Rosie O’Donnell made a comment today about how we shouldn’t fear the terrorists:

Faith or fear, that’s your choice. You can walk through life believing in the goodness of the world, or walk through life afraid of anyone who thinks different than you and trying to convert them to your way of thinking.

I figure most people are going to key in on the ‘we shouldn’t fear the terrorists’ line. Whatever. It’s expected from her. What I personally find noteworthy is how in one short sentence she has exposed both the hypocrisy and the innate instability of the leftist worldview.

“You can walk through life believing in the goodness of the world…” is the choice she wishes us to believe she has made. ‘Faith’ in her fellow man. I consider myself a freethinker. And a tireless seeker of the truth. Are people fundamentally good? Every day in the news they shows us otherwise; rather, greed, anger, and pettiness seem to be innate characteristics. Are people fundamentally evil? Thousands of acts of kindness both large and small–many going largely unrecognized and unrewarded–would seem to belie this assertion. I submit instead that people are neutral. Neither good nor bad until we make that choice.

To have faith in the goodness of the world is to invite yourself to become a victim. Should girls at college parties get drop dead drunk assuming that all men are perfect gentlemen? Should the elderly couple entrust their life savings to a shyster? Should a person walk down the streets of Camden Town at 2 am assuming that no one will assault them?

To do so is not only the height of stupidity, but if Ms. O’Donnell truly behaved in such a fashion and truly lived in the real world, she would quickly be disabused of such lofty and inane notions.

…or walk through life afraid of anyone who thinks different than you and trying to convert them to your way of thinking. Here Ms. O’Donnell seems to be talking about the Right, religious and otherwise. But what about herself and her own politics? She rails against firearms, yet if people were truly good, she would have nothing to fear would she? She bangs her meaty fist upon her desk screaming at the camera about the need for social welfare. Yet if people were truly good, would we have need for such things? Ms. O’Donnell compares Christians to the Taliban and tells us that Christianity is if not evil, at least a danger to be carefully guarded against.

She openly derides those who seek limited government, and seeks to impose her leftist will upon us through government. She campaigns for the erosion of freedoms that could be used to cause harm and demands that government force us to be charitable.

Rosie and her ilk have no faith in the goodness of people or they wouldn’t campaign so hard to limit our freedoms and coerce us into making the social choices they want us to make. They have no respect for opposing viewpoints or they wouldn’t work so hard to silence voices like mine. Or, at best, compel us to act as they would wish through the use of government fiat, making us unwilling cogs in their machine.

What is it they fear? The evil that lies in the hearts of men. The pettiness. The greed. Just as everyone else does. This is why they fight tirelessly to control how we behave. They fear that a morally neutral tool would inevitably be used against them. They see the freedom of others as innately threatening. They fear that left alone, we would let others starve as we pad our own pockets. They fear that we have no capacity for goodwill toward others. If they do not fear such things, why do they work so hard to legislate them?

What is it they have faith in? It’s clearly not the people, or they wouldn’t try so hard to direct our every move. Yet, feeling as they do about our capacity for evil, they willingly give power to government to control us. They find little to be apprehensive about in this granting of enormous power because it will be ‘used for good’.

And yet when non-leftists are in control they briefly don the anti-establishment cloak that never leaves the shoulders of liberty-minded individuals, wearing for a time the mask of someone who sees the implicit danger of concentrated power. Faith in big government by fellow leftists, but not in big government by those other than themselves. What is this but fear of others that believe differently from you. We are left to the inescapable conclusion that what the leftist elite have faith in is in their own ability to justly preside over others.

I choose neither faith nor fear, but simple rationality. People are neither good nor bad, but will act in either fashion as their own self-interest dictates. Unlike the leftists, I do not fear others to the point I wish to control them. But neither do I have faith in them to always act in a goodly manner. More importantly, whereas the leftist has faith in ‘the right people’ and their ability to rule over us, I have faith in no one to do so. I am not an elitist, believing I operate on a level of righteousness unparalleled by ‘the common people’. I have within me the same capacity for evil as they do. And so I wouldn’t trust myself with such power, nor anyone else of a like mind. I do not hold myself above others, as the leftist elite seems to.

So. This is an ugly time in our Nation’s history. Far uglier than the Civil War and Reconstruction. Much worse than the Depression–although the seeds of today were planted by FDR, his four freedoms, and even moreso his massive ego.

Claire Wolfe puts it succinctly in the opening lines of 101 Things To Do ’til The Revolution when she says:

“America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”

That is exactly the situation we’re in. At this point it is all but impossible for one to vote for a party that supports the essential American ideal of liberty. The Libertarians who perhaps come closest still fail to acknowledge the basic pragmatism espoused by the founding fathers and which common sense when applied to classical liberal theory would suggest.

A vote for the Democrats is the same as a vote for Old Europe. Also known as the road to serfdom, socialist collapse, and totalitarianism. To vote for the Republicans is to vote for a strange combination of plutocracy, social authoritarianism, and a brand of big government all their own. Democrats fail to understand that if it requires coercion to maintain, then it can’t really be freedom. They also strangely see no problem with giving Government control of our economic lives, all the while whining about the problems faced by those without it. Republicans are unable to separate their personal moral views from their political stances. And neither party is able to understand the difference between political and economic capitalism.

Both parties are broken. The left irretrievably so seeing as the very definitions of important words like ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ they operate under are flawed. Castles in the sand and all that. Democrats’ minds inhabit a world in which physics, biology, and basic mathematics do not obey the rules of the physical universe. They live in a world where ’socialism is a good idea in theory’. Despite the fact that it’s at the theoretic level that socialism is most flawed, failing to take into account the basic self interest inherent in all animals.

Republicans? I’d give them slightly better odds but not much better. This might be a personal bias though. Like most minarchists I’m more sympathetic to conservatism than neosocialism since although we push for legalization of many things conservatives stand staunchly against, many or most of us willingly choose not to partake in such activities. Firmly wedded to personal responsibility as we are, the liberties of excess are not objectives we are likely to pursue.

So what do we do with one of the few tools left to us? Our vote? Well, we’ve all heard the basic arguments, which basically boil down to two:

1) The Republicans are still better than the Democrats, so we should vote for them.

2) The Republicans need to be sent a message so we should…

2a. Vote Libertarian
2b. Vote Democrat

3) The political machine is completely broken so we should refuse to vote at all.

4) Give the Democrats some power so they can hang themselves with their own rope.

I think Michael Savage has taken option 3 (if you can overlook his egotism, he’s actually fun to listen to). Boortz has rejected option 1, but I don’t know if he’s committed to anything else.
Personally I’ll be using option 2a and 3 depending on availability and palatability.

Just a couple days ago I reminded people that this is not an either/or proposition. And that’s what we need to keep in mind. This isn’t about choosing between Republicans and Democrats but architecting the birth of a new party or three. About changing things from the top to the bottom. Perhaps the new parties will keep the old names, perhaps they won’t. The fact that the Democrats can call themselves the ‘Party of Jefferson’ proves that names are as ephemeral and irrelevant as can be imagined.

Not everyone will choose the same option. Not everyone should choose the same option. I will say that Option 4 is just plain stupid. The thing about government power is that once granted it is almost impossible to revoke. Bush, like the past 70 years of presidents, is operating under the ‘emergency powers’ that FDR bequeathed upon himself. His Rural Electrification Administration is still in operation. Which is strange. I’ve lived in West Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and rural New York state, and have never had a problem with access to electricity. It’s just possible that that particular branch of government has outlived its always dubious usefulness.

Choosing Option 4 in other words is to accept that revolution–a true revolution–will be the only recourse. Whether it could be avoided in any case is doubtful. Still, as a young man who hopes to raise children as soon as he finds a worthy vessel, I’d like to at least try for a peaceful solution.

The other options boil down to a combination of geography, the individual candidate, and personal principle. I refuse to vote for a Republican. I can do this because I live in what was the Reddest state in the union back in the 2004 election. I’m also lucky enough to call Porkbusting Senator Tom Coburn my own. I get to have my cake and eat it too. Were I to live in a borderline state like Ohio or Wisconsin, my personal convictions might have some negative side effects.

My vote isn’t meaningless, but it is futile. Even if the libertarian party presented me a candidate who’s head wasn’t in the clouds, a candidate with a strong and popular following, some Republican who displayed ‘Christian Family Values’ would still win. But like I said, my vote isn’t meaningless. Voting for an LP official would send a message. 5% of the vote this cycle, 10% next cycle. It would remind the people at large that there could be a viable alternative. And it would remind the Republicans that they aren’t the only option for non-socialists. And there is a certain comfort in knowing that even though I’d be ‘throwing my vote away’, at least I wouldn’t be abetting a Democrat in gaining a seat.

In a similar way, the same goes for those living in California, New York, or any of the other neosocialist bastions. They similarly have little chance of changing the tides. They are free to vote for an alternative candidate with a clear conscience. And that is what they ought to be doing without a doubt.

Borderline states, it’s you who have the real dilemma. When elections hang on margins that measure in the low thousands, your vote does make a measurable difference. Not voting for a Republican could change the election. Then again, voting for a Republican doesn’t quite convey your disapproval of the GOP. And then there’s the danger of the message being interpreted wrongly. The GOP could always take your decision not to vote for them as a signal that they need to turn even farther left. All I can tell you is that just remember that Dems in power means yet more liberty all but irretrievably lost.

Maverick candidates offer the best of both worlds. Republican candidates who support the FairTax plan, are more socially liberal, or firmly stand against the growth in the Executive Branch are people we can give our full support to. Unfortunately they’re an all too rare breed.

Nope, I don’t have an all encompassing solution to this quagmire. And there is no one-size-fits-all voting strategy. Human power struggles are far too messy. Which is probably why the Founders sought to limit the power of government so much when they created the law of the land. Sadly, we forgot their lesson. And this is the mess we’ve inherited.

All I can hope for is that we tread carefully and prudently. Whether we merely prolong the seemingly inevitable or somehow manage to revive our ailing nation, either would be better than hastening its demise.

70 years ago, the Indian symbol for good fortune was appropriated by an ambitious German politician to denote his Third Reich. The symbol that had graced everything from doorways to jewelry for thousands of years was in a moment’s space twisted into a representation of one of the most evil regimes in history. Today, for me to display an important part of my heritage would send quite a different signal from that intended.

Also around 70 years ago, the transformation of the word liberalim from a doctrine of minimal interference and autonomy to direct interventionism and state-mediated privileges neared completion under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his four freedoms.

“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under
the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist
program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without
knowing how it happened.”–Norman Thomas, founder of the American Socialist Party

I got in trouble back in middle school for drawing a Swastika on a notebook. The teacher demanded I throw the notebook out. I did. And then drew an even bigger one, in marker, on a new notebook. She tooke the hint. Hitler perpetrated so many evils against the Jews and other undesirables, as well as Europe as a whole. To allow him to further rob Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains of an essential part of our heritage is unconscionable.

It is for the same reason that we must not yield the name ‘liberal’ to our ideological enemies. To do so is to grant them a victory and a legitimacy they do not deserve. When I started this blog, almost a year ago now, I said that the war against the left wasn’t merely about issues, but about definitions. I still believe that if we are to win, we must show the world how hollow the word ‘liberal’ rings when it comes from their mouths.

Liberal–from liber, meaning free. Freedom. Autonomy. Non-interference. As 311 says:

do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law
until you violate the rights of another
respect the space of your sister and your brother

This is the sum total of what it means to be liberal, freedom to choose both good and bad, yourself.

To take the hard-earned fruits of labor from some to give to others. Not liberal, but statist.

To criminalize the possession of objects, rather than their criminal use. Not liberal, but statist.

To ban unhealthy foods, because people ‘don’t know what’s best for them’. Not liberal, but statist.

To seek comfort through government. Not liberal, but statist.

To view government as the creator, rather than a defender of liberty. Not liberal, but statist

Every time Boortz denigrates the deranged thought patterns of ‘liberals’, every time Michael Savage descends into yet another overly egotistical yet erudite tirade against the ‘liberals’, it rankles. Every time a leftist declares that he is a liberal, every time someone who supports social welfare insists he’s more ‘liberal’ than me, my anger grows.

And the converse is also true. I am not a conservative. I cannot be lumped in with the conservatives. Because although I and many of my ilk are more sympathetic to conservatism, we understand that ultimately that road leads to the same tyrannical and oppressive government as leftism does.

I am a liberal. I am proud to follow in the footsteps of Jefferson, of Paine, and of Locke. I revel in the words of Godwin and Voltaire. I nod in understanding as I read Hayek, Freidman, and Smith. I am but an insignificant part of a strong, proud, and long philosophical heritage. And I will not have my name taken from me without a fight.

So 1000 lawyers have shown up at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay to defend the 400 some inmates, for free. Screw the inmates, lets focus on those lawyers.

I’m going to go ahead and make the assumption that probably upwards of 90% of those lawyers are flaming leftists. With maybe the remainder made up of conservatives and libertarians who dissent with the war for whatever reason.

Why do I make this assumption? Because under international law, the only rights of enemy combatants fighting without uniform is to be summarily executed and/or hanged after a redundant battlefield court martial. In other words, just by being left breathing, they’ve been shown considerable mercy. And through leftist posturing, they’ve been given more amenities than I get. And more consideration for their religion too. Which is funny because Hindus have never tried to kill Americans in the name of religion.

What do you call someone who wants to give people ‘rights’ that are neither rights nor deserved? A leftist. Hence my assumption that these lawyers are leftists.

Moving on, that’s slightly more than 2 lawyers per detainee, all of whom vote for Democrats because they’ll ‘take care of the less fortunate’. These people likely call those who don’t support social welfare names like ’selfish’ or ‘greedy’ or ‘uncaring’, while they call themselves ‘charitable’, and ‘respectful’.

So here’s my thing. How many of these 1000 lawyers do you think have ever offered their services to the poor for a significantly reduced rate or for free? You think it’s even as high as 50%?

Leftists talk a good game about caring more about others than we do. Yet a look at their personal lives often reveals just how hollow their talk of charity and good will really is. As I’ve discussed before, they on the other hand simply vote for someone else who will so that they don’t have to.

What does it say about a person that they think service to his fellow man can be discharged by choosing a proxy, and then forcing everyone else to do the same?

I’ve got a dirty secret. I don’t see the point in packing heat all the time. Or even most of the time. There. I said it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a very strong second amendment supporter and the fact that I have to get a license to concealed carry pisses me off only slightly less than the fact that California still has an ‘assault weapon ban’. And don’t get me started on the BMG ban. I also believed that an armed populace is more important than jail sentences or a police cruiser as a criminal deterrent. But by and large I am and have always been far more interested in the right to keep and bear arms than doing so myself.

We were talking about it on the Life Liberty Property community’s mailing list after we got sidetracked from the initial subject of web traffic. Don’t ask me how. RG Combs was telling me about his experiences with the Guardian series, which I’ve been eyeballing after playing with (and enjoying) my Black Widow. I admitted that I’m simply not that worried about the personal safety aspect, expecting a torrent of distaste and angry statistic quoting. Instead it turns out I’m not the only one. Several in fact have never even fired a gun before.

And it occurred to me that the libertarians who make you feel bad for admitting the above are guilty of making the same exact mistake conservatives do. They forget that the important thing is the freedom to choose to carry, not that you yourself carry. As I’ve said before, I probably wouldn’t even own a gun if I hadn’t been attracted to the engineering aspects first, and the fun second. Granted, I’d still probably have a CCW license just so I could wave it at hippies and make them cringe in fear…

I’m a rather conservative man as personal habits go. Yet I support drug legalization and a host of other ’socially liberal’ things which I myself either look down upon or simply would never do. When conservatives hear that, they often make the mistake of assuming that I am somehow ‘for’ those things. Heh. If only they knew just how puritanical I can be. On the other hand, I hate seatbelt and helmet laws, but I always buckle up and wear a helmet on the rare occasions I ride. Which upsets the leftists, who claim I don’t care about people, unwilling to realize that I’m simply willing to give them the respect to allow them to make their own decisions about issues that only affect themselves.

What I’m getting at is that the biggest difference between classical liberals and both the right and the left is that the latter share the belief that personal opinion should be law. When we create an environment where other liberty-minded individuals feel like pariahs because they have little interest in firearms, we make the same mistake the mainstream does. The important thing is that–like us–they support the right to use firearms in defense, utility, and fun, not that they themselves do so.

It’s a common plot device in cartoons. Kid gets tired of being bullied. Kid learns karate/gets special powers/buys robot and neutralizes bully. Kid eventually becomes worse than old bully. I would say it’s gotten tired and old, but it hasn’t. And it’s yet again a lesson the leftist would do good to apply to his political thought process.

In 1789 the French stormed the Bastille and took a stand against the aristocrats, abolishing feudalism and theocracy in one fell swoop. In the 19th century, protests against the robber barons raged far and wide all over the West as workers and their children were exploited during the Industrial Revolution. And in October of 1917, the Bolsheviks took the words of Marx to heart as they usurped control both in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The common theme of all of these events was injustice. People had power they did not deserve, and they were exerting it over people who couldn’t defend themselves. Although I have little patience for socialism, even I must admit that something had to be done about what was going on.

The danger comes when a perception of wrongdoing turns into outright jealousy, and the desire to dispense justice turns into the bloodthirsty motivation to punish. One sees this most clearly with Marx’s–and his followers’–endless tirades about the bourgeoisie. When all is said and done, their greatest criticism of the fledgling middle class is that they are better off than the proletariat. And so they punished prosperity. The Soviet Union managed to function for 74 years after that revolution, but it never knew wealth. Could it be that the two are related?

It seems that along the way leftists found themselves unable to keep their eye on the prize. The point was to prevent men from becoming prosperous by taking it off the backs of others, not to prevent them from becoming prosperous. But by looking first at their situation and then assuming that a crime must have been committed, they have become just as oppressive in their own right as the kings of days past.

And I speak not only of wealth, but of any pursuit in which we will naturally stratify and separate into different levels of success and attainment. Of academic excellence and artistic fervor. In athletic competition. Even, sadly, in health. The left sees each of these things and believes that any differential amongst the various demographics cannot be tolerated. They punish out of jealousy and nothing more.

The founding fathers stressed the importance of reciprocity in government. In fact, it is reciprocity that separates the fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property from the coercive privileges demanded by the modern leftist. Civil rights weren’t created for the majority, but for the minority. Freedom of speech wasn’t for the eloquent but for the dastardly. If you took free speech away from him, you have also taken it from yourself. By the same token, by punishing someone else for their success, you prevent yourself from ever being rewarded for your own.

In a casual conversation the other day, we got to talking about traffic laws, parking tickets, university police, and other such travesties of justice when someone wondered aloud why law enforcement seems to attract the best and the worst people in society with equal frequency. I would think that the answer would be self evident to anyone. And it bothers me that in a few months, tens of millions of people are going to elect state and national leaders without understanding this basic aspect of human behavior and its political ramifications.

The purpose of government is to ensure the well-being of the people. But government cannot discharge this responsibility except through the projection of power. At its core then, government is force. Like any other potentially destructive implement, the determining factor isn’t in the object itself, but can be found in the character of the man wielding it.

As the old adage goes, with great power comes great responsibility. These ultimately inseparable aspects of any position of influence nevertheless attract two very different kinds of people. And therein lies the danger.

While being far from an accomplished woodworker, I do enjoy the avocation. For me it’s about watching a few pieces of oak or pine magically become a functional, and sometimes aesthetically pleasing, piece of furniture. At the opposite end of the spectrum we have Tim ‘The Tool Man’ Taylor. With his constant quest for more power and his animal-like grunting, and the fact that I don’t think I ever did see a finished piece of work on his part, one is left in little doubt as to where his interests lay.

And so it is with government. There are those who lust for power, and then there are those who desire nothing more than to fulfill their duty to their fellows. The Founding Fathers–and in particular George Washington–were perfectly situated to claim as much power for themselves as they liked. After all, even in their own time they were treated almost as demi-gods, and it was they themselves that created the government they would later lead. Yet they created a founding document intended more to curb and limit government, rather than empower it (the EU and Iraq could take a lesson from that. Washington himself was treated like a king, and indeed at one point they tried to make him president for life. Washington was never tempted, never took the gifts of power that he was offered, for he knew that foremost among his responsibilities was to set an example for the maintenance of carefully circumscribed government.

Compare this to FDR, who ran for four terms as president. Who by declaring a State of Emergency, gave himself more power than any president who preceded him. Who mocked the very soul of this land when he declared the Constitution a ‘horse and buggy’ document and proceeded to destroy the Fathers’ vision as surely as Orwell’s pigs learned to walk on two legs. Or to Bill Clinton, whose ego makes even this author look as humble as a saint. Or to George Bush, who though not as bad as the press and the left make him out to be, is clearly a power monger in his own right.

How then do we prevent the power-mongers from taking office, from becoming dictatorial bureaucrats, or from wearing a badge? Is there a good way? We can’t achieve this in medicine or in the clergy, why would government be any different?

Those on the Left seek a big government. They do so because they think government has a larger responsibility to do things for its citizens. But they forget that with greater responsibility will come greater power. And, inevitably, abuse of said power.

In neurobiology you learn about a condition called pain asymbolia. This condition is fairly unique in that people with this disorder have pain messages transmitted up the spinal cord into the brain and they can acknowledge that this pain is uncomfortable, but it completely lacks emotional context. They aren’t particularly scared, annoyed, perturbed, or angered by pain, treating it like they would any other harmless stimulus.

Although the result of a problem with the wiring of the brain, this condition can be reproduced in perfectly normal individuals. While no human mother has ever been quite overprotective enough, laboratory researchers have shown that when puppies are raised in a pain-free environment, they are unable to learn from painful experiences and so never lean to avoid injury.

While this doesn’t sound like a particularly dangerous condition, when you realize that pain is merely a signal for injury, and that these people–not being able to feel pain–are completely unable to anticipate and avoid said injury, you can understand just how harmful to your health such a cognitive problem can be.

What a ‘government that cares’ gives us is something all too similar. It acts as a buffer preventing people from feeling the full consequences of their actions. ‘Society’ takes much of the load. For almost any bad decision a person can make, from unintended pregnancy to drug addiction, there exists a government or private program that will pay the costs for you. The injury occurred, but you never felt the pain.

This situation is exacerbated when the nanny state moves from a ’safety net’ as we still often refer to it in the states, to a ‘human right’ as they have become in Europe. With the former, at least it is acknowledged that you did screw up. With the latter, what you did to end up on the rolls is irrelevant: you deserve that handout no matter what you have done.

In England, it wasn’t too uncommon to come across multiple-generation teenage mother families. Great grandmothers under 50, three generations of absent men, and three generations of women who had never worked a day in their lives. Because ‘the government owes it to them’. It wasn’t uncommon to see lushes and addicts of all kinds on the rolls either. Our situation here isn’t quite so bad, but I can remember more than one personal encounter in which someone insisted it was their right to have the government support their family so they didn’t have to work.

It’s a delicate balance to maintain; so many of these government protections go toward families. And one would rather not have the sins of the father revisited upon the son. Even in the depths of my heartlessness I find it hard to acknowledge that a child should starve because the stupidity of his mother. Yet clearly something must be done.

At the most basic level, people must pay for their mistakes or they will never learn from them. And if a portion of that punishment is to be subsidized by the state, and thus the taxpayer, they must be made to acknowledge that the pain would be far worse without others to help them. And there must be a penalty for multiple infractions, another incentive for learning.

The most basic lesson to be learned from evolutionary biology, economics, and the failure of socialism is that all individuals are self-interested. Without incentive to work harder, they won’t. Without incentive not to make mistakes, they will. Without a reason to be good and a greater reason not to be bad, people will not choose good. When a comfortable life becomes a right people will fail to grow.

There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.–Daniel Webster

The uniting feature of all leftist ideologies is the belief that a central government is an inherently good thing. That only through unilateral control can the evils of man be subdued. The problem with this, of course, is that it is men who make up said entities. It is very possible that, as the esteemed Mr. Webster remarked, the originators of such political philosophies really were good men; Leon Trotsky strikes me as one such individual. But it is also oft said that power inevitably corrupts; the greater the power the greater the temptation. It would thus seem inevitable that government would come to embody the very evils it was meant to suppress. Government in its purest form is nothing but power. The power to control, the power to suppress, the power to protect, and the power to enable. Power, like any other tool, is a neutral entity. Under a benevolent dictator like Pratchett’s Vetinari, a powerful government is almost transparent, doing little more than greasing the occasional squeaky wheel. Yet those who found their necks under Stalin’s jackboots had quite a different opinion of tyranny. It would make sense, then, that if one were to advocate for a powerful central government, one would take some care in choosing his leaders.

For the past several years, I have remained dumbfounded by the Left’s inability to champion anyone who wasn’t an insincere self-serving egomaniac as a popular, cultural, or official leader. In college, Che Guevara t-shirts abounded. Of all his crimes against humanity which included thousands of executions of enemy combatants as well as the brutal murder of innocent peasants, perhaps his most heinous was his role as the architect of the Cuban ‘labor camps’ in which people were ‘re-educated’ for not believing in the flawed concept of Marxism. Using governmental power for thought control and persecution of dissidents, clearly Guevara was an exemplar of the use of the state in curbing the more unsavory aspects of man’s character.

In the political arena, we have an assortment of silver spoon rich WASPS claiming to actually care about the less fortunate among us. From their class-obsessed lifestyles, to the privileges they would deny us yet retain themselves the position that they are in fact sincere in their leftist tendencies would strike any honest man as completely without basis in reality. This cast of characters is exemplified by Hilary Clinton. If ever there was a character in the political arena who answered to ambition and ambition alone, it would be her.

But what sparked this insight on my part was the self-absorbed nature of Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos himself. Although the man has not declared an interest in running for office, he is nevertheless a political and popular icon among the left and so wields no small amount of power himself. Leaving aside the warped worldview that allows the man to declare he’s a libertarian without bursting into fits of self-induced laughter, the man has named a gathering of his followers…after himself. The YearlyKos he calls it. As the real implications of this hit me, I merely sat dumbfounded for several minutes. Here we have a man who preaches ‘equality’, ‘opportunity’, and ‘prosperity’ yet is so narcissistic as to organize an entire conference of leftists in his own name.

Leftists would create a government of unprecedented power and then willingly hand over the reigns of the terrible beast to those who would be most likely to misuse it, only to look up in shock as the wheels of the juggernaut moved to crush them.

Government is an attempt at the solution of societal ills through the application of power. Power is the method, not the purpose, of government. To lose sight of this is to invite both failure and totalitarianism, as Hayek prophetically warned us so many decades ago. Why then does the Left continue to choose leaders more interested in the use of power than the solution of societal problems?

It is true that there are power-mongers and egocentric people among libertarians. And there are figures who are nearly universally respected amongs us: Thomas Jefferson, Robert Heinlein, Patrick Henry. And there are politicians we unabashedly and nearly unanimously support: Ron Paul, John Cornyn and…that’s about it. But there is a limit to our respect and our support. We do not define ourselves by these people, we do not put them up on pedestals. We see them as fellow travelers, perhaps with a taller soapbox, perhaps with a little more prestige, but we see them as like-minded individuals not rulers. But more importantly we don’t trust them with such formidable power.

When I took up my summer job at the Oklahoma State Department of Health I took an oath to the constitution. Anyone who works for a federal agency does. As we sat there, repeating after the lady from personnel, I couldn’t help but snort audibly and let the beginnings of an ironic chuckle leave my lips. Everyone staring at me, I realized how futile it would be to explain that by working for the department, most of us would be violating our oath every minute we were on the clock.

It occurred to me that if everyone realized the hollow nature of that oath, knew the constitution enough to understand the contradictory nature of their position, the world might be a better place. And it occurred to me that if one day everyone bound by that oath were to live up to it, America might be returned to her former glory.

While many don’t see it that way, abortion is one of the thorniest issues in libertarian thought. Most libertarians are pro-choice. But quite a few are pro-life. For scientific and philosophical reasons. On a personal level, I fall into the latter category as I believe life starts at implantation (not conception). On a political level, I see the issue as considerably more murky.

Libertarians for life has done a good job of outlining the basic libertarian argument against abortion:

1. Human offspring are human beings, persons from fertilization.[emphasis mine]
2. Abortion is homicide — the killing of one person by another.
3. There is never a right to kill an innocent person. Prenatally, we are all innocent persons.
4. A prenatal child has the right to be in the mother’s body. Parents have no right to evict their children from the crib or from the womb and let them die. Instead both parents, the father as well as the mother, owe them support and protection from harm.
5. No government, nor any individual, has a just power to legally depersonify any one of us, born or preborn.
6. The proper purpose of the law is to side with the innocent, not against them.

The problem comes in that their first statement boils down to a matter of belief. Self-evidently, fertilization gets the ball rolling, however, where life begins isn’t as cut and dried as that. An egg is just a single cell with the potential to create an entire human being. But after the first division at the two-cell stage, each cell is also capable of becoming a human, as it is for several divisions afterward. In fact, identical twins are the result of one of these early stage balls of cells dividing into two separate pieces. Does this mean at the two-cell stage what we have are two lives?

There are several ’starting points’ along the way that could just as easily be argued to be the start. Implantation–when the early embryo embeds itself in the walls of the uterus and it fuses with the fetal trophoblast to begin forming the embryo. The heart starting to beat in the 3rd week. The point at which fetuses are capable of surviving to adulthood with medical intervention (20-23rd week with various levels of debility). The point at which the cerebral cortex (the part of the brain that actually ‘thinks’) becomes functional (26th-29th week). The point at which the fetus can survive outside the womb with minimal or no medical intervention (highly variable but generally after cortical function). Or birth.

In addition to the question of where ‘life’ begins is the question of when that life becomes ‘human’. As I said earlier, I believe that it’s a life from the time of implantation. When does it become a human life? I’d argue from the point at which it could be removed from the womb and at a minimum develop into an adult with borderline normal human intelligence. Which is at some point between the 20th and 26th weeks. Curiously, most European abortion laws use some kind of the combination of logic I’ve presented here to set a point of no return that varies from the 20th to the 25th week depending on the country. It’s one of the rare instances where I’ll say that European law trumps ours.

The idea that life begins at birth is the most inane of all of them. Babies are routinely born 4 to 6 weeks early nearly indistinguishable from full-term babies. Meaning the only essential difference between a fetus 4 to 6 weeks from expected delivery date and a newborn is location. One can define what it means to be human in myriad ways, but I’ve never heard environmental context to be one of them.

The problem then becomes which of these points between fertilization and fully-matured fetus does human life begin at? Science cannot give an answer to that. And as I’ve attempted to show, any philosophical position on the matter is somewhat untenable.

‘Arbitrary’ and ‘just’ are mutually exclusive terms when it comes to the law. So while it goes against my belief that anything later than the morning after pill is murder, I must concede that this is a decision best left up to the mother and father.

And here the quandary moves from epistemological to moral. Yes, the decision is best left up to those who are the biological progenitors and eventual material and emotional supporters of the fetus. But the choice they will make is one that affects not only themselves but the potential person that is the fetus. The choice they make–and their philosophical reasons for doing so–thus determines if an abortion is murder or not.

As Libertarians For Life point out:

Politically, of course, our perspective is libertarian. Libertarianism’s basic principle is that, under justice, each of us has the obligation not to aggress against (violate the rights of) anyone else — for any reason (personal, social, or political), however worthy.

The question with regard to abortion is whether or not it represents aggression against another person. A fetus can’t be said to necessarily have the basic rights of all people–life, liberty,property–because it hasn’t been determined to be a person. However, it is owed at the very least a full inquiry as to whether or not it is a person. Anything less is a travesty of justice.

By engaging in a voluntary activity with the implicit consequence of creating a new person, the mother and father accept the consequence that–should life be created from the act–they have a duty to support this person. Because the question of when that fetus becomes a life they are indentured to is best left in their hands, they have a duty and an obligation to utilize all the information available to make that moral decision. Abortion awareness acts are one of the best methods at our disposal to ensure that this occurs. They aren’t perfect, but the only other solution I can come up with is to put each and every couple who undergo an abortion to a trial in which they defend their decision. Hardly preferrable. The most basic right of the fetus is a right to a fair trial.

The open border policy that many libertarians support continues to baffle me. Do they not understand the implications of such a policy in today’s political environment? Do they not understand that we are in an era where some people vote money out of others’ pocketbooks? Do they not understand that in a social welfare system, the more poor people, the greater the tax burden on everyone else? Do they not understand that the lower per capita income is the larger the welfare state will grow? And that the larger the welfare state grows, the harder upward mobility will become? Yes I agree that a strong border policy isn’t necessarily a libertarian position. But are you so wedded to principle that you will cling to it as you openly invite and foster the growth of the Nanny State?

Positions such as these are one of the reasons I’ve chosen to call myself a classical liberal. To me the term not only implies the dedication to life, liberty, and property that we share with libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, but also the knowledge that while not good, a state is necessary. Laws are necessary. And that sometimes compromises must be made to better protect those rights we hold so dear.

I’ll concede that if we lived under a perfect libertarian system, if our government still resembled that envisioned by the framers, that there would be less need for a closed border (but there would still be a need for immigration control). But such is not the case, and in this world even stronger border controls than a libertarian government would call for are necessary. And as such, we must recognize that in this less-than-ideal current form of government, sometimes counterintuitive positions must be taken. This was the basis for my essay on Liberty in a Statist World.

So lets go back to the basics. We aren’t anarcho-capitalists. Therefore we all acknowledge that the state does have a legitimate role in society. I like Chris’ list the best. It’s more or less what I ascribe to as well. All of us are going to agree with most of that list, so let’s leave minor quibbles aside. Most of what a state should do is distributed equably among the people. Roads, the court system, etc. The state is funded through taxation. Obviously, this state needs borders. A line of demarcation in which services are paid for and rendered. For this state to be just, it goes without saying that the zone of taxation and the zone of services must be perfectly overlapping. There are basically two competing forms of taxation: income and consumption taxes. Currently we operate under an unconstitutional income tax system. Most of us favor a consumption tax. But that has its own problems. In the situation like we have, where a sizeable proportion of a certain immigrant population’s paychecks are sent out of the state, that means that this money is exempt from taxation. I feel it’s a relatively minor foible, and at any rate, it isn’t the system we operate under so let’s move on.

Any income tax that isn’t a flat fee is by its nature progressive. Whether it’s a flat percentage or a ridiculously progressive rate (like the system we currently have in place), the more you earn, the more you pay. Yet under a libertarian government, you don’t necessarily receive more in government services. Rather than worry about how fair such a system is, let’s move on to the basic realities of a government so funded. Government spends roughly the same amount of money on each person, yet it receives more from some, less from others. An influx of people on the lower end of the scale means that the per capita revenue and thus per capita expenditure drops considerably. A general raise on taxation rates would thus become necessary to maintain the same level of government service. And under a welfare state as the United States is (43.5% of government expenditure goes to social welfare), the more you make, the more you pay, yet the less you receive. Since government can’t tax those who receive welfare and medicaid benefits, increases in taxation would be borne fully by a relatively small proportion of the population. I developed this idea more fully, with better examples in The Economics of Illegal Immigration.

Moving on from an economic perspective, lets turn to equality. Being fully committed to the idea of negative rights, we are the only political ideologies fully wedded to the idea of equality. But in this day, equality of opportunity has been replaced with the idea of equality of outcome. Such is the political climate, like it or not. And it will only become worse. Whether it’s college admissions and courses being less dependent on test scores and more on waffling ‘qualitative’ factors, or how many black actors there are in sitcoms, sometime before I was born it was decided that equality can only be measured through proportional representation in every part of the human condition.

We are importing a population that is by and large uneducated. That doesn’t speak English. And where many show no desire to. Into this home environment children will be born. And more children per family than their native counterparts. Will these children do as well economically and academically as the native population? Doubtful. And so the hue and cry of ‘racism’ and ‘prejudice’ will be raised. A generation from now Sharptons and Jacksons with latinized names will rise up, speaking to cultural identity that their only path to ‘freedom’ lies in increased governmentally-sanctioned privilege. Privilege that will come at the expense of freedom and opportunity for all other races. And in this political climate, they will be all too successful.

Let us not forget that when the modern left redefined rights as privilege, stealing from us the title ‘liberal’, the very word that defines us, they changed the nature of American politics. They changed our nation from one that defended our inalienable rights to a tool by which one party gains advantage over another. They created a political machine in which people vote to take away the rights of others to further their own desires.

Even in a minarchist country, where there would be no welfare state, no juggernaut of privilege encroaching upon our very liberty, we must yield to basic economics. A state can only be maintained so long as the proportion of people who pay less than the average taxation amount are balanced by those who pay more. Or even those most minimal of government services we believe necessary will find themselves compromised.

This is a world in which benevolent dictatorship does not work. This is a world in which democracy is our best tool. A world where documents as strongly worded as the constitution find themselves to be as fragile and brittle as the parchment they’re written on. The greatest threat to our liberty is an oppressive majority. And it is that which you would usher in with your open borders.

Final post on why all moderate movements can go to hell. For this week anyway.
Earlier Entries
Never Trust A Moderate
Pragmatism Is Not An Ideology
The Issues Don’t Matter…
Meddling Tends To Backfire

Thomans Brackett Reed looks like a pretty interesting character. He ran in the same social circle as Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt, two of my favorite American icons. I really wish I knew more about him, but the following quote tells me that if our paths had ever crossed, we probably would have gotten along just fine:

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.

Unity08 ‘doesn’t have a platform’. And it’s true that they haven’t taken a position on what they’re going to do. But they have decided they need to do something about ‘pressing issues’. While I’m also concerned about our dependence on oil, the state of social security, and the laughable excuse for an education system we call public schools, I doubt I’d go about fixing it in the same way they would. As I’ve articulated several times in the past couple of days, they have defaulted to an interventionist position simply by taking a ‘focus on the issues’ stance.

Unity08 and the Radical middle in general want to move away from ideological issues to pragmatic issues. It’s a dangerous step. At the end of the day, whether its legal or not to burn a flag doesn’t really change things in this country all that much. It’s an ideological matter–an important one, banning flag burning is equivalent to urinating on the Bill of Rights and claiming you’re ‘restoring’ it–but ultimately one that matters little to the prosperity and safety of our country. On the other hand, violence, social security, healthcare, and education all have a much more palpable impact on our daily lives, on the other hand. Which is what makes these issues so dangerous to discuss without a clear ideological framework on the role of government.

Issue-driven politics becomes nothing more than a combination of bribery, scare tactics, and offers of protection in return for subjugation. Politicians offer you safety and prosperity in return for your tax money and your liberty. Sometimes they appeal to your greed (medicare drug benefits, welfare expansion, etc.) and sometimes they appeal to your fears (crime is up! must ban guns not used in crimes! Because criminals are far more scared of soft targets than they are hard ones!).

Issue-driven politics is about explaining to you that if you were reasonable you’d see that you don’t really need all that freedom, and excuse me while I assemble the walls of this cage around you “for your own protection”. I once heard the practice of purdah justified using similar logic. Bollocks.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to order my AR-15 before ‘reasonable’ and ‘pragmatic’ men attempt to ban a low-powered semiautomatic rifle just because it looks scary and I don’t actually need it.

Fourth in my Unity08 prompted extended rant about the dangers of centrist politics.

I watch a lot of family programming. ABC Family, Nickelodeon, Disney channel. While I can enjoy a dirty joke as well as the next guy (and frequently make them), I get rather tired of it when it comes to sitcoms. Maybe I’m just thirsting for the days of Leave It To Beaver and the Dick Van Dyke Show, but I like the idea that people are capable of producing an entire 22 minute program without resorting to crudities and sexuality–especially as so much of TV seems infested with teen promiscuity and other wanton behavior. Call me old fashioned, but I’m of the opinion that if you’re doing adult things you ought to be an adult. Not to mention that, having worked in public health for the past couple months, I’ve come to understand all too well the hidden and not-so-hidden dangers of the free love that modern culture seems so insistent on foisting upon us. But that’s a topic for another time.

That’s So Raven is a show on Disney Channel, a fairly funny series about a girl who has psychic visions of the future, and predictably attempts to interfere in things, either to prevent or ensure their occurence. And you know what? It almost inevitably backfires. This basic plotline is a conceit that has appeared multiple times in almost every sitcom known to man, not to mention a host of funny novels (such as all PG Wodehouse work). It’s just possible that they may be on to something.

As I’ve been talking about throughout this discussion, the biggest danger of centrist politics is that it is only issue-driven–usually practical rather than ideological–and thus focused only on how to legislate away problems. But today rather than focus on the tendency of a ‘centrist’ state to devolve into totalitarianism faster than either leftist or conservative states, I thought I’d focus on the pragmatic side of state intervention, since that’s what the middle claims to be all about.

One of the major problems with the mindset behind interventionism is that it is built upon a false premise. Understanding the order of social systems and the behavior of the individuals within them requires first that you understand that it is a dynamic process. When the behavior of one individual changes, the behavior of everyone else changes to a greater or lesser degree in response. The very order of a society is subtly changed every time one participant is affected by the actions of another. It’s a point neatly encapsulated by Gandhi’s quote that when you take an eye for an eye, everyone ends up blind.

In other words, things don’t stop, their effects reverberate throughout the group, the end result oftentimes opposite that of the initiating event. Interventionism ignores this fact, treating society as static and assuming that the only effect of a given act of government interference will be the direct one. It is as if the interventionist pulls the trigger on a .50BMG rifle expecting to make a bullet fly out the muzzle, only to be surprised when the firearm recoils in his hands. And in fact this is exactly what those sitcoms show us time and time again. The action gets the ball rolling, but cannot control what direction it takes or just how far it will travel.

One of my favorite examples of this is the push to raise CAFE standards. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Raising fuel economy standards will mean we’ll need less gasoline for the same amount of commuting and travel, which would mean a reduction in our . But, because of reduced demand, prices would drop. Less gas at a lower rate would mean that we’d be spending less on gasoline, and therefore we’ll have less incentive to turn toward alternative fuels such as ethanol or biodiesel.

Another example is the federal subsidization of college loans. Which has likely been a key factor in the explosive growth of tuition fees in the past few decades. College opens doors, so it makes sense that we find a way to help as many people pay for college as possible, regardless of income level. In this case, the unintended consequence is quite large in its deleterious effect. While many more can finance their post-secondary education, once out they find themselves under mountainous levels of debt.

To understand why this has happened, I’ll use the example of automobiles. When I moved back to the states, I knew I’d need a car. While walking 2.5 miles to and from school every day is quite feasible in London, this isn’t quite the case in Oklahoma City. I’m not a fan of debt, and so had intended to buy a 1998 Ford Ranger outright when I got settled in. My parents offered me in essence a no-interest loan on a 2006 Mustang GT that I would have to start paying back when I started residency (eerily similar to the college loan situation). I took the deal, tripling what I was willing to pay for a car. The situation is much the same for college tuition. If there was no financing available, there is no way that the current costs of tuition would be sustainable.

These are just a few examples among many. While the initial government action may be quite simple in nature, its effects are rarely straightforward. And more importantly, it can often worsen the situation. By appealing to ‘the issues’, centrist parties and the moderates that support them set themselves up to create far more problems than they will actually solve. Their solutions are too simplistic, too lacking in grounding in the science of social behavior, and too much based on the need to ‘do something‘ rather than properly address the problem itself.

Third installment in the anti-moderate rant. You can head to Unity08 to see what prompted me.

The issues don’t matter, ideology does.

My very first post on this blog made my stance on this quite clear:

The war isn’t about issues, it’s about definitions. Our definition of freedom is incompatible with theirs; granting the rights they wish to grant can only be achieved by constraining all men. We must attack their ideology, and not just their legislation.

It’s why I don’t do the link-quote-comment-quote-comment-rant thing. The problem today is that the very way we look at political issues is flawed.

In an email I received yesterday, a reader made the following comment:

I read your post today, and I think you are way off base when talking about Unity08. I think you need to read more about their core values, and less about what their supporters personal ideologies are…

I believe this is what Unity08 is saying: Politics is messed up because political parties are only pushing wedge issues (in order to GOTV). Therefore, no real issues are being pursued (education, social security, health care, etc etc). Unity08 believes that by nominating (and maybe electing) a viable third ticket, that the major political parties will have to cater more towards the middle, and therefore get back to the core issues that Americans want resolved (or at least talked about).

Unity08 hasn’t taken a stand on any issues (because they have not nominated any candidates) – so to say that they are anything but an organization claiming to provide Americans with a third choice come 2008, is simply wrong.

And he’s right in that this is all Unity08 claims to be. But my very problem with them stems from the fact that they are trying to divert attention toward those which ‘reasonable people’ want addressed. Yesterday’s rant about pragmatism could easily have been devoted to ‘reasonable legislation’ with nary a word changed.

While wedge issues do have the unfortunate side effect of diverting attention away from impending challenges our nation will face, they are important in that they allow for a quick and easy identification of a politician’s ideology. Michael Bloomberg has done an excellent job of painting himself as a rather libertarian-leaning Republican, but his draconian stance on gun control reveals his true colors. Without such wedge issues, many might never have known any better.

The problem isn’t right or left, the problem isn’t that we’re choosing polarizing issues to elect our leadership on, it’s not that we’re failing to focus on the ‘crucial and pressing’ issues, the problem is that we are electing people based on how they will increase the scope of government.

I’m not a big fan of the middle. While some have clearly developed and thought out their moderate stance, most take the position because they’re vaguely dissatisfied with the polarizing rhetoric of both parties, but see something wrong in society and think ’someone ought to do something’. That ’someone’ is usually government.

In my opinion the middle has taken the first step of seeing something wrong with the social limitations Republicans want to impose as well as the socialism that the Left clearly so wants to take us toward. But the fact that they fail to question whether government should get involved in a given issue at all is what makes them so dangerous.

Just because a piece of legislation is ‘reasonable’ doesn’t make it right. I’ve used the helmet law example because I currently work for the Oklahoma State Department of Health and hearing the Injury Prevention people going on about how we’re ‘backward’ for being the last state without a helmet law really gets my goat. I don’t even ride motorcycles or quads, nor do I plan to. But it’s an almost textbook case of a ‘reasonable’ law that is nevertheless completely unjust. Yes, there is a traumatic brain injury problem in Oklahoma. But why should the government be able to criminalize my doing something that can only harm myself.

Another problem with the middle is that they’re more focused on ‘doing something’ about these pressing issues than what effect government intervention will actually have. That’s the topic for tommorrow’s post so I won’t go into much detail here. But we can all think of laws that were passed and had an effect quite the opposite of what was intended.

The Founding Fathers were quite wary of government. They understood that it could be used by some citizens to oppress others. By politicans to oppress citizens. And that eventually all governments would cease to serve the interests of their constituents. It was for this reason that they were so adamant about philosophical discussions. This is why thousands upon thousands of different pamphlet titles were produced in our Nation’s formative years. This was why the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists started one of the earliest newspaper editorial wars. This is why, although similar in background, temperament, and ideology, Jefferson and Adams fought to their dying days about the implementation of their political philosophy.

What will save our country isn’t shifting attention to issues that interest the middle, but rather engaging everyone in a frank and open discussion about what the role of government should be, why they have authority, when they should interfere in the affairs of man, and how they should do so. Only if we elevate ourselves to be truly political beings can citizen participation bring anything but oppression and tyranny. A friend of mine back in high school told me that the first duty of a good jew was to question. It’s that questioning spirit and intellect that our country most needs now.

Continuing my week-long rant dedicated to the inanity of the radical middle. Prompted by Unity08.

When I ask a moderate to actually explain what he believes in (i.e. negative liberty, collectivism, whatever), frequently enough his answer is, “I’m a pragmatist.” He’ll then usually accuse me of having my head in the clouds. Which is funny, since I take my philosophy from real life. From history and from evolutionary biology. I’ve taken the time to really understand human nature and not to think only about the ‘problem’ and the government ’solution’, but about the the unintended consequences as well. More importantly, I don’t think there is a more pragmatic viewpoint than classical liberalism. It is the only political philosophy that balances the occasional failures of self-interested individuals to organize, the maximization of liberty, and the threat of tyranny against each other. Most other ideologies ignore one or more of these aspects of human nature.

Pragmatism is not an ideology, but a tool. Classical liberalism (in my opinion) can be differentiated from libertarianism primarily through its higher degree of pragmatism. We share with libertarians our inherent distrust of government; However, we also recognize that the market can’t solve all problems and that sometimes central planning can be necessary (as in highways). As I said yesterday though, this position isn’t to be confused for statism. A classical liberal sees government intervention as inherently bad but sometimes necessary. A statist on the other hand, sees intervention as fundamentally good. They see government in an enabling role whereas we see it in a restrictive role.

Pragmatism is a tool. It is the flexibility to compromise your ideology to better harmonize with the realities of a far more complex world. As I discussed in the debate I had with Francois Tremblay, an ideology is much like a mathematical model. It works only when certain conditions are valid. When these conditions don’t apply, the model doesn’t work so well. Pragmatism allows you to bridge that, to recognize when the model doesn’t work, and to aid you in finding a solution, rather than merely ignoring the problem altogether.

When a moderate calls himself a ‘pragmatist’ what he really means is that he is an adherent of interventionism. He supports the use of government restriction, regulation, taxation, and criminalization to fix societal problems and to curtail personal choice. He sees a problem and immediately assumes that government is the best source for a solution, often ignoring the fact that government caused the problem in the first place. It is the moderate you’ll find supporting ’sensible’ legislation. Helmet and seatbelt laws, fast food taxes, gun control (because a pistol grip makes a rifle so much more dangerous), and other such monstrosities. And slowly the role government plays in making personal choices for us will grow. They will cage us before our very eyes and we won’t even notice, feeling comforted by the boundaries they place around us.

There’s a new third party group out there calling themselves Unity08.

It’s more or less the same ‘Having no political ideology is an ideology’ garbage typical of the Radical Middle.

Let’s look at who they say they are:

Unity08 divides issues facing the country into two categories: Crucial Issues – on which America’s future safety and welfare depend; and Important Issues – which, while vital to some, will not, in our judgment, determine the fate or future of the United States.

In our opinion, Crucial Issues include: Global terrorism, our national debt, our dependence on foreign oil, the emergence of India and China as strategic competitors and/or allies, nuclear proliferation, global climate change, the corruption of Washington’s lobbying system, the education of our young, the health care of all, and the disappearance of the American Dream for so many of our people.

By contrast, we consider gun control, abortion and gay marriage important issues, worthy of debate and discussion in a free society, but not issues that should dominate or even crowd our national agenda.

I could scarcely come up with a more comprehensive list of all possible ways a government could meddle in the affairs of its citizens.

My problem with moderates is that by positioning themselves between the two poles of statism, they would create the worst of all possible worlds. The Left sees economic redistrubtion and social engineering as inherently good. The Right sees restriction of ‘immoral’ behavior as a worthy province of government intrusion. ‘The Middle’ challenges neither of those perspectives, instead accepting that both are good ‘in moderation’ whatever that means. But if there is one thing we can learn from history, it is that governments grow over time. They grow more ponderous, they grow more restrictive, and their interests grow farther and farther away from those of the people they claim to represent. By failing to question whether or not government should even be allowed, they would open the floodgates of power and so cage us all. Hardly a desirable platform.

Moderates also confuse ‘democracy’ for ‘freedom’. To do so is to ignore the lesons of history, of human nature, and of the sad excuse for a constitution that Iraq recently ratified. They forget how short a step it is from ‘rule of the people’ to ‘mob rule’. And that a tyranny of the majority is still a tyranny. But most importantly they fail to understand that democracy is nothing more than a tool. And like all tools, it needs to be guided. No one can deny the importance of voting in a just society. But it also can’t be denied that all too often the vote has been used to imprison one group or to allocate special privileges for another. Such things are hardly just and do anything but further the cause of freedom and prosperity.

The importance of structural restraint of government power as well as the danger of democracy were things well known to our founding fathers, who sought to create a way to keep both inherently destructive forces at bay with the Constitution. Moderates forget both of these lessons, perhaps two of the most important ones the founding fathers conferred upon us

A few of my fellow med students took a trip to Kenya to do AIDS outreach work this summer. Dispensing medication and the like. I told them they had just consigned a lot of innocent and uninfected people to die and would be actively working to spread AIDS. I then went on to explain to them how most foreign aid to nations which are under unsustainable conditionds is not only useless, it is harmful. They were understandably upset. Which doesn’t change the fact that I’m right. And I felt vindicated when they came back saying now they understand what I was talking about. I was also pretty happy that the experience has started one of my leftie friends on the road to rationality.

You see someone starving, hurt, or dying, and it’s only natural to want to do something about it. As social mammals, we’re literally wired for compassion. But, one thing that separates us from other social mammals are the size of our brains. It would be nice if we used those once in a while. There’s a reason why theoretical economists, ecologists, and the like have to go to school for so long. And that’s because these issues are quite complex. And a simple action-reaction model quite frankly almost never works. A small dose of poison can leave you healthier than none at all. Sometimes tax cuts can increase GDP and federal tax revenue (see Laffer Curve). And yes, withholding aid to impoverished nations often results in less total suffering than granting that aid.

There’s a lot of different ways to look at foreign aid and understand just why it’s so harmful. I once wrote a 25 page paper on one of these perspectives that barely did the concept justice. Needless to say, I won’t be going into full detail in this initial post. Just wanted to introduce the basic ideas.

Ecology
I became a die-hard Hardinite while taking a class about the intersection of EEB and culture. When it comes to method of political discourse, he’s probably my clearest influence. Following his example, I take things back beyond economics to the more encompassing science of ecology. And like him, I come away from it with a strong libertarianish bias. Hardin wasn’t the first political behavioral ecologist, though. That would have to be the maligned and misunderstood Thomas Malthus, who interestingly enough both preceded and heavily influenced Darwin.

Mr. Hardin was very critical of foreign aid his entire life, seeing it as aggravating a problem caused by an already artificially high and unsustainable population level. The basic idea is that a given ecological area has a certain carrying capacity. That’s how many animals it can sustain indefinitely. Now, you can support a larger population level on that land for a while. But eventually the area will crash. Resources will have been eaten away instead of being replenished. And the population will almost completely die off. Because the land was so badly ravaged, the new carrying capacity will be considerably lower than it used to be.

Which is pretty much the situation we have in many parts of Africa and Asia. We simply have too many people for what the land can support. Foreign aid can’t change the intrinsic factors of fertility and natural resource distribution. But it can support and even increase this artificially high population. Which will further ravage the land and further decrease the carrying capacity. Not pretty.

Epidemiology
The thing about STD’s like AIDS is that they’re often spread actively and voluntarily. For something like TB, malaria or leprosy, it’s a bit of a different story. Transmission happens diffusely. With the latter diseases foreign aid can be effective. This is partly because you can actually cure the infected. Diseases like those three are dependent on a number of environmental and population level factors and don’t really have all that much to do with the individual person. Every time I go to the backwaters of India, I’m exposed to all three. And, even though I’ve got a lot more money than the poor, there’s really not a whole lot more I can do to protect myself from those pathogens. I’m always a bit surprised when my TB exposure test comes back negative. I know I don’t have it. But I’m almost positive I’ve been exposed. And malaria? Fairly positive I’ve had that.

India’s also got a rather high density of AIDS infections and an escalating rate of infection. But that doesn’t even faze me. This is because unlike the other three, which will spread no matter what you do (more or less), AIDS requires that people engage in certain activities. Which I don’t do. And, unlike the other three, you can’t cure AIDS. You can only extend the asymptomatic period using anti-retroviral drugs (the drug cocktails you hear about on the news every now and then). Which basically means you’re given more time in which to spread the virus.

This is a particular problem in areas where there’s a high degree of promiscuity, unplanned pregnancy, and rape, which is much of subsaharan Africa. You have people both knowingly and unknowingly spreading the AIDS virus to many different partners, who also have many different partners. You have already infected people becoming pregnant. And you have strange ideas about how raping virgins can cure you. Artificially extending the period during which a given person can be a part of that vicious cycle–especially when they probably will be–is thus actively increasing the incidence of HIV infection.

Human Nature
The thing about money is that it’s a symbol. It’s a piece of paper or common metal, or even just a number in a computer somewhere. You can say “this is to feed the starving”. But once you hand it to an African politician, all bets are off. As a guy I was talking to once remarked “When you think about all the money that’s going into Africa, how much richer their politicians are getting, and how much worse the continent is getting, it’s not too hard to connect the dots”. Which sounds about right.

Economics
Not much here because I don’t think you can have a full discussion of this without taking a more in depth look at ecological factors and their interplay with economics (no nothing as boring as Guns, Germs, and Steel), so I’ll get to it later. But I will say this. The strength of an economy is fundamentally dependent on its natural resources, either past or present. If a nation can’t feed itself, it can never develop into something greater. Once its economy is off the ground, the agricultural self-sufficiency part becomes a little bit less necessary. But in Africa we have an entire continent that is so far beyond its carrying capacity one can barely fathom how it got there. People like Gates are throwing money at the place so they can feel better about themselves, talking about ‘development’ and ‘education’ and all that. Utter rot. You cannot build a castle in the clouds for the simple reason that all economies need low-level workers. All economies no matter how service and/or technology oriented need entry-level, unskilled, and semi-skilled labor. And if the people who would fill those jobs can’t get enough to eat, how are they supposed to provide the foundation of your economy?

Conclusion
The only time you can make a truly strong case for foreign aid is when a transient deficiency occurs, such as a tsunami or a hurricane. I know it sucks to see other people suffer. And giving and helping out feels so good. But sometimes help can really hurt. I’m going to leave you with a hick parable that I think you’ll find fairly apt:

A fire breaks out in the barn…the summer heat, all that hay, and even looking at it funny could’ve done it. Everyone on the farm breaks as fast as they can for the buckets, forming a chain from the cattle trough to the barn. The bucket is filled, and as it gets passed from one peson to the next a little bit of the water sloshes out. By the time it gets to Poppa, who’s closest to the fire, it’s only halfway full. Dousing the growing conflagration, he’s surprised when instead of sizzling and popping, it explodes with tinges of blue, bigger and hotter than ever. That wasn’t the cattle trough, but JimBob’s corn whiskey still. As everyone begins to flail around in panic, you realize they’re only fanning the flames…

People on the left talk a good game. About freedom and empowerment. About prosperity and harmony. Which is all fine and good until you realize that they intend this to happen by instituting government control of all aspects related to the above. But what really gets me about them is that they turn a blind eye to the negative (but all-too-often expected) consequences of their illogical actions. The gun control debate is a perfect illustration of both their disconnect from causality and their inherently statist outlook. Which is–perversely enough–the reason I became a gun owner.

While I’d always leaned to the right, I was rather Krauthammer-ish in my lack of respect for the 2nd Amendment and my indifferent-bordering-on-hostile attitude toward guns in general. Guns just never really meant that much to me. Not as a hobby, not as implements of self-defense, not as outdoor tools. In fact, the first time I ever shot a firearm I was in the socialist state of New York. And the first time I went to a real range I was in even more gun-fearing and even wussier England. This despite being born and raised in the southwest.

Nope, unlike most gun rights advocates, I kinda went through the reverse process. First I saw the stupidity of anti-gunnies and then I became a firearms enthusiast. I used to hang out on a forum called FocalJet. Being a forum devoted to the Ford Focus, many members spent most of their time engaged in political debate. It was there I was first introduced to the real statistics on violent crime (and defensive gun uses). It was there I was introduced to the illogical inanity that is the AWB. And it was there that a good chunk of my development from a vaguely conservative individual to a staunchly minarchist intellectual was made.

Among other things, I learned that the violent crime rate dropped wherever CCW legislation was enacted. I learned that home invasion rates dropped as gun ownership went up. And I learned that in areas where gun bans were in effect, criminals grew bold and citizens grew fearful. I learned that there is all too much truth to the adage that in a world where ‘guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.’ I later experienced the immunity with which criminals function among the unarmed sheep of a ‘progressive’ citizenry firsthand, both in India (communist ‘freedom fighter’s) and Britain. I learned that guns are involved in only about 20,000 injuries and murders a year (excluding self-inflicteds and suicides), yet are used defensively as many as 2.5 million times a year. In short I learned that speaking strictly pragmatically, guns in the hands of responsible citizenry is a far better proposition than the opposite.

Which led me into contemplating the philosophic and ideological basis for gun rights vs gun control. On the one hand you have the basic liberty-minded argument; what a man does and what he owns are none of anyone else’s business so long as they hurt no one. And it’s a pretty strong argument. On the other hand you have the equally basic (although wrong) argument that without guns, the jurisdiction will be less violent. Much weaker, since legislating guns away and actually taking and keeping all guns away is completely different matter.

But a more enlightening line of inquiry is the question of protection and defense. Now, as a 210lb trained boxer, I feel a bit silly asking the question “Who will protect me?” It’s something I oughtta be capable of doing myself. I am, and I’ve done it successfully on occassion. But this isn’t a question of capability but responsibility. The gun rights advocate believes that no matter what other forces are at work, ultimately it is his responsibility and his alone to protect himself and his loved ones. He prepares and arms himself for the eventuality that he might be required to discharge said duty.

But the ‘progressive’ simultaneously holds the views that a man can defend himself without a firearm, that it is the police’s responsibility to protect you, and that the police can’t be prosecuted for failing to do so. Which at every level is a strange position to take. Considering his willingness to give privileges to some but not others, and to hold back some for being ‘too successful’, it would seem odd that hear, when it comes to something as vital as one’s personal safety, he’s unwilling to allow the citizen an equalizer. A hispanic may need affirmative action to compete with an asian in college admissions. But a 105lb woman can effectively stop a much larger and highly motivated violent attacker with no weapon at all. And as for the absurdity of an essentially reactionary agency acting as a prophylaxis, I won’t even comment.

As I looked at a position that both ignores reality and denies the sacred autonomy of the individual, I couldn’t help but show my disdain. Not because I had anything at stake in the debate, but because the leftist side simply didn’t make any sense. So I took sides. First adding my own observations to the debate, and then by making the conscious decision to begin partaking in an activity I knew upset them.

I’d like to claim that I’m applying for CCW because I want to be fully prepared to defend my own. I’d be lying. I’m doing it for the simple fact that the ability to carry is a right enshrined in the constitution…and because it pisses off idiot GFW’s. I’d like to claim that the reason I’m buying an AR is for hunting or target shooting. But I’m really buying it because it’s evil-looking and black. And as for things like the ‘flare launcher‘, Barrett M82, S&W .460XVR, etc. that I plan on buying in about 8 years when I’m out from under my loans and out of indentured servitude, I’m not even going to attempt to justify as rational.

There are a lot of reasons I’m glad I was introduced to the firearms world. It’s a great place where my multiple interests and pursuits can come together. Mechanical nerdery, boyish obsessions with things that go boom, and development of hand-eye coordination, all in one. And I’m glad that soon enough I will have the option of one more tool to add to my belt, whether for defensive or outdoor purposes (come to think of it, most of my personal implements have those dual functions). But at the end of the day, the only reason I ever pulled a trigger was because living in a society where I wasn’t allowed to do so was unconscionable.

I generally enjoy Rick Roberts in the morning. He had the balls to call one of those California congresswomen (they’re fairly interchangeable aren’t they?) a socialist, to her face, on the air. And then after saying that she and her ilk were what’s wrong with America, He hung up on her. On his own radio show! How can you not like a guy like that.

But every now and then he does the ‘morally outraged citizen legislating something just to feel better’ thing. He supports the flag-burning amendment because, to paraphrase ‘when our rights are used against us, as flag burners do, it’s no longer ok.’ Which is a pretty weak argument.

To quote Boortz, ““Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection.” It’s a sentiment he and other libertarians share with the founding fathers themselves. In fact, I’d say that the legality of flag burning is one of the greatest examples of the strength and sanctity of our Bill of Rights. Granted, said argument rings hollow when it comes from the mouths of the people doing the flagburning, but their insincerity makes it no less true. Besides, now you’re hearing it from a patriot.

And one of Rick’s callers, an activated guardsman, said it even better (again paraphrased): “Why should the government have any right to tell me what I can or cannot do with the flag I would die for.”

Says it all, really.

This discussion will be nuanced, so leftists would have me believe my conservative readership wouldn’t be able to understand it. However, since the logical fallacies I’m about to expose are primarily championed by them, it would probably be very much a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Introduction
The thing about being human is that so much of our interactions are done using something–either a tool, a specific action, or another person–as an intermediary. While this ability gives rise to the wonderfully complex network of human interaction that forms the core of society, it also can make it somewhat difficult so separate cause from effect, especially when the actual cause was several times removed from the effect.

This is particularly problematic when it comes to understanding how the actions of one person may affect another. Whether a matter of criminal activity or public health, government is often eager to leap into the fray, announcing that they’ve decided to make the ’cause’ of this injurious activity illegal. Often enough the cause they find is nothing more than the implement used in commission of said act.

Disregarding the efficacy of such laws, one must question their logic. Unless we’re literally discussing forces of nature, most actions have a human cause and a human effect. Yet, all too often leftist logic dictates that what must be proscribed or punished isn’t the action but the tool.

This willing shortsightedness is boiled down to a few key points:
1. It makes a value judgment about a neutral object.
2. It ignores the human causes behind the action
3. It takes a perverse and confining view of human agency.

This post will be concerned primarily with the first two, the latter needing a bit more exposition.

Together, these fallacies result in laws that are neither effective nor just, as well as offering needless restrictions upon behaviors that are of little threat to anyone. Neither liberty nor safety preserved. Government control of man in his daily life, on the other hand, significantly increased.

Guns Don’t Kill People…
Guns are a very polarizing issue; the (positive) connection between stricter firearms control and higher crime is easily one of the most politically charged topics here in the US. Sadly, in the rest of the developed world, the leftists have won their battle against common sense. But because it’s the most loaded topic, it might be better to start off with something more neutral. Like a steel toe boot.

Yes, we normally think of such footwear as mundane everyday objects. But those of us who shift large amounts of weight and who were born with a certain level of clumsiness find them almost invaluable. Yet in the UK, death by kicking has rapidly overtaken firearms as method of homicide. Steel toed boots are renowned for the damage they can cause in a street fight. Indeed the shiny toecaps worn on the outside of many bikers’ boots are donned for just such a purpose. Which are they? Destructive streetfighting monstrosities only one step removed from coshes and brass knuckles? Or a way that men who work in rough environments can avoid stubbing, smashing, breaking, or otherwise maiming their toes?

And pointed kitchen knives will only be mentioned in passing…

As for firearms, I won’t bother with the standard treatments, just click the link on the left to the gunblog community and have your fill of it. Instead you’ll get an animal analogy. Yes, weapons were invented for violence (just look at Anomalocaris, the oldest known predator). But well before humans ever lived, weapons took on a very important function: preventing violence. Sharp teeth and claws were first seen on predators. But it wasn’t long before they were seen on herbivores. The herd of triceratops pointing their sharp horns at the T. Rex’s soft underbelly, watching him rear up, zeal abated at the thought of a quick disembowelment. Or the alpha male baboon’s canines, bared at the approaching lioness, warning her that the little dog-nosed, monkey-thumbed infants under his care just aren’t worth her trouble. The threat of violence by the meek has become one of the most effective defenses they can wield against the predatory meat eaters who would seek to end their lives. So again, I ask you, do guns promote violence or do they prevent it?

We may have heard in the news about the pitbull bans all over California, the northeast, and Denver. Disregarding the outrageousness of the police coming into a person’s home to ‘confiscate and euthanize’ what is for all intents and purposes an adopted family member, we must ask ourselves if these dogs really are the dangerous brutes they’re made out to be. There is a lot of evidence and discussion out there that would lead us to the opposite opinion. Personal experience with pits (along with a variety of animals ranging from livestock, to everyday pets, to veryexotic) would lead me to the conclusion that no, they aren’t particularly bitey. Particularly telling is the fact that the pitbull scores better on the Temperament Test (which is a very well designed test) than the average, and significantly better than a lot of those high-strung ‘toy’ breeds. Epidemiological data on bite rates confirms this, with retrievers, of all things, being far more likely to bite than a pit.

It just so happens that a pit does more damage when it does decide to use those magnificent jaws. But as I posit when some seek to limit the power of handguns and rifles, why stop there? Why stop at just breeds of dogs. If potential for damage is the issue, why not ban big men? Do you know how hard a big, trained fighter can hit? We’re talking a 200lb boxer hitting 5-10 times as hard as a male of average build. I say this because I’ve been hit by both, and, come to think of it, have been both. ‘That’s absurd’ the leftists tell us, even as they prepare to use that same logic against large ATV’s, powerful musclecars, and a host of different mechanical devices which were not designed to hurt people.

People Kill People
The thing that should be clear is that an implement, no matter how dangerous, has no value beyond that which we impart. Furthermore, like Schroedinger’s much put-upon cat, these devices can be said to be simultaneously both good and bad. Until they are put to either type of purpose, at least. Although perhaps to stick closer to the analogy, it is the observer who imparts such value-laden meaning onto both the tool and the action. After all, although few of the women in such a situation would see it that way, there are those who would contend the rape victim is morally superior to the woman standing with a smoking gun in her hand, a despicable subhuman bleeding at her feet.

But regardless of whether inanimate objects and less-than-sentient animals can be possessed of moral value in and of themselves, legislation that goes after such things is highly logically suspect. Crime after all is committed by people. Although certain implements may be preferred for certain tasks, or certain objects more prone to be neglected (and so contribute to crime of a more passive nature), they are all but roads toward a single end. And, while one road may be more traveled, more wide, and easier to access, other roads abound.

Take the twigs away from the New Caledonian crow and he’s just another crow. Take the hammer and anvil stones away from the chimpanzee and you have a very frustrated animal staring at a seemingly uncrackable nut. Take the gun away from the murderer and he’ll turn to the knife, the boot, poison, or any other number of less-than-pleasant methods (as in the UK and Australia, he might become even more dangerous). Take the gun away from the suicidal and he’ll merely find another way. Japan, with a suicide rate greater than ours, yet with a near-total ban on firearms, is a perfect illustration of this.

Or to come back to negligence and unintentional crimes, lets revisit the pitbull. The representatives I’ve had the fortune of getting to know have all been even-tempered animals I’d trust my child with (I might speak differently when I have a child. But I’d trust my golden with them. Which is just about as close). The pitbulls I tend to pass in the neighborhoods I live and work in tend to be a different story. To a dog you can practically see their owners’ neglect writ large across their unsteady eye. You can literally see their lack of training. These are dogs suffering from the equivalent of child neglect. And of course this is true of many of the dogs in such neighborhoods. It just happens to be that when not raised properly pitbulls can cause a lot more damage than say a toy poodle. And like a young child who never had the fortune of good parents, some are more destructive than others. But few place the fault upon the child. An aggressive pitbull is almost always the result of willfully abusive owners. An aggressive pitbull not properly restrained is always the result of negligence.

It’s a funny thing, but doing basic carpentry and mechanics, like any good hick, I’ve come to realize that even the most mundane of maintenance or assembly tasks has several different routes, several different methods, that can be used to reach the final product. A crescent wrench or a ratchet? Drill or screwdriver? Circular saw or scroll saw? Flathead or Phillips? Dovetails, mortis&tenon, or two 45 degree cuts? (Funnily enough, many of the people destined to be ‘cultural elite’ couldn’t find one way through one of these jobs, let alone the 8 or 10 me and my buddies would argue over.)

I also bear more than a few scars. Paint stripper chemical burns on one forearm, one thumb literally glued back together after an xacto knife split the tip down to the bone, woodsaw, circular saw, runaway belt sander. A rather long list, but not as long as many. One I consider a testament to my own stupidity (and in the case of the woodsaw nearly taking off a finger, my friend not watching out). I can’t even fathom how I could blame the tools.

People are adaptable, we’re flexible, we’re innovative. I won’t say this sets us apart from other animals, but certainly no other animal quite shares our abilities in this regard. So to posit that by removing just one tool in a criminal’s arsenal, they can leave him powerless is the height of lunacy. Faced with the meaninglessness of such bans, a government can either react to failure by admitting the logical mistake and vigorously pursuing the actual agents of destruction (want to take any bets?), or they can continue to proscribe all implements that could possibly be used in such crimes. Not only would the latter be highly ineffective—it is highly unlikely that the entire government could react at the same speed as a single criminal, let alone a society impregnated with them—it would be one of the greatest threats to our liberty yet seen.

Any object with the potential for misuse would find itself banned or regulated. And looking around your cubicle walls (or even worse, at home), just how much do you see that could easily be used to commit a violent crime? Looking up the statistics on domestic violence and lovers’ spats you might find that your imagination pales in comparison to the reality of the resourcefulness of human nature.

Conclusion
Crimes hurt people. Crimes are committed by people. Blame for crime should always be directed at the perpetrators, the ones with the blood on their hands. And fighting crime should always be directed at people, not objects. Everything else is just window dressing. Nothing more, nothing less.

There is a lot to be said about the kind of mind that would say otherwise, that would confuse mechanisms and processes as causes. A lot of condescension for one thing, that to think by manipulating the presence or absence of various objects they can change the way you think. But worrisome than the kind of person who would seek to manipulate humanity in such a way is the way they have gotten the masses to think about themselves. That they are the mindless sheep their masters want them to be, nothing more than reactive products of their environment.

It’s an idea worthy of its own post, and I’ll try to get it up next week in Radical Behaviorism and the Leftist Mind

You’ve probably noticed that I’m involving more and more general behavioral ecological theory in my discussion of political topics. I started moving that direction with Evolution, Economics, and Political Philosophy but really ramped it up during the whole minarchy-anarchy debate. Well as the title makes apparent, I’ve finally figured out what to call this kind of thinking. Considering I started thinking (but not blogging) about this kind of thing way back in 2003, it’s pretty sad that it took me this long to figure out what to call political philosophy from a behavioral ecologist’s perspective.

To leave you with something a bit more substantive, I threw up a little in my mouth when I read this:

After compiling the evidence of liberal catechism, Coulter finally turns her bazooka on the foundation of liberalism itself: Darwinism.

OK, seriously, why don’t you just throw down your pen and start waving a white flag? If you’re going to concede that nonsensical idea to them, you might as well start declaring that socialism is a good idea in theory and that the UN is a noble organization.

This isn’t hard, people. It really isn’t. Leftism is about the collective, about the group, about the state, about the people as a different entity from all the persons who comprise it. Evolution is about the individual, about self-interest, about competition, about survival of the fittest.

Even if you don’t agree with evolution, at least use it as a tool to expose their hypocrisy.

A post about affirmative action in law school kind of chrystalized a strain of thought that’s been running around in my head for a few years now.

Even if we disregard the logical failings and moral reprehensibility of an equality of outcome measure like Affirmative Action, somehow rationalizing it as some form of justice that we revisit the sins of the father upon the son (and on me, a freaking immigrant), I believe that AA actively hurts its supposed beneficiaries.

If you happened to attend one of the so-called elite institutions in the past few years, you would have noticed an interesting dichotomy in the aptitudes, background knowledge, and success rates of students. The separation didn’t occur along gender lines, or chosen fields of study. It didn’t correlate all that well with race or income, but both were clearly involved in some way. There were smart and hard-working minorities tearing their way through school alongside their pigmentally-challenged compatriots. But it was almost too easy to point out the AA and legacy kids. Whether intermediate spanish or an upper-level genetics seminar, the students that struggled consistently tended to be from those admissions groups. Now, I’m not saying that every kid given non-merit-based preference was like that, just a good many.

The thing about colleges is that some expect more of you from the get go than others do. You can get an outstanding education from a state school that rivals what you get at any ivy, but you have to ask for it. No amount of melanin in the world can make up for the fact that you hadn’t read Hamlet or taken calculus before you got to college when it comes to the substantive parts of your education. It would be far more in your best interest to go to a school that’ll allow you to set your own pace and make up for some of the deficiencies that aren’t necessarily any fault of your own before you throw yourself into the deep end. As an analogy, I’m starting to row again, but I’m training on my own. Because I’m old, slow, achy, and simultaneously fatter and skinnier than I’ve ever been in my life. I would gain nothing by training with a competitive team again. Might even lose some confidence and conditioning due to the fact that I didn’t even have a shot in hell at keeping up. So I’ll work at my own pace and ready myself for the fall.

Several commissioners expressed concern, shared by myself, Prof. Lempert, and Professor Sander, that many “diversity” candidates have no idea regarding the extent of the preferences that they receive, or how this might affect their chances of successfully completing law school and passing the bar exam. Even Dean Smith acknowledged that it might be a good idea to make more information about the success rate of matriculants available to prospective students, if such data could be gathered accurately. There was significant support among the commissioners for a pending bill in Congress that would require universities to reveal far more about their admissions policies, especially with regard to preferences.

Sounds about like what I saw when I was in undergrad.

Another factor is that at elite institutions, these kids will be far more likely to be passed through regardless of aptitude, only to realize they weren’t prepared for licensing and/or the real world:

As I understood it, Professor Lempert was not at all confident that similar benefits accrue to the purported beneficiaries of preferences at lower-ranked law schools, which (as a emphasized in my testimony) have a much lower (and often disastrously low) rate of success in graduating such students and preparing them for the bar.
[-----snip-----]
(5) Several commissioners expressed grave concern about the extraordinarily high rate at which African American law students at non-elite law schools either fail out of law school or fail to pass the bar exam (over 50% at the bottom two-thirds of law schools), and about the fact that while the new standard requires law schools to pursue diversity in admissions, it says nothng about the need to ensure that admittees actually succeed in becoming attorneys.

Crucial factors in school rankings include retention and graduation rates. And the same schools that vie for the top of those rankings are usually the same ones that bang the diversity drum the loudest. At the undergrad level, we’ve seen their need to keep both high in the proliferation of “look at me, i’m a minority” studies like african-american, hispanic-american, and asian-american studies and an increased ratio of BS (and I don’t mean bachelors of science) classes compared to the hardcore social sciences and liberal arts. When it comes to professional schools, the institution might just keep passing you up, but you’re going to run into a brick wall when it comes time to take the USMLE, Bar exam, or what have you. Which can’t be very fun.

Institutions more localized in their pull and less ambitious in their goals actually have less incentive to keep the chaff around: The US News rankings have little bearing on schools like Oklahoma University Med School where I think 95% of my class is either Oklahoman or has a tie of some kind to Oklahoma. And where around 75% of us will stay in Oklahoma. Career goals are different for these kinds of places, and cachet is less important both to the school and to the student. Which is why these lower-ranked schools show such abysmal pass rates. With such strong ties to their communities and states, they have little incentive to bother playing that arbitrary numbers game. So long as their graduates yield them a good reputation with local laypeople, they’re doing their job. These lower-ranked schools thus offer the best indication of differences in achievement and preparedness in the applicant pool.

But a far more disturbing aspect of the matter is that racial preferences–particularly when less-than-qualified applicants have to be accepted to meet quotas–actually justify prejudicial thought: They actually make such stereotypes valid:

Various commissioners focused on the fact that the proposed standard’s official “interpretations” requires the ABA to consider not just law school diversity recruiting efforts, but also results. The ABA representative (Dean Steven Smith) had no good answer when asked how–given the unfortunately small pool of “qualified” African American applicants available to elite schools–a results-based standard could be met without resort to preferences.

AA often (usually) results in a student pool that is segregated along racial lines, with Asians being the most well-qualified applicants, whites next (expect that difference to disappear in a generation or so), and hispanics and blacks last. This racial stratification remains prominent in graduate testing and even licensing. As an example, there are *cough* certain race-based medical schools out there with slightly low average MCAT scores.

What this means is that at the population level the contention that minority graduates–despite possessing the same degrees and same qualifications as others–are of lower quality is valid. Not because they’re minorities, but because a minority could be a weaker job candidate, student, or applicant and still be accepted. A degree from an elite institution is supposed to mean a pattern of hard work from high school onward. It’s supposed to mean a high SAT score, a lot of in-depth and relatively advanced classes. And it’s supposed to mean that the kid really did get a better education. But when whites and asians are held to one standard, and ‘underrepresented minorities’ to another, this means that a diploma earned by a member of one race means an entirely different thing from a diploma earned by a member of a different race. Furthermore, with many of these AA kids going into joke majors, many are not going to find the career prospects they expected.

Affirmative Action makes a mockery of Dr. King’s words that a man should be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. By focusing our attention on race, AA exacerbates differences and fails to bring any real harmony. Resentment from whites and asians, failure for ill-prepared minorities it’s supposed to help. Not to mention the basic social injustice of making some races work harder than others to achieve the same thing, even when they have no causal connection to a practice that ended almost 150 years ago. Affirmative Action is racism, and it hurts everyone.

This is the last one I’ll do. I’m getting testy, and I’m pretty sure he’s refusing to listen to a single thing I say. In the interest of not wasting any more time on a lost cause, and not venting my frustration on a guy who, for the most part, I respect, I’m cutting myself off. I’ve said everything that needs to be said about the failures of market anarchy to live up to the real world. If that makes me a coercive statist, so be it. At least my eyes are open.

What I respect most about Mr. Tremblay is his philosophical consistency and his ability to get other liberty-loving folks to sit up and think. What I do not like about his belief system–market anarchy–is that the entire philosophy seems a bit like a teenager who’s watched A Beautiful Mind or read Freakonomics and now can’t stop raving about the amazing predictive ability of economics, yet hasn’t put much thought into the basic assumptions made by either market anarchy or economics or the limitations of both.

Market anarchy obviously is built upon economic models. Some of the assumptions that an economic model makes are perfect rationality (yeah, right), perfect information (people know EVERYTHING about what’s going on…), and that market value and real value are commensurate (I’m not even going to bother). When these conditions (and others) are satisfied, the model shows excellent fidelity. When these conditions aren’t satisfied, we see various levels of crappiness.

Furthermore, market anarchy takes the one inviolate assumption of all behavioral modelling, that individuals are self-interested, and then proceeds to make strange claims about how that self interest manifests itself. Not to mention making judgments on what we actually value.

Market anarchists hold that what people will always value life, liberty, and property at a high level. While there is good evidence for the first, and the third could be argued, the notion that liberty is highly valued is laughable.

From hormonal systems all the way through highest-order brain functioning, we are literally wired to seek comfort and security. Comfort and liberty are often, but not always, mutually exclusive entities. Furthermore, contrary to how many of us feel, most people would gladly trade their liberty for comfort. Hence my example of the serf. Liberty is an abstract. An abstract that in and of itself guarantees little or nothing in material wealth. Why should I pay a guy 10,000 dollars to keep other people from killing and stealing my property if he’ll let me starve to death? Surely I’d choose the guy who charges 15,000, performs the above services, but throws in a minimum level of food and shelter into the bargain? So what if he tells me I can’t do certain things (like not wear a seatbelt or leave the house past certain times) in order to be true to my contract? At least I won’t starve.

Mr. Tremblay tries to divert attention by saying that somehow people wouldn’t behave that way when free. Which explains why as I said there is no human society without a monopolizing power structure of some kind or another. He tries again by missing my point about monopolist systems. The structures themselves are remarkably stable. It’s merely the players that change rapidly.

Which brings us to another important facet of self interest: The quest for power. The man charging 15,000 is not merely after wealth but after power as well. He will manipulate the self interest of others, particularly their comfort-seeking, in order to gain power. At first, of course, it might be limited to material wealth. But it will turn itself to control of those under him. Such as restrictions on their behavior, etc. And if this man comes to control a sizeable portion of the total wealth in the population (which he will, given our innate tendencies), little could be done to stop him becoming a tyrant. Mr. Tremblay makes the quaint assertion that:

An anarchy can exist where 99% of people do not desire to be free, and they are free to assemble themselves in hierarchies as much as they want- but as long as some people do desire to be free, those people will be able to assemble and live their freedom relatively fully.

Because ambition has never led a man to want to control others. Oh sure, I guess the 1% could amass their fortunes and attempt to rise up. That’ll of course end well. Like the Alamo or Thermopylae.

Given this fact, there is no point in invoking hypothetical “invasions”. There is no such thing as an “invasion”, for there is nothing to “invade”. There is no “country” or “state” to take over. Another group of people who want to assemble together in a hierarchy is merely that- another group of people who want to live their lives differently. Can Nikhil tell us what is being invaded?

Well, I thought I was being clear about what invadable meant. Invasion is a term used in game theoretics to denote what happens when new players enter (or old players start to play differently) who play by different rules than the old players. Invasion occurs when the old system doesn’t work under this onslaught. Such as when, far from valuing liberty, people would actively yield it. And pay to do so. In this case, the invaders are power-mongers and comfort-seekers, as opposed to the utopian extant population who place a high monetary value on liberty.

Would a society where 99% of people reject rights be free? Not really. But a minarchy in that same society would make people even less free. So once again his point should be returned to himself.

I’ve never said that a minarchist society would be perfectly free. I’ve merely asserted that it would keep people the most free. Now, if you mean to tell me that a society organized along the lines of the intent of say the articles or the constitution (albeit with fewer federal AND state’s rights but more individual rights) would be less free than a society that’s 99% communist russia and 1% anarchist utopia?

Interesting proposition to say the least.

Nikhil keeps making veiled threats of coercion against anyone who disagrees with his ideal system. Unlike Nikhil, I have no wish to force those people to live the way I want. I am not a violent or utopian person. I simply wish for all to be free to live the way they want.

Apparently, this principle is very hard to understand.

I think I’ve done a good job of demonstrating that people won’t be free to live as they want. The majority will willingly choose the comfortable cage. And the ambitious men who guide them into those cages, taking money as they do so, will hardly constrain their ambition to just those many. Armed with the majority of societal wealth, it would be hard to stop such juggernauts from coming down like an armored fist upon those who really did value freedom.

So what we end up with is the market anarchist saying that ‘well at least I let people put themselves in a totalitarian goverment.’ Which seems to be the jist of it as he admits that people won’t necessarily choose liberty. So it doesn’t protect natural rights, by his own admission. But it is a convenient moral and philosophical high ground. Which I’ll concede. He’s more internally consistent, while I’m a violently coercive and oxymoronic statist claiming to defend liberty by chaining people to government. But at least I make sense in the real world.

By supporting ‘market anarchy’ you support a quick return to totalitarianism. Market anarchy is too far removed from the real world, takes too few factors into account, and makes some rather strange and un-thought-out views about human nature. In a lot of ways, they remind me of Marx. Starting out on the right track before veering off into the clouds with daydreams about what they want people to be rather than what we really are. But that’s probably just an assertion too.

Introduction
I figured that the knowledge that the Founders were hardcore individualists, together with the understanding that milita by its nature means not tied to the government, would make the 2nd Amendment issue pretty damn cut and dried. I was wrong.

Intellect Impure, who’s probably just playing devil’s advocate, has shown how leftie minds work when it comes to the Constitution. Lawyering to destroy and otherwise undermine core principles of classical liberalism.

I have said before that the only way you could take the 2nd amendment as protecting only hunting and sport, or as a collective right, is if you personally want it that way and have no care what the intent of the law actually was. I have one word for you: Un-American. Don’t try to give me your BS about ‘evolving documents’ or ‘but it could be seen this way’ or ‘being American is about compromise.’ No, it ain’t. All that matters are the core principles of the philosophy upon which this country was built. That is what being American is all about.

So let’s go through this word by freaking word with the help of a fantastic resource I’ve used once or twice: The Online Etymology Dictionary, along with some supporting historical information. Not to mention a re-affirmation of the fact that the US was founded by individualists with a healthy distaste for government. Who wrote a document constraining rather than empowering the government they themselves founded. It’s pretty clearly a nonpartisan source. But the interesting thing is that OED has a specific entry for words that lefties attempt (and often succeed) at implying mean something other than the founders’ words.

The 2nd Amendment

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Well-Regulated - Surely this means controlled by government legislation. After all, this is what we tend to mean by ‘regulation’ when we talk about things today, huh? Only, diesel engines have regulators, as do the streets, according to Warren G. Now, I’m almost positive that the mechanical valve in a diesel engine’s air manifold isn’t a piece of government legislation, and I’m equally certain that Warren G wasn’t referring to mid-level bureaucrats in Washington DC…

Not to mention that the phrase ‘well-regulated’ certainly looks like an idiom. That’s the only reason I could think of that it would be used as an adjective in such a short clause. It must have a meaning of its own that goes a bit beyond two simple words. And, lo and behold, it does. It was used in all sorts of contexts which government control do not apply, including ‘well-regulated person’, ‘well-regulated mind’, and ‘well-regulated clock’. Sounds like ‘well-regulated’ means exactly the same thing it does when you’re talking about a diesel engine: running smoothly.

As Brian Halonen (who wrote the piece in the link above) says:

The phrase “well-regulated” was in common use long before 1789, and remained so for a century thereafter. It referred to the property of something being in proper working order. Something that was well-regulated was calibrated correctly, functioning as expected. Establishing government oversight of the people’s arms was not only not the intent in using the phrase in the 2nd amendment, it was precisely to render the government powerless to do so that the founders wrote it.

And OED provides an interesting take on the word ‘regulate’:

In U.S. history, applied to local posses that kept order (or disturbed it) in rural regions c.1767-71

A well-regulated milita thus means a militia that discharges its function in an ordered manner.

Militia
The National Guard is our militia… Nope, not unless sometime in the recent past a group that by definition is a part of the military, and thus the government, can also somehow be outside government control. What does a look at its etymology have to say?

Sense of “citizen army” (as distinct from professional soldiers) is first recorded 1696, perhaps from Fr. milice. In U.S. history, “the whole body of men declared by law amenable to military service, without enlistment, whether armed and drilled or not” (1777).

The word ‘militia’ as used by the founding fathers meant men who could be in the military but aren’t. As a member of the national guard, you are governed by the UCMJ and can be called into active duty without a draft. Not to mention that if you aren’t an officer, you’re enlisted. The National Guard isn’t much of a militia. In fact, members of the National Guard and Reserves, by the very nature of their appointment, are no longer members of the militia.

Civilian men (and women) are the militia. The militia is not a government entity. Pretty clear.

The People
This is the one that lefties love to pounce on. “The People” they say. Clearly that implies a populist/collectivist thing. The people as a single entity, rather than a collection of individuals

The etymology?
Meaning “body of persons comprising a community” first recorded 1292 in Anglo-Fr.; meaning “common people, masses” (as distinguished from the nobility) first recorded 1306 in Anglo-Fr. The verb is c.1489 (intrans.), c.1500 (trans.). The word was adopted after c.1920 by Communist totalitarian states to give a spurious sense of populism to their governments. b.

So the collectivist interpretation came about at the turn of the 20th century, as a specific invention of leftist/socialist regimes, as a propaganda tool. Throughout the Constitution the phrase ‘the people’ is used. With regard to all sorts of other rights, it of course refers to an individual’s right to life, liberty and property. But when it appears in the 2nd amendment, it refers to the right of some abstract known as ‘the people’s right, a usage that didn’t appear until close to 150 years later. Yup, that’s exactly how a reasoned mind would approach the interpretation of the 2nd amendment.

Keep and Bear
Keep of course means to own or otherwise be in possesion of. I don’t know that anyone has attempted to contest the meaning of this word (making it nearly the only one).

Bear means to wear or carry. Which would seem to imply that men could carry firearms upon their person. Concealed or unconcealed they don’t say. But tiny, concealable guns were in use in the 17th and 18th centuries. So they at least knew about the existence of the latter without remarking upon the need to ban them. And besides, the next part leaves little to the imagination.

Shall Not Be Infringed
Implicit in this phrase of course, is that if it looks evil (such as having no wood furniture and being painted black, or having a pistol grip), is a pistol, or fires a projectile larger in diameter than .5 inches, that it’s ok to ban it. An interesting take on an otherwise clear cut statement I might say. Not to mention that the Rifles used by the minutemen (an unlegislated militia that was nevertheless well-regulated) and the revolutionary war soldiers (who unlike the minutemen were enlisted and belonged to a formal military) used firearms that fired a bullet that was .69 inches in diameter. Their officers often carried flintlock pistols both under their coats and over them whether on foot or horseback.

Conclusion
What we’re left with is that well-ordered groups of able-bodied men outside of government employ in such capacity are important to the free state. Indeed, the writings of Thomas Jefferson indicate that one of the reasons for men to be armed is so a government does not take them for granted and thus cage them in tyranny: “No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

We’re also left with the conclusion that civilians should be allowed to carry and own firearms of all types and that government shall not be allowed to take away that right. As Patrick Henry said, “The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.”

Of course, what do they mean by ‘arms’? There are some libertarians who insist that this implies that we should be able to own anything we wish up to and including nuclear weapons. I left this for the conclusion to show that liberty-minded individuals can be just as self-serving when they read the constitution. Arms is the only word that the Founders used that was truly vague, even when viewed through the light of historical perspective. Artillery and bombs were of course known to exist by then, and were also referred to as ‘arms’. However, ‘Keep and Bear’ would be the key phrases here. I’m a strong guy, but I’d be hard-pressed to bear even a four-pounder cannon. And, I’m almost positive I wouldn’t be able to move more than 5 yards with it strapped to my back, if my knees didn’t collapse with weight in the first place.

Nope, very hard to bear something much bigger than a small arm (firearm). Not to mention that artillery and explosives were not (and for the most part still aren’t) individual weapons at the time of the writing of the Constitution. They are instead thought of as force multipliers and methods of projection of power. Even though there are individuals at the trigger, fuse, or button, they aren’t designed to protect the individual or harm another individual, but to protect and likewise damage larger bodies of men from the squad on up. Thus even though mortars, RPG’s, etc can be born and fired by individuals they aren’t really ‘individual weapons’. Besides, as seen by the Patrick Henry quote and the writings of others’, the Framers clearly meant firearms when discussing individual weapons.

The truth about the 2nd Amendment is as easy to see as anything else, once you wipe the grime of 230 years of linguistic corruption away. And once you apply a few techniques from the liberal arts. Maybe just a touch of nuance and sophistication as well. And a bit of honesty.

But I’d like to leave you with a few words that aren’t my own, a more general thought about the purpose of the constitution:

“No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words “no” and “not” employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution, and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.”–Edmund Optiz

Added Two Hours Later:
Assistant Village Idiot and Intellect Impure bring up the point that we don’t have a militia, well-regulated or otherwise, for the most part. Valid point, but here grammar comes to our rescue. The implication of the order of the clauses is that without an armed populace, you can’t have a well-ordered militia (indeed, it’d be rather hard to field a fighting force if none of the force had weapons). And without a good militia, you can’t protect a free state. Referring back to the Jefferson quote, we must remember that the 2nd Amendment is the last defense of liberty, included in order for the people to overthrow a government that would eventually find its way to tyranny once again. While I’m not saying that the Michigan Militia separatists have the right idea (at this point in time anyway), I am saying that the militia needs to exist in potentia (not to mention that we’d be better off if the militia really did exist as a potential check against the current crop of legislators). And that militia can’t come to fruition without an armed people.

Again, there as both Intellect and Assistant point out is room for debate (particularly with regard to machine guns, the larger sniper rifles, and types of ammunition), but it remains hard to justify the banning, licensure, or other forms of control of semi-automatic firearms of just about any kind. Driving may be a privilege, but arming oneself is a right.

Crossposted at Homeland Stupidity, where I’ll be publishing more on the theme of libertarian conservation efforts as time goes on. Probably healthcare as well.

Environmental conservation and libertarianism aren’t words frequently heard in the same sentence, unfortunately. Instead when we think conservation, we think hippies. Hippies and annoying rangers and officials telling us we aren’t allowed to play in the park anymore, build a house on our own property, or drive that gas guzzling sports car.

I say this is unfortunate because capitalist ideas, where they’ve been tried, have been more effective than anyone could have dreamed. It’s pretty easy to see why, when you think about it. One method makes the process of conservation antagonistic whereas in the other people actually profit from it. I’ve heard it said that the way to succeed in life is to make everyone think they’ve gained in a deal. That’s the beauty of capitalistic strategies; everyone leaves happy.
To an economist, life can be seen as a series of ‘games’. These are decisions that create winners or losers. Now, there are two kinds of outcomes: Zero-Sum and Non-Zero-Sum games. The difference between the two is that in the former, there is no new wealth created. The winner ‘wins’ because he takes wealth from the loser. In the latter there is new wealth created. So both parties can win, although one might make out on the deal better than the other.

Typical conservation efforts use the zero-sum model. Man against nature. Which is slightly ironic considering our stereotype of your typical environmentalist. It’s easy to see why people will be perpetually unhappy with that:

“You want to take my land to give to that endangered newt?!?!? A newt, who the heck cares about a newt, for crying out loud?”

Conservation programs that have been popular with the locals and haven’t hemorrhaged money on the other hand are based around the non-zero-sum model. I’d like to claim that libertarians were the ones who spearheaded these programs, although largely they weren’t, just conservationists who were willing to give evil capitalism a try. The way these programs work by and large is to tie the identity and the prosperity of a local community into the natural habitat that the overbearing white people are trying to preserve.

For us to turn conservation into something that profits everyone (non-zero-sum), we have to give value to the protected area and animals within. This can be done in two ways: Giving them intrinsic or extrinsic value. Extrinsic value is what the pricetag says. Intrinsic value is why you could never sell it, at any price.

Hippies try to appeal to conservation efforts based on the intrinsic value of the natural world. As a Hindu and an outdoor kinda guy, I wish it could work that way. Hindus and buddhists, and to a lesser degree Tao and Shinto, are the best target population for this kind of entreaty, their religions being based to a large degree on interaction with the natural world. And, well, if you’ve seen the changes that have occurred in India and Southeast Asia in my lifetime alone, you’d understand the futility of that.

No, our best chance is to appeal to the extrinsic value of that which we would protect. Money. I don’t like that it has to be that way, but I’m mature enough to admit it. One of the most spectacular conservation successes has been the Karisoke Wildlife Reserve, a mountain gorilla habitat in Rwanda. This is the camp that Diane Fossey setup, where she went slightly native as she studied and yes, possibly engaged in fornical activities with, gorillas. It wasn’t her efforts, but the work of her successors Bill Weber and Amy Vedder, that I’m going to mention in passing.

(great read, great animals, great people. Their passion is just amazing, I was lucky enough to see a talk they gave over their conservation efforts. Very good stuff.)

The couple decided to try a more local-friendly approach than is traditional (usually the locals are treated like the enemy). They paid the wardens well, hired local trackers, camp workers, and publicizers. They went to the schools in the area to educate kids about the intelligence and beauty of gorillas. And, in a coup-de-grace, they set up a tourist program in which rich Americans and Europeans funnel thousands of dollars per head into the local and national economy just to point and laugh at the gorilla scratching himself funny. The result was that when the Rwanda/Uganda civil war of the 1980s erupted, only 2 gorillas were killed by underfed soldiers turned to poaching…on the Rwanda side anyway. Just across the imaginary line where Karisoke stops and the Ugandan part of the Virunga mountains start, close to 100 times that number exist.

Here, we’re not quite as impoverished as Africa, the same kind of economic incentives don’t necessarily work to the same degree. But we are a nation of hunters. And that’s a vastly under-utilized resource. Sure, there are yahoos out there that will shoot at anything that moves, but most hunters are responsible, ethical, intelligent individuals. As such they understand that if there’s no more pristine habitat, there is no more good hunting. If we better tapped them as a resource, the national park system would be a good deal more robust, and conservatives would be much happier with conservation efforts.

Kim Du Toit brings us an example that has to do with culling an elk population in Rocky Mountain Forest. The government plan will of course cost 18 million dollars and take 20 years…to kill 1500 elk. Which, as Kim points out, is something that hunters pay to do. His modest proposal would resultin a 1.5 million dollar profit based on hunting permits alone. Throw in the money spent on travel, lodging, food, guides, and we’re talking a fair amount of money injected into the economy here.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that with capitalism, not only can we make conservation less painful, we can even make it a substantial new growth sector in the economy. As Weber and Vedder showed us, it’s at least worth a shot.

Individ has a post up that mirrors what I’ve been feeling for the past couple years but was having a hard time articulating…

I try to be a pretty tolerant guy. Tolerant of different views, different lifestyles, different cultures. But one thing I’ve always had a tough time of it with is collectivist ideology. Not the people necessarily, your average person who ascribes to such modes of thought tends to be no different from others in a lot of respects. Now, the people in power, and some of the people on the dole can be a different story. But for the most part, I approach debating and questioning them as I would a child who hasn’t carefully reasoned out his stance. Not because they’re inferior intellects, but rather because, like an intelligent child, they seem to have formed their opinions without all the facts and without carefully following their reasoning through to the end. Not to mention just a touch of the ‘It shouldn’t have to be that way’ mentality, even when it’ll always be that way. Karl Popper, the philosopher best known for his work on the nature of science, addressed this in his opus The Open Society and Its Enemies, in which he showed the basic flaws of Marxist theory, although as he said himself, he was sympathetic to said mode of thought.

I’m not sympathetic to it. I believe it wrongheaded; it violates everything from the basic biological tenets of behavior to the natural processes which created such a wondrous thing as complex social behavior to the innate diversity and uniqueness of every individual. Yes, it is born of good intentions. But if I recall correctly, that’s what the road to hell is paved with.

Of all the wrongheaded claims that collectivists make, the most transparently wrong is that they love America. They don’t. Not in anything more than the superficial way that I love my mustang. Or watching Shakira shake it in Hips Don’t Lie. They ‘love America’ so much that they want to change the very things that define it:

Listening to them prattle on is like watching Amanda Peet try to change everything about Jason Biggs in Saving Silverman. Now, I’ve never been in love, but I’ve been close a couple times. And it strikes me that if you truly love someone, you wouldn’t want to change their core identity. You might fuss about details like their habit of using the couch as a clothes hamper, or the fact that they never want to go see the new guns and glory action movie with you, but you don’t try to change who they are. Yet ever since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (hah, got the first name right this time) tried to redefine the word ‘freedom’ in 1934 that’s exactly what ‘progressives’ have been up to.

What is America, what is it that makes us different from other nations? Our founding philosophy. Now, there have been other populist revolutions and other countries in which oppressive governments were thrown out. From the French Revolution to the November Revolution the fragmentation of the USSR. But all of these, though catalyzed by the same types of injustice that drove us to enter the Revolutionary War, were underpinned by a very different way of looking at the people. All of these, in some way or another, were collectivist (mainly socialist) efforts, and thus largely about removing one statist government from power in order to implement a different sort of statism, which often enough turned out to be just as oppressive or stifling as the one that preceded it. What makes the American Revolution and the country that followed it so different is that this was a conflict of individualists against statists, about those who saw government as a tool of the people instead of the other way around.

What makes our country America are the ruminations of Thomas Paine in Common Sense. It’s the Federalist papers. It’s the long tradition of classical liberal philosophy. It’s the principled, reasoned, and articulate stance on individualism that no collectivist has ever managed to approach in detail, coherence, or viability. It’s the impassioned speech of Patrick Henry declaring no alternative to freedom but death. It’s George Washington crossing the Potomac and Thomas Jefferson pulling the world’s most famous all-nighter to write the Declaration.

To quote Individ at length, this is what loving America is about:

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am an Americanist in philosophy: I stand for the people. If you stand for each individual, if you respect people as individuals, then you are are an individualist; and an anti-collectivist. If you are an American (and when I say that, I mean by philosophy): you stand for individualism; you stand for personal responsiblity; you stand for free markets; you stand for freedom from government; you stand for small government and low taxes; you stand for gun rights, and for all unalienable rights.

I proudly fly an American Flag outside my house, all year long. But I fly it NOT out of support for government; I fly it out of support for an ideal, for the American Philosophy. What a precious and rare thing it is. And I cry tears of blood when I think of how few truly appreciate the few remaining tattered freedoms we still have, the sliver of waning liberty that we still possess. As true Americans we are supposed to Hate Government, and Love Country.

‘Progressives’ have tried to change everything. There is nothing American about ‘People For The American Way’. There is nothing American in their ideology, their speech, or their behavior. Although I guess the flags they fly help to assuage their consciences just a little. But worst of all they try to tell us that rather than remaining true to being a country founded upon Freedom From Government, we should become a country that espouses ‘Freedom’ Through Government. They are not patriots, they do not think like Americans. Now, their heart might be in the right place, and in a couple of instances they might even have a point, but that doesn’t change the fact that what they believe in isn’t the America that men have fought and died from 1776 until today. They want to change every principle that defines our country as they vilify those of us who remain true to its ideals. If that’s love, I don’t want to see what hate looks like.

This is the second installment of the series on Evolution, Economics, and Political Philosophy, the introduction of which can be found here.

Introduction
Actually, I probably could have titled this ’self-interested nature.’ Self interest doesn’t quite make the world go round, but it certainly makes us go round. Beyond DNA and various parts of our molecular machinery, self interest is the unifying theme of all living organisms. Selfishness is why evolution has produced such myriad forms as the Mantis Shrimp and the Scaly Anteater.

Some have accused me of being a neo-Randian, of worshipping at the altar of selfishness even as they deny its very existence as our primary motivator. The self-interested nature of all living beings is morally neutral. It isn’t something to deify as anarcho-capitalists do, or to vilify and attempt to expunge as collectivists do. It exists, it is the single rule that all life obeys. It is responsible for our greatest masterpieces and our worst catastrophies. Mother Teresa was motivated by self interest as much as any Fortune 500 executive. Self interest just is.

Modeling Behavior: The Assumptions Behind Game Theory
The assumption that individuals will act in a self-interested and rational manner has allowed the study of behavior–both human and animal–to move beyond the nebulous world of thoughts and feelings, archetypes and motivations, to a predictive model of behavior. While not as refined or determinate as physics or chemistry, mathematical models of behavior are capable of astonishing accuracy when it comes to predicting the choices we make both conscious and unconscious. John Nash of Beautiful Mind fame, and sociobiologists John Maynard Smith and Robert Trivers are a few of the great names out there when it comes to the mathematical modelling of behavior.

Any explicative theory or paradigm is built upon certain assumptions. Game theoretics and other mathematical models of behavior are dependent on the following three:

• 1. Individuals will always act to further their own interests

• 2. Individuals will act in a rational manner

• 3. Individuals are party to all necessary information to make an informed decision

To present this from a Platonic point of view, if the model is the perfect form, the real world is the slightly bastardized expression of it. In other words, these conditions don’t always hold true. Humans aren’t completely rational, and natural selection isn’t rational in the least, merely appearing so when looked upon with a teleologic perspective . And we are never possessed of perfect information; at some level, our cost/benefit analysis is never going to be 100% accurate. We can never quite know whether what we think is a winning choice actually is. The idea of imperfect information is a pretty basic one, and needs little further discussion other than to understand that there is always uncertainty in decision-making. Rationality, however, is a topic worthy of further discussion at a later point.

The high fidelity of these models in predicting behavior is what lends credence to the assertion that self interest is ultimately our sole motivation. The only other major paradigm that has been asserted is group selection (in sociobiological literature); its political equivalent–one which it enjoys an incestuous ideological and historical relationship with–is collectivism. For the past 200 years, group selectionists of every stripe–sociobiological, economic, and political–have tried to assert the viability of this selective domain, and have continued to fail in presenting any evidence for its existence.

Given this long history of failure of the group selectionist paradigm and the equally long history of success of that of the individualists, it is probably safe to say that self-interest is our primary motivation. However, another thing one must remember about models is that in addition to the fact that their assumptions aren’t ever completely fulfilled, they are often narrower in scope than the real world. By this I mean self interest is a wide-ranging and broad concept that cannot be reduced simply to maximization of economic wealth or reproductive gains. Mere observation makes it patently obvious that very few individuals’ lives revolve around either of those goals.

Self Interest Defined
The truth is that self interest manifests itself in everything from the food we eat to our education to our work ethic. Major failings of both libertarian and mixed model ideologies is that they over-estimate the importance of economic (material) wealth. Many libertarians believe that ‘the market’ will solve all problems. Many leftists believe that no one would want to stay on welfare, the standard of living (material wealth) being so low. However, few individuals would feel adequately compensated for the loss of a child if they received in return every cent they had spent raising him. And many people don’t believe that leaving welfare and getting an entry-level job in order to increase material wealth only incrementally is worth the 40 hours a week of exertion.

While it would be nigh on impossible to catalog, model, and codify all the various avenues in which self interest expresses itself, understanding the ways in which self interested behavior impacts social and political systems is considerably easier. Although imperfect, a useful classification arises if we define selfish behavior as either acting at an internal or an external level. Internal self-interest is about ‘feeling good’. External self-interest could be conceived of as ‘being superior’. The former, of course is about the position the individual sees himself in, while the latter is about how others perceive the individual in question. The primary internal interest is maximizing comfort. Whereas the primary external interests are power and influence. Wealth actually contributes to all three; serving to grease the wheels as it were.

Comfort is fairly self-explanatory. While many dream of a mansion, a summer home on the spanish riviera, a supercar, and a yacht, most aren’t motivated to turn this dream into reality. People are quite content with reasonably comfortable accomodation, a trip every year or two, and a car that gets the job done. While what they define as adequate may vary, few would need to become highly paid executives, plastic surgeons, or hollywood entertainers to achieve their relatively modest goals. Most people are content not to find themselves wanting for any of life’s basic and not-so-basic necessities.

While obviously wealth is necessary to achieve all of these material goals, after a certain point, such wealth becomes superfluous. At that point, the marginal utility of undertaking extra work, vying for promotion, getting more training, is considerably less. The attendant increase in comfort just isn’t worth the extra work.

Influence–an external interest–is perhaps the most nebulous. The academic who after 10 years of schooling and postdoctoral work is making about as much as an electrician and considerably less than a plumber. Who nevertheless spend 60, 80, even more, hours a week relentlessly pursuing research. Who takes off for the wild jungles of Brazil or Africa to make notes on what a monkey is doing every minute of every day for a year. He’s driven by the desire to be influential, at least in the limited circle of individuals engaged in similar pursuits. George Soros pouring millions and billions into moveon.org and Air America, he too is thirsting after such a title.

Power differs from influence in that power is a more direct attribute. The prince under Machiavelli’s tutelage was a man questing after power. Machiavelli’s primary concern was influence. The man behind the man on the throne. Frederick Delano Roosevelt, though, was a man after nothing more than power. From his assumption of Emergency Powers to his dramatic expansion of the Executive, to the fact that he fully intended to continue being elected president for the remainder of his life, there can be little doubt that no matter what other motivations he had, power was clearly one of them. Some would say the same of George W. Bush’s recent expansion of Executive–indeed all goverment–power.

It would be a fair assumption to say that there are scarcely few elected officials at the national level who aren’t drawn to the position out of some desire for power and influence. The same could be said of those in the upper echelons of civil service as well. Teasing apart influence and power can be a difficult proposition at best, but is more or less unnecessary to the understanding of the operation of political systems. Influence manifests itself through its effects on the projection of power; so one merely needs to look at power and how it is distributed and used to understand the contribution of both. As in comfort, wealth is clearly involved in attaining and maintaing both influence and power. Here, however, the marginal utility of increased wealth is considerably greater, to look at the interplay of wealth and power in the legislature alone.

Conclusion
The distribution and control of wealth is all too often the centerpiece around which political systems are drawn. As I’ve attempted to show in the preceding paragraphs, this view is at once both myopic and overly constrained. Wealth is merely the currency through which one’s aims are realized. It is the motivations of comfort and power that we need to understand. It is these which people thirst for, and which they will attempt to gain, often enough at the expense of others.

In order for a government to be stable, in order for the people under said government to be free of oppression, the political system under which it operates must be constructed to be proof against the depredations of those who would obtain their material wealth from the pocketbooks of others, as well as against those who would use the power of the government to oppress the very people it was meant to keep free.

The next installment will cover cooperation. How self interest is ultimately the motivator behind it, and how group selectionist and collectivist paradigms will always fail to incite cooperation, instead tending toward exploitation of the few against the many.

Today’s thought isn’t mine. It’s Terry Pratchett’s. For those of you who don’t read the Discworld series, start. It’s set in a fantasy world, just because it makes the absurd easier to write about. (Kinda like the social commentary in Futurama. The setting made it funny while still poignant. Same deal here) Anyway, Ankh-Morpork, the city where a lot of his stories are set, could best be described as an almost anarchic benevolent dictatorship. The dictator, or Patrician, is a man named Lord Vetinari. Known for what he doesn’t do, which is cause harm. Without further ado:

‘I’m sure we can all pull together, sir.’

Lord Vetinari raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh I do hope not, I really do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.’ He smiled. ‘It’s the only way to make progress…’

Any commentary would be superfluous. And now it’s time to turn a 20,000 word master’s thesis into a 4,000 word paper. Only to be rejected because I don’t have a PhD. Fun times will be had by all.

Go. See. Puke.

I know I never shut up about it, but that’s because it’s an important point. Collectivism is based on the false, unproven idea of ‘group selection’. That animals work for the good of their social group or their species, instead of just themselves. There are, however, two situations where you can end up with what looks like a collective:

1) When all the animals in the group are closely related to each other. In this case, what’s good for the group is the same thing as what’s good for you. Because everyone in the group is related to you, by helping them, you’re helping what amounts to a part of yourself. Still not group selection.

2) When an individual needs a group for selfish reasons. Now this is a bit more confusing, but I’ll use one of my infamous hypothetical monkey examples (people who know me in person are running now). So imagine you’re a big strong male monkey. You’d be alpha male if you were in a troop without a problem. What’s going to limit how many babies you have? The number of females in the group. The more females in a group, the more you can impregnate at any one time, the more who will have babies during a given period with you as alpha, etc. In other words, if by your own action you can keep a larger group cohesive, you’ll make a lot more babies. Now, because you’re putting a lot of effort into the maintenance of the group, it can certainly look like you’re doing things for the good of the group. But of course nothing could be further from the truth. You’re doing it for yourself. So you can make babies.

Group selection has never been proven, never been shown to exist. I doubt it ever will. Group selection is prone to all sorts of problems including cheaters, defectors, exploiters, and lazy bastards. Actually the last two aren’t technical terms, they’re terms I use when I talk the politics of the Left and why it will never really work. They’ve been obsessed with group selection, ‘progressivism’, and all those other funny little terms that talk about ‘group consciousness’, or people ‘pulling together’. Unnatural, the lot of it. Many biologists over the years have taken this leftist interest in ‘the collective’ and attempted to search for it in biology, probably most famous among them Teilhard de Chardin. And of course almost every leftist political theorist from Karl Marx onward has attempted to look to nature to justify his belief in people working together ‘for the good of the species’.

This article represents egregious egregiousness on the part of both journalist and study author. An attempt to allow their political ideology to influence their science. In this way it is no different from the transgressions of the Intelligent Design, and indeed the methods both use aren’t too different from the other group.

This next part was probably just a misunderstanding on the part of the journalist:

Writing in the journal Nature today, the team reports that studies of lab-grown yeast populations suggest the benefits of cheating are eventually counterbalanced by the costs. This contradicts classic evolutionary theory, which states that in a competition for common resources the long-term winner will always be the individual acting selfishly rather than the one working as part of a group.

Actually many individuals act in a selfish manner while participating in the maintenance of a group.  If they didn’t, that would mean us sociobiologists have wasted the past 40 or so years.  Which would kinda piss me off.  No, evolutionary theory states that those organisms acting in a self interested manner will leave behind more offspring than those who act solely ‘for the good of the group’ (who will eventually eliminate themselves).  Selfish animals form groups, selfish animals help maintain groups, selfish animals help increase the prosperity of groups.  But they do it because it benefits them to do so.

Now on to study design:

In one corner were the ‘cooperators’, which produce energy efficiently by taking in sugar slowly and fully converting into energy all that they ingest. This method maximises resources available to the group by avoiding any waste.

Against them were the ‘cheaters’, which produce energy rapidly by quickly taking in all the sugar they can and only partially converting it into energy. While this ensures swift energy production for the individual, it is a wasteful method that reduces resources available for the group as a whole.

Before I get any farther I’m going to predict that ‘cooperators’ do better than ‘cheaters’.  And that they’re going to use this as evidence that ‘group selection’ or working for the good of the group or altruism or whatever they want to call it is valid.  They can go screw themselves.

To pre-empt them, I’m going to attempt to discuss the real differences between ‘cooperators’ and ‘cheaters’.  These are single-celled organisms, not exactly the most complex of social creatures.  And as the researchers mention the only thing that was different was how these guys metabolize resources.  The ‘cooperators’ do it nice and slow with a minimum of waste.  The ‘cheaters’ do it pretty dang fast.  Now the difference between these two has nothing to do with group behavior, but the efficiency and amount of waste.    ‘Cooperators’ are more efficient, turning more of the substrate into energy, and producing less waste.  They grow slower, but can grow for a longer period of time.  ‘Cheaters’ can grow faster initially because they metabolize things a lot faster.  But because they are a lot more wasteful, they end up freeing less total energy.  In addition, metabolic waste products are usually poisonous for most organisms.  So ‘cheaters’ are poisoning themselves.

Notice that there was nothing in the above that had anything to do with group living?  It’s simply two alternate feeding strategies, stable slow growth vs. exponential growth followed by a plateau.  What does that have to do with cooperation or cheating?  Nothing.  Bastards.

And he’s about to trot out his little political point:

“This evidence that a cooperative group can resist invasion by exploitative cheats is unexpected and gives us greater insight into how cooperation evolves. This is important because we live in a world in which cooperations exists at every level, from genes working together to build functioning individuals to individuals forming societies.”

The researchers suggest that the ideal organism type would be one that can switch between selfish and efficient metabolism. Dr MacLean adds:

“While microbes are obviously not capable of rational thought, they can change their behaviour rapidly in response to simple environmental cues. The possibility that one type could become both a cheater and a cooperator depending on what’s needed at the time is intriguing. We hope examining social conflict at the level of individual cells will shed more light on this.”

I’m dumbfounded Mr. Teilhard de Chardin, jr.  Dumbfounded.  You’ve tried to define ‘cheater’ as self-interested and ‘cooperator’ as group selectionist, and then tried to prove your point with an irrelevant experiment.  You, sir, I just don’t even know what to say.