A friend of mine gave me a newspaper with this ad. He had written across the top of the page “Car Payment Day”.
Maybe Austrian economics is starting to sink in, even with the Faux News crowd.
It reminded me of another picture of a guy with a wheelbarrow full of money.
I was recently thinking about David Theroux’s newest article on C.S. Lewis (C.S. Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism) over at the Independent Institute. I recently read Out of the Silent Planet for the first time and found an interesting quote. In this case, it is sort of mad scientist, Weston, defending himself after kidnapping the philologist, Ransom, for a trip to the planet Malacandra, and Ransom’s response:
‘As it is, I admit that we have had to infringe your rights. My only defense is that small claims must give way to great. As far as we know, we are doing what has never been done in the history of man, perhaps never in the history of the universe. We have learned how to jump off the speck of matter on which our species began; infinity, and therefore perhaps eternity, is being put back into the hands of the human race. You cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison to this.’
‘I happen to disagree’, said Ransom, ‘and I always have disagreed…’
This fits in very well with Theroux’s section entitled “Collectivism and Statism” and reminded me of something I vaguely remembered from the Peter Jackson’s amazing expanded editions of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. One of the things that makes Jackson’s work so wonderful is the excellence in each portion of the bonus materials – whether set and costume design or the writing of the script and Tolkien’s biography. I remembered a snippet of one of the biographer’s comments on Tolkien’s generation and war which tied in nicely with Lewis’s reaction to ‘scientism’ and his later statements about how power corrupts. The quote is from Tom Shippey, author of J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century:
Tolkien’s generation had a problem identifying evil. They had no difficulty recognizing it – they had to live through it. The puzzling thing was that this seemed to be carried out entirely by normal people. And, indeed, Tolkien, who was a combat veteran, knew that his side did things like that too. The nature of evil in the 20th Century has been curiously impersonal. It’s as if sometimes nobody particularly wants to do it. In the end, you get the major atrocities of the 20th Century being carried out by bureaucrats. Well, the people who do that kind of thing are wraiths, they’ve gone through the wraithing process. They don’t know what’s good and evil anymore. It’s become a job or a routine. You start with the good intentions, but somehow it all goes wrong. So it’s a curiously distinctive image of evil and – I should say – it’s an unwelcome one. Because, what it says is, it could be you.
Whether the clerk whose letters reference penalties for non-response or the functionary picking and choosing which subsidy should go to which interest group, even a tiny bit of power can affect behavior and begin to corrupt.
Please check out Theroux’s article. You will profit from it.
Occasionally a discussion with a conservative or liberal progresses to the point where my counterpart utters what he thinks is a magic phrase that will destroy my arguments. He pauses for a moment and leans in and says, “I don’t know why you rail against the government. It’s consensual and you get a vote.” My old response was an argument based on Hoppe’s Democracy: the God that Failed. Last Friday, I received in the mail the basis for a new avenue to travel.
The U.S. District Court District of New Jersey sent me a Juror Qualification Form in the mail. Included with the horrible mess of a document (questions about employment suggesting that if I worked the government I would not have to be bothered with jury ‘duty’ and a bunch of questions about race) was a letter from the clerk which informed me that failure to respond within 10 days would result in a summons to fill the form out in the courtroom. Failure to respond to that summons could result in a “fine of not more than $1,000.00 or imprisonment of not more that 3 days, or both (Title 28 U.S.C. Section 1866).”
Of course, the government’s power is consensual – it does arise from our acceptance of it – but I think my next discussion response will remind my interlocutor that sometimes force, or the threat of force, brings about consent. Some guy they elected president did mention “speak[ing] softly and carry[ing] a big stick.”
While it’s fresh in my mind I thought I’d recap my recent trip to Brazil, comparing TSA and US Customs with Brazil.
I flew out of Philadelphia International Airport on Delta, through Atlanta and to Sao Paulo.
Since the TSA has instituted the nude scanners I have become pretty adept at dodging them and making my way through the metal detector.
It just goes to show how much security theater and a show it really is. As I approach the security checkpoint I size up which lines lead to the metal detectors and which lead to the RapeScan (I think that’s right) machines. It’s as simple as nonchalantly slipping into the correct line and pretending like you don’t hear the TSA agents yelling at you to switch lines.
After taking my belt, watch, phone, wallet, jacket, and shoes off, I made my way through Philly security no problem and got onto my flight, albeit delayed four hours.
Brazilian passport control was no problem taking only about 10 minutes, and you don’t even have to fill out a customs declaration. I simply claimed my luggage and walked out of the airport.
After a long week and lots of traffic we headed back to the airport to come home.
I never have any hesitation about foreign airport security because they are always polite and respectful, the total opposite of the TSA.
When leaving Brazil, I noticed the airport had copies of the TSA’s 3-1-1 posters about liquids in your carry-on posted everywhere. The funny part was it looked like they had blown it up to poster size from a thumbnail so you couldn’t read any of the text. Perfect.
What I really love about the “3-1-1 Rule” is the pretense that modern explosives are fine for air travel, as long as you store them in 3 ounce containers, and only bring a quart worth.
Security was very polite, and only had me remove my laptop from by backpack. They also didn’t require me to remove my shoes before going through the metal detector.
The real fun begins when you try to get back into your own country.
After landing in Atlanta you’re directed down a series of hallways to passport control, a giant room with 64 booths for US Customs agents to process people.
Since most international flights are overnight and arrive in the morning, you’d think there may be some extra staff available, but no. In typical government fashion there were only a handful of agents there and as all the flights arrived, the queue filled up quickly. I had a three hour layover until my flight to Philly. Should be plenty of time. Ha.
While you’re forced to stand in a seemingly endless line, you have the pleasure of obnoxiously loud overhead speakers playing the audio from a propaganda video that is running on monitors overhead. The video explains all that you’re about to endure in order to visit the land of the free.
I wish I could have used my phone to take a video of it, but that’s prohibited and I’d probably be in jail now. Just imagine lots of American flags with patriot music in the background and someone extolling the virtues of US Customs and Border Protection. It took nearly an hour to make it through the line and about thirty seconds to get my passport stamped. For now, only foreigners are required to provide their fingerprints and photo. The guy didn’t say a word and I don’t think he even looked at me.
On to baggage claim and waiting another 25 minutes for my bags. I claim them, hand by customs declaration form to another “officer” and he checks to make sure I don’t “owe” any taxes on my gifts. Good to go and I’m ready to re-check my bags onto Philly.
Now for the fun part. No matter what your destination, even if you are leaving the airport, you must check your bags and go through TSA security. That’s right, to leave the airport or get back on another plane.
Remember all those people that just came through passport control? Well, they’re in line with me now too. Another 30 minutes to get to the head of the line. I sized up my lane for a metal detector, but when I got up closer saw that they were all disabled and everyone was being forced into the backscatter radiation booths. So I prepared myself for what was coming.
To add insult to injury, just as in passport control, there was a video playing about how safe the backscatter machines are, that there is no medical risk, that no naked images can be seen or stored or copied from the machines. Basically just a stream of lies, set on repeat.
I told the TSA agent I was opting out of “that thing” and as they normally do, she yells “We got an opt-out here. Need a male for opt-out.”
I shove all my stuff on the conveyor belt into the x-ray machine and stand in the holding area. Another agent comes over and grabs my stuff and I walk shoeless over to a screening area.
The agent looks like a total creep (the image below is not him, but a good approximation of the creepiness level) as he pulls on latex gloves. He asks me if I understand that opting out requires a pat-down. I say yes.
This is not him, but a good approximation of the creepiness level.
Then he goes on to explain how he’ll be molesting me today. When he finishes describing the gate rape I said in the angriest tone I thought I could get away with, “You do what you gotta do.”
Then he asks if I’d like a private screening, to which I replied, “No, let’s do this out in the open where everyone can see.”
Although I have no doubt that the stories of the TSA actually groping people are true, this guy was either lazy or thought I would deck him if he tried anything.
After a cursory pat-down he goes to check his gloves in the machine for “explosives” and comes back in 30 seconds to tell me I can leave now.
Perhaps the most disheartening thing was not the TSA, but rather that out of the hundreds of people in line, I was the only one who opted out. The rest simply trotted into the machines like lemmings, not a care in the world. If everyone in that line had opted out, the airport would grind to a halt and the scanners would be gone in a day.
I will be prepared next time though. I plan to start carrying one of these when I fly.
Recently there have been a series of posts over at the Action Institute’s PowerBlog by Joe Carter regarding libertarianism and Christianity.
Norman Horn has a good summary and some rebuttal of Carter’s confused understanding at LibertarianChristians.com. Norman beat me to the punch as I was getting sick of reading Carter’s inane posts, but Carter is back at it so I’m going to take a shot this time. His latest piece is called How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist.
His thesis is that libertarians “love the principle of liberty in a way that undercuts the reality of liberty.”, and “By not accounting for how humans behave in the real world, libertarians can set themselves up for a fall.”
It is quite clear from his diatribe that Carter has no clue about what libertarianism is and no idea what the non-aggression axiom says.
Carter uses the recent sub-prime housing bust as an indictment for why libertarianism doesn’t work:
A prime example of what I mean can be found in the way libertarianism would have dealt with the recent housing crisis. Consistent libertarians would say that we must not separate choice from consequences, and so the proper response would be to let the banks fail and the mortgage holders lose their homes.
Let’s concede for the sake of argument that the libertarians are right and that this would have been the proper and preferable response. What would have been the effect of such a policy? The answer depends on whether you assume that America is secretly composed of 300 million libertarians. If it is, then we can expect that everyone would shrug and stoically accept their fate, even if it meant the annihilation of our economy. If it were not, then the result would be that few people would have the stomach to accept such consequences. The citizens would empower both progressives and the government to help them avoid the consequences of their actions. That is essentially what happened with the non-libertarian safety net that we already had in place. If Americans had endured the forced austerity required by pure libertarianism it would have lead to an even more empowered and intrusive government.
Libertarianism could be, in theory, the greatest political theory of all time. But in reality it suffers the fatal flaw shared by all utopian schemes: a failure to account for how humans actually behave.
Look how sneaky he is. He poses a question based on the libertarian concept of moral hazard, inserts a false dependency, makes an assumption as to the consequences (annihilation of our economy), and then declares victory.
His argument assumes we magically found ourselves in this situation because of the free market and libertarian principles will just make it worse. This is obviously false as government intervention into the housing market caused the malinvestment in the first place.
His last statement actually makes the libertarian case. Exactly by accounting for the fact that humans behave badly, we’ve come to the conclusion that you have to remove the ability for that bad behavior to have influence over millions of people, thus not putting yourself in a situation that leads “to an even more empowered and intrusive government.”
He continues by quoting Edmund Burke:
Indeed, conservatives agree with Edmund Burke, who said:
I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country.
For libertarianism to be effective would require a revolution to wipe the political slate and start with a country that is nothing but carte blanche, a slate upon which they may scribble whatever they please.
Carter is associating the violence of the French Revolution, of which Burke was speaking, with a libertarian’s desire to be left alone by the state. Yes, carte blanche, but only insomuch as it does not aggress on the freedom of others.
He’s also inferring that one should never get rid of the state, simply reform it. That’s exactly the problem. It can’t be reformed, and the reason is exactly what Carter says is libertarians’ problem. That is “how humans behave in the real world”.
Then, since (as he admits) Carter does not know any libertarians, he relies on whatever pops up in Google for fodder.
He references Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason as the oracle of libertarian thought.
Caplan is an admirably consistent and realistic libertarian. He not only follows the logic of libertarianism wherever it leads (e.g., pacifism) but is fully aware that since he can’t make the world libertarian, he can at least retreat into his own libertarian world.
And then:
Caplan’s libertarianism leads him (rightly, I believe) to embrace pacifism. As he says, the foreign policy that follows from libertarian principles is not isolationism, but opposition to all warfare. The is internally consistent yet self-defeating since the conclusion is that libertarianism means loving liberty only to the point that you are not required to defend it by means of warfare.
Since when does libertarianism lead logically to pacifism? Maybe Carter should expand his search a bit and see what other libertarian thinkers have said about self defense.
This is a confused “conservative” relying on a confused “libertarian” for easy arguments to knock down. Let’s see him engage with someone like Murray Rothbard or Ron Paul.
And finally we get to the real angst behind this post.
In contrast, I—like many other veterans in America—served my country (fifteen years in the Marine Corps) precisely because I loved freedom. I loved it so much that I was willing to sacrifice some of my own freedom, or even my life if necessary, to secure it for myself, for my nation, and for libertarian pacifists like Caplan. He is able to afford the luxury of living in his beautiful bubble because other Americans have bought that liberty for him. For over two centuries, American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have paid the cost necessary to allow people like him to live freely. We have provided him with the safety and security he needs to crawl off in his elite bubble and forget that people like us exist.
Caplan is free to move to Switzerland, though I suspect he’ll keep his Bubble in Arlington, Virginia. As a libertarian economics professor at George Mason he’s smart enough to do the calculus. He knows that his optimal choice is to stay put and keep free-riding on the benefits provided by other people—whether liberal, conservative, or libertarian—who love liberty more than he does.
This is the same crap that we are always fed about the military. That if it weren’t for the American soldier, we’d all be living in 1930s Nazi Germany, or under Sharia law.
The problem is it’s simply not true. There have been no soldiers killed on American soil protecting American liberty since the American Revolution. None. Every other war was fought either to trash the ideas of the Revolution (The War of Northern Aggression), as a boondoggle for the military industrial complex, or as a religious attempt to bring about the end of the world.
Sorry Joe, but just because we choose not to go around murdering people on the other side of the world in the name of “democracy” and based on the state’s lies does not mean we don’t love liberty.
In the IT and Contact Center world we have a term called “lost hours”. It refers to time that a user is idle, not being productive due to inefficiencies or downtime in the systems they need to do their job.
I was reminded of this the other day while in the car.
I stopped at a local gas station located in a strip mall to fill up my car. After paying $3.53/gallon for gas in worthless Bernanke Bucks, I got back in the car and proceeded to the mall exit. There is only one entrance/exit and you drive past a Food Lion to get there. In front of me is a school bus which stops right in front of the store, in the fire lane. Lights and stop sign go on and they start unloading kids. For about five minutes no traffic moved an inch, none except the moms who just picked up their kids and cut the rest of us off speeding out of the lot like a bat out of hell.
So I was reminded of lost hours as I have been before, but this time I decided to do a little research. I wondered how many lost hours Americans spend every day waiting on government buses to retrieve and disgorge children to and from school.
According to schoolbusfacts.com (yes, it really exists) which is run by the American School Bus Council (yes, it really exists), there are 480,000 buses in the US. Curiously their site doesn’t have any real stats like average number of stops since they’re too busy propagandizing about how safe and awesome school buses are.
So, I’m going to make some assumptions.
First, that each bus makes only five stops each way, which is probably low.
Second, that each stop lasts about one minute, probably low.
Finally, that each bus stops only 5 cars at each stop, again probably low. I won’t bother with how many people in each car, just assume 1.
Given 180 days of school each year, we get:
480,000 buses x 10 stops/bus x 1 minute x 5 cars x 180 days = 4,320,000,000 minutes/year or 3,000,000 days of lost time per year
If we use a metric business people are familiar with, it would mean 34,615 full time employees sitting idle every year.
Where is Walter Block with his private roads anyway?
I’m back from a long break, and here’s something amusing.
I seems the RNC is extremely worried about losing again in 2012 to Obama.
Recently I received a letter from John Boehner, Speaker of the House, with a delegate-at-large “survey and credentials confirmation” enclosed. The desperation bleeds through with the first sentence:
Your name was placed in nomination before the 2012 Republican Congressional Platform Planning Committee as someone who strongly supports our Party, our candidates and our conservative principles.
Obviously they had to dig deep for my name on their list of “supporters” since I haven’t been registered to vote in 12 years, and they sent the letter to my parents’ house.
Oh, and I hate the republican party.
I also love that they capitalized the word “Party”. Very Soviet.
Johnny also requests that I send my contribution of “$25, $50, $100, $500, or $1,000″ back with the “survey”.
For virtually all the questions I can replace Democrat/Obama with Republican/Bush and the question still makes sense.
Here’s one example:
Do you support massive cuts to the government spending to rein-in the current federal debt which has grown by almost one-third in the three years of the Obama administration?
I can only imagine they would have asked the same of Bush’s debt increase from $5.6 trillion to $9.6 trillion.
Not to be outdone by Boehner, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin also sent a letter to my old address, begging for money to “help answer the deluge of liberal money flowing into Wisconsin and will allow me to answer the Big Labor funded rampage of attack ads with the truth.”
You see, the public labor unions are trying to recall him and he needs me to “stand up for democracy and for conservative stewardship”.
I didn’t know stewardship means appointing your biggest donor’s son to an $80K+ a year government (read: cakewalk) job.
I guess I’m ready to lead now.
So are these folks suggesting that Ludwig Von Mises was NOT a badass? I have always thought of him that way. With a name like that, I think you have to be a badass.
h/t: Bob Murphy
Bruce Schneier links to an article in The Atlantic titled “Do We Need Even Tighter Controls on Sudafed?”
I will give the author, Megan McArdle, some credit for this:
But no policy question is ever as simple as “How can we stop X”, unless “X” is an imminent Nazi invasion. We also have to ask “at what cost?” and “by what right?”
She’s referring to stopping people from cooking meth from sudafed. But neither Schneier or McArdle bother to investigate the real reason why pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) was moved behind the pharmacy counter and replaced on the shelf with phenylephrine (crap that doesn’t decongest anyone).
Jeff Tucker does a great job of exposing it here.
Let’s follow the money a bit. It seems that most all pseudoephedrine is manufactured in China and India, and very cheaply, much more cheaply than it can be made in the United States or Europe. What that means is that these companies don’t have lobbyists in Washington who can make an effective case for their product.
Contrast this was phenylephrine, the world’s largest manufacturer of which is located in Germany. The company is called Boehringer-Ingelheim, according to MSNBC. It developed the drug in 1949 for use in eyedrops. In the last two years, virtually every manufacturer of cold medicine has changed its formula to include the Boehringer drug. Some continue to make the old formula available but only with special access.
Is it possible that the move against wonderful pseudoephedrine and in favor of useless phenylephrine was really a form of protectionism in disguise? That it was really about rewarding a well-connected company at the expense of companies without connections?
According to this chart, either they agreed to pay for this for a long time to come, or they’ve got more useless products in store for us.
Tucker continues:
So let me go out on a limb here and say what any reasonable person would strongly suspect. The reason you can’t get Mucinex and Sudafed that work without jumping through hoops isn’t really about stopping basement meth users. It is really about the racket going on in Washington in which the law is used to benefit influential producers in cahoots with the political class at the expense of less influential producers and the American people, who should have the freedom to choose.
Schneier says he likes to frame this as a “security trade-off” and McArdle seems to be taking issue with the insurance/healthcare costs of it.
I prefer Jeff’s take on it:
Remember: there is a story like this behind just about everything government does. If you comprehend that, you can understand why people like Albert Jay Nock said that the state is always and everywhere the enemy.
If nothing else, Wilson continues to give me a seemingly endless supply of topics about which to write.
In a recent post Doug takes issue with what he calls “false equivalence” between abortion and collateral damage in war.
Let me set this alongside a comparable moral failing — the refusal to acknowledge a distinction between a deliberate targeting of civilians (as when Hamas blows up a pizza joint full of teenagers) and when one of our units targets combatants who place themselves in close proximity to civilians, so that the civilians might get caught in the crossfire. If the rules of engagement instruct our troops to do whatever is possible to protect the lives of such civilians, then this is completely different from the first scenario. These are two military actions which result in the deaths of civilians, but they nevertheless occupy two different moral universes.
The first problem is the word ‘combatants’. It is used here in the same ambiguous manner it’s used in the NDAA. It means whatever the government wants it to mean. Sick and tired of having a foreign power occupying your hometown, killing and destroying as it wishes? Don’t dare take up arms against them or you’ll be labeled a ‘combatant’.
The use of this word presupposes that there is a moral right for ‘our units’ to be there in the first place.
What is totally left out of his post is that we are not talking about any generic war, at any generic time, for any generic purpose.
We are talking about undeclared, preemptive war in which ‘our units’ have no business being there. It is not defensive, and we can be nearly 100% sure that innocent men, women, and children will die as a result.
Even if we leave the ground troops out of it, I think you have a hard time making the case that continuous indiscriminate drone bombings without knowing exactly who will be killed is not murder. I quote Wilson from a previous post about Ron Paul’s view on abortion:
This, in effect, was saying that if we don’t know if someone is living in a room then it must be okay to fill it up with poison gas. This example might seem beside the point because, if we did that, we would eventually have to carry a dead body out. But, in the case of this small victim, nobody ever needs to know. But, speaking frankly, and just between us, “nobody need ever know” is not exactly a pro-life rallying cry.
Likewise, Doug, and just between you and me, “If the rules of engagement instruct our troops to do whatever is possible to protect the lives of such civilians” is not exactly a pro-life rallying cry either, and probably little comfort to the families of the mounds of corpses left behind.
