Radical Centrist

Please! Shrug! Just Shrug!

2009-05-14T11:04:00.003-04:00

A request to the executives of the banks which are not sucking at the public Tarp Teat:

The U.S. Treasury Dept has decided that it has the authority to regulate your salaries. It has decided that the value of your labor should be determined, not by the market, but by the same moron politicians who caused the collapse in the first place.

I say, please, for the love of reason, if they cut your salary, walk away. Just walk away. Do not let yourself become a slave of the state.

If they think they can do your jobs better than you, let them try. Let them see what the world is like without you.

And please read "Atlas Shrugged".

I ask you to do these things, not for me, but for yourselves.

Obama Budget Cuts Visualization

2009-05-02T23:13:00.002-04:00

Let's put the Obamanation's "budget cuts" into perspective.

Open Letter to DHS

2009-04-16T14:28:00.003-04:00

Since you, Virginia, and Missouri have decided that my friends and I, who support Ron Paul, vote Libertarian, want to restore the Constitution, exercise our Second Amendment rights and generally disagree with the Government are terrorists, I wanted to make sure you spell my name right when you come to collect us.

It is Rich Paul. That's P-A-U-L.

I would just hate for all my friends to be rounded up and shipped off to Syria to be tortured -- that *is* what we do with "terrorists" in the new Bizarro-America, isn't it? -- and to be left here alone to endure the Socialist hell-hole which the Bush and Obama administrations are cooperating in creating.

Molon Labe!

Live Free or Die; Death is not the Worst of Evils

2009-02-06T14:24:00.005-05:00

Just a quick note to let y'all know that I have abandoned my life, such as it was, in South Carolina, and am currently posting from Gettysburg, en-route to New Hampshire, the Free State.

Please have a look at the Free State Project at http://freestateproject.org/, if you don't know why.

As America's Second Great Depression bears down on us, again caused by the Federal Reserve, and again attributed to free markets which do not even exist, the time has come for those of us who love Liberty to concentrate ourselves somewhere where we can make some difference, where we can have an impact, where we can speak with the resonance of many voices raised together against the impending explosion in Federal power, and where we can -- should the Federal Government so overstep the bounds of reason, of decency, and of the laws of economics that is brings about it's own destruction -- be surrounded by like minded and well armed people, prepared to pick up the pieces and see that whatever Socialist monstrosity follows the collapse will not be able subsume the entirety of what was once the freest nation on the face of the earth.

Let the red states and the blue states fight each other to the death over whether their salvation lies in Fascism or in Communism. My salvation lies in Freedom, and if I must choose a hill upon which to die for it, I choose a hill in the Free State of New Hampshire.

In Liberty

Rich Paul

What do humanitarians eat?

2008-12-06T02:43:00.003-05:00

The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.

But he is confronted by two awkward facts; first, that the competent do not need his assistance; and second, that the majority of people … positively do not want to be "done good" by the humanitarian…. Of course, what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.
--- Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (New York, 1943), p. 241.

Classic and true. Check out the "regarding" link for an analysis of the Great Society, one of the many chains by which we are bound.

For Schiff: We told you so, you RUDE rat bastards!

2008-12-04T18:07:00.003-05:00

What pisses me off as I look back over these videos is how rude and condescending these rat bastards were to Peter Schiff, economic adviser to Ron Paul and one of the very few who warned us that the imaginary prosperity we were enjoying would come to tears, because it was a fiat money bubble which had to burst.

So for all of you who laughed at our warnings then, here is a video. Enjoy it. Then go fuck yourselves. If you don't fuck yourselves to death, go read some Austrian Economics.

Here is my prediction: the worst is still yet to come. I'm not sure what Peter is saying these days, he's never interviewed anymore, but it is mine.
If you want to patronize Peter's company, it's at http://europac.net/

How low can we go? I hope we never know.

2008-11-24T12:21:00.003-05:00

The financial press, which has become little more than cheerleaders for the DOW, won't cover this. I will.

The economy faces a slump deeper than the Great Depression and a growing deficit threatens the credit of the United States itself, former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead, said at the Reuters Global Finance Summit on Wednesday.
Whitehead, 86, said the prospect of worsening consumer credit woes combined with an overtaxed federal government make him fear that the current slump is far from over.
"I think it would be worse than the depression," Whitehead said. "We're talking about reducing the credit of the United States of America, which is the backbone of the economic system." Whitehead encountered plenty of crises during his 38 years at the investment banking firm and was a young boy during the 1930s.
Whitehead warned the country's financial strength is at risk due to the sweeping demand for tax relief and a long list of major government spending plans.
"I see nothing but large increases in the deficit, all of which are serving to decrease the credit standing of America," said Whitehead, who served as chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp after the World Trade Center was destroyed during the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Whitehead, who helped make Goldman a top-tier Wall Street firm and led its international expansion, left in 1984 to become a deputy secretary of state under Ronald Reagan.
He warned that the country's record deficit is poised to balloon as the public calls on government for more support.
"Before I go to sleep at night, I wonder if tomorrow is the day Moody's and S&P will announce a downgrade of U.S. government bonds," he said. "Eventually U.S. government bonds would no longer be the triple-A credit that they've always been."
There are at least ten "trillion dollar problems," facing the United States, he said, including social security, expanding health insurance, rebuilding infrastructure and increased spending on green energy. At the same time, the public does not want to pay for it.
"The public is not prepared to increase taxes. Both parties were for reducing taxes, reducing income to government, and both parties favored a number of new programs -- all very costly and all done by the government," he said.
Large deficits can weaken the country's credit and increase its borrowing costs, which already constitute a significant part of funding to cover expenses. Whitehead said it could take "several years" for the current problems to be resolved.
Whitehead said he is speaking out on this topic because he is concerned no lawmakers are against these new spending programs and none will stand up and call for higher taxes.
"I just want to get people thinking about this, and to realize this is a road to disaster," said Whitehead. "I've always been a positive person and optimistic, but I don't see a solution here."

Don't blame me, I voted Libertarian

Clinton Saves the Day!

2008-10-10T23:51:00.010-04:00

From the New York Times archives:

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending
By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Published: September 30, 1999

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.
"Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements," said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. "Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market."
Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.

There are a few things which are interesting here:

It shows some of the roots of the current mess
It shows that the problem was government
It shows that Paul Krugman was on vacation, and that the New York Times is actually capable of getting a simple economic analysis correct when that happens.

Of course they weren't as correct as the articles here, but what do you expect? I'm just happy that the New York Times didn't just give us their usual "the government says it's OK, that that's good enough for us" boilerplate. The amazing thing about a dancing bear is not how well it dances, but that it dances at all!

Quote of the Day

2008-10-06T18:18:00.004-04:00

From the von Mises Institute

The most famous depression in modern times, of course, was the one that began in a typical financial panic in 1929 and lasted until the advent of World War II. After the disaster of 1929, economists and politicians resolved that this must never happen again. The easiest way of succeeding at this resolve was, simply to define "depressions" out of existence. From that point on, America was to suffer no further depressions. For when the next sharp depression came along, in 1937–38, the economists simply refused to use the dread name, and came up with a new, much softer-sounding word: "recession." From that point on, we have been through quite a few recessions, but not a single depression.

If only actual problems could be caused that easily. In order to prevent the reality of a depression (or recession, if you prefer), they only need to do two things:

Get out of the way
Better define and enforce property rights

But then again, if they came up with simple solutions, they wouldn't be able to hide their corruption. People would actually understand what they were doing!

And if they came up with solutions that worked, people would understand how little we really need them.

Bush Attacks Market For Working

2008-09-13T12:55:00.006-04:00

So now, the Confuser in Chief has decided to start a brand new war, this one is against the free market. Of course Republicans claim to want a free market, but few of them understand that having a free market involves things like not having corporate welfare, not having price and wage controls, and actually leaving people free to buy and sell based on what they believe to be best, not what some politician thinks best.

So now, Dubya the Decider has decided to crack down on anyone "taking advantage" of the changes in the oil market brought about by the hurricane by adjusting their prices to match reality.

Some who -- like Bush -- never studied economics, must be asking themselves "is this guy arguing for higher prices?" Yes, I am. Why? Because that's what reality requires.

For a time, there is less refining capactity in America. That means we are producing less gasoline. If we continue to attempt to consume the same amount of gasoline, we will have shortages. We cannot consume more than we produce. The free market has a solution to this problem. It's called a price. When the price goes up, people -- even people far away from the hurricaine -- will have incentive to consume less. Prices are always moving towards -- but never reaching -- the point where supply and demand are equal. Any change in production or in the value of consumption must be reflected in the price, or the market fails to work.

So what happens people are frightened by Bush's threat, and fail to adjust the price to match reality? Shortages, and lines. Waste, as people continue to use fuel which could serve more important needs for less important needs ... as long as they can get it. Then lines at the gas station as they try to replace the fuel they wasted, in order to meet their more important needs. We saw this in the 1970's, when the "free market" Republican in office imposed price and wage controls. Does anyone remember the lines at the pump, the "out of gas" signs appearing on gas stations? I do.

The lobotomized market Bush proposes is the road to disaster. A free market, as proposed by the Libertarian Party is the only cure.

Pauls, and Baldwins, and Barrs ... Oh, My!

2008-09-11T14:17:00.019-04:00

There has been much debate among Libertarian and libertarian leaning voters as to which way to vote in the coming election. I wanted to share the thinking which led me to my decision. Firstly, I should state my minimal criteria for considering a candidate:

The candidate must argue for shrinking government significantly.
The candidate must not argue for growing government in any area at the level at which he is running (e.g. a candidate who argued for State regulation of abortion would be acceptable as a candidate for Federal office, but not at the State leve.)
The candidate must not have any clear mental incapacity, such as bigotry.
The party platform must be acceptable.
If the election of the leader in question is likely, he must have sufficient credibility to convince me that he is likely govern as he campaigned.

There have been three men suggested as potential candidates for libertarian voters:

Ron Paul -- Write-In
Chuck Baldwin. -- Constitution Party
Bob Barr -- Libertarian Party

Clearly, neither Obama nor McCain deserve a second thought. Each has devoted his life to the growth of government, albeit in slightly different directions. If I'm on a jury considering their fate, I might vote for them -- to hang -- but that's the only way they'll get a vote from me without changing virtually every position they hold.

Paul is not a candidate, and although I would frankly prefer him to either of the others on the list, I will not write-in a candidate. It's cheaper and easier to simply stay home on election day. Write-ins are meaningless — they will not be counted, tabulated, recorded, or announced. Nobody will ever know how many people write in Paul's name, or anybody else's for that matter.

Baldwin fails #2, and #4. His party’s platform welcomes only Christians, which is unacceptable to me, both as a matter of policy and a matter of strategy. He also wants the Federal government to control abortion. This does not mean that I consider him a bad guy. I consider him to be a generally Liberty oriented candidate. None the less, I cannot support him.

Barr meets all my criteria. He is the only candidate who does, and therefore, I can elide the more subjective process of choosing between multiple acceptable candidates.

There have been some recent criticisms of Barr, which deserve consideration, so I'll address those briefly.

Barr is a recent convert to Libertarian who may not be sincere
This would be a serious issue, if it was likely that Barr would be elected. It is much less important in this election. It will be at least a couple more cycles before we have grown the party enough to have to worry about that. I'm looking forward to it!
Barr is a recent convert to Libertarian who may not have the best interests of the party in mind.
This is an important issue during the primary season. It does not much matter at this point. Barr's what we've got. Votes for Barr will not make him president, but they will make our party credible, if they arrive in sufficient number.
Barr is a recent convert to Libertarian who may not have the best interests of the party in mind.
This is an important issue during the primary season. It does not much matter at this point. Barr's what we've got. Votes for Barr will not make him president, but they will make our party credible, if they arrive in sufficient number.
Barr's strategy has been poor when dealing with Ron Paul and/or the Campaign for Liberty.
This is an important issue during the primary season. It does not much matter at this point. Barr's what we've got. Votes for Barr will not make him president, but they will make our party credible, if they arrive in sufficient number.

The bottom line, as I see it, is that we who value freedom must rally behind Barr, regardless of whether we supported his nomination, because he is the nominee we have. For this election cycle, he's the only nominee we have. It is what it is.

Never forget, as you consider your vote in the next election, the words of a wise Libertarian thinker, Ron Paul:

It's not about me, it's about the MESSAGE.

Sarah Palin and Victory

2008-09-05T12:53:00.010-04:00

I was somewhat encouraged by the selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate for John McCain. I even went so far as to say that the best likely outcome -- that is, the best outcome which does not involve breaking the stranglehold of the Republican and Democratic wings of the Big Government Party on the American government -- for America might be if McCain was elected and immediately dropped dead.

I still believe that, but Palin stands out because she is a Queen in a deck of Jokers. She stands out not because she understands what is best for America, but because she misunderstands our plight a little bit less than McSame and Biden.

On the subject of foreign policy, I am sad to say, she seems to be as dazed and confused as they. She opened her acceptance of the nomination with error. She accepts, in her words, "the call to help our nominee for president to protect and defend America". That is a fine job, but it is not the one for which she has applied. The job for which she has applied is commenced with an oath. Her oath, should she be elected, is not to protect and defend America, the American people, the American economy, American prestige, American power abroad, or American influence in foreign lands. Her oath, should she be elected, will be to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That is the first and most important responsibility of any American elected official.

She goes on to say that McCain was criticized for his unwillingness to "lose an election than to see his country lose a war". This statement is in error in many ways. Firstly, the war, had Congress declared war as the Constitution requires, would have been declared against the Government of Iraq. The Government of Iraq against which our Congress failed to declare war no longer exists, and therefore seems to be rather poorly positioned to win a war. The head of the state against which we did not declare war was a man named Saddam Hussein. An evil bastard, to be sure. He is, however, no better positioned to win a war than the Iraqi government. He has, you see, been hung by the neck until dead, dead, dead. This seems an inauspicious position from which to declare victory.

If the question in Iraq is not winning a war against a defunct enemy, or losing to the dead leader of a non-existent government, what is the question, today, in Iraq?

The question is "Is it worth spending more American treasure, atop the trillion dollars we have already spent, in order to defend a foreign nation against the ethnic and cultural divisions which have existed in it since the British decided that three disparate peoples should be forced to live as a single nation".

The answer is no.

The question is "Will America benefit by providing potential terrorists with the corpses of friends and relatives, dead at our hands, to avenge."

The answer is no.

The question is "Is it worth the life of one more American soldier to provide security and prosperity to a foreign people who have never posed a credible threat to America, but have never paid a single dollar in taxes to America, nor sworn to protect and defend her Constitution, nor thanked her for removing the Odious Hussein, nor supported her which she was in need, nor defended her values, nor offered her anything except animosity.

The answer is HELL NO.

As far as I am concerned, America entered a broken country, removed the worst of the impediments to it's reform, and spent far too much blood and treasure attempting to offer her security and prosperity. The results have been imperfect, but Iraqis are no worse off then they were when we came. It is within the power of the Iraqi people to reform their nation, or to descend into chaos. The time has come for them to choose, and to live with the consequences of their decision.

But let us, for a moment, return to Sarah Palin. There is another glaring error in her speech which must be addressed. It illustrates either her failure to understand the American system of justice, or her willingness to sacrifice American values for expediency. That error is her statement that "Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America ... he's worried that someone won't read them their rights".

Ms. Palin, it is after, not before, the investigation that Americans determine the guilt or innocence of those accused of crimes. We do not base the tactics of the investigation on the guilt of the targets, nor on the severity of their crime, but on the bedrock of our immutable, written, Constitution. Americans -- true Americans -- choose to accept risk rather than to risk tyranny. They choose not to sacrifice their Liberty for temporary Security, knowing that a people who does so deserves -- and will receive -- neither Liberty nor Security. True Americans choose to risk their Lives, their Fortunes, and their Sacred Honors, not for absolute protection against every possible risk, but for protection of their Liberty against the ever looming danger of a government run amok. They know that a criminal freed due to a violation of his rights may kill them. They accept that danger because they heed the words of John Stark, the most famous New Hampshire soldier to serve in the Revolution:

Live Free or Die: Death is not the worst of evils.

I do not agree with Palin that Liberty must be sacrificed in order to achieve reasonable Security. But even were she to convince me that I must choose between them, I would choose dangerous Freedom over the illusory Security of Servitude.

In the final analysys, Palin is an unacceptable candididate because she, by her own words, is willing to sacrifice Liberty for Security, because she is willing to trade American blood for an illusary "victory" against the dead leader of a defunct government, and because she does not understand that no nation, no matter how powerful, and no matter how well intentioned, can impose it's will on other nations with impunity. For all these reasons, the selection of Palin does not change my choice. I'll be voting for Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate for President, and the best hope to restore Liberty to America.

General Curtis claims Bob Barr is a traitor

2008-07-18T18:15:00.005-04:00

This commentator claims that Bob Barr is "A Traitor" to the Republican Wing of the Big Government Party, because he is not supporting the McSame canidacy.

The problem is, that Bob Barr left the Republican Wing of the Big Government Party years ago, and was even a member of the Libertarian Party's board before becoming a candidate for the nomination and a candidate for president.

Wouldn't endorsing McBama be the error, given this fact?

As for the claim that Barr is "stealing votes" from the Republican Wing of the Big Government Party, the reality is that they have been defrauding Small Government advocates for decades, stealing their votes and their money, by saying "If only we get Congress, we'll shrink government".

This was a lie. It was so proved when they got congress, and did nothing to shrink government.

So then they cried "If only we get the presidency, we'll shrink government".

That was another lie. It was so proved when the got the presidency, and government grew even faster than it had under the Democratic Wing of the One Big Party.

So now they cry that small government advocates owe them their votes. They are entitled, they say, to the everlasting, unquestioning, unrewarded support of anyone who believes in small government, because they have, when it suited their purpose, spouted a little bit of free market rhetoric.

I say that what small government advocates owe the Republican Wing of the Big Government Party is a class action lawsuit, in order to recover the money out of which they were defrauded over the years. This, a knife in the back, and a kick in the head would put us about even with the Republican Wing of the Big Government Party.

Actually, now, if we want to get even, we'll need to do one more thing:

If -- and it's a big if -- we can find any evidence that the Republican Wing of the Big Government Party ever had any allegience to the Constitution, the Free Market, Limited Government, the Rule of Law, Capitalism, Freedom, or anything other than staying in power, we should call them traitors.

McBama Ahead of Barr on Suicide Advocacy

2008-07-18T15:21:00.007-04:00

The Chief Evangelist of the Environmentologist Cult, Al Gore, has decided that nobody should ever burn oil for any purpose again.

He claims that McBama, the undifferentiated mess composed of the presidential candidates of the Big Government Party, is way ahead of most politicians in stiving to reach his goal of economic suicide.

I don't know about most politicians, but he sure is way ahead of Bob Barr is forcing us to return to the Horse and Buggy Era! Bob has not recognized any need to abandon technology and return to the era when people could count on their 'Back To Nature' lifestyles to keep them alive to a ripe old age of 40, and sometimes 50!

Barr does not understand that success is sin, and that we need to atone for our lack of grinding poverty and starvation with some good old Human Sacrifice!

Link: My Way News - Gore sets 'moon shot' goal on climate change

A Good, Old Fashioned Bank Run!

2008-07-15T16:19:00.003-04:00

An interesting story above! Looks like there was a good, old fashioned bank run at IndyMac! That's sad for the people who still have their money in the badly broken U.S. banking system, but at least people are starting to wake up! Hopefully, more people will start pulling their money out of the system and putting it on gold, silver, oil, or something else which is real. Normally, I would include real-estate on the list, but personally I think that market still has a long way to fall, and as long as Helicopter Ben keeps dumping money into the system, whether through Corporate Welfare Bailouts or through simple printing of counterfeit money backed by nothing but a politician's promise, the market cannot adjust to reality. I can hear Scotty, down in Engineering, screaming:

She canna take the strain, Captain! She's breaking up! I canna change the laws of Economics, Captain!

So stock up on something of real value, guys, 'cause either we're heading for trouble!

Speculators and Oil Prices

2008-05-13T14:29:00.003-04:00

In his recent tirade against the free market, Socialist senator Levin, of Michigan, gave birth to the following puff of rhetorical flatulance:

Much of this increase can be attributed to speculators, who buy and sell futures contracts for crude oil and leverage them just to make a profit, creating an artificial 'paper demand' that does not accurately reflect actual market conditions.

First off, it should be pointed out that *ALL* productive activity, including (of course) investing in commodities and anything else, is carried on "just to make a profit". The purpose of production is to provide an output which is more valuable than the inputs -- land, capital, raw materials, and labor -- required to produce it. This difference is called profit.

In the case of commodities traders, the principal is the same. The difference is that their 'input' is a commodity at one point in time, and their 'output' is the same commodity at another point in time. Like any entrepreneur, their business is prognostication, and they make money if -- and only if -- they reach the correct conclusions about the future.

The need for 'speculators'

The specter of 'speculators' is too frequently raised by the economically ignorant to be ignored. Most people do not understand their function, nor the service they provide, and they are therefore easily used as scapegoats, as Marx and Stalin used 'the bourgeois', and their spiritual brother Hitler used Jews. In their defense, I will therefore explain, in a simplified way, the service that 'speculators' provide to consumers.

There are two types of trade which an 'evil speculator' can engage in. These are called 'short' and 'long' trades.

A long trader believes that the current price of a good is lower than the future price of the same good. He therefore buys the good now (raising the current market price), and sells the good later (lowering the future market price). Assuming the 'speculator' is right, the consumers will pay a higher price now (when prices are relatively low), but will pay a lower price later (when prices will be relatively high).

A short trader believes that the current price of a good is higher than the future price of the same good. He therefore borrows and sells the good now (lowering the current market price), and later buys the good to repay the lender (raising the future market price). Assuming the 'speculator' is right, the consumer will pay a lower price now (when prices are relatively high), and will pay a higher price later (when prices will be relatively low).

The short trader cannot operate, of course, without long traders from whom to borrow the good. Also note that when I say 'short trader' and 'long trader', I am speaking about an individual's role in a given transaction. Traders execute both short and long trades.

In either of these cases, of course, the trader makes money if and only if he correctly predicts the market. Money is made by buying cheap and selling dear. If a long trader is wrong, he will be stuck with a good for which he paid dearly, and must either store indefinably (which costs money) or sell cheap. If a short trader is wrong, he will have to replace a borrowed good which he sold cheap with the same good, for which he must pay dearly.

This explanation of commodities trading is somewhat simplified, there are actually a great variety of contract types and terms, but it illustrates the principals behind commodities trading, the benifit which these 'evil speculators' provide to society, and why they must be permitted to continue to provide those benifits.

The alternative is a 'lobotomized market', in which people burn wheat instead of coal in the winter, since they can save money by doing so, and then starve -- or eat the seeds of their future havests -- in the summer, since the wheat which the 'evil speculators' would have saved for them has been -- quite literally -- thrown into the fire.

What Levin Should Do

If Levin truely belives that there are too many people trading long, and that the current price of oil is higher than the future price of oil, there is an action he can legitimately take in order to correct their error. He can sell oil short. As stated above, this will lower the current price of oil, and raise the future price of oil. Of course, if he is wrong, he will be doing harm, not good. The beauty of the free market is that he will automatically pay for any harm he does out of his own pocket, and if he is consistently wrong, he will blow through his considerable wealth, leaving him with nothing to harm us with in the future.

It is sad that politics does not have similar automatic and unavoidable penalties for being consistently wrong.

Isn't it nice when criminals make restitution?

2008-05-12T16:06:00.000-04:00

For years, I was a victim of extortion. Over the course of years, over a quarter of a million dollars were taken from me, by a ruthless gang which threatened to kidnap and mistreat me if I refused to pay them. In return for my money, they gave me "protection", which I neither wanted nor needed. This served to create the illusion that what was going on was somehow moral and above board. The people from whom I needed protection, of course, were the perpetrators of this extortion, but none was forthcoming.

Then, suddenly, out of the blue, I received a check in the mail. It was only 300 dollars, but even that was a welcome sign that these ruthless thugs had somehow seen the error of their ways. They had realized that if they wanted money, they needed to earn it, not steal it from the people who had.

Over the decades of the Clinton and Bush administrations, I had begun to lose my faith in humanity. I began to believe that maybe we were getting the government we deserved. But this little check as illustrated to me that even hardened criminals can see the light. Maybe there is hope for America and for Humanity after all.

If the IRS can repent their crimes, anybody can.

A worthy cause for those who want to help others!

2008-03-08T22:37:00.007-05:00

Here are some kids who get it, and are fighting for their right to fight for their lives!

We cannot purge all the madmen from society. We cannot prevent the occasional murderous rage. What can we do? We can fight back. Here is a group of students who understand how to put an end to the 'Campus Rampage' phenomenon. Those of us who love liberty should rally behind these brave, politically incorrect, and most importantly correct group of young people. We can't always be there to help, but we can let them help themselves.

Open Letter to Glen Beck

2007-12-19T18:28:00.000-05:00

Mr. Beck:

As I watched your excellent interview with Ron Paul for the second time, I felt moved to write to you, for two purposes.

Firstly, I want to thank you for giving Ron the chance to explain his ideas in detail, something I have have never before heard him permitted to do in a national forum. Libertarian ideas, especially our ideas on economics, do not easily reduce to sound bites. For example, Libertarianism sounds like it would be disastrous for the poor, until you understand that poverty could be almost completely eliminated, except in cases of severe mental or physical incapacity, by our policy of economic freedom. This point is essential to understanding why Laissez-Faire capitalism is the most, not the least, humanitarian approach to economics.

In reference to your assertion that in order to subscribe to Libertarian philosophy, one needs to be willing to "step over homeless people". This is false. Consider the 10 commandments. These are moral rules for living, which may be embraced by people of any political persuasion. People might find that there are valid reasons that the government should not force others to "Have no other gods before me". These same people may well feel that it is a moral imperative that they have no other god before their God. Their unwillingness to force their morality on others does not reduce their commitment to their morality. It merely acknowledges that if God wanted to add an 11th commandment, saying "Thou shalt force thy neighbor to live by these commandments", he would have done so, and he did not. Likewise, the Libertarian unwillingness to force others to spend their money on charity does not imply unwillingness to spend their own money on charity, and in a prosperous, free, and lightly taxed America, there would be much more money to devote to such things, and fewer people who needed them.

Secondly, I want to apologize, on behalf of some of my fellow Paul supporters, for any threatening or abusive mail you have received from them. Sadly, when you advocate real change, you tend to attract some people, e. g. conspiracy theorists and extremists, who may feel justified in attempting to achieve their goals "by any means necessary". I have been embarrassed and saddened by some of those who have joined me in supporting Ron Paul. I was horrified to discover that a white supremacist group understood so little of the philosophy of individualism that they endorsed Ron Paul.

I appreciated your refusal to blame Ron Paul for the antics of some of his supporters. My logic, in reaching the same conclusion, is similar to that I use to defend border control activists. Although some racists may support the Minute Men, that does not imply that all Minute Men are racists. I understand the economics of immigration well enough to know that even though there are invalid reasons to oppose illegal immigration, there are valid reasons to oppose it as well. That two people reach the same conclusion does not imply that their motives and reasoning are the same.

In conclusion, I enjoy your show, and I hope you will ponder the following questions: If left alone, it is clear and obvious that many Muslims would continue to hate Americans. But would they, if they did not feel themselves (rightly or wrongly) to be under occupation and under threat, be likely to resort to desperation tactics like suicide bombing -- which is the only way a backward precapitalist society could possibly attack America on it's own soil. I also hope you will consider whether our security could be increased by redeploying the troops currently in Iraq, Germany, and Japan to Afghanistan, where they might well be able to catch bin-Ladin, and to America, where they could defend our borders and our nation, rather than defending our defeated enemies.

Comrade Mitt joins the fight against the Free Market

2007-11-30T04:07:00.000-05:00

I guess I'm naive. I was surprised by Mitt Romney's abject economic ignorance at the debate last night. When asked about agricultural subsidies, he said that he didn't think that the Free Market could provide food reliably, and that central planning of the economy by the government was needed to guarantee our food supply.

Just on more reason to vote against Comrade Mitt.

Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November

2007-10-29T08:35:00.000-04:00

Remember, remember, 
the fifth of November
The gunpowder treason and plot

I know of no reason
the gunpowder treason
should EVER be forgot.

Watch the clip, and then click the link.

Announcing the "Anti-Universal Coverage Club"...

2007-07-09T06:30:00.001-04:00

"Universal Coverage" sounds nice and fuzzy. How could anyone object to "Universal Coverage"? I object. I do not object to "Universal Coverage" if it occurs naturally -- if everyone in America decides that health insurance is a good idea, and decides to go out and buy it of their own accord, I don't have a problem with it. But it's not going to happen. Why not? Because many of us, myself included, do not need health insurance.

I don't need health insurance because the hospitals are required by law to treat me whether I am insured or not. They should not be, but they are. So long as they are required to treat me even if I don't pay, I see no reason to pay, so I don't. That makes me one of the however many "victims" that the government wants to "save" by instituting health care rationing. Sorry, not interested. How about this as an alternative: Stop forcing hospitals to treat me if I don't carry insurance, and I'll buy insurance. Seems fair to me. digg story

GeoLibertarians and the Land Value Tax

2007-07-03T18:25:00.001-04:00

I am curious about Geolibertarians and the Land Value Tax. I do not (currently) support their proposals, since I am unsure as to the nuts and bolts issues thereof, but I am interested in finding out more. It appears that this is a free market system which would allow for a (minarchist) state to be financed in a way that (purportedly) would minimally distort the markets upon which we depend for those things that we need.

Here is the basic idea as I understand it. This is a request for clarification, so please do not take my comments as a canonical description of their beliefs, but rather as a reflection of my imperfect understanding thereof. That said, here is my understanding of the conceptual underpinnings of their system:

All which is created by a human should be considered property of that human, and he should be free to distribute that property as he sees fit.
Workers who create property using the existing property of capitalists do owe the capitalists compensation for the use of their capital, at whatever rate the workers and capitalists agree upon. This is not Marxism. I am phrasing this proposition in the reverse of the most popular formulation (that capitalists should be able to pay workers at whatever rate they agree upon), but the two formulations are equivalent.
Land cannot be created, and therefore should not be considered property. Buildings and improvements to land, however, are created, and therefore should be considered property.
The free market should be allowed to function. All controls on wages, prices, imports, exports, trusts and other contracts should be repealed. All subsidies to businesses and organizations should be repealed.
No specific welfare systems should exist, except that any land value taxes which are collected in excess of that amount required to finance a (tiny) government should be refunded to the citizens in equal shares. This would be done without respect to income, poverty, property, or other considerations.

This all sounds pretty good to me. I must question the mechanisms by which it could be achieved, however. My concerns are as follows:

One cannot easily move buildings. How, then, could the market be used in order to determine the value of land, as opposed to that of buildings?
What would the incentive structure vis-a-vis voting with regard to tax rates? Would it be possible for small property users to profit by progressively taxing larger property owners beyond reason, and reaping the benefits as larger refunds? It seems that if this occurred, there would be adjustments in the relative land holdings of individuals as their higher incomes would allow them to procure more land, and that there would be a kind of equilibrium established in the long run, but I am not even sure how to model such a thing.
How would the real estate market work in establishing rights of tenancy on previously unoccupied land? What would be the limits to these rights be?
What would happen to incentives to preserve the value of land one was using? Would there be greater incentive to quickly exploit, and thereby destroy the value of, land under this system?
What would be the potential abuses of this system?

There would also seem to be some advantages to the system:

An (almost) completely free market, modulo any distortions introduced by the tax system itself.
A minimal income to those who were disabled or unable to work, and chose not to overconsume land, without creating incentives to cultivate poverty or helplessness.
A strong disincentive against buying and holding land for long periods of time, without putting it to use, in hopes of later gains.
An increase in "green space", as people minimized their usage of land, without creating (as government owned "green space" does) homelessness when land values exceed the means of potential tenants.

All in all, my view of this proposal is similar to my view of the "fair tax". I'm not sure how to crunch the numbers, I do believe that it could by much clearer and probably more fair than our current tax system (the obfuscated assembly language source code to a random number generator would be clearer and more fair than our current tax system). Are there any geolibertarians out there would would like to share their vision of how their system would work?

What's your political persuasion?

2007-06-13T08:30:00.000-04:00

You Are a "Don't Tread On Me" Libertarian

You distrust the government, are fiercely independent, and don't belong in either party. Religion and politics should never mix, in your opinion... and you feel opressed by both. You don't want the government to cramp your self made style. Or anyone else's for that matter. You're proud to say that you're pro-choice on absolutely everything!

What's Your Political Persuasion?

This is a pretty good test, although it conflates the concept of private and religious schools. Of course right now, many private schools are religious, because churches subsidize religious schools, and it is very difficult to compete against the (so called) "free" government schools, which people are forced to pay for, even if they do not use them. This would, of course, be different in a freer society where government paid for, but did not control, education.

"For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid!"

2007-06-12T17:59:00.001-04:00

This is a wonderful article, explaining how well intentioned westerners are destroying the economies of Africa. We are killing them with kindness, and except for the politicians, nobody wins.

read more | digg story

Reagan Government too big for Ron Paul

2007-06-11T14:06:00.000-04:00

Here is a hit piece on Ron at Capital Cloak, which is so ripe and full of misinformation that it begs to be Fisked. So here it is:

Reagan Mantle Too Big for Ron Paul

Actually, it was not his mantle, but his government that was too big. We libertarians believe that government should not interfere with your fireplace.

Libertarian conservatives have been busy artificially bolstering the myth that their presidential candidate of choice, Ron Paul, has a strong grass-roots base and wide appeal. During Fox News’ sophomoric cell phone text message voting during the second GOP presidential candidates’ debate, Ron Paul’s boosters voted early and often, causing the post-debate results to appear skewed toward the opinion that Paul was the winner of the debate, despite his trip to the proverbial woodshed courtesy of Rudy Giuliani for his argument that America brought 9/11 upon itself. Initially I thought that perhaps some of Paul’s poll votes were coming from Democrats hoping to dilute strong performances by Giuliani or Romney by voting for the least likely and most provocative of the candidates. However, comments posted by Paul supporters on conservative Internet sites or in blogs indicate that Paul is viewed by some as the only true conservative in the race and a champion of the constitution. Of course, Paul himself declares that he stands for the constitution, and on the surface that sounds like an honorable position to hold.

I am glad that on the surface you support the constitution. I hope that your support will broaden and deepen as time goes one. I suppose I should point out for those who did not see the debate that this is a misrepresentation of what Paul said. Don't take my word for it, watch the footage on youtube. Then consider the difference between causation and justification.

When it comes to government spending and government involvement in social matters, Paul’s urgings to limit government only to the duties expressly permitted by the constitution have appeal and resonate well in conservative circles. What conservative doesn’t want to see certain federal governmental departments disbanded and their duties reverted back to local and state authorities?

Well, if you define the Neo-Conmen as conservatives, they don't. They have expanded government in every area, foreign and domestic.

What conservative doesn’t want to see the dreaded income tax disappear?

Perhaps those who in 12 years in control of congress and 8 years in control of the entire government never bothered to try to get rid of it? But again, I'm assuming that you define neocons as conservatives.

To some conservatives, the economic/social aspects of Paul’s libertarian-leaning principles are a siren song by which they wish to be led, if only someone holding those views could actually secure the GOP nomination. Paul clearly is not a candidate that can win a national election, and for clear-thinking conservatives who can look past their own personal benefits from no income tax and smaller government, the reason for Paul’s lack of appeal is easy to identify.

So the logic is: if you vote for what you want, you might not get what you vote for. If you vote for what you do not want, however, you are sure to get it. Therefore you should vote for what you do not want. That's neocon logic.

Ron Paul is no Ronald Reagan. Paul’s supporters may claim he is the true representative of conservatism in the current candidate field, but Paul has an Achilles heel that keeps Reagan conservatives and Regan Democrats alike from ever considering him as anything more than a campaign footnote: He is selective about which portions of the constitution he would adhere to strictly, and “provide for the common defense” is not among them.

Actually, the reason Ron Paul opposes the war in Iraq is because it is an offensive, not a defensive war. Ron Paul supported the war in Afghanistan, because it was, indeed, part of the common defense. He would have liked for Congress to live up to their constitutional duty and declare war even there, however.

In the second GOP candidates’ debate, Paul stated the following: They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East [for years]. I think [Ronald Reagan] was right. We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. Right now, we're building an embassy in Iraq that is bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting… …They’re not attacking us because we’re rich and free, they’re attacking us because we’re over there. Reagan directly repudiated Paul’s isolationist foreign policies 23 years ago on the beach at Normandy, France, a site where American intervention in foreign affairs proved most decisive in freeing Europe from Nazi enslavement: The Boys of Pointe Du Hoc June 6, 1984, Normandy We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars. It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent. But we try always to be prepared for peace, prepared to deter aggression, prepared to negotiate the reduction of arms, and yes, prepared to reach out again in the spirit of reconciliation.

Uhhh ... perhaps Mr. Reagan should have referred to governments with expansionist intent and some way to do something about it. It is amazing to me that people can turn Hussein, whose military we defeated in a few weeks, into Hitler, who actually had a larger military then we when WWII stared.

Reagan conservatives and Reagan Democrats need look no further than Reagan’s statement to find sufficient reason to shun Ron Paul’s isolationist ideas. Paul claimed during the second GOP candidates’ debate that the U.S. has been bombing Iraq for 10 years, as if it were unjustified and indiscriminate bombing of cities. That is patently false. Prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, the U.S. had occasionally bombed Iraq’s air defense stations or shot down Iraqi aircraft because Iraq regularly violated the no-fly zone enacted by the cease-fire that halted the first Gulf War. Paul chooses to ignore the fact that the Gulf War was, as Reagan prescribed, a “response to a tyrannical government with an expansionist intent.” Saddam invaded neighboring Kuwait solely for expansionist and economic motives. He wanted Kuwait’s oil and Kuwait’s ports, and Kuwait’s accumulated wealth, and so decided to take it by force. World leaders in 1991 had the fortitude to band together and, led by the U.S. military, pushed Saddam back behind his original borders. Had Saddam not violated the terms of the cease-fire by targeting our aircraft, there would have been no need for any further bombing. The defense of the no-fly zone lasted from 1991 until Operation Iraqi Freedom made it a moot point by removing Saddam from the equation because of his failure to abide by any of the UN conditions for the cease-fire enacted in 1991. Thus the current Operation Iraqi Freedom is merely a resumption of hostilities and is a continuation of the Gulf War.

So the United States should remove any government that violates UN resolutions? Does this include Israel, which refuses to abide by UN resolution 242 (among dozens of other resolutions)? Personally, I am opposed to your proposed invasion of Israel. The United States should simply withdraw from the UN, which has no business commanding US troops who enlisted in the US military to defend the United States. If the UN wants it's resolutions enforced, they should raise an army, and they should pay for it. Of course the UN resolution thing is a thin justification for our attack on Iraq, since they didn't want us to go. But if it had been a good idea to go, I would have said "Go, and the UN be damned". I also would have opposed any suggestion that we invade ourselves for ignoring the resolution.

Saddam, like Hitler, was removed, and rebuilding a nation and protecting it from foreign interference by those with designs on fomenting chaos, much like post WWII, is why our troops remain in Iraq. Had Ron Paul been president instead of Truman or Eisenhower, all of Germany would have fallen under Soviet occupation and Japan would have been overrun by Soviet or Chinese forces seeking retribution because Paul would have pulled American troops out of both places and brought them home immediately upon conclusion of the war. There would have been no Marshall Plan, no rebuilding and friendship alliance with Japan. No BMWs; no VWs; no Hondas; no Toyotas. Likewise, in Paul’s isolationist world, there would be no democratic South Korea. There would only be communist Korea, since Paul would not have committed U.S. troops to defend the free people of South Korea.

Wow ... that is one commonality between Saddam and Hitler. They're dead. They also had really funky mustaches. Maybe these comparisons of Hitler, who commanded a huge military and could actually threaten the world, and Hussein, who commanded a tiny military and could actually threaten a country the size of Rhode Island, are not as absurd as I thought.

Ron Paul wants America to approach foreign policy with a pre-WWI mentality, when the mindset centered on the idea that America should not involve itself in any foreign war, and we nearly allowed all of Europe to be defeated by Germany. That war was so destructive that the isolationists redoubled their efforts between 1919 and 1941 to keep America from ever entangling itself in a foreign war. That isolationism resulted in Nazi occupation of continental Europe and Scandinavia, and horrific bombings of England. It also cost 6 million Jews their lives while Americans, who thought then as Ron Paul now does about intervention, stood silently on the sidelines of history, much to their condemnation.

Well, it would have been interesting to watch Hussein try to take over Europe. Turkey might have cooperated with him, allowing him to get as far as ... Greece. And then he would have been a grease spot, because Greece is part of the EU. Please don't think that I"m implying that the EU is not militarily pathetic. Just that they were not as pathetic as Hussein. Of course if we announce that the EU is responsible for defending themselves, they have economies that would allow them to defend themselves. This is in stark contrast to Iraq.

Paul’s supporters should consider another sentence from Reagan’s powerful speech at Normandy. His explanation for why America’s military remained in Europe to confront potential Soviet aggression long after WWII, was simple, profound, and prophetic of our continued presence in Iraq: Today, as forty years ago, our armies are here for only one purpose: to protect and defend democracy.

Actually, Reagan was paraphrasing Wilson, who entered into WWI, to "make the world safe for democracy", and thereby turned what would have been a defeat of the Kaiser into a rout of the Kaiser, and thereby ensured the rise of Hitler. I guess blowback is not a new concept after all?

Regardless of how Iraq’s democracy came into existence, it is there now. Iraq has a constitution. Iraq has a democratically elected parliament that represents the wide variety of religious and tribal divisions of its population. It is imperfect, and it is often contentious, but so was America’s in its early years. The question Paul should be forced to address is, “Does America have a duty or role in history to protect and defend democracy in the world?” As an isolationist he will argue that such is not America’s role as it is not defined in the constitution. Reagan understood history far better than Paul, who would like to believe that the world begins and ends at America’s shores and nothing that occurs in foreign lands is worthy of intervention unless American interests are directly threatened. Technically speaking, from an economic/trade point of view, would it have made any difference to isolationists like Paul if Europe had been enslaved by Hitler as long as Hitler let America alone? America could have conducted normal trade in goods with Nazi Europe, including lucrative arms sales. Rescuing Britain, France, and Italy from Nazi control certainly involved an enormously “entangling alliance,” something George Washington warned of and Paul concurs with wholeheartedly. Why then did America free Europe and remain there in defensive posture for decades? The answer, as Reagan stated so perfectly, is that isolationism has never been and never will be an appropriate response to tyranny. Tyranny must be confronted wherever it exists, defeated, and replaced by freedom. Ron Paul would rather put his head in the sand and selfishly keep democracy and liberty all to himself.

Actually, I get the idea that Ron Paul believes we should avoid sand. Of course he does not want to keep democracy to himself. He just recognizes that if you impose democracy on people who do not want it, they will vote it away, and that when you force liberty on people at gunpoint, you have not freed them. The mindset in the Middle East is not quite what prevailed in America during and after the Revolution. If you want liberty and democracy, you have to be willing to die for it. We were. They are not.

Reagan understood something that Paul does not: America does not hold an exclusive right to freedom. America does not possess liberty out of luck or superior intellect. America is free and powerful because it is destined to use that power to spread and preserve freedom throughout the world. Paul’s strict but selective constitutional adherence seems to ignore that the right to liberty is identified in the Declaration of Independence, not as an American, English, or French right, but a right that belongs to all men, presumably even those in the Middle East whom Paul would abandon as apparently unworthy of these Jeffersonian words: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I don't think that Paul ever said we should prevent Iraq from gaining freedom, if and when they want it. Just that we should not try to impose it on them, when they do not.

This is the great issue of our time, and Paul falls woefully short in his willingness to engage in the defense of freedom. His GOP opponents more closely resemble the Reagan tradition. For example, when asked in the third GOP candidates’ debate what was the most important moral issue facing America, Giuliani replied that the greatest moral issue is whether America will share its blessings of freedom and liberty with the rest of the world. Conservatives should not allow themselves to be fooled by the Ron Paul Internet “phenomenon.” Paul was declared the winner of two GOP candidates’ debates by MSNBC, CNN, Politico, Slate, ABC News, and myriad other left-leaning media sources. A review of Wikipedia’s Ron Paul page certainly could leave an undiscerning reader with the idea that Paul has widespread support and is whipping all comers in the GOP debates. The liberal slant is obvious. Clearly from an ideological perspective liberals do not embrace Ron Paul’s libertarian views, so why is he the darling of the media and many Internet blogs? Quite simply, it is because Paul is 2008’s Ross Perot. If even 3 percent of conservative voters are swayed by Paul, it could spell the difference in a tight race and throw victory to the left, just as Perot’s theatrics did in 1992 and 1996. The left knows this and is in fact counting on it for victory.

The problem with defending freedom abroad is that in order to do so, you have to destroy it at home. Have a look at the Patriot Act, or the draft for Vietnam and Korea, or an income tax form if you do not understand this concept

Libertarian conservatives should not worship Paul as the constitutional savior they hold him out to be, and Reagan Conservatives and Reagan Democrats should remember that Paul is an isolationist hoarder of liberty, unwilling to preserve it among nations who possess it or share it with oppressed peoples who long for it and implore America to help them obtain it.

I suppose that Washington and Jefferson, by your definition, were "hoarders" of liberty, when they suggested "free trade with all nations, entangling alliances with none". But they never suggested that we should prevent people who so desired from achieving liberty. It is not like, were they to achieve liberty on their own, we would somehow have less. You cannot hoard liberty. If the Iraqis truly wanted it, they could have removed Hussein themselves. I think that you fail to understand what Reagan did understand (at least after Lebanon): the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. If you need help in this respect, have a look at the irrationality of your own.

Capitalism in a Free Society #1

2007-06-08T22:41:00.000-04:00

There are criticisms of Capitalism which are so widespread and so plausible that they must be addressed, before we can hope to establish a Libertarian society. These criticisms generally come from the Left, but there are those on the Right who make similar arguments. This article will attempt to address some of these issues from a Libertarian perspective.

Q: Who coined the term Capitalism?

A: An excellent question. Who came up with the word "Capitalism"? It doesn't sound very nice. It sounds as if Capitalism is designed to benefit those who provide the capital. It sounds as if Capitalism might well be very bad for others who live under the system, for example workers and consumers. Why would the creators of Capitalism have chosen such an emotionally loaded word to describe their idea? The reason is simple: the word Capitalism was not coined by Capitalists. It was coined by socialists, and thus the emotional loading is purely intentional. Capitalists adopted the word Capitalism in much the same way that Americans adopted the phrase "Yankee Doodle", which was originally a British slur, and made it a term of honor.

Q: What is Capitalism?

Capitalism is a system with two essential characteristics: Private property, and free markets. Both of these characteristics are considered by most Libertarians to be expressions of natural rights. The right to exist, combined with the human need for material goods in order to live, implies a moral right to private property. It also implies a right to defend this private property from those who would confiscate it for their own ends, as otherwise, one would have to depend for survival on the hope that nobody would come and take from you those things which you need to live. Free markets are really merely an extension of private property. Since ownership of private property implies the sole right to dispose of that property, and since free markets are merely the sum of all voluntary exchanges in a society, the only way that a society could exist without free markets is to violate the right of private property by forbidding people to trade what they have created.

Please note that these are the only two essential characteristics of Capitalism. Capitalism does not imply the existence of corporations, of democracy, of a government, of copyright, of patents, of large industrial facilities, or any of the other trappings which are frequently associated in the popular imagination with capitalism. If you strand two naked people on an island, and they trade with each other without violence, you have created a Capitalist society.

Q: Who "invented" Capitalism?

A: Capitalism was never invented. As illustrated above, it flowed naturally from the advantages people can gain by trading with each other. The person most referred to as the "father of Capitalism", Adam Smith, described capitalism (without ever using the word) in his 1776 classic "The Wealth of Nations". He was describing what he saw, and advancing arguments for dismantling the state controls of the economy which had characterized earlier economic systems, for example, Feudalism and Mercantilism. We have never, since the establishment of government, come close to the ideals which Smith described, although sometimes we have been closer than others.

Q: What are the classes of people in a Capitalist society?

A: People may play many roles in the economy of a Capitalist society. The three basic roles are:

Capitalist: One who owns capital, and manages it's use in the production of goods
Worker: One who produces goods or provides services
Landlord: One who receives income from the ownership of land

These are not, however, "classes" of people (except in the broadest sense of being classifications which can be attached to people). There are several reasons that these can really not be called classes:

These roles are not immutable. An individual in a capitalist society will more than likely play more than one of these roles in his lifetime. He may well start out as a worker, and choose to refraining from spending some of his income, and to invest it instead. Now he's a capitalist. He may choose to invest in land, rather than tools and equipment, in which case he's a landlord.
These roles are not exclusive. An individual may well play many of these roles simultaneously. Consider a carpenter who owns his own tools. When working, this carpenter is making money through his labor, which would make him a worker. He is also magnifying the effects of his labor, by using tools, which he owns. This, of course, increases his income, making him a capitalist as well. An even better example would be an family farm. Consider the owner of such a business:
1. He works his own land, making him a worker.
2. He owns his land, and receives income from it, therefore making him a landlord.
3. He owns his tools, and thereby increases the income from his labor. This makes him a capitalist.
These roles do not imply different levels of wealth. It is a common misconception that a business owner makes more money then a worker. This misconception does not bear even casual scrutiny. It is quite possible that a business owner or landlord will lose money through error or while ramping up a new business. A worker, of course, runs no risk of losing money through his labors. The worst that could possibly happen would be for his employer to go bankrupt, and fail to pay his wages. Even in this case, though he has not been paid, and rightly feels he has been cheated, he has not actually lost anything he already had. He has failed to gain his rightful due. This is bad, but not nearly as bad as having built a business and then lost it.
These rules do not imply different levels of power. In a command economy, like socialism, the various roles imply a level of power over others. If a member of a subordinate class fails to obey his master, his master can have him killed, imprisoned, or otherwise punished. This creates a tremendous power differential. In a market economy, like capitalism, however, there is no difference in power. Any person can make whatever offer he chooses to any other person, but there is no way for him to punish those who refuse to obey his request. He can, of course, refuse to pay those who refuse to work for him, but he cannot take from them their lives, their liberty, or their ability to pursue happiness.

This is probably enough information to absorb in one sitting, and it is as much as I choose to write right now, so I will sign off, and return later to expound further on the joys of capitalism and freedom.

Ed and Elaine against Leviathan

2007-06-07T22:12:00.000-04:00

As the Feds menace Ed and Elane Brown in New Hampshire, I felt that I had to at least get online and say something. I have never met these people, but I fear for them, as the murderous ATF advances upon them. I don't know if this will be another Waco. I hope not. But I do fear it, and suggest that all of us, even if we do not agree with Ed and Elane's politics, contact the IRS, the ATF, and the Federal Marshal Service and demand that the Feds not murder the Browns, as they killed those in Waco.

For those of you unaware of the Browns, and their plight, you can find some information by clicking the "Regarding" link above.

Gay Species: Naive Capitalism: Why I Am Not a Libertarain

2007-06-07T20:54:00.000-04:00

I trust we remain vaguely familiar with the pernicious effects of child labor, market indenture (virtually "slave" labor), intolerable working conditions, exploitation for greed, etc., to realize not everyone's "self interest," in Adam Smith's famous phrase, is in our common interest. Unrestrained greed may manifest particular individuals' "liberty of free exchange," but if so, maybe "free exchange" as a principle is too high a price to pay for its adverse consequences? In other words, the principles of liberalism are not in themselves the objective, but the means to an objective. Libertarianism confuses the "means" for an "end."

I have to disagree with your criticisms of the Free Market. The "horrors" of the free market seem less horrible when you consider that for the people participating in such "horrors", the "horrors" were better than the alternative. The error you make is one of context dropping: judging their solutions to their problems against our opportunities, and finding that our opportunities are better then theirs were. This is true, of course, but they did not have our opportunities. For that matter, were it not for their hard work, and the Free Market which made it possible for them to prosper by it, we would not have these opportunities either.

Consider child labor. Obviously, in a society as affluent as ours, child labor would be extremely rare with or without laws forbidding it. It is safe to say that the number of working children even when child labor was first outlawed was quite small, or those who chose to engage in it (or their parents) would have shouted down any attempt to outlaw the choices they made. Today, nearly all parents are ready, willing, and able to provide better alternatives to their children. But it is a common error in "political economics" to say that if most people can afford a thing, all people should be required to purchase that thing. If (and only if) working is the best option for the child, then forbidding child labor is forcing them into something worse. For example, there are third world nations that have forbidden child labor, only to see 14 year old factory workers becoming 14 year old prostitutes. This is not a step in the right direction. People should always be free to pursue the options that they, themselves, find to be in their best interests. This is not always what some arrogant, rich, white, liberal academic thinks would be in their best interests.

I'm not sure what you mean by market indenture, unless you are referring to the system of indenture under which many of our (extremely) early immigrants escaped from the mercentilist economy of England to the freer economy of America. This turned out to be a very good deal for some. It turned out to be a very bad deal for others. Eventually, it became unpopular, and involuntary servitude was instituted in America in order to force people to come under less humane conditions. Of course if the government had not intervened by sanctioning and enforcing the practice of slavery, the employers would have been left with only one option: make conditions better for those who traveled under indentures to America. This would have probably meant shorter terms of service, greater compensations, and addressing whatever complaints previous indents had had with the system. Even so, the deal offered to indents would probably only have been marginally better then the lives they lived in England. But "marginally better" beats the hell out of "trapped in England". This is evidenced by the fact that 6 out of 7 early immigrants to America in the 1600's died, but yet they continued to come. England, and her "regulated, fettered markets" were that bad.

Providing a working environment with "intolerable working conditions", of course, suffers from the same problem. If a thing is intolerable, people do not tolerate it. Now of course what we consider to be intolerable now that we have been enriched by capitalism should not be confused with what was considered intolerable by those who had been impoverished by the "reasonable, common sense" interventions of Feudalism and Mercantilism. Why would somebody work in an intolerably unsafe factory, when they could, for example, start a service mowing lawns or running to the store to buy people groceries? Well, obviously, in order to entice people into unsafe factories when they had other alternatives would become more and more expensive, and in order to attract workers, employers would have to make their factories safer. It would become cheaper to do so then to pay the workers more to enter unsafe factories. Thus the problem is resolved, without the arbitrary intervention of government, and all the costs to human flourishing which that entails. The solutions arrived at by the market, of course, would have tremendous advantages over the arbitrary dictates of the Government: this is because the issues addressed would be those that mattered to the workers themselves, not those chosen by bureaucrats bought and paid for by the industries that benefit by the extra costs they generated.

Exploitation for greed is a lovely emotional phrase. Sadly, it lacks any rational definition, when applied to a free market. One can only exploit by force, and in a free market, you can apply no force: the only way you can attract workers is to offer them a better deal. If offering me a better deal then the one I have right now is exploitation, then exploit me early and exploit me often.

The upshot is that a "fettered, regulated market" can never improve upon the results gained in "unfettered, unregulated markets". The weapons which we have so carefully fashioned to cut the wealthy down to the size our envy dictates will turn like boomerangs, mid-flight, and return to cut us to ribbons. This is because the laws will always be controlled by those who can buy them to exactly the extent that they can trick the rest of us. The more byzantine the law becomes, the more the area of incomprehension grows, and the more we will be exploited by the forces we ourselves have empowered by chipping away the risks (and rewards) of limited government. The only solution is to take responsibility for our own lives, to consider the costs, the benefits, the risks, and the rewards of our actions, and to live our lives to the best of our ability. If I refuse to take a risk there is a chance that someone who needs the reward more then I will risk what I would not, in order to receive it. That is his right. To take that right from him is the most inhumane thing that I could do.

Ron Paul on Tucker Carlson

2007-06-06T19:51:00.000-04:00

With so much wonderful video, I'm having a hard time convincing myself to write. Here is some more! This was a great interview, with Tucker Carlson getting off the best line:

I hope you can come on regularly, to just give a tutorial on what it means to be free.

Stupid in America

2007-06-06T18:56:00.000-04:00

An excellent expose of why public education is the best way to promote universal ignorance in our lifetime.

Thirteen Things That Should Earn Your Vote

2007-05-10T15:57:00.000-04:00

Here are thirteen reasons you should vote for Ron Paul in the upcoming primary (and draft him to run as a Libertarian, if he doesn't get the nomination). It feels awfully strange for me to be endorsing a Republican candidate. I have never voted for a Republican in my life. But in this case, in the primary, I will make an exception, and if comes down to Dr. Paul vs. a Libertarian, I will vote for whichever I think more likely to win at the time. Maybe we'll get lucky, and Ron Paul will get the nomination, and we Libertarians will endorse (or join in nominating, I don't know how it would work) him as a party. But before we worry about such tactical matters, here are thirteen things that should guarantee Ron the votes of any peace loving and freedom loving American patriot:

He will get us out of IRAQ. Not in years, or in months, but as quickly as it can be done without compromising their security. The (big government and neocon) Republicans won't. The Democrats won't. Ron Paul is the anti-war candidate. That alone should be enough reason.
He will help us get back to sleep. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, one of their admirals is quoted as saying "I fear we have awakened a slumbering giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve." The Giant hasn't slept a wink since 1941. It is time for the Giant to sleep again, so he will be prepared, if and when he is again threatened.
He will make us wealthy. We have an economic system which is the most powerful engine of wealth creation known to man. But that engine is fouled with interventions which sap it's performance, and misdirect it's output. Real, natural economic growth benefits everyone. Government distorted economic growth benefits only the aristocracy of pull. Look around you: which do you see?
He will tell us the truth. You can tell if most politicians are lying by watching her face carefully. If her lips are moving, she is lying. Dr. Paul throughout his life, has stated his intentions, stuck to his guns, and kept his promises.
He will return our independence. We do not need NAFTA or CAFTA for free trade. We only need to drop our tariffs and let the market work. We do not need the UN to be a force for peace. We can become a shining example of rational peace by refusing foreign adventures, but being prepared, if attacked, to respond, to crush the aggressor, and to withdraw, without occupation and without nation building.
He will start the process of emancipating our posterity from the crushing load of debt that is the legacy of big government. This debt is taxation, to be imposed on a helpless group of people without any representation. This wrong must be redressed.
He will protect our money supply. The Federal Reserve board is the root of all inflation. When they print fiat dollars, their value The value comes from a reduction in the value of the money already circulating. This predominantly hurts the poor, as the rich have investment bankers to advise them. It is the most regressive and most destructive of taxes.
He will secure our borders against illegal immigration. Libertarians want open borders. But we recognize that we can ill afford them, until we have put our house in order. Before we can open our borders to peaceful people, we must roll back the welfare state, so those come come to produce, and produce and prosper, not to enter the hospice of welfare. Before we can entirely roll back the welfare state, we must build our economy so that it is workers, not jobs, that are scarce. Once this is done, we can allow more legal immigration, instead of ignoring illegals.
He will veto any national ID card bill which crosses his desk. If Americans want to hear the chilling words "your papers, sir", they should rent Casablanca, and take careful note of what happens in a police state, when one is unable to produce them. Then he should take a moment to be grateful that we are not in that time or that place.
He will protect our privacy. Identity theft is possible because Americans now have a single identifier, their SSN. It should be used only for social security. Next, laws requiring businesses to release the bank balances, medical records, and other private information of their customers should be repealed. Government has the right to invade your privacy only with a warrant issued by a judge to whom probable cause has been presented.
He will protect your property. The Constitution allows the government to take your property only for public use and only with just compensation. But now, the government has arrogated unto itself the power to confiscate your property, without just compensation (which would be the amount for which you were willing to sell it), and give it to private companies for private use. Even worse, some regulations allow the government to forbid you use of your property, while leaving you the deed, and to confiscate the value of your property with no compensation at all. This tyrannous behavior is inexcusable, and must be stopped.
He will restore us to a constitutional and sane foreign policy. No more will we be dragged into foreign wars, in countries we cannot locate on the map, because of entangling alliances which we have formed, in defiance of the warnings that both Jefferson and Washington gave our nation in it's youth. We have troops in 130 countries. The constitution only authorized us to keep troops in one. Support the troops. Support them here.
He will make us safe. Government cannot protect us from all the evils of the world, but our biggest threat comes from government itself, finally free of the constitutional chains which have bound it, and mad with power, it is wasting our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor with abandon. It must be restrained before it is too late.

Those are just 13 of the many reasons that Ron Paul is the best hope for America. Of course, each time your best hope is taken, your second best hope becomes your best hope. But each time, it is more distant and more forlorn. So I beg you with all the earnestness at my command: don't let this hope go. Join the Ron Paul Revolution, and remind the politicians that America is yours, not theirs.

Great interview with Ron Paul!

2007-05-10T15:47:00.000-04:00

Great interview with Ron Paul! Go, Ron, Go!

Congress attempts to silence grass roots organizations!

2007-05-10T15:11:00.000-04:00

Here is a copy of the email I just sent to my CongressCritter via DownsizeDC.org. The legislation which imperils us is another stealth legislation, which they expect to be voted upon very quickly. Please join me in contacting your "representatives", and in demanding that they make no attempt to silence the people of what was once the freest country on earth. Click on the "Regarding" link above, or go to DownsizeDC.org, to make your voice heard.

Please follow the lead of the Senate in stripping regulation of grassroots groups from any lobbying or ethics bill that comes up in the House.
My personal comment to you:
We citizens organize at the grass roots for one reason and one reason only: to have an impact. This is our legal right under the First Amendment to the Constitution to the United States. If the First Amendment did not exist, it would still be our legal right under the Ninth Amendment. If the Ninth Amendment did not exist, this would still be our legal right, as Article 1, Section 9 does not specify limiting political communication as one of the 19 strictly limited enumerated powers it confers upon the Congress. In law, if a way is specified by statute, there is no other way. By extension, if a set of powers are specified, there are no other powers. Even if the constitution did not exist, since as noted in the Declaration of Independence, our rights are inalienable and independent of any government, which is only established to defend the rights we already have, we would still have the natural right to speak.

You WILL NOT make me a coward. I ask you not to make me a criminal.

Thirteen Things Wrong with Thirteen Things Criticism

2007-04-26T23:22:00.000-04:00

There are actually more than thirteen things wrong with what I'm fisking here, but I liked the title, so I kept it. I think I refuted all points pretty well.

Yes, right libertarianism (or more correctly, propertarianism) is becoming more popular with those in I.T. and the "new economy" types, but I, for one, am not impressed.

There is nothing "Right Wing" about Libertarianism. Your confusion is probably brought about by a one dimensional political world view. Before I realized that there are (at least) two orthogonal dimensions to political thought, I described myself as "to the left of the Democrats, and to the right of the Republicans". Now I realize that on both of the identified axes, economic and social, I am partial to freedom, which makes me a libertarian. If you must have a direction and a bird part, I suppose you could call me a Forward Beaker. This would be appropriate, as authoritarians, who opposes both personal and economic freedom, would then be Back Butters, which sounds vaguely obscene. The extreme of the right is fascism. The extreme of the left is communism. The extreme of the front is anarchism. The extreme of the back is totalitarianism. Unfortunately, the extremes of the left and right both come out in practice looking much like the back.

Propertarianism does not contradict Libertarianism, but does not fully specify it. It merely accepts the morality of private property. I suggest the word Libertarianism, which fully specifies the Libertarian philosophy. Generally, propertarianism is used as a slur by socialists, though some Libertarians have, in the Yankee Doodle tradition, adopted the slur to negate it.

As J.K. Galbraith said, "...[the libertarian] is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness".

Actually, what Galbraith said is "the modern conservative..." not "the libertarian...". A conservative, like a (modern) liberal, is 90 degrees from libertarianism on the political compass. You might want to find an authority who actually criticized libertarianism for your next article.

Regardless of the morality of the thing, there are plenty of other reasons to dislike Libertarianism. Here are thirteen:

Disregarding morality is normally unwise.

1. Libertarianism is highly axiomatic: There's a set of rules to be applied to evaluate what is proper, and the outcome given is the answer which is correct in terms of the moral principle of the theory. This leads to quite a few tortured 'terms of art' in libertarian thought since, due to it's axiomatic nature, the libertarian rhetoric cannot survive counter-factual arguments.

Yes, Libertarianism *IS* a simple system. This is important for several reasons. One of these reasons is that ordinary people in a just society must know, without question, whether they are breaking a law at nearly all times. Even when grey areas are unavoidable, they almost must know where the grey area is, so that they can seek legal advice. To imprison or kill a person for a crime they do not understand and could not define seems to me the height of injustice.

Note that Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a moral one. It does not ask "What should I do?" but "What should all people be forced to do?". Libertarians, though we have a consensus on most legal and political issues, have a wide variety of tastes and personal moral convictions, all of which are tolerable in a Libertarian society. Acting upon them is also tolerable, so long as they do not stray into the area which is axiomatically and legally impermissible. Which brings us to the non-initiation of force.

2.Non-Initiation of Force: Libertarians claim to believe that "No person should initiate the use of force against another person." Fine and dandy, except that what they really mean is "No person should do something improper according to Libertarian ideology". For instance, government collecting taxes is "initiation of force", governments enforcing contracts is not...

This is an important distinction. The difference is the point of initiation:

I have not agreed to pay taxes. Therefore, in the tax game, the first move goes to the government. They attempt to force me to pay them, and I resist. The first use of force is by the government.
On the other hand, if I enter into a contract, and receive something of value, that item of value is owned by me contingent on my complying with the contract. If I am later unable or unwilling to comply with it, I no longer own the property. Were I to attempt to forcibly prevent the other party from reclaiming his property, that would be an initiation of force. Were the government to respond, it would not be an initiation of force. It has previously been initiated.

There is another case in violation of contract, which is the one where the parties to the contract disagree as to it's meaning, but this case can be resolved by mediation by a non-governmental (or governmental) individual or body which attempts to make a determination fair to all. In this case, there is no use of force.

3.Negative Rights: Libertarian thought is based almost entirely on the concept of negative rights (freedom from...). There is little discussion of positive rights (freedom to...) in libertarian rhetoric. This type of empty Formalism makes for good sound bites, but does little to articulate a firm deontic position. Ruling out positive rights as a matter or principle create an argument by counter-factual: If negative rights are to be significant, then there must be a positive duty to protect and uphold them, transforming them into positive rights.

Freedom from initiation of force implies "freedom to..." do anything which does not initiate force. It is completely symmetrical. It does impose a duty on others: the duty to refrain from initiating force. To argue that there is a positive duty to "protect and uphold" rights is an odd perversion of this. If I have a duty to "protect and uphold" rights, then I am not free, if I am struck, to turn the other cheek. I have a duty to "protect and uphold" my rights by striking back. This is a very odd duty.

But this is not usually the duty to which people refer when they talk about the duty to "protect and uphold" rights. Usually, they believe that people have rights to material things like food, clothing, and medical care, even if they choose not to make any effort to secure those things for themselves. Since none of these things exist until a person creates them, this is a non-symmetrical arrangement: those who choose to create (and succeed) have a duty to those who do not choose to (or fail to) create. And those who choose not to create have a right to take what they want, by force, from those who do choose to create. They cannot do so without violating the rights of the creators. Thus positive rights in this sense cannot be symmetrical. And rights which are not symmetrical cannot be universal. There can be no "right" to enslave others.

4.Non-Autonomous Sentient Beings: Libertarianism asserts that each autonomous agent initially fully owns herself and that agents have moral power to acquire property rights in natural resources and artifacts. What is the status of non-autonomous beings-such as children and many animals-that have moral standing (e.g., because sentient)? One possible reply is to deny that there are any non-autonomous beings wth moral standing (e.g., because only beings capable of having moral duties-agents-are owed any duties). Non-autonomous beings are simply things to be used. As such, they can be the full private property of agents. Few people, however, will accept that position. Children are not the full private property of their parents. Dogs may not be tortured for fun. Another possibility is to hold that non-autonomous sentient beings are also full self-owners, where the rights involved are understood as protecting their interests rather than their choices (see, for example, Vallentyne 2002). This, of course, would have the wild implication that rats are protected by rights of self-ownership. Perhaps there is some plausible intermediate position, but if so, it has not yet been developed adequately.

Wow, this one isn't entirely wrong! This is a grey area. On the one hand, people have a right to raise their children as they see fit. On the other hand, children are moral agents and have a right to be free from the initiation of force. This is one of the very few areas in which legitimate rights conflict. Since there are so many violations of rights which take place every day which are unquestionably violations, I would suggest that the question of whether a parent can spank their child be deferred until sometime after we have established, in all other respects, a Libertarian society. Most Libertarians will generally prefer such issues to be handled by non-governmental bodies, but are aware that this is sometimes this is not possible.

5.Historicism: According to libertarianism, the justice of the current distribution of legal rights over resources depends on what the past was like. Given that the history of the world is full of systematic violence (genocide, invasion, murder, assault, theft, etc.), we can be sure that the current distribution of legal rights over resources did not come about justly and that adequate reparations have not been made. At the same time, however, we have little knowledge of the specific rights violations that took place in the past (e.g., we have little knowledge of all but the most egregious rights violations that took place more than one hundred years ago). Thus, we have little knowledge of what justice today requires. The epistemic problem confronting libertarianism is similar to that confronting utilitarianism and other consequentialist theories. Consequentialist theories require knowledge of the entire future that will result from each possible action, and we have very little such knowledge. Libertarianism requires knowledge of the entire past, and we also have very little such knowledge. The appropriate answer in both cases is that the facts determine what is just, and we should simply make out best judgements about what is just based on what we know. Moral reality is complex, and it's not surprising that it's extremely difficult to know what is permissible.

It is impossible to trace property rights back to the beginning of time, and to determine their validity. That is correct. There have been numerous government interventions, conquests, thefts, enslavements, and other such actions in history. Since it is impossible, I would make the pragmatic suggestion that we not do it. Alternately if one mass redistribution was required in order for history buffs to be willing to enter into a Libertarian society, I, personally, would not object. The nice thing about capitalism is that it is a huge wealth creation machine. The wealth that existed in America during slavery, for example, is a tiny fraction of the wealth that exists here now, and as total wealth grows the importance of historical wealth diminishes. And all this progress has been made in a government hampered market.

When businesses are not able to claim government support in preserving monopolies, barbers cannot prevent more people from becoming barbers by imposing absurd regulations, people are free to build themselves "sub-standard" housing when that is the best they can afford, wealth is not wasted in offensive and pointless wars, and the market is able to operate at the greatest possible efficiency, imagine how quickly wealth will be created!

The most important point is that people will be free to work as much as they want, rather than being artificially limited to 40 hour weeks (the average work week 100 years ago was 60 hours, and when most people were low tech farmers, 12 hour days were the norm. Most people in our society do not need or want to work that much, but those who do are forced to work two separate jobs, due to mandatory overtime, rather than the more efficient solution of working more hours on their first job. This is the same principal which leaves many people with two part time jobs instead of one full time job when benefits are mandated for full time employees. Of course if you mandate benefits for part time employees, and their production ceases to be at least equal to minimum wage + mandatory benefits, their jobs just disappear and they become unemployed. But they are unemployed at a higher wage, if that makes anyone feel better. Of course as the economy grows and grows, and labor becomes more and more scarce, fewer and fewer people will choose to work long hours, unless they are pursuing some goal which they consider worth the extra effort. Attempts to "force" people to work long hours by threatening to fire them only work when unemployed workers are more plentiful than jobs. The only way employers could get longer hours would be to pay more. This would be possible, because more capital creates more productivity.

Since ownership of a thing is naturally vested in the creator of that thing, and anyone who wants to obtain that thing must pay the creator, in the long run distribution of wealth will be much more fair, in that it will much more closely match the amount which has been created by the owner, plus that which has been freely given to the owner, minus that which has been consumed by the owner minus that which has been freely given away by the owner. This is the only "fair" distribution of wealth.

There are alternatives to either an arbitrary (perhaps random) redistribution of wealth at the outset or a clean slate policy to accept the status quo and move forward. One is to declare the current distribution to be unfair, and to intervene again and again, over and over, based on incalculable results of unknowable crimes. Each historical claim or counter claim could be studied ad nausium and at great cost, producing another imperfect result to be further litigated at a later date. You can see the results of such thinking anywhere in the Middle East. Or, alternatively, we could require that the wealth of every individual be made equal and kept equal by force. Any time anyone created anything, they would then have more than their neighbors, and their creation would be confiscated and divided among the population. This might happen frequently, at first, but soon people would learn their lesson, and they would never create anything again. Famine would commence soon after, but we would all starve equally, and that's what really counts, right?

6."Natural" Rights: That there are such things as rights anterior to the establishment of governments: for natural, as applied to rights, if it mean anything, is meant to stand in opposition to legal - to such rights as are acknowledged to owe their existence to government, and are consequently posterior in their date to the establishment of government... That which has no existence cannot be destroyed - that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, - nonsense upon stilts. (Bentham, 1843).

Was Hitler's government just, because everything it did was legal under German law, or was German law wrong? If German law was wrong, there must be a standard outside of government by which it can be judged. If there is a standard, operating outside government, which can be used to classify government or set of laws as right or wrong, it must exist independent of government. Therefore, either Hitler violated no rights (in Germany), or natural rights exist independent of law.

Of course one could argue that a standard came to exist at some time between the creation of the American government and Hitler's government, but if so, what is it and where is it? Would Hitler's government have been just, if only it had existed prior to the creation of this standard? Rubbish.

Also, government does not exist in order to prevent rights from being destroyed. Rights cannot be created or destroyed. Government exists to keep rights from being violated. There is a difference.

7.Free Markets & Freedom From Coercion: Libertarians claim that the only economic order that respects individual freedom, is the free market. According to libertarians the free market is the sum of the voluntary exchanges, and contracts going on in a society, nothing more and nothing less. Any distribution that occurs in the operation of a free market, is therefore just since at no stage has anyone's rights been violated, and all the exchanges were voluntary. The people involved in a free market must accept the rules of its operation, namely the rules that forbid attacks on others, using another's property without their consent, trespass, and fraud. This means that the free market has to include the mechanisms for deterring crimes, and mechanisms for compensation and punishment should such crimes be committed. The amount of coercion required to prevent such crimes, depends on the level of acquiescence of the population to the free market rules. For a libertarian to claim that a libertarian society is totally free in this sense, and justify it by saying that they expect everyone to respect property rights in this way, is on a par with a socialist claiming that a socialist society is free from coercion, because they expect everyone to be willing to accept the socialist's laws.

Actually, the market does not include the mechanisms for deterring crime, for compensation, or for punishment. That is the role of government. Libertarians are well aware that people will commit crimes. We are well aware that a certain amount of force will be required in order to minimize this factor. But even when government uses force in this way, it has not initiated force. If the violated law was just, then force was initiated by the criminal, and the government responded. If, however, the violated law was unjust, for example if the government arrested the person because they thought that someday the "criminal" might commit a crime because he smokes pot, then the government initiated force, and is in the wrong.

Note that just laws, and the enforcement of just laws, do not take away any rights. If a law is passed against murder, it does not take away my right to murder, since I never had a right to murder, even in the absence of the law.

I also disagree with your belief that the level of acquiescence of the population to free market rules is what governs the coercion required to prevent or punish crime. I would suggest that most people are more pragmatic than that. I would say that most people, given the choice between making a good living through work and being a criminal, will choose to make a good living through work. There are exceptions, who would be criminals in any society. These would have to be dealt with by force. But most people will be criminal only when the benefits of the crime outweigh the "opportunity cost" of the crime, including the risk of apprehension. The faster the economy grows, the more money people will make, and the more money people make, the less likely they will be to rob, rape, or murder others.

8.Enrichez vous!: If we take liberty to be the freedom from coercion, then this implies that the amount of property determines the amount of freedom you have, something which libertarians would explicitly deny. It also determines that property becomes the concept which determines what liberty is. Without property, you are completely subject to the whims/wishes of others, a state which I do not consider to be one of freedom.

I explicitly deny that. There is no relationship between the amount of property you own and the amount of freedom you possess. You have the freedom to acquire property, and you have the freedom to trade property. There is no such thing as a person who is entirely devoid of property, because every person owns himself. Therefore, every person can trade labor for goods. Once he has done so, he owns both his body and the newly obtained goods. If he chooses to consume less than he produces, he will accumulate goods, and thus become richer. If he chooses to consume more than he produces, he will exhaust his store of goods, except that he will still own himself, the one property which cannot be transferred.

One individual or group owns the entire planet, and
That individual or group is malevolent.

The first condition cannot evolve in the free market. As an individual tried to buy all the land in the world, people would use the money they got from him in order to buy more land, which they prefer to the land they have. Property prices would rise. The more our evil genius buys, the higher the prices go. The earth is a closed system, so people cannot leave the area. They need places to live. As the cost of buying a replacement home rises, they demand more for their property. And as they watch the real estate market rise, they increase estimates of the future values of their homes. This goes on and on and on. As the percentage of the earth owned by our evil genius approaches unity, the prices he pays for each new piece of land approaches infinity. Since nobody can produce an infinite amount of wealth, he could never buy up the entire earth. In practical terms, he could never even buy up 1% of 1% of the surface of the earth.

9.Circular Arguments: Libertarian arguments mix the consequentalist (teleological) and the nonconsequentialist (deontological). The first is the province of free-market economists and other social scientists, who contend that laissez-faire capitalism produces desirable consequences. The second is the realm of libertarian philosophers, who contend that because of its intrinsic justice, laissez-faire is desirable a priori, regardless of its consequences. These two kinds of reasoning render each other superfluous. If libertarian philosophy is valid, there is no need to investigate the empirical consequences of laissez-faire. And if the a posteriori consequences of laissez-faire need to be investigated, then there is no need for a priori libertarian philosophy.

A circular argument is one in which the conclusion is one of the premises. For example:

Joe: The Bible is the literal word of God.
Joan: How do you know?
Joe: God said so.
Joan: How do you know?
Joe: It says so in the Bible.
Joan: How do you know the Bible is accurate?
Joe: Because there cannot be any errors in the Bible.
Joan: Why not?
Joe: Because the Bible is the literal word of God.

This is not the case you are describing. What you are describing is a redundant argument. A redundant argument is not a fallacy, it is another way of arriving at the same result. And in this case, the argument is not even redundant, it is reassurance.

Let us imagine that somebody convinced you, through a nonconsequentialist argument, that there was a moral imperative to strap dynamite to yourself and blow up the headquarters of the Libertarian Party. Through some wondrous argument, you are finally convinced. To be a moral person, you must do this thing. You like being a moral person. But you also like being a breathing person. So you say "I would prefer to be a breathing and immoral person then to be a dead moral person. I will not do this thing, despite the fact that it is a moral imperative". At this point, the person says "If you do this thing, you will go to heaven". This is a consequentialist argument, made to reassure you that the result of doing the right thing will be better than you thought. It is not redundant. However, in case you are thinking of blowing up our headquarters, I should probably point out that both arguments are false.

In the case of Libertarian philosophy, there is a somewhat more complex dynamic going on, because we are taught (through consequentialist argument) in the public schools that capitalism is immoral. It impoverishes the noble worker and enslaves the virtuous peasant. It creates monopolies, restrains competition, causes overproduction, and underproduction, and bad breath to boot. All of these things are false (except possibly the bad breath part). So some of the consequentialist arguments made in support of capitalism (which is part of Libertarianism) are to dispel the illusion that a free market would result in a society that would be unpleasant at best, even if it were moral. There is nothing wrong with this.

10.Anti-Democratic: Libertarians I have spoken to, and most I have read, rail against "mob rule", usually along some variation of "Mob rule isn't any prettier merely because the mob calls itself a government." Corporate feudalism isn't any prettier merely because the corporations prattle about free markets. Strawmen are SO easy to create. A landed aristocracy which derives its liberty and power from property ownership is bound to be a bit upset at the idea of the unpropertied voting. Seems no different even if you call it "libertarianism".

I know some anarcho-capitalists who are entirely anti-government they could be considered to be anti-democratic, anti-fascist, anti-communist, anti-monarchist, and anti-socialist equally. Most libertarians are minimal statists. They support the existence of the state, and most of them, myself included, prefer a constitutionally limited democratic government, similar to the one which the founding fathers designed for America. We would limit the government a bit more, for example, we would not permit the laws which created slavery, which requires legal support in order to prevent prosecution of slave owners for initiating force, even if 50% of the population supported such laws. To this extent, we are anti-democratic, just as the Bill of Rights is anti-democratic: it limits what 51% of the population is permitted to do to the other 49%. We are anti-democratic in that were Hitler to be democratically elected tomorrow, as he was in Germany, most of us would probably be in Washington the following day, with the guns we demand the right to keep and bear, trying to get a clear shot. Your majority does not override my sovereignty over my person.

I personally believe that many of the unjust laws in America were passed in an undemocratic manner due to a flaw in our Constitution. The problem is that only 25% support is required in America in order to pass a law that binds the 75% of the population which disagrees with the law, even if that law was the only issue that was relevant in their voting decisions. This is due to a mathematical oddity of our form of representative democracy. In order to elect a congressman in America, 50% plus one of the actual voters must support him. In order to pass a law, 50% plus one of the congressmen who vote must vote for the law. This means that if people were willing to do absolutely anything, including relocate, in order to get a law passed, it would only require 25% of the population in order to do so. As a matter of fact, probably 20% would be enough, if they moved into the least populous congressional districts. As far as I know, this has never happened (to this extent) in America, but as the Red State/Blue State dichotomy shows, small changes in political power among different groups in different localities in America can have overwhelming consequences in who is elected. If there were any differences remaining between the "lesser evil" parties, they would have had overwhelming differences in policy, as well.

11.Rational Choice Theory: Libertarians claim that without beginning from an assumption of humans as rational actors, there is no basis for the development of any coherent theory of political organization or rights.

I don't make quite that claim. I do make the claim that from a political perspective, it should be assumed that (most) people are rational. The reason for this is that people have unique values. I cannot know your values, and thus I cannot know if any given action you take is consistent with your values. The closest I can come to understanding what your values are, however, is to watch your behavior and to assume that your behavior reflects your values. If your behavior does not match your values, it is not up to me to force you to change your behavior to match your values (or mine). It is up to you to behave in a way that better reflects your values. If you are unemployed, it may be because you would rather be broke and not work, or it may be because you are irrational and refuse to seek work despite the fact that you would rather not be broke. This is your issue. Of course if you are unemployed because the government enforces insane regulations that prevent the creation of jobs and the accumulation of capital, as they do now, that is a public issue, and one which Libertarians are trying desperately to address.

12.Moral Autonomy: Except in all instances of disagreement with practices in the 'free market' of course. In a libertarian world, no one has the moral autonomy to question or oppose the 'free market'. I fail to see how elevating a new moral authority (the market) is a critique or repudiation of the concept of moral authorities (governments).

In a libertarian world, anyone would have the moral autonomy to question or oppose anything they wanted to question or oppose. They would have the right to, for example, form quasi-socialist communes within that society (see my article on Peaceful Socialism). The only thing they would not have is the right to use force to prevent others from participating in the free market. The only right that a non-participant has with respect to any voluntary transaction is not to participate, and to voice his displeasure. He does not have the right to force others to spend their lives pursuing those things that he values, rather than to spend their lives pursuing those things that they value. The converse of this, since negative rights are reflexive, is that they don't have the right to force him to spend his life pursuing to goals that are important to them. The price of tolerance is tolerance.

The market is not, and should not be, any sort of moral authority. One thing that the market has in common with government is that it is entirely amoral. If you want to purchase drugs, or booze, or the services of prostitutes, or anything else, the market will provide them to you, provided that no law is in the way. The difference, of course, between the market and government is that the market cannot compel you to purchase those things that you do not want. Halliburton could not, for example, go off and bomb Iraq in a free market and force you to pay for it. Compulsion requires government (or a compulsive personality, but that's different).

13.Process Legitimizes Outcome: Libertarians believe that there is no such thing as distributive justice in the normal sense. To them, the outcome of the 'free market' as they define it is always just, regardless of what that outcome is. Thus a libertarian cannot oppose racial, sexual or any other form of discrimination if they are the result of the market. Personal feelings about such circumstances must be treated as wrong-headed if such circumstances emerged as the result of a libertarian 'free market' society.

You're right, sort of. There is no such thing as distributive justice, in either a normal or an abnormal sense. The reason is that there is no system of distribution which can be deemed either just or unjust. There is only a system of production, and a system of government. Under a just system of government, all which you create belongs to you because you created it. It would not exist if you had not made the effort to create it, so how can anyone else have any claim to it? In the case of groups engaged in production, they can divide the result in any way which pleases them. If capital is plentiful and workers scarce, as was the case in the 1600's in America, a large share of the value of the product will go to the workers and a smaller share to those who provide the capital. This will continue until capital is consumed or the workers multiply to the point where the balance tips the other way. If workers are plentiful and capital is scarce, a large share of the value created will go to capitalist and a smaller share will go to the workers, until enough capital is accumulated to tip the balance the other way. At the same time, more successful or more frugal workers will accumulate resources, and will either invest them or go into business for themselves, in either case creating more jobs. In the case where capital and labor supplies in an industry were precisely balanced, the wages of labor would approach the value of the goods created, minus the amount of interest that would normally be paid on the value of the capital plus an adjustment for risk, which would take into account the probability of loss and the magnitude of loss. None of these changes happen because people love their fellow man, or are pulling for the team, or anything equally unlikely. They occur because each person pursues his own self interest in the best way he can and in accordance with his values.

Since the market values of inputs and outputs are constantly rising and falling, this would be a balance which would be constantly pursued, rarely attained, and never maintained. Most of the time, there would be imbalance in one way or the other, but these imbalances should be relatively even unless there is some sort of bias in government which makes the imbalance chronic (as we have now in America) or the reproduction rate of the unskilled exceeds economic growth as a whole. As the society becomes richer, the latter threat recedes (rich people tend to reproduce less than poor people) but the former threat increases (rich people tend to look around and see things which seem unacceptable to them, although they were the norm in the recent past. There is always the threat that they will feel there is some sort of "distributive justice" principal which is unsatisfied. If they just donate to charity, this is not a problem, as no force is involved. If they pass a law, like an income tax and welfare system, they can make imbalances permanent. This also applies to laws that fix maximum wages (which happened during WWII, when labor was scarce and capital plentiful) or minimum wages (which happens now, and maintains the scarcity of capital, as well as preventing people from working when they would be willing, creating more poverty in the long run), or any other price fixing scheme.

As for the rest, I'll start with the most absurd statement first: Libertarianism has no stance on what your personal feelings should be. It is a political philosophy. It only addresses violence, fraud, and rights, as those are the realm of politics. Feel how you like, and say so, and say so loudly. If I personally consider your feelings to be wrong-headed, I will tell you so, but you have every right to feel any way to want to feel. By the way, your feelings are wrong-headed. That's from me, not from the party.

A political question: Should government force you to associate with someone with whom you do not want to associate. I would answer no. As a matter of fact, I think that the best thing that white separatists could do for America is separate. They could buy a great big ranch, and all 237 of them could move there and stay there, and I, for one, wouldn't miss them a bit. I do not want to associate with such people any more than they want to associate with me.
A second political question: should government enforce laws or policies which treat one group of people differently from another group of people. My answer to that is no. Government exists to protect the individual rights of the members of the society which it governs. That is what governing is, in a just society. That means that government should be completely color blind, and that the laws which created slavery (creating exemptions in existing statute to allow involuntary confinement of some groups of people, for example), the laws which are now called Jim Crow laws, and Affirmative Action in government hiring are all, in my opinion, immoral. Government has a responsibility to treat all individuals as equal under the law, unless they have initiated force against other individual, in which case they have given up some of their rights. Government should also be colorblind in it's own hiring practices. Any government which makes it's hiring or buying decisions based on race is not a just government. By the way, initiation of force is not genetic, you cannot inherit the mistakes of your parents or your race.
An economic question: What would happen in a free society, in which a minority was considered undesirable by a majority of the majority? This is an extreme case, I would guess that the proportion of bigots among whites in America, for example, is about 1/1000. But lets examine the extreme case, and see what it yields. The answer is that in the long run, what you would end up with is basically two economies, separate but equal, with trade between them. This trade would occur either through non-bigoted members of the majority community, or it would occur through bigoted members of the majority community who were more greedy than bigoted. It would be as if two countries had been superimposed on the same territory, with no trade restrictions between them, and with a treaty which allowed them to buy territory from each other as their populations grew. In other words, it would not be the end of the world. This is because the laws of physics, the laws of economics, and the laws of our hypothetical society work in the same way for all people. If one group had a comparative advantage over the other group, trade would occur between them. This trade would benefit both groups. If one group was poorer than the other group, they would be willing to work for less. This, in and of itself, would constitute a comparative advantage. It would have two effects: the first would be that capital invested in the workplaces which employed the poorer group would be more productive than the capital invested in the workplaces which employed the richer group. Capital would flow from the richer territory to the poorer territory until workers in the poorer territory became as productive as those in the richer territory. Entrepreneurs in the poorer territory would also have better opportunities than those in the richer territory, for the same reasons. This would cause capital owned by members of the poorer community to grow faster than capital owned by members of the richer community. Unemployment would increase in the richer community and decrease in the poorer community. Wages would decrease in the richer community and increase in the poorer community. Eventually, parity would be reached. None of this requires anything from the people involved except plain old fashoned greed, and evolution has assured that we have plenty of that.
Does this part sound far fetched? Look at the history of the Jewish, the Italian and the Irish communities in New York! Look at some of the rich but segregated black communities that grew up in Kansas and other places. Discrimination does not make economic sense. Some will practice it, if they let their bigotry overcome their greed, but others will let their greed overcome their bigotry and ignore their personal feelings because the market doesn't care what color you are. Those who choose bigotry will prosper less than those who choose greed. And eventually, nobody will even notice which group you belong to, because the most successful members of the majority community are those who did not discriminate, and because it is obvious to all observers that the members of the minority community work just as hard, are just as productive, and are just as well educated as members of the majority community. In the long run, bigotry is a self-liquidating phenomenon. Those few bigots who remain, and you would be hard pressed to find any belief, however irrational, that wasn't held by somebody (there are still socialists, even after the intellectual, moral, and economic bankruptcy of socialism has been so completely exposed) but they would be a small minority of failures who just needed somebody to blame. And that would be the end of that.

The Free State Project #1

2007-03-10T12:34:00.000-05:00

The Free State Project, for those of you who don't know, is an attempt to move 20,000 (L|l)ibertarian activists into New Hampshire, so that we can live in one of the freest States in the Nation, and so that we can help it to stay free, and to grow freer. I have been looking forward to my move for some time, and hope to make it this year! I'm nervous about moving to a new state, where I don't know anyone, and building a new life there. So I've been watching the FSP web site as I build up my nerve (and wait for school to end). I caught a video today that really got me excited about the prospect. It was a rally in support of a New Hampshire bill which will announce that the State will not participate in the RealId Program. It wasn't huge, probably about 500 people, but where I live now, they are so in love with government that there hasn't been a peep. Nobody understands that RealId is another brick in the wall, and it's a big, gnarly brick. I have to admit, this video made me a little misty. I listened to people in my future home who actually get it. They see the police state coming. They care. And they mean to "Live Free or Die". I read on the Free State Project web site that New Hampshire allows open carry of firearms anywhere except in courthouses. I thought "Yeah, right, good luck trying it!". But at the demonstration I noticed people carrying. At a demonstration! Without fear, without harassment. No wonder New Hampshire has such a low crime rate!

Anyway, enjoy the video, and if you care about liberty, click on the "Regarding" link in the header of this message to sign up for the Free State Project and start building a life of Liberty.

Bush: Imperial President?

2007-03-02T08:18:00.000-05:00

Analysis of Bush Presidency. Has he misunderedtimated the Constitution?

The Corporation

2007-02-25T15:41:00.000-05:00

The Corporation, by Joel Bakan, is a left liberal rant with some interesting substance beneath it. It discusses the nature and history of corporations, the odd if not absurd rulings that made them, in America, "people" under the law, and therefore entitled to rights under the 14th Amendment, and provides a litany of corporate misdeeds (in my opinion, some real and some imagined) throughout the years. It discusses the very real problem of "regulatory capture", where regulatory agencies that are created to "protect people from industry" end up serving the established interests in that industry to the detriment of consumers, potential competitors, and everyone else, but falsely concludes that more regulation is the solution to this problem. This error is repeated throughout the book, with government recommended as the solution to each and every failure of government stated or implied in the text.

There is, however, some merit from a capitalist and libertarian point of view to some of the arguments made within this book. For example, there is the fact that one of the defining attributes of corporations is the limitation of liability they provide for shareholders. The owner of an ordinary proprietorship, for example, is personally liable for his acts and the acts of his company, just as he would be liable for the same acts were they carried out in his non-working hours. The same is true of a partnership. This is not true of corporations. The liability of investors in corporations is limited to to the value of their investment. This is not much of a problem for companies and people who do business with the corporation. They know about this limitation, and that their potential recovery in suing a corporation are limited to the value of that corporation. This is why corporations are required to put the ubiquitous "Inc" after their name on contracts, for example. But there are people effected by the acts of corporation who do not have any choice. A corporation's externalities, for example, are different from the externalities of a person or an ordinary business, in that even if you sue the corporation, your recovery is limited to the value of that corporation. And since externalities are, by definition, "effects of an act on non-consenting third parties", you cannot choose to have externalities imposed on you only by people and ordinary businesses. If corporations exist, and if they produce externalities, as everyone does, they can impose externalities on you, and there is no way to opt out. This can be considered an initiation of force.

Mr. Bakan goes to great length to point out that corporations, in their single minded pursuit of profit, are inhuman. This is, of course, true. Corporations, legal fictions aside, are not people. He fails to point out that your car, your house, and your dishwasher suffer from the same failing. Corporations are more like machines then like people. His assertion that they are psychopathic, however, does not hold water. Psychopaths are people, and it is reasonable to expect a conscience from people. If they fail to display such, they are defective people, and therefore may be termed psychopaths. However, hammers and bulldozers are rarely described as psychopaths, despite their notable lack of conscience. However, there is a grain of truth in this argument as well. Corporate directors frequently act as if their limited financial responsibility for the acts of their corporation is also a limited moral responsibility. This is false.

So what can we do about the real problems concerning corporations? How would they be handled in my perfect world? Here I differ with Mr. Bakan. In my perfect Libertarian world, there would be no limited liability for corporate shareholders. Instead, there would be insurance companies which served to protect shareholders from liability from the actions of the corporations in which they invested. This insurance could either be purchased by the shareholders themselves, or could be purchased by the corporation itself on their behalf. Thus, those exposed to externalities by corporations would be able to recover their losses from the owners of the corporation or it's insurance company, even if it exceeded the value of the corporation. And stockholders would bear the cost of liability for their corporations, just as they do for their homes and cars. The insurance companies would vary their rates, on a case by case basis, for the shareholders of the various corporations, based on the behavior of those corporations.

I would also return to some of the older rules regarding corporations. For example, I would not permit corporations to own stock in other companies. This is a human right, but it is just that: a human right. There is no reason that companies must own each other, except for the purpose of obfuscation. And obfuscation is the bane of any market economy. Rather than merging companies, there is no reason that a corporation cannot sell it's assets to another, pay off it's shareholders, and cease to exist, rather than selling itself to another company. The main difference would be that the name of the company would cease to exist along with the company, and contracts would not be transferable. It really annoyed me, for example, when Cingular Wireless bought AT&T wireless, and without my consent, I became a customer of Cingular. I did not choose to do business with Cingular, and did not like the way they treated me.

And I would strongly consider returning to the rule that corporations could be created only for a narrowly defined purpose and a limited time. This might entail some loss of economies of scale, but would allow much greater flexibility to investors in choosing which things in which he wanted to invest.

What would the results of these changes be? In my opinion, they would reduce the number and size of corporations by removing one of the primary reasons (if not the primary reason) for incorporating, and by limiting corporations to a single purpose. The only time when it would be to the advantage of investors to incorporate would be when they needed to in order to raise the requisite capital in order to pursue the limited objectives they pursued. Transparency would be increased, as I suspect that insurance companies would be reluctant to insure shareholders of companies which were not forthcoming about their business practices, and willing to submit to inspections by the representatives of the insurers.

The problem that would not be solved by these changes is the problem of externalities. This problem is not specific to corporations, but merely exacerbated by their limited liability. The only solution I can see here is a more complete definition of property rights, and for more things to be privately held. But I will return to that subject in a forthcoming article on externalities.

The End is Nigh

2007-02-24T09:58:00.000-05:00

This expose of the victimization of the poor must not be missed! Click the "Regarding" link above to view!

Peaceful Socialism

2007-02-21T18:43:00.000-05:00

Somebody asked me, once upon a time, if there was any characteristic of Libertarianism which made it indisputably the most just form of government. There is. That characteristic is that it is so open, so free, that nearly any form of social organization is possible within the Libertarian framework. The converse is not true. One cannot set up a Libertarian society within a Socialist society, as having everything allocated by government would make private property impossible. But it is possible, to the extent that a Socialist society is possible at all, to set up a Socialist society within a Libertarian society, given three conditions.

Remember that in a Libertarian society, the only function of government is to protect individual rights from attack, either from inside society, as in criminal activity, or from outside society, as in invasion. This is truly a least common denominator government. So how can Socialism, which requires complete centralization of all types of economic activity, possibly be achieved within a Libertarian society? Quite easily. The proviso that a Libertarian society forbids the initiation of force implies the following three conditions:

That members of the Socialist subgroup not be coerced into joining that subgroup. For the subgroup to kidnap members of the society at large, or to otherwise force them to participate, would obviously be an initiation of force. This cannot be permitted. But so long as subgroup members were willing participants, force would not be involved, and therefore there would be no conflict between the Socialist subgroup and the group at large. By the same token, the group at large would have no right, and no desire, to forcibly prevent those who chose a Socialist lifestyle from enjoying that which they have chosen.
That members of the Socialist subgroup not be forcibly prevented from leaving their subgroup. That is, if and when members of the subgroup chose to leave, Libertarian principals would require that the group at large intervene were we to discover that he was forcibly prevented from leaving the subgroup. Just as group marriage would require a contract that specified the terms for divorce, a Socialist subgroup would require (or at least would be well advised to have) a contract with each of it's members specifying, for example, what sorts of property the member would be permitted to retain if and when he left the group, and whether a member whom had received investment in the form of education would owe the subgroup compensation if he immediately left the subgroup upon completion of this education. The only requirement which a Libertarian government would impose on this contract would be that he be permitted to take is body with him, and that he not be subjected to a debtor's prison in order to repay whatever was required by the subgroup's contract. All other contract terms would be purely private matters between the subgroup and it's members.
That members of the Socialist subgroup not confiscate property from non-members in establishing or expanding their holdings. That is, they could not initiate force against their neighbors in order to gain more land on which to live and/or work, they could not take factories by force. They could, however, buy any property they desired, in order to expand their operations.

These simple conditions would make it perfectly possible to form several different kinds of Socialist organizations that could exist at peace within a Libertarian society. Since there would be no pesky tax collectors coming around, the subgroup would not be forced to trade with members of the group at large in order to get hard currency to pay taxes. But there would be nothing to prevent them from trading with the outside if they so chose. They could either trade in kind, and preserve the purity of their moneyless system, or they could trade goods for cash, and maintain a collective store of cash for future trade. They could even, if they so chose, invest their collective wealth in the stock market of the outside world, in order to have their operation partially financed by the outside economy. No Libertarian society would object to any of these arrangements.

There are several collective arrangements that could be supported in this way.

A Kibbutz, a form of collective farm in which the inhabitants of the farm share equally in the proceeds thereof. They could be either self-sufficient, or trade externally (as a socialist nation likely would), or any combination thereof. They would be free to structure their operation as they saw fit. All they would need to do is to assure themselves that they were able to produce as much as their members consumed. And that, of course, is also a requirement of a Socialist government. It is an inescapable law of nature.
A collective business, or coop, in which the employees of a business, or other like-minded individuals, buy or build a business and operate it for themselves. There are innumerable ways to structure such a business, and I am no expert on what they are. But surely anyone who was interested in this form of organization would be able to come up with an arrangement that would suit them.
Many others, limited only by your imagination.

Why would any Socialist prefer such an arrangement to revolution or gradual socialization of an economy by successive interventions? There are several reasons. Perhaps the individuals in question truly do not want to do harm to anyone. My biggest problem with Socialism is that in a Socialist society, I would have to either be killed or tortured/starved into submission. This is something that I would take rather personally. My preferred social organization makes no such requirement of you.

Or perhaps one might be committed to Socialism, but unsure of what organization might work. In a Libertarian society, I predict that their would be thousands of groups who wanted to try different types of communal arrangements. If they were to carry out a revolution, and impose their first choice on a nation by force and law, they would find it difficult to change from that first organization to another if the first did not work well for them. And since it was on a national scale, they would only be able to try one form of Socialism at a time. But under a Libertarian governments, hundreds or thousands of organizational structures could be tried, limited only the members who desired to make the attempt.

Or perhaps you aren't entirely sure that Socialism will work, but want to make the attempt. A Libertarian society would allow a Socialist society that did not work to disband or reorganize, should Socialism, or the brand of Socialism they chose not work. This could be done without violence, and without the seventy years of hell that the Soviets endured, simply by unanimously choosing to disband. Or if part of the group wanted to disband, and the others did not, those who wanted to leave would always be free to do so.

So although I do not think that Socialism is workable on a large scale, I invite non-violent Socialists everywhere to join the Libertarians in attempting to establish a framework in which everyone's dreams, Capitalist and Socialist alike, can be pursued. I even have a suggested slogan for you:

We are the collective. You will not, unless you so choose, be assimilated.

The Social Contract

2007-02-18T05:49:00.000-05:00

When I grow annoyed at having the fruits of my labor, my liberty, and slowly but surely my sanity confiscated by our benevolent and kindly government, invariably somebody points out that I am a party to a 'social contract'. Being the literal minded SOB that I am, I generally point out that I never entered into any such agreement, and that I can hardly be bound by a contract to which I never agreed. The response is generally some noise indicating that I implicitly entered into the agreement when I chose to be born, to which I can only respond that I do not recall choosing to be born, and surely had I known the conditions of the agreement I was entering into, I would have made different arrangements. Of course it's a moot point, since we cannot be bound by a contract until we reach adulthood, and my parents were quite clear that that did not happen until long after I was born. They are less clear about whether it ever happened.

So I thought I might feel better if I obtained a copy of this document, affixed my signature, and was thereby honor bound to adhere to it. Sadly, in all the hubbub, it appears that the document has been misplaced.

So in order to reach the serene state for which I long, I am going to have to draft a new copy, based on current practice. I am not a lawyer, but since nobody else has stepped up to the plate, I guess I must.

Here is my first draft:

I, the undersigned, hereby agree to enter into "the social contract". I agree to provide the government with a blank check, which will allow them to at any time and in any manner they choose to take any amount of my earnings or accumulated property that they may desire. Further, I agree to bind myself to them as an indentured accountant, and to spend whatever amount of time shall be required in plumbing the depths of the byzantine and incomprehensible tax codes, as they shall be spelled out by the congress, and interpreted by the IRS. I accept that any assistance I am granted by my masters in pondering these imponderables shall be granted at their leisure and agree to take responsibility for any errors that either I or they may make in these calculations, as well as whatever penalties they should impose upon me for said mistakes, regardless of whether said mistakes are mine or theirs. I disclaim any responsibility on their part to be accurate, fair, sane, or humane.
I agree that in return for this consideration, I will be granted guidance in how to live my life, under the gentle tutelage of the Government's jack-booted thugs, who will provide me such kindnesses as burning down my dwelling with my family and friends inside, shooting my unarmed wife as she stands in the front yard holding an 18 month old child, imprisoning me, brutalizing me, lying to me, impoverishing me, redistributing my earnings to their cronies at their whim, drafting me to serve in their wars, granting or refusing me medical care at their whim, not based on the merits of the treatment I require but on the political expediency of my receiving that treatment, and other tender mercies too numerous to mention and too ghastly to consider. I am sure that by this process I will be able to finally understand ethical behavior and good will toward those men, women, children who are not located in some place which must be bombed in the national interest.
I agree not to attempt to comprehend the simple and concise wording of the constitution, or to delve into the mysteries of what phrases such as "shall not be abridged", "shall pass no law", might mean, as if I am unable to understand the tens of thousands of pages of the tax code, I surely could not begin to fathom the 4543 words that make up our constitution. I also acknowledge that the ninth amendment, otherwise known as the "but wait, there's more!" amendment, should not be construed to imply that I actually have rights that are not enumerated in the constitution (being neither female nor pregnant) and that the tenth amendment, which states that any power which is not explicitly granted to the federal government is explicitly denied them was just an April fools joke on the part of the founding fathers. They were such kidders. You should have seen some of the pranks they played on the British.
I agree not to question why the 18th amendment was required to start prohibition I, but no amendment was required to start the war on sick, harmless addicts and recreational drug users. I also agree to ignore the fact that harmful addicts, could have been dealt with under pre-existing laws against doing harm.
I agree in all matters involving the constitution to submit to the ageless wisdom of Chief Justice Humpty Dumpty:
When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less. The question is, who is master?
I agree to ignore the fact that is was not Justice Dumpty who used the words in the Constitution but rather the founding fathers, and that it was not just written but carefully negotiated. We all know what happens, after all, to the best laid plans of mice and men. Sooner or later someone decides that since they 'interpret' the constitution, and since the word 'interpret' is one of the words of the constitution, they may 'interpret' 'interpret' to mean alter, change, legislate, repeal, destroy, mangle, or any other damn thing the feel like 'interpreting' 'interpret' it to mean at the moment. We are, after all, a nation of lawyers, not of men.
In short, I agree to obey, rather than thinking. To coast rather than striving. To work, not for those things that I value, and those people whom I love, but for the aggrandizement of the omnipotent state, and the advancement of those things I abhor. I agree that my life is not mine, but is the rightful property of my neighbors; that it is their goals I must pursue, their wants I must satisfy, their lives which I must make meaningful.

On second thought, this contract would not be binding. Under American law, in order for a contract to bind, each party to it must receive something of value, and though the document gives away my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor, it provides nothing for me. So I guess it won't solve my problem after all. Oh, well, back to the drawing board!

Capital to the People!

2007-02-18T02:24:00.000-05:00

The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando de Soto, is a must read for anyone who studies or debates free market economics. Capitalism is the most powerful engine for allowing people to lift themselves out of poverty and empowering anyone willing to make the effort to reach their dreams. But in some developing countries, Capitalism is not reaching these goals. This is not because of "market failure", but rather because of government failure. De Soto demonstrates effectively how much damage a government which fails to provide simple, easy, inexpensive and effective registration of property and is therefore unable to enforce property rights can do. Through studies performed in his native Peru and throughout the third world, he illustrates again and again how the entrepreneurship of poor people is thwarted by the governments that are supposed to be protecting their rights.

Consider the Philippines, where it takes 168 steps and 13-25 years to formalize informal urban property. Or Egypt, where the procedure to gain access to desert land for construction and to register these property rights takes 6-14 years and 77 steps. Or Lima, Peru, where 728 bureaucratic steps must be braved, in order to obtain legal title to a home in a validated housing settlement.

The result of this madness? People build concrete and cinder block homes on land they do not own. People are forced to run their businesses illegally because running a legal business is impossible. And under those conditions, although these people have assets, they have no way of turning these assets into capital. Who would write a mortgage on a home built on land whose ownership cannot be determined? Who will finance the expansion of a business which exists only because the authorities have not yet gotten around to shutting it down? How can people escape from poverty, if access to the very basic legal system that capitalism requires is beyond their means.

Please click the link adjacent to the title, in order to order this fine work, and to finally put to rest the illusions of those Socialists who claim that the countries where many are unable to experience the benefits of capitalism is "proof" that capitalism creates wealth only for the few at expense of the many.

Where do I stand?

2007-02-17T19:13:00.000-05:00

I am a... Social Liberal (83% permissive)
and an... Economic Conservative (86% permissive)
I am best described as a: Libertarian

((( Don't let the words conservative and liberal scare you: in economic matters, conservative means "believer in freedom", just like the word "liberal" does in social matters. )))

The Politics Test

Libertarian Questions and Answers

2007-02-16T07:12:00.000-05:00

These are some good questions from a message board, I'm answering them here to reach a wider audience. See another take on these questions here

1. Should the federal government protect the environment? Should there be national parks or endangered species laws?

The federal (or more likely, state) governments should enforce property rights through the civil courts. If someone has damaged your property through pollution, it is a form or trespass. Trespass is force. So yes, to that extent, government should protect the environment. Also, government should protect the government by selling the national parks to the highest bidder. The highest bidder, having invested a great deal of money in his new land, is likely to do a MUCH better job of protecting it than the government ever has or will. For example, the Feds sell logging rights in national forests at a fraction of the price that any (sane) owner would require. People will only damage their own land if what they gain by doing so is more valuable than the land itself.

2. Should food companies be required to list the ingredients on the package? If not, should there be a punishment for printing false information on food product packages, or would the only determent be how customers would react if they found out they were lied to.

I don't believe there is a need to force food companies to print ingredients on the package. I believe they would do so, because I believe that most people want to know what they're putting in their bodies, and therefore would be more likely to buy food with such information provided. If a company printed false information (intentionally) on packaging (or anything else), that would be an act of fraud. Such fraud could be handled by either criminal or civil courts.

3. I’ve gained enough info to understand that libertarians are against federal drug laws, but what about state or city drug laws? Also, are federal drug laws unconstitutional?

Libertarians oppose all laws concerning "victimless crime". "Victimless crime" is a contradiction in terms. And yes, the federal drug laws are unconstitutional. When congress passed prohibition, they had to amend the constitution in order to give themselves the power, first. There is no such amendment to justify the "war on drugs" or the existence of the FDA, or mandatory prescriptions. When drugs are legal, I look forward to being able to make my medical decisions with (at my option) the advice of a doctor who knows that I am paying him, not for his privileged position as a prescriber, but because I actually value his advice. I suspect he'll make sure that I continue to value his advice by making it good.

4. Should there be a post office?

Yes. There are several that would do: FedEx, UPS, and there will be many more when the government is out of the business. BTW, before you assume that we would be paying the prices we pay such companies now, keep in mind that they are currently delivering a much more sophisticated service (rapid delivery) and I think it quite likely that they will end up offering more choice AND lower prices.

5. Should interstate highways even exist? Furthermore, should there be state-funded roads, or should all roads be ran by companies? Companies provide us with electricity we have to pay for, so why don’t companies provide us with roads we have to pay for.

Again, they should exist as private entities. This would have been technically difficult (but possible) in 1789, but would not be nearly as hard now. This is about my last priority, though. If, after the revolution, we end up with a government that builds roads and does very little else, it will not break my heart. It's such a simple thing that even they can't screw it up TOO badly.

6. Should there be anti-monopoly laws, or should the market take care of itself?

The market should take care of itself. Harmful monopolies can only be created/maintained by government intervention. There are some kinds of monopoly that can exist in a free market (for example a failure monopoly, where if a business builds a railroad to a small town, finds it can't support his debt payments and goes bankrupt, someone else can buy the old railroad at a fraction of the price and run it at a profit. But this sort of monopoly does harm not it's customers, as if they did not do what they did, the town would just have to live without rail service.)

That said, there is a possibility of collusion raising prices in the short run. I would like to see one or more non-governmental companies that made a business of finding businesses where this was going on, and either buying or building a new company in those industries to break the cartel. But governmental anti-monopoly practice does far more harm than good.

One issue that is open in my mind is copyright and patent. These are monopolies enforced by government. There are good arguments for and against them. Again, I could probably live with just about any solution to these problems a sane (libertarian) society came up with. I think that current copyright law gives too much away.

7. Should any government entity prevent restaurants from serving food or items that are known to be bad for us? A lot of libertarians disagree with the upcoming trans fat ban in NYC, but trans fat is pretty much just bad for us. What if restaurants still served our food on plates with lead paint? It’s bad, but people could chose not to eat there.

No. I like food that is bad for me. I like cheeseburgers, I like McDonalds fries. How much of these things I consume and how much of a price I pay to do so is an intimate decision that I am unwilling to delegate.

8. I’ve gathered that libertarians don’t like seatbelt laws, but should there be laws requiring parents to make their children under 18 wear seatbelts? With that said, should it still be illegal for parents to give children alcohol?

There is a law requiring that parents take care of their kids. It is the law of evolution. If they do not do a reasonable job, their bloodline will die out.

9. Should there be laws that say where guns are allowed, or should it be up to the owner of the place?

It should be up to the owner.

10. Should there be public education systems, or should all schools be private? I’m sure some charity would open free schools, but they wouldn’t be ran by any sort of government.

It should be private, and charity and/or financing should be fine for those few would could not afford the (much cheaper) price of education in a libertarian society.

11. Should it be illegal for an employer to discriminate by race when hiring?

No. That said, it would generally be in the employer's best interest not to discriminate, as if he does so, he is cutting himself off from part of the talent pool, and thereby costing himself money. Not to mention alienation of potential customers. Who wants to deal with a person like that?

12. Libertarians seem to hold private property in high value. Should people be allowed to own airspace?

I would say that everything which can be owned should be owned. Otherwise it has to struggle by defended only by an incompetent government. (Is there another kind?)

13. If our society were truly libertarian, what type of legislation would congress work on?

In a libertarian society, it is very likely that congress would almost never actually meet. Most of the laws could be written very quickly after the founding of the republic and left alone for long periods of time.

Why do they hate us? Let me count the whys! (Part 1)

2007-02-13T01:23:00.000-05:00

The Insomniac Giant

Teacher: ...so why would [the independents] fight so hard against us?
River: We meddle.
Teacher: River?
River: People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run don't walk we're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome.
Teacher: River, we're not telling people what to think. We're just trying to show them how.

From Joss Wheden's Serenity

After the surprise attack on Perl Harbor, Japanese Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto is quoted (possibly apocryphally) as saying "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.". Not only did the Japanese wake a sleeping giant, but apparently they also induced insomnia, as the giant has never slept again.

Since that fateful day, the United States has been involved in innumerable wars, all unjustifiable, with the exception of World War II itself, and possibly Afghanistan. The exceptions should illustrate my criterion for a justifiable war: a justifiable war is one which is a purely defensive war. World War II clearly began with an attack on the United States. Afghanistan may have been justified by the attack on the World Trade Center. All of the others were offensive wars. This includes those which have been called "police actions", "peacekeeping missions" and the like. They were attacks on countries which had not attacked us first. And that cannot be justified.

Remember those who Starve! A poster from one of the many Soviet famines.

The Cold War served as a container for many of these wars. They were merely battles in that larger undeclared conflict. But the Cold War itself was unjustifiable as it did not follow an attack or attempted attack on America. It followed rhetorical attacks on America. That's not nearly good enough. Some will way "what, are you a socialist?". Hardly. It is precisely because I have so little respect for socialism that I oppose the Cold War. Socialism is not a viable way to organize an economy.. It's not just unjust. It's not just unAmerican. It's also unworkable. And therefore we were fighting a paper tiger. Socialism collapsed under the weight of it's own stupidity. And by providing Stalin and his ilk with an enemy to scapegoat, we probably prolonged it's existence. Note the famines that were recurrent in the Soviet Union. You cannot fight effectively in the long run if you cannot even manage a working economy.

But our government felt the need to fight the Soviet Union. And to fight Korea. And to fight Vietnam. And to fund Israel as a foil to the Soviet Union. And to fund the Shah of Iran as a foil to the Soviet Union. And to fund just about every dictator to take over any country, as a foil to the Soviet Union. They, of course, took offense and funded every dictator that we weren't funding (and some that we were) as a foil against us. And so it went. The Cold War was a wet dream for any dictator, be he right wing, left wing, or pure authoritarian. One doesn't find many Libertarian dictators.

The problem is, the dictator business is hard work. Dictators have to relax. And the favorite way for dictators to relax is to kill people. Sometimes he kills his serfs. Sometimes he kills people in a neighboring country. There are lots of people in the world, and any dictator who looks around can find somebody he wants to kill. And with his shiny new American F-16 (dictators generally like shiny things, that's why they wear so many medals), available at deep discount prices and easy credit terms from Crazy Georgie's Discount Dictator Supply House, you can kill 'em in style.

Of course every nation, like every individual, has the right to keep and bear arms. And like the companies that sell weapons to individuals, the companies that sell weapons to governments should not be held accountable for how those weapons are used. But when a nation gives weapons away, that's a bit different. That is an endorsement of the policies of that country/dictator to whom you give the weapons. And we picked some real winners.

Of course the people upon whom the weapons are fired and the bombs dropped feel rather put out by the whole affair. And they blame America. Sometimes they make up conspiracy theories to explain why we do the things we do. They say we fund Israel because of the Zionist Lobby. They say we funded Noriega so that he would give cocaine to the CIA to import into America. They say we hate blacks, and Jews, and Arabs, and Spanish speakers, and the French (most of use really aren't crazy about the French), and pretty much everybody else. And if you look at the people our weapons have been used on, you might even think it true. But here is the deep dark secret to which nobody wants to admit. Giants aren't that bright. They bumble and they bluster and they step on people and they cause floods whenever they take a piss. But giants aren't evil. They've just got a dangerous combination of big and dumb. There is only one way to make a Giant safe: put him back to sleep. When they're sleeping, they look soooo peaceful!

Why socialism doesn't work (part 1)

2007-02-12T20:41:00.000-05:00

First off, let's imagine Marxism as Marx imagined it. Everyone has become the "New Socialist Man", and is no longer interested in their own life, wants, needs, dreams, or aspirations, but cares only about the almighty State and what they can do for their government. There is no money. There is no market. There is just whatever amount of stuff happens to have either been stolen from the bourgeois (capital) and the land itself. The running-dog capitalist exploiters of the noble workers and virtuous peasants and their itching-and-scratching-dog lackeys have been heroically tortured into submission or justly executed along with their families. It is time to celebrate our glorious revolution and to proceed to enjoy our new workers' paradise.

There is a problem, however. We have abolished money! We have abolished the market! We have no way of determining if anything is more or less valuable than anything else! So how do we decide what to produce? The answer is that in the absence of a free market, we have no way of determining whether ten tons of iron ore (about two tons of iron), 200 pounds of rubber and plastic, 50 pounds of glass and the labor, equipment and facilities required to turn the forgoing into an automobile are worth more or less than the automobile we could produce from them. Moreover, we have no way of comparing the value of ten of those potential automobiles to the value of one railroad engine. Or of five tractors. Or a refrigerator (which requires some different materials, and some of the same materials). Or a computer program (which requires almost none of the same materials and a totally different type of labor). We have no idea what we can do to serve our fellow man, which we want oh-so-badly to do, because we have no idea what he values.

So, with heavy hearts, we have to return to the drawing board. But do not lose faith, comrades! Just because Marx's dream of a moneyless and marketless economy does not stand up to even casual scrutiny, that doesn't mean that he was wrong. He just wasn't right. And logic, right and wrong are concepts of the bourgeois mind anyway. Our superior proletarian minds will find a way to overcome these temporary setbacks on our glorious revolutionary road to freedom, democracy, and the mass murders of all those who disagree with us.

Libertarian Strikes Back

2007-01-22T03:57:00.000-05:00

Here are my responses to a post by capitalistimperialistpig. The original post is accessible by clicking on the title.

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Actually, the question "Am I my brother's keeper" is a matter of personal conscience, not a political question at all. The question on which I differ with socialists and modern "liberals" is "should the state force me to be my brothers keeper above and beyond the dictates of my conscience". This comes down to your assumption below that libertarians are opposed to slavery. Yes, we are. It is nice to run across a liberal who actually states (rather than implying) that he is not. It clarifies things when you admit what you really believe: that you have the right to enslave your neighbor in order that his life can be spent in pursuit of your goals, rather than in pursuit of his own.

That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context.

The premise of libertarianism is as follows: you own yourself. In what way is that premise fraudulent?

For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human species has existed, all humans lived in a sort of libertarian paradise - no government, no organized religion, and few social constraints on behavior. A few lived that way until very recently. In many places people were able to achieve a kind of equilibrium with their environment, with population naturally controlled through homicide, infanticide, and starvation.

I'm afraid you've mistaken us for anarchists. There are good arguments for anarchism, but I am not entirely convinced by them, so I will defend your target of record, Libertarianism, not your straw man, Anarchism.

Clearly, humans are well adapted to that kind of life, so its no wonder libertarians would like to recapture that. The catch - there's always a catch - is that they don't want to give up the comforts of civilization.

No, we want to completely realize the benefits of civilization by removing fraud, force, and the threat of force from human interactions except in self-defense. That process has been started, and the USA is (as of yet) the closest any human society has come to that ideal, but we are not there yet, and have been regressing since the Great Depression from Republican (not the party, but the type of government) limited government to "my gang is bigger than your gang" pure democracy.

Hobbes and Jefferson had somewhat different ideas about the proper role of government in civilization, but I think we now have some historical perspective on actual as opposed to theoretical development, so that will be my approach. The serpent in the above described libertarian paradise appeared in the form of horticulture and the settled life it required. Hunter gatherers have no property but that which they can carry with them, so their wives and daughters are almost the only things they have worth stealing. Farmers have property - stored food, dwellings, and tools too big to lug around much. They also develop population densities large enough to become a menace to their hunter gatherer neighbors and each other. Thus, the necessity for organized defense.

Of course.

It's doubtless natural to be willing to fight in defense of one family and property, but it's decidedly unnatural to lay one's life on the line for the neighbors. Consequently, tribal and larger societies develop an array of strategies to compel service in the common defense, including elaborate patriotic social structures, organized religion, professional armies, and, or course, the naked threat of violence against non-participants. Military organizations inevitably partially enslave their members.

Why are societies formed in the first place? The answer is that organized defense is more effective and more efficient than disorganized defense. Thus the best way to defend your family and property is to join in the common defense of your nation. This is unnatural, in that animals would not generally do it, but one must understand that humans have one natural defense that animals lack: reason. Without that, we are lost.

I'm pretty sure libertarians oppose slavery in principle, but how can you have armies without it. The

Yes, we do! You can have armies without slavery by making your society worth defending. Worth defending to whom? To those who are asked to defend it. I will agree with you, however, that a society not worth defending must resort to armies of slaves.

only good defense anyone has found so far is the republican form of government. Unfortunately, as the history of Greece, Rome, Florence and many others shows, the Republic is fragile. There are number of diseases that afflict the Republic, as Adams and others among the founding fathers noted. One of the most pernicious is the concentration of wealth and power in a few dynastic families. Libertarians, at least our current Rand influenced version, seem unwilling to address this problem. Several times our ancestors found it necessary to attack this problem, by eliminating primogeniture, instituting the income tax, and inheritance and gift taxes.

Primogeniture still exists: in the U.S., at least, you are permitted to leave your entire estate to your first born child if that is what you desire. People rarely desire that, so it is rarely done. As for the income tax, inheritance tax, and gift tax, the first thing that should be noted about them is they are not wealth taxes, they are transaction taxes. Thus they do not have any effect at all on those who are living off their fortunes: they effect people who are attempting to build fortunes, thereby protecting the positions of established fortunes. So such taxes protect "the concentration of wealth in a few dynastic families". The one that comes closest to the effects you seem to want is the inheritance tax, but that is easily evaded if you can afford the lawyers to make it happen. It is again a punishing tax for the middle class, but not so for the truly rich. Two taxes that would come much closer to the goal of reducing fortunes are land taxes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism) and consumption taxes (see http://fairtax.org). Of course, a libertarian society would have very little governmental spending, so taxation would do very little to prevent concentration of wealth. That is not the purpose of taxation, the purpose of taxation is to fund your (hopefully minimal) government in it's efforts to defend you against crime from within and invasion from without. The advantages of these schemes of taxation is that, unlike those you listed, they would not increase the concentration of wealth.

The most important factor in keeping wealth concentrated is regulation. A relatively unsophisticated person can run a simple business in an unregulated economy. The only thing he needs to be able to do is create something -- anything -- that someone -- anyone -- values more it's creation cost him. That is not a particularly high hurdle. 10th century blacksmiths were able to run businesses. Crack dealers are able to run businesses. Pimps are able to run businesses. Why could your average American not run a business? Regulation. In order to run a business within the law in America, one would have to have a legion of lawyers on staff. As a matter of fact, I would be surprised if any businessman told me that his business never broke the law. There are 30,000 pages of regulation in the federal registry. Not to mention state laws. Nobody can be sure at any given moment that they are not breaking the law. They just hope that if and when they get caught, they have enough political pull to avoid the penalties, or enough money to bribe the official in question. Start-ups run by poor people almost never have those resources. Again, the position of the few is protected from encroachment by the many.

The second most important factor that keeps wealth concentrated is the shortage of capital. Every job that is created costs money. When there is more than frictional unemployment (see any econ text book for explanation), the price of labor tends to be low and the returns on capital tend to be high. The market will solve this problem very quickly, if left to itself, because those high returns on capital will cause people to make a greater effort to accumulate capital. Thus the returns will (largely) be reinvested, and those who earn more than subsistence wages will be more likely to invest. These investments will create more and more jobs. Eventually, there will be more jobs than there are people to do the jobs. Employers will have to pay more in order to get people to work for them. As this happens, more people will be earning more than subsistence wages. The high returns of capital will drive some of them to invest. More jobs will be created. And the cycle will continue. The rich will get richer, and the poor will get richer. The poor will get richer faster. And that is how it should be.

Unfortunately, Socialists have misinterpreted the high returns of capital as "exploitation". So instead of letting the increase in capital exceed the increase in population, they attempt to revenge themselves on capitalists for being successful. This makes capital grow more slowly, and prolongs the process. They have not entirely stopped economic growth, but they have slowed it down. Eventually, either socialists will reverse the trend of improvement by bringing the economy to a halt, and society will collapse (bringing about the anarchy you fear) or the free market will be welcomed and understood, and the conditions of workers will improve as they generally have since the transition from Mercantilism and Feudalism to capitalism started in the 1700's. As the level of capital investment balances the size of the population, the levels of wealth will equalize themselves.

A third important factor is mercantilist/socialist policies that attempt to control the economy to benefit some groups at the expense of others. For example, corporate bankruptcies that leave the same people in power that ran the company into the ground in the first place. Chrysler comes to mind, along with others. This means that incompetents get to continue wasting resources, and the taxpayer gets stuck with the bill. Failed companies should be allowed to cease to exist. This is a specific case of the general problem of subsidies. Any subsidy, whether paid to corporations, to farmers, to bums, or to anyone else, causes less valuable uses of labor and capital to replace more valuable uses of labor and capital. Moreover, subsidies go to those with the most political pull, who are generally the richest and most powerful members of society. Again, the richest are protected from encroachment by the poorer.

There is one more feature of the world economy (and economics in general) that will slow down the process of equalization in America. Since many countries have pursued mercantilist and socialist policies even more enthusiastically than we have in America, there are countries out there with huge populations of desperately poor people. As they abandon these policies, it will be most profitable to do business where there are the greatest concentrations of poor people, and the least capitalization. But this is a self liquidating phenomenon. As people invest in poor countries in order to take advantage of the cheap labor there, they must make those countries richer (if the foreign companies were not offering more than their workers were making before, their workers would not work for them). This will begin to take up the supply of poor people in these countries. Since these new producers will want to consume (why else would they be producing), local businesses will expand or be created to provide them will things to consume. This will further limit the supply of poor people in these countries. Eventually, there will be enough wealth in these countries that there is no longer any particular reason to invest there, as their labor rates approach ours, but that is not really a problem, since their economies will be healthy and thriving. And as that happens, and standards of living homogenize in the free world, the richer countries will begin growing faster again.

This is not to say that a free society would have no gradations in wealth. Of course it would. Different people have different values, and strive for different things. Why should someone who values wealth, and is willing to earn it, have the same outcome as someone who would prefer to exert themselves as little as possible and spend the rest of their time fishing? Also, different people have different abilities, and therefore would have different levels of success. The only way that any society can provide equality of results would be to provide inequality of treatment, rather than the Libertarian ideal, the Rule of Law. But the very large differences we see today would by and large disappear, and since it would be impossible to make your money by coercing others to do business with you (through government power) or by preventing people from competing with you (through government power), we could be sure that anyone who did amass a large fortune did so by providing us with those things we most value in the highest quality and at the best price. And those are differences I can live with very happily.

As long as libertarians refuse to embrace this necessity, they are the enemies of freedom, and need to be treated as such.

As long as socialists refuse to recognize that what I create belongs to me, they are enemies of freedom, and need to be treated as such.

England prepares for "Knife Control"

2006-06-21T02:48:00.000-04:00

Shops still selling knives to children | Reuters.com

It would appear that England wants to make life even easier for criminals. As one would expect, it's near total ban on handguns has caused an increase in fatal stabbings: committed, one must infer, by the few criminals too stupid to be able to find illegal guns. So what is the rational response? Who cares -- this is politics. The next likely response is an increase in the legal age to purchase a knife (that's right, they actually regulate sales of knives) from 16 to 18.

No information is available on the minimum age at which brits can obtain bats, rocks, blow torches, wrenches, lighter fluid, matches, tweezers, windows, fists, feet or any of the other tried and true methods of eliminating tiresome company.

On the brighter side, if they somehow make the gun and knife bans work, the English can look forward to an evolutionary increase in average height and weight, as more physically demanding forms of killing take over.

Sadly, their female population will probably drop, as women are stripped of the equalizers with which they can compensate for their generally weaker upper bodies. But isn't that a small price to pay for a disarmed and easily victimized public?

Overcoming injustice through DNA

2006-04-11T23:01:00.000-04:00

Matt and Andrew Moldawer have been unfairly descriminated against all of their lives. They have been excluded from equal consideration by schools, from scholarships, and from many other privleges due only to the color of their skin. This is bad enough, but they have now discovered that they are not even entirely members of the race against which their tormentors intended to discriminate. These discriminators assumed, based on their victims' appearance, that they were caucasion. But the victims have now discovered that they are 9% black and 11% indian, and should never have suffered this discrimination.

Of course under the constitution, as written, the discrimination should never have occurred. The 14th Amendment guarantees all citizens, regardless of race, equal protection under the law. But the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that while all the animals are equal, some are more equal than others. And Men of Colorlessness are the least equal animals in the zoo. They have inherited oppressorness from their ancestors, and therefore must be punished by Affirmative Action and other anti-equality laws for these 'genetic crimes'.

By the same token, an African who emigrated to the United States last year, is assumed to have inherited a victim gene that causes not only a darkening of the skin, but an increase in their level of privlege, due to the fact that some people with whom they share some genetic heritage were exploited by people with whom they share a differant level of genetic heritage.

The lesson is clear: be sure to check your genes, you may have inherited more equality then it appears.

If we had a first amendment ...

2005-06-13T15:02:00.000-04:00

One often hears people bewail the fact that in our society, often both 'the husband' and 'the wife' have to work in order to earn enough money to live and support our bloated and spendthrift government. We could solve this problem by cutting government back to the size mandated by the constitution, but I have grave doubts as to whether the weasels in charge will give up any signifigent amount of power without bloodshed. So I have a modest proposal for the intrim: change the rules.

There is no reason, outside of religion, that the size of a family must be fixed at 2 adults + zero or more children. And since the first amendment of the constitution puts protection the sanctity of anything completely outside the purvue of the federal government, sanctity being a purely religious concept, the laws that limit families to that size are completely unconstitutional. (Yeah, I know, the constitution also forbids the existence of the FDA, the DEA, two thirds of the ATF, the various educational prevention organizations, and most of the rest of the federal government. But none the less ... ) So why not allow families to be formed by any group of consenting adults that chooses to form one?

Some will surely say that human biology precludes this arrangement. Humans, they will say, have a biological imperitive that forces them into monogamous relationships. (Obviously, they never met my ex). They will be completely wrong, but they will say it none the less. To mis-quote Robert A. Heinlien, forgive them: for they are young and think that the customs of their tribe are laws of nature. Not only is there no such biological imperitive, but globally, plural marriage is allowed in the cultures of something like one third of the world's population, including Muslim countries, among the Bedouin of Isreal, among Jews in Yeman, among traditional Mormons, in several experimental Christian groups, and many other societies.

Morover, many of the societies that do not practice plural marriage, including mainstream Jews and Mormons, do not practice it because they have been forced or intimidated into giving it up ... Our government flew in the face of it's own constitution by forcing the Mormons to abandon the practice as the price of statehood for Utah, and I am told that some Jewish sects gave it up for fear of angering the Gentiles.

In many of the societies that do practice plural marriage, economics limits the practice to about 10% to 25% of the population. This, in my opinion, is due to two major factors: in many of these societies the economic status of women is limited, and their ability to work, is savagely curtailed. And often only poligamy ... one man, more than one women ... is practiced. But there is no reason this must be the case!

Imagine the opportunities availiable with plural marriage. A family of eight adults with 16 children could afford to allocate two or more full-time caregivers to the children, and still field up to 6 breadwinners! Two cannot live as cheaply as one, and 24 cannot live as cheaply as 16. But 24 can live together much more cheaply than they can live apart. Even with our corpulent government, this should be enough to allow economic success, and discretionary income as well. This discretionary income could be used to finance continuing education or to invest in starting a business, further increasing the economic opportunities of the family, and decreasing our dependance on corporations to create jobs. The possibilities are endless. No longer would men or women be unable to enjoy child-rearing due to medical problems. No longer would economies of scale be availiable only to business. A large clan could provide it's own group health coverage, or simply marry a couple of doctors!

People will wonder: how will we handle the legal implications of such groups? What about divorce, alimony, separation, health benifits from employment, and other issues? That's the easiest part. Rather than the one size fails all scheme of marriage we have today, entering into a plural family would simply be a matter of executing a contract. Most of these issues, like inheritance, divorce and alimony would be specified in the terms of that contract. No-one would be able to say 'the terms of this contract are unfair', since they would have negotiated those terms themselves in the process of forming the union. As for health benifits and insurance, those issues would be (slightly) more complex, as they involve third parties. But companies like to make money, and if there is demand for a service, it will be provided. The only reason that companies sometimes balk at providing services to 'domestic partnerships' is that they are sometimes required by law provide services at a loss. This, too, would become a non-issue in the presence of freedom.

Of course the ruling parties won't like these ideas.

The Democrats will fear that these arrangements could erode the victim class that has become their base. And they would be right. Only government needs a victim class, and only over-regulation and violence can create one. The victim class would become a thing of the past, as people freely formed the alliances that made sense in their own lives, and met their needs.

Republicans, on the other hand, will panic when they consider the sexual implications: Who, they will wonder, would sleep with whom in the presence of such freedom? How will we impose Christian morality on these people? Well, Mr. Bush, the imposition of Christian morality -- or that of any other religion -- by the government is unconstitutional. I know that means little to you, but it is still important to some of us. But to answer your question: I don't know who sleeps with whom -- and I'm not asking.

Deep Throat doesn't suck!

2005-06-01T00:28:00.000-04:00

I was pleased to see that Mark Felt, aka "Deep Throat", who started the ball rolling on the impeachment that ended Nixon's presidency, has finally come forward. But I was amazed at some of the responses from the criminals who served under Nixon. The response of Nixon aide and convict Charles Colson was typical:

"Mark first served this country with honor, and I can't imagine how Mark Felt was sneaking in dark alleys leaving messages under flower pots and violating his oath to keep this nation's secrets. I cannot compute that with the Mark Felt that I know,"

I say, thank god Mark Felt was more honorable than the man you thought you knew. It would be nice if one could expose the government for what it is without having to resort to leaving messages under flower pots. But in the real world, if one has real information about the antics of either wing of the ruling party in America, I suspect that the flower-pot method would be the one to choose. And if a few flowers are disturbed, so be it.

As for the violation of the oath, I am not in possession of a copy of the FBI oath. But most of the oaths taken by US officials, as far as I know, require the office holder to uphold the Constitution. And since the actions of Nixon's whitehouse were surely contrary to the spirit if not let letter of the Constitution, and given the danger faced by anyone willing to go up against the power brokers du jour, I would applaud Mr. Mark's ability to keep his priorities straight.

Government secrecy makes a joke of democracy, since one cannot select representatives likely to support good policies without knowing what policies the candidates have supported in the past. One cannot protest the all-too-frequently dishonorable actions of the government without knowing what those actions are. So my hat's off to Mark Felt! May you never grow hoarse.

Can I BUY my body?

2005-05-29T05:13:00.000-04:00

In most parts of America, it is illegal to sell your body. In most senses of the phrase. Prostitution and organ sales are both illegal. You can donate your body to science, but you cannot accept a fee for doing so.

This makes little sense until you look at the other things you cannot do: drugs, suicide, unapproved medical procedures, working for an unapproved wage, working at all without turning most of the proceeds over to the state, the list goes on and on. The conclusion is clear: we are slaves to the state. We cannot engage in behavior which might damage our bodies, because we do not own our bodies. They are owned by the state.

But I seem to recall that back in the days before slavery became universal, that a slave could buy his freedom from his master. Which leads us back to the thesis. I cannot sell my body. But can I buy it?

What could make a hurricane worse?

2005-05-29T03:15:00.000-04:00

As we in Florida approach hurricane season, let's consider how we as a society can make things worse for those at risk. How about an 'anti-profiteering' law?

If we allow 'profiteering', also called commerce, then imagine what could happen were there a serious hurricane that effected Miami, but not Tampa. Some poor unemployed guy in Tampa could get in his truck, load it up with bottled water at the supermarket, drive to Miami, and sell that water on the street corner for $10 a gallon. This would mean that a guy who should rightfully be suffering poverty and misery would be making money just by risking the drive into a dangerous, storm blighted area, investing in the gas and the vehicle, and doing the work. It would also mean that some poor person who should be thirsty and lack the means to wash her dishes and herself would not suffer from the lack of water, but instead would have paid $10 for a $1 gallon of water. She's out $9! Clearly this situation must not be tolerated in a civilized society.

So let's get tough on proffiteers. The $9 you save may be your own.

Could you be next?

2005-05-27T15:09:00.000-04:00

Austrailian beauty most recent victim in 'war on drugs'

A young Australian women stood shocked, today, as the new Prohibition robbed her of the best years of her life. It wasn't a drug addled junkie that brutalized this woman. It wasn't a "drug kingpin" who cost her everything. It was a judge. Her crime? I don't know. It is alleged that there were drugs the bag she checked, unlocked, hours before. She denies owning them, and suggests that perhaps a baggage handler used her as an unwitting mule. I'm well aware that everyone in prison is innocent if you ask them. But I'm a man, and whether hormonal or rational, my inclination is to believe her.

It could be true. Thanks to Prohibition II, a few of pounds of pot -- which would cost maybe $20 to cultivate -- is worth hundreds or thousands of dollars on the black market. I don't know exactly how much, I've been out of the loop lately. Perhaps you could ask your teenager?

Given the incredible profits, how hard would it be to get a job as a baggage handler in an airport, slip some pot into a tourist's bag, and have an accomplice at the destination airport retrieve it and send it on it's way? It's a risk, sure, but the Kennedy's didn't get all that money selling ginger ale. And how shocking is it, that sooner or later, the guy on the other end might drop the ball?

We do know that 15 Australians have been recently arrested for moving drugs into Sydney, where Schapelle Corby's plane stopped en-route from Brisbane to Bali. These arrests, according to the Australian Prime Minister, involved some Australian baggage handlers, though the reports I have read did not specify the details of the handlers' involvement. The Prime Minister seems to think it relevant, though, as he informed the Bali judge of it by letter. I can't draw any conclusions from here -- except that guilty or innocent, they can also be added to the collateral body count for the War to End All Freedom.

Just for a moment, let us put ourselves in Schapelle Corby's place. Imagine standing there, finally free of the plane, looking forward to your vacation. Imagine watching serenely as the customs agent starts to open your bag. Imagine your serenity turning to confusion as you see the plastic bags, with the green leaves inside, and think "Why the hell did I pack the spices? My hotel doesn't have a kitchen!". Imagine your confusion turning to horror as you realize what's happened ... And that what you thought would be a pleasant holiday is going to be the day that irrevocably changed your life. And your horror turning to rage and grief as you are robbed of your most precious gift: your freedom. I don't know if that's what happened to Schapelle Corby. But I do know it can happen to us. And I know that whether or not the weed was hers, she's more innocent than the politicians who have done this to her.

Of course if you're a politician, you don't have much to worry about. You can happily pass more and more draconian laws, knowing that you and your children are protected by your insiders' immunity, and that if you or they develop a drug problem, you'll at least have a chance to find a medical solution for a medical problem, and escape your own prescription for those who fail to live their lives as you dictate: degradation, dehumanization and despair. If you're a politician, just enjoy the bravery of being out of range.

But if your just an ordinary person, and the Just-Us system doesn't offer you professional courtesy, I've got some advice for you: Keep a low profile. Don't annoy the powers that be. And stay the hell out of Bali. Maybe here, we can cower behind the few remaining shreds of the Constitution, and be safe. Maybe.

Jurisprudence, and the "Punch in the Nose" test

2005-05-24T20:26:00.000-04:00

No lawyer will tell you about the "Punch in the Nose" test, and it's importance in jurisprudence. That is because this is a test that should be applied, not one that is applied.

My premise in making these statements is simple: Power is delegated to the government by the people that live under it's rules. But in order to delegate a right, one must have the right in the first place. Sadly, under our warped system of government, the voters regularly delegate rights to the government that they do not have. And that is the most important problem facing America today.

What power does the people delegate to the government? Simply put, it is the power to do violence on their behalf. It delegates the power to kidnap and confine human beings. It delegates the power to confiscate the property of human beings. And it delegates the power to kill human beings. Usually, the threat of violence is sufficient. And that threat is what underlies and upholds all government. Note that I do not claim that this is never justified. If someone is threatening my life, my fortune, my family, I have a right to confine them to prevent them from carrying out that threat. Depending on state law, I may even have a right to kill them to prevent them from carrying out their threat. And, to clarify the title, I have a right to punch them in the nose to prevent them from carrying out their threat.

But what if I see people sitting in a bar smoking a cigarette? What if they are smoking a joint? Or shooting heroin? Or having sex and exchanging money? Or playing poker for money? Very few Americans would acquit me were I to walk up to people engaged in such activity and punch them in the nose. And if I have no right to punch them in the nose, it follows that I have no right to take their freedom, to take their property, or to take their lives to prevent these activities. Lacking these rights, there would be no justification should I hire someone to engage in these activities for me. Not even if that person wears blue. Not even if they carry a badge. Not even if I have an enormous number of co-conspirators. Right and wrong are right and wrong, regardless of the number of actors, or the uniforms they wear.

Please don't take this as an indictment of our police officers. Nearly all of the police officers I have known have been fine and dedicated professionals, who due to their professionalism must enforce the law regardless of their personal feelings. They are required to punch people in the nose, even while their fellow citizens are enjoined from doing so, for trivial violations of outdated codes of conduct. It is that requirement which is wrong, and which must be abolished in order to establish prudence in American jurisprudence. The police are victims of a legal system gone horribly wrong. They cannot set the system right. Only we, the voters, can possibly do that.

So next time you are asked to vote for some law, try to consider the principal of the "Punch in the Nose" test, and whether the right the government wishes you to delegate is yours in the first place. Given the number of deaths that result from raids on the wrong address, the lives that are ruined because the owners of those lives decided to live them in a way that violates somebody else's conception of how life should be lived, the police officers killed fighting impossible battles to enforce laws that should never have existed, the nose you save may be your own.

That's my opinion ... But I could be wrong.

Unprecedented business as usual

2005-05-21T22:10:00.000-04:00

There is a great article here which points out how the Republicrat and Demican wings of the One Big Party being held at your expense in Washington are trying to score political points, by claiming that business as usual is not business as usual. Worth the read, though we all know that such tactics are business as usual. It's especially nice that the author doesn't try to hide the crimes of one party and expose those of the other, but recognizes that they are equally quilty in their jihad against truth.

The benefits of Prohibition

2005-05-21T20:54:00.000-04:00

People often forget how many Americans benefited from the oft-criticized program that we call Prohibition. As a growing minority, needlessly alarmed by the demolition of the bill of rights and deluded that the government has no right to force people to live as it sees fit, attacks the "War on Drugs" and the important steps it has helped us to make on the road toward total enslavement of the American people, I think it's important that we consider those who gained so much from this older sister of the "Drug war".

Politicians gained a 'crisis' they could exploit in order to increase their power, and the power of the government as a whole. They gained opportunities for graft beyond their wildest dreams. They came to know the joy of taking from their captives one of the simple pleasures of life, and the profit that can be made from the middle men who sell that pleasure back to them.

Criminals gained a new 'victimless crime', which allowed them to accumulate vast sums of wealth, limited only by their capacity for brutality, and their devious cleverness. And they gained respectability, as their wealth, and the fact that they were now providing services that people actually wanted, gave people an opportunity to realize that they were not just brutal thugs, but also exciting and flamboyant characters.

Respectable citizens gained excitement, as their previously safe and boring cities exploded in violence, brought on, as it always is, by more and more doomed attempts by the government to deprive the people their ability to choose their own fate.

And yet, this program which gave such much to so many, was ended, by a constitutional amendment, just 14 years after it's inception.

What have we learned from this much-maligned program? A great deal!

We have learned that if one actually amends the constitution in order to take people's freedom, those people might make us repeal the amendment, and put an end to our fun. But if we just IGNORE the constitution, as we do with the modern "war on drugs", there is nothing to repeal, and the people can be made to suffer under the lash of our laws much longer.

We have learned the importance of properly demonizing those whose rights we would take. If drinkers had been properly demonized, as smokers and drug users have been by our more enlightened modern masters, perhaps the people could have been cowed into silence, and many of the rights which we were not able to take until the more successful "drug war" would have been ours much sooner.

We have learned the joys of oppressing those who are not as moral as we, and the profit, both personal and political that such oppression brings.

And we have learned the importance of government control of education. For unjust laws can not be long enforced, unless the people can be properly convinced of their own impotence, incompetence, and dependence.

So next time someone points out the death toll of prohibition, or the near collapse of law and order it caused, remind them of the privileged few who reaped it's fruits, and the joy and power it gave them.

What the hell is a radical centrist?

2005-05-21T20:41:00.000-04:00

Hi, I'm Rich, just started this thing, and thought I ought to explain what it is. When asked about my politics, I generally tell people I'm a radical centrist ... Technically, I'm a Libertarian, but most people don't know what that means either, and it's more fun watching them try to figure out what a radical centrist is.

I describe myself as a radical centrist because as a Libertarian, I manage to be to the left of the Democrats and to the right to the Republicans. I believe that people should be free, not only to make and spend money as they see fit, but also to control their own bodies and minds. (Since I'm not an official spokesman for the Libertarian Party, have a look at www.lp.org if you want the official platform).

I was, at one time, a liberal, but realized as time went on that their way, as espoused by the Democrats and Socialists was as anti-freedom as that espoused by the Republicans and Nazis. The problem is that social freedom, combined with a welfare state, is not -- as the environmentalists say -- sustainable. In such a society, everybody would be free to make their own mistakes. That's good! But they would also be free to force their neighbors, who did not make the mistakes, to pay the consequences. That's less good. If I decide to spend my life exploring the 50 ways to leave my liver, just how many livers are you prepared to pay for? If I decide to spend my life playing, just how much work are you willing to do to support me in the manner to which I have become accustomed? So although this Brave New World they envision is seductive, it cannot withstand the cold calculus of reason. And no matter how much we legislate, we will no more be able to repeal the law of supply and demand then we could repeal the law of gravity. So where is the welfare state compelled to go? Just like the fascist state, it is compelled to totalitarianism, simply because if you have to pay for your neighbor's mistakes, you'd be crazy not to keep an eye on him.

So that's what I don't want. What do I want? To live my own life, to make my own decisions, and if I make mistakes, to pay the price myself. I want to be beholden to no man, and to have no man beholden to me. Simply put, I want self-ownership, for myself and for every other human on the planet. But hey -- if you don't like the idea of self-ownership, just take your extra money -- low taxes, remember? -- and hire Mistress Spanks-a-Lot to tell you what to do. I have it on good authority that she is not only more capable of making good decisions for you than the government ever will be, but she's not nearly as brutal as they are.

So that is what a radical centrist is. Or at least what this one is.