the wrong kind, to him.

They will dredge up lies and misquotes and glitches from his past. Since they can't just come out and say "We don't like this guy's ideas because we're liberals and he's not," they'll fall back on ol' reliable: personal attacks. Be very careful not to fall for these attacks, or eventual rumors about this act or that belief. They will try to paint him as a complete nut case, or a fascist, or a racist, or - given his age - around the bend.

None of these will be true. I've been following Paul for nearly 20 years, ever since he first got into the House. He's exactly as he pretends to be, has radical ideas (like a foreign policy of "mind our own business"), and even in areas where one might disagree with him -- he's against abortion, which is a problem for some people, and he, yes, actually doesn't completely believe in evolution (sadly) -- but in those areas he says it really shouldln't matter because - and this is KEY - he doesn't think the federal government should have control over those areas. And in a right-thinking world, the US President's beliefs in these and many other areas would not matter any more than his opinion of who should be winning American Idol -- it should be none of the Federal Govt's business. And that is the best answer of all.

And remember another thing: Sooner or later you'll find positions he takes that you simply don't agree with. After all, the only person who could run for president with whom you'd agree completely and totally would be yourself - but you're not running.

Keep reminding yourself to focus on which candidate you agree with the most - not completely, because there won't be such a candidate. And which candidate has positions you agree with that are the *most important* positions. So: His foreign policy positions, for example, I think are absolutely vitally important to the future health of our country. And finally, keep in mind which topics he can, as president, actually have an impact on -- some things, like foreign policy and certain kinds of regulations, he can rule by fiat as president - heck, all his predecessors have. In other topics, Congress has to support him, which they won't. So if you agree with him on something you think it important, and he can as President actually act on, then that's an important position. If there's something you disagree with him about, but it's less important -- or it's something he couldn't do anything about anyway -- then it's less important.

I remember when George McGovern was running against Nixon, and I disagreed with George about his domestic policies (he was a leftist Democrat--interestingly, he's changed as he's gotten older) but I agreed with his get-out-of-Vietnam policy. Belatedly I realized that his domestic policy ideas didn't matter because he'd never get the Congress of that day to go along. But the war he could end by fiat (since it was being run by fiat). So the thing I agreed with, he could do; the think I didn't like. he couldn't do anyway.

I've voted with that in mind ever since...

How The Press Blatantly Ignores Ron Paul - Without Guilt

2011-08-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

First, view this spectaculary funny, angrifying, and distressing Jon Stewart snippet: Jon Stewart: What's With TV's Bias Against Ron Paul?

Stewart is dead on. I couldn't believe the baldness with which they skipped right over him in the news coverage, and jumped down to the lower votegetters. It's shocking, really. The Atlantic columnist on this page makes many of my points explicit, so read his essay below the clip.

Then read this NYT article, "Ron Paul: He Who Shall Not Be Named," on whether they are ignoring Ron Paul -- and follow the logic of why they dismiss him. If you can follow it, that is.... How bald does this have to get before everyone admits that the punditry and political press have their own agenda?

Their insider argument to themselves is as follows:

1. Ron Paul, let's face it, simply can't win. It doesn't matter how much money he raises, how well he does in polls, how well he does in straw polls. He's too radical to win. A limited number of very noisy supporters accounts for all his success, and that won't stand up to the real election. So there's no point in covering him.

2. All the other candidates, no matter how poorly they do, could conceivably get elected.

3. BECAUSE they are all middle of the road to some degree, whereas Ron Paul is simply too radical to win the voters.

4. Therefore we can leap ahead to the assumption that he can't possibly win, and we can ignore him (except for eyebrow raising dismissals once in a while).

So -- it's a horse race and nothing but a horse race. Except there is a clear judgement call mixed in there, despite denials of taking sides: He;s too radical in our opinion and we judge that most others will agree and not vote for him.

What's wrong with this seemingly not unreasonable argument is that it assumes a lock-in to the status quo of political opinion. All opinions, ideas, and suggestions that are outside the middle-of-the-road conventional wisdom are unthinkable -- which creates the mystery of where change comes from in the world of politics? We wait for a powerful mainstream politician to suddenly get a fresh idea and risk his career on it?

Every major political and ideological shift of the past hundred years has come from the so-called fringes -- once-radical ideas that gradually gain traction as the public mulls them over (and becomes fed up with conventional solutions that aren't working).

But the press believes that the last thing it should ever do is treat the political sphere as a battleground of ideas. The safest thing for the press, as for the conventional politicians, is to treat it all as a horse race. Period.

So Ron Paul, who has fought against our multiple wars for ten years while both parties have dragged us deeper in, until now a growing number agree with him, is a radical.

What excuse do they have when, as happened in the Republican debate, everyone on stage starts moving in Ron Paul's direction regarding the war? Or the Fed? Or other issues? How do they dismiss him then?

We're getting to see....

--mac mccarthy

"What If You Had To Run Your Business Like A Government?"

2011-07-28T18:55:00.000-07:00

Frederic Paul has the genius idea of turning around the old saw about how we should run the government 'like a business,' and instead asks, "What if you had to run your business like a government?"

The result is a hilarious list of ten crazy-making limitations, obligations, and stupidities you'd face. For example, "2. Your business plan requires you to focus on your least-profitable customers."

It makes a great read, and I urge you to go read it, it'll give you a rueful laugh.

And when you're done laughing, see if you can derive from it the insights our Founders had two hundred years ago.

Because this article is (or should be) clarifying: These problems are exactly why we should hesitate to seek, as our first choice, government solutions for our problems. Because it's hard -- really, really hard -- for governments (at all levels) to solve problems -- by the very nature of political government. Which is, that government is at its core, and must be, political. (Even dictatorships; maybe especially dictatorships, which would help us understand why the rulers of Libya and Yemen and Pakistan don't just spontaneously start to 'do the right thing..)

The limitations of government are inherent in the nature and structure of government. They can't be 'fixed' by electing this or that political party, or ideology, or "good government" candidates, or honest John Doe's. Or by political will, or a sudden dose of realism on the part of voters. It's why the current (as of this writing) argument over raising of the US Federal debt ceiling is at an impasse -- 'compromise' say the pundits; who themselves wouldn't dream of compromising on their core political beliefs (compromise is always the job of the other guy).

Governments are bad at solving problems. Especially big problems. Especially problems that have political elements -- as almost all problems do. Especially problems that give rise to 'special interests,' or solutions that themselves give rise to more 'special interests.'

This was the fundamental insight of the Founders. You can't construct a government that will be composed of 'the right' people. So government power will from time to time (try: most of the time) be in the hands of bad people -- or people whose ideas of how to use that power you don't agree with.

So we should be very selective about what we ask government to do. And try really hard to find other ways to fix problems and address issues -- ways that don't rely on the weak reed of government.

("But they have so much POWER! and MONEY! If only they'd do what I want...." Sigh. We'll never learn....)

If you really care about an issue -- you should be willing to invest in coming up with a solution that minimally relies on the successful operation of government laws and rules, government regulations and bureaucrats, government police forces, and (most of all!) government politicians.

Listen, we know this at a basic level: We all hate office politics -- so why do we love government politics? Do we delude ourselves into thinking the people who exercise political power in government are on our side more than the office 'players' are on our side at work? Or on the condo board? Or the PTA board? Or the neighborhood committee?

I sincerely commend to you the most important book about government ever written: Frederic Bastiat's 'The Law'. -- It's under 100 pages long, can be bought for a song on Amazon or downloaded as a free PDF.

Bastiat was a lawyer and member of the French Assembly in the 1840s, during a period of radical unrest in France. One of his most interesting arguments was that giving government responsibility for difficult, even unsolvable, national social problems meant dooming the government to failure -- and as the government fails at task after task, respect for the government is diminished -- to the detriment of all.

One example he used was feeding the poor; he argued that making the government responsible for ensuring that everyone was properly fed was foolish, especially for those in the government. You'd surely fail. There would always be those not helped. In 19th century France, the problem was far more severe, and difficult to solve, than the present day of prosperity. So all you'd be doing is ensuring that the government would be hated for its ongoing, unavoidable failures, and constantly be under attack.

In other words, if you really cared about helping the starving people, you'd try to find a way to help them without dumping it into the laps of politicians. It's so tempting -- they have all that money, they can steal from/tax those damned rich (the ones richer than me, I mean), they can issue orders and pass laws at will -- all that power! But the nature of political government makes it unlikely that, if the poor are improved, it will be anything the government has done. In fact, all too often you'll find the government a stumbling block in the way of reform, new markets, lower prices, better choices, and more opportunity. Why would you want to do that to poor starving people?

It's a very interesting book, makes points I've never heard anyone else make, and does so succinctly and directly. I recommend it to you.

Crowdsourcing The Fight Against Corruption

2011-07-05T22:01:00.000-07:00

India is a nation famed, if that's the word, for official corruption -- the oppressive bureaucracy is made worse by the expectation that every single useful thing you want them to do comes at an extra-legal price.

Official attempts to control corruption are, as everywhere, useless.

But the Web changes everything. Someone set up a site where Indians can report examples of bribes requested, bribes paid, bribes refused. It is described in a BBC News piece title "Bribery in India: A Website for Whistleblowers," by Mukti Jain Campion, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13616123 . The site they refer to is called I PAID A BRIBE, at http://www.ipaidabribe.com/ . There you can, anonymously of course, Tell Your Bribe story (and flag it as 'I Paid a Bribe,' 'I Didn't Pay a Bribe,' and "I Didn't Have to Pay A Bribe.'). It makes fascinating reading.

It's slowly having some effect. The driving test unit in one Indian state was notorious for demanding bribes (and not correctly testing drivers, so bad drives were getting licenses - a double wrong). The embarrassment caused by the reports o I Paid A Bribe forced the unit to implement the world's first automated driving test center, where your skill at driving the course is monitored and reported by machines rather than bribe-hungry officials.

Fascinating stuff!

Ron Paul: The Founding Father

2011-04-24T20:21:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul: The Founding Father

Ron Paul profiled in Esquire - of all places!

How far he's come. Without changing a thing.

He's also completely unflappable, in front of any kind of audience or any kind of journalist.

Mr. Relentless - he's having a long-term impact, and that's good for all of us.

Myths and Facts About Nuclear Power (Reason Magazine)

2011-03-25T17:01:00.000-07:00

In a feature today, Reason magazine Columnist Veronique de Rugy debunks several myths about nuclear power, including:

Myth 1: Nuclear power is a cheap alternative to fossil fuels.
Fact 1: It isn’t.

Myth 2: Risk is the main problem with nuclear power.
Fact 2: Cost is the main problem, not risk.

Myth 3: The spread of nuclear power has stalled in the U.S. due to a hostile regulatory environment.
Fact 3: Nuclear power has stalled because it is simply not profitable.

Myth 4: Nuclear power is the key to energy independence.
Fact 4: More nuclear doesn’t mean less oil.

While we're on the subject, read:

Shikha Dalmia: "Glowing Endorsement" -- Japan's Failed Nuclear Subsidies

God bless facts!

What’s a Disaster?

2011-03-17T17:38:00.000-07:00

The Independent Institute:

What’s a Disaster?

A Citizen’s Guide to Surviving the Fear Mongers

Many people make big bucks these days scaring you about what’s happening, or about to happen, in the world. The media folks top the list, obviously: the more frightened you are, the more of their content you watch. There’s a second reason why media people exaggerate: the storyteller’s bias. When someone comes rushing back to the cave to tell about the saber-toothed tiger he just saw, the attention and adoration of his listeners depends on the size and ferocity of the tiger. Tell them it was a small, dead tiger, and everyone goes back to sleep.

...To counter these professional fear-mongers, we need an objective guide to the disasters we are likely to face, a scientific ranking that enables us to gauge the harm in each case. The scale proposed below is based on the number of deaths involved; one can assume a proportional economic and environmental harm....

READ THE REST AT http://www.independent.org/blog/index.php?p=6453

Here's How Tea Partiers Are Like Libertarians--in Driving Republicans Crazy

2011-02-15T11:28:00.000-08:00

A friend points out that the Tea Party is not Libertarian.

Indeed not, unfortunately. They only half get the Libertarian story.

But they are very similar to Libertarians in one important, interesting, and entertaining way.

The Democrats and the Republican mainstream for the most part are only ideological to the extent that it doesn't interfere with party politics -- it's party before all, including the best interests of the country, the voters, et al.

Thus you have the Democrats opposing the war when a Republican president is running it, then losing all interest in curbing US warmaking once a Democrat is running things. There are various reasons, rationales, and excuses for this (the Republicans do the same thing, except on the spending side), but mainly it's because the apparently ideological protests against war, or against spending, are just clubs to beat the rival gang with. An excuse; if circumstances change, they change clubs -- I wouldn't be surprised if you could find historical periods when the clubs were in opposite hands than they are now.

The Tea Party partisans, though, like the Libertarians, are extremely annoying to the mainstreamers because they act as if they believe their asserted ideological principles should actually be acted on once they get into power. Which is so insane that the mainstream members of the two main parties hardly know what to say. Thus the chaos in DC at the moment as the Tea Party-elected Representatives keep insisting, in the teeth of all historical precedent, on trying to actually *cut* the budget -- as in "spend less money this year than we did last year," which is not the standard DC definition of "cut," as you know. Libertarians like Ron and Rand Paul act the same way when in office, which leaves the DC residents reeling in incredulity.

And I enjoy watching them.

Jerry Brown has a tendency to do things from time to time that give the unavoidable impression he'd actually like to achieve the results he and other politicians campaign on but never actually get around to accomplishing. So he'd like to help poor people - actually, not in theory. And improve the schools - really, not just in the sense that they get and piss away more money. And fix the budget - really, not just use the budget process as a political club and not care the actual impact on the state.

I greatly enjoy that, too.

And I also enjoy the beneficial side effect of the greater mainstream media attention being paid to Rand Paul and to Ron Paul -- Ron is getting more MSM facetime than he's gotten in the whole twenty years he's been in office. This can only be good for the nation.

Mac McCarthy

Rand Paul is Right: End Foreign Aid to Wealthy Nations

2011-02-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

... Including Isreal - the third rail of foreign-aid politics, apparently.

Here is an article on Senator Rand Paul's excellent argument on the matter:

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/rand-paul-is-right-end-welfare-to-israel-and-the-rest-of-the-world/

He's got a point. It's not just Isreal -- we support Japan, South Korea, and a lot of other nations who should start by helping themselves and then if they come up short, call us.

Instead, our government loves the idea of handing out money because they like to think it gives us "leverage" over their nations and their policies.

Which is proven when we stop aid and embargo them to punish them. This worked well for Cuba, which is now a democracy, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq before we decided to invade them instead because, apparently, it was even more expensive.

Sigh.

New Drug Danger: Placebos!

2011-01-19T16:50:00.000-08:00

Great comic:
http://gocomics.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c5f3053ef0134859a632a970c-pi

New danger, ban placebos, yes?

;-)

Re: "Looking for Loughners Would laxer commitment rules make us safer?"

2011-01-19T16:46:00.000-08:00

My comment to a Reason article, title above, at

http://reason.com/archives/2011/01/19/looking-for-loughners#comment_2093940

Another way to look at this kind of problem is to see it as a set of tradeoffs, rather than a situation with a clear, crisp solution.

On the one hand, making involuntary commitment easier increases the risk of taking away the freedom of people unnecessarily, even opening opportunities for people to game the system to get rid of annoying relatives, enemies, rivals. In the old days, remember, that was the complaint: Too many harmless people locked up. Books, plays, and movies with this theme were common at one time: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Harvey with his six-foot imaginary rabbit, The Curious Savage, and even Miracle on 34th Street.

So we changed the rules, and now it's much harder to commit someone involuntarily. This really means that the tradeoffs lie in the direction of not locking up someone who eventually becomes dangerous, and thus innocent people losing their lives -- sometimes just the crazy person, who commits suicide when he could have been helped.

As we move the slider back and forth, we trade security for society on the one hand and concern for the individual on the other. If we choose to change the laws to make involuntary commitment easier, we have to recognize that the tradeoff is that we will have people who will be committed who shouldn't be; it's inevitable. And if we don't change the laws, we will have people die at the hands of insane people; that, too, is inevitable.

Of course, admitting to tradeoffs is not the way to win in politics or in public forums, to we tend to absolutism: Our way is best, not simply better, it is without negative tradeoffs or costs, and the other side's ideas are uniformly bad, period. We win arguments that way; we don't get closer to any useful truths.

Misunderstanding the First Amendment (in re: Assange and Wikileaks)

2010-12-22T12:36:00.000-08:00

In an excellent article by Jacob Sullum of Reason Magazine, "Is Julian Assange a Journalist? For First Amendment Purposes, It Doesn't Matter" , the author argues that the First Amendment is not restricted to journalists.

In the comments section, a lengthy dispute revolves around the applicability of a 1917 law restricting release of secret documents, and whether Assange qualifies for "protection" under the First Amendment if he's not a US citizen. This comment regarding the latter point is typical:

"Since when does the first amendment apply to those not living in the United States?"

This goes to the heart of a serious misunderstanding of the First and other Amendments making up the Bill of Rights. It's a mistake I see repeated endlessly in the press and from the lips of pols.

The First Amendment does not "apply" to specific people; it does not "guarantee" the right of free speech and press; it does not carve out an exception to the infinite power of the State; it is not a limitation that should be worked around or bypassed when inconvenient.

The First Amendment (and the other 9) is an *emphatic reminder* from the Founders that the Constitution GIVES NO POWER OR AUTHORITY to the U.S. government to exercise any control over speech and press. Period. The Constitution does not grant such power, and this amendment underlines the point, and *attempts* to block workarounds by ambitious politicians and bureaucrats. It emphasizes the point that the government "shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

If the government is granted zero authority to limit free speech and press, the question of whether the individual in question is a citizen of the U.S. is completely irrelevant, as is the question of whether he is a journalist. The First Amendment does NOT say "The government shall make no laws regarding freedom of speech or of the press -- for citizens, or for journalists as defined by the government."

Does it?

No interpretation of the First Amendment can create or invent authority for the government to make laws restricting freedom of the press or freedom of speech. If you happen to find a 1917 law that appears to say otherwise, then it's an argument for viewing that law as an unconstitutional power grab by the government -- that law does not override the First Amendment.

I am repeatedly disappointed to see conservatives and liberals alike view the Constitution as an inconvenient block to Righteous Action, one that needs to be bypassed regularly -- often by tortured interpretations of other parts of the Constitution that serve to make the Constitution and its Bill of Rights into pure nonsense (hence the "Ink Blot" interpretation of the 9th and 10th Amendments).

The Constitution is a (limited) grant of authority to the federal government, beyond which it may not go. It is not a list of citizen rights. Citizens have all rights not otherwise limited by the grant of authority (and there's an amendment that says that too, which is also generally ignored, and with which you are likely not familiar either).

Surprising article in NY Times on Ron Paul's rising star in Congress....

2010-12-12T19:40:00.000-08:00

"Ron Paul, G.O.P. Loner, Comes In From Cold" is the headline, but they mean his appointment to the chair of the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, which oversees the Federal Reserve as well as the currency and the valuation of the dollar -- his favorite subjects and his bete noire combined into one handy package.

The story is both fair and richly interesting. Give it a read! (I have been a Paul enthusiast for more than a decade, long before he was anybody more than "Dr. No" of the House.)

"Governance in the Age of Wikileaks" -- TNL

2010-12-12T12:27:00.000-08:00

A colleague, Tristan N. Louis, digs deeper into the whole Wikileaks controversy than you've likely read elsewhere -- in his three-parter (be sure to read all three parts) he considers the illegal actions of government opponents to Wikileaks:

http://www.tnl.net/blog/2010/12/12/governance-in-the-age-of-wikileaks-part-1/

Breaking the law by supporters of Wikileaks:
http://www.tnl.net/blog/2010/12/12/governance-in-the-age-of-wikileaks-part-2/

and freedom of expression in the age of Wikileaks:
http://www.tnl.net/blog/2010/12/12/governance-in-the-age-of-wikileaks-part-3/

Well worth reading all three, for a fully rounded perspective!

mac

Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies | Glenn Greenwald | Cato Institute: White Paper

2010-10-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies | Glenn Greenwald | Cato Institute: White Paper

This is important reading as California prepares to vote on marijuana legalization. Portugal made radical changes a decade ago -- how did they do it, and was it a success?

Time to Reconsider our Overseas "Defense" Commitments....

2010-10-08T15:01:00.000-07:00

This letter appeared in the WSJ today, 8 Oct. 2010, and I agree with it entirely; my emphasis added:

Less Government Means Less Defense Spending, Too

Arthur Brooks, Edwin Feulner and William Kristol claim that military spending is not the prime driver of our current fiscal crisis, but the Pentagon accounts for 23% of the federal budget ("Peace Doesn't Keep Itself," op-ed, Oct. 4). It is inconceivable that this spending should be exempt from scrutiny in a time of soaring deficits.

Rather than Congress constantly writing a blank check, the process of military budgeting should begin with a discussion about security necessities and their costs. That isn't a discussion that Messrs. Brooks, Feulner and Kristol seem anxious to engage in—unsurprisingly, since all three support the disastrous military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, cutting spending without a corresponding reduction in commitments is a recipe for overburdening service members taxed by too frequent deployments to far-flung places. But it is already obvious that most of what America spends on its military—often erroneously labeled "national defense"—really defends others who can and should defend themselves.

It's time for advocates of free markets and limited government to recognize that a vast military presence around the world is utterly inconsistent with those ideals. If we agree that government intervention domestically often has unintended, harmful consequences, we should recognize that the same principle holds true internationally, in spades. If we believe that the Constitution created a government whose most important duty is to "provide for the common defence" and "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity," we should not be so willing to deploy the sharp end of that government's power in support of those who are not parties to our unique social contract.

The Brooks-Feulner-Kristol approach to military spending amounts to another form of foreign aid, a massive wealth transfer from Americans to non-Americans, helping them finance generous social welfare systems. It is time to get our allies off the dole.

Ed Crane

Christopher Preble

The Cato Institute

Washington

Yes: "Let's Repeal Congress' Blank Check" (for war)

2010-09-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

Barbara Lee of Oakland, California is my Congress Critter, an archtype in most ways of the California left-liberal Democrat -- so naturally, she and I have little in common ideologically.

But as a Libertarian, I was delighted at her editorial today in Sept 30, 2010 San Francisco Chronicle, headlined "Let's repeal Congress' blank check" -- referring to the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force," passed in 2001 in the heat of the 9/11 attacks, which is the basis for the past nine years of war around the world..

I am happy she is pressing to end the several wars we are currently engaged in -- but more delightful is a particular insight she gives:

"I was the only member of Congress who voted against [the bill] because I knew some would use it as a blank check to wage war anywhere in the world."

Well, looks like she called that one right, doesn't it?

What's wonderful about this is not just the amazing bravery she showed in voting against "broadly authorizing the president to use 'all necessary and appropriate force' " immediately after these acts of terror. That's no way to get the pundits on your side.

It's her critically important insight into how government works. Her paying attention to the long-term effects of such grants of power is in full agreement with Libertarian thinking -- and even more so with the thinking of the Founders.

Back in the 1960s, as the Vietnam problem was enticing the US into deeper involvement, a confused report of North Vietnamese ships firing on US ships "observing" in international waters just off the coast of North Vietnam was used to create an uproar, in the midst of which President Lyndon Johnson (a Democrat this time) submitted a request, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, similar to the more recent one mentioned above, to give the president authority to pursue the malfactors of North Vietnam with all necessary and proper force. This bill passed in the Senate 99 to 1 (who was the sole holdout, anybody remember?). This bill, now law, was used as the primary justification for everything that followed in our undeclared war in Vietnam. Just as the current authorization justifies our undeclared wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and if we choose, future wars in Iran and Somalia (and anywhere else we claim to think is influenced by al-Qaida).

The historical parallel with Barbara Lee's statement above: Years later, when enthusiasm for the war faltered, Senator Fulbright, a staunch Democrat kingmaker, said that he regretted voting for that authorization, in hindsight. His comment, approximately, was: I forgot that I was voting this power not just to this President for this moment, but to any President at any time.

Each grant of power must be viewed in this light: Laws are rarely if ever written very narrowly, but tend to be written to grant sweeping authority to act with considerable discretion -- we tend to empower the authorities to "do what's right." Mainly because "our guy" is in power and knows what we mean by "what's right."

And then one day power changes hands and the other guy is holding the reins of power -- and, dammit, he's using that power to do what *he* thinks is right. How dare he! This is what happened when Reagan became president and tried to use the power Democrats had given Democratic presidents to Do Good, except he was doing *his* idea of good -- and of course that infuriated the liberals. Who hadn't thought that far ahead.

But politicians never think that far ahead. They think about now, and about how they can manipulate now to aggrandize their power, and their likelihood of getting reelected. And, like Scarlett O'Hara, they brush aside worries about what might happen in the future: "I shall worry about that tomorrow."

Good luck with that.

Except for Barbara Lee -- or rather, of course, except for Barbara Lee in this instance and with this issue. Her left-wing ideology starts her on the road to resisting calls for war -- though she, unlike her many left-liberal colleagues in the House and Senate at that time, actually went down that road to its logical conclusion.

I congratulate Barbara Lee for vision -- I wish she were able to see how other grants and grabs of governmental power likewise lead to greater and lesser tyrannies over time -- and for her courage in defying hysteria the first time. Rare to see that kind of guts in national politics.

How to Decide the Powers You Should Grant a Government....

2010-09-26T16:32:00.000-07:00

'What I have always found most extraordinary about the Constitution is that a bunch of powerful and ambitious politicians wrote a document to restrain people just like themselves. Instead of thinking, "What powers do I want when I'm in charge?", they thought, "What powers do I want that low-down skunk of an opponent of mine to have when he is in charge?" '
--Comment posted by "bampbs" in response to a Economist article "Worshipping the Constitution."

One of our many vices as a political, factional people is to judge something on its momentary advantage, and not think of what one's enemy might do with such power when their turn comes. It is a fatal flaw.

Senator Fulbright complained in the midst of the Vietnam War that in voting power to President Johnson war powers based on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, he had considered only what he thought this President would do with the power being granted, instead of considering what any President might do with such power. (He complained when Nixon, a Republican, became president after Johnson, a Democrat.)

I remembered this when Reagan was elected, and Democrats went into shock when it became clear that the powers they were eager to grant the Democratic president -- basically the power to "do good," the most common excuse -- was about to be exercised, not by an enlightened, liberal Democrat with values and views consonant with their own, but by a Republican with entirely different ideas of what "the good" was. (The Republicans make the same lament when the shoe is on the other foot, of course.)

Why the Constitution Is That Way
It was precisely this paradox that drove the Founders to consider and reject various schemes for ensuring that government power would be exercised wisely and properly, by the right sort of people. In the end they concluded that you simply can't ensure this, not in the long run. In the long run, somebody whose ideas you hate will seize the reins of power and proceed to 'misuse' the power you grant so eagerly to government authority when it was your people in power.

So the Founders came to the entirely reasonable conclusion that, since power will always be abused and liberty will always be at risk, the only sensible thing to do -- the only way to ensure the liberties of the people over the long term -- was to limit the power the government could have.

To limit it severely, in fact, and to forbid the government from taking more power (without a Constitutional amendment, made consciously hard to create).

They were willing to sacrifice the convenience of the ruler to secure the freedoms of the people.

Our (Overly) Optimistic Founders
Sadly, they were overly optimistic; they thought that the phrase "Congress shall make no laws" could not be loosely interpreted; that a structure plainly granting specific powers could not be misunderstood as granting specific liberties -- and just to make sure, they added the 9th and 10th Amendments, hah hah. Two centuries of relentless work by those who see governmental power as a wonderful opportunity for self aggrandizement -- whether to solve problems their way, or to enrich themselves, or to impede competition, or to punish the recalcitrant, or to 'solve' urgent moral problems -- have managed to turn their whole plan upside down. And the Founders also didn't seem to realize that, in time, the people would no longer understand why the Founders had fought so hard to limit government power.

All of the arguments as to why Constitutional limits on government power should be eased, lifted, bypassed, ignored as inconvenient to the modern world are arguments against the fundamental insight of the Founders that power will always be misused. The insight, in fact, in the opening quote of this post. In effect, modern commentators want, ultimately, to brush aside the Constitution -- not amend it, not debate it, not rework it. They insist on finding arguments that will justify ignoring the inconvenience of the Constitution's impediments to their strongly felt desire to use power to do things they think they should be done.

It's depressing. The Constitution isn't 'modern?' It allowed slavery (back when it was incapable of stopping it)? It didn't give the vote to women (in 1780)? It didn't take into account the really, really important problems we *uniquely* have today that can only be addressed by exercise of government power and authority forbidden by the Constitution because the Founders didn't realize how things have changed?

Oh please. If there is one thing the Founders *would* recognize if thy returned to modern-day Washington, it's the very familiar grasping for power -- not just by politicians, but by every rent-seeking American.

What Would You Do?
So we are left with one remaining argument to fight back: If you believe the Constitution is obsolete, that its strictures on government power should have no force, that this is a Constitutiuon of enumerated rights and not one of enumerated powers -- answer this vital question: How would you rewrite the Constitution? How would you ensure that it does not enable future tyranny? Or do you in fact not believe in the risk of tyranical exercises of power?

Or do you think only your people will ever after hold the reins of power?

Is US Aggressive Foreign Policy Forcing Nations Like China to Gear Up for War?

2010-09-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

David Gewurtz writes, "The Chinese government is now advocating for carrier-killing missiles (and we're the only logical target). What does it mean?" He argues the case for China preparing for war, presumably with the United States.

But Roger A. Maduro below argues the case for viewing world geopolitics in this generation as one where sensible nations consider the necessity and wisdom of preparing to defend themselves against aggressive U.S. foreign policy evident in recent decades....

"Is China Gearing Up to Start a War -- or to Fight A War?

By Roger A. Maduro

is China getting ready to START WWW III of to FIGHT a war? Big difference between "gearing up to START" a war and "gearing up to FIGHT" a war. There is no reason why China would want to start a war, but to the Chinese and the Russians, and many other countries, there is every reason to believe that they may be forced to fight a war.

I would suggest switching hats for a minute and looking at the world from the perspective of the Chinese, the Russians, and other countries that are not members of NATO.

So wearing a different hat, the question is which is the country in the world waging wars all over the place? Well, that's the United States. The U.S. has invaded Iraq to "prevent it from using weapons of mass destruction" which it turns out didn't exist.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan and now has some 150,000 troops deployed there. To sustain the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan the U.S. now has major military bases in former Soviet republics that border both China and Russia (how would you feel if the Chinese and the Russians were to build military bases in Mexico?).

The drums are rolling in Washington for an expected attack in Iran to supposedly stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb. To accomplish this will require a massive bombing campaign of Iran. Well, Iran turns out to be a strategic and economic ally of both China and Russia. One of the immediate consequences of this attack will the closing of the Straights of Hormuz. Guess how much oil consumed by China goes through the Straights every day?

After bombing Iran, who's next?

The U.S. is staging very aggressive and provocative military maneuvers a stone's throw from North Korea and major Chinese military installations and ports. Will North Korea be the next target? If the Chinese were to stage live-fire naval military exercises a few miles of the coast of San Diego would you not be a bit upset?

So, keeping your Chinese or Russian hat on, what would you conclude from all this military activity on the part of the US and NATO? Wouldn't the sensible thing to do is to be ready to DEFEND yourself?

The latest issue of Military History magazine <http://www.historynet.com/military-history> has a very well written and researched cover story on how close the US and Russia came to war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Using newly declassified documents and interviews the article documents how we where just a hair away from full nuclear war then. And the war was almost set off several times by stupid, unpredictable human mistakes.

It's really worth reading that cover story to understand how dangerous our world today is. But always keep in mind which is the country that is waging wars all over the planet today.

As for the carrier-sinking missile, yet this is a HUGE development and can change the balance of power in the world when it's operational sometime next year.

--Roger A. Maduro is a founder and managing director of Linux Infrastructure, LLC (LxIS), a company founded to help small and mid-sized businesses implement open source/Linux information technology solutions that meet the full range of their business requirements with more robust, reliable and secure solutions than the Microsoft-based solutions that have been available until now. He can be reached at ramaduro@lxis.com

"How To Slash Government Before IT Slashes You" (in 3D no less!)

2010-09-17T11:22:00.000-07:00

Coming Soon: Reason Magazine In 3D

In a couple of weeks, the November issue of Reason magazine will be hitting mailboxes and newsstands with a 3D cover and charts that show "How to Slash Government Before it Slashes You"and offering up a series of specific spending cuts.

You'll also get 3D glasses to view special Reason.tv videos on the growing cost of government and what to do about it.

You can subscribe to Reason here.

The October Issue of Reason Is Online Now

Why Focus on the Bush "Tax Cuts" Over the Bush "Spending Increases"?

2010-09-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

From this Reason.com article:

"So if the feds were generally pulling in more bucks each year [during the 2000s] - even with those tax cuts that so decimated federal revenue - where did the deficits come from?

Oh, that's right: From massively expanded spending that happened both under a lying GOP Congress and a feckless Democratic majority.

The story of the Bush years isn't to be found on the revenue side of the ledger, but on the spending side [see charts in article]. This talk about whether tax cuts are irresponsible given the fiscal pickle we're in is nothing more than a way of diverting attention from what Milton Friedman identified years ago as the true cost of government: how much the government shells out in a given year. We're on the hook for it, either through higher taxes now or higher taxes later.

We're in a lousy economy and most folks would agree that it's not a great idea to hike taxes or create huge new entitlements and regulations that will take years to figure out. That sort of action creates exactly the sort of uncertainty that freezes people. So do desperate attempts to keep house prices from falling, zombified banks and car companies from going belly up, etc.

The one thing the federal government could conceivably do is bring some commitment to freezing or rolling back spending and intervention to some baseline. The first rule when you find yourself in a deep hole? Bitch and moan that it's the other guy's fault. The second rule? Stop digging. Yes, I know, it's unlikely but not impossible that the feds would actually stop spending (go check Clinton's first four years).

But this much is certain: To talk about how 'tax cuts' inexorably add to deficits ignores the amount of tribute that poured into D.C. throughout most of the '00s. It's a fundamentally faulty and fruitless discussion."
- Reason.com Editor Nick Gillespie

My Profession--News--Embarrasses Me: The San Bruno Gas Pipeline Explosion

2010-09-10T15:44:00.000-07:00

Once again I am puzzled over how news coverage works -- in the case of the San Bruno gas pipeline explosion yesterday (Sept 9), the coverage in all media continues to be, the next day, entirely focused on the fireballs, the burning/burnt houses, the victim stories.

My early questions include: *What* high-pressure gas pipeline? What's that, and why is it running through the middle of our neighborhoods? Are there other like this? What's the story on 24-inch pipes of fuel being transported into our urban areas? There's got to be an interesting background story on that, at least.

But no, apparently not. Or apparently it's so well hidden that our friends in the news media haven't been able to dig it out yet. (One reporter, at least, knew a little: He pointed out that the natural gas for our water heaters comes to California from Texas in pipelines like these. Wow, interesting - tell me more! Nope.)

And as we all know, if there is an obvious immediate question that arises during a news incident, and you, the reporter, don't have an answer yet, the SOP is to pretend there *is* no question -- to ignore it, not to mention that you are aware there is a question. Just in case the listeners/viewers/readers don't think of it - that way they won't think you're an idiot for not being able to answer the question. Apparently techniques like "Questions arise about these pipelines--what are they, how do they work, why are they under our streets?--and we're digging into those answers for you right now" are unknown to these reporters and news editors.

Except of course *everybody in your audience* wonders about the item in question, and thinks you're idiots for very obviously and publicly not thinking of such obvious questions!

It makes me crazy.

Sometime in the coming days we'll get in-depth reports on the pipelines -- done in the breathless alarmist style "Are we in constant danger from these pipelines which run EVERYWHERE!?!?! When will some politician or government agency do something to protect us?!?!"

It should be easy - I did see one snippet (three paragraphs) this morning in which they found a government agency 'in charge' of this stuff, who mentioned that dozens of pipelines like this break, catch fire, blow up, etc., and dozens of people die each year. Oh. We didn't know. Because it wasn't News yet.

So stand by for the second-order fallout from this story: For the next six to nine months, every time a pipeline breaks, catches fire, burns, and/or kills anyone, anywhere in the country -- it will be on the front page. It's been happening for years, you understand, without making the front page -- but now it will be top-of-the-news leaders.

Making you think it's a brand-new, horrible, scary problem. Rather than the same old problem we've only now decided can generate headlines.

And, as happened with the LA Freeway Shootings of the early 1980s -- remember those? -- after nine months or a year, when the novelty wears off and everyone gets bored with having Yet Another Pipeline Explosion story, it will fade from the front page to the back pages, and eventually back to non-coverage, where it has always been.

This is what happened with the LA Freeway Shooting stories. After several months of hyper coverage of every freeway shooting, some reporter happen to look it up and find that there have been dozens of these things every year -- for decades. But they had never covered it before, and after a year or so, we all got bored so they stopped covering it again. The LA Freeway Shootings continue -- coverage doesn't -- we're tired of this story -- what else ya got? That's what will happen with this story.

The oil pipelines story might last a little longer than that because the politicians can more effectively jump on this with both feet -- by the end of the day today, I expect, at least one govt agency will announce hearings, and at least one pol will propose important new laws to Make Sure This Doesn't Happen Again. (And issue press releases pointing out that The Other Political Party Supports Exploding Pipelines.) And that government agency that's supposed to be in charge of these things but obviously failed to do its job? They'll get much-increased funding.

Sigh.... My profession (journalism) embarrasses me.

BTW Here are a few related links:

Snopes, on a gas pipeline explosion: http://www.snopes.com/photos/accident/gasmain.asp

Wikipedia list of pipeline failures worldwide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents

Detailed somewhat technical discussion of the national (US) network of gas transport pipelines:

http://www.naturalgas.org/naturalgas/transport.asp

Now you can be better informed -- or better informed than your local news reader, anyway...

mac

"Pay Up!" Philadelphia Wants Biz License $$ from Bloggers!

2010-08-22T21:28:00.000-07:00

Pay Up :: News :: Article :: Philadelphia City Paper

According to the city fathers, if you earn anything from your blog, you have to pay their $300 business license. The woman in this story earned $50 over "several years" -- too bad, pay up!

And you wonder why I'm a libertarian.....

Richard Epstein's Brilliant Three-Point Plan For Reforming Public Employment

2010-08-17T11:22:00.000-07:00

in Forbes:
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1815921225261478058

A shame no candidate for public office (save Ron Paul) ever talks like Mr Epstein in this essay -- and we badly need candidates to talk like Richard Epstein!

Some samples"
"No longer can we duck the two deeper questions behind these endless legislative and judicial struggles. First, what institutional arrangements give rise to these constant showdowns? Second, what can be done to fix them--not only for teachers, but also for prison guards, police and firefighters, and all other state and municipal workers....

"...Major states like California, Illinois and New York require state agencies and local governments to negotiate with unions. To avoid strikes, compliant public officials grant unions guaranteed wage and pension contracts that shift all the risk of the economic downturn onto public treasury. Bad times have led to a collapse in the stock market and a decline in tax revenues. So what if private citizens are taken to the cleaners? Who cares if discretionary public services are cut? The union ship continues to ride, untroubled, high on the roiling seas...."

"..The only serious solutions do two things and avoid a third. First, they launch a frontal assault on the protected status of public unions. Second, they cut pension benefits for present and future union retirees. Third, they forbid the use federal tax money to bail out failing states and municipalities...."

"...No public body should ever be required or allowed to confer monopoly power on an employee union--period. In education, for example, don't let powerful unions block charter schools, vouchers and home schooling. Any school, public or private, should operate with an explicit legislative guarantee that all teachers and other employers must agree not to join a union as a condition of employment. The "best interests of the student" cannot be allowed to become a fig leaf for protectionist union legislation. Alternative paths of education are the best way to reduce government expenditures and blunt union power."

Now here's where he gets really bold, see if you can believe any pol would agree:

"Second, cut back pension contracts for all retired and current workers now. Far from being sacred property rights, these sweetheart agreements between union leaders and sympathetic legislators represent the worst form of self-dealing. Some legislators sell out their constituents in exchange for modest campaign contributions; others yield to union threats of massive electoral retaliation if they do not go along with union demands.

"Regrettably, no taxpayer has ever been allowed to challenge these questionable deals in court before they took effect. That has to change. Any self-dealing between a corporate board and its key officers would not last a minute. These bloated union contracts should fare no better. They should be set aside as unfairly obtained. Exactly how they should be trimmed is hard to say....

" In the end, the ultimate objective is to reduce pensions for public employees to the levels received by their peers in private industry."

And, just to make sure you understand how *fundamental* this issue is:

"Last, this battle over union contracts and union pensions is part of a larger political struggle. One the one side are those who think that more regulation, more taxation and more spending are required to dig this nation out its current hole.... We need to move in the opposite direction: deregulate, lower taxes and slash budgets.

"The choice could not be more stark. The coming election will tell us what the American people are made of, for if the voters do not throw the rascals out now, they may not get a second chance."

Frankly, in my darker moods, I doubt if the electorate can or will rise to this challenge. A hundred years of being trained by politicians, special interests, and the lax press have trained our voters in all the wrong directions. We've seen this in California, we see it elsewhere, we'll continue to see it. I worry.

Our recession, like Japan's, is due to poor monetary policy

2010-08-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

"Recessions, in short, are positive, and historically brief occurrences that signal an economy on the mend. Failure to allow recessions to run their course in order to weed out bad investments and poor management merely ensures longer periods of economic strife; thus Japan's lost '90s decade, and ours at present."

http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/12/japan-deflation-united-states-opinions-columnists-john-tamny.html?partner=commentary_newsletter

Very interesting, and very scary, reading -- it seems we *know* what to do, and what not to do about the recession and recovery -- and our government is earnestly and relentlessly doing exactly the things it should not do, and refusing to do the things it should do. It is repeating the mistakes of Japan in the 1990s, condemning us to a decade of no growth.

It is all too depressing.

"Not the WHITEMAN'S bitch" -- Wisconsin govt ballot committee votes to block candidate's ballot slogan

2010-08-12T18:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/98941309.html

A fun article -- go read it.

What makes these officials think the Constitution has a gigantic freeway-sized hole in the First Amendment that says, apparently subvocally, "Congress shall make no law respecting freedom of speech -- as long as it's not obscene, offensive, or derogatory"?

First, this is exactly the kind of political speech the courts have been most interested in "protecting".

Second, her slogan *exactly* describes her politics; I'd bet every potential voter in her district would know precisely whether they'd want to vote for her, without needing to ask another question.

Third, since when is political offensiveness a crime?

And fourth, when did 'WHITEMAN' become a protected class?

(And let's not even get into the whole issue of "protected speech" as a mischaracterization of the Constitution and the First Amendment. The First Amendment did NOT carve out a set of categories of speech that are protected from government interfernce -- this would suggest that everything else is not protected. No -- the Constitution listed specific powers the government could exercise, none of which involved deciding whether someone could be blocked for obscenity or offensiveness -- but just to underline the point, the highlighted key examples of areas where the government has not, by any massaged misinterpretation, been granted power.

In fact, some objected to calling out these eight areas (of the original Bill of Rights) for specific mention, on the grounds that future generations might misunderstand and think that these are the *only* areas in which government may not intrude. The authors of The Federalist Papers, mocked this fear, noting that to misinterpret the rest of the Constitution to gain this belief, future generations would have to brush aside the plain implications of other parts of the Constitution. So they added the 9th and 10th Amendments just to double-underscore the point.

Of course, the skeptics were right and the Federalist Paper authors (including James Madison) were wrong: Major-league Constitutional scholars including a Supreme-Court nominee of recent years (Bork) have simply asserted that the 9th and 10th Amendments are dead letters, having no practical significance. Because if they did have practical significance, half the stuff the government does would be plainly illegal.

And you think *I* am a radical!

Penn Jillette on what distinguishes a Libertarian from a Liberal

2010-08-11T18:08:00.000-07:00

Pemn Jillette:

"I think the biggest misconception that I find about libertarians is that there's a lack of compassion and I think that there is as much compassion on libertarians as there is among liberals. It's not what the problems are, it's how to solve them."

Amen, brother. When I first read Milton Friedman's 'Free to Choose' I realized that here was a guy who, like me (a Democrat liberal at the time) cared about the same things: the poor, the unfortunate, the unfairly treated -- but who had fresh new ideas for how to organize a society that made solving these problems more likely -- or possible at all, frankly. I was a burnt-out liberal, tired of the same old 'solutions' that never solved anything but just argued in circles.

Pointless Political Greed re: George Steinbrenner's Billions

2010-07-14T20:04:00.000-07:00

I don't know which is funnier and weirder in this July 14 Investment News article about the death of George Steinbrenner and its relationship to estate taxes -- the amounts being discussed, or the panting greed of the politicians.

Here are a couple of excerpts, see what I mean:

"...The loss of tax revenue from Mr. Steinbrenner's death will no doubt have lawmakers in Washington clamoring to make the 2010 death tax retroactive to the '09 rate. Already, three other billionaires have died this year, including Houston oilman Dan L. Duncan, who left behind an estate believed to be worth nearly $10 billion. That's a lot of tax dollars being left on the table.

"In June, three U.S. senators sent a letter criticizing the lack of an estate tax, citing the deaths of Mr. Duncan and others. “At a time when we have a record-breaking $13 trillion national debt and an unsustainable federal deficit, people who inherit multimillion- and billion-dollar estates must pay their fair share in estate taxes,” said the letter, which was signed by Sens. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I."

OK, point 1: Private citizens have money, and we, the Congress, want some! "That's a lot of tax dollars being left on the table." Is that drooling I see? Let's disguise our bald greed with the judicious if inane use of the word "fair" as in "their fair share." A "fair" share, to a Congressman, is every nickel he can get from you. Preferably all of it. Don't waste your time trying to pin one of these jerks down to a definition of a "fair share." You got it? They want it. You big mean greedy SOB -- you just want to keep it because you earned it, you created it, you made it grow. And you can't pass it on to your heirs, like any normal human being would want to! That's "unearned income!" Which makes me wonder what the Senators who signed that letter have done to "earn" George Steinbrenner's billions?

Point 2: Look at all these billionaires getting away with their money! A couple at a billion each; one guy at ten billion! Damn! Hey wait a minute -- how much did they say that deficit was? Thirteen trillion?!?! Jesus, if you took every nickle from these billionaires you couldn't make a dent in that deficit! You couldn't add up the top 100 earners in the country to retire one of those thirteen trillion dollars in planned spending!

There's literally not enough money in the US economy to cover that deficit! And attempts like this to grab other people's money will have the consequence of depressing economic performance even further!

I have an idea! Why don't you go back and unravel some of that planned deficit spending, since we don't have the money and never will. Oh, I forgot -- no Congressman ever got elected or reelected by cutting spending.....

The Awful, Terrible, Really Bad Bright Green House

2010-07-10T21:07:00.000-07:00

This was in a recent issue of the Los Angeles Times:

Bright green house leaves the neighbors livid

"People in nearby earth-tone houses will ask the owner to think of them and mute her paint."

"Neighbors plan to draft a letter asking the homeowner to take their quality of life and property values into account."

The article is typical of its kind: The house is bright green, some neighbors (identified as "the" neighbors) don't like it, and want the law to come make her change it to a color they like. They don't say they have superior aesthetic judgement -- they talk about fitting in with "the character" of the neighborhood (though a neighborhood with all 'earth-tone houses' seems to me to be pretty much without any specific character), and about property values -- the ultimate sword of the neighborhood meddler: Someone's house for sale hasn't gotten any offers since that awful paint job!

It appears that each property owner in a free society is limited in the use of their own property by the potential sale price of neighboring houses. I mean, a free society is all well and good, but my property values....!

We had an optometrist who painted her office in the middle of our small town, Castro Valley, in northern California, a shocking shade of purple -- basically the same as this house, except purple with green trim. The neighbors jumped up and down and demanded a law - since we are in an unincorporated area, there were no laws. Uproar.

Then, oddly, a backlash -- other neighbors started insisting that THEY actually LIKED the colorful business building. Like another commenter here, they were tired of beige beige beige. They eventually drowned out the complainers.

Today, a few years later, nobody notices the purple building. It's still there. We've gotten used to it; now we like it.

Your instant reaction to art isn't and shouldn't be made into the law. Stop being so bossy; relax; take a chill pill. Wait a year and see if you still hate it. If you still do -- too doggone bad.

------------------

I understand that people might not like the color of a house, or not like it to be in their neighborhood. But the strength of their aesthetic opinion gives nobody property rights in another person's property.

You don't like it -- this gives you no authority over them. You really REALLY don't like it -- this STILL gives you no authority over them.

You can even say it makes it harder to sell your house, that it depresses property values in your neighborhood. The value of your property STILL gives you no property rights over her home!

You can not like it. You can ask her to change it. You can reason with her, try to persuade her. But in the end, it's her house. You have no property rights due to your eyeballs being offended.

If property rights mean anything, they mean the right to peaceful enjoyment of your own property regardless of the artistic opinions of your neighbors -- even if they are architects -- even if they are government officials -- even if they are sacred zoning commissioners -- even if you voted for them -- even if you are firmly convinced that YOUR value judgement here is far superior to hers -- even if you and ALL YOUR NEIGHBORS hate the color of the house!

If that's not true, then the expression, "It's a free country" is not true either. We don't live in a free country; we live in a country as free as our neighbors care to let us be. Instead of the old slogan, "My freedom to swing my fist stops at your nose," the saying should now be, "My freedom to do anything stops at your opinion of what I'm doing."

In other words, finally, I am free to do anything that you don't care about. As long as it doesn't bother you, as long as you aren't offended by it, as long as you don't disapprove, I can do anything I want. But woe betide me if you don't like it -- then I have no freedoms at all. The Neighbors get to rule -- supported by local government.

This kind of thing is catnip to politicians. And that's why the Constitution attempts (too often in vain) to limit their power to help your neighbors oppress you.

Bob Poole on Why High Speed Rail is a Boondoggle

2010-07-09T19:28:00.001-07:00

.. that has none of the benefits you may think it does, not even lowering carbon footprint.

45 minutes but worth every minute of it.

“Rahn Curve” Video Shows Government Is Far Too Big

2010-07-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

Rahn Curve&amp Video Shows Government Is Far Too Big

Cato 5-minute video presents a government-spending-optimization concept similar to the Laffer Curve for optimal tax rates.

Very interesting!

(And scary.)

Mac McCarthy

Mock political ad: "Clint Webb for US Senate!" - but horribly true!

2010-06-26T17:13:00.000-07:00

"Clin

Carl Sagan: Scientists change their minds; nobody else does...

2010-06-16T21:29:00.000-07:00

Carl Edward Sagan : In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. #Science and Scientists

One Lefty Who Thinks Rand Paul in the Senate is a Good Idea

2010-05-19T12:11:00.000-07:00

Signs of sanity on the left:

Truthdig: "Who's Afraid of Rand Paul?"

Matt Welch | May 19, 2010 Reason Magazine

Lefty-journalist warhorse Robert Scheer cheers last night's Randslide:

Count me as one lefty liberal who is not the least bit unhappy with the victory by Rand Paul in Kentucky's Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. Not because it might make it easier for some Democratic Party hack to win in the general, but rather because he seems to be a principled libertarian in the mold of his father, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, and we need more of that impulse in the Congress. What's wrong with cutting back big government that mostly exists to serve the interests of big corporations? Surely it would be better if that challenge came from populist progressives of the left, in the Bernie Sanders mold, but this is Kentucky we're talking about.
Rand Paul, like his dad, is worthy of praise for standing in opposition to the Wall Street bailout, which will come to be marked as the greatest swindle in U.S. history and which was, as he noted on his website, an unconstitutional redistribution of income in favor of the undeserving rich [...]
Heresy, I know, but it is only thanks to Ron Paul, the father and hopefully the mentor of the potential Kentucky senator, that we got a congressional mandate to audit the Fed’s role in the banking bailout. How bad could it be to have another irascible Paul in the Congress?

Whole thing here.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has a rich sampling of reaction here (thanks to reader Ray Eckhart for the tip).

Ron Paul on the crisis in Greece - and later California, then the US!

2010-05-07T20:34:00.001-07:00

Guy's been talking like this for a long time -- are we finally listening?

How should we think about stuff like the Gulf oil spill?

2010-05-07T16:42:00.000-07:00

This is a tough one -- oil companies with corrupt relations with state and federal governments, whom you just want to punch, versus a functioning economy. 'Reason' helps think it through -- by reminding us that it's seldom a black-and-white, good-guys-vs-bad-guys set of issues -- but almost always a set of tradeoffs that need to be honestly evaluated -- even though it suits everyone on all sides to be absolutist:

Weighing the Benefits and Costs of Offshore Drilling
Reason magazine's Ronald Bailey examines the environmental costs and economic benefits of offshore drilling: "Two weeks ago BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 workers. The exploratory well began gushing oil at an estimated rate of 5,000 barrels per day when the blowout prevention system failed. The growing oil slick menaces the marshes and beaches of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Should the slick come ashore, previous research suggests the deleterious effects on fisheries and wildlife would be substantial and long-lasting. As someone who has enjoyed the sugar white sands of Alabama’s beaches, it is a terrible shame that they are at risk of being despoiled by oily muck. But as someone who also enjoys the conveniences of modern civilization including the on-demand mobility offered by airplanes and automobiles that enable me to visit those beaches, I understand trade-offs...in deciding whether or not to continue offshore exploration for oil and gas, a calm quantitative approach makes more sense than a rush to ban drilling after seeing some pictures of oily birds. It would be useful to figure out if the costs, economic and ecological, outweigh the benefits of producing offshore oil and gas."

Walter E. Williams : Salt Tyrants - Townhall.com

2010-05-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

Walter E. Williams : Salt Tyrants - He makes a good point. If you believe government's writ is everything politicians and bureaucrats think is good for you, how far away are you from tyranny? And when tyranny comes, what protest will you have *in principle*? None - you've already given away your principles.

It always starts thus: Tobacco, of course, because it's bad for you. Salt - silly, but what harm in letting them control that? Save me from having to think about it.

One fine day they'll get to something you think is important, or inane, or offensive. And you'll be out of luck. Because your view is not rule-of-law, your view is what-I-and-people-who-think-like-me-think-is-reasonable.

That view dooms you.

If that assertion puzzles you, we have a long, long conversation ahead of us....

mac

Michael Medved : Should Government Guarantee Our Right to Cars? - Townhall.com

2010-05-02T20:03:00.001-07:00

Michael Medved : Should Government Guarantee Our Right to Cars? - I love sarcasm!

John Stossel : Everyone Prospers With Free Trade - Townhall.com

2010-05-02T20:03:00.000-07:00

John Stossel : Everyone Prospers With Free Trade -- True since Adam Smith, and still true.

George Will : When Indignation Trumps Information - Townhall.com

2010-05-02T20:02:00.000-07:00

George Will : When Indignation Trumps Information - (Immigration policy)

Matt Ridley: There are risks to avoiding the Eyjafjallajokull ash cloud too, you know!

2010-04-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

In the occasional publication EDGE which taps dozens of the wise to comment on current events:

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge317.html#tc

Several of the experts lauded the wisdom of the European bureaucracy that shut down air space during the Icelandic volcanic eruption, throwing the world economy into disarray -- the European ones patted themselves smugly on the back for intervening to prevent the Airlines, as one called them, making the decision themselves -- inanely taking for granted, for some mysterious reason, that the airlines were so greedy they'd fly into a destructive ash cloud with no consideration for the safety of their passengers -- yet would be so lacking in greed that they'd fail to consider the risk of losing multimillion-dollar aircraft, their safety reputations, their sanity reputations, and their shirts in court from the lawsuits that would inevitably follow should they act recklessly. Thank goodness for the Eurocrats, saving us from the bugaboo of Capitalism.

Yes, well, Matt Ridley was also there to add some balance and some sense to the discussion, herewith:

MATT RIDLEY
Science Writer; Founding chairman of the International Centre for Life; Author, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

The ash cloud reminds us of the risks of risk aversion. Shutting down Europe's airspace removed the risk of an ash-caused crash, but it also increased all sorts of other risks: the risk of death to a patient because an urgent medical operation might have to be postponed for lack of supplies, the risk of poverty to a Kenyan farm worker because roses could not be flown to European markets, the risk of a collision between ferries on extra night-time sailings in the English Channel. And so on. Risk decisions cannot be taken in isolation. The precautionary principle makes too little allowance for the risks that are run by avoiding risks — the innovations not made, the existing suffering not alleviated. The ash cloud, by reminding us of the risks of not being able to fly planes, is a timely reminder that the risks of global warming must be weighed against the risks of high energy costs — the risks of poverty (cheap energy creates jobs), of hunger (fertiliser costs depend on energy costs), of rainforest destruction and indoor air pollution (expensive electricity makes firewood seem cheaper), of orangutan extinction in subsidised biofuel palm oil plantations.

Oh, and remember the lessons of public choice theory: if you set up a body called the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, don't be surprised if it over-reacts the first time it gets a chance the demonstrate that it considers itself — as all public bodies always do — underfunded.

"1 in 3 San Francisco City Workers Make Over $100K"

2010-04-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

http://cbs5.com/local/sf.salary.data.2.1656896.html

When the City (like most) is rapidly going broke, here comes the annual report by the SF Chronicle that the city employees are earning, typically, far more than the taxpayers who have to foot the bill.

Highest paid -- a recently retired deputy police chief, who got $500K+ in his final year. He cashed in a lot of vacation days. Of course, in the normal world (that's the world where pay taxes instead of eat them), companies typically have policies specifically to prevent employees from piling up vacation days sky-high and then nailing the company for big payouts. This lets the company manage its revenues and cash flow sensibly. Not a consideration in city employment, obviously.

Another consideration in private companies: Vacation is supposed to allow employees to rest, relax, recuperate, recharge their batteries. Letting people pile up vacation days year after year unused means they are not doing their health any good -- and thus can't be performing optimally when on the job. So requiring you to use vacation days or lose them forces you to manage your workload to that end -- and also forces your bosses to figure out how to work around your vacation absence, instead of just working you to death.

Of course, city workers (and their unions) just argue that they are oh so overworked and suffering from such shortages -- like the rest of us aren't!

We are played as suckers once again. Fortunately, in recent months journalists, apparently discovering the memo that told them what job they were in, have started digging in and writing about the astonishing abuses of the taxpayer by city officials and city, state, etc. workers and their unions over the years. Now, of course, that it's too late.

Expect that when the first city father finds his backbone and tries to actually *negotiate* the next union contract -- instead of handing over the blank checkbook -- you will see such a storm of protest, strikes, wailing and whining, and the whole charade like you never saw before -- they will try everything to stop any attempt at reform in its tracks.

Expect them to win that battle.

Maybe we need some Isrealis on the SF Police Dept!

2010-04-26T15:32:00.000-07:00

Compare Isreali police with SF police:

*News item yesterday told of a nutcase in Jerusalem, a tourist running around with a knife. Isreali security shot him -- in the leg. He's in the hospital now.

*Meanwhile, in San Francisco, police shot a guy who came at them with a knife -- and killed him.

In SF, threatening police with a knife always results in a fatal shooting -- and no apologies. Police defend the practice of shooting to kill when threatened. Mind you, they don't say "He was right on top of me, I just shot at him as best I can" or "I tried to shoot him in the leg but I hit him in the heart by mistake." No, policy is, shoot to kill -- deadly force, period.

This isn't a problem because of sympathy for the attackers; this is a problem because so many of the attackers turn out to be troubled people, and so few incorrigible criminals. And so often somebody claims the dead guy doesn't have a knife on them after all. And sometimes it looks like they're right. And sometimes the City pays off the relatives of the now-victim (formerly criminal).

If the police had a policy, instead, of at least trying to shoot to disable the attacker, where practical, wouldn't that be better?

Maybe we need to hire some Isreali cops, who know how to shoot more accurately....

Disturbing.

Should the Feds regulate Wall Street and the Banks? You mean - they don't already??

2010-04-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

Financial Reform’s Day of Reckoning Might Not Be - The Gaggle Blog - Newsweek.com: "But there is general agreement on Wall Street as a villain. In a Gallup poll last week, when people were asked if the federal government should regulate large financial institutions, 46 percent were in favor while 43 percent opposed. But when “large financial institutions' was replaced with “Wall Street banks,” the spread jumped to 50 to 36.

"Most lawmakers agree that Wall Street needs to be reigned in after its snafu in 2007 and 2008."

When you think of the inbuilt prejudices of a given media outlet, think of the above example: All coverage of the "finance reform bill" in 2010 revolves around "if the fed... should regulate large financial institutions" -- as if they are not already heavily regulated. And "Wall Street needs to be reigned in after its snafu..." as if they were unregulated, unmonitored, unwatched by our regulatory solons. ('reined' not 'reigned' ...)

This is one big reason why the path is always from problem to government law and regulation, to more problems, to more government regs, to more problems, to more government regs, and on and on endlessly -- unless the entity involved simply ceases operation. At NO POINT, EVER, are the efficacy of previous regulations considered; is the regulatory regime questioned; is the underlying conceit -- that bureaucratic government regulators are capable, over the long haul (or the intermediate haul) of achieving the results desired -- anything other than simply assumed. And at NO POINT, EVER, is the possibility even considered that there might be other approaches, alternatives to more of the same ineffectual laws and porn-watching bureaucrats, that might be more effective at achieving whatever your goal might be.

Which is why libertarians trying to be heard in the marketplace of ideas are so frustrated. It always goes without saying -- literally without saying -- that the question is "What laws and regulations can the government add to solve this problem?" -- The large question is never posed: "What arrangement of markets and laws and information might improve this situation, or lessen negative impacts, over the long run, and while minimally damaging the marketplace, our freedoms, and our prosperity?" We dive immediately down to the level of the government being the only "practical" solution to any problem you can name. Period.

And this despite government failure after government failure. Libertarians are widely believed to be entirely impractical in their ideas; the great irony of our age is that the practical people -- politically practical, of course, for that is all they mean by this -- are the ones proposing the blatantly impractical solutions -- again! and again!

As the old Washington joke goes: The only problem with pragmatism is -- it doesn't work.

The only thing impractical about Libertarian ideas is that, since they represent real reform, they are always resisted to the death by politicians, their bureaucrats, and the 'special interests' -- that is, those don't want to lose out on the benefits they get from things are they are. This is a serious issue -- the practical question of how you get past this powerful opposition is very difficult to answer. And government steadily increases the number of us who are in that "special interest" group -- we get tax breaks, rebates, refunds, special highway lanes, access to things, deductions, and outright payouts, as well as jobs, subsidies, and government projects. And medical care and retirement money. Anything you try to "reform" in reality (instead of merely politically) is going to arouse a fury among those who will lose out on something. Which is, as much as the politicians can possibly make it, everybody. This is deliberate, because it does make real reform opportunities "impractical" beyond the question of whether the reforms themselves would reform anything.

But when you get tired of being tricked and traduced and made a fool of again, Mr and Mrs Voter -- contact your nearest Libertarian. With luck you might find a few ideas that could offer ways out of the endless crises. Thought you';d have to rise above your own personal special interests in order to see it.

Or you could just do what you always do -- vote for the Lesser of Two Evils. Again. Now that's a practical solution!

Joke: "The Haircut"

2010-04-25T19:45:00.001-07:00

(An Internet joke, author unknown to me.)

The Haircut
   One day a florist went to a barber for a haircut.

    After the cut, he asked about his bill,
and the barber replied, "I cannot accept money from you, I'm doing community service this week."

   The florist was pleased and left the shop. When the barber went to open his shop the  next morning, there was a "thank you" card
and a dozen roses waiting for him at his door.

   Later, a cop comes in for a haircut, and when he tries to pay his bill, the barber again replied, "I cannot accept money from you, I'm doing community service this week."

   The cop was happy and left the shop.
The next morning when the barber went to open up, there was a "thank you" card and a
dozen donuts waiting for him at his door.

   Then a Congressman came in for a haircut, and when he went to pay his bill, the barber again replied, "I cannot accept money from you, I'm doing community service this week."

   The Congressman was very happy and left the shop. The next morning, when the barber went to open up, there were a dozen Congressmen lined up waiting for a free haircut.

   And that, my friend, illustrates the fundamental difference between the citizens of our country and thepoliticians who run it.

George Will : The Thunder Roars in Trenton

2010-04-23T21:20:00.001-07:00

"Saying "subtlety is not going to win this fight," Christie notes that New Jersey's police officers, the nation's highest paid, can retire after 25 years at 65 percent of their highest salary. In the state that has the nation's fourth-highest percentage (66) of public employees who are unionized, he has joined the struggle that will dominate the nation's domestic policymaking in this decade -- the struggle to break the ruinous collaboration between elected officials and unionized state and local workers whose affections the officials purchase with taxpayers' money."

Michelle Malkin : All the President's Goldman Sachs Men...

2010-04-23T21:19:00.001-07:00

Michelle Malkin : All the President's Goldman Sachs Men

"While President Obama assails the culture of greed and recklessness practiced by the men of Goldman Sachs, his administration is infested with them. ...

"As the New York Post reported Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee immediately bought sponsored Internet ads on Google that direct web surfers who type in "Goldman Sachs SEC" to Obama's fundraising site...."

"While irony-challenged Democratic candidates like mob-linked banker Alexi Giannoulias in Illinois (who hopes to fill Obama's old Senate seat) call on Republicans to return their fat-cat Goldman Sachs donations, the Democrats are silent on the $994,795 in Goldman Sachs campaign cash that Obama bagged. The class-warfare Dems are also mum on all the president's Goldman Sachs men sitting in the catbird's seat: ... Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler is Obama's Commodity Futures Trading Commission head. .... Goldman Sachs kept White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on a $3,000 monthly retainer while he worked as Clinton's chief fundraiser.... Former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson serves under Geithner as his top deputy and overseer of TARP bailout -- $10 billion of which went to Goldman Sachs. ..."

There is a whole lengthy list of more of them, but you get the idea. The Feds are going to 'clean up' Wall Street -- and newspapers don't have either the sense or the shame to put it in quotes....

mac

We keep forgetting importance of Rule of Law--for everyone!

2010-03-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

In an email exchange at a writer's group discussing (sigh) the health-care bill, this exchange:

"[m]any Republicans decried the last minute tactics practiced by Pelosi, Reid and Obama to pull the off vote, but I applaud them. I want to see our leaders pull out all the stops for something that can help tens of millions of Americans. I want to see them threaten, cajole, bargain, terrify, and bully lawmakers into submission."

Another writer asked if this is really, really what the previous writer wants.

I think the more pointed question is what you want the rules to be, moving forward. If this is your idea of proper conduct in this situation, are you willing to accept that at some future time, your ideological opponents can use these same tactics, but against you and what you believe in? That they, perversely, may think they are saving or helping millions by stopping you, or forcing you to pay for things you hate?

Rule of Law doesn't mean rule only by people who agree with me, against people who don't agree with me and who are therefore wrong. It means a set of rules that is used by everybody, good and bad. These aren't rules for The Right People. They are the rules for everyone. And that should make you afraid.

Yes, I know, you probably think your opponents have been using such tactics all along and it's nice that somebody on your side is using them for a change. But that moves you in the direction of accepting such tactics as appropriate.

I keep remembering that when Carter was President, there were rules of behavior and laws passed that were The Right Thing to Do. Then the idiot electorate went and voted some rightwing knucklehead named Ronald Reagan into office, and *he* promptly went and used all those same rules, intended for Right-Thinking Rulers, for his own ends. To do what *he* thought was Right. Because, oddly, he thought of *himself* and those who agreed with him as Right-Thinking People. No accounting for life, huh?

So be very careful about applauding the use of theats, terror, and bullying when it's done by your side; because you can't confine it to use by your side and by those who agree with you. And when it's done by the other side against what you believe in, you will no longer, *in principle*, have any grounds on which to object.

But that would require rulers who have principles, wouldn't it? And the impatient always prefer the use of power to achieve their ends.

The Guilty Pleasures of Government Spending--Starting with NASA

2010-03-19T16:33:00.000-07:00

Great summary of just how much trouble we're in in this essay from the weirdly named blog "Zombies Uncensored" - but the argument's not weird at all. Here's a tempting tidbit:

"The budget crisis will continue to grow as long as we are unwilling to forgot the guilty pleasures of government spending. NASA is just one in a long list of guilty pleasures Americans have indulged in.

"The lover of money is facing stiff competition from the love of force to do good, as the root of all evil. The love of force to do good easily seduces the purest of hearts, who are unwilling to delay gratification of good goals."

The Guilty Pleasures of Government Spending, and this from a guy who loves NASA!

A Gaggle of Contrarian Political Links....

2010-03-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

Think you know what's going on?

Maybe not entirely.

John Stossel, Feb 10, 2010, in his Townhall column "Hurtling Down the Road to Serfdom" and again on his excellent Fox opinion show, "According to the Tax Foundation, 60% of the population now gets more in government benefits than it pays in taxes. What does that say about a society in which *more than half* the people live at hte expense of the rest? Worse, the dependent class is growing. The 60% will soon be 70%.

"Rep Paul Ryan of Wisconsin seems to understand the threat: He's worried that 'more people have a stake in the welfare state than in free enterprise. This is a road that Hayek perfectly described as "the road to serfdom." '

"Do we want a culture of takers or makers?"

"Fiscal Stimulus is Buying Trouble: Why government spending hasn't brought the economy around" is a Reason magazine piece worth reading.

Also insightful is Big Government's Cronies: The real reason politicians like complicated tax and regulatory schemes. If you don't know the corrupt fundamentals of this article, you need to read it fast.

And for all those high-speed rail enthusiasts who think it will change transpo for the better, Reason's High-Speed Rail Plans Are Misconceived: What problem are these trains solving? Who will pay the annual operating costs? should slow your mental train to a more reasonable speed. Rail enthusiasts of all stripes have been getting a free ride for decades; it's about time they were run out on a rail themselves, before we're even broker than we already are. And bear in mind that Reason started out as a research firm specializing in transportation. Go to the Reason.org site for much, much more from these train experts.

"Who's Greedy?" is a good healthy counterweight to self-righteous blather about the evils of greed. Cafe Hayek is a great blog site with much sense about economics in our confused modern world. The author points to a difficult contradiction in the thinking of those who accuse capitalists of greed.

Cafe Hayek is also the source of the wonderful Fear the Boom and the Bust, a video 'starring' free-market economist F.A. Hayek 'debating' government-market enthusiast Lord Keynes in a rap-music argument and counterargument that will knock your socks off. It's such a Youtube hit that it's been translated into several dozen languages around the world already. Dee-lightful! And a surprisingly accurate summary of the economics of each!

"...A bunch of self-righteous nincompoops..."

2010-03-19T15:47:00.000-07:00

Good summary of the farce of Congress, of all groups of dopes, calling Toyota on its carpet for humiliation, in Forbes of March 29, 2010, quoting Jens F. Laurson, editor-at-large of the International Affairs Forum:

"Among the most pathetic rituals in contemporary culture...is the compulsory appearance before Congress... The latest and most prominent practitioner of this ritual is Akio Toyoda, who was compelled to fluff the egos of members of U.S. Congress--a bunch of self-righteous nincompoops, most of whom are guilty of so many ethical failings and screwings of the citizen that they could face a similar last judgment in front of a higher body regulating quality in politics, if only there were one."

Government will save us from those damned free-market special interests! Yep.

2010-03-11T17:22:00.000-08:00

Sweet JESUS, save me. Save me from the idiot electorate.

Here is my dear childhood friend's view of the world, and why we need the government to finish taking over the health care system. Bear in mind, people, that this view is the most common view among the everyday voter today.
----
Trouble is, Michael....we have allowed the "free market" system to run its own course, so to speak, until Wall Street and the Auto Industry cried us a river that they would drag the whole u.s. economy down if we didn't bail out their sorry asses.....and they still lavished their failed company ceo's millions of dollars in bonuses etc.

The government gave us social security and medicare and medicaid. They didn't do too bad a job, all things considered, especially for people who did not have a silver spoon in their mouths.

Before those three government run programs, if you didn't have a job or were too sick or old to have a job to pay for health care, food, clothing and shelter, and did not have a large family to take care of you, you were fucked. Just save a few pennies to buy a bullet and put a gun to your head to end your suffering. I guess the one thing that Libertarianism does not do that bothers me is that its members want someone else to take care of people who do not have enough money, or clout, or family to help them out, when they cannot help themselves. You see, brother.....not everyone who is poor, sick, or out of work is a lazy, shiftless, slothful parasite.

Let me go one step further, Michael. If you lost all of your savings, could no longer read, write or speak....or...say...you lost your hearing or your ability to transport yourself from point a to point b, i.e. became crippled....lost your home.....lost your wife....and your kids were unable to help you out.....what the fuck would you do then? Mooch off of your friends or your brothers and sisters?

The only difference between doing that and accepting a "dole" from the government is that your brothers and sisters are related to you within one generation. The other people in the nation with money and who pay taxes are your family, too.

I would be interested to hear what you and John Stoessel have to say about that.
----
Of course, John Stossel would have plenty to say about this purblind misunderstanding of the world. Notice that he blames the bailouts on the free market. The *government* bailouts.

Here's what I had to say to him about it. In despair, because the people have no understanding.

--
Yes, that damned free-market system, source of all our ills. The free market system that produced *government* bailouts, yes, that one.

Wake up: Medical care in this country is heavily, heavily involved with the government, from tax treatment of coverage in corporations versus individuals, rules and regulations aimed to reduce fraud but reducing flexibility and increasing costs, legal liability laws that likely increase costs and decrease care, state-by-state management of insurance and outlawing of cross-state competition, government funding of research, government tax, legal, and regulatory treatment of research, R&D, medical innovations, and on and on, all designed IN THEORY to 'protect' the public but in reality digging us deeper and deeper into a world in which only special interests across the spectrum have any say.

The answer, of COURSE, is MORE government. Because by God you can never have too much government, can you?

Of course. *you* love Medicare and Medicaid (and Social Security) because they will pay your bills and my bills. They are rapidly bankrupting the country (with the assistance of government bailouts), as anybody with a calculator could have told us back when they were launched -- and DID tell us, but we weren't listening. We're in great shape; our kids are screwed. But never mind, never mind, our problem is that we have too free a free market.

We live in such a contradictory world: We disdain government idiocy and mismanagement and corruption and special interest influence -- yet when something hits US, we instantly want that idiot government to step in our behalf: Pass regulations and rules to protect us from the rich -- hah, think that;s going to work? Tax 'the rich' to pay for things we want but don't want to pay for -- which turns into tax on the middle class because the rich can protect themselves (they own the government!). Punish the rich and powerful -- using the very government the rich and powerful control!

Just ask yourself: Is there any law, rule, regulation, or tax that has any actual value to the regular guy that can be passed in the teeth of the opposition of unions, of the AMA, of the insurance giants, of the bio research firms, of the state politicians, of the federal and state bureaucrats, of the state and federal regulators?

The government has too much power, which is WHY the special interests spend all that money on it -- they are protecting themselves from us, and using government power to stifle competition and to line their pockets. So of COURSE the solution is the government more power! Of course! That will solve everything!

It's just a question of voting The Right People into office, Mr Capra. The good guys whom I agree with will fix everything. Boot out the corrupt and vote in the noble fellows.

This is a level of naivite that defies reason and knowledge.

What is the solution? The Founders knew what is was *not* - it was NOT giving politicians, tax services, and bureaucrats more power. It will be abused. It always is abuse and always will be.

They set up this country to limit the power of the government. It has taken 200 years but they have failed. Every man, woman, and child in this nation thinks their salvation lies simply in getting the government to be on their side, to pay for their welfare, to fend off their enemies, to support their morality, to punish their idea of the wicked. The same government, mind you, that can't keep you safe in your home and on your streets. Which IS a basic government job. But no, let's give them more to do! They fuck up daily, so let's trust our futures and the safety of our children to them!

Jesus. There's no point in even talking about this. If your *starting point* is that capitalism and free markets are ripping us off, and government can be bent to our will to make it all right -- then there's no hope -- not for you, not for the nation, not for our future.

What a waste of a perfectly good country.

mike

Barack, the Demo-Publican President, and Welcome To Him

2010-02-26T15:06:00.001-08:00

Well, I voted Libertarian, as always. The rest of you thought you were voting for Republicans and Democrats and, turns out, you were all voting for Politicians - or as we Libertarians say, the Politician's Party, or the Government Party.

I knew Barack would push for things like health-care 'reform,' and the irony is, the way things have been going the past two decades, if he had been a Republican he would have passed it. Now we might get lucky and have the evil thing die unborn.

But I at least hoped we'd get some good anti-Republican things from a liberal Democrats, like a reduction in our military presence overseas and our overreaching foreign policy that just has to involve itself in absolutely every single thing in every other country (when we can't do things right in our own). But no: We're still as involved as we were under the hated Republicans. So we've been getting the worst of the Democrats and the worst of the Republicans, just as we have been for years. Lots of government programs at great cost and little benefit, and lots of foreign policy at great cost and no great benefit.

Terrific.

Barack needs to take a leaf from Clinton's book and try to become the best Republicans president the Democratics ever had.

Prop 8 case: Judge Walker is Gay -- Does That Affect His Judgement?

2010-02-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

Debra Saunders writes an excellent editorial today in the SF Chronicle about Prop 8 presiding Judge Walker's sexual identity that might cause partisans on both sides to accuse him of prejudice in this California gay rights case.

As I read her editorial about the "biggest open secret" in the landmark case, I waited for her to mention, on the other hand, the aspect that makes this entirely paradoxical: If Walker should consider recusing himself because he's a gay man in a case about gay rights -- wouldn't a straight judge be equally open to accusations that his straight orientation could affect his legal judgement?

Think of this not as a case about gay rights, but as a case about sexual orientation rights, and the paradox might become clearer. By definition, it seems to me, there is nobody who could be considered a neutral judge here -- except maybe a castrati. (Kidding.)

Michael "Mac" McCarthy

Why Federal Govt is Bad Place for Education Policy

2010-01-20T18:22:00.000-08:00

Cato Institute: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/01/20/school-choice-advocates-beware-washington/

School Choice Advocates: Beware Washington

Posted by Andrew J. Coulson

The Brookings Institution will release a new school choice policy guide on February 2nd, and from the sound of it, children, parents, taxpayers, and the authors themselves should be concerned. The guide will provide:

a series of practical and novel recommendations for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including national chartering of virtual education providers; expanding the types of information collected on school performance; providing incentives for low-performing school districts to increase choice and competition; and creating independent school choice portals to aid parents in choosing between schools.

The goals these recommendations are meant to achieve are entirely laudable, but there are three reasons for serious concern:

1) The Constitution delegates to the federal government no power to provide or regulate education services, except in the execution of its explicitly enumerated powers. So the Supreme Court can ensure that state education programs abide by the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, but Congress cannot “charter virtual education providers.” Of course the federal government has been transgressing the limits on its education powers for more than half a century, but no one who supports the rule of law can condone that transgression, much less its expansion.

2) From a regulatory standpoint, Washington is the worst level of government at which to implement an education program. National education programs impose a single set of rules onevery participating provider in the country. Get those rules wrong — either up front or down the road — and you not only hobble the effectiveness of every single provider, but you eliminate the possibility of comparing outcomes between providers operating under different sets of rules. In essence you lose the ability to distinguish between different “treatments” — to determine what helps and what is harmful to the service’s overall success.

3) We have ample evidence about the quality of education programs implemented by the federal government. For example, after 45 years and $166 billion, Head Start has just been proven entirely ineffective. (See also the NCLB paper linked to in “1)”, above). Once again, this problem is exacerbated by the all-encompassing nature of federal programs. Get them wrong and you get them wrong for every participating student, everywhere in the country. With variation in programs among states, by contrast, we not only have the ability to compare the merits of alternative approaches, we have powerful incentives for states to get their programs right. Just as tax competition drives businesses from one state or nation to another, so, too, can education policy competition. States with better policies will attract businesses and more mobile residents from states with worse ones, eventually compelling the inferior policy states to redress their errors. We’re just beginning to see the prospects for this now, as school choice programs proliferate and grow at the state level, and introducing national programs that might well interfere with this process would be a disastrous mistake.

I hope that school choice advocates, including those who have contributed to the forthcoming Brookings report, will weigh these concerns.

Andrew J. Coulson • January 20, 2010 @ 3:08 pm

P.D. James Blasts BBC

2010-01-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

"Bestselling mystery author P.D. James blasted the BBC in a surprising interview with the British broadcasting network. Baroness James blasted the organization for its bloated executive salaries and failure to pay sufficient amounts to writers and producers of programming."

More at The Writer's Blog, http://www.writerswrite.com/blog/104101 .

As you read this all-to-rare attack on government-bureaucrat privilege, think of how widely this could be applied to every level of our own government, especially with the government monopolists all crying poor so loudly and demanding more money: A recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle lists the many police and sheriff's department managers who have retired with breathtaking pensions, in some cases exceeding their already generous working pay.

Fat paychecks, waste, mismanagement, overreaching in every aspect of public life -- yet the only answer ever proposed is: More money.

In an article reporting the general negative reaction to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed state budget, a simple chart illustrates the problem perfectly, yet its implications were not mentioned (or noticed?) by the article writers, or by any of those complaining: If the governor's proposal to cut the budget level next year were enacted, the spending level would be reduced to where it was all the way back in -- 2006.

That famously tight-fisted year in which we starved our noble bureaucrats, as you remember.

The ironclad rule in government budgeting is and has always been this: The budget can *never* go down; it must *always* go up. Always, regardless of any other factor.

Of course, if your ambition is overweening and limitless, your vision of government responsibilities completely open-ended, well of course the government will never have enough money. Because its ambition knows no bounds.

Now if only this elementary insight would dawn on a single political reporter or newspaper editor and affect the reporting on budget battles, we might have a chance at reform.

Not likely.

Is the Current Freeze a Sign of Global Cooling -- or What?

2010-01-11T12:53:00.000-08:00

1. The NYT published a short article yesterday (Jan 9, 2010) answering that question. Their answer: Nothing to do with global warming, or global cooling -- just an occasional recurring twisting of the jet stream that brings extra cold weather down from Canada. Meanwhile, the North Pole is warmer than usual (as a result).

2. That is the ONLY article answering this obvious question that I've seen anywhere -- and the first and only time I've seen the MSM talk about the issue ever. When it's really cold, they ignore the question.

3. The real problem is: When it's really hot, the warming enthusiasts immediately jump on the bandwagen and talk about how this is proof positive of global warming.

Last year was unusually warm, and that's all they talked about. The past decade was the warmest in a while, and that's all they talked about. This winter is the coldest in 50 years and -- complete silence.

Wouldn't want those antiwarming nuts to have something to latch onto, would we?

4. Weather is not relevant to the arguments over global warming. It's climate, which is the longrange (decades and centuries) overall weather. One hot winter or one cold winter is proof of nothing - the timeframe is too short.

There appears to be some evidence - not overwhelming and not perfectly persuasive - that we are entering a warming period in the climate. This would not be a shock; we had a cold period in the 900s or so, a warming period in the 1100-1300s or so (when the Vikings planted crops in Vineland), another cold period in the 1400-1500s (when the Vikings died or left Vineland because it was too cold), a warm period in the 1600s, a cold period at the end of the 1700s (when Washington crossed the Delaware popularly shown as ice-choked, though it hasn't often been ice-choked at Trenton in a long time in modern times), then a warm period since then. It is entirely possible we are entering a warm climate period that could last 50 or 100 or 150 years.

5. A separate question, though you'd never know it, is to what degree human activity contributes to whatever warming might be going on -- indeed, whether human activity is stimulating a warming period that would not otherwise be happening. This latter question is unanswerable, the former question involves issues so unbelievably complex that it may never be resolved or resolvable. (Back in the 1970s when I was researching future auto fuels for Southern California Edison, one scientist argued that climate is a topic so complex that we may never be able to fully analyze it or predict it.)

Those who are enthuse about the idea of human-generated climate change fall into several camps. Those who would use it as a club to beat whatever hobbyhorse they are on: anticapitalists, antimodernists, big-government enthusiasts, self-righteous assholes, and the like. And, separately, those who hope it's human-created because, if it is, maybe we can stop whatever we're doing and avoid disaster -- whereas if it's inevitable climate change, we're all screwed.

6. If we don't simply accept that it's human-caused change that could be significantly stalled if we took practical steps to reduce our impact on the climate -- whether because we think that's idiotic, or because we don't believe the changes required would leave society in a condition we'd either recognize or accept -- then we are left with only two options that I can think of at the moment: Hope the climate isn't changing; or think of what we can do to reduce whatever negative impacts might occur if it does come through. (This latter is an option even if we believe the climate is human-changed but we don't want to be reduced to living in caves to stop it.)

Of course, the steps we can take to minimize negative impacts of climate change -- such as protecting coastlines against flooding, and adjusting agriculture to weather changes -- can also lead statists to enthuse over yet more ways the government can boss us around, or send money to other countries, and the rest of their favorite ideas for ruining our lives. I see in the recent climate international meeting that suggestion was actually made: How the rich countries will have to pay big bucks to poor nations being affected by changing weather, and to small island nations that will be flooded. These demands will grow in the near term; be prepared for them.

mac mccarthy

Government Failure in Antiterrorism? A: More Govt!

2010-01-07T10:14:00.000-08:00

"To judge from the news accounts, Umar Abdulmutallab did everything to get himself caught except wear an Osama bin Laden T-shirt onto that Northwest Airlines flight Christmas Day. Yet the danger didn’t dawn on anyone until he allegedly set himself on fire while trying to detonate the explosives hidden in his underwear.

"So the solution being proposed is the one we hear whenever the government fails: Give it greater power.

"This is a common liberal impulse. The public schools aren’t educating students adequately? They need more money. The stimulus didn’t rev up job creation? Pass another one.

"But when it comes to national security and law enforcement, the same tendency afflicts many conservatives. They generally think the federal government could screw up a three-car funeral, but they expect it to perform with flawless efficiency in finding murderous fanatics. And if it fails, they look to expand its authority to do the job it botched....."

--Conservative columnist Steve Chapman http://townhall.com/columnists/SteveChapman/2010/01/07/the_naked_truth_about_airport_scanners?page=1

Sacrificing Liberty for Security? No!

2010-01-06T16:59:00.000-08:00

The Independent Institute

[a post on their Facebook page Jan 6, 2010--http://www.facebook.com/independentinstitute?ref=nf]

Charles Peña in Baltimore Sun: "just as we shouldn’t sacrifice essential freedoms to fight crime—such as probable cause and the need for a search warrant—neither should we do so for the sake of security."

The reason why we and you are against terrorism is because we believe that the rule of law should be upheld and innocent people should be protected from invasive force. The purpose then of policing/security and a system to enforce justice is to adhere to such a rule of law, in which no one is exempt from such rules, regardless of whether the person is a private terrorist or a government employee.

"War" is a condition in which the rule of law is suspended for "emergency" or "crisis" rationales during when individuals are allowed to deliberately and unaccountably harm others. In other words, "war" is precisely what we are against in insisting on the imperative of a rule of law. Hence, when a terrorist or a gang or an army invades and harms others, we are saying that this is unacceptable and those responsible should held accountable because we are basing this on the objective standard of the rule of law. We then fight against such predation in order to restore the rule of law, not postpone or end it.

However, the "war on terror" isn't even a declared war, but instead a state of permanent war operated by the President at his whim and for the advantage of those who support him. Indeed, aircraft carriers, ICBMs, spy satellites, and drone missiles have nothing to do with stopping a lap bomber. Instead of cheering on the warfare and national surveillance states and U.S. global interventionism, we should insist on the cessation of such oppression and the complete privatization and marketization of air transportation and security.

For a superb book on the subject, please see "Opposing the Crusader State": http://tinyurl.com/yckahz2

and....

Moral ethics and individual rights are not situational. The end never justifies the means because every means is an end in itself and whatever standard is used to justify any end also applies to each and every means. Moreover, the view that "safety" can be used to trump rights and justice invariably produces the opposite. Perhaps you should read the following book by Robert Higgs, "Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government": http://tinyurl.com/69lljx

Kiss Your Freedoms Goodbye If Health Care Passes

2009-11-07T16:07:00.000-08:00

Kiss Your Freedoms Goodbye If Health Care Passes

by Andrew P. Napolitano
by Andrew P. Napolitano
Recently by Andrew P. Napolitano: Health-Care Reform and the Constitution

Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn’t care about the Constitution, it doesn’t care about your inalienable rights. If this health care bill becomes law, America, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it and privacy as you have enjoyed it will cease to be.

Tomorrow, the House of Representatives will vote on a 2,000-page bill to give the federal government the power to micromanage the health care of every single American. The bill will no doubt pass. It will raise your taxes, steal your freedom, invade your privacy, and ration your health care. Even the Republicans have introduced their version of Obamacare Lite. It, too, if passed, will compel employers to provide coverage, bribe the states to change their court rules, and tell insurance companies whom to insure.

We do not have two political parties in this country, America. We have one party; called the Big Government Party. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. The Democratic wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. Both parties like power; and neither is interested in your freedoms. Think about it. Government is the negation of freedom. Freedom is your power and ability to follow your own free will and your own conscience. The government wants you to follow the will of some faceless bureaucrat.

Read the rest of the article

The One Minute Case Against Socialized Healthcare

2009-11-07T16:04:00.000-08:00

The One Minute Case Against Socialized Healthcare

from "One-Minute Case," at RationalMind.org

There is no right to healthcare

The United States was founded with the declaration that all men have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Founders recognized that all men have a moral right to be free from the coercion of others, as long as they allow others the same freedom. They believed that rights do not impose a positive obligation on others, but only the negative obligation to restrain from the initiation of force.

The claim that there is a “right to healthcare” violates the principle of individual rights because it requires that the liberty of doctors and the property of taxpayers be violated to provide for others. When the New Deal and Great Society programs forced doctors and taxpayers to become sacrificial offerings to the “common good”, the current “healthcare crisis” was born.

The myth of “free” healthcare

It is a common belief that when government provides something, it is free or cheap. But politicians cannot create wealth – they can only redistribute it. Money for all government spending comes from business – whether by entrepreneurial investment, the wages of patients, or taxes.

Whether by price controls of outright nationalization, when governments make prices artificially low, demand skyrockets, and shortages result. Politicians respond by passing ever more regulations to control costs. These regulations stifle innovation, drive up costs, and force healthcare providers out of business. The end result is to replace capitalism, the greatest wealth-generating system known to man, with an onerous system of central planning.

Capitalism cannot guarantee that all our medical needs will be provided for – no system can do that. But it does give entrepreneurs the incentive to compete to provide the best possible service they can. Centralized socialized systems have no incentive to improve service or to try bold new techniques. Politicians can force prices to be artificially low, but they cannot lower costs – they can only drive doctors, hospitals, and drug companies out of business.

The victims of “universal” healthcare

The waiting time for treatment in Canada varies from 14 to 30 weeks. Waiting lists for diagnostic procedures range from two to 24 weeks. Some patients die while waiting for treatment. To stop sick people fromcircumventing the “free” system, the government of British Columbia enacted Bill 82 in 2003, which makes it illegal to pay for private surgery. Patients waiting for critical procedures are now forced to seek procedures in the U.S. and doctors are abandoning Canada in droves. Cleveland, Ohio is now Canada’s hip-replacement center. Ontario is turning nurses into doctors to replace some of the 10,000 doctors who left Canada in the 1990’s. ¹ ²

What will patients do when it is illegal to seek private medical treatment in the U.S.? Politicians are already working towards that goal. State and federal regulation impose onerous regulations which forbid insurance companies from offering services such as basic coverage for emergencies by requiring coverage of many types of procedures. Medicare forces doctors to follow 130,000 pages of regulations. Critics often attack the “capitalist” nature of American health care system. The reality is that the government now pays for 50% of health care, and closely regulates the rest.

Healthcare is only affordable under capitalism

If a society is not wealthy enough to afford healthcare, health socialism will not make it richer. Cuba, a poster child of socialist healthcare schemes, spends $229 on healthcare per person each year, while the U.S. spends $ 6,096.³ Premium services are available only to paying foreigners, while natives must bribe doctors for timely treatment and bring their own towels, bed sheets, soap, food, and even sutures.⁴

A government can decide to replace individual choice with state-mandated decisions of what goods and services are more important for the “common good.” But it can only spend on one area at the expense of another. If Cubans are not totally deprived of medical treatment, it can only be at the expense of all other goods. A doctor’s salary in Cuba is 1.5 times the median at $15-20 per month. ⁵ A telling sign of their deprivation is the Cuban suicide rate, which is the highest in Latin America and among the highest in world. Cubans in Miami on the other hand, kill themselves less often than other Miamians.⁶ When they risk their lives in leaky boats to escape to the U.S., the right to make their own decisions regarding their health is among the freedoms they hope to gain.

References:

“Free Health Care in Canada” by Walter Williams
“Do We Want Socialized Medicine?” by Walter Williams
Reuters: Health care in Cuba more complicated than on SiCKO
BBC: Keeping Cuba Healthy by John Harris
“An Evaluation of Four Decades of Cuban Healthcare” by Felipe Eduardo Sixto (PDF)
Miami Herald: “Study: Suicide epidemic exists under Castro” by Juan O. Tamayo

Further reading:

Moral Health Care vs. “Universal Health Care” by Lin Zinser and Dr. Paul Hsieh
Health Care Is Not a Right by Leonard Peikoff, Ph.D.
Health Care Is a Business—or Should Be by Richard E. Ralston
Video: Unisured in America (Free Market Cure Documentary Series)
Americans for Free Choice in Medicine
American Health Care: Essential Principles and Common Fallacies
FIRM: Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine
The “Cost” of Medical Care by Thomas Sowell
Michael Moore’s Shticko by Michael C. Moynihan
NY Times: “As Canada’s Slow-Motion Public Health System Falters, Private Medical Care Is Surging“
Do fat people deserve medical treatment?
The One Minute Case for Individual Rights

Govt Stimulus Actual Vs Forecast

2009-11-07T16:03:00.001-08:00

No comment needed from me....

"Rights Talk" Incites, But Doesn't Solve

2009-10-13T11:55:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite political columnists, George Will, in his Sunday Oct 11 2009 column "Anger Management Hits a Hump," raises a good point, one you've no doubt run into when you get in an ideological argument with someone.

---

"If our vocabulary is composed exclusively of references to rights, aka entitlements, we are condemned to endless jostling among elbow-throwing individuals irritably determined to protect, or enlarge, the boundaries of their rights. Among such people, all political discourse tends to be distilled into what Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School calls 'rights talk.'

"Witness the inability of people nowadays to recommend this or that health-care policy as merely wise or just. Each proposal must be invested with the dignity of a right. And since not all proposals are compatible, you have not merely differences of opinion, but apocalyptic clashes of rights.

"Rights talk is inherently aggressive, even imperial; it tends towards moral inflation and militates against accommodation. Rights talkers, with their inner monologues of pre-emptive resentments, work themselves into a simmering state of annoyed vigilance against any limits on their willfuness. To rights talkers, life -- always and everywhere -- is unbearably congested with insufferable people impertinently rights talking, and behaving, the way you and I of course have a real right to....

"Can't liberals play nicely together? Not, evidently, when they are bristling, like furious porcupines, with spiky rights that demand respect because the right-bearers' dignity is implicated in them."

---

The example Will gives involves his observation of liberals, especially in federal government, but experience tells us that rights talk (sometimes in the form of self-righteousness) infects most of the rest of us too, conservative, libertarian, and decline-to-state alike.

Libertarians suggest Nobel announcements should be moved to April Fool's Day

2009-10-13T11:36:00.001-07:00

The Libertarian Party makes some good points in a recent press release about Obama's Nobel:

"President Obama has utterly failed to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has increased American military involvement in Afghanistan, and appears ready to escalate that war even further.

"...Perhaps President Obama would earn a peace prize if he were to change course, go against most Republican and Democratic party leaders, and support a Libertarian non-interventionist foreign policy instead."

On a subsequent page, read Libertarians suggest Nobel announcements should be moved to April Fool's Day . Between recent Nobels to Paul Krugman and Al Gore, and past peace prizes to war Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, maybe an April Fools' Day timing would clarify the true meaning of this award.

Why Democrats' Health Care Overhaul May Still Die

2009-10-13T11:32:00.000-07:00

Essay at Cato gives an interesting inside-baseball view of the political forces whipsawing our D.C. solons as they consider the health-care bill -- It seems there's a lot of "Who's paying for this? Not *me*!" back and forth going on in Congressional halls.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/10/12/why-the-democrats-health-care-overhaul-may-die/

Ah, the eternal dream: To get Someone Else Not Me to pay for the stuff I want but *I* don't want to pay for myself. Defining that Someone Else is always tricky, especially when that Someone Else has Congressional representatives too....

Obama's Peace Prize--What Happened to Our Peace President?

2009-10-11T20:54:00.001-07:00

Ron Paul On Obama Winning The Nobel Peace Prize

http://bit.ly/2YcuNs

Ron makes many good points about the irony that this president, who ran against the war president, is getting in deeper despite his peace prize.

(Ron suggests that it's Obama's pledge to be internationalist rather than to make peace that won him the prize.)

Makes more interesting viewing that almost any other commentary on this event that I've read so far...

NBA or NFL Criminal Class? (Amusing)

2009-10-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

Subject: NBA or NFL??

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

36 have been accused of spousal abuse

7 have been arrested for fraud

19 have been accused of writing bad checks

117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses

3 have done time for assault

71, repeat 71
cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

14 have been arrested on drug-related charges

8 have been arrested for shoplifting

21 currently are defendants in lawsuits,

and
84 have been arrested for drunk driving

in the last year

Can
you guess which organization this is?

NBA Or NFL

Give up yet?

Scroll down,

Neither,
it's the 435 members of the
United States Congress

The same group of Idiots that crank out
hundreds of new laws each year
designed to keep the rest of us in line.

Oakland Airport BART Rail Extension--We're Doomed!

2009-10-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

Headlines today (Oct 7, 2009):

Oakland Council Now Supports BART Extension Plan

Two quotes from the CBS 5 story will suffice for the moment:

"The 3.2-mile extension to the airport has been a point of contention for a while. The voter-approved project has grown from $130 million to over $522 million."

Got that? Fourfold increase. And it hasn't been started yet. Any bets on how soon it will pass one billion?

and

"Project opponents, who include many public transit advocates who favor bus service over rail service, claim BART could save hundreds of millions of dollars by using a rapid bus service instead. They estimated that such a service would only cost between $45 million and $60 million. "

And that? Given a choice between $500 million and growing, or $60 million (a tenth that amount) -- our solons leap for the big-bucks project! No hesitation! It's all about "keeping the Oakland Airport competitive" (Why?)

Two more justifications, equally idiotic: First, jobs will be generated - during construction and to run the thing. That's our new golden calf now -- if it generates jobs, even if they cost taxpayers millions per head, we have to do it. Second, the construction industry (source of electoral funding) and construction unions (source of electoral funding and endorsements) will be delighted.

Oh, and the money is already at hand -- part federal tax moneys (that the feds obviously can't afford, but no matter) and part a chunk from a bond measure the voters were dumb enough or deluded enough to approve a few years ago -- for "transportation projects." If it had been phrased, "So we can turn $60 million projects into $600 million boondoggles," who would have voted for it?

Judging from recent elections, maybe that's not such a good question.

But the real issue - not mentioned, of course, by our solons approving the project (of course) and also not mentioned by the reporters or editors (or apparently thought of, since it hasn't been mentioned in any of the recent coverage) -- What will it cost us to *run* this thing once it's built?

None of these rail projects pay for themselves. Even if $6-each-way tolls don't discourage traffic, chances are this project like all others will prove a permanent drain on the budget of whatever agency gets stuck with it -- BART, apparently, which is already deep in the hole despite tolls and a big chunk of everyone's real-estate taxes each year. Nobody thinks of this; nobody mentions getting stuck with the eternal tab; nobody mentions it, not even the press that's supposed to be paying attention; certainly not any of our political class.

So they've just voted for another appallingly expensive (and growing) rail project, for a trivial task that could have been taken care of less glamorous but much cheaper bus, and brushed aside all considerations of sticking future generations with the bill.

Your local politicians at work. Thanks, kids! (And the feds, too, who encourage such nonsense with their "mass-transit" funding out of their budgets we can't afford either.

We're doomed.

FTC Controls the Blogosphere

2009-10-07T10:45:00.000-07:00

The FTC, an agency of the US federal government in charge of asserting power over business and media, in October 2009 extended its rules about product endorsements in advertising into the blog world. If you write a product in your blog, you must--not as a moral or business obligation, but by government rule--mention if you received any compensation from the product maker, including receiving the product for free (as is common in product reviews in many markets).

Note that these rules do not apply to anything appearing in a conventional print newspaper or other print periodical.

As you would expect, the blogosphere--you should forgive the expression--is abuzz, and part of that buzz is coming up with examples of ridiculous corner cases.

And also ridiculous examples of noncorner cases, such as the argument that software sent to a tech reviewer is worthless after the package is opened; or that hardware the vendor refuses to accept back (a common type of bribe-like object) should not be included; or when vendors who offer to sell the product to the reviewer after the review is published, for a special low price, that shouldn't be considered compensation; or galley proofs of books sent for review, which proofs are not really marketable, should not be considered compensation. Well, no: If you accept the FTC's right to rule in this environment, then the above examples are exactly what the FTC means.

The whole problem is easily resolved for most bloggers, on the face of it, by simple boilerplate, as one writer has already done, along the lines of "Software/hardware/books reviewed in this space are in most cases sent to the reviewer free in hopes of being reviewed. When the review is finished, some materials are returned, some donated, some retained by the reviewer. The reviewer makes no representation to the vendors that products will be reviewed, or reviewed favorably."

IN specific cases, one can say, "The latest model of the iPhone, sent to us by Apple for review..." And then at the end of the review, "The device will be returned to Apple in six weeks (to allow for the possibility of corrections)." If you are reluctant to explain to the reader that you are keeping the product, free, or buying it at a "reviewer's discount," then you are obviously engaging in a conflict of interest.

And so on. But that's not the core issue here, not at all.

As a libertarian, I take the First Amendment more seriously than the FTC does, and so find no authorization in the Constitution for an exception to that amendment that grants a government agency authority to control the press, not even if it would be a really, really good idea and the poor dumb populace isn't capable of noticing whether an endorser is paid, and not even if it really is a good idea for the writers to acknowledge conflicts of interest.

The government and the courts have for a long time taken the basic position that the 1st Amendment's highlighting of the limits of government power apply only to daily and weekly and monthly newspapers; not to radio or TV and not to any less formal publications, and certainly not to anything in the advertising field. If it's not a newspaper, it's up for grabs. The Constitution doesn't say anything about this, of course, but when has that ever stopped anybody?

I think that's idiotic. No, I think it's abuse of government power, and this instinct to assert power in the teeth of Constitutional restrictions isn't just applied to the press and speech; Bush II should have been an object lesson in why we must stop government assumption of nonconstitutional power in every area. Because abuse of power knows no limits.

The government has no authority under the Constitution to make laws or rules or regulations about what people write or say, regardless of the venue, the medium, or the purpose. If you, as a public-spirited citizen, want to protect the public from bad words, bad opinions, misleading assertions and offers, you will have to find another method. Force, the threat of the use of force, fraud, and breaking of contract are all appropriate areas for laws; beyond this, no.

Insurance Company Contract Abuse

Which, as an aside, is something that puzzles me about the current healthcare debate. One obvious-seeming abuse of contract cited regularly is insurance companies that cancel policies when the insured becomes ill with a covered illness -- this seems like a straightforward violation of the contract. All we would need would be the government to assert that it will treat such violations of contract seriously, maybe setting up an agency to focus on this abuse.

Another example is the insurance company waiting until you have an expensive covered illness, then going back over your original application (filled out decades ago, perhaps) looking for technical inaccuracies that are not material to the insurance underwriting or to the present case.

A law could simply clarify that in this area, as in many others, minor, nonmaterial, and honest errors on applications cannot be used to deny later fulfillment of the insurance contract; and that after a given period of time has passed, the application shall be considered good on its face, thus forcing the insurance companies to check the applications for errors at the time they are submitted. The companies currently don't bother checking for errors or clarifications, knowing that if an expensive procedure arises, they can go back over the original app with a fine-toothed comb and any errors they find - no matter how innocent - can be used to deny payment.

This is a simple clarification of a contract law, one that would clear up a lot of things without requiring the government to engage in idiocies (such as requiring coverage at favorable rates regardless of preexisting conditions, which is crazy). Note that this kind of "after x period, everything here is accepted as true" provision is commonly written into contracts by businesses; of course, since we sign their contracts, and they are nonnegotiable, we don't get commonsense provisions like that.

"Is Capitalism Bad for Art?" - Stephen Hicks lecture

2009-10-06T17:33:00.001-07:00

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might be interested in an upcoming lecture by Prof. Stephen Hicks of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford College (Illinois). Here is his description:

Is capitalism bad for art?

I will be giving a talk with that title at California State University, East Bay, on October 14. Thanks to Professor Stephen Schmanske and the Smith Center for inviting me.

My theme will be the relationship between art and liberal cultures, focusing on economically free cultures especially.

One part of my talk will discuss how economic liberalism is empowering for artists both materially and psychologically, and part of my evidence for that will be historical: Why were the greatest of the great eras in art history classical Athens, Renaissance Florence and Venice, the Dutch Golden Age, Paris in the late nineteenth century. Why not, say, Sparta in the 5th century BCE? Or Milan in the 15th century? Or Denmark in the 17th? Or Portugal in the 19th?

Another part of my talk will take up the perplexing question of why, since the late 19th century, so many artists have taken anti-business and anti-capitalist stances. Pablo Picasso is representative here, having said, famously, “The merchant — there’s the enemy.” A fascinating set of adversarial (and self-destructive) issues there.

The lecture is based on my current book project, The Fate of Art under Capitalism, which I discussed in an earlier post.

Sound interesting? It does to me! --mac

"End the Fed!" Book hits NYT Bestseller List!

2009-09-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

Congressman Ron Paul, whose run for the Republican Presidential nomination last year was one of the few refreshing things to happen to the Republican Party in decades, published his book, End The Fed, a few weeks ago and it has already come out in the top-10 new books on Amazon, as well as the NT Times and the WSJ bestseller lists -- quite a feat for a book of libertarian politics that advocates ending the Federal Reserve!

Paul writes, "Since 1913, the Fed has had it all its own way: booms and busts, dollar depreciation, redistribution to the government and the big banks from the middle and working classes. But just as Andrew Jackson abolished the predecessor of the Fed, we too can knock over this dangerous institution. End The Fed teaches all the fascinating history, and tells us what we can do for the future."

I've started reading it and it is indeed very readable and quite shocking. Paul's bill to force the Fed to open its books to Congress has received surprising support in Congress, from the Democratic left in particular -- the sense of the Fed's enormous power and secretive operations is creating fear and worry. I recommend this book; it may be the only economic-policy book you ever read, but it will be the most important.

Interested? You can order this slim but important volume from Amazon at this link:

http://www.amazon.com/End-Fed-Ron-Paul/dp/0446549193/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254160345&sr=1-1

"More Government Won't Help," Ron Paul

2009-09-25T14:17:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul made this speech in the United States House of Representatives, September 23, 2009.

He begins, "Government has been mismanaging medical care for more than 45 years; for every problem it has created it has responded by exponentially expanding the role of government." He goes on to list 16 specific points, some examples of how the government has screwed up or set up for failure the medical care system, and other points suggesting better paths for us to follow to improve health care in the US.

The thing that amazes me in this debate is one simple example of the perversity of our political system: The government (including the president) assert that more competition is the key to a better healthcare system. They might be right. But one big reason we don't have more competition is government regulations forbidding it in some areas: Every state controls its own insurance companies, and forbids, by statute, selling insurance policies across state lines.

So you can't, as a Californian, decide that an insurance company operating in Arizona offers better coverage or better rates, and buy a policy there. It's against the law, in almost every state in the Union.

Recently, Republicans have suggested allowing cross-state-line competition in insurance, only to be roundly ignored. There are two reasons: First, state insurance commissions don't want to give up their regulatory power, which they can't exercise across state lines. And second, those who believe in government goodness are happy to list many reasons why it's better to exercise this control over insurance companies, who would otherwise do bad things. To control insurance-company abuse, they've set up 50 regulatory bodies, one in each state.

And when that doesn't work -- and insurance-company abuse of its customers is rampant, despite this supposedly noble political and bureaucratic control over them -- the solution offered is *never* to rethink the whole thing; no, it is to add more control. Always. There is, you see, no such thing as government failure that should lead to the government retreating from an area; only market failure that leads to government intervention.

Another level of irony is that the main forms of outrageous abuse insurance companies engage in could, in fact, easily be managed by the insurance commissioners doing their jobs better, and a few simple inexpensive laws being passed. Yes, laws.

For example: Insurance companies violate contract with customers by ending their coverage as soon as they catch an expensive disease. They do this by combing through the insurance application, which may have been filled out thirty years ago, to find apparent errors, to justify cancelling the policy. This is acting in bad faith, from a contract-law perspective, and a simple adjustment of contract law in each state would suffice to end this abuse. It's a contract-law issue, and shouldn't be used to justify government takeover of medical insurance. In most contract situations, simple rules say that if a contract is entered into in good faith, and a nonfraudulent error is not found within a reasonable time by the other party, then the error is considered nonmaterial and cannot be used to cancel the contract. For ordinary contracts, for example, if I make a spelling error in the name of my street or my house address, that is not fraudulently intended, then this cannot be made the basis for cancelling the contract twenty years later. Only in insurance contracts is this reasonable limitation not enforced. Our state insurance commissioners -- the ones whose campaigns for reelection are heavily funded by insurance companies -- should take care of this problem. They could. They won't. Their job isn't to solve problems; their job is to get reelected, which they do by demonizing their subjects and passing abusive laws that cause more problems.

How long will you continue to believe that this politicized system is a good way to solve social problems, in the teeth of the evidence to the contrary?

"Beware the Stalin in Progressive Hearts"

2009-09-25T13:54:00.000-07:00

Columnist Mark Tapscott makes some good points about how power tempts even progressives to abuse power -- in the name of good, of course, always in the name of good.

It's the fundamental libertarian insight: Every one of us, with access to the levers of power, hates to simply accept situations in which we might not 'win.' If we give everyone else full control over their own lives -- but no forced control over the lives of others -- then some people won't Do the Right Thing. We can come up with rattling good examples, too, of the negative impact on the rest of us. We think these examples justify our seizing of power over the lives of others.

Us. Over them. Never them over us.

And that's the problem: If only you, and people who agree with you as to what The Right Thing is, exercise this power over others, all is well. But sooner or later, Bad People take charge, and they proceed to use the power you granted to Good People to do things the Bad People think are The Right Thing, but, as you and your likeminded colleagues know, are really Bad Things.

How can one guarantee that only the Good People have access to power?

The fundamental insight of the Founders of the U.S. was this: There is and can be no reliable way to guarantee that. It is impossible to build a system of righteous tyranny that will remain in the hands of the righteous. Not even religious regimes are immune, though they think themselves appointed by God.

The Founders finally came around to the understanding that, if this is the case, then the only good government is one that is strictly limited -- limited, limited, limited! -- in its authority and its power over everyone else. It will still abuse its powers, but those powers will do less damage than an unlimited government would do.

It was the most original idea in political economy since the Athenians. It still is.

And it's an idea that has been lost. The average American is very uncomfortable with the idea that the government should be limited in its power to do good. The problem -- that we have different ideas of what good is, and where to draw the line - they see as just a quibble, a detail, something that even if imperfectly resolved, is better than just letting people do what they want.

Thus we have a political system used primarily for the purpose of each of us using government power to extract behaviors and moneys from others, to authorize and pay for and force things that we think are really, really important -- but not so important that we want to pay for them ourselves.

We want public parks because we want parks and want somebody else to pay for them.

We want government health care because we want health care and want somebody else to pay for it.

We want everything and anything we want, and we don't want to pay for it, so we look for excuses to force others to pay for it. We demonize "the rich" (somebody who makes more than your ambitions) as a way of pretending that it's not only OK, but even righteous to steal money from them to pay for things we really, really want but we really, really don't want to pay for with our own money.

And we hire politicians to make speeches to justify our greed.

Take the University of California school system, currently in lockdown because students and staff are protesting having their funding cut back to where it was, oh, a couple of years ago, and protesting having their heavily subsidized fees raised to a level closer to a third of what a private, unsubsidized school would cost. The students are actually greedy because they don't even want to pay a third; they want to pay less, ideally nothing; they want somebody else to pay for it. Nobody blinks at this. Nobody thinks this is wrong in any way. They point to this or that student who is poor, or comes from a poor family, and asserts that without the taxpayer subsidy, they would be shut out of an education. And thus a chance to become middle class.

If this were true, the direction of a solution set would lie in, first, means testing for student fee subsidies, with only the poorest students getting subsidies, with attention paid to alternative funding such as student loans and parttime jobs. Second, the subsidizing entity - the government, that is - should have the right to approve specific majors and exclude specific other majors for subsidized students -- exclude the majors that do not lead to middle-class lifestyles. You won't be able to major in surfing or basketweaving -- or for that matter in French medieval history or, come to it, in journalism. There's no future in them, so if we are helping poor students become middle class, then -- here it comes! -- we can't just let them choose their own majors, their own life paths! Can we? Of course not!

Think that's silly? Many another politicized part of our lives are under bureaucratic control and laws justified on the grounds that taxpayers have to pay for things. You have to wear a seatbelt because if you get hurt, the taxpayer-subsidized cops and cleanup crews have to clean up after you, and the taxpayer-subsidized healthcare system might have to pay for your medical care and maybe your welfare if you're hurt badly enough. Many have called for controlling foods allowed to be sold to the public on the grounds that people's bad eating habits cause health problems that the taxpayers end up paying for.

First, we offer to give you something for free. Then we offer to help you make decisions about your life that affect that thing you're getting for free. Makes sense. Welcome to serfdom.

"Bill would give president emergency control of Internet"

2009-08-29T19:17:00.000-07:00

CNET, Aug 28, 2009:

"[Bill would] permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity." emergency.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10320096-38.html?tag=nl.e703

"The new version [of a bill winding thru the US Senate--S.773 (excerpt)] would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat."

It would also set up a "cybersecurity professionals" certification and require some private-sector servers to be managed by someone with the certification.

Industry players are "troubled," the article says.

No shit.

"Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. 'We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records,'Rockefeller said.

"The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do."

Thank you. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Over and over, government players rear back on their hind legs and arrogate to themselves the authority to direct the actions of the rest of the nation (and the world), most commonly in areas in which government institutions themselves have failed to show any competence. They can't protect their own records; they can't organize their own cybersecurity; let them boss us around on these topics.

But then, nobody ever got elected or reelected by announcing that the government shouldn't get bogged down in some no-win situation, or should stay out of some area where it has no competence, or learn a lesson from its own failures and figure out a way to get out of the way instead of wading in deeper.

No, you get reelected by seizing on crises and taking advantage of the automatic assumption -- which the press will be happy not to even think to question -- that the first, best, and sole solution set lies in the exercise of more government power.

Well, why not. It's not like anybody is ever going to hold you to any standards of competence or performance. The city is incompetent at its basic job of protecting New Orleans, so the state government fails to intervene, leaving it to the feds to jump in -- too late. Make speeches, take helicopter rides, criticize partisan rivals (only), pass enormous spending bills -- and two years later you have a tale of waste, fraud, and only incremental improvements. But not to worry: The press isn't going to hold your feet to the fire. And if they do -- if there is a front-page multi-day story on how awful the government performed even at its most basic tasks -- well, still not to worry, because they won't follow up and keep hammering -- they've published their investigative report, now it's back to business as usual.

Next election, no worries because the press won't lean on you about your failed promises, your incompetence, or the government's general failures.

So we have what should be a big fat laugh: The feds want to take over private Internet network companies in times of 'crisis,' defined by the President -- who this year happens to be Barack Obama, but remember that recently it was one of the George Bushes, and it could be somebody like that again in the future -- and this new knucklehead will have the power you thought safely in the hands of your favorite political party, whichever one that is.

We are all idiots. Blind leading the blind? Dumb leading the dumb!