New School Politics

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In a recent article Walter Williams gives a working definition, as well as some elaboration, of free markets:

Free markets are simply millions upon millions of individual decision-makers, engaged in peaceable, voluntary exchange pursuing what they see in their best interests. People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What’s more, they believe they’ve been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others.

I disagree with one point: a free market need not be of “millions and millions”, in any case that there exists more than one there is a market. (A great example of a free market I think would be elementry school kids bartering different foods at lunch without being encumbered by teachers or administrators, and that certainly does not consist of millions).

Everything else Williams says is also very true, but it is something that so many who are against a completely free market will not admit. Simply, if you believe in a particular way that the government should intervene in the economy (price controls, regulations, etc.) then you believe that you (or the government) can make decisions for all people better than every individual can make as the choice pertains to them.

Lets see if what I have to say holds up…comments anyone?!

Popularity: 23% [?]

In the excellent John Stossel’s 20/20 interview with the maker of the new (and surely exciting) healthcare documentary, Sicko, Michael Moore seems stunned to find out that the government uses force to get its way:

Stossel: But government is force

Moore: Why do you see it as force?

Stossel: Because government takes money with force from people and gives it to others.

Moore: No, it doesn’t, actually. The government is of, by and for the people. The people elect the government, and the people determine whether or not they’ll allow the government to collect taxes from them.

I wonder if I really need to take my time to explain why government is force. I figure those who are rational already know, and those who don’t–like Moore–have no chance. Keep in mind the implications of Moore not recognizing government’s fundamental nature: he wants the government to completely take over healthcare, but he never even took the time to find out how the Feds might go about doing that.

But observe the biggest difference in how Stossel and Moore approach government force. When Stossel–a libertarian–refers to those who are subject to government force, he refers to them as “people”–as in a plurality of individuals. When Moore refers to the subjects of a government, he refers to them repeatedly as “the people”–as in one amorphous entity. The dichotomy demonstrates how any person’s moral code goes hand in hand with their political one: when one permits altruism and sacrificing one man to the whims of many, he will always choose collectivism; but when one recognizes that every individual is sacred and an end in himself, he will always fight for individual freedom.

Here is the rest of Stossel’s article on the topic, including his reaction to Moore’s statement. Its very good, I strongly recommend reading it.

Popularity: 51% [?]

Liberals defend many causes. They want us to back the people of various countries by giving them aid. They also advocate wealth distribution and other socialist programs. Thirdly, they want to protect the environment.

Unfortunately, here is our problem. These all conflict with each other.

Our world population stands at about 6.7 billion people and counting. The carrying capacity (for those of you without a high school education, that means the sustainable population size of a group in an area) of Earth for humans ranges between 500 million and 3 billion. That means that about 3.7 billion people extra are alive.

To make up for this, we decide to give away our “abundance” of resources to other nations. Unfortunately, these nations percieve us Western, developed nations to be a utopia of overabundance. Thus, they consume aid faster than we can provide it in such useless things as armies, genocide, weapons, beauracracy, and unnecessary goverment programs.

Well, guess what left-wingers. We’re consuming our environment’s resources faster than it can regenerate. Thus, the environment will keep shrinking and producing less, while we consume more. At the same time, if we try to share everything, we’ll just use it up faster. Some people will consume their share immediately, while others will decide to conserve their resources. Then the have-nots will demand a share from the haves, and we will keep repeating this until eventually nobody has any resources and we leave a barren, lifeless planet behind us.

There are three ways to solve this problem.

The first way, and the one I think is most effective, useful, and least infringing on my rights, is to stop sending aid to other countries, and to stop trying to share the wealth and divide everything up. Let natural selection take its course, I say, and prevent the unproductive and the unfit from reproducing. Otherwise, we favor the people whose genes are not the innovative, the intelligent, the athletic, but rather those whom reproduce the quickest. In our society, that would be people whom I personally would not trust running our government. Not only will we be able to filter out a whole bunch of people that leech off of the productive ones, but we would also be able to help conserve our resources and let them regenerate. Think about it, the people whom keep bringing back smallpox, polio, and drug resistant tuberculosis are infringing on my right to be healthy. The reason they have these is because they were too stupid to not follow the instructions of their doctors: thus, they shouldn’t be able to remain able to spread disease to me. We should let them die off quicker, so we don’t get infected.
As for those people in other countries, they can fight amongst themselves, reducing populations for us without the expenditure of my hard-earned tax-paid resources. It will also help to filter out a new generation of intelligent, hard-working peoples, instead of a generation of druggies, gangsters, warmongers, prostitutes, religious hypocrites, idiots, and disease-spreaders.

A second way to reduce populations, of course, is mass genocide. I’m not even going to discuss this one because it is too immoral for even my tastes. It would do wonders for the environment, though-all that biomass will help propogate species.

As a side note, I, unlike other libertarian-capitalist-objectivist-neocon peoples on this blog, support the environment, because without it, I wouldn’t be able to have foods, cures to diseases, oxygen, and other necessities of life. Plus, we need it to help suppress unwanted species from growing, like poison ivy, weeds, and Homo Sapiens.

The third way to control the population is to establish space colonies. Unfortunately, all the resources that may go to that are instead going to random countries to build more weapons to kill our people. Seriously, if people want money, they’re going to have to earn it by working, not by pulling strings.

And as a side note, for those whom complain at how rich children control all of the wealth anyways, one will figure that they will squander all of their money away anyways, and help to remove their stain from our gene pool.

And that’s my Darwinistic look of our world today.

Editor’s Note: Profanity was removed from this post and it was edited for further grammatical consistency at 10:45PM on 7/4/2007.  

Popularity: 46% [?]

George Mason free market economist Bryan Caplan (thats repetitive; all GMU economists advocate for the free market) had a “funny-cuz-its-true” commentary on EconLog about what he calls the “Jock-Nerd Theory of History”. Certainly worth reading:

One of my pet ideas is the Jock/Nerd Theory of History. If you’re reading this, you probably got a taste of it during your K-12 education, when your high grades and book smarts somehow failed to put you at the top of the social pyramid. Jocks ruled the school. If the nerds were lucky, they did the jocks’ homework in exchange for decent treatment.

According to the Jock/Nerd Theory of History, most historical human societies bore a striking resemblance to K-12 education. In primitive tribes, for instance, the best hunters are on top. If the the village brain knows what’s good for him, he keeps his mouth shut if the best hunter says something stupid. The rise of civilization gave the nerds a better deal, but as long as almost everyone worked in agriculture, brawn continued to pay well.

But then something amazing happened: Nerds got enough breathing room to develop and implement amazing wealth-producing ideas. The process fed on itself, devaluing physical ability and elevating mental ability. Nerds built the modern world - and won handsome financial rewards in the process. (Yes, I’m painting with broad strokes, but bear with me).

With the Jock/Nerd theory firmly in mind, this sentence takes on a deeper meaning:

We don’t take steps to redress inequalities of looks, friends, or sex life.

Notice: For financial success, the main measure where nerds now excel, governments make quite an effort to equalize differences. But on other margins of social success, where many nerds still struggle, laissez-faire prevails.

It’s suspicious - and if you combine the Jock/Nerd Theory with some evolutionary psych, it makes sense. When the best hunter in the tribe gets rich, his neighbors will probably ask nicely for a share, if they dare to ask at all. But if the biggest nerd in the tribe gets rich, how long will it take before the jocks show up and warn him that “You’d better share and share alike”?

Punchline: Through the lens of the Jock/Nerd Theory of History, the welfare state doesn’t look like a serious effort to “equalize outcomes.” It looks more like a serious effort to block the “revenge of the nerds” - to keep them from using their financial success to unseat the jocks on every dimension of social status.

P.S. If any jocks are reading this, please don’t hurt me! I’ll do your homework!

Popularity: 58% [?]

Habeas Corpus is a right that all Americans should hold dear. As with many other promises contained in the Constitution, the Writ of Habeas Corpus is one that protects the American people from their government. The only time it had previously been suspended was during the Civil War by Abraham Lincoln, and he had done so legally “in a time of war.” President Bush, however, has attempted to circumvent the rules of the Constitution by giving some terrorism suspects special treatment with an “enemy combatant” moniker. The name enables the government to treat the victim as a POW, even if s/he is an American citizen.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 aimed to “facilitate bringing to justice terrorists and other unlawful enemy combatants through full and fair trials by military commissions, and for other purposes.” Instead, however, it faciliates the deliberate destruction of several rights integral to the American tradition. Pushed through by a Republican Congress, the act has raised eyebrows at watchdog organizations like Amnesty International.

Dozens of cases like that of Jose Padilla have clogged the American military justice system as dozens of prisoners remain in Guantanamo Bay awaiting charges, not a trial. The Democrats, desperate for an election win in 2006, claimed they would repeal the bill. Still, months into a new Democratic-led majority, we’ve seen no policy change and no new direction. It seems as if the Democrats are content with revoking Habeas Corpus as well. The current Administration doesn’t understand the unconstitutionality of the bill, and nor does Congress.

Fortunately for America, the judicial system does. This week, a federal court ruled in favor of an enemy combatant, noting that the federal government could not imprison a US resident on suspicion alone. The beauty of America lies in its system of checks and balances, and, finally, the government has done its job. After Congress and the White House failed to protect individual freedoms, the courts have stepped up to the plate, finally doing what should have been done long ago.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Too often public opinion reacts with more emotion than reason to events of magnitude such as the Virginia Tech shooting of a month ago. Rather than take perspective on a monumental tragedy much of the public, the media, and politicians will move to use the event as an expedient for pushing an authoritarian agenda, and all the while they will remain oblivious to the fact that individuals have rights whose legitimacy does not waver with the breeze of public opinion.

Rights, to the contrary, are inalienable and they include not just the right to property, but the corollary right to self-defense. The right to bear arms proceeds from those two concepts: (a) the right to own the gun as property itself; and (b) the right to use it against anyone who threatens or attacks your own safety or property. Anyone who wishes to take that right away from you in the name of peace and public harmony are hypocrites, for, it is guns and force that the government itself must employ to keep its private citizens from having guns.

Let us first remember that crimes and violence are not committed because guns exist–crimes and violence exist because there are evil people in the world who believe that it is morally permissible–or expedient–to initiate force upon individuals at their own whim. Whether or not guns existed there would be crime–crimes occurred even before guns existed, believe it or not. Moreover there are even crimes committed without guns. Who would have thought? It is the people motivated to do so who are the driving force behind murder, and thus laws to limit murder must be concentrated on de-incentivizing criminal action–namely effectively enforcing the law, and strictly punishing violations thereof.

Re-examine Virginia Tech for a moment and recall that the perpetrator of the shootings, Seung-Hui Cho, was himself declared “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization” in 2005 and certified as “[presenting] an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness” by a Virginia judge. The problem at Virginia Tech was one with an individual, not with a nationwide policy of lax gun control.

And in this case, more guns may have actually been the remedy–not the cause–of such a grotesque death toll. Virginia Tech was notably a “gun-free zone” and as such it was against the rules for anyone to carry even concealed firearms on campus for the purpose of self-defense. By doing so those populating Virginia Tech were rendered helpless by anyone who carried a gun into the school with malicious intentions.

As we can see in the case of VA Tech, banning guns does nothing other than make self-defense impossible. When even a well intentioned administration makes carrying a gun illegal it makes it so only criminals will be carrying guns–and those criminals will not have any immediate barriers to their malicious intents. Gun control does not prevent crime, it incentivizes it.

Some feel that permitting a gun in the school is unsafe. But sometimes there is a difference between feeling safe and being safe. The fact remains, when administrations ban guns they also ban self defense, and in no way will that make any of us safer from those with the intent of harming us.

The fact remains that the right to own guns is enumerated in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Obviously it must have been significant to the framers if they made it the second of all rights enumerated in the constitution. During the zeitgeist of 1800 the notion of needing to seek approval from the government to own a gun would have been laughed at. As a matter of fact, gun registration was not issued in this country until after the War Between the States ended and the slaves were emancipated—why do you think that was?

Today, authoritarian intellectuals who couldn’t load and fire a rifle if their individual rights depended on it scoff at the idea that individuals need guns. “Collecting is childish–Hunting is cruel and primitive–Shooting at a range is pointless” are all conclusions we could expect gun controlists to make. Certainly collecting, hunting, and shooting on the range are all activities that must be protected by gun rights, but it wasn’t recreation for which the framers wrote the second amendment. The right to bear arms was perhaps the single most important check on government power written into the constitution. In light of a violent separation from an overbearing government the framers recognized that the last resort to protect the people from a monstrous dictatorship—whose power itself derived from its use of force–was to give the people the power to fight back against it. And to reserve that right it must give them the right to bear arms, because if the government were ever to effectively ban the ownership of guns there would be no power left to keep it from overrunning all individual freedom.

Popularity: 73% [?]

I’m at the Personal Democracy Forum at Pace University in New York City right now watching a group seminar with Jay Rosen, Mike Connell, Jeff Jarvis, and Walter Fields. I’ll be publishing more thoughts about this morning’s sessions and what was said later this evening and over the weekend. Jay Rosen, founder of NewAssignment.net and AssignmentZero, is discussing both projects and his new partnership with the Huffington Post. Today, Rosen has given the project a name. OfftheBus, the project’s new name, will be a collaboration between NewAssignment.net and the Huffington Post in an effort to bring the public the best election coverage. Arianna Huffington was unable to make PdF today although she was a scheduled speaker. Rosen cited that he believed that having over forty independent bloggers in cities around the country to cover the elections would be a far better alternative than having one journalist stay with the presidential campaign.

The new website will help to foster new media interaction in the presidential campaigns, something that’s been sorely lacking in recent campaigns. Will 2008 be the year of the democratization of election coverage? According to several of the panelists, new breakthroughs in media and pilot projects like Rosen’s NewAssignment and AssignmentZero signal what’s to come. Jeff Jarvis, both an old media pioneer and a champion of new media causes, seems to approve of Rosen’s new project with several reservations. The audience seems to have come to the same consensus. Only time, however, will tell if the distributed reporting in the 2008 elections will hold up to that of professional reporters.

Popularity: 92% [?]

For all the obvious inferences attached to the word, the very idea of secession is widely repudiated in American culture–except maybe in some areas of the nostalgic deep south. But recent murmers of secessionist sentiments in the state of Vermont have revealed the issue to a larger audience. In a Washington Post op-ed from Sunday, two secessionists–Ian Baldwin and Frank Bryan–enumerate the reasons for which they wish the “state of Vermont” to become the “Republic of Vermont”:

Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders and eroded Americans’ fundamental freedoms.

Vermont did not join the Union to become part of an empire.

Some of us therefore seek permission to leave.

The point being made, in essence, is that the Government of the Union has become too big and too coercive and has simultaneously infringed upon state and individual rights and thus Vermont no longer wishes to leave.

Secession lacks legitimacy in the court of public opinion because Americans unconditionally attach the idea to the old slave south; but in all their endless ignorance, the masses have made an unnecessary association. Perhaps America’s memory only can stretch as far back as the War Between the States; perhaps it forgets how America was born–it suceded from the British Empire. If the first American patriots did not believe that secession was a viable political tool, then we would have been under the tyranny of empire for generations more.

The point I am trying to make here is not that Vermont should seceed from the Union–quite frankly Vermont is no special state and demonstrates few viable, exceptional characteristics that give reason for its separation.  Rather, as an aspect of political theory, the idea of cedession is very viable and should be viewed with perspective and analyzed with rationality, for if a region presents itself as legitimately more free than the nation as whole it has the right to “declare the causes which impel them to the separation” and procede to do so.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Schools in the UK are planning to drop the required teaching of the Holocaust and the Crusades in an effort to dodge any criticism from religious parents. One school was “strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the State of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination.”

The teachers who refuse to explain to students the seriousness of these issues, out of fear from any religion, should immediately have their teaching certificates revoked and be fired. Schools have an essential responsibility to society to provide an unbiased understanding of society and prepare children for life in the real world. This is one reason why I disagree with certain private schools, as they are allowed to bend what’s taught. However, with true “separation”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church-state_separation of religion and state, there should not, in any circumstance, be the removal or addition of curriculum simply based on religion. Private schools provide a venue for religious teachings. This should not be intersecting with secular, government-run schools.

This argument is quite similar to the Kansas School Department agreeing to teach intelligent design, alongside evolution, based on the demands of local Christian parents. It’s not right to advocate a theology that completely eschews the fundamentals of science. It should not be part of the science curriculum, just as schools should not be sidestepping history in the history curriculum. Something as important to the 21st century as the Holocaust simply cannot be ignored into today’s world.

The UK Department of Education’s submission to the religious demands is simply sickening and deplorable to the fundamentals of true, transparent education. This should not be happening anywhere in the world. The people of England should be demanding that ALL of their schools refuse to rewrite history just because a few loud theologists demand it, out of respect to their religious beliefs. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Popularity: 70% [?]