blog.wobbles.org

Don't Reform; Abolish.

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I sent a feedback email to the US Travel Association, whose president yesterday attended a Senate Committee hearing:

US Travel Association president Roger Dow on November 2nd attended a Senate Committee Hearing, calling for reform of the TSA.

The TSA does not need to be reformed; it needs to be abolished. Private businesses have enormous incentive to keep their customers safe and secure. Customers also demand to be treated with dignity and respect. Businesses which cannot devise a way to keep customers safe without meeting both criteria will do worse than businesses which can. As a result, removing the TSA and putting the responsibility on the airlines will result in the most secure, respectful, and convenient security methods rising to the top. Customers will be happier with their treatment and satisfied with the quality of their security, and as a result the airlines will see more customers.

I avoid flying as much as possible. Being manhandled and treated like a criminal by the TSA is so unpleasant to me that I would rather spend more money and time traveling halfway across the country by car just to avoid passing through a TSA checkpoint to get on an airplane.

The TSA will never be effective. They do not answer to us, the customer. They do not care if we’re unhappy. It’s irrelevant to them if their methods make us averse to flying. We are not the customer, we are the enemy. We’re only potential terrorists or criminals.

Reform will not put more people on airplanes. It will not change the TSA’s mandate, which is strictly to perform security theater to make us feel safer. It will not change their attitude toward us. It will not change the tyrannical demeanor their authority gives them, or the somber air of fear their presence in the airport creates. Push for what will really help your industry: the complete abolition of the TSA.

The Right to Starve Your Kids

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Ron Paul only has one stance I can think of that I fundamentally disagree with, and that’s his stance on abortion.

Natural rights, the cornerstone of libertarianism, comes down to a single issue: property. Given the absolute right to own and defend justly owned property, we inevitably reach the non-aggression principle which states that no one may initiate force or violence against the just property of another.

These fundamental rights make no judgement as to the morality of how you use them. Anyone can spew hateful, vile, reprehensible speech which is racist, obscene, vulgar, and offensive. They can express a desire for the extermination of a class of people, insult your mother’s physique, praise a murderous dictator like Hitler. We may find it offensive and wrong, but they have the right. Or, put another way, we have no right to interfere. If someone is not aggressing against us, we have no standing under Natural Law to stop their activity.

So the only real question is, what defines aggression? The trespass or destruction of your property against your will. Is it an aggressive act to walk by a man bleeding to death in the street without stopping to help? No, it is not. We may say it is reprehensible and vile, that a man who would do such a thing is the antithesis of morality. But what we may not say is that he does not have the right to withhold his aid.

If that person on the street is a child, it does not change this fact. If that child is the man’s son, it does not change this fact. If that child was previously inside a woman’s womb it does not change this fact.

It may be repulsive to be forced to accept, but in order to have a consistent view of rights no one may be forced to assist or care for another against their will. Not even for the sake of a child. The sick may not force doctors to cure them, the hungry may not force farmers to feed them, the poor may not force the rich to fund them. Being forced to provide for a child is no different, in spite of our natural and instinctual desire to defend and protect them, in spite of their innocence or lack of ability to fend for themselves.

Which makes my argument against abortion simple. Regardless of the consequence to the unborn child, it doesn’t have a right to the mother’s womb. If she no longer wants it, she is within her rights to remove it as it is now trespassing. From a rights point of view she has no obligation to consider the consequences of expressing her right to her property in her own body. Again, we may morally berate her; but we may not use force to keep her from aborting.

So if I am saying that parents are not aggressing against children by aborting them or withholding care; am I saying parents everywhere who think their kids cost too much should just stop feeding them, or should cancel a pregnancy because it’s inconvenient? Of course not. They should sell them.

God Doesn't Act

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

In an article in a WSJ blog about one of my personal heroes, Penn Jillette, the author discusses Penn’s atheism, which is a theme of his new book God No!, Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales.

My comment:

Praying in particular I don’t understand. If God is omniscient, he doesn’t need you to tell him what you’re thinking or what you desire. He knows better than you do. But more interestingly than that is a logical conclusion arrived at by understanding action and its purpose. What is action? It is man attempting to make a change to his environment to remove some felt unease. If man felt no unease, he would be content, and would not act. Man feels unease because he is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and his environment is unsatisfactory to fulfill his desires.

An omnipotent, omniscient being such as God, therefore would not act. There would be no desires to fulfill, because his desires would dictate his environs without action. Hence, what good is prayer or worship when your God does not act? If he exists and is omnipotent and omniscient, present conditions will always satisfy him, else they would not have occurred.

What strikes me as odd are the number of devoutly religious austro-libertarians. I basically stole that point directly out of Human Action, yet nearly all the big Austrian names are religious, and many of them enough so that they have written entire books on the subject. With human reason being such a strong part of the foundation of Austrians and Libertarians, it’s surprising to me that many are so strongly religious. Poking holes such as this into religion is trivial when you apply a little reason to the picture.

Perhaps I should read some of their books about religion and see if they discuss these kinds of logical conundrums. It would be fascinating to see the ways they contort themselves to explain them away.

On "Freedoms"

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Over at HuffPo, there’s a piece up that’s actually pro Ron Paul. I made a dire mistake though, and read some of the comments. Before I could stop myself, I was hitting the reply button in response to this gem:

I can admire Ron Paul for his candor and consistency. I don’t think there’s a political bone in his body, unlike the othe [sic] snakes on that stage. The man says what he means.

And I agree with his stance on the wars.

On everything else I loathe his policies. He wants to dismantle the government, which is the only mechanism We The People have to pool our collective resources as a nation and to protect ourselves from Corporate tyranny. He defines freedom as freedom of the wealthy to do whatever the hell they want without any restrictions or responsibility as citizens. Whites only lunch counters, anyone?

In Ron Paul world, if you want access to the ideals of the US Constitution you have to purchase them. Freedom from want, freedom from hunger, freedom from discrimination, freedom from fear, freedom from servitude – these are only available to the rich and powerful.

Ugh. Several errors to go after there, all of which would take up a blog post, but I focused on his concept of “freedoms”:

Only one of those is an actual freedom. People have a confused definition of freedom (and rights), because they use the word with different meanings, and then conflate the meanings as interchangeable.

The first four are totally impossible “freedoms.”

Freedom from want? At its face this is absurd. The human condition is want. Every action we take is an attempt to relieve some felt unease, to further our conditions and improve our lives. To not want is to not act. It is a state of perfect contentedness. It is impossible.

Freedom from hunger sounds good, but who is to provide it? If this were a real right, everyone could simultaneously enjoy it. If you’re lost at sea with no land visible for miles, you’re likely to get hungry. How are you to enjoy this “right” or “freedom” to not be hungry then? It is clearly not possible.

Discrimination… We discriminate with every action we take, every day, choosing one over another. When interviewing for a job we discriminate against unskilled or inept applicants in favor of hard-working and intelligent applicants. We discriminate when we buy groceries, picking the cereal that suits us best in terms of cost, flavor and nutrition, over those which are less adequate. Sure, I know you mean against race, sex, or whatever else… But where exactly does it end? There will always be discrimination based on something, it is our very nature to identify more satisfactory over less satisfactory.

These are all what are called “positive rights.” A positive right is one which obligates another to do something on their behalf. One which requires another to give them special treatment, or permits someone to take from another. By definition they cannot apply to everyone equally.

Positive rights are not rights at all. They are fantasies, hopeful visions of perfect equality and utopia in which there is no scarcity, and no human flaws.

All true rights are negative rights. That means they do not require another to act, they just prohibit one from aggressing against another; from initiating violence against their fellow man.

Which brings us to your last freedom. Freedom from servitude. That one, you nailed. That’s a real freedom, a true right. No one has the right to enslave you, to force you to do things against your will, to take from you that which is not theirs. Yet this is the very definition of government, and exactly what Ron Paul is trying to fight.

Unfortunately, the full thing wouldn’t fit so I had to trim it down rather a lot. You got the director’s edition.

Refuting Rapid-Fire Demagoguary

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I cannot for the life of me remember where I found this quote, but I’m guessing it was Hazlitt or Hayek or someone of the sort: “The problem with socialism is that their fallacies can be stated in a single sentence, but they take a lifetime to refute.”

This column by Steven Pearlstein is an excellent example of this phenomenon, in rapid-fire form. He spews out a dozen assertions, each of which you could write an entire novel refuting.

Here’s my response, which I emailed him:

Your column, “The Magical World of Voodoo ‘Economists’” completely lacks substance. You make numerous claims that various programs are good and equate to progress, but nowhere in your column do you even attempt to explain why.

Reading your column paints me a picture of a person who believes anything done by the government counts as progress. I take it you support Guantanamo and torture? Internment camps for the Japanese Americans in WW2? Maybe you support the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The wars being fought in Afghanistan, Libya, and so on? Supporter of Citizens-United perhaps? If any of these developments are bad ones, what exactly makes the ones you refer to not? Surely you believe some of the 20th (or 21st) century really SHOULD be repealed; that we made some mistakes. That’s all these candidates believe, you just happen not to agree with what they believe didn’t or doesn’t work.

Without explaining any of why you believe those things are all good and proper, you do your reader no favors. You are simply a propaganda mouthpiece. I implore you to fight your battles in the realm of ideas and critical thought, not to stoop to demagoguery and sound bites.

I’ll just leave you with a few points, and I’ll try to be brief.

Social Security: The trust fund is a farce. Members of the Social Security Board of Trustees have admitted it. They also will admit that Social Security does, as Perry claimed, function exactly the same way as a Ponzi scheme. The difference they will say, is a matter of intent. But that’s only partially true. The bigger difference is in a Ponzi scheme, once you know what it is you have the option to get out. Look at the arguments they were making about the Social Security tax and the trust fund when its constitutionality was first called into question, and compare them to now. You will find a complete 180 in their positions if you do the research. If present day claims had been made then, it would have been struck down as unconstitutional.

Great Depression: Contrary to popular belief, Hoover was not a small government guy. Did you know FDR actually ran against Hoover on a platform of less intervention and government? Hoover didn’t leave things alone by any measure imaginable. He did exactly what FDR did. Want to know a secret? There was a severe recession in 1920. Want to know why you’ve never heard of it? Because Harding did almost nothing, and the economy recovered in six months.

Federal Reserve: It hasn’t actually done so great a job of providing us stability. Have you had your head in the ground the past four years? Hard to refute your defense of it since you don’t bother to provide one, but a real and honest discussion about how effective the Federal Reserve has actually been seems perfectly reasonable and healthy to me.

16th amendment: We got along just fine without income taxes for hundreds of years. Personally I think both the people and the economy would be better off getting to keep what they earn. Seems to me that the burden of proof for the necessity of taking people’s hard earned money from them should lay with those doing the taking.

17th amendment: There was a good reason for not having senators popularly elected. Democracy is not a perfect system, not even a great system. It leads to a tyranny of the majority. Which is why the founders set the US up as a Republic; they recognized this simple fact. Having senators accountable to the states rather than the people allowed the states to have a voice in the process. The people are already represented through the House, that was its purpose.

I could go on, or into more detail on a given point, but I hope you at least get the idea. Portraying them as kooks to further your own agenda is just disappointing. I hope you’ll make a shift in integrity and try some honest intellectual debate in the future.

Easy Street

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

There’s a road near my office called Easy Street. I don’t know if it’s the real name of the road (I suspect it isn’t) because there isn’t a street sign, just a big stone mailbox with a pretty painted tile that says “Easy St” in the yard at the corner of the T intersection. I wonder how often they pull up after a hard or long day and roll their eyes at their own unofficial street sign.

People have a tendency to be optimistic. It’s true. You may watch the news, listen to talk radio, or read a blog and think I am crazy to say this, that the world is full of cynics and pessimists. Well, it is. As contradictory as that sounds, there’s a piece which connects the two: people are optimistic that there is a solution, but pessimistic as to whether that solution will actually be put into place.

Unfortunately, what I’m complaining about today is the optimism. Too frequently peoples’ desire to see the world as a potential utopia blinds them to reality.

The particular example I’d like to point out is America’s debt crisis. The right thing to do is reign in spending, stop printing money, let interest rates rise and even default, if necessary. A typical talking head on a mainstream opinion show would look at you aghast if you proposed these measures. “Why, that would be a disaster for the economy!” True, it would be, you might concede, right before pointing out that we’re headed for a bigger disaster anyway.

It is incomprehensible to some people that some pain might be necessary, and attempting to avoid it might just make things worse. If you’ve got a life-threatening tumor and require a painful procedure to remove it, you’ve only got two choices, both of them painful. Sometimes there just isn’t an easy way out.

Voting Sucks–But isn't Pointless

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I sympathize with people who don’t vote. I understand their principles, their contempt for an unfair and unjust system. I share much of their attitude towards it. Despite what we were taught in public schools, and the rhetoric constantly spewed from the maw of the establishment, democracy is not an infallible system. True democracy is simply tyranny of the majority. The founders of America understood this; which is why we are a republic.

There’s one argument I hear from the anti-voting crowd that I don’t like, however. It goes like this: Your vote has never and almost certainly never will matter. No important election has ever been decided by a single vote. Presidential elections have only been swayed by one particular state a handful of times, and that particular state never by just one vote. Because your vote will never matter, you shouldn’t bother to, they say.

There are a few elements of this I’d like to consider. The first thing which I think is overlooked is the meaning of the phrase. What does it mean to say your vote does or does not “matter?” The view taken by those who proclaim that your vote doesn’t is that the only way for your vote to “matter” is for it to be the sole factor in determining the outcome of an election. If your vote isn’t the tiebreaker, it doesn’t “matter.”

I for one, discount this assertion. If a man is drowning, does any singular drop of water in his lungs matter? If someone is bleeding to death, does any particular drop of blood lost matter? If a woman develops radiation poisoning from a few thousand chest x-rays being done in the course of an hour, did any single x-ray matter? I’d say in every case, yes they do matter. None may have borne the sole responsibility for the outcome, but their contribution did have an effect even if in isolation it may have been harmless.

These might be attacked as fallacies of division; that I am insisting what is true for the group must be true for the individual. This is a fair consideration, and shouldn’t be dismissed. However, I feel it is important to reiterate, I am mostly concerned with the meaning of the word “matters.” I dispute that for something to matter, it must be the final arbiter. Contributions matter. If I am carving a statue, I don’t feel that the first chip out of the block is irrelevant just because it didn’t produce the end result. It was a factor on the way toward the end result, and is therefore important and necessary.

Indulge me briefly in a thought experiment. Ten Americans are dropped on a deserted island. Being patriotic sheep, they’re convinced democracy is the Best Thing Ever and they should vote on every issue. Things go smoothly for awhile, until they come to notice one of the castaways is contributing very little, and consuming a lot. Encouragement, admonishment, and supervision fail to effectively change his behavior. Frustrated, the individual the castaways look to for leadership calls a vote: he proposes they should put the slothful member of the group to death; he is nothing but a burden.

Although a radical proposition, the charismatic leader drums up sufficient support: 7 of the 10 castaways vote to put the lazy parasite to death. Now, let us pause and consider. For a principled libertarian, and hopefully nearly any moral person, execution is a completely unjustifiable punishment. However, the view that votes don’t matter should hold that none of them can be held accountable for the outcome of the vote. The winners had a sufficient majority to avoid a tie, even if one of them had decided not to vote, or voted differently. If none of their votes “mattered” they are absolved of responsibility at an individual level.

A final thought on the subject. Even if we assume that it is true to say that a single vote does not matter unless it directly affects the outcome by breaking a tie, we can only know if those conditions exist in hindsight. The odds of such a thing happening may be infinitesimally small, but they do exist. You cannot therefore claim unilaterally and definitively that your vote doesn’t matter until after the fact.

In the ancient arenas of Greece the crowd would display their thumbs to signify either mercy or death for a defeated gladiator. If they thought he fought bravely and deserved mercy, they would point their thumbs in the air; if not, they would point them down. This is the origin of the modern “thumbs up” and “thumbs down.” It was a death sentence carried out by a majority, by democracy.

I have no great love of democracy, it is merely the force of the majority taking what they wish from a minority. But whatever system we have, regardless of how flawed, we should always do what we can from within to reform it into something better. One tool at our disposal is voting, and while I have enormous respect for anyone who exercises their right to withhold their vote, I reject the idea that voting is a specious or pointless activity.

The Theory of Capitalism

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Capitalism is often a misrepresented concept. It’s usually seen as an ideology or economic system, created and maintained by people of power. A country can be socialist, communist, or capitalist. The issue I have with the aforementioned prototypical grouping is that capitalism does not fit. This is because capitalism is a theory to describe human behavior, rather than a system to be incorporated.

Let us take a simple example. Imagine if you will a totalitarian society, wherein every member is given what he needs to survive. Would the members of this society have precisely the same interests? Would none of them hope to further their own interests through trade? Perhaps one member of the society is frequently cold and would like to trade some of the provided food for a blanket. This barter, and indeed ny choice one makes is a simplistic example of capitalism: everyone seeks to further their own interests with their time and resources. They seek profit.

To take the concept further, you can apply it to any action a person takes. A student who chooses to study all weekend instead of join his friends on a vacation might say, “this exam cost me a trip to the Bahamas.” He made a value judgment between the two actions, and speculated that studying for the exam would result in a more preferable action. If the student is afterward dissatisfied with his choice to study (perhaps he would have easily passed the exam regardless), he may consider the missed trip to the Bahamas a loss. It is important to note he could not be certain ahead of time, just as an entrepreneur would not be in choosing to start a new business.

The takeaway is simple. It is human nature to behave in a capitalist manner. It is not something which should be scorned or used as a scapegoat; it’s rational, elegant, and beautiful. When we limit our interference with this natural phenomenon everyone is better off.

Life Isn't Fair

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

It seems to me a general theme of liberal policy is focused on fairness, or balancing perceived inequalities. The arguments tend to be rather infantile: Everyone should get health care, it’s not fair to poor to deny them. Letting businesses lobby is unfair because they have lots of money. It’s unfair for businesses to discriminate, the government should force them not to.

Some people have more money than others. Sometimes it really isn’t fair: born into a wealthy home versus a poor home is beyond your control. This is of course why they say life isn’t fair. This isn’t something that can or should be legislated away. It’s impossible to make life perfectly fair and equal for everyone.

The problem with people’s obsession with fairness is they fail to properly determine exactly what should be fair; and the answer it turns out is stunningly simple. There is in fact one thing which not only should be fair, but must be fair: laws.

Laws must apply to everyone equally, or they cannot possibly be fair or just. Yet we have huge programs which blatantly defy this truth, created in the name of fairness: Medicare/medicaid and social security are unfair for many reasons. They are demonstrably unsustainable, they force everyone into them regardless of their preference, and even if they were sustainable some people will die before they can collect. The ADA and anti discrimination laws target specific groups, forcing one to treat the other a certain way or cater to them; by their very existence they don’t affect everyone equally. It is a sad irony that these kinds of laws actually foster and create discrimination of a different sort.

You cannot legislate the world into being fair; and attempting to do so begets numerous unintended consequences. Focus less on the folly of trying to force an unfair world otherwise, and more on fundamental rights when examining proposed legislation. While the latter may sometimes seem at odds with the former, it will counter-intuitively yet assuredly result in a more free, prosperous, and ultimately fair world.

Principled Libertarianism

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Very recently, within the past few months, I became what I call a principled libertarian. Rothbard would probably describe it as Anarcho-capitalism. I discovered a few ideas and principals which I had prior not clearly recognized. My beliefs have mostly not changed, but I’ve dug down to the root of them and unearthed the foundation they’re built upon. It gives me a much clearer understanding of why I believe the things I do, and in circumstances where I’m presented with new problems, a starting point.

Is it common for people to have this luxury I now possess? My inclination is to say the average person does not, but I cannot be certain this is not for the selfish reason of wanting to believe I’m not stupid for taking 26 years to finally stumble upon the truth.

So what is this truth, the idea behind my so-called principled libertarianism and Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism? Put simply, property rights. At the center of any philosophical discussion I’m engaged in, I side with the position which advocates absolute property rights. From intellectual property to capital punishment to animal rights to abortion, all of my positions can be traced back to my belief in a property owner’s absolute right to control his own scarce resources and defend them from aggression or invasion.

I could give in-depth analysis on how each of the above subjects can be traced back to property rights, but for now here’s the basic gist of each:

Intellectual Property: Ideas are a non-scarce resource, and thus not subject to property rights. Attempting to treat them otherwise forces upon others restrictions on how to use their own property; effectively ceding exclusive control of their property to another without consent.

Capital Punishment: A crime is an act of aggression against another person’s property: be it damages, trespass, or theft. The victim is the only one with a reasonable claim to punish the aggressor, because it is his property rights which have been violated (through the concept of self-ownership, each individual’s body is their property, and they therefore retain the exclusive right to its control and defense). In the case of murder, the victim has been removed from the debate: in this case, either an heir or the victim’s will would decide to what extent to punish the aggressor.

Animals’ Rights: This is the one way in which rights are not universal; they do not extend beyond the human species. The reason is simple: animals do not respect any property rights whatsoever, and operate based on their own necessities exclusively. They are not rational or even (in most cases) self-aware. We will recognize the property rights of animals whenever they petition for them.

Abortion: This one is sort of complex, but to be as brief as possible: where life begins is irrelevant. If a fetus is alive and unwanted (regardless of at what point in the pregnancy it becomes unwanted), it immediately becomes a trespasser and invader to the woman’s property, and given that she has the exclusive right to control her body then she may expel it. Note that I make no judgment on the personal morality of this scenario, only on the larger immorality denying the woman’s natural right would be.

I’ll probably post about each of these four things and go into more detail on each another time.