Unruled

Aphorism for ABB

2011-07-25T11:16:00.000-04:00

On an island of unarmed people, the one armed man is king. -- Ilkka

Selling Citizenship: Monetizing the Rule of Law

2011-06-15T15:55:00.003-04:00

Via Darth Moldbug, I've converted to the Sith. I am resigned to the inevitability of the state, at least insofar as given humanity as it now is, statism is a necessary and unskippable stage on the way to anarchocapitalism. (Perhaps more on this in another post.) That said, it is worth thinking about how to run a neocameral state, or any state. (My post on improved democracy was in this spirit.)

So what sort of immigration should a profit-maximizing state run? Certainly nothing like USG's current policy. USG has a monopoly on US citizenships -- restricting the supply is what all rational monopolists should do. USG should set a restrictive quota and sell immigration rights. Use an auction to fetch top dollar.

One immediate consequence of selling citizenships is that illegal immigration would be seen in an entirely new way. Current illegals do cost USG something, but they also pay taxes, so it is hard to say exactly whether or not they are a good deal or not. In a regime where citizenships have a market value, illegal immigration is tantamount to stealing directly from the treasury. As such, the state will not put up with it; you'd see real enforcement almost immediately. Yes, even from Democrats -- would they rather enforce immigration law, or cut education spending?

How much money could be raised for the US Treasury in this fashion? Quite a bit, is my estimate. The economic value of being in America is huge for most immigrants: they get access not only to America's capital, but to the rule of law (which is far more important than capital).

By my very rough estimate, the lifetime value of immigration to America even for unskilled labor is on the order of $1 million for people coming from places without the rule of law. How did I compute that? The annual disposable employment income per worker in constant 2005 international dollars for USA: 31,410. Mexico: 5,837. Difference: $25k/year. $25k/year over a working life of 40 years is $1 million. To be clear, I don't think the average person in the Mexico or the world would get a $25k raise by moving here. (Though I would point out that Mexico is not poor nor distinctly disfunctional, by world standards.) That's not the question; rather, it is can .14% of the world population per year command that raise? I think so.

Of course most immigrants would need credit to raise $1 million, or something loan-like: i.e. immigrants pay an income surtax for N years. And USG would have to make legal provision for this, by making "citizenship loans" be unbankruptable, like student loans. Without unbankruptable citizenship loans, the market would be relatively tiny. With them, though, practically anyone in the world might be able to afford America.

To cut off the obvious exploit of getting a loan then going on welfare, USG should do two things. First, require a "trial period", akin to current green-card status, where the immigrant is on the path to citizenship, but does not have it yet. Second, require some downpayment on loans. Perhaps 10% -- $100000 or so -- from the immigrant. The downpayment is also a bond, to be forfeit if the immigrant acts sufficiently badly (i.e., criminal acts while in green-card status).

So, USG should be able to extract something on the order of $1 million per immigrant, so long as we keep the numbers relatively low. How low? It is hard to say for certain, but USG should be able to work out the demand curve for citizenships pretty well by increasing and decreasing the monthly quota of citizenships sold. See what the market will bear.

My feeling on the demand for immigration to the USA, even at $1m per, is far higher than than the current citizenry is comfortable accepting. (Currently, immigration is about 1 million legal immigrants per year, plus another 500000 illegal.) So I might guess that under a more restrictive monopolistic regime, USG would accept 1 million immigrants per year. 1 million immigrants per year, fetching $1 million each for that privilege, is a cool $1 trillion per year. That, by itself, would almost eliminate USG's current budget deficit.

So, what sort of consequences do I foresee if such a policy were enacted?

First, it would be very hard to undo, once it was running even for a year. The state would find it very, very hard to replace $1 trillion per year.

Second, it would change the immigrant mix drastically. It is hard to know exactly how the mix would change, but it is fairly certain that immigrants would be higher skilled, since higher skilled people would be more likely to have the downpayment required, and to be able to repay their loans. The mix would also change away from Mexican peasants to a more even mix of people from all over the world, because given a high price and reasonable enforcement, proximity would cease being such a decisive factor.

Readers are invited to put their predictions in comments.

Some scenarios in anarchy

2009-12-16T22:14:00.004-05:00

On a thread at UR, Nick Szabo gave a series of specific questions regarding the functioning of anarchy, so I thought I would answer him. Before jumping into it, let me clarify two things.

First, I am no prophet of AC. Perhaps you ask David Friedman, you get different answers. Perhaps neither of us is farsighted enough to exactly predict what would happen. Again, as I have said before, anarchy is defined not by the function but the form: market provision of protection services, including competition among agencies with overlapping territory.

I usually discuss AC for simplicity using what I have found in Friedman and elsewhere: protection is provided by protection agencies (PAs) , which are a sort of cross between police agency and insurance company. Adjudication is supplied by separate corporations specializing in it. Everyone has an ongoing relationship with one PA (or maybe more if needed). But is it possible for the system to work without having existing "insurance" client relationships? I think it would be... and that might even be general. It is just hard to say what sort of forms would happen in a free market, because it is so different than what we have now. (If you want some taste of weird arrangements of governance, then hie thee over to Nick's blog and read about jurisdiction as property.)

Second, there is a general property of in anarchy that is worth reiterating, since I have not seen any anarchists making this point other than me. PAs are weaker than states. Therefore, any institution which serves to rein in the state, must also serve to limit PAs, unless somehow it relies on the monopoly of coercion that define the state. Thus, any of the numerous techniques people have invented to moderate the badness of states will also work on PAs. (I discuss this more here.) Because of this, I expect the normal PA (and/or its adjudication agency) to have a constitution (that it actually follows!), an extensive bill of rights, perhaps some sort of limited democracy, etc. Honestly: would you submit yourself to a PA that promised you nothing of that sort, if you could at little or no additional cost, submit yourself to a PA that did? I wouldn't.

Anyway, here are answers to the specific questions Nick asked, which do serve to bring out some of the functioning of anarchy, as I see it.

A factory under the protection of one PA emits pollution, which probably causes extensive damage to the value of properties of hundreds of people, customers of several dozen different protection agencies, downwind.

Probably? Well. Let's just assume it is damaging. So, the aggrieved parties get together and take the factory-owner to court. Presumably some settlement is reached. Then, further assuming that the decision goes against the factory-owners, the PA enforces it on them if they do not comply.

Why should a PA enforce laws against its own paying customers? Profit. I picture every PA as existing in a state of bilateral treaty or contract with every other PA which it might interact via conflicts of customers. This treaty might be explicit (written), or implicit. Either way, for the PA to unilaterally pull out of its treaty with any other PA is to throw its honorable reputation in doubt. This alone seems strong enough that a PA would rarely be tempted. But beyond mere reputation is the potential for collective action by other PAs. They could embargo the PA in many ways that would damage its profits. For example, most obvious would be to declare all judgments going against customers of the PA in question to be voided or in abeyance until it submits.

Trade sanctions are not effective in the state system, because there is no way to pressure the ruling elite enough without drastic effects across the society. And also, because the elite are not motivated by money, but power. Most ACs picture PAs as corporate (as I do), so they are motivated by profit. And their "interstate" trade is orders of magnitude higher.

A PA security officer suspects that a person he sees driving away from the scene of a burglary probably committed that crime, but is not at all sure. The officer arrests the suspect and locks him in prison. A week later the real criminal is found and the suspect is released. But meanwhile the suspect is fired from his job because he failed to show up to work that week.

I doubt this would end up in any way other than what currently obtains. But it is true that states are far more arrogant in power than I picture PAs being; so there is some chance that a victim of such high-handedness might be able to sue and collect damages.

The economic tradeoff that it comes down to is this: customers want more rights, but more rights cost profits. So, ceteris paribus a PA with a policy of "you can sue us" will get more customers. If the average man is willing to pay for the extra dollop of protection he gets, then the whole thing is viable and you see it. (Probably widely, since people's desires are not that variable.)

Note that such economic tradeoffs are of no interest to a state, which has every incentive to declare itself sovereignly immune. What, are you gonna move?

Repo man working for a bank under PA2 repossesses a car owned by customer of PA1 who is late on his payments to the bank. Security officer from PA1 believes he sees a theft in action and arrests and imprisons the repo man.

Again, this sort of thing can happen now within a state. I.e., a repo man from one jurisdiction gets caught by some other. This is an example of where there is almost certain to be some sort of adjudication already in place. So, after some delay perhaps to check up on the repo man's authenticity, he is released. Again, whether or not he can sue the PA for mistaken arrest is not clear, and may vary by PA.

A murderer, belonging to PA1, which forbids the death penalty, is caught and convicted by PA2 that liberally applies the death penalty. PA2 executes the murderer over the strong objections of PA1.

Easy: he's dead. But you said that. Really, this outcome assumes there is already agreement between the two (which again, there almost certainly would be), and that the terms worked out by PA1 and PA2 allow PA2 to kill convicted murderers.

Continuing the above example, PA1 in retribution disavows its contracts with PA2.

Then they are edging towards war. Perhaps a bit much for a murderer. But surely possible. In any case, highly unlikely given that they are profit-maximizing, as in the first example. Their trade with PA2 may be minimal and worth sacrificing to score points with their own customer base. But their trade in general, with all other PAs, is probably not minimal. Therefore, PA2, if they can, would be advised to seek out collective action to get PA1 to back down.

But what if nothing happens? Then, unless PA1 are willing to go to war, which is unlikely for any profit-maximizing body, then that is that. PA1 may well advise its customers who want to murder people that they should check to see if the victims are PA2-people first. I kid. The point here is that unless the customers of PA1 are truly fanatical in their anti-death-penalty stance, then it is unlikely that they are willing to pay the costs necessary to prosecute a war or even lose the trade possibilities with PA2-people. (I don't know of anyone that fanatical, not even progressives at their worst.)

A customer takes the opportunity to leave his protection agency. In retribution, the protection agency kills him, and threatens any other customers who leave with a like fate, although one can still leave the PA voluntarily after paying a 50% wealth tax as a final payment for services rendered. To justify these acts, only recently implemented, the PA cites a long-ignored passage, obscurely worded and in fine print in the 500-page PA contract but absent from all other PA materials describing their services, by which the customer agreed to give the PA a number of powers of legal procedure "and all other sovereign powers" over the customer.

Great profit opportunity for other PAs here. Collectively, or individually, they sue in whatever means seem presentable, perhaps "class action". The point is that the PA is a fraud, and just murdered a man. But they need not wait for the law's wheels to grind. Rather, they announce their near-certainly of the outcome, and that they are willing to go all the way to war against the PA if it attempts any such thing on any other customers that wish to defect. Perhaps this is backed with something like an injunction, which they can get in short order.

The next day, the PA has no customers left. Perhaps the CEO hangs. He did, after all, kill an innocent man and attempt to semi-enslave his customers. But more likely, the threat of mass abandonment by jealously free customers would make all PAs with any significant competition think more than twice about any such slaving scheme.

PA2, armed with nuclear weapons, seizes an important oil field owned by the customer of nuclear-free PA1, claiming, PA1 officials and the owner believe falsely, that the owner reneged on an obscure pledge in the fine print of his mortgage regarding religious practices.

Back to court, and the first scenario. In this case, I think Nick is hinting at the idea that if a crime is profitable enough, perhaps it would be worthwhile to sacrifice relations with every other PA, and lose most of your customers over it. (Or perhaps you just form a mercenary army and forget about being a PA as such.) Well. Then you might possibly organize the rest of the world against PA2, and refuse to buy their oil or do any other trade. Could the blok hold? I don't know. What this boils down is a state forming. It would not be a nice state, at all. Who would want to live in a hermit nation? But it is at least possible that AC might end up with slavers sitting on particularly valuable resources, at least so long as the resources hold.

For Neocameralism, Against Morality

2009-05-15T19:38:00.001-04:00

Morality, a consistent morality, was one of the reasons that I long ago became a libertarian, and then an anarchist. I took the precepts of morality as I received them, and pushed them hard. Thus, I accepted (and I still accept) the libertarian argument that taxation is theft. If taking property by force is wrong, then voting about it does not make it right. You can see such arguments widely in the libertarian ideosphere; I am certainly not alone. (I would guess that most libertarians are highly intelligent moralists, usually self-educated.)

There is a big problem, though, with morals as a foundation for politics. It is this: it may be that a moral society cannot last. That is, that there is a "tragedy of the commons" with morality itself. It may be the case that a consistently moral society cannot compete against immoral societies. One example of this is the common idea that a anarchic protection agency would not be able to effectively defend territory against state incursion. Another example is the conservative idea that civilization itself is created by patriarchy. If that is so, then a progressive civilization is not possible in the long run. Yet another is the idea that the welfare state is not compatible with free immigration.

To take a case I know I have written about some years ago: taxation. To many people, it seems commonsensical that that a state that will not tax will be beaten militarily by other states not so squeamish. But here is me, 15 years ago:

[Q:] How do libertarians feel about taxes?

The state must initiate coercion to tax. As such, taxes should be abolished.

[Q:] I'm for cutting taxes, but as a practical matter, how do we do it?

This is not a practical FAQ. Morally speaking, we should end all taxes first and figure out how to solve the resulting economic mess later.

[Q:] Aren't you going too far?

For those in the statist mindset? Yes. But you see, they DON'T BELIEVE in one of our basic moral axioms.

For us? No. Once you identify what is moral -- what is acceptable and not -- then logic compels you to accept the social and political effects of your morality.

I became an anarchist, in part, because anarchy offers a partial solution to the problem of suicidally moral government. Anarchists conceive of protection agencies as government-like, but still corporations subject to market forces, including most particularly competition. So, they can have policies, which would be immoral if forceable imposed. The moral objectionableness is reduced, at least, because the affiliation of the customer with the agency is (to some degree) voluntary.

Of course, there are still moral problems, even with anarchy. For example, what if a customer only has one protection agency to choose, or two, even. Two does not seem like much choice -- might be a choice between "pay 30% income tax" and "pay 31% income tax". And of course, there is the lingering concern that anarchy itself is unstable; that the agencies would not be able to defeat a protostate because they are hamstrung morally.

With relatively modest moral assumptions, neocameralism offers us a way out of this conundrum. Note that the defining feature of democracy, including the chimerical "limited government", as well as anarchy, is that government is based on the will of the governed. Thus, it is transparent to the morals of its citizens or customers. That is, there can be no unpopular law. (This is in the abstract. In the real world, "friction" of various kinds means there can be unpopular law down to a certain minority level of support. However, abstractly at least, the principle applies.)

By contrast, in neocameralism the source of state power is not the subjects; it is an earlier conquest. The end of power is profit to the stockholders. Note two things. First, both of these are invariant. Because they are stable (unlike popular opinion), the law will also be stable. Second, note that neither the justification for power, nor the ends to which it is put, are derived from moral reasoning. They simply are. They bear no relationship to morality at all.

Thus, it is possible for a neocameral society to have laws that are not possible in democracy or in anarchy. This would be any law which is profit-enhancing, but which is immoral. Obviously, if people are unanimously against the law, it will be abolished; but even a minority who support would be sufficient to uphold it so long as the sovcorp's owners wanted it. Or, alternatively, if it was not sufficiently immoral that men would refuse to enforce it.

For example, consider laws controlling immigration. It is certainly possible to be against them in the abstract while nonetheless enforcing them, or supporting their enforcement, as upholding the rule of law. That is, while they may be objectionable, at the same time, it is even more objectionable to have a body of unenforced law.

Thus, it is possible for a neocameral society, even composed of entirely moral men, to implement laws that no person holds as moral!

Now, most of us intuitively sense this, at least in the case of bad laws, immoral laws. This is our progressive education speaking: cherchez la genocide, it whispers. What, the state can fire up the ovens, and nobody can stop it?? Well, yes, it can. (That it has incentive not to -- well, progressive education does not teach anything about incentives and their effects.)

But I think few us consider the case of good laws, or at least, necessary laws, which are nonetheless hard to square morally. In progressive terms, the category is empty; it's oxymoronic, because the law and righteousness (social justice) are one. As anti-progressives, we should reject such reasoning, and look at the case with fresh eyes.

2008-09-18T10:22:00.001-04:00

Mencius Moldbug on the financial crisis. Pithy quote amuses me:

Accounting is boring. Or at least, it should be boring. If it's not, something is probably up.

(Hear, hear.)

About Fnargocracy

2008-06-27T14:43:00.006-04:00

I've been pretty active over at Moldbug's place. But I had this old essay I wrote up about one of his old posts, which explains neocameralism via our old friend Fnargl. So I thought I would post it to use a springboard for more general discussion about neocameralism.

...let's assume that the dictator is not evil but simply amoral, omnipotent, and avaricious.

One easy way to construct this thought-experiment is to imagine the dictator isn't even human. He is an alien. His name is Fnargl. Fnargl came to Earth for one thing: gold. His goal is to dominate the planet for a thousand years, the so-called "Thousand-Year Fnarg," and then depart in his Fnargship with as much gold as possible. Other than this Fnargl has no other feelings. He's concerned with humans about the way you and I are concerned with bacteria.

You might think we humans, a plucky bunch, would say "screw you, Fnargl!" and not give him any gold at all. But there are two problems with this. One, Fnargl is invulnerable - he cannot be harmed by any human weapon. Two, he has the power to kill any human or humans, anywhere at any time, just by snapping his fingers.

Other than this he has no other powers. He can't even walk - he needs to be carried, as if he was the Empress of India. (Fnargl actually has a striking physical resemblance to Jabba the Hutt.) But with invulnerability and the power of death, it's a pretty simple matter for Fnargl to get himself set up as Secretary-General of the United Nations. And in the Thousand-Year Fnarg, the UN is no mere sinecure for alcoholic African kleptocrats. It is an absolute global superstate. Its only purpose is Fnargl's goal - gold. And lots of it.

In other words, Fnargl is a revenue maximizer. The question is: what are his policies? What does he order us, his loyal subjects, to do?

Well, I don't think taking control is exactly that easy, although it depends on details. But let's ignore that.

What would Fnarglocracy be like? Well, I think Moldbug is right in that it would have strong private property. Fnargl's interests are aligned with ours in some ways, one of them being preventing wastage from violence, theft, and most of what we think of as crime. Economically, assuming Fnargl has reasonably finite computational power and/or limited abilities to gather information, he'd want a free market.

Fnargl would certainly not want a gold standard. Monetizing gold encourages saving it, including cacheing it and wearing it, both of which may result in lossage. Rather, he could set up a nearly perfect currency: fiat, with no dilution. If he came now, he'd probably just use dollars for this: new bills would be printed only to replace old; the Fed would be closed down, or at least open-market operations would be. This is what taxes would be collected in, so that it is what the world would have to use (not to mention it being superior even to gold as a store of value). Then Fnargl would use taxes to buy gold, which he would store in a heavily guarded pile somewhere. (How exactly he would do this is an interesting question, but I am ignoring it.) The price of gold would go sky-high, as a means to get humans to mine it assiduously. In this manner, Fnargl would use the free market to channel as much human effort as possible into gold mining.

I think it would probably be safest for Fnargl if he created propoganda (see discussion below) that there was a vague sort of gold backing for his money. This would be useful to justify state gold-buying and to explain the existence of the gold-pile, which otherwise might cause people to wonder why Fnargl is so interested in the stuff. If it is seen as just "backing up our money" in some vague and esoteric way, nobody will think much about it, just as nobody currently makes anything of the huge gold pile the USA has stashed away.

In other ways, Fnargl's interests are opposite ours and not libertarian in the
least. For one, he wants to extract the maximum possible tribute from us, so he'd tax us at nearly the Laffer maximum. He does want investment, to increase the size of the economy. He'd probably mandate high forced savings. But he'd let us run our investments ourselves, for the same reason he'd have a free market -- to let the market work to allow us to best motivate ourselves.

For a few other ways in which Fnargl's interests are not the same as ours, read on. What these boil down to is that Fnargl is not liberal -- he does not see the point of our lives as we do. Liberals agree that our lives should be for us to live; the specific lives we choose vary widely. To him, though, our lives are simply means by which gold is to be extracted, refined, and moved into his stockpile. These are very different goals. Our subordination to him allows him to align them, but only so long as we are productive as possible right now, or will be in future. This is not exact alignment. In particular, goals are different at the extremes of our lives.

Before we exist, we don't have goals, whereas Fnargl does. He wants only the most productive bacteria. Once we are alive, we very much value our own life, for its own sake, whereas Fnargl values it only if we produce. Otherwise, he'd prefer us dead, ceterus paribus. Also, we tend to value ourselves as we are, not in some alternate form. (We do change ourselves to a degree, but this is self-chosen, and usually minimal.) Fnargl may envision radical changes to us, and it certainly does not matter to him whether we would want these changes. Consider this simple question: do you think it would be a good idea to amputate your hand and replace it with a shovel? Probably not. Fnargl, however, might consider that worth doing if it speeds your ability to dig for gold.

Conversely, there are people who kill themselves that Fnargl would probably want alive. In Fnarglocracy, suicide would be a crime, just as it was in monarchy, and for the same reason. You're depriving the state of your production! The difference is, human moral sentiments revolt against hurting innocents to punish a suicide. Fnargl would be happy to visit punishment on anyone near and dear to you. Now, he may or may not -- this depends on whether or not he feels the downside (him being seen as a meanie) would be more demotivational for survivers than the upside would be. Hard to say. But it is certainly a possibility.

will Fnargl allow freedom of the press? But why wouldn't he? What can the press do to Fnargl?

It can determine how people view him: God or devil. Benevelent and lovable? Or evil and greedy? It can also determine how people view working for him. This will determine other things. How likely it is that people close to him attempt to attack him or the regime? How willing are people to work for him? How much does he have to pay to get good help? He needs an apparat, just like any other state. Money helps when hiring, and he will certainly use it to get the best and brightest. But fanatical devotion can also be useful sometimes.

If Fnargl is invulnerable, why should he fear attack? Well, there are some attacks that might work, depending on the exact details of his powers. For example, Moldbug describes Fnargl as immobile. So, one way to deal with him might be to drop him in a deep hole or desert somewhere (perhaps he sleeps), and run for it. Or, perhaps you can't run: still, a sufficiently motivated suicide squad may be found to do this. Alternatively, you create a desert where he is -- perhaps via a thermonuclear attack. (Fnargl himself is invulnerable, by assumption. But it would clear out all nearby people and equipment, so that Fnargl is now isolated and cannot exert any control.)

Is it nitpicking to think of ways to attack Fnargl? After all, he's an imaginary alien. But he is supposed to stand in for Moldbug's preferred state owners --shareholders of a sovereign corporation. And they can be attacked, perhaps in ways analogous to attacking Fnargl. For example, they might be rendered unable to actually communicate with the CEO, which is analogous to stranding Fnargl in a desert. If the CEO is faithful, he'll find a way to reconnect. If he isn't, he may decide it's time for neocameralism to evolve into monarchy.

By controlling the press, and other information-transmitting institutions, Fnargl can ensure that he himself is loved by humanity. He should not tell them the truth (that he is here only for gold, that he cares for us not at all, and would happily blow up the planet if it secures more gold). Rather, he should tell us that his enlightened species has taken a benevelent interest in us, and that he has been sent to help us rule ourselves, to prevent our self-destruction (which his people's advanced social sciences have determined to be inevitable on our own), and to bring us into a golden age of freedom, equality, and righteousness. He should definitely hold elections, so allow us to endorse his rule. (Of course he should not allow any legislation which would significantly impair our gold extraction operations.) That is, he should coopt the existing progressive memeset and consent-manufactories to his own advantage. The more we love him, the more we consent to his rule, the less likely it is that anyone manages to bring off any serious attack against him or his state. As Moldbug himself said elsewhere: "Once people even start to see you as powerful, rather than responsible, a crack has appeared in your armor. You have enemies. And who wants enemies?"

Even after Fnargl manages to securely set himself up as god-king, there is still the problem of people being unproductive. They can steal from each other, for example. They might engage in intra-human politics or warfare to grab stuff. They might engage in strikes, or slow-downs, in ways that cut production. Or, they may simply not work hard. They might devote their lives to esoteric stuff that humans care about, but Fnargl doesn't -- the pursuit of as much sex as possible, for example. All of these things are more reasons why Fnargl will want a press that is not objective. Rather, the press should instill the correct values.

Hard work is one such value. I've read that in Japan, when a man is unhappy with his job he works harder, to attempt to shame his superiors into giving him a promotion or more pay. This is a memeset Fnargl wants, not the memeset where when you are unhappy you quit, slack off or strike. What else? Well, Fnargl certain does not want people idling away their lives on selfish pursuits, meaningful only to themselves. Sex and drugs, to take the most salient examples. But also writing poetry, gossiping, entertainment -- anything except work and reproduction. He will tolerate our distractions to some degree, I think, because they make us happy, and Fnargl wants us to have rewards so that we have a reason to work hard. But I think his press will discourage the more self-centered life. And he may well decide to keep laws against really addictive and disabling drugs.

What other values will Fnargl want? Law abidingness. Peacefulness, even pacifism. Docility. The brotherhood of man. Do these values sound familiar? Well, yes -- they are the values of progressivism! Again, Fnargl will do well by coopting this memeset, not by letting it die. He certainly does not want every bit of progressivism, but he does want some of it.

Do the values above remind you a bit of sheep? Well, no surprise -- wild animals are far more unruly than our domesticated breeds. We've bred certain behaviors out of them. Establishing progressivism as his state religion is one means by which Fnargl will domesticate humans. But then there is literal domestication, too. Why should Fnargl let us breed as we choose? He should not. Rather, he will want to control our breeding, so as to achieve several ends.

One important end would be to rapidly increase the total population of the Earth to near its carrying capacity. More people equals more production. Fnargl would want to stabilize the population only once there were enough people so that marginal human life was at zero gold(tax) production, that is, just scraping by. He's not concerned with our average quality of life: he's concerned only with total production. Given variable harvests, I don't think it unlikely that he'd let us go beyond the carrying capacity for a while, during years with good harvests, then let us starve back to it in bad years.

But there's more than just numbers here. Fnargl always will want to increase our productivity, and not only via capital investment (the current means), but also by cultivating better people. Eugenics! He'll want to increase our intelligence and decrease our time-preference, both of which are known to be correlated with (and most likely causal of) productivity. He'll certainly want us healthier, and probably also physically smaller (fewer calories per worker). And he'll probably want to increase our docility, law-abidingness, hard workingness, and general disinterest in selfish pleasures. How would Fnargl do these things?

Some of his eugenics could be done more or less in a free market way. I.e., Fnargl would probably subsidize reproduction, enough to make pregnancy and child rearing more lucrative than some work, at least for people whose traits he likes. Remember that he's got all the taxes he needs to do pretty much whatever he wants. Children pay out in the long run for Fnargl, but may not for us. From his POV, this is a market failure that he'll want to correct.

After he filled the world to the quantity of people desired, which would take a few generations I'd guess, then he'd start in with the harsher stuff. Once you've got sufficient quantity, then you start working on quality. (Increasing the supportable amount of humans would also be a goal, but the free market would handle that just fine; Fnargl doesn't need to invest in that himself.)

Some of the eugenics would be... less than free. Three generations of imbeciles would be way too much for Fnargl -- I doubt he'd even allow one. I don't see him allowing morons to live off the state, that's for sure. He'd probably let them live, so long as they are sterilized and paid for privately -- this goes in the category of "let them have rewards to keep them working". But without someone else paying their bills? Euthanasia. (The progressive consent-manufactories would be kept busy for quite a while with this one.)

With the world at its carrying capacity, Fnargl would want to start replacing the least productive people. This would be people with low intelligence, high time preference, and few skills. Some of them might accept being worked to death, but some might revolt or turn to crime, or otherwise cause problems instead of dying peacefully. This is an example of a situation where interests are not aligned -- our genes tell us categorically "do not die"; Fnargl cares not. These criminals he would kill if he caught them, perhaps having them disassembled for organs if possible. (He might also attempt to squelch the crime of desperate men by harsh measures: punishing their families.) I could also imagine Fnargl learning that working people to death was not cost-effective, and perhaps preemptable. I can imagine him clearing whole countries at a time via his snap, if he didn't like their average genetics and/or culture. Then he could resettle using people who were more to his taste. For PR reasons, he would probably try to justify his genocides, probably by manipulating a group he had decided to genocide into warring on a neighbor. His progressive PR organs would clarify these occurances to make sure that the world understood things correctly.

Fnargl would enforce breeding limits against people with all sorts of genetic problems. How would he do that? A caring (but steely) progressive bureaucracy. Every person would be genetically tested prenatally, and perhaps also at birth, with abortion/euthanasia for those found wanting. Further testing would be done later in life for personality and intelligence, with sterilization for the worst cases. License to breed granted conditionally. Justification? Overcrowding, and of course "the good of the children". Again, here's a situation where progressivism is vital: how else can Fnargl create millions of dedicated eugenecists and their staffs, the informers, the voluntary compliance to something as illiberal as this?

I also tend to think he would want focused inbreeding programs on small groups of people, to attempt to fix certain traits for general propagation. This is how we artificially select animal strains, and I see good reason for Fnargl to desire it. 1000 years is plenty of time to spread desirable traits to everyone living. Women (even girls) might be encouraged to reproduce using state-sponsored sperm donors, perhaps via very large subsidies. Or perhaps they'd just be forced, if not enough of them were volunteering. Droit de seigneur, indeed. Perhaps they'd call it "being drafted" and it would be highly praised as "doing your duty" and "serving humanity".

Mencius Moldbug and the Ring of Power

2008-04-15T10:01:00.009-04:00

I've been at a bit of an intellectual dry point for a while. I'm too lazy to read books, while blogs are not sufficiently challenging intellectually

This is why Mencius Moldbug's blog (see sidebar) has been very welcome to me. Having discovered it a few months back, and dabbled in the comments there, I continued to find him stimulating enough that I went back and read through his archives. Which are voluminous -- the man is quirky. Among other quirks, he never writes a paragraph if a page will do.

I think I will try to write up a more complete discussion of the philosophy of Moldbug to coincide with his promised April 17 return. Meanwhile, I was thinking about power analogically, using the Lord of the Rings template, when I realized Moldbug's ideas actually map onto it quite nicely.

In LotR, to recap for those few who have not read it, the central conundrum is created by an evil artifact, the One Ring of Power. It was created by an evil demigod, Sauron, who poured much of his power into it. Sauron was vanquished at one point, and almost but not quite dead. But he cannot be killed while the Ring exists. So Sauron has rearisen to threaten all of Middle Earth with his armies of evil orcs, trolls, etc. This time he has far more power than the degenerate kingdoms of men and fading elves that he faces. They cannot win militarily and everyone knows it.

The One Ring is, as its name indicates, very powerful. Any great person who wields it can command armies and gain victory via its power. However, nobody who has owned it has ever voluntarily given it up, except two hobbits (this seems to be their special power). The Ring is evil, and has a will of its own: although its possessor may have the best of intentions and may do many good things with it initially, the Ring will possess his or her mind in the long run. It will inflame the base desires of the Ringlord, which for men and elves both seems to involve the will to dominate others.

Thus, the conundrum in LotR is that the Ring offers military victory, which is not possible in any other way. And yet if anyone of the "good guys" should wield it and win, it will destroy him or her and in the long run set up its dark dominion in any case. It seems like a no win situation, however, there's one out. The good news is it can be destroyed. The bad news is, being ultramagical it can only be unmade in one place in the entire world, the volcano in which it was forged. And Sauron happens to own that place, which is in the very center of his dark kingdom, practically impossible to get to.

So, in the LotR a couple of weak, largely clueless hobbits are sent on a rather ridiculous errand into the heart of the enemy's territory to throw the Ring into the fire. (This can work in fiction -- may the Plot be with you. But it's still risible from any "realistic" perspective, which many of the characters in the book understand quite well.)

The libertarian analogy here is clear enough. The Ring of Power is coercive power, particularly, legitimized coercion as institutionalized in the State. The conundrum is similar: as Acton said, power corrupts. Nobody can be trusted to run the state, it seems. And so we anarchists want to "throw it in the volcano" -- to break outside of the entire paradigm that the damn thing must always exist. And the risibility factor also maps: how do we get to liberty from where we are? Vote for it? Please.

Mencius Moldbug comes on the scene with a new proposal, his "neocameralism" as he calls it. You can read his explanation at the link. To understand neocameralism via analogy in Middle Earth, we need to understand a few more of Tolkien's "rules". Lesser rings of power were created for all of the free peoples of middle earth (Men, Elves, and Dwarves). Men who get lesser rings of power actually fade from the world, turning to undead, evil wraiths. Elves have their own lesser rings, which Sauron never touched, and they do not fade. But we are assured by everyone concerned that they cannot wield the One Ring safely, presumably because they do like domination (although less than Men), which it would inflame. There were also lesser rings created for the Dwarves. But these rings are said to have little power over Dwarves, who were created separately from Men and Elves. Rather, the only effect on Dwarves is to inflame their existing greed, their covetousness of gold, jewels, and other wealth. (Also the rings seem to magically help them with wealth accumulation in some unspecific way.)

Now I've laid out enough here to understand a radical proposal that should have been entertained at the Council of Elrond. It is this: give the One Ring of Power to a Dwarf Lord. (Presumably this would have been Dáin II Ironfoot, who was the current King Under the Mountain when the War of the Ring happened, but let's call this hypothetical dwarven hero "Fnargl".) Fnargl can use the military power of the Ring to destroy Sauron's power, thus saving Middle Earth from the dominion of a known evil. So far so good. (Analogically, neocameralism fills the power vaccuum that folks like Moldbug worry about in anarchy.) Now the bad part: with the Ring, Fnargl is unstoppable. He will take over the world. (Analog: anarchy is not possible. The State must exist.) But there's good news: unlike other mortals, dwarves don't want domination. Rather they want money. And so the resulting Fnarglocracy will be something truly new in Middle Earth: a kingdom without a real King. Oh, Fnargl will be there, yes. A sort of God-King. But he won't care a whit about the subjects as such: from his point of view, they exist to make him money, and he is undying so he has very, very low time preference. Everyone must be subjected to force them to pay taxes, but Fnargl does not want to control them for dominion's sake, or for any other end except money, money, money. Since the best way to make money is via a free market, he'll let them have that. (With heavy taxation, of course.) He won't otherwise interfere with them. So, you'll get a semi-libertarian outcome: far more liberal than any modern state, but just as tax-heavy. The hobbits can still smoke their weed, so long as they continue to work most of the time. (Analogically, instead of an eternal ruler, Moldbug envisions a corporation. Agency becomes a problem, and more on that eventually, but the idea is the same: corps exist to make money for their shareholders, and so according to Moldbuggian thought they'd make good rulers from the POV of not caring what their subjects do.)

Anyway, for much more on Fnarglocracy, you can read Moldbug's views here. Note that Moldbug is proposing an interstellar alien as Fnargl in the linked piece, with a slightly different power ring. But the same general principle applies.

I have my own critique of Fnarglocracy, which I suppose I will post eventually. Some of it maps to critiques of neocameralism; some of it may not.

Improved Democracy

2008-04-11T10:37:00.005-04:00

State democracy is a form of socialism. As such I've got no desire for it. However, democracy as a decisionmaking process is useful in many organizations, for example corporations. And it is also important in the state, of course, whether I like it or not. It is impossible for me as an engineering mind to look at the current system and not think of ways to improve it. Here's a sketch of how I'd set up the democratic subsystem of a government.

The legislative branch is bicameral. The lower house (let's call if, "of Representatives", to make things easier on us with American civics knowledge) is the lawmaking body. The upper house (the "Senate") is the law abolishing body. Laws do not come into effect without being passed by both houses. The upper house, alone, can strike a law from the books, by sunsetting it (see below).

Citizens do not have to register to vote. Every citizen who has registered to vote has one vote in the lower house of the legislature. These votes can be proxied, to any other citizen, or to two special proxies: "no", and "abstain". All proxy assignments, of all citizens, are public information. As a convenience, a citizen's proxy is asked for on each election day, but can be changed at any time by a relatively simple procedure, akin to registering to vote. Proxies themselves may proxy, although they are not allowed to change their own proxy except as a part of an election.

Note that this makes, de facto, two classes of voters: "representatives" (who cannot change their proxy at will), and normal citizens (who can). (Unregistered citizens are a third class.) A representative who wishes to change his proxy without an election should be allowed to do this, but only by giving up his representative status (until the next election). All citizens who were formerly proxying to him should be notified of what happened, and they should have their proxy reassigned to his (old) proxy.

Actual legislation can be voted on electronically, if the technology is present. In that case, there is no need to exclude any voter, although for convenience it may be worthwhile to forbid individual voters. In a lower-tech setting, a physical meeting would be necessary. In this case, only the top 100 representatives (by votes proxied) should be allowed to vote.

There are two kinds of legislation that the House may create. "Writs of Abolition" are proposals which only remove existing laws, they cannot also create any new law or change any existing law. All other proposed legislation is called a "bill". To pass legislation of either kind, 50% of the non-abstaining registered voters must vote for it. The "no" proxy is counted as voting for all Writs of Abolition, and against all bills. The "abstain" proxy always abstains. Representatives vote as they like. A proxy votes with the weight of all citizens who he/she/it is proxying for, who are not currently present and voting.

The upper house ("senate") also is a proxy-based voting system. However in this case, the proxy link is secret, not public. Each election, each voter may vote for a single proxy by a secret ballot. The top 100 vote-getters will be the new Senate. Again, note that proxying means that unsuccessful candidates (those not in the top 100) will have any votes they get proxied to their assigned proxy; this is done as part of the election. Once the election is completed, all proxying to Senators is fixed until the next election.

The senate does not have a lot to do. It has only three powers:

to vote to affirm a bill that has already passed the House
to vote to affirm a writ of abolition that has already passed the House
to vote to change the sunset provision in any existing law.

All laws have a subset provision in, that is, a date at which they cease to be in effect. (Note that the House may assign a sunset to a bill if it wants to, but this is largely cosmetic because the Senate can always change the sunset.)

When a bill comes to the Senate, it must vote to affirm that bill before it can become law. If the Senate does not vote on a bill, it automatically is removed from consideration as possible law at the next election day. (After the election the House may always re-pass the bill to replace it into consideration.) The only change the Senate can make to a bill is to add a sunset provision to it. And it must do this (unless the House did), because for the Senate to pass legislation, it must be sunsetted. The earliest allowed sunset is 90 days after the next election day. The longest allowed sunset is 10 years.

Any existing law may have its sunset provision changed by the Senate. The same limits to possible sunsets apply: the earliest allowed sunset is 90 days after the next election day. The longest allowed sunset is 10 years.

Finally, when a Writ of Abolition comes to the Senate, it may vote to pass it. If it passes, the change in the law takes place immediately. Thus laws may be immediately abolished only with the consent of both houses.

In all three cases, simple majority vote (of proxied citizens) passes the law/sunset/writ.

Making money in America

2008-02-18T11:34:00.003-05:00

Can one make it in America starting with nothing? This guy did.:

Alone on a dark gritty street, Adam Shepard searched for a homeless shelter. He had a gym bag, $25, and little else. A former college athlete with a bachelor's degree, Mr. Shepard had left a comfortable life with supportive parents in Raleigh, N.C. Now he was an outsider on the wrong side of the tracks in Charleston, S.C.

But Shepard's descent into poverty in the summer of 2006 was no accident. Shortly after graduating from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., he intentionally left his parents' home to test the vivacity of the American Dream. His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education.

During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.

The effort, he says, was inspired after reading "Nickel and Dimed," in which author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on a series of low-paying jobs. Unlike Ms. Ehrenreich, who chronicled the difficulty of advancing beyond the ranks of the working poor, Shepard found he was able to successfully climb out of his self-imposed poverty.

He tells his story in "Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream." The book, he says, is a testament to what ordinary Americans can achieve.

The link has a short interview with the author. Practically the first question is, "but surely your background – you're privileged; you have an education and a family – made it much easier for you to achieve." Shepard thinks not, but of course he does have many advantages ("privilege" means "advantage" to the left). He's white for one thing. Young and healthy, presumably. And most importantly, he has a work ethic. That's a very real advantage.

I've been given Nickled and Dimed to read, by goodthinking friends. And I've read it; it's good, but you should read it knowing that its author is a hard-left ideologue. She documents ably the fact that low-end jobs are not very pleasant, nor hugely remunerative. She works hard for little, and is amazed that people can work that hard. But her experiment doesn't show what she thinks about opportunity in America. Ehrenreich was, by intention, sampling how she might live given certain jobs. She was not trying to get ahead. And her lifestyle, for all the privation she experienced, was nonetheless not the same as many of her coworkers. For example, she'd get an apartment for herself to live in when she tried a new job. Real minimum wage workers rarely live alone; they live with relatives, or get roommates. When I was in graduate school making $14000/year, I lived in a series of group houses with up to 4 other people. My share of the rent: from $250 to $400 per month. I also lived alone, when I was first in College Park, in a tiny miserable mildewed little basement apartment which rented for $650/month. Living alone, as Ehrenreich did, is not what the working poor do.

Lamest Edit Wars

2008-01-11T12:46:00.000-05:00

Via Balko, the Lamest Edit Wars in Wikipedia page:

Cow tipping

Is it appropriate to include a picture of a cow with the caption An unsuspecting potential victim? People disputed this caption, largely because a couple people considered it humor and no evidence could be found that it was. Many different variations were put forth from plain "A cow" to humorous "Mooo?" Consensus was to delete the image, but the article ended up with the picture of "A cow in its natural upright state." There were attempts to add a cow lying down to dispute that cows can lie down and get up, but the edit warriors refused it. Perhaps cow tipping is just an urban legend and the implication that this cow could be tipped violates WP:NPOV. Can any reliable source verify that the cow is unsuspecting? Does it matter that the cow is looking at the camera? How does this segue into links to flatulence humor and the dozens? Learn the answers to these burning questions and others at Talk:Cow tipping.

Immigration

2008-01-10T11:38:00.001-05:00

Many libertarians propound what we might call the hardline abolitionist stance on immigration: people have a right to move around; movement is not coercion. Ergo there should be no immigration or emigration restrictions. None, anywhere. No passports, no regulation whatsoever. Full stop.

This analysis is simple enough, but it is also wildly impractical when imagined in our real-world situation, where the state exists and serves as a conduit for forced wealth transfers to all subjects, which includes immigrants. Furthermore, we are rich and the world is poor, so there's plenty of reason to want to move to America.

Surveys that Pew did in Mexico suggest that 40% of Mexicans want to move to the US, if they could... and Mexico is not even a particularly poor country, by world standards. If economic factors drive most immigration, which seems likely to me, then it seems possible that a third or more of the world's population would want to move to America tomorrow, if we abolished immigration restrictions.

How do you think having 2 billion new citizens, most of them desperately poor, uneducated, non-English speaking, not our culture, would affect America? What if it was "only" 1 billion, or even just 500 million?

Well, one thing a lot of libertarians have thought over the years is: well, that would kill the welfare state. Because the tiny minority of native-born citizens, in that scenario, would no longer consent to (or even be able to afford) the level of wealth transfers we'll put up with currently due to our relative uniformity. Uniformity in many ways: wealth, culture (including language), and yes, race. Presumably the native-born would have the power (due to owning most of the wealth) to change the laws. And yes, I am aware that we are not that uniform now: I mean only to say that we are quite uniform now by comparison to how we would be if we abolished all immigration restrictions and a billion peasants immigrated from all corners of the world.

OTOH, there's a second argument that says the newcomers would easily outvote the native-born and they'd vote to dispossess us. Perhaps large parts of our welfare state would go, but not all, and certainly the ideological basis of it would not be destroyed. I subscribe to this position, myself. In this analysis, the fact of the existing state with its mechanisms for forced wealth transfers makes allowing any immigration into a species of coercion; but we can afford quite a bit, and so even the current level of immigration, while perhaps somewhat of a strain, is affordable. But free immigration would not be.

Thus, as an "implementation detail" of libertarianism, it is important that before we abolish immigration restrictions, we abolish the welfare state. Don't hold your breath on that one! Meanwhile, while we wait for the welfare state to collapse, immigration should be limited enough so that we can assimilate our immigrants, economically at least. And given that we do already have laws about immigration, it seems like those would be the place to start. There's something to be said for the rule of law.

Although it is quite possible to graft a racial analysis onto all that, or to emphasize race over culture, language, religion, etc. as a form of diversity, it is not necessary. The simple brute reality of a rich democratic state in a world full of poor people is all you need to force some rather ugly choices. It's not just here, either; it's every Western country.

Another aspect of free immigration that may be dangerous in our current world is letting into the USA vast numbers of immigrants who hate us for our violent interventions in their countries of origin. We are opening ourselves to terrorism if we let just anyone come and go freely. Now, the answer to this is rather like the former problem of the welfare state: abolish it. If we stopped intervening worldwide, gave up on pushing around foreigners, then (after a while) it should be safe to let in all the immigrants we want to, at least in terms of their holding grievances against us. But again, that's not how things are now. So, we do need to become a peaceful country before letting in just anyone.

Unlike the situation with the welfare state, which seems extremely unlikely to change, I think a peaceful USA is an plausible, attainable political goal. It's not only crazy libertarians who talk about abolishing the warfare state and empire: we have friends on the left and right on this issue. But we're not that country now, and so there is a certain prudence in keeping out foreigners who we've offended.

Now, there is one more thing here that many paleocons and paleolibs care about, that I care less about but I still think is worth considering. And that is this whole "national question". If we opened the gates, America would change, drastically. We'd go from being a nation that is post-Protestant, white, and Anglo (with a nice leaven of believing Christians of many flavors, Jews, blacks, hispanics, etc.), to a polyglot patchwork of nations. We would no longer be a nation in any substantial sense, although we would still be living under one state.

Is the demise of American nationhood worth arguing or worrying about? Well, some people really like our country as it is, and I can't blame them for that. I like it too. I don't feel I have the right to coerce people to keep it static, but a lot of people do. Certainly I see no principled reason to abolish immigration restrictionism outside of libertarian thought.

But more importantly, there's a real danger in diversity within a nation-state: once it becomes simply a state, it may not be stable. An unstable state is a dangerous thing, typically full of civil conflict and civil rights violations, sometimes externally aggressive as well. If we look at the world today, we can see many stable nations, and many unstable ones. And the correlation is high between stability and nation-states, as versus unstable states which do not have a (single) nation in their territory. There's also a high correlation between a country's wealth and its level of stability. We may not have the option to be a highly diverse, peaceful, rich country. We may have to choose between being a somewhat diverse, rich nation-state, or a truly diverse poor unstable state at war with itself.

To put some numbers on the value of stability, read this article at Reason. It's a discussion of a 2005 study from the World Bank, "Where is the Wealth of Nations?: Measuring Capital for the 21st Century", which makes estimates of the contribution of natural, produced, and "intangible" capital to the aggregate wealth nations. The findings are interesting: most of the value of living in the first world is not due to natural resources (good farmland, timber, oil, metal ore, etc.), or even already-produced capital (factories, roads, etc). It's "intangible" capital, that is, living under the rule of law in a stable economic system with freedom of contract. If we let in too many people who are not used to the rule of law, who have their own religious law and/or cultural norms, and who have no particular attachment to the common law and inherited Anglo-American national traditions, they may unintentionally destroy our intangible capital.

Now, the preceding analysis is something hard to prove one way or the other, but it seems plausible to me. How much risk should we accept that we'll destroy the rule of law in the USA? It may not be highly likely, but it's a terribly bad outcome.

And, unfortunately, this is an angle on immigration where race and religion, among other forms of diversity, are unavoidable. We are what we are: white English-speaking post-Christians. Diversity, for us, is anything not that, which people notice and care about. To the extent that you buy either of the two arguments about nationality (that you want America to remain more or less as it is, or that you fear that the post-national state will be unstable and thus violent and poor), you will want to exclude immigrants that "aren't like us", in whatever ways seem relevant to you in the above analysis.

Of course, the good liberal response here is that we are not supposed to notice race, religion, culture, etc. Those things are not supposed to matter. Perhaps not, but they manifestly do to most people. We may think all that religion stuff is silly, but ask a believer and he'll tell you that his religion is not silly to him.

My response to the "national question" is as an anarchist: I want to abolish the state. With no state, nations can coexist because there does not have to be one policy. But failing that, I don't think multinational states are stable, at least not liberal democratic ones. (The Ottoman Empire lasted for a very long time, but it is not a model for us.) Thus I think it would be wise, so long as we do have the state, to limit immigration to moderate levels that we can assimilate.

Hunter S. Thompson on Candidate Motives

2007-03-10T21:32:00.000-05:00

A couple things I've seen online today have reminded me of the inimicable Hunter S. Thompson's analysis of the relation of the ego to Presidential ambition, in Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail '72. Anyway, I naturally went googling for it, and discovered to my amazement, that I couldn't find it! So I got down my copy, and found the passage, and re-googled using specific words... nada. Well, as a public service... here it is.

The context here is a discussion of the possibility of a McGovern/Kennedy ticket, after McGovern had secured the nomination of the Democratic party:

McGovern and most of his staff people had been interpreting Kennedy's hazy/negative reaction to the VP offer as a sort of shrewd flirtation that would eventually come up 'yes'. A McGovern/Kennedy ticket would, after all, put Nixon in deep trouble from the start -- and it would also give Teddy a guaranteed launching pad for 1980, when he would still be two years younger than McGovern is today.

Indeed. It made fine sense, on paper, and I recall makeing that same argument myself, a few months back -- but I'd no sooner sent it on the Mojo wire than I realized it made no sense at all. There was something finally and chemically wrong with the idea of Ted Kennedy running for vice-president... Kennedy wouldn't put his presidential ambitions in limbo for eight years, behind McGovern or anyone else. Superstar politicians [have] delicate egos.

The ego is the crucial factor here, but ego is a hard thing to put on paper... File cards are handy for precinct canvassing, and for people that want to get heavy with the Dewey Decimal System, but they are not much good for cataloging things like Lust, Ambition, or Madness.

This may explain why McGovern blew his gig with Kennedy. It was a perfectly rational notion -- and that was the flaw, because...

Now the fun begins!

... a man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare -- any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it. The bull elk is a very crafty animal for about 50 weeks of the year; his senses are so sharp that only an artful stalker can get within 1000 yards of him . . . but when the rut comes on, in the autumn, any geek with the sense to blow an elk-whistle can lure a bull-elk right up to his car in ten minutes if he can drive within hearing range.

The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous system of every bull elk on the mountain. They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the large ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares.

A career politician finally smelling the White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything he can't handle personally he will hire out -- or, failing that, make a deal.

Good stuff. (The ur-blogger; this in indeed where a generation got "indeed".)

Education is the secular religion

2007-03-05T13:26:00.002-05:00

If you want to know how a libertarian thinks about education, all you need to know is that education must necessarily include instruction in morals and values. That is to say, that education is necessarily religious.

Thus everything you mainstream people think about the relationship of the state and religion, to a libertarian, also applies to education, and for much the same reasons. Some things are too important to let other people dictate to us, or even vote on.

Dog Sayings

2007-02-28T17:30:00.000-05:00

Matt Yglesias wonders where the saying "sick as a dog" come from, seeing as how most modern dogs are not sick very much.

Myself, I've started saying "hold your dogs" sometimes instead of "hold your horses". Dogs, I know. They are very, very impatient. Horses? No idea. I suppose they must be impatient too, hence the saying, but who knows anything about that? Why should I continue to propagate a saying that is meaningless to me?

Updates

2007-02-20T12:35:00.000-05:00

I figure: if I read you all the time, I should link you. So I went to add some stuff. Google's now in charge, so I upgraded the blog to take advantage of their stuff. So now it looks a little funny, but its tolerable at least. I'll get the formatting touched up eventually.

World Cup Broken

2006-07-10T14:01:00.000-04:00

Steve Sailer puts my feelings about soccer perfectly:

Americans simply can't watch soccer on TV without making lists of all the ways we'd fix the game to make it better. We're reformers and improvers and tinkerers by nature, and it drives us crazy to see something with the potential of soccer that is mired in primitive rules.

This reminds me of the P.J. O'Rourke bit about Russia, where he observes the post-Communist level of competition and thinks it's not quite there. He just wants to bring in a few Americans, grandmother types, who would whip the restaurant he's in into shape in a few days with liberal applications of American commonsense, niceness, and cleaning products.

Get in the ring

2006-06-23T01:05:00.000-04:00

13 rounds of argumentation with Billy Beck. The topic: voting.

Beck:

I don’t see how one can be a libertarian and vote for anybody at all, period. Look: I don’t have a right to get together with my friends and determine with them how to dispose of your rights. Any sensible person would call that a conspiracy. Nobody has that right

So I tell him what I think, and back and forth it goes. We end up just about where we started, in disagreement. Oh well. (Like I thought he would change me or vice-versa. You never know, though.)

A good argument. I feel a bit bad about hijacking the UO thread like that, but the argument was more or less on topic. It is reasonable to hash out whether or not voting is morally acceptable, and if so, what sort of voting strategy is moral, before proceeding with any sort of libertarian-democratic entente.

I'm quite certain that voting to prevent or mitigate an already-existing rights-violation is morally acceptable. What I'm still thinking about is whether there's any way to stretch the notion of defensive voting to a strategy of voting for gridlock.

Watching the Watchers

2006-06-13T00:40:00.000-04:00

In anarchy as it is typically described by anarchocapitalists, many protection agencies compete for customers. One of the protests I often run into about this, especially for those first encountering the idea, is what keeps the agencies "nice"? Why can't they just violate their customers' rights?

I often see other anarchists emphasizing "exit" as the means for the customers to control the agencies. The analogy into our world of markets is good, but not great. You can see how, if the agency is somewhat nice to begin with, this would work. And in fact, if you're the sort of person that anarchy appeals to, you'll be immediately attracted to the idea of wielding that sort of power over your government. But... this still assumes the agency is nice enough to let you exit.

What if your agency is not nice? What if it turns rogue, and enslaves you? They've got the guns, right? What about company towns?

One answer to this is simple: in the real world you can't truly guarantee anything. If you set up an anarchy “wrong”, then abuse can happen. But this is not a problem unique to anarchy; states also have the seeds of tyranny in them. Even seemingly nice democracies, like Weimar Germany.

However, let us take some hope from the world of states. Consider all of the inventions men have invented to rein in the state. I would argue that none have been fully effective, but some have had real effect. I am thinking here of these:

democracy
human rights
civil rights - habeas corpus, trial by jury, etc.
constitutionalism
armed people/militia
federalism
separation of powers
church/state separation

And there's probably others I'm not recalling just now. These are the stuff of the basic civics class.

OK, so here's my big idea: all of these state-limitation techniques could be applied to anarchic protection agencies. None of them rely on the state being a state per se; that is, none of them require a monopoly on legitimized violence. Rather, they could be applied by any “government”.

Put another way, the agencies in ancap are weaker than states. Any institution which serves to rein in the state, must also serve to limit ancap agencies, unless somehow it relies on the monopoly of coercion. Furthermore, in ancap you add a brake that is far, far more powerful than any of those above: exit. Exit alone won’t do the trick, I don’t think. But exit, along with all of the sorts of nice-state tricks we’ve invented so far, will.

In my opinion, ancap has not worked thus far for several reasons, not least of which is it is hard to get going. I analogize it to an arch: very stable once set up, but not likely to just happen. Rather it requires “scaffolding”, and states by their nature won’t allow the “scaffold” to be kicked away.

However, there may be another reason why ancap hasn’t taken over yet: it requires a certain level of technology. I think, at minimum, it requires technologies only invented during the Enlightenment - those listed above.

My Offerings

2006-06-13T00:19:00.000-04:00

I did a week of guestblogging over at Unqualified Offerings. I supposed I should link the writing I did, so's I can find it later if I want:

a post on Cuzan's idea that we're always in anarchy
a metareview of Derb's review of POD
a snit at the tendancy to ignore genetics and extrapolate from correlation to causation
a comment on a Rothbard article, suggesting that it be read mindful of Free Software

You might also look at the week in general for other postings' comments, since I was pretty active in jumping into many of the threads.

One minor little story about the UfOing worth telling. I like to know who's writing what I am reading before I start. UO (and many blogs) don't do that automatically. It's fine for a solo blog (like this) to elide bylines; there will never be a guest blogger here unless I find myself strangely being read enough to matter. But in a group blog (as UO was, for a week) I find it annoying to have no bylines. In my first post, I explained this, and I posted my name at the top. Without any further prompting (from me, anyway), my co-bloggers for the week adopted the practice! Anarchy in action.

Music similarity networking

2006-05-24T22:58:00.000-04:00

Pandora! This thing is ... I want to say frickin' awesome... no. It's wonderful. Go find yourself some new music!

An icon for Unruled

2005-07-29T14:02:00.000-04:00

Blogger now allows uploading of images. I am trying to use it to add a favicon to this blog. A favicon is one of the cute little pictures you see in your browser next to a webpage's name or address.

Here's mine:

Update: it worked. Unfortunately it appears the file I uploaded (a png) got automatically jpegged, and the parameters used were not favorable. Hence the non-smooth background. Have to fix that.

An Environmentalist Exchange

2005-07-27T16:17:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting exchange between environmentalists Bjorn Lomborg (author of The Skeptical Environmentalist), and Carl Pope (executive director of the Sierra Club), on environmentalism. Lomborg argues for realism and prioritization. Pope resists both, but can't help but acknowledge some of Lomborg's points, responding quite lamely to perhaps the most important one:

[Lomborg:] You return to the 1,300 scientists and their report on the world’s ecosystems. What their results show is that when people are starving, lacking clean drinking water, getting poisoned from indoor air pollution, and dying from easily curable communicable diseases, they let the environment get ravaged, too. Your solution is to deal with the environment first. But shouldn’t we, morally and practically, help them gain wealth first, so they can take care of the environment too?

[Sand:]Bad human decisions, not inescapable reality, make the environment appear to be a “trade–off” with prosperity.

It's a bad human decision to be born in a poor country!

Firefly

2005-07-25T15:30:00.001-04:00

Good times for the scifi fan. Galactica is backtica, and it is good. Not too much to say about it; obviously trying times for Colonel Tigh but beyond that, things are rather slow. One thing that does bug me is they've cut back on the intro/theme, that was formerly so evocative. Pity.

The big scifi news for me: Firefly. I'd heard good things about this show, and I like Joss Whedon, so, I've had a "firefly" item set to record on the Replay for over a year now. It's playing now, and to judge by a single hour (half of a two hour episode) seen, it is tremendous. I've just seen "Serenity" (half of).

Galactica is good, but it is still TV aimed at the average viewer, or at least, average scifi fan. Which is to say, that it's easily graspable with a single viewing. I've rarely rewatched any BSG episode, and never more than twice. Firefly is... well, let me put it this way. I watched this episode five times, skipping some 30 second chunks in later viewings, but still mostly five times. I "got" it on the first time, in terms of what happened. One time was deeply satisfying. But there was so much there.

I've posted exemplars of how particular other scifi series hooked me: a smart scene, good dialog will do that. For Farscape, the scene about enslaving horses. For BSG, the cancer diagnosis scene. Well, "Serenity" had that scene for me two minutes in. Malcolm (Our Hero) has been abandoned, and ordered to surrender. He watches as the enemy Alliance forces land in the valley he's been fighting to hold for weeks. It was all for nothing. He stares in shock and disbelief at the huge Alliance ships landing. The noise of the battle fades as all he knows is the end: of his army, of his cause, of his faith. The man watching next to him is shot dead. (Classic Joss.) Fade scene, and we see him again, "six years later", in a spacesuit, upside down. Symbolism! Yes, the world has been turned upside down for poor Mal.

But that's just the first scene that grabbed me. I could go on; five, maybe ten. Wow. Here's a review from one C. A. Bridges that meets my approval.

a veteran of the losing side of a galactic civil war must find a way to survive on his own terms under the government's radar. With a small, quirky crew and a small, quirky ship, Captain Malcolm Reynolds takes on whatever job, legal or otherwise, that he can get.

...

You won't feel stupider afterward.

Regular television consumption will leave you with the inescapable conclusion that everyone in the world is a moron. People say stupid things, make stupid assumptions, and consistently fail to see obvious solutions because then the show would end 52 minutes too soon. You can actually feel your brain freezing up from vapor lock

The folks in "Firefly," good and bad alike, tend to do the same things you usually scream at television people to do, before you think to scream them, except when they're doing something even better. As it turns out that doesn't always help, but at least then you've got no one to blame but yourself.

...

You may notice I've said little about the characters. I haven't mentioned Mal's frightening pragmatism, Zoe's loyalty, Wash's sense of humor, Kaylee's sunny nature, Jayne's cheerful violence, Book's wisdom, Inara's sensuality, Simon's sacrifice, or River's peculiarities, and that's because trying to label any of them with a single description is useless. You really should meet them yourself.

So, now's your chance. See the shows as they were meant to be seen -- in order (!), with the three unaired episodes -- and enjoy a truly great science-fiction show.

I'll be watching. Bonus: libertarian applicability!

Coerced Testimony

2005-07-07T23:52:00.000-04:00

I post a lot at Unqualified Offerings. A reader over there asked the following question, which I think I'll address:

[me:]In anarchy, some agencies will, and some won’t, have laws allowing compelled testimony. This strikes me as the best possible solution.
.
How is that supposed to work? If you don’t want to testify, I can shop around for an “agency” that will lock you up until you do? Hey, maybe if I pay them enough they’ll even torture you.
.
Rules of evidence have to constrain third parties. You can’t create an Autonomy Zone around yourself and demand that nobody make you a witness to anything without your consent. And without testimony (not necessarily compelled testimony), nobody knows who’s committing “aggression or initiation of coercion” and who’s not.

First things first: the standard disclaimer about anarchy. Anarchy is a system that is defined by what there isn't -- a state -- not by some specification of the society that will result. Thus, any notion I propound, although it's probably a good guess, is just that: a guess. Anarchy is what anarchy does, and I may be wrong.

OK, so how does it work? Well, first let's posit that coerced testimony is useful from the POV of achieving high-quality justice. (If it isn't, then there won't be much coerced testimony in anarchy, because the market won't produce many worthless services.) Given that it is helpful, then I think most people would agree to allow themselves to be coerced in order to be member of an agency that coerces. Of course, this is not coercion in its bad sense, since it is agreed to. It's just a contract, where the party agrees to testify freely and truthfully, with coercive sanctions if he fails to do so.

So most people will end up being governed by an agency which has coercive testimony, at least for internal disputes (between two customers). It is very likely that the agencies will extend that to disputes between customers of different agencies (which both allow coercion), since the same utility applies.

What of the minority that doesn't want to be forced to testify? If there are enough of them, and/or they have enough wealth, they can set up their own agency. Perhaps the rules will allow coercion within, but not without. Or perhaps no coercion at all. In either case, there is a mismatch with outside agencies.

Now, it might happen that in any given dispute, a person who can't be forced may agree to testify anyway. But of course, that doesn't solve all disputes.

In others, a person (let's call him Joe) will refuse to testify (and his agency will back him), and a foreign agency will want him to testify.

The first thing to point out here is that if the second agency is libertarian, it will not coerce Joe because to do so would violate his rights. But remember that this is not a libertarian minarchy, it is anarchy. The agency is not limited by libertarian ideas, and may threaten to coerce in spite of it being aggression. So what next? It threatens to coerce, and the second agency will defend its client. This turns into the standard agency conflict scenario. I've discussed it long ago (here), so read that.

The upshot of agency conflict is, typically, that they can foresee it, and if it is likely at all, they'll have negotiated it out long ago. War is incredibly costly, and bad for business; a last resort. In a case like this one, where a minority wants something that is reasonable, the likely outcome is the minority agency pays the other agencies, and they agree to apply the minority rule in conflicts. Thus, Joe ends up paying more to his agency (so it can pay others), but his right to not testify is upheld.

Or, it may be that the right not to testify is sufficiently unpopular that the equilibrium ends up with the minority being bent to the will of the majority. Joe will have to testify. But note that in this case, it's likely that his right is "bought out" by the agencies that want it. Also note that Joe still doesn't have to testify against other customers of agencies which don't coerce. This may seem a small thing, but it would allow a minority to effectively achieve their goals, at the cost of cutting themselves off from the majority (so that conflicts don't happen).

So, getting back the my interlocutor's questions. Yes, you might be able to shop for a venue to force Joe to testify, or you might not. Depends. Either way, I don't see a huge problem.

There is nothing in anarchy that defines there as being no official torture. However, I predict there won't be any, because it is not very productive and it is anathema to all decent people. The tiny minority who would want it is like the minority that want to murder freely. If they did start and agency that allowed it, all the other agencies would band together and annihilate them.

As for an "autonomy zone", well, that's exactly what you can do. Judith Miller is doing it. Anyone can. Because you control your tongue. I see no reason whatsoever that any agreement between third parties constrains me. If they want my agreement, let them negotiate with me (or my proxy).

Political Orientation and Heredity

2005-06-22T23:02:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting paper discussed a bit in the blogosphere that is basically twin studies done on political positions. Politics: complex; must be environmental, right? Wrong. It's heritable, about as much as most other traits. Best discussion I've seen on the web is not the NYTimes piece, which was pretty ignorant, but this one:

The authors do not argue that genetics makes one a Republican or Democrat. Indeed, people like me who are Libertarian with Republican leanings may not fit at all into the study if such were the assertion. Rather, they base the study on the notion that certain character traits are to some extent inherited. Character traits such as openness in turn are translated into social attitudes. These social attitudes are then transformed, to some extent, into political attitudes and later into political behavior. The genetic component, they predict, should be an important factor but certainly not the only one or even the most important one.

Well, it's quite important for at least some traits, i.e., American's position on school prayer.

Not really that new or unexpected if you keep up with what modern science is discovering about heredity. One of the reasons I love Sailer is he keeps up with this stuff religiously so I don't have to.

The wisest remark I've seen on this thus far: the Derb:

The subtext here is the assertion of determinism -- that what we are, WHAT I AM, is not as much a product of my free will as I should prefer to think it is. All the science on human nature is tugging in that direction, the determinist direction; all our instincts and preferences and faith tug in the other direction.

Science will win, of course -- it always does. We shall find out that our cherished beliefs about the Self are largely illusions, and we shall come to terms with that somehow -- but we'll protest every inch of the way there.

Science is cold.

I thought of that paper when I saw an item on a new libertarian blog, hosted by the Catallarchy guys. One of the liberty belles ("Lea") is taking up the old chestnut, why are there so few libertarian women?

I posted briefly there, and thought I would expand a bit here. My theory is by no means a total explanation, but partial. It's very simple: libertarianism is an ideology that appeals primarily to high IQ people. As Larry Summers won't tell you openly any more, there are more high-IQ men than women. This is a result of higher variability in the normal distributions of male IQ as versus female. More stupid men, more smart men. As a logical consequence, we should expect a disproportion in the number of libertarian men vs women.

The size of the imbalance depends on several things: the difference in average IQs for men and women (if any), the difference in the standard deviation of these two populations, and the correlation between IQ and libertarianism. From observation, I'd guess the ratio of male:female libertarians is something like 4:1.

Here's some more predictions from this theory. First, there should be relatively few libertarians. Imagine a simple model where everyone above a certain IQ has a N% chance to be a libertarian, while everyone below the cutoff has none. To get a 4:1 difference in men:women with two bell curves that are very similar, we'll need to go out a standard deviation or so. But this means the total number of people who might possibly be libertarians is only ~15% of the population. If we imagine N to be perhaps 20% we get a pretty good estimate of the number of libertarians as registered in opinion polling and voting.

Next: we should expect to see disproportionately many Jews in the movement. (See the previous post.) We should expect to see very few black or hispanic libertarians until those populations close the IQ gap.

Finally, and back to the paper mentioned at the beginning, we should expect that libertarianism is quite heritable. A great example of that is the great Friedman line: Milton, David, and now Patri.

What if I'm right? Well, here's one consequence: engaging in majoritarian politics is largely a waste of time for us. We'll never get more than perfect saturation of those able to grasp the ideas, say, 15% or so. At least until we engineer humanity to all be higher-IQ. The only hope here is intentional concentration, ala the Free State Project.

Second, we need to focus efforts to recruit that 15%: high IQ people. Right now I'd say the left still dominates there (look at the universities), but there's no reason why we can't fight for that demographic and win it. As socialism continues to fail, as it will, and capitalism keeps rolling, we'll see continued success in converting people.

Ashkenazi Jewish IQ and disease

2005-06-09T11:32:00.000-04:00

Here are two curious facts about the Ashkenazi (European-derived) Jews. As a group, the Ashkenazim:

average higher IQs than the European norm, by a standard deviation
have much higher incidence of certain nasty genetic diseases. The persistence of these diseases in the population is something of a puzzle due to their simple genetic character but drastic effect on fitness. For example, Tay sachs, happens in homozygotes for a single damaged gene, and kills all of them by age 5. The incidence of a damaged copy of this gene in the Ashkenazi population is something on the order of 3%.

Are these two facts related somehow?

Yes, according to a new paper by Greg Cochran, Jason Harper, and Henry Harpending:

Our general hypothesis is that high IQ test scores of Ashkenazim, along with their unusual pattern of abilities, are a product of natural selection, stemming from their occupation of an unusual social niche. All the required preconditions low inward gene flow and unusually high reproductive reward for certain cognitive skills, over a longenough period did exist. These preconditions are both necessary and sufficient, so such a selective process would almost inevitably have this kind of result. The pattern of high achievement among Ashkenazi Jews and the observed psychometric results are certainly consistent with this hypothesis.

Our more specific prediction is that some or most of the characteristic Ashkenazi genetic diseases are by-byproducts of this strong selection for IQ. ... We predict that heterozygotes for the sphingolipid storage mutations should have higher scores on psychometric tests of verbal and mathematical abilities than their non-carrier sibs.

It appears the internet is breaking the logjam in the popular press in discussing politically incorrect ideas like this one. The NYT, to its credit, ran with this story. However it is not getting wide coverage in the MSM, which is a pity since it is solid science, fascinating history, relevant to our lives, and even better if it turns out to be correct.

Not only that, but important for the general populace to understand the truth here. Groups are not all the same. This contradicts the "uniformatism" of the PC worldview, where all groups are the same. No group is any smarter than any other group, nor does any group excel in any way that might result in differential "success", however defined.

Within the uniformatist worldview, there can be no explanation for underrepresentation of a group in any particular profession, other than chance (which is not believable if the group and profession size is large), prejudice, or conspiracy. But the same must also be true of overrepresentation. It must be chance, prejudice (favoratism), or conspiracy.

Well, Jews in the USA are almost all Ashkenazim. They are smarter, on average, than the average American. Jews are overrepresented in practically every high-visibility profession there is: doctors, academics, lawyers, money men, hollywood, you name it. How can Jews be 10% or 20% of the top professionals when they are only 3% of the population?

To a person who knows the truth about IQ, the answer is simple enough. The top professions require high IQs, and a disproportionate number of the really high-IQ people in America are Jews. That is, the Jewish representation is merited.

To a uniformatist, it can't be merit. So, it's a CONSPIRACY! This is the genesis of at least some antisemitism.

Comments

2005-06-07T17:37:00.000-04:00

I turned them on a while ago, but did not put them into my template. Well, now they're on. Have fun. Usenet recreated small.

Democracy and Socialism

2005-05-27T21:59:00.000-04:00

This goes out to my homie, Zack. I asked him "why you think I despise social democrats"?, and he replied:

You use socialism as a slur for any government program you don’t like regardless of whether that can be classified as socialist or not.

For another, witness your case for colonialism in India. You seem to believe that Indians would have had more liberty under British rule because there would have been less socialism. It sure sounds like you don’t consider the right to decide your own government to be part of liberty.

Let's define some terms, shall we? M-W has Socialism: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods. Now, it is a given that essentially all real world socialism involves a state as the "government". Saying "government" is thus obfuscatory; all societies imaginable will "govern" at least some people (criminals, insane, incompetent). Saying "the state" makes it clear what is meant: that people will not be allowed to opt out of the communal ownership scheme. Thus, socialism is "the state ownership of the means of production".

I reserve the word "communism" for non-state collective ownership theories. Note that in the real world, another meaning of "communism" is: a form of socialism where only one political party is permitted (along with the ramifications of that, such as mass murder).

Also note that I class as "means of production" people. In pure socialism, everyone is owned by the state; if the state decides to sacrifice you for the greater good, so be it, you die. To the extent that the state can determine how you are used, they are asserting ownership of you. Thus, state invasions of personal liberty are a form of socialism.

Note that again I am talking about how *I* use the term, not necessarily how you do. I once got a conservative very mad going in these lines, since I lumped all sorts of his sacred cows (i.e., the draft) in with "socialism". He took very poorly to the idea that drafted soldiers are a species of slave. I offered to use "l-socialism" for the things we didn't agree on, but that didn't mollify him. He virtually stomped off in a rage.

Now, let's return to your statement:

You use socialism as a slur for any government program you don’t like regardless of whether that can be classified as socialist or not.

I don't like all state programs - I am an anarchist; the state should be abolished. And yes, they are all socialist, in the sense that they are being paid for by a defacto state ownership of my income. With no taxation, I would not object to many things the US government does. However, with no taxation, it would not be doing them.

We can imagine, though, a government that is completely voluntary. Not a state, then. It runs on money it is freely given, and provides various services using that money. For instance, it might give out money to poor people. This is just fine with me.

So, it is certainly possible to distinguish between various things a state does, in terms of are they necessarily rights-violating (hence, socialist), or are they 'only' rights-violating in the sense of paying for them? Clearly the latter things are "better" in some sense than the former. For example, rent controls are necessarily rights violating. They are, prima facie, an expropriation of the landlord. Doesn't matter how you pay for their enforcement. By contrast, welfare (handing out money that you happen to have) violates no right necessarily.

As for a being slur - yes, indeed. I view violating people's rights negatively. Therefore, a political theory that holds that people have no rights, I view as wrong, and put into practice, hurtful. Stalin's millions of victims cry out. Yes, it is definitely a slur to call something socialism. Socialism has earned it. Not only that, the rights violations continue to this day, and may yet destroy us all.

Now, regarding "the right to decide your own government"...

Sure, the right to determine your own government is a part of liberty. However I mean that "your" as individual, not collective. You, personally, have the right to determine how you, personally, are governed. So do I. So does every individual who has not aggressed against another.

But this is unrelated to elections. Collectives have no right to rule anyone who has not explicitly agreed to be ruled by them. Democracy and liberty are two entirely different things. What is "democracy"? M-W.com again: "government by the people; especially: rule of the majority". Liberty? Well, it's not well defined at m-w for what we're talking about here (here's the link anyway). But I am taking liberty to mean, the state of being uncoerced by other people.

Now, what does it mean to be ruled "by the majority"? Well, the details of that vary with the voting system. What is clear, though, is that unless the majority never votes to violate any individual's rights, democracy will necessarily violate liberty. In fact, democracy in a state is a specific form of socialism wherein it is theorized that voters collectively own everything, via the state, and should vote on the uses of said property.

To the extent that democracy does effectively withhold people's rights from the voting mechanism, it is undemocratic. For example, the Bill of Rights is an undemocratic limitation on the Congress.

But as for despising social democrats... no, I just think they are wrong. But they are not obviously wrong (or else there would be few or none of them). Nazis and "communists" (both of them, species of socialists who believe only a single political party should be permitted) -- they are despicable. History, well attested and well accepted, shows they are wrong.

History has not spoken clearly on "social democracy", so it is unfair to despise its advocates. Yet.

Evil in the Welfare State

2005-05-13T20:04:00.000-04:00

"Theodore Dalrymple" in an
interesting article from last fall:

My patient already had had three children by three different men, by no means unusual among my patients...

The father of her first child had, of course, recognized her vulnerability. A girl of 16 living on her own is easy prey. He beat her from the first, being drunken, possessive, and jealous, as well as flagrantly unfaithful. She thought that a child would make him more responsible—sober him up and calm him down. It had the reverse effect. She left him.

The father of her second child was a career criminal, already imprisoned several times. A drug addict who took whatever drugs he could get, he died under the influence. She had known all about his past before she had his child.

The father of her third child was much older than she. It was he who suggested that they have a child—in fact he demanded it as a condition of staying with her. He had five children already by three different women, none of whom he supported in any way whatever.

... she had knowingly borne children of men of whom no good could be expected. She knew perfectly well the consequences and the meaning of what she was doing, as her reaction to something that I said to her — and say to hundreds of women patients in a similar situation — proved: next time you are thinking of going out with a man, bring him to me for my inspection, and I'll tell you if you can go out with him.

This never fails to make the most wretched, the most "depressed" of women smile broadly or laugh heartily. They know exactly what I mean, and I need not spell it out further. They know that I mean that most of the men they have chosen have their evil written all over them, sometimes quite literally in the form of tattoos, saying "FUCK OFF" or "MAD DOG." And they understand that if I can spot the evil instantly, because they know what I would look for, so can they—and therefore they are in large part responsible for their own downfall at the hands of evil men.

Definitely worth returning to.

Clublife

2005-05-10T18:45:00.000-04:00

Clublife is a blog by an elite bouncer, "Rob", in NYC. His writing reminds me a bit of Tim Green, being essentially a jock but still an astute observer of humanity. Fascinating stuff and the guy can write. Example:

Big "Stan" is a bouncer at the club. Stan is a very large and very dark black man. At the beginning of the night, when greeting Stan, I feel as if I'm shaking hands with a catcher's mitt. Everything about the guy is just really, really big and really, really black.

Stan has taken a liking to me over the past few months, most likely because I provide him with a steady stream of Altoids throughout the night -- far be it for him to purchase his own fucking tin once in a while -- but additionally because we share a level of disdain for the customership which, quite possibly, surpasses that of any bouncer on the staff. Theoretically, it could be the intensity of my hatred for the patrons that has fueled my semi-consistent maintenance of this blog over the past year, with most of the posts contained within pertaining to their inexplicably asinine behavior on a nightly basis, but I digress. I wonder if Stan has a blog.

Simply put, Stan wants to be left alone. So do I, but as a big, blockheaded white-guy bouncer, it's easy for me, because I can blend into the woodwork with the twenty other big, blockheaded white guys on the staff. A six-foot-seven, three hundred twenty pound black man isn't going to fly under anyone's radar anywhere, and Stan, therefore, becomes a magnet for every misfit Guido customer who walks past. On Saturday night, I stood nearby as he engaged in an animated conversation with one of these, the customer continually shaking Stan's hand and embracing him as if he'd been reunited with a long-lost relative.

"Who's that?" I asked. "Your retarded stepbrother?"

...

The same thing happens every night. If I'm standing next to Stan, I'll watch as a steady stream of well-wishers forms a line to come up and pay their respects, tangling him in their elaborate 'soul brother' handshakes and hugs, ignoring my existence all the while. If their attention does eventually turn to me, and they offer a handshake, I give them the standard, straightforward white man's grip, pulling my hand away, on principle, before they attempt any sort of digital masturbation.

I'll have more to say about this whole thing some other time. Suffice to say, that the interior of a nightclub is a largely anarchic environment, so, I'm interested.

Wiki: anarchic knowledge organization

2005-03-30T17:40:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting article on wired about Wikipedia, the anarchic encyclopedia. It's on online work that anyone can edit. Doesn't that cause problems? Well yes and no. "Vandals" as they are called do try to make a mark. But anybody can place an article on a "watch list"; when it changes, they can find out easily and potentially revert the change if they don't like it.

Wikipedia has an innate capacity to heal itself. As a result, woefully outnumbered vandals often give up and leave. ... making changes is so simple that who prevails often comes down to who cares more. And hardcore Wikipedians care. A lot.

Wool logs on to Wikipedia at 6 each morning and works two hours before leaving for his day job developing education programs for a museum. When he gets back home around 6:30 pm, he hops back on Wikipedia for a few more hours. ... It's tempting to urge people like Wool ... to get a life. But imagine if they instead spent their free time walking through public parks, picking up garbage. We'd call them good citizens.

Many wiki "citizens" defeat most casual defacement by uncoordinated action opposing it. But some defacement is not casual... and so the process of government formation has started.

Still, even committed citizens sometimes aren't muscular enough to fend off determined bad guys. As Wikipedia has grown, Wales has been forced to impose some more centralized, policelike measures - to guard against 'edit warriors,' 'point-of-view warriors,' 'revert warriors,' and all those who have difficulty playing well with others. 'We try to be as open as we can,' Wales says, 'but some of these people are just impossible.' During last year's presidential election, Wikipedia had to lock both the George W. Bush and the John Kerry pages because of incessant vandalism and bickering. The Wikipedia front page, another target of attacks, is also protected.

If that suggests an emerging hierarchy in this bastion of egalitarian knowledge-gathering, so be it. The Wikipedia power pyramid looks like this: At the bottom are anonymous contributors, people who make a few edits and are identified only by their IP addresses. On the next level stand Wikipedia's myriad registered users around the globe, people who have chosen a screen name and make edits under that byline. Some of the most dedicated users try to reach the next level - administrator. Wikipedia's 400 administrators ... can delete articles, protect pages, and block IP addresses. Above this group are bureaucrats, who can crown administrators. The most privileged bureaucrats are stewards. And above stewards are developers, 57 superelites who can make direct changes to the Wikipedia software and database. There's also an arbitration committee that hears disputes and can ban bad users.

At the very top, with powers that range far beyond those of any mere Wikipedian mortal, is Wales, known to everyone in Wiki-world as Jimbo. He can do pretty much anything he wants - from locking pages to banning people to getting rid of developers. So vast are his powers that some began calling him 'the benevolent dictator.' But Wales bristled at that tag. So his minions assigned him a different, though no less imposing, label. 'Jimbo,' says Wikipedia administrator Mark Pellegrini, 'is the God-King.'

The God-King drives a Hyundai.

Chuckle. Good stuff. Order, and government, arises in anarchy. It's only when government turns monopolistic/coercive that it becomes the state and must be opposed by the moral man.

Anarchists have a many good examples these days arising online.

Terri Schiavo is dead

2005-03-27T23:49:00.000-05:00

The Schiavo case has been on my mind lately, and since I've tossed off some comments on some of my favorite blogs I thought I'd write a bit more on it.

First off, to my mind the most salient aspect of the thing is that Schiavo's body ought to be hers. Her private property. Not her husband's, not her parents', not the Congress's. Hers. It should be disposed of as she wills, or, in her absence, as she willed. Now this is a liberal society, in the best sense of that word (meaning: libertarian). Liberals believe in self-ownership; it is the one thing still connecting the Left to the term "liberal". So it is not surprising to find them supporting Schiavo's "right to die", which is really her property right in herself.

It would be nice if Terri Schiavo could be consulted as to what to do with her, but that is not the case. She's not here anymore; she's dead. So the decision must be made by others. It was made by the court, as a finding of fact. Schiavo wanted to be killed in this circumstance. They may or may not be right. But to overturn that finding would be to overturn our entire judicial system. Of course, finding that she wanted to die, and giving people the right to kill themselves are different things. Suicide is illegal in many (most?) states. As a liberal, I'll fight for the right to die. But Florida evidently allows people to will themselves to be unplugged, and I am fine with that both on liberal grounds and on Federalism grounds; I don't care what they do in Florida.

Speaking of which... second thing that needs to be mentioned is how appalling it is to see the Congress trying to involve itself. Federalism, conservatives?

Third: one thing that few are mentioning is cost. Money is talked about, it being the cause of the first rift between Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents. But not the cost of keeping Schiavo alive as a vegetable. Medical care is not cheap. For the price of one Terri Schiavo meat puppet, 100 children could be kept from dying from dehydration during diarhea. Of course, by killing Terri's body we don't magically shunt money to the third world. We do, however, shunt it either to Michael Schiavo, the parents, or to insurance companies (and by extension everyone paying premiums). It helps someone. Or to put it another way: someone is paying for this.

All of that is a long way to get to saying: there are real costs involved on both sides here. It's not just a matter of "life" versus nothing. It's a matter of money, and money buys everything, including life if you're poor enough.

Some have suggested just giving the body over the parents who'd presumably take care of it. Well, see point 1. The issue of cost is more one about the motives of someone contemplating what to tell their friends and family to do with them in this sort of case. Staying alive will be taking money out of the pockets of someone, probably those you love. Do you really want to do that? For a 2% chance that I might wake up and be marginally the person I am not... well, that's worth a lot. But for a .001% chance that I'd wake up as a horribly damaged near-animal? Kill me.

Tabula Rasa Madness

2005-02-25T19:41:00.000-05:00

There's been a bit of discussion I've seen recently about an article on newsweek exerpting "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety" by one Judith Warner. Jim Henley has two posts worth reading on it. Start with this one:

[Warner] mistakes "the middle class" for people like her. Warner is an upper-middle class striver and moves in that milieu. What she chronicles and exemplifies is simply American workaholism applied to child-rearing. ... So the ambitious income redistribution that she imagines will solve the problems of women like her and her friends amounts to a bold if imprecisely quantified call for the redistribution of wealth from the upper-class to the upper-middle class. To the barricades, comrades!

True enough, some other good snarking about the article.

There's one point I've not seen anyone bring up, so, I thought I would discuss the article myself.

Warner is among a generation of women raised in feminism, who've accepted the idea that people are "socially constructed": that we are blank slates. Feminist ideology holds that there is no such thing as human nature. The mind may be evolved, but it has no significant natural inclinations. These beliefs are wrong in many ways, but they represents the default ideology of the left, and increasingly (sadly), the right. What are the implications of blank-slatism applied to mothering?

Well, one is, if you love your child, and want that child to succeed, then someone must do something to mold your child into a successful person. It doesn't just happen. There is no such thing as innate tendancy, or even more horrifying, smarts (IQ?!!), drive, etc. These things must be created. And in our private society so decried by Warner, it is clear that the person molding little Johnny Rasa must be the parents, most particularly mom. Warner:

I was a committed mother, eager to do right by my child and well-versed in the child care teachings of the day.

Another thing we are evolved to want is for our kids not just to "succeed", but to "get ahead" - that is, to be more successful than average. Modern women feel that way, naturally (though they don't know why). The desire for your kid to get ahead has an even harsher implication: to the extent that you see other women molding their kids to be a success, you have to mold yours even harder to insure above-averageness. That is, blank slate ideology induces women to enter a competition, one-upping each other on every aspect of "mothering" as they perceive it.

Women from Idaho to Oklahoma City to the suburbs of Boston—in middle and upper middle class enclaves where there was time and money to spend—told me of lives spent shuttling back and forth to more and more absurd-seeming, high-pressured, time-demanding, utterly exhausting kids' activities.

And yes, that is crazy (as Warner perceives, though not why). But I don't see an answer available to her within her ideology. To the extent that people really are blank slates, women are acting rationally when they break themselves making sure their offspring are better than the others.

Well, I suppose I must give her what is due. What you have here is a sort of tragedy of the commons. Even some libertarians accept the idea of using the government to organize "society" to solve problems of externalities. (Though I do not.) Certainly Warner is no libertarian so the idea of using the government to solve her problem is natural to her. If Warner and her co-ideologues could only agree to "not run" the race, they'd probably all be happier. Thus, the nauseating political prescriptions that Jim Henley punctures. As Henley notes, what Warner calls for really wouldn't end the competition:

Warner's desired government subsidies can't solve her real problem, which is ensuring that her children have relatively higher status than the bulk of their generational cohort. You can offer tax-funded ballet classes to every Jacob and Caitlin in the country, but there will still be only one "best" ballet class in a given town. Meritocrat moms will still "need" to get into that class, not the ones for the hoi-polloi.

(my emphasis). People do strive to advance their children; that's an evolved part of us. They did so in ancient Rome, they did so in the Soviet Union, and they do here in America today.

Although it is clear that Warner and her suffering co-affluents do very much want their kids to "get ahead", I think one part of their problem is they don't know why they want this. They see that they are paying a price for it; thus they fear they are irrational. One thing that might help is simply to know that it is natural for them to want to advance their kids. It's an evolved aspect of human nature.

It may also help them to know that in general in primates, females are much social than males. Thus there's a reason why their husbands are not similarly busting their butts molding the kids: hubby just ain't that into it. Knowing this might help these women live more peaceably with their family.

(Indeed, it seems one obvious prescription even from a blank-slate perspective is: just stop wanting little Johnny to get ahead! The fact that you want it means that you were socialized a certain way, and since that is causing you pain, stop it! Take control! And if you can't change yourself, at least you should try not to infest your progeny with the "want success for child" meme. Fight the power!)

But there's another way that the blank-slate ideology is wrong which is much more significant here: that it's flat-out wrong in its understanding of the sources of success. In fact, success in meritocratic free-market America is largely a function of one thing: brains. Heritability of IQ seems to be similar to that of many other human traits (like height) -- high, but nowhere near total. So, the best thing that Warner can do for her kids is to be high-IQ herself - which she probably is; and in any case, she can't change her own intelligence. This was the message of the Bell Curve, the notorious book that was shut out of polite discourse for discussing several such un-PC ideas.

This is the message from science: human beings are animals. Just like other animals, we have inborn desires. Just like other animals we receive a significant proportion of who we are when we are conceived; and much more is determined by the time we are born. Unlike other animals, we can learn and change and move outside our programming. However, worrying about whether your child will succeed is largely irrelevant. He or she will succeed or fail largely on his or her own, regardless of what you do.

Once you know this, you will be freed to be a much "worse" Mom.

The Derb on Homosexuality

2005-02-17T16:54:00.000-05:00

John Derbyshire is one of those people I watch. I don't agree with him in many ways, but he is far enough outside of the PC box that it is plain, both to him and to anyone reading him, that he cannot get back in. Thus he is free to write unPC stuff. There's a freedom that only pariahs have.

Anyway, he's got a good review of the scientific understanding of the origins of homosexuality up at NRO. The particular concern is: is it "inborn"? Derb thinks it is. But being him, he hastens to add:

I am, though I say this with all appropriate modesty, something of a hate figure to the more fanatical kind of homosexualist, as you can easily see by Googling my name. One has for several years been running an energetic campaign to get me fired from National Review. That I am in broad agreement with these folk about the inborn nature of their homosexuality therefore puts me in company with people who hate me, and whom I myself generally dislike. There is not much point in being embarrassed about this. That's science for you. Science is 'cold,' and doesn't care what we think or wish for. (This is a point about science that many people simply cannot grasp. The opposite of science is not religion; the opposite of science is wishful thinking.)

Science is cold. Ice, ice, baby!

More on Implicit Assoc Test

2005-02-07T17:52:00.000-05:00

There's an article on it in the Wapo:

"... I had as much trouble pairing African American names with pleasant words as I did insect names with pleasant words."

Greenwald sent Banaji the computer test. She quickly discovered that her results were similar to his. Incredulous, she reversed the order of the names in the test. She switched the left and right keys. The answer wouldn't budge.

"I was deeply embarrassed," she recalls. "I was humbled in a way that few experiences in my life have humbled me." ... For years, Banaji had told students that ugly prejudices were not just in other people but inside themselves. As Banaji stared at her results, the cliche felt viscerally true.

Mmm, science.

Battlestar Galactica

2005-02-04T15:33:00.000-05:00

I'm not much of a TV watcher, but I do have a DVR and can thus watch pretty much anything if I want to. It's just that most of it seems like a waste of time compared to other idle pursuits. I've not watched any show regularly since I got done going through "Angel" (after Buffy, after Farscape). So that's where I'm from when I say:

This new Battlestar Galactica is good.

That's all you really need to know. Go watch now, me like.

But for those who want a reason... well... I am reminded of the time I got hooked on Farscape. I'm flipping channels, as it happens, midway during the first season. Good looking folks in scifi setting, OK. John (human) and Aeryn (alien) are talking as they're doing other stuff:

John: I am never going to get used to walking around inside a living ship.
Aeryn: You have nothing similar in your culture?
John: Well, Jonah and the whale, but no contemporary parallels. Except maybe the horse and rider.
Aeryn: Rider? The horse is a beast of burden?
John: Yeah. Not as large or sophisticated as Moya here, but kinda similar. Loyal and intelligent.
Aeryn: That you capture and make work for you.
John: Yeah, but we love them, too.
Aeryn: You love what you enslave?
John: We don't enslave them, all right? We ... Fine, we enslave them.

Now, that's sharp writing. The rest of the ep was hard to follow, but this one bit of writing interested me enough that I watched a "Farscape marathon", and that hooked me for good. And FS really was good for the first season, and much of the second, and flashes thereafter.

For BSG, I liked the miniseries enough to set it up to record. I missed "33". I watched "Water" and liked it, but I was not compelled. Then I get to this sequence in "Act of Contrition" that I just adored.

The President is talking to a doctor; she's got breast cancer. He asks her why she didn't get an examination over the last five years - I'm getting preachy modern health-fascism vibes here, yuck - then she comes back with that's not your business. Woohoo! Then he lights up a cigarette. !!! On a TV show made in the last ten-twenty years, and scifi no less, a cigarette! She looks at this somewhat aghast, and asks "do you mind", and he says, "yes I do mind" and keeps right on smoking! National TV! Then they talk about possible treatment, clearly not with a very good prognosis. She wants to explore "alternate treatments", his take (not knowing she has a good reason for this), is "oh you're one of those people". He suggests, "prayer", she says "funny", all very fast. Then they discuss a technobabbled alternate therapy - 'marsala root' or whatever. He agrees to try to help her. He snubs his cigarette and starts to leave, but then tells her with great sympathy: "seriously: you should consider prayer". We get an ambiguous reaction shot from her and end of scene.

Wow. Politically incorrect in three different ways, but very real, and nothing like I'd expect to see on TV, scifi or not.

War Nerd on Elections

2005-01-31T11:53:00.001-05:00

Go click that link for the war nerd and revel. The topic this time: America vs Iran. Choice bits:

The suicide car bomb is a good example of why I don't worship hardware like most war fans do. These cars are actually no-tech guided surface-to-surface cruise missiles--and damn effective. ... They're especially deadly in urban warfare, because they're perfectly camouflaged till they actually blow up.

Or this on the Iraqi elections:

Right now, they [Iraqi Shi'ites] are cooperating with us -- not because they like us, but because we're helping them use their majority to take over Iraq.

It's a laugh, the way Bush's people say the Shi'ite enthusiasm for voting proves that "democracy is taking hold" in Iraq. All it proves is that Shi'ites can count. They've got 60% of the vote sewed up, and we're riding shotgun for them, absorbing all the violence the Sunnis can dish out, while the Shia go out and grab power by the ballot box.

Sure enough.

Implicit Association Test

2005-01-31T11:49:00.000-05:00

An interesting test: inplicit association tests of race with loaded words. I took it and got a neutral result: "Your data suggest little or no automatic preference for White American relative to Black American".

Voted

2004-10-26T23:56:00.000-04:00

I'll be spending some time in America's Outback next week. So, no normal vote for me. I just voted; an absentee vote.

I cannot understand those libertarians who say the old line "it just encourages them". Well, yes, it encourages anyone you vote for. It discourages anyone you vote against. So, discourage them - vote against everyone who you are sure won't improve things. In my case, I voted for Badnarik, who I am quite sure would improve things marginally; it's a moral vote. I also voted for "Nota" in many races (write-in); let them figure that one out if they can.

I also voted against not one or two, but 12 Bond Issues for numerous things that the Baltimore City government should not be doing. (you can see them here.) It's rather amazing - just one election, and they are putting up $120M in bond issues. There are about 2/3M people in Baltimore - so that's $180 for each of us they propose to spend, above and beyond what they normally do. And of course, for us people that actually pay significant tax it is much more per person.

I do understand the argument that voting is (almost precisely) pointless. In fact the 2000 election showed that strongly - the voters only matter in aggregate; the individual's vote cannot make the difference in a national election (unless the individual happens to wear black robes when he votes).

However, voting still does have a powerful symbolic effect. And the people in the aggregate can throw off their chains, if they have the will; of course they do not right now. But it is possible.

Voting also gives me credibility with democratic socialists, which is just about everyone these days. The sort of people who think it is your civic duty to vote.

Finally, voting makes me feel good. "No". "No". "No". "Nota".

Deterrence

2004-10-06T16:33:00.000-04:00

Bill Whittle has a new essay up called deterrence. My response to it:

Bill,

You define "deter" in a strange way. Here's what M-W.com has on it: "to turn aside, discourage, or prevent from acting". That is, deterrence is active. It means taking or threatening an action that changes the incentives of a would-be opponent.

Similarly, in your carrot versus stick contrast, you offer a false dichotomy. In both cases are actions. The assumption that some action is necessary is smuggled in.

The sensible people on my side of this debate are not talking about taking action to deter terrorists. As you admit: they cannot be deterred very easily.

Rather, we are saying that inaction is the correct course, to not-provoke terrorists. Our criticism is exactly that too much action has occurred, in the past, and that those actions and their results are the grievances that terrorists have. They are specific grievances, against America. These include 50 years of your interventionism, but the specifics on Al-Qaida's list are these:

(1) we support their hated Israel, ergo, at one remove the killing and other mistreatment of Palestinians
(2) we killed Iraqi children via "sanctions"
(3) we occupied their holy country, Arabia

These things are all true, albeit not the whole truth. But you cannot expect those aggrieved by them to care about mitigating factors, i.e., that Saddam worsened the effects of the sanctions. They are fanatics. They do not see the truth as well-educated right-wing Americans see it. They see the truth that educated right-wing Arabs see.

These grievances are the reason why they attack America and American interests, but not, say, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, Costa Rica, and any number of other western, but peaceful, nations. They are rational men. They attack us to try to influence our policy. They don't attack nations whose policy they don't care about one way or the other.

Now we've added a new grievance to the list: we have occupied Iraq. A whole generation of Iraqis is being radicalized against us. (Cough Abu Ghraib cough.)

You don't "deter by being nice". Deterrence is applicable only in the context of conflict. Rather, what my side sees (and your side apparently does not) is that ideally you remove conflict in the first place by being nice.

"Deterrence" assumes conflict is not tractable. It is usually better than appeasement (i.e., being nice when conflict is intractable). But it is not better than simply having no conflict to begin with.

I suggest that, ideally, America should have no conflict with the world. America's policy should be viewed with indifference by the world. In the past it was fairly safe to do things that caused distant peoples to hate you. They'd attack your colonial army, maybe, but the home front was too far to attack. In this era of technology, breeding hate is no longer safe. Therefore it behooves us to stop breeding it.

That is the lesson of 9-11.

And the historically clear way to produce indifference amongst distant people is quite simple: don't hurt them. Trade peacefully with them if possible, otherwise, leave them alone. Make simple and clear boundaries that they agree on. Spank them if they aggress, otherwise, nothing. This is isolationism, in a nutshell.

The nuclear genie is not going back into the bottle. In the long run, terrorists will get nuclear weapons if they want them. (Is anyone so daring as to say, no terrorist will ever get a nuclear weapon?) When that time comes, I hope that they no longer have serious grievances against us. And if we want that to be true in, say, 20 years, we'd better start now, acting inoffensively in the world. This means pulling back from the world militarily. Trade peacefully; let them run their own affairs without interference from us.

Meanwhile, our new policy of preemptive attack against a weak country (Iraq), but not other recent or soon-to-be nuclear states (Pakistan, Iran, perhaps North Korea) sends a clear signal to every third world dictator type: get nukes ASAP if at all possible. That is, our belligerence is arguably counterproductive on the issue of nuclear proliferation.

Given that terrorists will almost certainly get their first nuke from a nuclear state, and probably a non-Western nuclear state, is that sort of belligerence really in our interest? I think not. We are not deterring in Iraq; in fact, we are making nuclear terrorism against the USA more likely.

Well, it's too late to change what we've done in Iraq, but it's not too late to change our policy and firmly disavow what President Bush and his people did. That's a good reason not to vote for Bush.

Not that I'm voting for Kerry. As you say, he's basically Bush lite. He's in cuckoo-land if he thinks that "alliances" are going to get us anything in Iraq. I don't think he thinks that, actually; I think he's too smart. I'm not voting for either him or Bush. Badnarik remains my choice.

Assigning blame in democracy

2004-09-17T20:35:00.000-04:00

There's some interesting back-n-forth going on between the ex-prolific-libertarian blogger Jim Henley, who's currently sadly reduced to a once-in-a-while blogger, and Diana Moon, with a jolt of Justin Raimondo and Steve Sailer thrown in for spice. At issue: whose fault is the Iraq Attaq?

Well, it is quite obvious that the ultimate mover here was Bush himself. Only he is commander in chief. But what's motivating him? Are the neocons pulling on his puppet strings?

Moon is, I think, correct that ultimately the "American public" in general is to blame, or at least, the 50% of them (or whatever) that were and still are for the war. And she understands some of their motivations, but only the amoral ones:

The real story is that this was a war for oil, supported by a majority of Americans, and ignorant as they are, the gas-guzzling public knows one thing: it needs the slick stuff, and its willing to kill for it. If the people they have to kill are Muslims, so much the better. They don't care about Iraqi deaths and they don't care about Abu Ghraib. And they don't care if some guy with a name like Jorge Lopez dies for it. They want their toys. They know that Presidents have to lie and say nice things about Why We Go To War, and maybe some of them even believe it, but deep down they know what the score is.

Or in her followup:

The American public was salivating for war. They hate Arabs, they want oil. [an example:] A couple of regular guys, hardcore conservative, belligerant, hostile ... they were quizzed on the Iraq/9-11 link, which has been shown to be completely false. They said, "Nothing will convince me that Iraq wasn't behind 9/11." That's it: Nothing. No evidence. Nothing. This is the white, male, prosperous American electorate that will vote for Bush. Arrogant, insufferable, callous and vicious. These are the people who supported the war, and still do.

Let me put aside the overgeneralization here for later. The point here is, the public wanted war. And that's certainly true. But as for the motivations ascribed - no, the public is both better and worse than that. The public doesn't care about oil - the elites do. The public does care about 9-11, and wanted blood. And the public does, at least titularly, care about our own "security", about saving people from dictators, and about helping people by giving great (though abstract) gifts of the American Way to the world. These latter impulses are not strong, but neither are they base. (Neither are they realistic.)

You surely didn't see Bush promising cheap oil as his primary reason for war. You did see him promise security, and a world transformed in a way not good only for Americans (though definitely good for us); but rather, transformed to Good Good Democracy for everyone, starting with Iraqis. They were to be the first beneficiaries.

So the public is certainly somewhat to blame. They bought it. But the masses don't think up complex ideas on their own. They repeat ideas thought up by intellectuals. This is not surprising: someone has to think of an idea first, and a complex idea is unlikely to be thought up in parallel by everyone. Take an idea like "we've got to depose Saddam for the good of the Iraqi people". That's not something the average American will come up with: Americans don't care about Iraqis. We care about them now only insofar as "our boys" are over there; once the US forces leave, we'll care about Iraqis about the same as we now care about the Vietnamese; that is to say, nearly zero. (People, in general, don't care about people they don't know. This is part of human nature, perfectly sensible.) Intellectuals had been agitating for war against Saddam for a variety of reasons, for years. Only after 9-11 did they break through, because the public was finally ready to hear them.

So where did the public get inobvious ideas like "preemptive war for peace", "America can reform any society into a nice happy democracy", "Iraqis will welcome us as liberators", "the hijackers were Iraqis", etc.?

Neocons. As Raimondo writes to Henley:

Ideas rule the world, and it is the neoconservative idea that brought us to where we are today. I don't see how anyone can dispute that and still retain a modicum of intellectual honest.

Well, I can dispute it somewhat, for it was not only neocon ideas, I think, nor only neocons spreading them. Some of these are older ideas. Many are not the exclusive provenance of neocons - for instance the left has been saying for years that "we can rebuild America (via government tax/spend)". Neocons merely adapted that from the inner city to Iraq.

To my mind, being "neocon" isn't a boolean thing. It's fuzzy. You're a neocon to the extent that you believe and/or propound various neocon ideas; and what exactly are neocon ideas is a moving target, the set of ideas held by, well neocons. It's somewhat circular; nonetheless grounded in the a history of various ideas. Included in that set is the idea that America can successfully reform other societies and/or religions by force. That Islam needs a reformation for us to live with it. That "national greatness" is worth seeking via the state.

To me, Bush, Rumsfield, and Cheney are neocons, to the extent they hold or act on neocon positions. So they are semi-neocons. Humans don't fit into boolean pigeonholes - never.

But the larger point is important. Intellectuals do have real influence, even if it is hard to trace. Ideas do come from somewhere, and they do matter. Not just to us (the intellectuals), but to the man on the street. He may not come up with stuff on his own, but he knows a good argument when he sees it. Look at any comments section on a warblog and you'll see this. All of them repeat the "Saddam was evil justifies invasion" meme, the "drain the fever swamp" meme, the "world has changed due to WMD".

All of which is not to say that intellectuals control anything; we don't. In that sense, we can't be blamed, neocons or otherwise. We propose; the public and politicians dispose. But at the same time, in the long run, ideas are practically all that matter. (To take one example: imagine what would happen in our society if everyone woke up tomorrow with the idea that the government had the same level of legitimacy that the Iraqi government has.)

As the Russian said: "A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war."

Given the power of ideas in the long run, it's impossible not to think that they are important, and that therefore there is some blame to be assigned for thinking up and/or propounding bad ideas, and credit for good ones. This is, in fact, common sense.

So who is it? The intellectuals? The public? The politicians? Well, it's all of us, and none. Each group draws support from the others. Each group is self-interested in one way or another. Blame is not easily assigned. It is, instead, the system that we should look at. For it takes two things to implement policy: the ideas implemented, and the system they are implemented within. We've agreed that our system is producing bad policy. So it must be either bad ideas, or a bad system (or both) that is to blame. We've found bad ideas, but found it remarkably difficult to pin down who's to blame. Without blame and effective punishment for bad ideas, they'll keep coming; and that's a perfect description of politics within the state.

As an anarchist, let me through in my 2c. Blame the state. Without the state, America would have no large standing army, and thus, no adventurism abroad regardless of how we felt about a hypothetical 9-11. And that attack would be very hypothetical since, without a standing army nor the ability to support Israel via taxation, we'd have no involvement to speak of in the middle east. There would have been no Gulf War, no sanctions, no American troops in Saudi Arabia, no American relationship to Israel nor the Intifada. Without the state, there would be no push by the military industrial complex to open up new markets. Without the state, the oil industry would have to find a way to get its raw materials without relying on the taxpayer to fund the enforcement mechanism.

Ms Moon will not give up the state, of course. She needs it for her liberal/socialist ideas. So she is reduced to blaming the evil People, and the evil regime. (The neocons are evil too, she says, and should be run out of town, but they cannot be blamed. That's antisemitism!) Since the people cannot be changed (damn!), her vitriol is directed to Mr Bush and co., with a nice side helping directed towards those who are fighting the neocons in the war of ideas.

As for Ms Moon's charges of antisemitism: well, "shrill" is right. You cry wolf often enough, nobody pays attention. Is there a pogrom afoot in the US? I think not. You're just going to have to face a harsh fact: individuals who are Jewish do have some power. They do bear responsibility for what they do, including espousing neocon ideas. This isn't about being Jewish, it's about propounding bad ideas.

Incidentally, I find it quite offensive to see someone crying antisemitism who is so willing to use hateful invective and overgeneralization like that I quoted above: "This is the white, male, prosperous American electorate that will vote for Bush. Arrogant, insufferable, callous and vicious." Please, tell me again what I am?

One more small nit to pick with Ms. Moon: I'm not exactly a paleo but I feel closer to self-identified paleos than about anyone else. Lew Rockwell and the Rothbardians are anarchists of my stripe, and many of them call themselves paleoconservatives. Anyway, I can testify that their/our beef with the neocons has nothing at all to do with Judaism. It has to do with the state and socialism. Neocons are for both. Paleos (and libertarians in general) are against both.

Neocons are little-c conservative, in most domestic policy; they do want some change, but perhaps marginally less than also little-c conservative Democrats. But both groups have basically accepted socialism as good and proper. Bush and the neocons support everything socialist that America already does; social security, daycare prisons, welfare. They've created a new socialist agency (the TSA), want "no child left behind", and want citizens to surrender a few more rights to the central state "for our security". Abroad, the neocons and Bush differ somewhat on how grandious should be the plans to Invade the World: Bush may think we should invade the whole thing, but only the neocons say it. Nonetheless this is a 180 degree reversal from the "humbler" foreign policy we were promised. In all these things, neocons are wrong, and leading America towards socialism and thus, ultimately, collapse.

Update - a reader reminds me that all societies have "standing armies" in a sense, so I cannot claim "no standing army" in anarchy. And that's true enough - anarchy (or a truly limited libertarian state) would have a much smaller army than America has, but not no army at all.

The Joy of Internment

2004-09-15T14:44:00.000-04:00

Thus far the best review I've seen of Michelle Malkin's vile book. Anthony Gregory horselaughs:

Malkin explains that the term "Japanese Internment" is loaded, because there are technically different correct names for all the distinct policies Roosevelt had for relocating and detaining people without trial. ... In fact, Roosevelt – always inclusive and progressive – not only interned and detained those with Japanese heritage; he had the multicultural good sense also to intern Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, and Bulgarians. More than one might gather from the conventional wisdom, FDR practiced Equal Opportunity Internment.

Malkin shows that the Japanese were not the only ones who had to sacrifice for the Good of the Fatherland:

"Enemy aliens from all Axis nations–not just Japan–were subjected to curfews, registration, censorship, and exclusion from sensitive areas… And beginning in September 1940, more than a year before Pearl Harbor, more than 10 million young men of all backgrounds were conscripted into our nation’s armed forces. Approximately two-thirds of the 292,000 Americans killed and 671,000 wounded in the war were forced to serve."(xiv)

So there you have it! Roosevelt wasn’t just picking on the Japanese. Even before the war he had the foresight to begin drafting young men (just in case the Japanese ever attacked in a surprise strike of which FDR had no expectation whatsoever). And by the end of the war he had forced nearly 200,000 young men to fight to their deaths! Compared to the conscripted war dead, the internees were lucky FDR didn’t kill them.

Malkin also points out that the United States wasn’t the only country to detain "enemy aliens" without trial. "During World War II," she writes, "virtually every major country – from Japan to Germany, from China to Egypt, from Holland to New Zealand – interned its enemy aliens." (54)

Even the Germans and Japanese did it during World War II! So it’s not like the US government did something the Nazis weren’t willing to do.

Hee. Gregory does note an interesting point regarding MAGIC. (Malkin relies on the new availability of declassified documents as the "hook" to hang her book's radical new view on. Surely new information should lead us to revise the tired old received view that imprisoning innocent people is wrong.) Gregory:

Malkin shows that government officials who opposed internment, like J. Edgar Hoover, were unaware of the US government having cracked the MAGIC code. On the other hand, the top leaders in the administration, such as War Secretary Henry Stimson, who were aware of the code breaking, also tended to support internment. Hmmm. I wonder if the same people were also privy to the naval code that revealed Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor. How interesting, if the same people who knew about all these codes also happened to support Japanese internment.

That is interesting.

Sailer (and Adams) on Interventionism

2004-09-09T10:06:00.000-04:00

Love it. Wish Sailer had decent permalinks. Sailer on Neocons and Chechnya:

I'm still wondering why the neocons insist on having a dog in this particular fight. As a conservative, my Burkean prejudice is: 'First, do no harm.' I look at the Chechen tragedy and say, 'Sheesh, I have no idea what should be done over there. If I got involved, I'd probably just make it worse.' So, instead, I think more about how I can help my country avoid getting involved in that kind of mess.

In contrast, neocons seem to wake up every morning thinking, 'What far-off, complex, interminable conflict should I turn my penetrating brilliance upon today?' It must be nice to feel that self-confident, but it sure isn't conservative.

John Quincy Adams:

... friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers ... should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind?

Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.

She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.

She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.

She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

In other words: a moral foreign policy. What's that worth in lives?

How to Analyze Anarchy

2004-09-02T20:55:00.000-04:00

Over at America's Outback, Garth is challenging himself thinking about anarchy (read down for two more posts). Meanwhile, it appears that Arthur Silber has reluctantly seen the light of reason, and converted. So it's a good time to talk a bit about anarchy.

I see all sorts of objections and arguments raised by libertarians (sometimes minarchists, sometimes just small-government types) against anarchy. Many of these are, in my opinion, pretty weak. But others hold water. In any case, thinking about anarchy is something most people aren't very good at. There are lots of real life models that are applicable, but most people don't think about these. I'd like to lay out a few ways that I think about anarchy, using some examples seen over at Garth's place.

Perhaps the first way to look at any proposed challenge to anarchy is to say: would it really be a problem if I can opt out of my protection agency? Most libertarians do, I think, get this. So they see some of the attractiveness of anarchy.

The next thing to think about when considering a problem in anarchy is: is that problem soluble here and now, in the real life of America 2004? If not, then in expecting anarchy to solve it you're expecting utopia. Consider Garth's example:

...a waste disposal company has bought up 30 acres abutting your back yard and will proceed to use it as a landfill. ... You send [your protection agency] over and they discover that there is nothing in any contract that forbids the construction of the landfill. You are informed that the only way to prevent it would have been a purchase of the land yourself.

Well, that's tough. But the same thing can happen under the state; in fact, due to eminent domain it's more likely to happen. In anarchy, landfills would logically be placed only on the cheapest, most worthless land. Land next to a housing development would probably not be used because it would cost too much. With eminant domain, however, a state is often shielded from the true cost of land (and is spending someone else's money even if they do have to pay a market price). So you can expect many more landfills to end up next to neighborhoods under statism than anarchy.

Again, anarchy doesn't solve all problems. No system can.

Now let's assume there is some solution to a problem here in the real (statist) world. A second way to approach a potential problem is to understand the solution for it here in the real world, and see if that works in anarchy, too. Consider, for example, the problem of a protection agency turning into a state. This is certainly a valid worry. Here's Garth:

Over time PEI becomes a protection monopoly, sets the pricing it wants for its service. Some people drop out and do without, of course, but what happens in the long run is that PEI becomes, de-facto, our government. But one without the constitutional checks and balances that we currency enjoy.

So from anarchy, Garth is seeing the evolution of an unchecked protection agency into an unchecked state.

But in the real world, we have a number of practical institutions by which we rein in the power of the state. Here are some:

democracy - the idea that the elite decisionmakers of the state must be accepted by the majority of the citizens
constitutionalism - the idea that a the state will follow written rules
right to jury - the idea that citizens are each other's judges, and the ultimate judges of the law itself
federalism - the splitting of power into subunits of a weakly integrated whole
RKBA - the idea that average citizens must be given tools capable of overthrowing the state
bill of rights - the idea that people's rights are explicitly written out and understandable to the average man
civil rights - the idea that the state must observe extra safeguards when dealing with citizens
judicial review/veto - the idea that law can be nullified by agents of the state

Now, look at that list and consider the difference between a state and a protection agency. The difference is that the state has a monopoly on force; the agency doesn't. But how does that matter for any of these? It doesn't. All of the practical institutions that rein in the state, above that men have invented over the ages that rein in the state can be applied just as readily to a protection agency.

If you are the sort who worries about the state evolving from anarchy, ask yourself this: would I sign up with a protection agency that did not have a written law, a constitution, a bill of rights, etc.? If you want these things (I would), don't you think most other people would too? (I do.) These things strike me as very cheap to provide, practically costless for an honest protection agency. I think most people therefore would want them, if only as insurance. Given them, even if the agency did evolve into a state, it would be a "nice" state, akin to a modern social democracy, not the sort of nasty state that people seem to imagine by crossing the United Fruit Company with America under Bush and a dash of Stalin.

Thus, as a sort of worst case result, we get basically what we have now. This is not that bad.

I summarize this whole mini argument as follows: protection agencies are weaker than states. Thus anything we've invented that works to rein in the state, will also work to rein in a protection agency, unless it relies on the monopoly power of a state to work.

Finally, let me assume that you've found a problem that would appear in anarchy but not under statism. Well, that I'd be very interested to hear about. But before you're so sure your problem really is novel, remember that anarchy lurks within of our system, in more ways than one:

anarchy among the state elite within a state
international anarchy
anarchy in the power of the people
anarchy in certain uncontrolled institutions, notably the internet

Go ahead, make my day.

So now let's assume you've got in hand one of those rare things that anarchy does worse than statism. Are you really willing to give up all the positives of living in a peaceful libertarian society society for that? Are you willing to give up on living in a moral society for that?

I'd be willing to give up a great deal to live in a moral society.

Thoughts on Blogging

2004-08-31T10:15:00.001-04:00

There were times, before I started this blog, that I thought I had what it takes to be a Pundit. I do have a point of view that is unusual, and that helps. It's ideologically pure and seamless, so far as I can tell. I am, in a word, Right, and the world (including practically everyone who'll ever read this), Wrong. But especially for an ideologue, I tolerate human difference, ideological impurity, and just plain error. I hate the immoderate language that characterizes too much of our modern political discourse. I understand my liberal enemies; after all, at one time I was one of them, or at least, one of them on certain ideological points.

But these things do not make for good punditry. A good pundit needs the desire to be heard, most of all. But also: motivation to write even for nobody, and an eye to controversy. Oh, and also: the ability to write really, really fast, so as to develop volume, volume, volume.

Most of those things I'm just not that strong on. I can, if I work at it, generate a post or two a day. I did for months, anyway. But in the long term, unless I was getting more out of it than I do, I just can't sustain that. And in any case, in this biz you need more than a post a day to keep the traffic coming.

But anyway, the dream of being a Bigshot Pundit was never much more than that. This blog remains of interest to me, because it allows me to "say" all the things I'd like to say to people I may not know now, or ever. It's a diary, but public. It gives me a voice to whisper with, into the darkness perhaps. But even a whisper is enough for I told you so's, or to tell someone who you are. And for that I think, in this internet era, that laying down a record is a great thing. Ten years from now, people will be able to look back and see that way back when, I was a libertarian anarchist with exactly the same views as I now have. (Indeed, you can look back into usenet and see some of my views if you know how to find them, and I've been ideologically pretty constant since about 1995 when I got interested enough in refining my already libertarian political ideology to purchase The Machinery of Freedom and Anarchy, State, and Utopia, on the recommendation of net anarchists that I respected for their writing ability and style.)

Anyway, this brings me enfin to the proximate motivation for all that, which is a letter received from the blue from a reader, one Frank Kelly, who likes this blog. He's just started his own, and thus far I like his stuff. Let's see if he can sustain it; good luck and welcome to the show, Frank.

A little shout-out from the ether keeps you going.

Where Will Anarchists Keep the Madmen?

2004-08-10T12:15:00.000-04:00

Actually, the question about the madmen is not really answered, unless you identify them with criminals. But this article by John Sneed is worth the time, laying out the structure of anarchic law and order as many have seen it. Here's Sneed on the advantages of anarchic "prisons" over state-run prisons:

If we assure mobility and a competitive gross wage, then the effort expended by the convict is directly rewarded with a shorter period of confinement or probation. He would have an objective yard-stick by which he could measure his progress. The present parole system administered by often corrupt, bigoted, or politically minded minor bureaucrats would finally be put to death. Prisoner morale would improve, making eventual rehabilitation easier.

As an extension of this point, the convict would be shown directly the value of education. If he committed his particular offense primarily because he had no trade, he will find it to his advantage to learn one. The penal agency may supply education on a profit-making basis, or allow profit-seeking educators to do business within their walls. Thus the convict would have a better chance of returning to a normal life when he regains his freedom.

The penal colony would also generally continue employment of the convict after he has retired his debt. It would be foolish to in effect fire a worker with experience simply because he has now regained his freedom. He will still remain employed by the penal agency but will become free of security restrictions and will be an ordinary worker. Indeed, an agency which does provide employment for 'graduated' convicts would have a strong competitive edge in the recruitment process.

The convict will have a direct incentive to exhibit good behavior. The better risk he appears to the penal agency, the more likely he is to be allowed parole or other freedoms in the interest of increasing his productivity. Good behavior will be rewarded monetarily also, reflecting such declines in marginal cost of security provision as reduced wear and depreciation of guards.

Finally, the agency would be responsive to the demands of the convicts, for they are mobile employees, and not literally prisoners. Thus, with whatever net wage they keep after making their agreed-upon payment to the penal agency or defense company, the convict would be allowed to purchase goods from the non-prison main economy, subject naturally to security constraints, thereby eliminating the current extortion and black marketeering rampant in our prisons. Visitors and mail would no longer be arbitrarily cut off. Conjugal visits, or in some cases the moving of one's family into the prison, would be allowed. Our analog to prison would not be, as today, a brutal institution primarily functioning to teach brutes how to be more brutish, but would become almost a treatment center, a place to learn how to live peaceably in outside society. Our present system only teaches a person how to live in prison.

Similar to my own thoughts on the matter, but this is from 1972. !

The Athenian Constitution

2004-06-24T11:20:00.000-04:00

Roderick Long has a great analysis of the "constitution" (meaning political organization) of ancient Athens. He looks at later critics of that system, and finds it generally admirable.

it is odd that [Isabel] Paterson so roundly condemns the Athenian practice of ostracism, when she praises the Romans' habit, during the Imperial period, of assassinating their Emperors (about a third of all Roman Emperors died by assassination) as a useful constitutional adaptation, akin to a letting a fuse blow to protect a circuit in event of a short. Surely the Greek ostrakon, whatever its faults, was a more civilized response to the threat posed by powerful individuals than the Roman dagger.

Interesting political ideas in Athens: representation by lot, not voting. Ostracizing the powerful for no good reason whatsoever, other than that they are powerful.

Like other quasi anarchic systems, it died via conquest, not collapse from state engorgement. Of course being conquered has been the fate of most states; so this does not distinguish it much. Still, what we can say is that states that collapsed on their own were not well designed. That doesn't mean the other were, but they might have been.

Long has a second article on Athens, discussing its civil society:

One of the most remarkable features of Athenian democracy is the extent to which legal services themselves (dispute resolution and enforcement) were the province of civil society rather than of the state. Laws were passed by the state (or at any rate through the state, via popular referendum), and applied by governmental courts (manned by juries). But there were no police, and no public prosecutors. All suits were treated as civil suits, prosecuted by the victim; offenses against the community as a whole were prosecuted by self-selected individuals on behalf of the larger society, rather like class-action suits today. (No distinction between crimes and torts was recognised.) And even before coming to court, litigants were asked to seek private arbitration, thus exhausting all avenues within civil society before turning to the state (rather the opposite of today's practice):

Private arbitration ... had a long history, extending back to the time of Homer and Hesiod, before the emergence of the state .... It was a private mechanism evolved to serve the needs of a society where kinship and the reciprocal obligations of kin and friends predominated. With the emergence of the state, private arbitration did not disappear but continued in use. ... [T]he courts were only a final stage in a complex disputing process which allowed, indeed encouraged, adjudication to coexist with arbitration and mediation.
(Hunter (1994), p. 67.)

But the most intriguing aspect of the Athenian "private law" system is the privatisation of enforcement:

The ancient city-state had no police other than a relatively small number of publicly owned slaves at the disposal of the different magistrates .... [T]he army was not available for large-scale police duties [because it] was a citizen militia, in existence as an army only when called up for action against the external world. [Yet] a Greek city-state ... was normally able to enforce governmental decisions ....
(Finley (1994), pp. 18-24.)

Most of the major tasks of policing -- investigation, apprehension, prosecution, and even in some cases enforcement of court decisions -- fell to the citizens themselves. For private initiative and self-help were the rule. ... Here punitive enforcement is not the result of coercion by a central authority but of autonomous self-regulation on the part of the community. ... For many of the functions that the modern state now entrusts to bureaucracy, police, or judiciary were embedded in a variety of social institutions ....
(Hunter (1994), pp. 3-5.)

Since there were no regular police in Athens, such street fights were not uncommon, and it lay with the spectators to decide who was in the right and restore order. ... It is clearly recognised as a duty of bystanders to help any victim of violence; this was very necessary in a city so ill-policed as Athens, for the safety of the community depended upon active support of the law by all well-constituted citizens. ... It will be noticed that the State made no provision for arrest and bail; these were private transactions. This led to abuses, such as ... wrongful detention ... but each man involved took care always to provide himself with witnesses .... There was no police-force; hence the bystanders took a lively interest.
(Freeman (1963), pp. 105, 128, 177.)

Even tax collection was privatised:

From his own assets, the wealthy contributor of proeisphora paid immediately the total amount of eisphora due from a number of other taxpayers. In return, he was given the right ... to recover his excess payment from the various obligors.
(Cohen (1992), p. 197.)

Rather anarchic. Yet it persisted for hundreds of years.

"Alleged"

2004-06-23T11:36:00.000-04:00

Two days ago on NPR I heard a story about Abu Ghraib, where the news reader referred to "the alleged abuses". Not "torture" - "abuse". Now, I don't think there is any question that there was abuse. One needs only to look at a few of the photos. And I don't think that anyone is claiming the photos are doctored, or otherwise untrustworthy.

So here we have something that is about as close as we can get to a consensus fact: that there was "abuse" in Abu Ghraib. The media have gotten completely silly about the use of "alleged". The word means that something has been asserted by somebody, but that something is questioned by at least one other person.

Was there "abuse" in Iraq? Yes! It's as plain as the alleged nose on my face.

America is mine, that's why

2004-06-23T11:35:00.000-04:00

Gene Callahan on Moral Equivalence. I have exactly the same feeling reading a lot of neocon sites.

I'm going to ... share some of my worst difficulties with you all.

They arise from the horrible case of "moral equivalence" that my wife somehow has contracted, most likely from her frequent contact with "leftists" while working in Manhattan. The most common form of the disease manifests itself in the infected person voicing one or more complaints about immoral or illegal actions undertaken by the US government. Moral equivalence can then immediately be diagnosed by any neoconservative or neoliberal, who can point out that, even as the infected person is protesting some action by the American state, that he is failing to note all of the other instances in history when some other government did something similar, but even worse.

Well, my wife has this disease in a bad way, even if the form she has contracted is not the most typical. Let me give you a few examples. For instance, the other night I weaved my way home after having about ten beers. As I stumbled through the door, she berated me for having gotten trashed. Now, wait just a second: Somewhere, I read about Stephen King confessing that he was drinking an entire case of beer – that's 24 of them, for you non-brewmeisters – pretty much every night for a couple of years. But was my wife there at his front door, waiting to berate him when he stumbled through its portal? Has she ever even raised her voice in protest against his excesses? No, she has not!

Funny.

Old Thoughts on Torture

2004-06-10T12:07:00.000-04:00

Folks popping in from UO: hi. No mention of torture up here -- what Jim is referring to is a blog entry from last year.

Own up to your values

2004-06-04T15:01:00.000-04:00

Thanks to a link at UO, I popped over to Crooked Timber to read this:

How would you rank the following priorities for making the planet a better place?

* A major improvement in health in poor countries, saving millions of lives each year

* Substantial progress in reducing the rate of climate change, preventing large-scale species extinctions and other environmental damage

* New and improved advertisements for consumer goods

You don’t have to be Bjorn Lomborg to agree that, given the choice, improvements in health should get top priority.

From which he goes on to argue the standard leftist claptrap. If "we" would just give up our ads, "we" could fund this or that socialist policy!

I left the following comment, which I share for my readers.

You can easily reduce the amount of advertising consumed by Americans (assuming you are one).

How?

Turn off the TV. Don’t watch the programs which are supported by commercial advertising. Don’t watch Buffy, or those reality TV shows that you love to hate. Don’t even watch public TV, with all that “underwriting”.

Turn off the radio. Don’t listen to music which is supported by commercial advertising. Buy a CD and a CD player, or do without.

If you are unwilling to do that — to stop watching the commercial TV shows that you like — then please stop whining about how you don’t like commercials. The fact is, you are revealing your preference for them, by watching them. The fact is, you do, actually, value them (for making possible the programs that come with them), more than you value food for poor people.

Instead of watching an hour of TV, work an extra hour and donate the money to OxFam.

Stop being a hypocrite, or, own up to the fact that you value the things that you do.

NB: I do watch a small amount of TV. But I am not a hypocrite. Every evening, I have the choice whether or not to watch that TV, or work for the poor, and I choose to watch TV. I value it above feeding the poor. I am responsible for what I do. What about you?

A New Iraq Exit Strategy

2004-05-27T13:41:00.000-04:00

This is brilliant:

The Clash Referendum:

... why don't we let the Iraqis democratically vote us out of Iraq? Let's announce that we will abide by the will of the Iraqi people as expressed in a national referendum on, say, June 30. The ballot will have just one question on it:

Should we stay or should we go?

If the Iraqis vote 'go,' then we go (within, say, 60 days). In leaving, we give the Arab world an impressive object lesson in how the United States of America believes in democracy and the rule of law. We leave with our honor intact.

If they vote 'stay,' well, then we're stuck there, but at least we've shown the world we're wanted.

Greg Cochran came up with the idea.

Of course, we don't really believe in democracy for the wogs, so this won't happen. But it is a great idea from the POV of finding a way to back out with face saved.

The March for Women's Lives

2004-05-05T13:31:00.000-04:00

... er yeah, whatever. As if some folks are against women living, or having lives. Anyway, since I went, I figure I might as well put down a few thoughts, even though late.

I went to the march. Living in Baltimore this was not particularly hard. Going to a march like this is much like voting: it impresses people who believe in the civics-class version democracy. I figure to earn a certain street cred with socialists, since I was at the '92 march too. And I wanted to make sure there was at least one libertarian there, flying the flag of liberty (Gadsden), to show that self-ownership is not merely a socialist idea. They got it from us, the liberals, way back before they stole the label and corrupted it to mean "milquetoast socialist".

The march was a lot better organized and funded than the antiwar marches of last year. There were a few fringe lefty groups that I noticed, but not that many. Whoever it was putting it on shelled out massive bucks. All down the mall, on both sides, were these rented big-screens -- really big, like 30 feet by 20 or so -- with the 18 wheelers used to haul them in. Perhaps 8 or 10 of them. Those can't be cheap -- renting a crummy little 1280x1024 beamer for a weekend business conference is $10k. How much are massive TVs? Hard to know - $100k/day? More? That's a million right there.

There were a huge quantity of printed signs being handed out for free at the metro. And then more signs on the mall. Thousands -- would have been enough if 1M people showed. Again, even at a dollar a sign this was fairly serious money.

Anyway, we got to the mall and I unfurled the mighty Gads. Very quickly I met a libertarian, but he turned out to be a tinfoil hat type. Gah. Well, I got the thing after the peace march last year, because I wanted to meet and talk to the libertarians, not socialists. Later on I met two interesing normal libertarians - one worked at Cato. So, it worked.

I walked around, not really listening to the dumb speeches; some of the speakers had a libertarian tone, though, and that was good. Most were socialists, pity. I got in a good circuit of the crowd, though, from several hundred feet from the stage (it would have been very hard to get any closer in the throng), to the very back of the crowd, which went back almost to the Hill.

I ran into a lesbian couple from my climbing gym. That was cool. Wonder how many other folks I know who were there but I didn't run into?

After this, some more boredom while the blatherers blathered, then we got to marching. The prolife people were out in fairly good numbers, and there was the standard silly crowd stuff on both sides. Chanting: "Prolife/it's a lie/you don't care if women die"; the smarter prolife using megaphones to subvert the chant by rhyming in "you believe in genocide" at the end.

I was walking on the far left edge of the river of women, so both sides could see my flag. One guy seemed to recognize it and started yelling at me, so I tried to go talk to him, but the cops (who were numerous) along that particular stretch of road were not letting marchers close to the protestors, and pulled me back.

Later on there was a black prolife group with explicit signage relating planned parenthood to nazis and the KKK. Charming.

The crowd was huge; very impressive. And that's the point. I got some good pictures of things, but no shot of me. Oh well, I'm sure shots exist out there. Garth at America's Outback was here in the core the day before the march, and got a shot of me and the flag.

Sexed Politics

2004-05-05T11:06:00.000-04:00

Fred Reed can be brilliant; read this, be pleasingly amused, and ponder:

Women and men want very different things and therefore very different worlds. Men want sex, freedom, and adventure; women want security, pleasantness, and someone to care about (or for) them. Both like power. Men use it to conquer their neighbors whether in business or war, women to impose security and pleasantness.

Billy Beck has made much the same point (anyway I think it was him... my hazy memory is not enough for google): women are evolved to have different minds than men. This informs a different politics, which is not favorable for liberty in a democratic context.

Military Power is not Constructive

2004-04-28T12:28:00.000-04:00

I sent Jim Henley a comment on his recent piece on What to Do About North Korea, and he was kind enough to mention me. But I did not have in mind only, or even primarily, military power. Rather, what will be needed when the state in North Korea implodes is "soft" power - money, know-how, organization. Yes, some ability to break heads will probably be useful. But that's just a small part of what "nation building" entails.

This is what I said:

Of course I agree with your prescription - pull out, ignore them, and be nice. However, I disagree somewhat with your analysis of what "we" might do if somehow we did come to conquer Korea.

We'd turn 'em over to the South Koreans. Yes, the North is a basket case and all that. But we have people right there, on the ground, who speak Korean, who look Korean, who are Korean - and who are, basically, on our side. Capitalism, democracy, etc. And they are, by world standards, rich enough to help significantly. The model here should be East Germany if it is anything.

The contrast to the situation in Iraq is worth mentioning in this context. Part of the reason we're losing there is that we have no Arabic nations that are friendly enough to help us. We only have some bought states, and hirelings are not friends.

Of course, I am not sanguine on the ability of any outsiders to conquer North Korea militarily. Rather, Kim Jong Il, who has near-zero legitimacy, will eventually lose his hold on the tiger. Then he will be overthrown, and change will come.

It's Not Nam, But It'll Do

2004-04-27T10:28:00.000-04:00

Something for the chickenhawks to read: It's Not Nam, But It'll Do by the War Nerd, Gary Brecher. He cracks me up.

Libertarian Purity Test

2004-03-09T13:50:00.000-05:00

Since the meme is going 'round again, I thought I'd report my thoughts on the Libertarian Purity Test.

First off, my scores. If I take the test without reading the questions closely, I score 160. No sweat.

If I take the test skeptically, reading every question tightly and only agreeing when there is no possible way I can see to answer the question "No", then I score 61. An example of this is the word "abolish". To me "abolition" has the connation of a legislative act that applies universally. As an anarchist, though, I am willing to let other people have what I regard as politically-incorrect institutions. So consider q63: "Should the state be abolished?" Under the reading of "should" where "I should" or "we should" do something, I do not want to abolish all states; to do so would mean at minimum (a) war with every state in the world, (b) an army to make that war, and (c) contradiction, as you cannot supply such an army without taxation, conscription, and generally an iron-fisted state.

If the question read, "do you hope that the state peacefully fades away", then I would answer "Yes".

Generally, a lot of the questions have one or more of the following problems:

they lack context: I want free immigration into the USA after abolishing Federal taxation, not before. The order matters.

they use "we" incautiously: I do think "we" (meaning: the USA federal government) spends too much on anti-poverty. The correct level is zero. But "we" (the society of people that live in the USA), spend about the right amount. I certainly don't think that "we" should, could, or would abolish welfare under the latter reading.

they use "government" to mean "the state": in anarchist thought the protection agencies, judging agencies, etc will "govern" the people. Criminals will be hunted, caught, and brought to justice. This is "government".

they don't take account of the decentralist aspect of libertarian thought

Let me expand on that last point. If you take one particular fairly-large state that a libertarian lives in - i.e., I live in the USA, or Maryland - then I would argue that libertarian thought is, indeed, a single spectrum. At one end is North Korea; at the other end, anarchy. But we live in a federal state, and an anarchic world system. There are many states, some small and some large; and we are not citizens of them all. There are, in short, many third parties.

Libertarian thought has little to say about how third parties interact. It says what the individual should do - not coerce others. It doesn't say what to do when you find someone else coercing someone. Yes, it's admirable to help; some libertarians think it is necessary, but not all. It is not morally required. So it has nothing to say about what we should, or should not, do for people not in our state.

Furthermore, the very notion of coercion fades away gradually as you get to very small states. Consider a most-nearly-anarchic USA where counties were the states (i.e., they have the power to initiate coercion, and a monopoly), and the states and Federal government existed only as fully voluntary bodies which the counties could opt in or opt out of freely. In this scenario, an individual would have a choice of many counties to live in without changing his job. Practically speaking, this would be near anarchy, since the counties would be able to compete to be nice places to live in. Although technically they would be states, the degree to which their laws would be "coercion" would be far less than currently is the case, because "love it or leave it" would begin to have real force.

Of course, the right to secede ought to hold universally, right down to individuals and their property - that's what anarchy is. If the state can take your house, you are not free. Still, competition between counties, and small-scale democracy in them, would make the typical predations of large states (taxation, inflation, regulation) very rare in such a system.

As a measure of what I believe libertarianism is about, the test is quite lacking. I can do better than that easily. Hmm.

La Griffe du Lion

2004-03-08T11:13:00.000-05:00

Of my daily reads, two rise above: Sailer and Henley (see right). From Sailer's site, I got to the fascinating yet damningly crimethinkish La Griffe du Lion. Here's stuff to make a liberal scream:

The fundamental law of sociology

If, as he begins this essay, the reader finds himself unacquainted with the fundamental law of sociology, he should not be reproached, for the law is first about to be articulated. It is a difficult task that we undertake, though in fact it is undemanding and straightforward. It is difficult because those who will welcome our results eagerly are among the most perfidious of our species, while those who reject them will do so out of antipathy not discernment. Sandwiched between the devil and the fuzzy-minded are the learned and sagacious readers of La Griffe du Lion, to whom we address our remarks.

The fundamental law of sociology is a summary of hundreds of observations. It asserts that:
On large-scale tests of reasoning ability, the observed mean difference between non-Hispanic whites and African Americans is 1.1 + 0.2 standard deviation.
The observation is so unerringly reproducible, it justly earns the appellation, law.

I've been meaning to post a review of la Griffe site since I discovered it (and had to read everything - sadly, he (or she) doesn't post very often). But now Sailer has saved me the work and put up this overview on vdare.

Frank Rich: Mel Gibson Forgives Us for His Sins

2004-03-08T09:52:00.000-05:00

Found in the NYT:

Mr. Gibson's movie had almost as large an opening week as 'The Lord of the Rings.' The star has won his battle. He's hotter than ever in Hollywood, a town whose first commandment is that you never argue with a hit. ('If Hitler did a movie with these numbers, we'd give him his next deal,' one Jewish mogul told me in a phone conversation this week.)

Rich sure does feel bad about that movie.

Chernobyl

2004-03-05T17:19:00.000-05:00

Via Billy Beck, a fascinating tour of the Chernobyl "dead zone".

People had to leave everything, from photos of their grandparents to cars. Their clothes, cash and passports has been changed by state authorities. This is incredible, people lived, had homes, country houses, garages, motorcyles, cars, money, friends and relatives, people had their life, each in own niche and then in a matter of hours this world fall in pieces and everything goes to dogs and after few hours trip with some army vehicle one stands under some shower, washing away radiation and then step in a new life, naked with no home, no friends, no money, no past and with very doubtful future.

Lots of photos.

Still Pinned Down

2004-03-01T17:54:00.000-05:00

On Jan 2, I criticized Mark Steyn for predicting the Iraqi resistance would collapse since Saddam was captured. Well, it's six weeks later, plus. It appears he's wrong... but we must wait a bit longer for definative proof. Reevaluation in two weeks, I promise.

Meanwhile, the War Nerd sends nyaa-nyaas to similarly wrong correspondents:

So what does it say that they’ve been doing these ambushes every single day for months, most of the time hitting us hard, killing GIs, without killing Iraqi civilians or getting caught? Simple—it means everybody, and I repeat: EVERYBODY in town is with them. Not just passively, but actively helping them. The Iraqis are our enemies. The people we’re there to liberate hate our guts.

I don't completely agree with Brecher - I don't think the hate is quite as universal as he makes out. But enough of them hate us, and the rest are cowed into silence or complicity. We won't be there in a few years. Whoever wins the struggle for the Ring, will be.

There's another new War Nerd too, yeah buddy! Haiti.

Abraham Lincoln Brigade

2004-02-20T23:54:00.000-05:00

From wikipedia:

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was a loose organization of American volunteers supporting or fighting for the anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War.

... the brigade was made up of volunteers from all walks of American life, and from all socio-economic classes. It was the first racially integrated American fighting force, and the first to have an African-American officer, Oliver Law, led white soldiers.

American volunteers began organizing and arriving in Spain in 1936. ... By early 1937, its numbers had swelled from an initial 96 volunteers to around 450 members.

The International Brigade was used by the Loyalist army for several battles in Spain. ...

The Brigade was a cause celebre in the United States, however. Liberal and socialist groups organized fund-raising activities and supply drives to keep the Brigade afloat. News of the Brigade's high casualty rate and bravery in battle made them romantic figures to an America concerned about the rise of Fascism around the world.

The Lincolns are the canonical example of what I am talking about when I say it is perfectly fine for people that want to try to save the world to do so. Voluntarily, using their own lives or money.

But the business of the USA - the government - is as follows: "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity". It is not to "establish our rule over others", "ensure international Tranquility", "provide for the UN's defence", or "promote the welfare of foreigners". These goals may be good goals, or maybe not. Either way, they aren't what our government is empowered to do.

Save the World on Your Own Dime

2004-02-17T11:42:00.000-05:00

Jim Henley has been having an interesting argument with Tacitus. But he has made the fundamental mistake of accepting Tacitus' worldview. Tacitus assumes (tacitly) that all possible worlds involve America pushing around the world. In doing so we create enemies; and they sometimes try to help each other out. Thus we must fight, fight, fight. We have allies (particularly Israel; but our support of dictatorships like Saudi Arabia also counts) that are themselves involved in wars or insurrections; and thus we take on proxy enemies.

Henley and Tacitus are, in essence, arguing about those proxy enemies. Are they really dangerous to Americans, or not? If so, how much? Etc. etc.

But this misses the point that if America followed a libertarian foreign policy - isolationism - we would not have foreign enemies; either directly on our own account or via proxy. Therefore it would not matter to us whether they are working together or not; and there would be no necessity for us to try to analyze intelligence to try to determine for every group in the world whether or it is "trying to kill us". Consider Switzerland. Nobody is writing long screeds arguing about whether or not Hezbollah is targeting Swiss citizens or not in their war with Israel. It's a non-topic. Isolationism works, at least against foreign terrorists (domestic is different; there, liberty works).

Now, Tacitus seems to be aware of the attractiveness of political isolation; and he tried to head it off via an analogy with personal crime: the Kitty Genovese analogy:

There are ample grounds for warring against these three groups within the context of strictly American interests. All three have posed, and do pose, a clear and present danger to the United States and Americans. But let us not pretend that there would be no such case for war against them in the absence of such direct threats. I would argue that it is enough that they are practitioners of jihad. Even if you don't accept that, it is nonetheless still enough that they are, by any objective standard, barbarous and evil, and perpetrating their monstrous crimes upon innocents. In my book, that merits my active opposition. I know that libertarians like Henley disagree: in their book, foreign policy must be run strictly on the Kitty Genovese principle. Which has the advantage of being simple and easy to apply, for sure. When you see the dead neighbor, though, it tends to tax the conscience.

In Tacitus' mind, there is no difference between state action and individual action. If there an evil anywhere in the world, it merits Tacitus' "active opposition"; but by this he means not that he, personally, will go to try to solve the problem - rather, he means all Americans should be taxed, to pay for yet others who will go, to go do what he, Tacitus, says they should do, to solve the problem. This is not generousity as a libertarian understands it.

America should be myopically concerned with evil only in America: defending ourselves against invasion. That does not, however, mean that Americans can do nothing about non American evil. They can send (their own) money; they can volunteer themselves (not others), and go try to help. But America as a state should do nothing - solving problems in Zimbabwe is not the business of America.

There are several huge advantages to isolationism, which I think Tacitus has a dim understanding of. One is, that it's very easy to crisply delineate boundaries for it; consider by contrast the neocons' "invade the world" idea: should "we" invade North Korea? Haiti? Where is there not evil in the world, other than possibly Antartica? Yet, "we" seem to be unwilling (or dare I say unable) to invade every country in the world.

A second big advantage to isolationism is that it involves no necessary invasion of our other liberties. A peaceful nation is compatible with liberty; a nation at war is not.

And a third advantage: it's moral. Unlike Tacitus' taxation funded strategy of invade the world.

And finally, there's a big practical advantage to fighting against evil with your own time, money and life, rather than others' forceably taken: costs are internalized, which (economics tells us) will result in solutions that work better; better bang for the buck.

Of course, there's a huge downside to a moral foreign policy, from the POV of secular millenarialists like Tacitus: when you can't use force to extract resources, the scale of what you can do to push around foreign people and "fight evil" is vastly reduced; and that's especially so for "evil" that's mostly in the eye of the beholder. To those who see America as the instrument of history or God or Progress, to uplift humanity and bring about Good everywhere, this is a big problem.

It's not to me, nor should it be to any decent libertarian. You'd think that the idea of using the state to achieve secular salvation would have died with the Soviet Union - but no, only the idea of domestic socialism was discredited. War socialism is alive and well in the American Right.

Presence of Mind

2004-02-13T13:11:00.000-05:00

Via Billy Beck, just discovered (possible re-) Presence of Mind. All sorts of interesting stuff there; go play. This post got me hooked. It's funny, snotty, and the libertarians triumph in a little way!

I have always been very careful to insulate my son Cameron, just turned twelve a month ago, from my beliefs. He knows what they are, if only because he hears me talking to my wife ... I can't help it that Cameron knows what I think, but I can make damn sure that he knows what he thinks.

This is an issue right now because of an assignment he has in his Language class. (I have no idea what Language, as distinct from language, might be; presumably it's an excuse for not teaching English.) The assignment, the momentous '6th Grade Fall Project,' is due today. This is the challenge the sixth graders (note that in language, as distinct from Language, positive cardinal and ordinal numbers below 13 are spelled out) must surmount:
Assignment: You are designing a building or complex that would benefit your community in some way. You will present your building or complex to the class as if they are the City Council. You are attempting to get the 'City Council' to approve your proposal.

Requirements:
400 or more word essay that explains why you chose this particular project. You must include where you got the idea and how you created your model.
YOU MUST HAVE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:

A. Model: Create a model of your building for the 'City Council' to see. Make sure you can carry it into class.
B. Blueprints: On poster board or large pieces of construction paper, draw your designs out. Make sure we get a clear picture of what you want.
C. PowerPoint presentation: You may create a PowerPoint presentation. Again, you must give a clear idea of what your building or complex looks like.

Presentation: You will present your idea to the class. The presentation must be 2-4 minutes in length. Practice this at home and time it.
There is no limit to what I can find to hate in this assignment.

The kid comes up with a great idea: Robin Hood, Inc.:

At Robin Hood, Incorporated, we believe that so-called "community investments" which lose money are not investments. An investment that loses money is not an investment at all! It's just an oxymoron! So we take these so-called "community investments" and liquidate their valuable assets, raze or sell the structures, and sell the real estate back into the free market.

Good grade!

Tolerance and Rights-ideology

2004-02-06T17:49:00.000-05:00

Animal rights, mentioned below, is only one of many areas where rights-theory fails to work. Another example is that of incompetent, irrational, or non-adult humans. Hitting people, we think, is wrong because it violates a right not-to-be-hit. Your right to swing your fist ends, etc. etc. But what of corporal punishment? Is that not "aggression"? Personally I think it is OK, suitably governed, but I'm surely aware that others disagree on that. Philosophically, I can tolerate error: anarchists tend to be localist. The only place I am concerned with the legality of corporal punishment is where I happen to live. But the statist cannot be philosophically tolerant.

If a statist really has no opinion on an issue, then the fight over it by others more idealist doesn't really concern him, but he will get one policy or the other as a result.

The tolerant statist with an opinion is always hit with an argument from ideals. If something is right for him, in an idealist world it must be right for everyone. And if that's true, then a Federalist argument - to let other sub-states determine a different policy - looks either wrong, or like moral cowardice. Why not use the Federal state to crush the incorrect policies?

To an anarchist idealist, things look different. "Crushing" other people's laws is tantamount to war. So ideals, even if attractive, must be worth fighting a war over. The practical result will be a lot fewer universal laws in anarchy, and a lot greater variety.

Animal Rights in Anarchy

2004-02-06T17:33:00.000-05:00

I was once a libertarian minarchist. It's been a long time since then, and sometimes I forget the inescapable logic that lead me into the anarchist camp. But then all I have to do is read a libertarian blog for a while, and it comes back.

Case in point: this article at the Agitator:

While discussing animal rights with a couple of colleagues over happy hour a while back, we started discussing what value we ought to place on animals, and what rights animals have that ought to be protected by the state. ...

[Scenario:] A real life Cruella Da Vil systematically buys up cute, furry puppies, then tortures and slaughters them solely for entertainment value.

[Read the comments; they are worth the trouble.]

This is one of a myriad of places where traditional libertarian rights theory falls down. Our instincts assert to us that animals do have rights. Many people try to get around that, by worrying that torturing cute puppies might be a gateway to "real" human rights-violations. But let's assume not: Cruella has lived and worked with all manner of people for years, quite peacefully. She's never committed any crime, nor even raised her voice against a fellow human. She just likes the screaming of puppies, that's all.

If animals can be admitted to have any rights whatsoever (and that's exactly the compelling case that Peter Singer made in Animal Liberation), then it's hard to see where their rights begin and end. Here's the problem: we assume they have rights, less than ours, more than a mere inanimate piece of property. But they cannot articulate nor fight for their rights. Only we conceive of rights. So how to know what their rights are?

Failing to define animal rights means inevitable human conflict, as one human claims rights over an animal owned by another.

The problem of animal rights largely disappears once we give up on the notion of platonic Rights, and the State to enforce them. To my way of thinking, anarchy is something that will naturally unfold out of human nature. Its ideology will be libertarian as a practical matter, but anarchy precedes the ideology, not vice-versa. In anarchy, animal rights and human rights are exactly the same - ideas that humans have, not platonic solids out there somewhere. In both cases, they are things that human customers will try to get provided by their protection agencies. Within a given state, there cannot be two policies, so there must be conflict and forced agreement. In anarchy, there will still be some forced agreement - some things, like laws against murder, are not negotiable. But there is the widest possible latitude for multiple policies. (That's why we've already determined that federalism works - it allows multiple policies.) And animal rights, as with other areas of rights-theory that are fundamentally unclear, will be one of the areas where a thousand flowers will bloom.

Some protection agencies will take a "anything goes" view of animal rights. Animals are mere property and you can torture them at will, if you like. Your neighbors, of course, will be free to shun you if they find out. Landlords will be free not to rent to you. Employers will be free to terminate you. But no government will interfere. Other protection agencies, probably the majority, will have anti-abuse laws. Why? Because most people, decent people like "brooke" in the Agitator's comments, will demand them, and supplying them is not expensive.

As "brooke" says:

I can't quite say that someone's preference for torturing and slaughtering puppies is more important than the puppies' lives. It has an ickiness factor that I can't wish away with my libertarian principles.

Quite so.

2004-01-29T10:08:00.000-05:00

Offending Liberty

Read this article by Brad Edmonds

I get impassioned emails from readers who are military veterans or relatives of military veterans, saying, in essence, 'You go ahead and say your terrible things. The men and women of the armed forces will continue risking their lives to defend your right to say it.' These readers claim that the only reason I'm free to say the things I do, and the reason I owe the military all sorts of my money, is because the military has for 200 years defended my freedom all over the world.

I say, Hogwash! ...

I'm sorry that so many honorable military men and women have been misled. I'm sorry that so many believe they fought for our freedoms. I'm sorry that a smaller, but significant, percentage of those believe that I personally owe them an involuntarily-taken chunk of my income. Morally, I do not owe them this. I did not ask them to do what they did; they already have been, and are being, paid; I believe my freedom has only been eroded, not enhanced, by their presence; and I believe my actual personal safety is more threatened by their existence, not less, as a result of how they have been used by Congress and the White House.

Ditto.

I'd only quibble with Edmonds on the small issue of women in combat. Equality under the law demands that any Federal institution, including the military, make every effort to achieve equality of opportunity. Withholding certain jobs from a class of citizens based on their genes is thus not supportable, either morally, or (IMO) under the Constitution:

14th Amendment
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States,
and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the
United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State
shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges
or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any
State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law, nor deny any person within its jurisdiction
the equal protection of the laws.

The only limit on service in the government should be competence to do the job. The average woman may not be strong enough to be an infantrymen. That's one thing. But there are many combat roles that do not require much physical strength. Tankers don't walk; they drive. Women would make great tankers. Let 'em ride, I say.

Of course, in my ideal world the US military would only be a few thousand people, supported by bake sales and charitable donations. As Edmonds points out, it is the militia - the people, armed to the teeth - that make us unconquerable. Having a bloated military is not needed for defense; its use is offense. It's a form of corporate welfare: not just in terms of handing out tax dollars to the military industrial complex to generate expensive high-tech weapons, but in terms of subsidizing the security costs of corporations in and out of the US.

2004-01-28T11:30:00.000-05:00

The Incredible Shrinking Terrorist Threat

I mailed Jim Henley the other day some thoughts that I almost posted here, but I've been kind of lazy about posting. Anyway, he saved me the trouble and posted them as part of his mailbag response. Go read it there. Jim asks,

why don't America's terrorist enemies apply the 'Israel model' to strikes against the US? Is it because they don't think it will do any good, or because they don't have the resources to mount a sustained campaign?

I think the answer to that is sort of both, sort of neither. Terrorists (and "freedom fighters") are utility maximizers; they strike where they think they'll do the most good relative to the cost to them. Costs here are not necessarily their lives, which they hold cheap; but the difficulty of getting the physical goods (explosives, weapons, etc.) for the operation, and the difficulty of getting physical access to the scene of the operation.

The place where it is cheap to strike is among sympathetic people, and close to home, and where security procedures are lax. The USA is apparently not generating political terrorists from among our home-grown Arab-Americans. So there is nobody who wants to strike here for whom it is the home field. Clearly, Arab terrorists are going to find it easiest to pull off operations where there are lots of Arabs. On the supply side, "security" measures do affect terrorism at the margins. Sure, the USA has instituted a lot of mickey-mouse bullshit security since 9/11. But I'd wager not all of it is completely worthless; and if most of it is vile from a libertarian perspective it still may "work" from a myopic security POV.

"Security" is a microcosm of the entire War on Terra. Short term fix for problems we caused, which will result in long-term problems. Both fit exactly into the paradigm of creeping socialism. Social control is like squeezing a balloon - pass a law to squeeze it in here, it "unexpectedly" pops out there, and you need another law; repeat until everyone lives their life chained in a padded room watching only PBS.

2004-01-14T13:41:00.000-05:00

Personal Anarchy

Butler Shaffer had a nice article about anarchy on lewrockwell:

I am often asked if anarchy has ever existed in our world, to which I answer: almost all of your daily behavior is an anarchistic expression. How you deal with your neighbors, coworkers, fellow customers in shopping malls or grocery stores, is often determined by subtle processes of negotiation and cooperation. Social pressures, unrelated to statutory enactments, influence our behavior on crowded freeways or grocery checkout lines. If we dealt with our colleagues at work in the same coercive and threatening manner by which the state insists on dealing with us, our employment would be immediately terminated. We would soon be without friends were we to demand that they adhere to specific behavioral standards that we had mandated for their lives.

Should you come over to our home for a visit, you will not be taxed, searched, required to show a passport or driver’s license, fined, jailed, threatened, handcuffed, or prohibited from leaving. I suspect that your relationships with your friends are conducted on the same basis of mutual respect. In short, virtually all of our dealings with friends and strangers alike are grounded in practices that are peaceful, voluntary, and devoid of coercion.

Anarchists are those who think that peaceful relationships can be extended throughout society. But it's always worth pointing out that the vast majority of our interactions are already ungoverned by any law, other than that of voluntary association. My friends are not mandated.

2004-01-13T11:41:00.000-05:00

Anarchy in the Northeast

It's a pity this won't work:

KILLINGTON - Voters may consider something a bit weightier than the usual town meeting fare this spring - whether to secede from Vermont.

The Select Board is considering asking for voter approval to cut ties with the Green Mountain State and essentially have the town become a landlocked piece of New Hampshire. ...

'We're very serious,' said Select Board Chairman Norman Holcomb. 'It's not just an effort to make a statement. It's an effort to save our community.'

But officials in Montpelier don't seem worried about having to redraw any maps. Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz cited some imposing obstacles to Killington's quest, beginning with the legal relation between the state and its towns.

'This is symbolic, clearly,' she said. 'Absent an armed insurrection type of thing, there isn't anything a town can do to secede. A town is a construction of the state and exists at the pleasure of the Legislature.'

Killington's discontent has to do with justice as much as dollars, according to Town Manager David Lewis. It is rooted in the history of Killington's effort to fight for an equitable tax scheme since the passage of the statewide property tax, Act 60, in 1997, he said, and a sense that the town has exhausted all its options. The town manager compared Killington's situation to that of the American colonists under the British monarchy. He said Killington sends $10 million to the state every year through the statewide property tax, and receives only $1 million in return.

Sales and business taxes generated in the resort town add another $10 million to state coffers. But Killington, with less than 1,000 full-time residents and one legislator shared with three other towns, does not have the political clout to bring this money back to the community, Lewis said.

'They don't have to worry about 1,000 people here affecting anything politically. We're a big meal ticket to them,' he said.

They don't have enough rifles to pull it off. But imagine a world where every city, county, township, etc. was explicitly allowed to reaffiliate at will with the state of its choice. That's not so far fetched, but the effects would be far reaching. Suburbs and rural areas would secede from the more socialist states and affiliate themselves with low-tax states. This would concentrate tax-hating people into low-tax states, thereby creating political incentives to lower taxes even further. "New Hampshire", "Wyoming", and "Alaska" would spread nationwide. Meanwhile, the socialist inner cities would gradually all be gathered together into "California" and "New York", which would collapse financially because of ruinous taxation. People would then vote with their feet to get out of the socialist hellhole "states", and into the capitalist "states". But this would not typically very difficult - it would usually mean only moving to a nearby suburb, not out into the middle of nowhere. Eventually the capitalist states would have to take over and reform the socialist ones.

2004-01-12T14:58:00.000-05:00

On Immigration

So Bush has a new proposal to reform the USA's immigration system. The usual suspects shriek; the Democrats say little because they know it will favor them. Basically the idea is to implement a guest worker program; this probably looks great to the President because it would be a reserve army of non-voting unemployed who can be kicked out during recessions, thereby making himself look good. (He's probably wishing for some expendable workers that could be exported right now!) I also expect that the neocons like the idea of a greater America. They can knock over foriegn states, true, but they can't conquer the world because they cannot control entire alien populations. But they expect that with our fine public schools, they can beef up America by importing people and Americanizing them. Bush wants to increase the legal immigration rate. But opponents of the guest worker system are right that it will also increase immigration, illegal and legal. People who are here "temporarily" will just stay and go underground. Also, they'll have children - instant new citizens. Then family unification kicks in. No sweat.

Immigration is a conundrum for libertarians. On the one hand, people should have the right to travel and live whereever they want. "We" should not be excluding anyone. There should be no immigration system at all, nor border controls - abolish the entire business. On the other hand, we do in fact have a state, and it is doing what states always do - redistribution to buy support. And immigrants get goodies too; hence, some immigrants come here only as rent seekers. That's wrong - they're exploiting those of us who produce. Knowing all the transfers that go to immigrants on my dollar, I'm definitely inclined when wearing my technocrat hat towards a system of immigration more like Canada's - that is, only let in people when you can be pretty sure they'll pull their weight.

In anarchy, if it were to happen tomorrow and the wealth levels of the world stayed the same, there would be massive immigration into the USA. Why? Because we have massive amount of capital here, and the only way to access a lot of it is to move here. That's why our wages are high, at least, in the short-term sense. (In the long term, we're rich because we are capitalist - more on that anon.) The incorrect, but common understanding of the Hans-Hermann Hoppe thesis (that a stateless society would or could control immigration) is bullshit. Read what Hoppe himself says. In a stateless society, because all property would be privately owned, in theory "they" could collectively stop immigration by refusing to rent or sell to any immigrant. Similarly, in theory "we" can collectively stop crime by simply refraining from any criminal acts. The point is, as always, there is no "we" in anarchy. "We" assumes that everyone in a whole country might act the same way. That never happens, not even in a state that coerces uniformity. We're humans, and there's money to be made. Employers don't care who the employee is as long as the job gets done. Landlords don't care who the tenant is as long as the rent comes in on time.

So the long run goal is clear: no state, no immigration controls, and probably as a result a very high level of immigration. It would all be "legal immigration" looked at from our current point of view, since the entire notion of "illegal immigration" would be inoperative. However, these immigrants would not be responding to the same set of incentives that current immigrants face. They would be getting much more liberty, including the liberty to keep their culture. But they'd not have the power to take money from the current residents involuntarily.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, we face a problem. The welfare state is not going away. It's much easier to reform immigration - which affects nonvoters - than to take even the most transparently wrong welfare off the books. So, what to do? The vdare types would say that's easy: restrict immigration. But to me that's not so clear. If welfare and immigration are intimately tied together, then perhaps the way to undo welfare is to free immigration. After all, arguably it was the early-century restriction of immigration which made the New Deal politically possible. The vdare mindset would say: it's too late for that. "White" people are already close to a minority: soon they will be, and the socialist transfer state will be unstoppable. This is a reasonable argument.

I mentioned earlier that America is rich, in the short run, because we have capital. That's true, but it's also true that we have capital largely because we had capitalism up until the 30s, and even now have a fairly capitalist economy. The long run problem for America is maintain the institutions that permit laissez faire. And for that, allowing untrammelled immigration might well be a problem. Poor people and culturally alien people in general, and low-intelligence (== uncompetitive) poor foreign people in specific, are dangers in a capitalist (more or less) democracy, because they are likely to vote for rents. Bush's proposal can perhaps be seen in this light as somewhat helpful: although it seems to envision much higher immigration, by regularizing the process it should make it much easier for immigrants to come from places that are not physically close to the US - that is, it should increase the proportion of immigrants from places other than Mexico (most specifically) and Central America (in general). If this has the effect of increasing the flow of culturally capitalist, educated, and/or intelligent immigrants from the rest of the world, it may not prove to be destabilizing to liberty as the current immigration pattern is. However, that remains to be seen. Right now, the immigrants which we want from the POV of capitalist America - educated Chinese, basically - are still voting Democratic. But that may yet change.

2004-01-09T14:56:00.000-05:00

Mission Impossible

We aren't wasting money fast enough down here on Earth, it seems. Most Americans love war, but it doesn't create enough jobs. And the killing is distasteful (at least to some of us weaker humans). To get reelected, the Republicans clearly feel they need to connect more of the people with the Federal tit. Thus Bush Plans To Call for Settlement On Moon. The piece has to be read to be believed. The gap between what the USA can do (not much - shuttles go boom!), and what is proposed is huge. Meanwhile the need for manned spaceflight is severely lacking (and the Federal government's need for it even more lacking), and the scientific value of the endeavor is near if not exactly zero. (It's subzero compared to what the US is currently doing: using robotic probes.) But none of those minor problems should stop the "mission to Pluto"!

2004-01-02T10:29:00.000-05:00

Pinned Down

It's always nice when you can actually get the opposition to predict something clearly. This shows their worldview; their working assumptions. Case in point: hawk Mark Steyn

"2) THE INSURGENCY

On Groundhog Day in America, the groundhog emerges from his hole and whether or not he sees his shadow determines whether winter will last another six weeks. I don't know whether Groundhog Hussein saw his shadow when he emerged from the hole, but another six weeks of insurgency sounds about right, after which it will peter out, despite the urgings of Tariq Ali, George Galloway and other armchair insurgents.

That is, Steyn appears to believe that the insurgency is a Ba'ath lead thing, and with no leader, it will go poof. In contrast is the idea that the insurgency is popular, and the idea that with the chance to become a billionaire at stake, greedy and ruthless men will be fighting like animals for the ring of post-Saddam power. (Idea #2 courtesy of Steve Sailer - read down about two posts.)

Who's right? Well, let's check back in six weeks - mid Feb - and see if there are still attacks going on against US forces and the Iraqi organizations blessed by the US. Then check in again by maybe March to see if they've petered out. My prediction: they won't. The insurgency will continue through the year.

2003-12-31T15:56:00.000-05:00

Power Corrupts; Bureaucracy Enstupidates

This seems to be real. The fish that threatened national security.

the TSA supervisor was called over, and he berated me profusely. He exclaimed that in no way, under no circumstances, was a small fish allowed to pass through security, regardless of what the ticket agents said.

Mr. Supervisor was causing a grand scene, marshaling the full authority of the TSA to refuse me. Now, I know my fish is a terrorist (Osama Fin Laden we used to call him back at school), but doesn't it strike you as funny that, with all the commotion my little security threat was causing, by now engaging the full attention of the TSA at LaGuardia, that someone who posed a real threat to passenger safety might be conveniently slipping by?

By this time, I was in tears. The supervisor furiously told me to dispose of the fish. Dispose of my fish?!

Funny yet angering.

2003-12-30T11:40:00.000-05:00

Controlling the Proletariat

Most people don't know that the police as an institution are a modern invention, part of the industrial revolution just like railroads. Those who know tend to assume that the reason the police were invented was a natural reaction to crime rising. This article challenges that notion:

contrary to the crime-and-disorder explanation, the new police system was not created in response to spiraling crime rates, but developed as a means of social control by which an emerging dominant class could impose their values on the larger population.

This shift can only be understood against a backdrop of much broader social changes. Industrialization and urbanization produced a new class of workers and, with it, new challenges for social control. They also provided opportunities for social control at a level previously unknown. The police represented one aspect of this growing apparatus, as did the prison, and sometime later, the public school. Moreover, the police, by forming a major source of power for city governments, also contributed to the development of other bureaucracies and increased the possibility for rational administration. In sum, the development of modern police facilitated further industrialization, it led to the creation of other bureaucracies and advances in municipal government, it consolidated the influence of political machines, and it made possible the imposition of Victorian moral values on the urban population. Also, and more basically, it allowed the state to impose on the lives of individuals in an unprecedented manner.

Crime rates skyrocketed when the police were instituted, not because they were naturally going up but because many sorts of new laws were created and imposed, that could have never been enforced without a standing army of enforcers.

2003-12-19T14:02:00.000-05:00

Qveere Eye for thye Medieval Man

Kyan: "thy hovel moste certainly is a pigstye!"

2003-12-19T13:52:00.000-05:00

Jim Henley's blogging has gotten noticed. He has a perceptive piece in The American Spectator

The conservative charge that Democratic candidates for president want to 'cut and run' from Iraq is unjust, which is too bad. We'd have a genuine debate then. With the partial exceptions of the minor candidates, the Democratic presidential candidates rush to assure us that we must stay the course. ... Their metamessage is that this election, to exhume a phrase, is about competence, not ideology; the chorus from the December 9 debate in New Hampshire: We'll fix Iraq better.

How? There is a single answer: Get foreigners to do it!"

As Jim says: "We'll get more international help is not a policy, it's a hope." Quite so. The opposite of engagement is disengagement, which makes sense to me. But clearly the American people are not ready for it; most are pro-war know-nothings. But the bike-path left aren't going to win with pro-war-lite. Prowar intellectuals correctly understand that war is committing, and if you are to do it you must do it "right". Doing it right - that's exactly what real anti-war intellectually are afraid of. Go read up on your War Nerd if you are a bike-pather and don't really understand war.

2003-12-15T16:07:00.000-05:00

What is War

Was just googling to find Gary Brecher (the War Nerd), and found a great interview. Two of my favorite writers: Steve Sailer interviews the War Nerd for UPI. A choice quote: "Get it straight: massacres are normal, battles are unusual."

Here's more:

Q. When journalists [describe] various wars in Africa as 'senseless,' are they making sense?

A. That's the best question you asked. No, it's absolute BS but nobody calls them on it. If you guys were doing your job, they couldn't get away with it, but they do. When Kristof says 'senseless,' he means he doesn't WANT TO KNOW about it. He won't even try to think like the people doing the fighting. Try doing that and see if it still seems senseless.

Here you've got one kind of war, the 'sensible' kind with uniforms, 'rules of war,' and big battles like Jena or Verdun. That kind means you stand up and walk into cannon fire, grapeshot or machine-gun fire and massed artillery, and all you get out of it is a few dollars a month, and if you decide to quit on your own, they hang you. How is that sensible?

Now take African war. You have these neighbors you hated since forever, and you decide to do something about it. You get together quiet with the rest of your tribe and jump the enemy village while they're sleeping and kill everybody except maybe the cute girls, then you take all their stuff and burn their houses and take the girls home to be slaves.

Maybe I'm crazy, but that sure makes more sense to me than getting your head blown off for the glory of king and country.

As a fellow war nerd, I say read it all. Brecher is funny, which is why people read him, but what's he's saying is not funny. And it's more applicable now than ever, what with the Iraq situation.

2003-12-10T14:27:00.000-05:00

The Origin of Property

It is sometimes argued by statists that creating property rights can only be done via the state. I think of that when we get snowstorms, as we did last week here in Baltimore. After a storm, the cost of creating a parking spot, combined with human beings' natural territoriality and innate sense of justice, creates property. It doesn't matter whether or not the practice is legal or not. People will claim the spots they create. The state is not creating this property; often it is opposed to it. But it happens nonetheless. Enforcement of the regime is easy enough, via anarchic individual action. When someone steals your spot, you retaliate against their car.

Here's some stories on the practice of winter parking spot homesteading. Given its roots in human nature, I expect it will be found anywhere where there is a combination of parking in a commons, and big winter snowstorms.

In Baltimore:

Shoveling mounds of back-breaking snow brings out the territoriality in Baltimore's automobile owners. Like flags declaring a pioneer's conquered land, Baltimoreans will use anything they can find to mark the asphalt their hours of work have uncovered.

In Boston, they do it:

If you're looking for a parking space in the wintertime, especially if it has recently snowed, be careful. Residents who shovel the snow out of a parking spot on the street will, for the rest of the winter (and sometimes into spring), view that parking spot as belonging exclusively to them. When their car is not in that spot, they will "reserve" the space by leaving a chair or a trash can or anything else they have on hand in it. If you should remove this debris and park your car there, you may find scratches, broken windows, or some other damage to your car when you return. Be careful!!!

Don't think too badly of the Bostonian for this lapse in friendliness. There is so little parking around town - and the snow makes it that much harder to get a decent spot. I've spent hours shoveling snow & chipping ice out of a spot. And when somebody else "steals" your spot, it forces you to "steal" your neighbor's spot.

Some people don't "get it" naturally, as happened to a callow youth in Troy, NY:

The man pointed to my car and asked if I knew who owned it. I replied that it was mine.

I informed the man that I had spoken to officers in the Troy Police Department, and that they had told me that the laws that permitted residents to reserve parking spots with garbage cans had been repealed three years ago, and that parking on the street was fair game.

The man didn't seem to care, and he demanded that I immediately move my car or else he would have it towed. When I reminded him that the law was on my side, he threatened to slash my tires, which I suggested might not be such a good idea, seeing as I knew that he lived next door. Naturally, my neighbor began to hit the side of my car with a snow shovel, something that is apparently a customary way to ask another to move his or her car in South Troy.

In Chicago, the system has (necessarily) been perfected:

Rule #1: If you shovel a spot after there has been enough snow to make it difficult or impossible to pull in without shoveling, it's yours. If there are two inches of snow on the street and you try to save a spot, drop dead. I'm not saying anyone OWNS a parking spot. There's a difference. If you do have the right to a spot, be creative and put something truly hideous there that suggests you have no taste, no shame, and certainly no problem causing serious property damage to anyone who moves your junk.

Rule #2: Peeling out of a spot for 10 minutes and leaving a ton of snow everywhere does not count as shoveling. You have not actually removed any snow, you've just sent it into the street and into the spots on either side of you. Lazy bastard! Don't even think of putting that milk crate there, your neighbors have eyes everywhere and they will steal it.

Rule #3: If someone moves your stuff out of your spot, tosses it aside in the snow, and then takes your spot, you are free to pour some nasty liquid on their car, especially if you put a lot of work into clearing that spot. If it took me more than an hour of back-breaking labor, that car would feel my rage. I still laugh thinking of the old man on my dad's block on Wolfram near Southport who actually dragged a chair and hose out and sat there all afternoon icing down someone's car. The cop who lived next door came out and shot the shit with him for a while, and then just asked him to stop. That's justice!

Rule #4: If someone goes a step a further and STEALS your stuff out of your spot (even if it's junk, which I hope it is) and then takes your spot, escalate the property damage accordingly.

Rule #5: If someone has the audacity to take your spot and then put their own junk in it when they leave the spot, that has serious, serious repercussions. That is beyond rude, that is an actual assault to your dignity and to the dignity of humanity. I would recommend breaking windows, scratching a key on every single panel, or knifing the tires. Or even better, doing all three. "Listen to your heart," as Fat Tony on the Simpsons would say.

You may be afraid to take action when someone steals your spot because you wonder how you know if the person parked there was the person who took it in the first place. Well, if it's been less than a few hours I'd say the chances are really, really good. But yes, if you aren't sure, play it safe. Then again, if someone sees a spot that looks too good to be true, e.g. it's neatly shoveled and there is a giant ironing board in the snow next to it, I'd say they ought to know better and stay the hell out of it.

Am I insane? Yes. But try to find a cop who gives a shit when you call up and claim someone iced your car. They know the score.

Chicago economics professors have noticed the phenomenon:

The tough issue is whether the Chicago system is better than any real-world alternative. Writers who condemn the practice treat the situation as one of mere distribution of a given amount of parking space. But an economist would predict that permitting private property would incite others to expand the amount of space. And so it does. Not only do those who dug out their cars the first morning have a space thereafter, but neighbors whose cars were not on the street begin to hack away the snow masses created by city plows to make a space for themselves. As black patches increase, the snow melts fast along the cubs. In both respects, the result is not just distribution of a given quantity of space, but creation of more space.

To me what's most interesting is not whether or not the system is efficient. It's the simple fact of the creation of private property outside of the law. The state is not necessary for private property to exist.

2003-12-09T16:36:00.000-05:00

Galactica

Back when I was watching Farscape, and complaining to scifi friends about how nobody would stay dead, everyone (and I mean everyone!) was telling me that I would love Buffy. That was before I had seen a single episode. Having now watched all of Buffy (except the season 7) via the magic of my Replay device (a DVR), I can confidently say: they were right! Joss rules. Joss kills 'em like flies, and at least some of 'em stay down. I don't ask for all of 'em. Just some. Thanks, Joss.

Now we have on radar a remake - er, "reimagining" of Battlestar Galactica. I vaguely recall the original series, having been the perfect target demographic at the time. But I have no strong attachment. The new thing... any good? Well, I'll see tonight. I have #1 on the DVR, with #2 slated to air tonight. Meanwhile, this review makes it sound quite promising: "this is definitely one of the darkest sci-fi shows I’ve seen in a while."

2003-12-08T16:47:00.000-05:00

Everyone is paid, except one

In the Journal of Medical Ethics, a call for a market in human organs:

There is a lot of hypocrisy about the ethics of buying and selling organs and indeed other body products and services for example, surrogacy and gametes. What it usually means is that everyone is paid but the donor. The surgeons and medical team are paid, the transplant coordinator does not go unremunerated, and the recipient receives an important benefit in kind. Only the unfortunate and heroic donor is supposed to put up with the insult of no reward, to add to the injury of the operation.

We would therefore propose a strictly regulated and highly ethical market in live donor organs and tissue.

They probably mean "regulated" as coercive, but it can be read as voluntarist by the anarchist.

2003-12-08T16:17:00.000-05:00

An Alien State

Fred Reed, living in Mexico, writes on The Virtue of Lawlessness:

In fiesta season, which just ended, everybody and his grand aunt Chuleta puts up a taco stand or booze stall on the plaza. Yes: In front of God and everybody. These do not have permits. They are just there. If you want a cuba libre, you give the nice lady twenty pesos and she hands it to you. That's all. There is in this a simplicity that the North American instantly recognizes as dangerous. Where are the controls? Where are the rules? Why isn't somebody watching these people? Heaven knows what might happen. They could be terrorists.

Funny.

2003-12-04T16:48:00.000-05:00

Yes Master

At samizdata, Natalie Solent has a great piece on the effects of men owning other men. Application: medical research. "Slavery is: work for nothing. Slaves are: lazy, obstructive, lacking in zeal. "The work is not well done." Yes, life must have been tough for the owners of lazy slaves. And it always will be. Important work is done by free men."

2003-12-01T10:19:00.000-05:00

Segregation in Public Facilities

Via DeCoster, I found this article:

Transgender, gay and feminist groups at the University of Chicago are asking officials to consider creating more gender-neutral bathrooms, saying some people aren't comfortable selecting a gender-specific facility.

"Persons who are not easily legible as male or female often experience various forms of intimidation in these places. If a woman in a women's-only restroom is assumed to be a man, there may be real threats to her comfort and even safety," warns the Coalition for a Queer Safe Campus

PC gone amuck. Kind of funny.

I doubt that in an anarchy there would be any trifurcated bathroom system. Nonetheless, on this issue the transgendered people are right. The state should not discriminate on sex. It should not have separate-but-equal anything - schools, jobs, and yes, even bathrooms. Of course, the fact is that most people like sex discrimination. I do too. But that has nothing to do with equal treatment under the law. It's just a preference. We don't racially discriminate regardless of what the poll numbers on it are.

The right answer to the problem here is simply that the state has no business doing anything where discrimination is necessary. It should not be running universities. A private university can discriminate against transgendered people, and probably should (at least, in terms of economic efficiency it should). But if the state insists on supplying education, it should make bathroom facilities open to everyone. Anything less is unequal protection.

The problem here is not the trangendered activists: they are a symptom. The problem is state ownership of the means of production.

2003-11-30T23:36:00.000-05:00

Anarchy on the Field

An interesting post at Samizdata: sports as anarchy.

2003-11-24T17:34:00.000-05:00

The Organization of the Political Means

Wandering the blog world, came across an interesting blog item. The author is an Iraqi who appear to have been there through the recent unpleasantness. This post is dated Aug 30:

The looting and killing of today has changed from the looting and killing in April. In April, it was quite random. Criminals were working alone. Now they're more organized than the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) and the troops combined. No one works alone anymore- they've created gangs and armed militias. They pull up to houses in minivans and SUVs, armed with machineguns and sometimes grenades. They barge into the house and demand money and gold. If they don't find enough, they abduct a child or female and ask for ransom. Sometimes the whole family is killed- sometimes only the male members of the family are killed.

For a while, the men in certain areas began arranging "lookouts". They would gather, every 6 or 7 guys, in a street, armed with Klashnikovs, and watch out for the whole area. They would stop strange cars and ask them what family they were there to visit. Hundreds of looters were caught that way- we actually felt safe for a brief period. Then the American armored cars started patrolling the safer residential areas, ordering the men off the streets- telling them that if they were seen carrying a weapon, they would be treated as criminals.

This quote is almost too good to be true for an anarchist. Anarchy releases criminal elements (the unorganized political means). This is opposed by the armed people, which works: "we actually felt safe". But the state interposes; it will not permit any challenge to its monopoly, regardless of the price that the peons pay.

2003-11-20T11:24:00.000-05:00

Gay Marriage: Politics

Meanwhile, there's an interesting aspect to the developing story of gay rights that I haven't seen talked about yet, so I thought I'd bring it up in case you want to think about it. And that is, that outside of some fairly small (but important) issues, gays on the whole are in many ways a natural Republican constituency. They're on average white, educated, high income. Of course, the Republicans will never give up the religious right (~15%) for gays (~3%). That's simple math. But if the political party is more or less impotent to legislate, then both factions can live under the tent. This is the case for, i.e. abortion: because of Roe v. Wade, the ability of the party to make serious change is null. Thus there can be prochoice Republicans - it's an issue, but not a party-central one.

The Republicans can benefit from gay marriage, assuming that they don't do anything in the coming backlash that locks them in as the antigay party. If the courts manage to legislate gay marriage, and there is not the democratic wherewithal from the legislative branches to stop it, then we may well see gays abandon the Democrats in the coming years.

If, on the other hand, the Republicans manage to pass an antigay Constitutional amendment, then they will alienate gays more or less permanently. I wonder if Rove is working this angle yet? Gays might be secured to the Republicans in a matter of 10 or 20 years. It will take generations for Hispanics to go Republican, if they ever do, seeing as they are already on the transfer-payment gravy train.

2003-11-20T11:09:00.000-05:00

Gay Marriage: Woohoo!

A great decision in Mass. Garth writes a good bit about it.

I know there are a few libertarians that oppose it. The argument can be made: state-sponsored marriage gives unwarranted privilege (which is true), such as the privilege to force an insurer to cover you simply because they cover the spouse. Expanding marriage expands this rights violation. But that must be weighed against what marriage offers: some of the most fundamental rights that humans have. The right to proxy decisions. The right not to be forced to do certain things against your will (i.e., to testify against a loved one). And the right to control your own property: to have less taxes stolen from your income, or as inheritance. These and many other aspects of marriage are freedoms that everyone ought to have; expanding them to allow gays to have them too isn't much, but it is something.

Of course, the symbolic aspect of this decision is huge. It won't have much effect on the real world - gays are a small minority, after all. But it's a huge win for human liberty.

2003-11-19T12:21:00.000-05:00

Matt Taibbi writes that America needs to get tough in Iraq:

The spectacle of last week’s embarrassing events ought to send shivers up the spine of anyone who derives comfort from our great power status. In case you missed it, the U.S. responded to a series of suicide attacks with a volley of deranged, incoherent strikes at empty buildings. In particular, the U.S. rocketed an abandoned dye plant at the edge of Baghdad, making sure that it was empty first, and not even destroying the structure but simply shooting it full of holes to render it dysfunctional. It had not been functioning anyway. The "new ‘get tough’ policy" (what was it before?), code-named Iron Hammer, was designed, allied commanders told reporters, to "send a message." Here is how the AP described that "message":

On Thursday, U.S. soldiers with loudspeakers drove through the neighborhood warning occupants to leave before the impending strike. Later, at least nine large-caliber shells were fired into the empty plant, heavily damaging the structure. The tactical goal was not immediately clear since this sprawling metropolis of 5 million people has other sites to launch attacks.

That last sentence, with the "sprawling metropolis" line, is about as sarcastic as wire service reporters get. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the AP has reigned as humanity’s most impenetrable fortress of unfunniness. So when even they are laughing at you, you know you have problems.

Funny.

2003-11-17T15:56:00.000-05:00

Economics is not Science

Last week Garth over at America's Outback posted some criticism of Austrian economics. I've been wanting to respond to it, but I haven't made the time. Well, enough of that - do what you can.

I'll take the last question first, as I think it is illuminating:

Austrians, were is all the math to back up your views? You seem light on models. So far my reading has seemed more like philosophy than economics.

Yes, precisely. In the Austrian view, economic knowledge can only come from two places: reason and introspection. This is a radically different methodology (they call it praexology) than mainstream economics. On the face of it, it is crazy-talk. And I don't completely accept that one should do completely without data, models, and all the other physics envy. Still, when you think about it there is something to recommend it. People's tastes and desires are not open to our examination; indeed they are impossible to measure in any absolute way. We can get relative information about people's tastes (via revealed preference: "I'll trade you the orange for the apple."), but we can never get any absolute information. ("I like the orange three utils more than the apple.") It is hard to get honest information from people - only by watching them act with real money (goods, value in general) on the line, can we see what we think are honest actions. Furthermore, people are not always rational, either because of lack of information, because they are stupid, because we have built-in irrationality (that we can in theory characterize), or, in the worst case, just because we are ornery. Building any theory based on this slippery substrate is difficult at best.

I think that trying to test theory against reality is, even if extremely difficult, worth trying. But there always comes the problem of how to interpret what you find. History is problematic that way, because it only happens once. We can't rerun it, varying the conditions each time, the way we'd like to (from the scientific POV). Ultimately, I find it much more satisfying to look at things like money from the Austrian standpoint than to try to figure out what is going using econometric data. Malinvestment is a logical consequence of money creation. That much is true in all possible worlds (given certain assumptions). How large of an effect it has - that, theory tells us nothing about. It is not logically safe to identify any feature of the real world with the theory. In particular it is not sound to say that the predicted "business cycle" is in fact the business cycle that econometric data see. Still, that is my odds-on bet. But that's going to be an awfully hard thing to prove.

Proving causation in the real world in something as large as the macro economy is hopeless. That's why we need economic theory, and why praexology makes a certain kind of sense. So, to take one example, there's there issue of who to blame for the 90's tech bubble:

Where do I lay the blame? The private sector’s misallocation of capital as was clearly evidenced by massive investment in firms whose P/E ratios were infinite. Remember the “new paradigm” where old measures of value were discounted, cash flow was considered a meaningless concept, and the Dow was going to 36,000? Fed policy did not create any of this, a mania did.

Yes, but who created the mania? Perhaps central banking did; perhaps not. We can't tell. What we do know is that Greenspan et al were creating a boatload of money. Connecting the two we simply cannot do with any logical rigor.

As an Austrian, I look at it this way. A shady character was seen lighting a match in the vicinity of a building that later burned down. Was it arson, or just irrational flame exuberance? In the case of the economy, we know that the Fed was (and is) creating lots of money, which must cause malinvestment And we know there was a bubble. I choose to connect the two. It's not a hard connection to make, just hard to prove anything about.

But let's run with it, anyway.

The argument... is that economic recessions; the recent bubble in tech stocks; and all manner of horrors are the fault of the Federal Reserve making interest rates artificially low thus encouraging mal-investment. Presumably this all has to do with the failings of “fiat money” and the inefficiency of the public sector in comparison to the private sector in allocating capital.

The banking system is not exactly public, nor is it completely private. I would not place the blame for the malinvestment on that: it's not that there is necessarily a certain amount of bungling of investments. Rather, it is that there is too much investment. No matter who is running it, public or private, you simple cannot channel more money into capital goods than the market wants, without creating a lot of useless factories. That's what the theory says: the interest rate has a communicative function. It signals entrepreneurs as to the overall level of future demand. If you communicate massive future demand falsely, then you will induce a lot of people to borrow and build stuff that won't actually be fully utilized in the future.

Here’s what seems so weak about the Austrian theory of the business cycle: it assumes that businesses, entrepreneurs, financiers, and other investors take their cues solely from current Fed interest rate policy and without an ability to forecast a future realignment of those interest rates.

No. This reverses cause and effect. The interest rate does not cause people to borrow money. Rather, it is people borrowing money that creates the interest rate. It is a statistical construct; the reality is a million loans of various sizes, rates, etc. The Fed is shoveling money into banks (who loan it out, multiplied); it is the finding of enough borrowers that affect the interest rate. The point here is, people will be found. Yes, perhaps some or even many in the market anticipate higher interest rates. Perhaps everyone smart does. So what? The bankers will keep lowering the interest rate until they are fully loaned out. They do this because their license to print money is conditional: they only get free money as loans, not outright. If they have to find shady borrowers to take the money, they will. In fact the more "smart entrepreneurs" there are, that disbelieve the interest rate, the worse the resulting borrowers will be. That is the problem.

It is odd that the theory ... seems to assume that all long-run decisions are based on short-term, government interest rates when in fact (and I know this from a practitioner’s perspective) long-term investments are made based on the credit markets long-term interest rates.

It is not the short-term interest rate only that is forced down. This would be the case, if we imagine that the Fed would sometimes create money, sometimes destroy money. But they don't, at least in the longer run. They always expand the money supply. That's why the dollar is worth 1/4 of what it was in 1970. So bankers getting new funds coming in have no incentive to retain reserves against Fed deflation.

Furthermore, while Garth has experience with big borrowers, those are not the only borrowers in the market that fractional reserve lenders are trying to reach. There's also credit cards, home loans, car loans, small business loans, etc. These tend to be shorter term loans, in the case of credit cards, as little as a few weeks. So short term rate should apply to the extent that any do. Further, it's worth pointing out that consumers are notoriously less savvy as "entrepreneurs" than big business. Expecting everyone with a credit card to be a proto-Austrian who will discount the discount rate due to the Fed's evil influence is just silly. They're rationally ignorant. All they see is that if they refinance their house, they can take out $10000 in equity and buy a boat! Oooh!

The vast majority of credit in the economy is not created by the Fed, it is rationed by the private sector. Austrians argue that the banks are a collective cartel whose lending is artificially stimulated by Fed actions and desires. This completely ignores the tremendous amount of credit created by other actors in the economy such as General Motors which is not a bank, is not regulated, is not a part of the cartel yet which I believe (at least until recently) creates more credit than any bank in the system.

I would hope that the Fed has not yet crushed all private savings, and that is true. Private savers - including GM - certainly do play a part in the credit economy. But the point is, they should. That's the private market in action, is all. Nothing to see here. Sure, the Fed and the banks only create some fraction of the money. So what? They are still causing malinvestment. As such they must necessarily destroy wealth, causing business failure.

The thing to focus on is not credit creation, per se. Credit creation is a perfectly moral and rational behavior. Rather the problem is a particular species of fraud, fractional reserve banking, in conjuction with a particular species of immoral coercive action by the state, central banking. Fractional reserve with no moderating central bank was bad, not only because it would have bank runs, but because it was inflationary. Central banking would be wrong regardless of whether or not they allowed fractional reserve.

I will certainly agree that the combination of the two is more stable that the former system. However, solving a problem with a greater violation of liberty is, IMO, not the right solution. Rather, the whole business of fractional reserve should never have been allowed. Further, I don't think that creating a massive banking cartel somehow creates a crash-proof bank. What it does is to insure that the entire system fails in unison. It has not failed. Not yet. However, for a system to stand for 70 years is not proof of eternity.

2003-11-11T15:05:00.000-05:00

Arnold Kling is ripe for the The Sect of Austrian Economics. Actually I doubt he will come around on defense. Just remember Arnold that war is the health of the state. But let me talk about the Austrian theory of the business cycle, and the analogy Kling makes to restaurants. Briefly stated, Kling gets it all wrong.

One the key Austrian insights as regards money is that, ideally, the interest rate is a market-created phenomenon. People don't actually hold more than token amounts of money as money. Instead they either spend it (consuming now), or invest it (consuming it later). All spending is aimed towards consumption; the question is simply now or later. The interest rate is a price, like the price of bananas, that reveals the outcome of that negotiation by all parties in the economy: from both the consumer/investor side, and the producer/borrower side. Alternatively it can be helpful to see the spend/save decision as a decision to spend, either on consumer goods or capital goods.

Now what happens when the interest rate is in some manner falsified? Well, as economists we know what happens when the price system is interfered with: it's always bad. Let's take for example bananas. What happens when the price of bananas is falsified? If the price of bananas goes low, then producers cease to supply them, and consumers find them a great deal. Thus a shortage erupts, and (absent the ability for the price to change), bananas must be rationed by some non-price method. If the price of bananas goes high, then producers rush to plant more trees, banana production increases, but meanwhile consumers aren't buying. Bananas pile up in the stores. Bananas rot.

Bad outcomes result no matter if the price if falsified as too low, or too high. (And note that you are invited to plug in "marginal" in the above paragraph in 27 places if that helps you feel good about it.)

The same is true with the price of money. Interest rates are routinely depressed via central bank manipulation. This will predictably cause people to stop saving (why save if interest rates are pathetically low), and it predictably will cause capital spending to increase (the rate signals that people want goods in the future). So people spend on current consumption (keeping all of the businesses concerned with current consuption busy), and businesses expand (keeping all of the businesses which make capital goods busy). Everyone is busy - that's a boom. But there is no future consumption - the businesses were fooled. The interest rate "lied" to them. So eventually, when the new productive capacity comes online, there is overproduction. More is being produced than people want to consume. The capital structure of the economy is disaligned with the consumer reality. That's the recession part of the cycle.

Now, Kling makes some very imprecise restaurant analogies from the simple theory above. You can read them yourself. So what's more straightforward: the idea that waiters can submit extra orders, and thereby cause the cooks to be frantically busy? Or that the cooks just get manic every so often? If you think of there being only one or two cooks, maybe that is plausible. But we are analogizing cooks to be the entrepreneurs and business owners of the whole economy - so we must imagine many, many cooks. How likely is it that 100 cooks in a large restaurant all happen to be manic-depressives, and all skip their medicine the same day, and all get manic together? Yet Kling is apparently happy with the notion that all of the sanest, wisest leaders in a modern economy can get a bit manic synchronously.

By contrast, what are the waiters being analogized to? Banks. Banks are the middlemen in the economy between people saving and business. What are the chances of a large number of a waiters all turning in extra orders? Well, in a normal restaurant not large. But that's where the analogy just fails. For in our economy, banks are cartelized, and there is one single central bank which can cause the entire system to inflate. So, in terms of the restaurant analog, we might imagine that the owner hangs out at the place. He believes that the waiters are deliberately "under ordering" food, and he thinks he should therefore "juice the kitchen economy" by making lots of orders that he is sure the patrons will end up wanting. But if the waiters aren't under ordering, what we have is a system that will waste a lot of food.

Note that this analogy does point out one thing wrt the theory of the business cycle: it is quite possible for the system to be in a steady state, the owner continually falsifying kitchen orders and food continually being wasted and thrown out. Only if the owner submits his extra orders in blocks (then backs off when the piled up food is clearly visible) do we get something analogous to the business cycle. Which of these is better analogous to the real economy, I don't know. What is clear, though, is that no matter how it happens, for the owner to order extra food that nobody wants is clearly wasteful.

2003-11-10T13:42:00.000-05:00

Everything has an End: oooh, Deeeeep, Dude!

Saw the last Matrix movie over the weekend. It's crap. Oh yes, lots and lots of shoot-em-up bang. FX still amazing, though, we've come to expect that, haven't we, Mr. Anderson? Some nice new PC type heros. But there's nothing left of the old Matrix (#1), except parts of the look and feel. It's a inflatable doll of a movie, where there used to be a real live woman. It's paint by the numbers. It's cell-phoned in.

The first Matrix really was fresh, though it was marred as scifi by the utterly silly explanation for why the machines keep around humans. Still, it was possible with a small leap of imagination to get past that. Maybe the machines actually want to harness humans to do interesting things for them that they cannot do well themselves. Who knows. Meanwhile, the scene between Agent Smith and Cypher alone was worth the price of admission. The philosophy was, if obvious, nifty.

The second movie was bloated, but still a pretty good movie. The philosophy was perplexing. Many at the time took this as a good sign, signifying that there was a real philosophic destination the filmmakers were going to, and that the viewer needed to work a little bit, and it would be worth it when the 3rd movie came out. I always suspected it merely indicated that the filmmakers were reaching for Philosophy, at the film-student level of understanding (that is, near zero). Still, I was happy to play the game of philosophize in the blanks. I was happy to speculate on what was really happening, and what would happen. When Neo talks to the Oracle, that's a great scene.

Well, here's movie #3 and now we know for sure: the second movie was just slinging around big words. Reality is hard to underand not because it is complex. Rather, it is hard to understand because it is magical and follows no rules. Philosophy has been replaced by action, meaning by explosions, self-consistency with a cute kid. The movie is hollow to its core. Oh, sure, go ahead and see it - you want to know how it comes out, right? Well, probably worth the eight bucks on that score, but as a testament to the first two movies.

In my mind, the Matrix trilogy ends when the Architect offers Neo the choice. That's cute, but drastically stupid. I don't know where it should have gone, but I'm sure I'll think of a suitable ending.

The movie world is a hard place for the real scifi lover. It's full of visually-oriented fantasists who think that the future will look neat, and therefore, that they should be setting their magical fantasy films in the future and selling them as scifi.

2003-11-07T12:14:00.001-05:00

The parable of the trees

Once there were two people living in a primeval forest. They were innocent, and had no notion of laws or property. Now, Adam liked apples, but they were hard to find in the forest. One day he invented the idea of farming. He realized: if I cut down some of the trees, that will create a clearing. Then I can plant an apple tree there, and then eventually it will grow and produce apples. So, he chopped down some trees (luckily he had an axe handy), planted some apple seeds, and went on his way.

Eve came along. Eve did not particularly like apples. She thought: how lucky to find this nice clearing, but how unfortunate that there are apple trees growing here, and not yummy plums! Then she had a flash of creativity, and invented the idea of farming. She thought: if I tear out these apple trees, then I can plant some plum trees, and then eventually they will grow and produce plums. So she did, and proceeded on her way.

Later on, Adam returned to the clearing. Seeing the plum trees, he was puzzled. I know I planted apples, he thought. Hmm, that's odd. He tore up the plum trees, and planted apples.

Later on, Eve returned to the clearing. Seeing the apple trees, she was perplexed. I know I planted plum, she thought. Oh well, whatever. She tore up the apple trees, and planted plums.

The next spring, Adam returned to the clearing. Seeing the plum trees, he got a little angry. Someone else is tearing up the apple trees! This time I'll hang out here so I can guard the trees. So he pulled up the plums and planted more apples, and he made his camp there.

A couple days later, Eve came to the clearing. She said to Adam: what have you done to the lovely plum trees I planted here? He said, I tore them up. I like apples. Well, she said, I like plums. So she tore up his apple trees. He tried to stop her, but being innocent he could not force her to stop, and she darted around him to get the trees. He said, If you plant plums, I'll tear them up. Well if you plant apples, I'll tear them up, she shot back. They glared at each other.

Then she had an idea. She said to him, how about we both plant trees? I'll plant a plum tree over here, and you plant an apple tree over there? (Eve was known for uptalking even then.) Adam said OK, so they both planted a tree.

Later that week, Eve returned to the clearing and pulled up the apple tree, and planted a plum tree. After all, she didn't like apples.

2003-11-07T11:56:00.000-05:00

The parable of the pie

Once there was a man who loved apple pie. But he didn't know how to make it. He knew how to make pumpkin pie. His neighbor was a friend, and sometimes he would take a pumpkin pie over to share with her. Sometimes she would make an apple pie and bring it over to share with him.

One day they were talking, and he asked her: How do you make such wonderful pie? She said, well, it's not hard. Just apples, crust, and spice. Spice? he said. Yes, spice - nutmeg and cinnamon. I see, he said.

So the man thought, now I can make my own apple pies. He put cream, eggs, apples, nutmeg and cinnamon in the blender, and whipped them up. Then he poured the pies and baked them. It wasn't very good.

2003-11-06T16:36:00.000-05:00

The parable of Laketown

Once there was a small town in the mountains called Laketown. It sat next to a small lake in a deep valley. The lake was drained by no stream or river, and so its level would fluctuate up and down. But it never raised very high, because the people in Laketown would prevent that. Long ago, their ancestors had built a clever bucket-carrying system at one end of the valley. Volunteers would gather there when the lake rose too high, and together they would carry water up high enough to spill it over into the next valley. In fact they didn't really have to lift the water very high - that end of the valley was split by a deep canyon. Some people said that the canyon had been cut by water, and that was proof that in the prehistoric past the lake had been higher. But most people pooh-poohed such talk, pointing out all the land that would be flooded in the valley if the lake were to rise even a tiny bit above its current level. No, they said: the lake must stay where it is. Too much is at risk. In any case, they said, it's no big deal. Just a few days each year, and a few people can prevent any flooding.

Time went on, and Laketown prospered. But there was a problem. The climate around Laketown changed and became wetter. (Some folks said that the new farms and roads that people were building affected the weather.) People had to spend more time each year carrying water to prevent flooding. In fact there weren't enough volunteers, and the town flooded several times. What panic! So the people got together and made flood control mandatory.

It was called the Mandatory Volunteer Lake Control Program. Early on, helping out was only required for the biggest farmers, and the ones nearest the lake. But they weren't enough. More days of rain came, so they extended the Program to everyone. First for a few days each year, which everyone thought was OK except a few grumblers. But then it rained, and rained. And it became 10, 20, 50, 100 days each year. The people groaned, but nobody could see anything to do. If they let the lake rise, wouldn't they be ruined? Sure it was objectionable to be forced to spend half your life carrying water, but wasn't that the price that one had to pay for civilization?

Pretty soon everyone was working 200 days a year, just bailing the lake.

One man rose to address his fellows. He said, My Friends, we're attacking this problem in the wrong way! If we just let the lake rise a little bit, then it will be high enough to once again spill down the canyon where it once ran. Then we won't have to spend any of our time bailing!

He was, of course, shouted down. Everyone knew that the only way to prevent flooding was hard work. So they exiled the man, and returned to their work.

2003-11-04T15:03:00.000-05:00

Review: Manias, Panics, and Crashes: History of Financial Crises by Charles P. Kindleberger

Recently I spent time in America's outback with a friend with excellent credentials in economics in general and big-money investment in specific. We argued, as libertarians are wont to do, over fine points of theory. In particular I expounded Austrian economics. He doubted, and gave me this book, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, to read. A good thing too, since the flight into flyover territory is rather long.

Having finished it, I think it is a good book from the point of view of a sort of passive-voice history: a history of facts. So and so was here, and did this, said that. A battle was fought. Lives were lost. It is a history devoid of theory, almost, and therefore hard to understand. In this case, it's about financial history, but only the panics. A fraud was discovered. A panic started. Money was tight. Money moved. A lender of last resort appeared, or didn't. Missing from all that is the why: why do bubbles happen? What is speculative mania? Why do bubbles pop? Kindleberger does not explain these things; a sense of the economic structure is quite missing. In fact he willfully ignores most of them: the economic expansion period preceding a bubble he explicitly disattends.

It all reminds me of reading biological tracts written before the theory of evolution. Before then, it was quite evident that animals were designed, and designed pretty well. Much good work was done without evolution; but you could see ever so much more with that simple theory to guide you.

In the case of Manias, there is an abject ignorance of the theories of Austrian economics, in particular the theory of the business cycle. I doubt Kindleberger had heard our theories when he wrote the book. It's a revised edition I read, so there is all of one paragraph in the entire book where Kindleberger notes that there's this "new" theory about but dismisses it out of hand. (The fact that Kindleberger was completely ignorant of Austrian theory about the business cycle, which dates to Von Mises in the thirties, is a sad reflection on the damage Keynes inflicted and continues to inflict on economics.) In the Austrian view, trying to understand panics without understanding credit and money creation is like trying to understand for what purpose God put nipples onto men.

Kindleberger has no notion of where manias come from. To Kindleberger, they are just a given. Mania happens. People are irrational, and sometimes they just get nutty. End of story: now let's see how it unravels. That's not good enough for me. I'm an Austrian economist. The massive fraud of fractional reserve banking is what underlies the business cycle, including mania and crash if the swings are high/low enough.

To be specific, the source of mania is fractional reserve banking. In fractional reserve, demand deposits are lent out. The same money is supposedly available to the deposit any time he wants, even when it has been lent to somebody else. Banks are technically bankrupt at all times. There are real effects to this practice, even with all the moderating superstructure built by the modern state to try to prevent bank bankrupcies. In particular, when money happens to be flowing into banks (for whatever reason), it induces them to create and lend out large amounts of new money in an actuarially unsound structure. This falsifies the signalling that interest rates provides to entrepreneurs, and causes a boom. When money flows out of banks, the reverse must happen: they must reduce the money supply by a multiplied amount. But because the money is tied up in promises (which is what credit is, ultimately), it cannot be got easily. Thus the fundamental bankruptcy of the bank is exposed. Without state intervention, rational depositors, seeing that their bank is bankrupt, rush to extract their deposits. Panic ensues.

The state has, over time, evolved a number of ways to prevent the bankruptcy of banks. (Why, one might wonder. Is it for the good of the depositors, or the bankers?) With deposit insurance and the lender of last resort, there is no bank run. But there still must be the adjustment of the economic structure to reality. The structure was overbuilt due to false interest rate signals. Thus it must be partly liquidated. This process is recession.

Yes, a "lender of last resort" does help, in the sense that it can cut off a panic. But what is does not do is cut off the business cycle, nor the fundamental fraudulent nature of the system. Furthermore, the lender of last resort is itself, ultimately, just a big bank. Thus it, too, can be bankrupted if the crisis is large enough. What we have done, therefore, in tying all the US banks into one system is to guarantee that when failure happens it is absolutely catastrophic.

It is like playing double-or-nothing when one loses at blackjack. As long as the streak of losses is not too long, you stay ahead. But when you get unlucky enough - and it will happen - then you lose all. Meanwhile, though, you can be lulled into thinking that with your fancy betting strategy you have achieved something for nothing.

Perhaps an even better analogy would be in the way that the state has historically fought forest fires, without really understanding them. The more you fight fires, the more unburned stuff piles up in the forests; eventually a fire breaks out that you cannot contain. Modern foresting practice is to let fires burn and even set them; they happen yearly but no given fire is catastrophic.

What I did gain from the book was more of a sense of history, including some interesting panics. Most particularly, Kindleberger talks about a (fraud-based) mania/panic that happened in gold coins. In his mind that proves that mania and panic are not features of fiat money. In my mind, it is proof that monetary fraud underlies mania and panic.

I also deeply enjoyed the discussion of the connection of fraud with bubbles. Kindleberger can't really explain it; and I doubt he has a mind to. But I can, and do. The explanation is Austrian. Money is created in a fractional reserve system largely by banks, who must lend it out to stay competitive. This is what falsifies the interest rate. Bankers, naturally, want to invest in the soundest, safest investments they can. But the more money they have to invest, the further out they have to go on investment quality. But there is a smooth spectrum of quality connecting an outright fraud to a sound investment. For every sound investment, it is possible to find a slightly less sound one. If one man has a two year track record, another has only one. If one man is completely sure his idea will work, another is just pretty sure. If one man has $10000 in collateral, another has $9000. And so it goes, for every dimension you can imagine. Similarly for fraud: for every fraudulent scheme there is a slightly less fraudulent one. The spectrum meets in the middle. Thus, money creation via bank lending necessarily drives the society further out into the risk spectrum than it "should" be - that it would be without the fraud of fractional reserve. Some of those risks always turn out to be fraud; and thus, frauds inevitably accompany inflationary central bank policy in larger amounts than they would in an honest monetary system. Thus, it is almost always frauds being discovered that sets off a panic.

2003-10-01T12:01:00.000-04:00

Live Free or Die - The FSP has voted. It's New Hampshire. Woo-hoo!

Judging from the comments on their forums, a goodly number of them will be moving almost immediately. Others will be waiting for the 20000 membership level; but I have the feeling that is less important than having made the right choice. If Wyoming had been selected, I think a lot of people would be sitting back, waiting to make 20000 before commiting. But there's jobs in NH, so, there's a lot less planning and risk required to move there. There are a lot of libertarian leaning people out there that are not going to feel the need to officially join up with the FSP in order to move to NH. They're just gonna do it. So I don't think it really matters that much if the FSP makes 20k or not. The important thing is, libertarians have collectively made a decision to focus on a state.

Now the work begins.

2003-09-24T16:10:00.000-04:00

As a teenager, I used to think about democracy a fair amount. It's a system, I'm a system hacker by nature, so, I thought about ways of running it that would lead to better results. Of course, I ended up rejecting the state as incompatible with morality. And thus democracy doesn't seem so important; I have not given much thought to how to run it well in years. But since I have been lurking over at the FSP boards, practical politics is more in my mind. Thus, some thoughts on how to run a fairer system of democracy.

As I understand it, the idea behind electing representatives is that they represent us - they proxy our votes. My idea is simple: make vote proxying explicit.

There would be no elections, per se. Instead, it would be an ongoing fee-based project of the government to discover proxies for the citizens. There might be special times when the government organizes itself to reach out to the masses to try to get them to reconsider their proxy; and these might seem something like our current elections.

Every citizen would have the right to pick any proxy he or she wished. There would be just two types of proxying allowed: one would allow further proxying (with the proxy choosing), and the other, not. Any proxy with a sufficient number of votes proxied would be allow to sit in, and vote in, the representative body (let's call it Congress, but it might be any legislature type of body). The proxies with the largest number of votes would be allowed into Congress. This might be everyone representing at least 1m voters; or it might be the 400 top proxies.

Voting in Congress would require different voting levels to pass two fundamental types of laws. An "abolition vote" would be any vote to abolish any current law(s) while adding no new law. Abolition votes would require a 50% majority of proxied votes of the assembled, voting, legislators. Thus, people who are not represented in Congress, or whose representative did not show up that day, effectively abstain from all abolition votes. All other voting actions by the Congress would be in the second category, and would require a 50% majority of all registered voters - registered, that is, with any proxy, or with no proxy at all. Thus, people who are not represented in Congress, or whose representative did not show up that day, effectively vote against all ordinary congressional votes.

What's good about this system as versus our current system?

First, under a proxy system it should be easy to get very good representation for almost every voter. Consider a system where the 400 top proxies are allowed in Congress. Perhaps half of these would be "Centrist" representatives comparable to our Demopublican politicians. But the other half would be every imaginable flavor and combination of radical. Basically, every political group down to about the 0.1% level would be represented. If 2% of the public are libertarians, they could proxy to a handful of well known Libertarian politicians.

Second, the representation is much more direct. Changing your proxy is allowed. There would be a fee for the service under any libertarian system, but presumably that would be small. Thus, any politician would be held directly and immediately accountable to the voters. By contrast, in our current system if your representative votes wrongly, you can do literally nothing about it. One can imagine mass campaigns to de-proxy politicians after every major vote. If you think politicians are risk averse now, it isn't anything. This is good - it builds in tremendous resistance to change.

Note that the ability to reproxy also increases the effective representation ability of the system. Let's say you are in some tiny minority so small you have no representative in Congress. You might still get effective representation by switching your proxy at strategic times, based on upcoming votes. Because proxies can "pass on" the proxies (of the voters that allowed that), the fee for strategically reproxying can be spread over the entire group. Thus the group of lesbian pro life black vegetarians, for instance, might proxy to a NARAL representative some of the time, a vegan representative some of the time, The Rev. Jesse J some of the time, and the "Gay Alliance" rep some of the time.

The final improvement over the current system is that this system allows a form of opting-out. If you register, but don't vote, or if you proxy to someone who is not allowed to vote, or who can't or won't go to Congress, then you effectively are against all new law. A minority opting out is still subject to the will of the majority (that's democracy - replacing this aspect of the system would be interesting, but not democratic). But an anti-political minority can, at least, make it harder for the majority to add new law. If one third of the voters are not represented, then it takes a 2/3 supermajority of the represented voters to pass every law; but still only a normal 50% majority to remove laws.

By contrast, in our current system everyone who voted or did not vote is equally considered to be represented by the winner. Most winners get less than a quarter of the electorate to endorse them. And many laws are passed by near votes of about 50% of the representatives. Thus, looked at in terms of proxies, many of our laws really only proxy for about 1/8 of the voters; and few laws if any proxy for more than about 40%. It is no wonder most people feel so estranged from politics - it's because we, collectively, are.

2003-09-23T11:53:00.000-04:00

Unreal Economics - An interesting aspect of the effect of deflation on the computation of economic aggregates:

more than half of the second-quarter growth of 3.1 percent was due to defense spending. Another chunk was due to investment in computers, which soared by $38.4 billion. But the vast majority of computer investment never occurred. Given the bizarre way government statistics are compiled, nobody actually paid anything and nobody received anything. That's because Washington measures computer investment by calculating how much it would have cost in 1996 to buy a computer of equivalent power to today's machines. Of the $38.4 billion in the increased computer investment, therefore, only about $6 billion was real spending. The other $32 billion was a statistical construct, which is just a fancy way of saying it wasn't real. Without that false comfort, we would have been looking at a second-quarter growth not of 3.1 percent but of roughly 1.7 percent--and most of that attributable to defense spending.

Eventually foreigners will stop funding our excess. Meanwhile, we trick 'em with shady accounting.

2003-07-31T17:52:00.000-04:00

I haven't been into the news, or blogging, much at all this month. It's happened to me before (i.e. last October), and I am sure it will happen again. Just not interested. Perhaps it is post-Iraq letdown. The drip, drip, drip of human blood in Iraq is not very interesting or speedy compared to the flashy war that has led to it.

Meanwhile I have been spending time over at the Free State Project forums. In particular there is a fun argument/discussion on anarchy over there, that I've been pounding words about. I came in about here, and the thread goes on for pages. If you like a nice heated discussion, and you like anarchy, maybe you'll like it.

Meanwhile, if you by some chance are reading this page and have not already found out about the Free State Project - well, what are you waiting for? Liberty in our Lifetime is their motto, and they are probably the best chance libertarians are going to have to make a difference, before the Federal government brings ruin on us all.

Update - that thread got merged. My entry into a now much-longer thread is here. Read onward from that for some sweet old usenet-style back-n-forth. Naturally, nobody is convinced of anything. But we all sure look pretty doing it!