Look How Important I Am

I just got off IM with a friend of mine in China and he told me the government's decided LL&L shouldn't be allowed for public consumption. It's kind of funny; most libertarians see the Internet as a sort of Mecca. It's where government regulation is difficult or, for some things, impossible. It's where ideas and energy meld into a dynamic world culture. It's a virtual version of what we'd like to see in the real world. But in the place that needs the tough questions the most is the place where it's hardest to get them.

I told Tony I'm honored to be blocked by the Chinese government and I thought it was strange that was my first response. If this happened in the States I'd be angry and outraged, but we've come to expect this from China. Hell, I almost want to thank them; it's a sort of mark of pride to be blocked by an oppressive regime. I wonder if we're blocked in Cuba?

Damn Lies and Secrets

Enemies are everywhere, we’re told. Deep dark monsters loom in the shadows, some sanctioned by governments and others nothing more than angry men with bombs.

But it’s never as bad as we’re told it is. Experts exaggerate to keep us in line or to scare us so we buy their counsel. Sometimes they go over the top so no one can blame them for not crying wolf when the shit finally does hit the fan and sometimes scare tactics crop up because it’s expected. Paranoia is rarely justified.

Fear knows no boundaries, no matter how absurd. Today on Kudlow & Company, Jerry Taylor from the Cato Institute and Frank Caffney from the Center for Security Policy exchanged opinions about CNOOC’s buying of Unocal. CNOOC is a Chinese oil and gas company; American Unocal also focuses on those energy commodities.

Caffney accuses CNOOC of being a puppet of the Chinese government (they are heavily subsidized) and this acquisition is but a step in an economic attack of epic proportions. I wish I kept track the number of time he said “strategic,” but it was a great deal.

Taylor made the very good point that you can’t control a market as wide and deep and vague as energy, but he didn’t push it hard enough. If, in the unlikely event, that this is just part of the much larger puzzle and “they” are trying to take our energy, then we have nothing to worry about it. There are endless alternatives to oil and gas; even if I were to make the paranoid assumption that everyone was out to get us, they cannot plunge us into darkness.

It’s fitting that Rep. Richard Pombo suggested that this deal could be the Sputnik of our time. Sputnik I orbited the earth for less than six months. It did little more than gather information about electron density in the ionosphere. It wasn’t a spy satellite, nor could it fire lasers from space. It had absolutely no military application at all. Like this deal, all the danger is in the fear-monger’s heads.

Saving 51 Billion Dollars a Year: Priceless

Tell me if this sounds familiar:
Disposable gloves: $30
Teddy bear: $60
Toothbrush: $1,000

Remember when we heard about the military charging erroneous prices for the most mundane items? But these aren’t for the latest soldier’s personal kit. They’re items from a medical bill.

Yesterday morning on Dolan Unscripted, the Dolans talked about rip-offs, ending with these grievous errors on hospital bills. According to the National Healthcare Anti-Fraud Association, some $51 billion was lost to fraud and overcharging.

These are hardly honest mistakes and point to why some libertarians would like to see health care completely pulled out of the public sector. Not only would more competition lower prices and improve quality, these kinds of errors would be far less likely. I’m not going to worry about a $1,000 toothbrush if it’s not my money, but I’ll be damned if I spend that much at Wal-Mart.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

I heard on the radio that the Illinois man who grabbed a girl’s arm was deemed a sex offender by the state court last week. It happened because the kid ran out in the street without checking for cars and the guy got out of his car to give her a lecture on traffic safety. He never committed actual sex acts against the girl.

So how is he an offender? The court claimed that this act of parenting often leads to rape. Thus he is guilty without even committing a crime.

If the incident happened in one of the several Florida cities with segregation laws, the man would be forced to move to one of the few neighborhoods without a school. This leaves very few choices. That’s a stiff punishment for someone who was just trying to save a kid’s life.

No one thinks sexual offenders are good things for the world to have. But we shouldn’t throw away our core values in a hapless pursuit of a child-proof society.

Check out this editorial for more information.

15 Minutes

I'm writing this 15 minutes before the 4th just to make sure I'll post it in time. However you celebrate tomorrow (if at all) we should all respect how others choose to, even if we disagree with it or find it insult (as long as others aren't being harmed and so forth). There is perhaps no holiday where that attitude is more appropriate.

But if you want something more than watching things explode, I suggest you do what I do every 4th: read the Declaration of Indepedence. I find that document to be more fulfilling and celebratory than all the fireworks in the world.

Libertarianism in 30 Seconds

An IHS alumn wanted to create a wikipedia entry that would serve as a forum for discovering an "elevator definition" of classical liberal. An elevator definition is an explanation of a word or idea that's short enough to convey in an elevator ride. The rule of thumb is a thirty second time limit.

This is a valued project as most people don't know what a libertarian is and have little interest in discovering what it means to be one. But the wiki people rightly concluded this is not what the online encyclopedia is for.

Thus I offer LL&L as a forum. This post will be labeled under "Ongoing Posts" to the right so users can update and reference the discussion with ease.

If you comment using the "Anonymous" option, please sign your name at the end to make responding less confusing unless you want to remain nameless.

Driving While Resurfacing

If libertarians really want to make a freer society instead of daydreaming about it, perhaps we should focus on how ridiculous the law can be with a comical but true story.

Yesterday afternoon a police officer followed up on a call that someone was erratically driving a Zamboni in a local ice rink. When the cop arrived at the scene the driver was having lunch with a friend. Noticing tell-tale signs of alcohol use the officer administered a blood test on the man who registering .04 points above the legal limit. He was arrested for drunk driving.

If the goal of drunk driving laws is to keep us safe, how is arresting this man—who drove in a private space with no one else around and didn’t go faster than nine miles an hour (a Zamboni's max speed)—pose a threat to anyone? It doesn’t, of course, but I’ll guarantee you that it will be included in arrest statistics that area politicians will cite to convince the public they are safer.

Superheroes of Liberty

While waiting at the airport last week for the flight home, I got into a discussion with some IHSers about super heroes. It made me think of The Dark Knight Returns, a comic a friend of mine once told me about. In this grimy future, Superman is the lackey of a US President and Batman is retired, though he returns to his crime fighting ways in part one.

By the fourth part, Superman is deployed to Latin America to put down a military force on a small island. This leads to the USSR launching a nuclear warhead which will unleash an EM pulse and shut down electricity to North America. Chaos reigns in the streets and Batman leads an army of followers to restore order in Gotham City. The government sees Batman as an embarrassment and a threat and sends Superman to put him down.

Batman vs. Superman captures eternal struggle between liberty and force. Batman is businessman. As a loner, he’s not a big fan of authority. He donates to private charities. He’s a vigilante. He even saved the notes that would become Human Action from the Nazis. Batman is a libertarian.

Superman is a little trickier at first. In the first Superman movie, his dad tells him that if he helps people all the time they won’t know how to help themselves. A very libertarian theme. But if you look deeper, that’s about all Superman has in common with classical liberals. Superman thinks of people as weak; Clark Kent personifies his view of humanity. He enforces whatever the law says. In a recent Justice League Unlimited episode, Superman sternly says he’d “never fight the government,” not even if Lex Luther was elected president. Speaking of Luther, Superman’s main villain is a businessman. And like many people’s view of government, Superman can do almost anything masterfully. Superman is a statist.

In The Dark Knight Returns, Batman dons a super-suit powered by kryptonite to fight Superman. Does kryptonite resemble reason as the only force that can smash statism? I doubt it was intended in such a way but it certainly works. Something to ponder.

Welcome To the Family

Astute visitors to LL&L would notice that there are two new blogs under IHS Alumni: FLOW, penned by Michael Strong, and Cantillon’s Paradise, authored by David Skarbek. One can only hope they reciprocate.

I met both these sharp guys I met at last week’s seminar and I encourage all of you to add their sites to your regular blogging ritual.

Mike is the Director of Educational Programs at the Institute and doesn’t look much like his picture. David is an anarco-capitialist, as opposed to myself who’s a minarchist. Clearly there’s potential for a catchy-titled debate: David vs. David where we explore the right role (if any) of government. I’m certainly interested in having this debate, though I don’t know how we’d do it. I’d also have to find some Prozac so I could be mentally accustomed to the idea of defending the state. Whoa.

By the way David, where did you get that Calvin cartoon on the June 21st posting?

Speaking of Tom Cruise

This is just funny.

I'm Back

And I have stories. At the top of list is James Buchanan who spoke at the seminar. His speech was about religion, libertarianism and how they actually meld together very well. It’s a shame, he says, that most libertarians are suspicious of religion because the two can work so well together.

Libertarians claim no authority over others thus people can believe what they want without conflict. Communism, on the other hand, requires the populace to lionize the government, crowding out any prospect of competition. There is only one moral authority and that’s Big Brother. Libertarians simply do not claim to be so god-like.

It’s a good, though underdeveloped, point and it was swimming in my mind as I prepared to get caught up in the news. And what do I see? Scientologist Tom Cruise battering Matt Lauer on the Today Show about antidepressants. Matt questioned Cruise’s comments concerning Brooke Shields, who admitted such drugs helped her with depression, and everything went to hell. Some quotes:

Cruise: No, you see. Here's the problem. You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do.

Cruise: The thing that I'm saying about Brooke is that there's misinformation, okay. And she doesn't understand the history of psychiatry. She doesn't understand in the same way that you don't understand it, Matt.

Lauer: But a little bit of what you're saying Tom is, you say you want people to do well. But you want them do to well by taking the road that you approve of, as opposed to a road that may work for them.
Cruise: No, no, I'm not.
Lauer: Well, if antidepressants work for Brooke Shields, why isn't that okay?
Cruise: I disagree with it. And I think that there's a higher and better quality of life. [Emphasis added]

Cruise: Matt. Matt, Matt, you don't even — you're glib. You don't even know what Ritalin is.

Lauer: But you're now telling me that your experiences with the people I know, which are zero, are more important than my experiences.
Cruise: What do you mean by that?
Lauer: You're telling me what's worked for people I know or hasn't worked for people I know. I'm telling you, I’ve lived with these people and they're better.
Cruise: So, you're advocating it.

See how he turned that around to an outrageous accusation so he didn’t have to answer the question? There’s an overwhelming arrogance in Tom’s words as he echoes the beliefs of his faith. Anyone that disagrees with him is just ignorant or stupid. He cannot be wrong. I don’t claim that all scientologists are egotistical jerks, but some institutions are more prone to such individuals than others.

This is why libertarians are so suspicious of religion because most of it is based on telling people how to live their lives. Some beliefs aren’t so superior and with no one claiming Ultimate Authority, libertarianism meshes well with them. But others would like nothing better than to strip away a person’s freedom to determine how they will live their lives. Libertarians can respect the belief, but not the attitude; that’s the problem.

Off To the East

Starting tomorrow I'll be in Virginia for an IHS workshop on social change and won't be back until the 24th. I suggest your take this week to browse our extensive archives; the summer of last year was particularly active. Have fun.

Letters to a Libertarian

I don’t know when it happened, but at some point I became a conservative.

At least that’s what the Conservative Book Club thinks. I got a letter a few weeks ago from them offering to a copy of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History if I sign up for their organization. From what I understand, the Guide is actually a pretty good book and tells some economic truths about the New Deal and the Marshal Plan.

That’s not all because this is where things get strange. By now I’m used to being thought of as a conservative for those who don’t know what a libertarian is, but this is the first time someone thought books authored by Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and David Limbaugh would be a tempting offer. That’s right. I can get great deals on books by those who advise shouting matches rather than calm communication with liberals, believe the Patriot Act doesn’t violate civil liberties and insist marrying whomever you wish isn’t a right, respectively.

As usual in politics, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing because a few days ago I got a letter asking me to subscribe to the American Free Press, a liberal newspaper. The AFP piece tried to sell me with phrases like “corporate elite” and “Media Monopoly” (their capitalization).

Here’s a bit of free advice: if you are an organization that proudly advocates one side of the aisle or the other, then focus on economic liberty (for the right) or civic liberty (for the left) to get the libertarian dollars. If you want to paint yourself as freedom-loving in general, then stop it because you’re both pretty crappy at it.

House Develops Conscience

The House voted to limit the Patriot Act as it pertains to libraries and bookstores. Finally. Now all they have to do is remove the nine billion other over-extended laws--and get the Senate and Pres to cooperate--and then we'll be getting somewhere.

Of course, that's unlikely because the President has already threatened to veto the change. If what Mr. Bush says is right, that the terrorists hate us for our freedom, then why is the Administration so bent on making us less free?

Get Out Your Checkbook

While it looks like tropical storm Arlene won't be turning into a hurricane, she is a tumid reminder that Pay-For-People-Too-Stupid-Or-Cheap-To-Move-Out-Of-The-Danger-Zone Season is upon us. Hurricanes are sure to be a plenty this year (just like they have been for thousands of years), and with it comes property damage and government checks.

When a flood in 1996 smashed my hometown of Davenport (luckily I was no where near the flood-zone) I heard a lot of people asking why so many live on the Mississippi. I bet my bottom dollar some of them live on the Atlantic coast in the southeast. Do I really have to reciprocate?

Greed: A Definition

Wow I haven’t posted in a while. That’s partly because I haven’t heard anything that’s really sparked a desire to write an article, but mostly because I’ve been busy taking advantage of stress-free enjoyment before fall semester preparation goes into high gear.

So I’d thought I’d take this opportunity and talk about something fundamental in the capitalist and anti-capitalist camps: greed.

Greed is one of those things everyone thinks they know what it is. We usually say it with a sneer. It is the attribute of evil and detached people who care nothing more than indulging in their vice. For many anti-capitalists, greed is the lifeblood of the free market demon: the binding force that ties in all arguments against capitalism. Like money, it is the root cause of all evil.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no set definition of greed. From economists to ecologists, from pundit to pop culture, greed means different things. Generally speaking it hinges on two distinctions with concern to material wealth: the nature of the desire and the relative value of the object in question.

For most, the first characteristic is about wanting (as opposed to demanding). Massive pillars of popular morality, such as Jesus and Gandhi, believed wanting of material things was being greedy and therefore evil. Greed as a matter of want is generally accepted as a signature aspect.

But you are not being greedy just because you want stuff. Both modern and ancient philosophers concluded that want is not always bad. A person should not be condemned because they want food or shelter in order to survive. Thus greed is sometimes equated with “want beyond need.”

This of course means that everyone—including all members of the Catholic Church—is going to hell. Surely there are scant exceptions but can you not think of anyone that does not desire beyond basic food, shelter and clothing? Even the poorest of people want to do more than merely survive.

Modern society has tacitly understood that want beyond need is inadequate so we have adapted the meaning in two different ways. First, we define greed as want beyond what’s earned. If Bob earns $50,000 a year but wants $100,000, he is being greedy. This line of thinking carries problems. Someday I would want to earn a six figure income, even though I haven’t done enough yet to justify that income. Am I being greedy because I set goals? People shouldn’t be deterred from desiring a better life just because they can’t justify it instantly.

Conceivably, protectionist pundits and anti-capitalists understand that people wanting to do more with their lives is a good thing, as long as they are of a sympathetic people. Few would call small businesses and middle class folk greedy the same way corporations and billionaires are. In the mainstream context, greed is set aside only for certain classes. It is want beyond what’s accessible to most people. Whoever “most people” are remains dubious, for the line between the well-off and the wealthy is a matter of context and perception. Thus it is perfect for popular media because the “greed” label can be applied to anyone as long as you juxtapose them with someone who isn’t as successful.

It appears that the popular belief of greed only applying to certain groups (and the desire to be like that groups) stems from humanity’s ancient roots. The rich were those of kings and knights and merchants that curried favor with the ruling class. The greed was often truly evil because they did not merely want more than they deserved, they took it by force if their threats were not taken seriously. Demanding what’s owed (whether it is beyond need or beyond the masses) is certainly not evil, but demanding beyond what’s earned is the hallmark of tyranny.

Modern thinkers get confused. Taking what you do not deserve is a zero-sum game, one with a victor and a loser, gain and loss. For thousands of years this was how most fortunes were amassed and often thought of the only way they could be cultivated. It was greed and because it was at the expense of others; it was a sin.

Yet today, citizens and firms hold greater fortunes than was the richest of kings. Almost as a reflex, we equate them with those nasty tyrants without ever stopping to remember that the people—for the most part—bestowed the wealthy’s fortunes on them. It was amassed through voluntary exchanges and thus pleasing to both parties.

If we constrain our definition of greed to merely taking unearned property, then it is always evil. But if we accept more popular perceptions—greed as desire beyond need or as the want of excess—then we have to acknowledge it is not always immoral. In fact, the rewards of wealth are a power motivator that makes society as a whole richer and happier. That is the hallmark of a positive sentiment: surely greed can be ethical as well as evil.

The Market Be a Harsh Mistress

It is inevitable. Whenever free people gather, markets emerge. This is true from the lowliest of small towns to the largest global societies. It’s even true when the stage in question isn’t really there.

World of Warcraft is a Mass-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). On my server (Azgalor), there are over 12,000 characters with nearly 8,000 of them on my side (Alliance). Players create some of these as secondary characters, which they use for various purposes. But it’s still a lot of active minds.

These minds do most of their economic activity at the Auction House (AH), which, for the Alliance, is in the rather unremarkably named Ironforge. Countless items are traded at the AH, including herbs which people make into potions. By far the hardest herb to come by is the Ghost Mushroom. It’s needed some powerful potions but can only be found in small numbers in remote and dangerous places. For a while, they were going for one gold each (which is a lot considering one of the most expensive thing in the game—the epic mount—costs 900 gold).

This is where it gets interesting. A friend of mine often sells these mushrooms because they generate so much cash (making them available to lower levels like myself). But he noticed they were selling incredibly fast, even at that high price and even though he was “farming” for them all the time. So in true supplier form, he raised his price.

Doing this on the AH is very hard because undercutting is a common tactic. But since these mushrooms are hard to come by and my friend has other characters on his account, he thought he’d give it a try. He sent the goods to his pair of “alts” so he could sell them under their names. He even contacted another vendor of the ‘shrooms, telling him the price was rising. This other vendor thought it was a great idea; apparently his mushrooms were going fast, too.

Overnight the price doubled to two gold, and it looked like it was the consensus of four different players.

My friend gladly declared to me that he loves gouging people. I calmly told him “gouging” is actually impossible, unless force is involved. This is a lesson he quickly learned because he couldn’t sell his wares. One gold may have been too little, but two gold was too much. And to make matters worse, some people who weren’t selling them before began to undercut his bids. Apparently, they didn’t think one gold was enough to even bother.

I’ve just checked the price of the mushrooms and currently they are selling at just over one gold piece, my friend included. People don’t control markets, markets control people.

Sense and Sithability

I saw Episode Three yesterday. The dialogue was corny and most of the acting was poor, as predicted. But for some reason I couldn’t describe, I found myself thinking “This isn’t half bad. It’s actually okay.” Maybe it was the epic battle scenes, the overarching conspiracy plot, seeing the wookie planet or discovering how Darth Vader became Darth Vader, but I wasn’t completely disgusted.

Yet as I think about it more and I realize it’s a tragedy. The most interesting part of the movie—the conspiracy—is drenched in several layers of crap. Hat tip to Maddox’s review which helped me sort through these issues.

Beyond the dialogue and acting, there were cutsy additions, overwhelming and unnecessary special effects, poorly executed character development and nasty cases of inconsistency. But Maddox doesn’t go far enough. While he rightly pointed out how unreasonable Anakin’s switch to the dark side was (check out the cartoons here and here), that problem pales in comparison to how easily the Senate throws aside democracy in favor of a dictatorship. It takes just one speech about how bad Jedis are—one speech—and people are cheering for an emperor. Excuse me, what? The war just ended, the democracy is on the winning side and Jedis are famous for being the good guys. No power hungry tyrant—not Hitler, not Napoleon, not Caesar—could pull this off. But Palpatine did?

All of these things were clear to me when I was watching the film, but like millions of others I still walked away with a positive opinion. Why? Why is it so hard for people to realize it’s a crappy movie? The simple fact is we don’t want it to be.

The movie answers a lot of questions people had from the far more likeable trilogy. It explores characters we care about and connects them to fonder memories from earlier movies. It revolves around an epic and powerful story about greed, deception and betrayal. Thus we are willing to ignore how badly the story is told in order to accept the story itself. What we forget is that there are hundreds of well told stories with similar plots. Remember that next time someone praises Episode Three.

Best Birthday Present Ever

After months of waiting and uncertainty, George Mason sent me a letter accepting me into their Master's program. Woot!

Whoa

Whoa I totally missed it. A week ago today marked my one year anniversary at LL&L with this post. We've come a long way since then and to be sure, there's more to come. Thanks for reading everyone.

The Bad Boy of Europe?

Today France became the first country to vote against the new EU constitution. Since all members need to ratify the charter to make it a reality, the results single a depressing defeat for the organization. NPR predicted the outcome this morning and speculated its importance, calling France the “undisputed bad boy of Europe.”

The vote was certainly significant, but “undisputed bad boy?” France? France hasn’t been a bad boy since the Napoleonic Wars, and all that instigator got was an ice cream and a psychological complex. (Fun fact: Napoleon was actually slightly taller than the average man of his era; his popular 5’2 was actually measured in French feet. By English feet, his height was just over 5’6.)

So what inconceivable event rocketed a people better know as chefs and surrenders to a nation of bad boys? The short answer is overwhelming statism. The new law restricts immigration barriers and better politically integrates the EU members. The far left complained about overwhelming capitalism, the far right spread fears about loosing national sovereignty, and with it, cultural identity. But it’s nothing more than hype and fear.

Like nature itself, economies and cultures are evolving bodies. They operate best in climates favoring freedom: climates of adaptation. History’s peaceful changes have always been generated by the people and by their will alone. Those who wish to deny economic or cultural evolution deny their fellow man fundamental freedoms, even if they deny it to themselves.

It’s far too easy to reject something when you don’t know what you are missing. So let me illustrate how unreliable paranoid statism can be with a historical example.

Over a hundred years ago, a nasty-looking structure rose above the skyline of a major city. The city wanted it torn down after it served its purpose, a feat belayed as engineers discovered it was ideal for radio transmissions. Otis Elevator Company (an American firm) built the machines that let people explore the building with ease, increasing its popularity. The construct I’m talking about is the Eiffel Tower, France’s best known symbol. If the naysayers had their way in 1889, there would be no Eiffel Tower or at least it would be a bitch to get to the top.

It’s easy not to see glorious possibilities and only fall for reactionary scares. It’s easy to forget centuries of history and progress just to embrace the latest call for authority. It’s easy to treat your fellow man as ingrates that need to be controlled instead of people that want to be liberated. These are the acts of cowards, not bad boys.

Legalizing Responsiblity

No one likes to see people get hurt, especially kids who are at the prime of their life and have so much to experience. That’s why the flurry of car accidents in Maryland last year was so tragic. But instead of encouraging parents to take an active role in their kids’ lives the Maryland legislature is just passing a matching flurry of laws to try to change behavior.

The basic result will bar countless high schoolers from driving themselves teenagers now require at least sixty hours of practice.

Here’s where it gets interesting: according to existing law, the minimum driving age is 18 but parents can sign a waiver so their children can get a learners permit at 15. Most do. The parents are saying they want their kids to drive which means one or more of three things:

1. The parents want their kid to drive themselves because they feel the teen is responsible enough to handle it and wants to allow for real world experience.
2. The student is involved in extracurricular activities and this level of independence makes it easy or possible to continue these activities.
3. The parent is irresponsible and signs the wavier even though the teen isn’t ready to handle driving.

The law makes things worse for all these families. The first two possibilities mean the law takes away freedom and opportunity unjustly. In the last scenario, the law sends a message to the parents and kids: you don’t need to be responsible; the state will take care of that.

And while I’m sure most of the criticisms of the legislation come from those of the first two categories, I’m more concerned about what the last means. It is merely a small piece of a much larger message: Trust must be enforced and not earned. A responsible citizen is a law-abiding citizen. Only the legislators can make you safe, happy and free.

Is that really the message we want to send to our kids?

Just Turn the Page

Friday’s Des Moines Register published this editorial by Clarence Page where he claims that immigration is only sort of good for the American economy, but controls need to be put on it in order to protect our low-wage jobs.

I never thought I’d hear someone say wages need to be kept low, but there are surprises around every corner.

These low wage jobs are disappearing, but being replaced with higher wage jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more positions will be added to the top quartile of wage earners than all other quartiles combined over the next seven years.

This is happening because our economy is, on the whole, still free and nimble. Entrepreneurs and inventors create new ideas and constantly allow participants to do more with less. Every person adds to that capacity in ways we don’t always see or understand. Page wants our immigration to be “controlled and orderly;” hardly words that fit in with a dynamic, successful economy.

Forging Our Next Second Class Citizen

It begins with a reasonable law, or well-sounding claim. It begins with a call to protecting someone else, someone with a person connection to the people, or the people themselves. It begins with seemly justified paranoia.

Oklahoma just passed legislation requiring all convicted sex offenders to wear GPS bracelets for the rest of their life so law enforcers can track their every move. Even if we go on the rather ridiculous assumption that every single one of these felons really was guilty, they are still citizens of this country and have done their time. Don’t we have a law against cruel and unusual punishment?

Senator Myers defends the law, saying it will make their other laws “faster and more efficient” to implement. If we only cared about our justice system being fast and efficient, we’d just execute all the guilty.

Law, Legislation and Special Effects

There are aliens at the theater.

No, not just the foreign kind, the green-scaled kind too. While all you in the big cities began seeing the Star Wars fanatics form a movie line weeks ago, the local news reported that ours started today. And the only thing more over the top than the costumes is the attitudes.

Most of the public is guarded, but optimistic. But the fans—the hard core fans—have predetermined that this will be the greatest movie in the last several years. These are the same fans that thought Episode II was pretty good and Episode I wasn’t that bad. Why are they not willing to admit the third time is rarely the charm?

Hardcore fans’ relationship with their object of worship is similar to politicians’ relationship with their pet legislation. They trump it whenever they can. They are most likely to dress up for it. They have a hard time admitting when it’s crap. When they do admit it is crap, they always insist it’s because of relatively small problems.

Thus Star Wars fans blame Jar Jar Binks for the poor quality of Episodes I and II just as lawmakers blame legal wording for the failure of their laws. But the problem is always more fundamental. Laws rarely do what they are supposed to do and often make a matter worse. Politicians rarely have the capacity to recognize when a law goes too far (which is most of them). Laws are a hammer and everything looks like a nail.

George Lucas is a poor director and a poor writer. He’s obsessed with special effects and thanks to CGIs, he stuffs them into everything he touches. He spends more time on getting the lightsabers to look right than he does smoothing out dialogue or keeping the plot moving. And because thirty years ago these options weren’t available, Lucas had to focus on the parts that make a good movie good. Ego inflated after decades of constant praise, he has become his own biggest fan, incapable of acknowledging the fundamental mistakes he makes.

Special effects, like laws, have their place, but are devastating in the wrong hands. Those who put them on pedestals are doomed to witness them become untoward. Those who are unwilling to recognize that problem are doomed to repeat it. If special effects are the legislation of the movie world, than its characters are surely humanity and its plot, their everyday activity. That’s what we should focus on: not making it look good with rules and explosions, but by freeing up those core elements that make a movie worth watching, and a society worth living.

Still Nothing On....

Congratulations to MTV for launching its 100th channel (MTV Africa)! I just saw an ad for the celebration. My studies and constant exposure to free markets has really raised my expectations but one hundred channels for one brand name? That’s impressive. Now if only they would play some videos.

Prediction: UK Blackouts In the Next Twenty Years

Greed. For countless people worldwide the word can’t be said without a sneer at free markets and an implicit call for government regulation. Technically meaning “desire beyond need” or “desire beyond merit,” today’s commentators have mutated it to “desire beyond some arbitrary point.”

No where is this more clear than at the Isle of Man Today Newspapers where a recent article trumps new laws that cap power prices. The article demonized producers, calling them “greedy suppliers” after “excessive profit.”

What the article fails to tell you is that this will likely lead to an England energy crisis similar to the one we saw in California a few years back. You probably heard that those blackouts were actually caused by deregulation and corporate greed. You were wrong. While the wholesale price of energy (the price companies charged one another) was deregulated, the retail price (the price consumers pay) remained artificially deflated. Companies did not have a reason to build new power plant (not that other regulations made such construction viable).

I have no idea where this line is that makes legitimate compensation “excessive” or “too much.” I don’t even know why wanting more than what you have is inherently evil. I do know that greed generates the incentive to keep the power flowing. If you think capping energy prices is going to help a country’s most downtrodden, then you better be ready to sit in the dark.

Someone Get Me Some Advil

I try to imagine how much time and money go into fighting the War on Drugs and every time I do, I get a headache. In this opinion piece from Keeping People Connected News of northeast Indiana, the author trumps a new law the governor recently signed.

The law makes it more difficult for people to legally purchase substances that could be used to make meth. Note I said “legally purchase” and not “obtain.” The new law will certainly makes these components more expensive on the black market, but the kids will still use them.

The law puts limits on the amount of ephedrine or pseudoephedrine a person can purchase in a week, requires identification and creates a database of such people for inspection by police. Civil rights arguments aside, the author makes the counterintuitive claim that this will make the community safer. It seems it is more important to do thousands of background checks—most of which are on senior citizens—than to catch murderers and rapists.

Creepy Words of Wisdom

I was wandering around on the White-Wolf forums today when I noticed a user called “DEVONBIRKENEAU” uses an example as his signature to distinguish between “terror” and “horror.”

“Terror is being stabbed to death by a hulking serial killer.
Horror is waking up the next morning, realizing you were self-identifying with another one of your victims...”

Has nothing to do with economics, laws or anything else I usually ramble about, but it’s pretty damn cool.

Cranial Coverage Generates Disorder

In every society, there are people who want to control it so they concoct the most insane relationships of cause and effect and then regulate the “cause.” The most recent example is Tony Blair’s support for laws that ban “hooded tops and baseball caps from the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent.”

Hooded tops, or hoodies, are sweatshirts with hoods. Baseball caps are those rimmed hats associated with one of America’s boring pastimes. It seems these insidious devices cause anti-social behavior orders (asbos) and engender yobs (a British slang term for rowdy, aggressive and violent young men).

I suppose next, the government will suggest everyone wears a uniform to prevent theft.

An Iowan Design Cartel

So much for my back-up plan to design rooms in my hometown.

Iowa Governor Vilsack signed into law last week a new requirement that interior designers have to be legally registered in order to “protect the citizens of Iowa because they will know if an individual entrusted to create their interior spaces meets baseline professional standard,” said Anita Baltimore, president of American Society for Interior Designers. Apparently, the only way to know about health and safety issues is to be sanctioned by the government after six years of training and experience.

Here is where you can contact the ASID to tell them how they should be ashamed of themselves. I did. Here’s what I wrote.

I have a problem with your organization encouraging useless legislation in Iowa, recently signed by Gov. Vilsack, which requires all designers to have six years of education and experience.

Claiming it is the only way to ensure quality (including in safety and health issues) is a logical fallacy and disproved by centuries of free market activity.

This attempt to form a government monopoly will raise the price of design and encourage consumers to do it themselves. By definition, they are most likely to commit the mistakes that endanger their health and safety.

Since most of your members, no doubt, already meet the registration requirements, your organization clearly does not think they are good enough to compete on a level playing field.

Thus I will endeavor to hire a non-licensed designers (and encourage my friends to do so) for not only will they be less expensive and better at what they do, they will almost certainly be less corrupt.

Sampling the Laws

This is a great example of how one over arching law lends to the creation of a myriad of other legislation. Wouldn’t it be easier to drop the age minimum for drinking? Europeans did and their society isn’t falling apart (well, their economy sort of is, but not their society as a whole).

Jesus Christ in Legal Battle in W.Va.

You have to take a look at this. It’s too funny.

Job Search Job

Job had a pretty bad run of luck: boils, the death of his wife, and more importantly, his sheep. I am tempted to feel sometimes that my job search is plagued by Job-like pestilence: few call backs, a lack of experience, two cars, neither of which is reliable, and even a little religious discrimination thrown in for good measure. But alas, Job’s fortune turned around, and so will mine…eventually.

But the job market is a reliable indicator of the need for labor in the larger market. It tells consumers and investors alike what areas are in need (higher wages, less wait time to get a job) and what area are saturated (lower wages, more wait time, greater selectivity). It could be worse. I could be fighting an economy like Germany’s that just introduced mandatory minimum wages, or like some other countries that track you into your job, have industry quotas, and all the rest. I may not like having to scrounge for a while, but scrounging remains preferable to bureaucratically controlled placement. So while I am apt to complain that I have not been hired in record time and at a record starting wage, in the bigger picture I am not so upset.

Faking Private Ryan

It’s good to know that the government is so concerned about our safety they are willing to lower their standards to make sure they have enough bodies. The military is one of the few things government should do; shouldn’t they do it right?

Revenge of the Phantom Clones

The first one sucked. The second was painful. And while Star Wars fans the world over anxiously await the final installment of Lucas’s vision I remain suspicious despite the glowing reviews.

Tyler Cowen cites Variety’s praise of the movie and mentions the magazine’s reliability in this matter. What he fails to mention is that three years the same reviewer of Revenge of the Sith called Attack of the Clones “a grand entertainment that offers a satisfying balance among the series' epic, narrative, technological and emotional qualities.” (To his credit, the reviewer didn’t like The Phantom Menace but because I don’t have a subscription to Variety, I don’t know the details of his analysis.)

Friends point out that the preview looks great and the film will answer a lot of questions, but the last two previews looked great and the last two films answered a lot of questions (some poorly, some not worth answering). I implore everyone to remember that the first trilogy (which is really the last trilogy) was not directed by Lucas (except Hope), while this trilogy was. That makes a galaxy of difference in itself.

I mentioned in an earlier post that judging a movie before you see it is a process of tacit knowledge and by no means a science. So while I may be wrong, let’s get real for a moment. Reliable signs suggest RotS won’t be worth the price of admission. Unless you’re risk-loving, save your money and watch one of the earlier chapters (which are really the later chapters). At least you’re guaranteed a good time.

Four Slots and Seven Cards Ago

People hate change, even good change. They even can be surprisingly stupid when it comes to their own values.

Take last week developers unveiled plans to build a casino a mile and a half from the Gettysburg battlefield. The uproar was immediate as historians condemned the idea as insulting the memory of fallen soldiers. According to prize-winning author and Civil War authority James McPherson, “It would be a desecration of their memory and sacrifice to establish such a tawdry, tasteless enterprise next to their fields of honor.”

Let us set aside the fact that a mile and a half doesn’t constitute as “next” and the casino wouldn’t even be visible from anywhere on the site. Let us also table the reality that the casino would not it have a Civil War theme (hardly desecration). Let us even ignore that “tawdry” and “tasteless” are mere matters of opinion because in light of all of those things, McPherson is still wrong.

I suppose it is the unfortunate tendency of historians to put their area of expertise on such a high pedestal, they loose touch with the real world in some kind of reactionary attempt to return to the period in question. Because casinos were never in Gettysburg during the Civil War, McPherson reasons they should never be, even if people want them. Even if it could help raise money to save other historical places, as one preservationist pointed out.

In his obsession for authenticity McPherson has lost sight of the ideas behind the Civil War. There were lots of reasons for the War, but there was a central theme of liberation (either from government or from slave masters backed by government). If I were a fallen soldier, I’d be more insulted by attempts to curb others’ liberty than people freely contributing a service to society.

Helping to Stave Off Rotten Luck

Mike sent me a link to this site to help out in my movie-going quandary. It certainly looks like it makes going to movies less risky—and here’s to anything that betters our lives—but we agreed movies are still a roll of the dice.

When Caution Goes To Far

The Airbus A380 is the world’s largest commercial airplane ever built. Completed earlier this year, it stretches nearly 240 feet long and almost 80 feet high. It can seat 555 passengers on two decks and carry them up to 8,000 nautical miles. By any measure it is a marvel of engineering.

Imagine filling five of these planes to the brim with children—most four years old or less. Now crash them all. Do it every day: seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. That will give you an idea of the African death toll thanks to malaria.

Today the World Health Organization and UNICEF jointly released a report on the disease, concluding malaria kills a child every thirty seconds and siphons off 1.3% of economic growth from the worst affected countries. To combat the disease, the report suggests a variety of methods, including pesticide spraying which admits is the most effective method.

The report even points out the most controversial chemical in this regard—DDT—was principle in eliminating malaria in the West. According to one graph, the sixties witnessed the some of greatest decline in malaria and was the height of DDT use. The WHO still recommends the insecticide for the worst afflicted countries.

But it does not recommend its widespread use. It’s not even mentioned in methods for improving the situation. DDT—a chemical that is safe enough to eat and cheap enough for the struggling countries to afford—is Africa’s greatest hope. But greens continue to oppose it based on the precautionary principle: it might hurt the environment, though there is no evidence that it would. The concerns are unfounded. The consequences are real. DDT could save more lives than a cancer vaccine and make a big step to pulling an entire continent from gut-wrenching poverty. How can we even pause?

In A World of Asymmetric Information....

The summer movie season is looming and thus the burning question every movie-goer must ask: which ones will actually be good and which ones should I avoid completely?

Not just a case of adverse selection, movie quality is a matter of taste and preference. Attempts to create a symmetry of information can never be consistently applied. If I bring a mechanic with me to buy a used car, he could give me all the information the dealership has: this part needs replacing, this part is good, that part is wearing. It’s not a matter of debate.

But suppose I consult someone with better knowledge about the movie, such as the director or screen writer. Assuming they are honest (a problem in itself), any opinions he has about the thing that matters—the quality of it—is subjective. Any objective information (such as the details of the plot) could be helpful to assess its quality, but it could ruin the movie. More information would not only affect my opinion of how good the movie is, it could actually decrease my opinion of the quality. Thus creating symmetric information while changing the value of the good as little as possible requires a delicate balance of conveying personal opinion and relevant fact. Rarely can these requirements be separated for one is embodied in the other.

Consider the movie trailer. It is meant to transmit the objective fact of what the movie is about. Thus it always has to give away information, but it passes on as little as possible to maintain the potential entertainment value. And yet it embodies personal preference, just as a journalist passes on their opinion by how they report the news. Scene selection, voice over dialogue, visual order—all of these are meant to engender a positive opinion of its quality. But ultimately it is not of the movie, but of the trailer. Trailers are not enough to judge quality with certainty.

So we hear/read reviews, where a critic (or a friend) consumed the good and reports on the quality. Assuming you can find someone you consistently agree with (a feat in itself), exceptions always loom as objective changes (such as the plot or style) dramatically affect the subjective conclusion. A local critic once gave a bad review of Jurassic Park, a movie most would consider phenomenal. It was clear from that review she simply didn’t like science fiction.

Sometimes a good indicator of movie quality is the basic information about how the movie is made. Who is the director? Is it a remake? Who stars in it? But none of these are consistent. Sometimes remakes are good (The Italian Job), sometime they are not (Planet of the Apes). Some directors are usually great (Tim Burton), but they have their dismal failures (again, Planet of the Apes). Sometimes Bruce Willis is in a good movie (Die Hard), sometimes he’s in a crappy one (Armageddon). A consistently good director can make a poor movie (Steven Spielberg’s AI) and a first time director can make a wonderful movie (Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints). There are no hard-fast rules.

I would love a reliable way to judge movie quality, but there is none. It ultimately comes down to considering all three categories and making a judgment based as much on instinct as information. But it takes a lot practice before you get any good at it. So before you go to the movies this summer, do your homework and think about the information you get. Realize the trailer isn’t the movie. Take all critics’ claims with a grain of salt. See how the movie is made. Who knows? You might just get lucky.

If You Ever Need a Message Near Your Crotch

Free markets create some of the crazies things. Here's one for the books.

Mad props to Seth for sending me the link.

Re-entering the Fray / Free Market Enviromentalism

Before I go into my post, I’d like to say a few things. First, let me convey my apologies for being lax about my participation here at LL&L this semester. As some of you may know, I am graduating from Bethany College next week, so this has been my final semester. Congrats to me – I finished my comps this week and have been notified that I am graduating from Bethany with Distinction. Yay!!!

Also, I’ve just been notified by IHS that I’ve been accepted to the Liberty & Current Issues Summer Seminar at Catholic University in D.C. this July. I am quite excited about that, and I hope that maybe I’ll see some of you there.

Now to the post…

Interesting set of articles in The Economist magazine this past week about environmental issues. Among them a discussion about how our ability to assign price to environmental factors is increasing the markets ability to account for those factors efficiently. For example, it has been found that coffee fields planted within one kilometer of a forest are 20-plus percent more productive than fields further away, and that the key difference between them is the increased natural pollination that occurs as a result of forest-dwelling insects. In this way, the presence of that forest is worth, to the farmer at least, the margin of increase in productivity.

Another example is some of the forested area on Panama’s Pacific coast. Medicinal scientists have been documenting for some years now numerous cures (or likely cures) that exist in the swampy muck and moldy undergrowth of that region. Large pharmaceutical companies are already clamoring to gain rights to those areas in order to leave them undeveloped, because in this case, the trees and swamps have enormously more value than condos and golf-courses, that is, if one is operating on a longer time horizon.

Granted, these are not a perfect demonstration of the free market at work, and getting market systems to take hold with regards to environmental stuff has much further to go in terms of sophistication. Most significantly, there are still many perverse incentives written into national laws throughout this country and Latin America. But it does signal a move in a generally good direction. The more that the market can demonstrate itself capable and competent in assigning accurate value/price to environmental concerns, the more likely governments are to abandon the command-and-control regulatory/prohibition model that so dominated green-policy over the last three decades in favor of a market-oriented approach. I’d strongly encourage those of you who are interested in the intersection of the free market and the environment to pick up a copy of The Economist for April 23-29, 2005 – it’s worth a look.

See also: abetterearth.org the IHS site dedicated to applying the free market to the environment.

How To Be Sporty

In an earlier post I made fun of baseball because I found it boring and hinted that it wasn’t a real sport. One commentator asked what I consider a sport to be and implied that since I admit I’m not a fan of sports, I’m not in the best position to define one. But it is because I find no sport-like game interesting that I think I am very qualified to define what a sport is—I lack the vested interest to mold the meaning to favor “my” game. Besides, I don’t live in a cave and I’m well aware of what the idea of a sport should be.

And we should really be honest about this definition. Sports get public funding (such as youth sports) and their own special laws (such as monopoly rules regarding baseball). Since only athletes play sports and people hardly care about participates of just any game, properly defining a sport hold real world consequences. (Of course, government shouldn’t coddle it, sport or not, but this is the world we live in.)

A sport is a type of competitive (the object of the game is to win over an active adversary, such as a computer or a person) game (a strategy-based activity). Specifically, it requires that intense physical exertion is an inherent part of the game.

Thus NASCAR is not a sport; sure there’s strategy and it’s competitive, but physical exertion isn’t inherent in the activity.

Golf isn’t a sport, either. An avid golfer friend of mine pointed out that “real” golfers carry their own clubs, thus it’s physically intense. But carrying stuff around isn’t inherent to the activity. You see someone swing a club at a little ball, they are clearly playing golf. If you see someone haul around a bag of iron sticks, they could be doing anything (like working as a caddy). You can’t claim what’s inherent about your game just so you can call yourself an athlete (which is what a lot of golfers call themselves).

Now baseball’s a pseudo sport because about half the time you’re sitting down waiting to bat. This is different from sitting on the bench as second string. No matter how good you are, you will have to sit down, often for (relatively) long periods of time. Waiting is intrinsic to the game and while parts of it are inherently physically exerting, it’s not a true sport (like basketball or football).

Here’s a quick way to tell if something’s a sport: if practicing it is good exercise (as in you get winded), you are at least halfway there.

The Other France

The French are a people of contradictions. I think it’s a mix of realizing that in order to do well in the global economy they need to work hard while at the same time pursuing the European Dream of free money. Forget two Americas, but there really are two Frances: one wants to work hard, the other wants to fall asleep drinking wine.

In a recent poll, 56% of the French thinks they don’t work enough. This consensus is reached while they protest adding another day of effort to their work year. The vacation day that’s being proposed to be scraped didn’t even exist two years ago.

This attitude is typical of most crowds. Like many environmentalists, socialists, democrats, republicans, industry leaders, NGOs and a myriad of other special interest groups, they want a better society but they’ll be damned if it means they have to pay for it. You really have to work to be this inconsistent.

Going, Going...Yeah It's Still Dull

I know I’m not in the minority when I say this: Baseball is boring. Our national pastime has got to be most mind-numbing national sport (and I use the term “sport” loosely) of all national sports. Hell, cricket is more interesting and I don’t even understand it.

You’d think this thing that’s so important to our national identity would have the freedom to reinvent itself so people might actually watch it. Think again—the House wants the Commerce Department to randomly test players of all pro-sports and get teams to contribute millions to a fund that would run ads discouraging young people from using steroids.

Why can’t there be two baseballs: a boring one, where the teams disallow the use of performance enhancing drugs, and a slightly less boring one, where it is allowed? If everyone agrees on the rules, it’s not cheating and it would lead to better safety measures because we would remove the incentive for secrecy. But I guess our representatives don’t care about keeping our national pastime alive.

Centuries of the Blame Game

While driving around today I noticed a pick-up with a Confederate flag instead of a front license plate. Considering both Iowa and nearby Illinois were both free states, this was rather odd.

But it got me thinking about a cartoon I saw some years ago when Virginia wanted to hoist the Confederate flag over their state capital building. It depicted a trio of Afro-Americans looking on at a group waving the symbol of the Confederacy. One said, “I wish people would stop living in the past.” All of them were holding signs demanding reparations.

History’s useful for perspective (something we are genuinely lacking), but it’s often the target of obsession. Not only do people think things were better then, they use long-standing history to justify whatever they want and in doing so, repeat the evils they are trying to correct for. Afro-Americans used it to justify affirmative action, effectively legalizing racism. Zionists used it to justify Israel, kicking out hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and igniting one of the worst continuous conflicts in human history. Palestinians are now using ancient history to justify kicking out Israelis. Of course slavery and oppression are horrible things but we can't let its past consume our future.

I have no problem in assigning compensation with regards to recent atrocities (like, say, the Holocaust), but these others conflicts are hundreds or thousands of years old. That’s simply too long to flatly blame someone’s ancestors for your problems—too many thing happen in the meantime to prove guilt. Stop living in the past!

All I Ever Needed To Know I Learned From Watching Prices

I just finished watching an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit of which they debunk the myth that recycling is good for the planet. The reality is it takes more resources (time, energy and so on) to recycle trash than to simply throw it away and make stuff from scratch. I’m not sure if P&T realize it or not, but they offered two pieces of evidence that alone demonstrates this truth.

This first one is as follows: It costs $50-$60 a ton to throw garbage away in a landfill. It costs $150 a ton to recycle it.

Prices are determined by supply and demand. If an input has a high demand and/or a low supply (compared to alternatives), its price will be higher. But we don’t care about just one input (like energy costs or landfill space); we care about all of them. The price for a good captures all the scarcity of the inputs for that good. The higher the price, the scarcer the inputs as a whole are, and the more society looses when the good is produced. (This only works if inputs come from privately-held property, and for the purposes of the topic, this holds true.)

Note that if one input becomes scarcer, the overall price increases (all things held equal). If it becomes dangerously scarce, the price will increase a lot. Thus when environmentalists say we are incredibly low on landfill space, we know they are lying. If it were true, the price of throwing away garbage would skyrocket beyond recycling. It has never done that.

The second bit of evidence involves the other side of recycling: material creation (as opposed to disposal). It costs more to create resources from recycled inputs than from virgin inputs (except for aluminum cans).

Again, this difference in price tells us all that we need to know. The key distinction between recycled products and virgin products is the origin of the core material (such as trees versus paper to make paper). Since the other factors of price are so similar, comparing prices is the same as comparing the costs of each strategy to society as a whole. If one of these valued virgin inputs becomes dangerously scarce, the price will reveal that by becoming more expensive than recycling.

The main input for paper, for example, are trees (the vast majority of which are grown on private land just so they can be turned into paper). If trees were as scarce as environmentalists claim they are, then the price would be so high it would be cheaper to recycle newspaper. The same goes for just about anything else.

Aluminum, on the other hand, is comparatively more expensive to extract and manufacture, which is why recycling those cans isn’t only cheap, it nets a profit. It’s not a coincidence that this is the only aspect of the recycling phenomenon that didn’t need some of the eight billion dollars of subsides that recycling programs require every year to stay afloat.

Recycling isn’t profitable, thus it doesn’t add anything to the economy or to the environment.

Earth Day Footprints

In contradicting their mantra that “Earth Day is everyday,” Greens are making a big fuss this twenty-second about how angry our planet is. As the world turns to the 35th anniversary of the day we all complain about the environment, be prepared to hear a lot about finite resources and “ecological footprints.”

Both concepts demonstrate a juvenile understanding of the economy (for the former) and the environment (for the latter). I’ve explained many times that the amount of resources on the planet doesn’t matter—the important concept is how scarce they are, and they are becoming less scarce. The economy is a living thing and it adapts as needs change.

Ecological footprints are a little different, but people misunderstand their role for similar reasons. According to optimumpopulation.org, an eco footprint is “the process of determining the bioproductive area that a person or a population needs in order to sustain a specified lifestyle.” The explanation continues:

There are two sides to ecological footprinting - supply and demand (of renewable resources).
-An ecological footprint = demand for (and impacts on) biological product, which is defined as the area (mostly land) needed for that product.
-Biological productivity (bioproductivity) or biocapacity = supply of biological product (biomass).

This straightforward idea assumes if we leave a “footprint” (take in more than we put out), we are doing harm to the environment. Essentially, it assumes our ecosystem is perfectly balanced and every species has a vital role to play. This runs contrary to the theory of evolution which describes nature as a messy, creative destructive process that’s happening all around us. The planet is designed to take a beating.

Does that mean we should slap it around just for fun? Of course not. But we don’t need organizations making sure we minimize our impact. Combined with free markets and private property, ecological footprints have about as much impact as real footprints.

Parks for Turks

I’m spending the next few days writing cover letters to potential employees and I was recently reminded of a nasty little law I learned about while studying in Istanbul.

If you ever go to Turkey’s biggest city, you’ll notice something annoying immediately. It’s rather a pain to get anywhere because the metropolis is so spread out. My Turkish friends told me the city extends the entirety of both peninsulas it sits on. When I first left the city on a bus trip, I learned this exaggeration is well justified.

The reason for this sprawl is quite clear—most buildings in the city never reach up more than fifteen or so stories (with the exception of one area of the city where modern hotels rise like trees on a well-cut lawn). But why this limit? I asked a friend about it and she said there was a law against skyscrapers. (Well, she didn’t use the word “skyscrapers” because she didn’t know it, though her English vocabulary was very extensive. I found that to be an interesting cultural consequence of the law.)

She attributed the law to Turks’ love for green spaces. I tried to explain to her that the law doesn’t increase the amount of parks and gardens, it actually decreases. Floor limits require people to use more land than they normally would to make a certain amount of space. I illustrated this with a pair of glasses. First, they were both directly on the table and then I stacked one on top of the either, leaving an empty space for “development.”

She still wasn’t convinced and she continued to be unconvinced after I used this same logic to explain how Manhattan Island—some of the most expensive real estate in the world—is home to no less than seven parks (including Central Park which covers 6% of Manhattan). She then added that tall buildings are ugly, referencing the skyscrapers in the district that’s the exception to the rule. Of course that’s ugly—there are only a few such buildings. A good skyline has many. Think how different Manhattan would look if the only towering edifice was the Chrysler Building.

It’s instinctive to think that creating public goods (including beauty and natural spaces) require laws. There’s no doubt that the developing world’s biggest barrier is learning to surpass this instinct, even when it comes to trees.

Statebusters II

A few months ago I wrote an article about how the movie Ghostbusters has a strong libertarian theme. Last night I finally got around to renting Ghostbusters II and I’m proud to say they didn’t stray from their roots.

In the opening scenes, we learn the ghostbusters’ business ended because they were sued for saving the city (just like in The Incredibles). But it wasn’t private citizens or even private businesses that created the legal troubles. It was the government. “[We] ended up getting sued by every state, county and city agency in New York.” -Winston

A few scenes later we learn the city didn’t even pay the ghostbusters for services rendered. When Bill Murray’s character tried to talk to the mayor about being screwed over, Jack Hardemeyer, the mayor’s assistant, intercepted him. The mayor’s up for re-election and doesn’t want to be associated with the once-heroes. Power is more important than paying what’s owed.

While in court for tearing up 1st avenue (granted, they shouldn’t have done that), we learn just how much the government is pushing them around. The judge begins the trial by saying he doesn’t believe in ghosts and denies any reference to them during the case (odd because five years ago, the city was attacked by a giant marshmallow man, but I guess the judge thought that was just the Michelin guy on steroids). Then we learn the ghostbusters have a judicial restraining order that bars them from performing services as paranormal investigators or eliminators. It’s like keeping a firefighter away from a burning building because last time he put out a raging inferno he got the carpet wet.

Minutes later the judge rescinded the order, not because it was the right thing to do but because he was being attacked by ghosts and needed their help. So much for judges being completely neutral.

This allows the ghostbusters to restart their old business, which they use as a jumping point to better investigate the growing evil presence in the city. After they figure out what’s going on, they go see the mayor to warn him. He waves them off. The wormy assistant takes this as an opportunity to have the ghostbusters committed so they wouldn’t hurt the mayor’s re-election. Hardemeyer’s a typical bureaucrat, pushing around other people for greater power and prestige.

The mayor releases them only after it really does look like the world’s about to end. He uses the ghostbusters—the world’s best chance—as a last resort, endangering the entire planet so he doesn’t have to admit he was wrong to ignore their warnings. Yet even in this darkest hour, the bureaucrat tries to convince the mayor otherwise. Thankfully, it didn’t work.

Ghostbusters II builds on the importance of local knowledge and liberated societies. Authorities are more often a barrier than an ally and are willing to ignore overwhelming evidence if it suits their needs. For heroes to be heroes they need more freedom, not less.

A Little Bit of Sanity

Someone at Wiki wrote this on my talk page concerning my contributions to the global warming article.

Thanks for trying, Atlastawake. Be aware that enlightening people who have been trained to accept what they have already been told, can be difficult. I think Plato mentioned something about this difficulty with his parable of the cave. And sometimes a paradigm shift can be too painful to contemplate. "How could it possibly be that so much of what I believe is a lie?" It's so much easier to belittle the annoying revealers than to examine the evidence they reveal.

It's like sociologists studying the new religious movements. If they don't join the anti-cult movement in denouncing the "cults", then they must be "cult apologists". The possibility that objective research doesn't support the "mind control" theory which justifies deprogramming is just too painful to face, for some people. (At least in the cult articles, we contributors are on good terms. I don't know why it's not like that in the climate articles.) -- Uncle Ed (talk) 20:45, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

A Week of Waste

It’s National Parks Week (apparently) so I thought I’d celebrate it by doing a little investigating.

The International Paper Company privately holds tracks of land to grow trees for production. The largest of these acreages is in the mid-South region at 1.2 million acres. While the trees grow, the company sells the use of the land for purposes of camping, hunting, fishing and hiking adding up to $5.5 million dollars (25% of revenue). That’s a huge incentive to keep the forest sustainable and the firm even cuts trees down in such a way that it maintains wildlife cover.

Some may say that this is a relatively small amount of land and nature needs more room. But if this little-known bit of forest was a national park it would be the tenth largest by acre, tied with the Grand Canyon. Privatizing national parks is most certainly a profitable and environmentally sound business opportunity.

Contrast this success story with the National Park of American Samoa: 9,000 acres of rainforest and coral. In 2003, it received over $1.2 million of taxpayer money for its operating costs. Hot Springs, the only national park smaller than American Samoa, had over 1.5 million visitors (with a budget of about $3.36 million). Black Canyon of the Gunnison (whose budget barely edges over one million) had about 165,000 visitors. So how many did American Samoa had? 200,000? 500,000?

Try 366. That’s right, just 366 people: an average of one person a day, at the cost of $3,478 per person. You can rent whole floors of hotels for less.

Assuming that a private company couldn’t cut the park’s cost (unlikely because federally funded parks have to wade through costly requirements, among other reasons) and assuming advertising wouldn’t boost attendance (also unlikely; the place is gorgeous) then this private park would probably go out of business. If this happened, environmentalists would claim this is why the park has to be national—its value is so high, it has to be preserved no matter what. Of course if they really believed that, they would have shelled out the four grand for admission.

Hollywood Libertarians

"Hollywood liberals" is a term conservatives like to throw around when they want to describe the source of some new idea or fad or Washington policy. “This uproar is nothing but the work of Hollywood liberals,” “The only people telling you this is okay is just a bunch of Hollywood liberals,” “The Democrats are too busy trying to please some Hollywood liberals” and so on.

They make it sound like there’s a subculture in the Democratic party whose values and ideologies are fundamentally different from the rest of it, so much that it needs a special name. But really there’s nothing ideologically distinctive about this group. A Hollywood liberal is just a left-winger that’s rich, good-looking, has legions of fans and lives (more or less) in Hollywood. Sounds like someone’s just jealous.

But it’s true that a lot of celebrities are Democrats, especially the ones in Hollywood. And I’ve discovered that some of their core beliefs “rub off” on the scant few libertarian counterparts they interact with. While a Hollywood liberal is just some rhetoric bullshit, a Hollywood libertarian really means something.

I’ve discovered this while watching Real Time with Bill Maher (a self-described libertarian) on the night he had Jason Alexander (another libertarian) on the show. At the end, Bill brought up greed and how bad it is that all companies care about is “hitting the numbers.” Jason built on that and argued that it was because we are too short sighted and we don’t plan enough. We think too much in the short term. Later he suggested the government should set energy goals in reducing our dependency of oil.

Bill then moved the conversation to why companies have to grow: “It seems like this is the only country in the world where just doing well is not enough. No corporation can just do as well as they did last quarter. We always have to have growth.” Growth, of course, is a good thing. That’s why people want it. But Bill’s rather suspicious of corporations.

In general, a Hollywood libertarian shares these values with their liberal counterparts:
-The government is the best tool to protect the environment.
-People are too greedy and that’s inherently bad; government should pull it back via taxes (specifically progressive taxes and the estate tax).
-National health care is a good idea, even though it’s a disaster in Canada.
-Schooling is the government’s business and public schools need more funding.
-As a nation we should be concerned about outsourcing and foreign competition.
-Corporations are poisoning us (via pesticides and other chemicals).

This is a working list and is mostly generated from Bill Maher (there are few Hollywood libertarians and Bill’s the only one I know that talks about politics for a living). I really do admire Bill Maher—he has a lot of good thoughts and was my early introduction to libertarianism. But he’s also pretty damn Hollywood.

Market Saints

Yesterday I wandered into Suncoast looking to use a five dollar gift certificate I’ve been holding for a few months. I wanted to expand my movie collect but I didn’t want to spend more than ten bucks (in other words, no more than fifteen on the tag).

After about twenty minutes of wandering around the store I decided on the beloved classic, Boondock Saints (which is a kick-ass movie by all measures). I went to the cashier to pay for it only to discover it’s already five dollars off. With the gift certificate, I got the DVD for less than a value meal. Woot to the free market!

The War Between the Stars

The line for Star Wars III begins. Makes me wish I was in a city that was large enough to have the big dorks that would camp out at the theater so I could get a Spock costume and flick them all off.

Or at the very least, drive by and tell them to enjoy their “Star Trek” movie. That would really piss them off.

I gotta respect Star Wars, though. It’s certainly more realistic than its counterpart. A sword made of light? Okay. The Force? Sure. Socialism that works? I don’t think so.

A Contract Is a Contract Is a Contract

Skyler Stone is a young man who decided a long time ago he would be a con man. For many years he lied to get free stuff so he wouldn’t have to actually get a job.

I’m very rarely in favor of government intervention in our daily lives but I do have a problem with this. Con men violate verbal contracts (whether such a contract is legally binding in a local state in question is irrelevant). Because contracts are a basic tool of a well functioning extended order, ignoring them does a disservice to the economy (on a local, national and global level). Ensuring they are fulfilled is a job of the government.

Currently Mr. Stone has a new show on Comedy Central unimaginatively called Con, ironically transforming someone who takes away from the functionality of the economy to someone who contributes to it by taking away from it. I’m not sure if there’s a net loss or a net gain in this matter.

But I’m finding that as I watch this show, it demonstrates how well the economy works because the contract is so trusted. The victims readily believe his lies. While part of that stems from his ability to lie, another part is that the conned have no reason not to believe him. It may not seem this way from what we hear on the news magazines but breaches of contracts are pretty damn rare.

When I go through the drive thru, I give my money before I get my food. I have never encountered or heard of a time when a fast food place collected the cash but refused to live up to their end of the bargain (by denying the Happy Meal or whatever people are eating now).

When you pay for furniture and ask for it to be delivered, we rarely consider that the store will never show. We might fear that they will be late, but never completely absent.

And if I were to finally receive a letter from George Mason telling that I was, say, accepted to their PhD program, I wouldn’t consider that they would deny me entrance when the semester began (assuming I could pay for it).

These are all small exchanges between economic agents that are repeated in some fashion a million times everyday. When it comes to big projects—such as the construction of a building—at least one party involved is a lot more careful because they are on unfamiliar ground. That’s why Mr. Stone focuses his lies on everyday verbal or implied contracts—we inherently trust them. Because the economy works so well, so do his cons.

49 Down.....

I heard on the radio this morning that Montana recently became the 49th state to outlaw open alcohol containers in moving vehicles (Mississippi being last in line).

Open container laws always kind of rub me the wrong way. Having an open container doesn’t mean you’ve been drinking and driving. I can understand it usually means a drunk driver, but that’s what breathalyzers are for.

But there are everyday scenarios where A does not follow to B so nicely. What about bringing home a half-finished bottle of wine you brought to a party? Or transporting cans to the store for recycling but one of them wasn’t quite empty? Should one get a ticket because he absent-mindedly forgot to finish his drink at a tailgate party? Or if friends are having a picnic and it suddenly starts raining, should they be punished because in their haste they brought their drinks into the car and then forgot about them?

I’m not a drinker myself so I could only imagine the myriad possibilities where an open container is justified. Is it really worth punishing everyone especially since we have the technology to better separate the legitimate lawbreakers from the victims of circumstance? Of course not.

The Sweet Smell of Death

Visiting college friends is a lot of fun, but it certainly has its disadvantages. For example, if you’re at war and you leave, the enemy has a golden chance to gain significant ground.

The day after I got back from Beloit, I discovered an ant crawling along my desk. Then I saw another on the floor. Then another. Then another. I followed a short path to the bathroom floor, which was crawling with the suckers. Twenty or thirty easily. As soon as I realized how bad it was, I got into my car and drove to a nearby hardware store. It was eight o’clock at night.

What traversed over the next hour was a vicious retaliation as I defended the home land. Following the strategies on the Raid can, I soaked them until the floors where slick with poison and after I swept up the bodies and mopped the floor, I secured a perimeter in the bathroom. (Where I occasionally see one or two of the suckers.) I used a whole can.

I would like to thank Raid for supplying the weaponry. Not only did they include the strategy, the spray also comes in two scents (plus a scentless). I opted for Country Fresh, making my victory that much sweeter.

A New New Deal?

Thomas Friedman was one The Daily Show tonight plugging his new book, The World Is Flat. The economic world today, Friedman says, is much like what people once thought the physical was: flat. We now live in a world where technology has linked in such a way that more people have a better chance at equal opportunity. Geniuses in Beijing can be just as useful as those in New York because they can bypass their poor economies and oppressive governments to contribute to the economy at large via Internet, satellite communication and other advanced tools.

This can only be a good thing. Once, brilliant people who could make the world better were shut out from it. Now they can enter the discourse and add their passion and intellect to society at large. With this extra help, we can hasten the discovery of a cure for cancer, enrich cultures across the board or build wonders far greater than anyone has ever dreamed.

And yet, Friedman insists there’s a dark cloud: the country needs to continue the pursuit of knowledge and technology. And we could be in danger of falling behind. He even says we need a “New New Deal” for these changing times. “When was the last time you met a twelve-year-old kid that wanted to be an engineer?” he asked anchorman Jon Stewart. It’s good rhetoric, but a pretty useless question when you think about it. Most people don’t know what they want to do when they’re twelve. (I wanted to be a magician that did real magic.) Most people don’t even know what they’ll do when they enter college. (I was originally going to major in English.) The strength of our economy is embodied by our ability to adapt and considering we are still the number one source for technological advancements across the board, we really have nothing to worry about.

But somehow, somehow, Friedman made a transition from this to energy independence. There’s a valid facet of concerning about where we get our energy (as in oil) from (because it comes from corrupt and oppressive governments). But that’s becoming less and less significant as we expand our definition of oil, new countries export it and we create and improve alternatives. This captures what’s wrong with Friedman’s vaguely nationalistic anxieties about the level playing field because it doesn’t really matter where we get the good from, just as long as we get it competitively. Who cares if we don’t create all the new technology in the world? We’ll still get it. Who cares if we’ll get most of our energy from abroad? We’ll still get it. Wanting a stable economy free from unstable and tyrannical governments is one thing—I’m on board with that. Trying to get it by encouraging self-sufficiently (in technology or energy) is quite another. It won’t make us wealthier, only busier.

Make Your Economy Happy

On my way home from work yesterday, I heard a radio commercial brought to me by (if memory recalls correctly) the Department of Health and Human Services. Apparently the government has amazing news for us: walking is good for our health.

Now you could say that our health is important (no argument there) and we needs someone to remind us of ways to improve it (agreed). But why does it have to be a government agency? There is not a single method of improving our health that would not benefit from a product or service generated privately. Thus those firms that provide the service could advertise the importance of health and sell their product at the same time.

Case in point: Even something as mundane as drinking more water is encouraged by private industry. Aquafina is running commercials that remind us of the importance of water in our daily diet. Their slogan: Make Your Body Happy.

Fallacy 2

In response to my earlier question, David has suggested that we refer to the fallacy as "the fallacy of the unclaimed dollar." It comes from a joke:

Two economists are walking down the street. One sees a dollar lying on the sidewalk, and remarks on it. The other economist scoffs, and tells the other that his mind must be playing tricks on him. "If there were a dollar there, someone would have picked it up!"

It is my hope that, years from now, someone will credit Law, Legislation, and Lunacy for the naming of the Fallacy of the Unclaimed Dollar.

All the Fallacies, Baby

People make all kinds of mistakes. One of the more popular songs the kids are listening to is “Rich Girl” by Gwen Stefani. Its refrain goes like this:

If I was a rich girl (Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na)
See, I'd have all the money in the world, if I was a wealthy girl
No man could test me, impress me, my cash flow would never ever end
Cause I'd have all the money in the world, if I was a wealthy girl

On two accounts Gwen mixes up her cause and effect, committing the Casual Fallacy of Wrong Direction.

-Just because you are rich does not imply that you have all the money in the world. I can think of lots of rich people that do not fulfill the criteria (like, all of them).

-Just because you have all the money in the world does not imply that quantity is infinite. In fact, the amount of money is a set comprised of a limited number of elements, thus it is actually finite.

Most people would agree that it’s simply a matter of direction and the reverse (if I had all the money in the world, I would be a wealthy girl) is logically valid—assuming "I" is a young female). Casually speaking, I would agree with them.

But let’s be anal retentive economists and see if there’s a way to make it invalid. Money is often quantified into four broad categories: M0, M1, M2 and M3 (economists aren’t very creative). Each one of these definitions can be applied to different currencies. Suppose Gwen is talking about M0—all cash and coin in circulation—of, say, the Soviet ruble. Since the Soviet ruble is no longer in circulation, that total is zero. Having all the money in the world can result in no change to your bank account. If you have no other holdings, then you certainly are not rich even with the inclusion of these rubles.

She also made the Inductive Fallacy of Hasty Generalization when she said “No man could test me, impress me” as a result of her theoretical limitless funds. Perhaps in her experience all the men she’s encounter have been intimidated by wealth but I doubt she’s been tested by a large enough portion of the population to logically make that conclusion (especially since all we need is one case that makes the assertion invalid). However, it’s reasonable to conclude a proportion of men could not test nor impress her if she was wealthy, which I think she is.

To make her song logically valid to our anal retentive selves, it would have to go a little something like this:

Suppose I was a rich girl (Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na)
Now suppose I have all the legal tender in the world (assuming that quantity of legal tender represents a significant proportion of economic activity and the economy in question is widely defined), thus I would be a wealthy girl
A larger portion of men couldn’t test me, nor could they impress me, my cash flow would be larger than possibly most
Because I'd have all the legal tender in the world (assuming that quantity of legal tender represents a significant proportion of economic activity and the economy in question is widely defined), I would be a wealthy girl

Logical errors may make result in poor understanding, but they are certainly useful in music.

Note: I'm aware that "widely defined" and "a significant proportion" are not terms appropriate to logical agruments but the vagueness of the word "wealthy" barred me from constructing a more precise logical statement.

Bonus Question: There is an economic argument that questions the validity of my claim that even after correcting for Wrong Direction and Hasty Generalization, the lyrics still don't logically hold. What's the argument?