Flag Pins
by neolibertarian
That whole Obama flag pin controversy reminds me to say a few quick things.
First, I'm wary of too much emphasis on outwardly sporting symbols in order to qualify as a good person. This is similar to Roman requirements to make outward sacrifices to the gods and reminds me of Soviet generals and ambassadors wearing hammer and sickle pins. Heterogeneity is a good thing.
Second, this also reminds me that I'm really glad we don't have national celebrations of politicians' birthdays like they do in some countries and cultures. I'm actually rather disappointed that after reading an unrelated article I even know McCain's birthday (August 29 - now you suffer with me!). Those sorts of showy, superficial prostrations at the feet of country or leaders can lead to dark and miserable results.
Finally, with that said, you'd think I would really appreciate Obama's defense that not wearing a flag pin is actually more patriotic (since the pin is supposed to be a substitute for Obama's true patriotism). I don't think that failure to wear a pin should be a mark of shame, but neither do I think that wearing one should signify a shallow love of country. As anyone can see, most pages of the www.neo-libertarian.com website have an American flag image at the bottom. Maybe that biases me, maybe it doesn't. Regardless, it seems like the point should be that actions speak louder than symbols, not that the lack of symbols speaks louder than symbols. That's just the same fallacy in reverse.
Reactionary 'Libertarian' Ron Paul
by neolibertarian
The old Ron Paul scandal that a number of bigoted and paranoid statements were published in a newsletter bearing his name has resurfaced. Apparently this came up Monday or Tuesday, in time for the NH primary. I'd heard of this one a while back, but nobody thinks Ron Paul will win no matter how much money he raises (you can't buy a free and fair election without a good candidate - see Mitt Romney on that one) so nobody bothered to publicize it or research it.
Why trash Ron Paul? His biggest function is to sit there in debates, and (despite being earnest in trying to answer questions instead of spinning them) let the other Republicans look good by trashing his wacko beliefs. He's sort of like Don Knotts was to Andy Griffith: a loser goofball who makes you look good by comparison.
Ron Paul says he takes moral responsibility but that he never wrote it or believed it and somebody else used his name with permission, but without oversight. Whatever, I was never very comfortable with Ron Paul on race anyway; his casual way of defending his interracial appeal by saying that "blacks" and "Hispanics" come to rallies struck me as too overtly racial. But is he a racist? I don't know. Regardless if he is, I can't support the guy.
Don't get me wrong, I've always admired Ron Paul to some degree, if only because he was the lonely libertarian in Congress. Although he's probably accomplished almost nothing in his terms of office, he was at least a voice for sanity. When Congress was debating whether to pass the Patriot Act and other restrictions on freedom for four years or for five years (basically, not whether the Constitution should be suspended but for how long it should be suspended) it was Ron Paul who pointed out hwo crazy it all was.
I knew I'd have trouble voting for him, though, even though he's a pro-life libertarian. His thinking has always come from a rules-oriented, state-focused consitutionalism, rather than a freedom-oriented, individual-focused minarchism. Ron Paul might be ideologically libertarian, but his political positions are almost entirely based on his view of the Constitution. And that's great, but I'd rather have somebody who can argue why freedom is so good instead of bitching and moaning that we aren't following the rules. Ron Paul argues 98% for the rules and only 2% for why the rules need to be there.
I want a candidate with an abiding passion and faith in the Constitution and laws of the US, but I want him to be able to articulate and convince people why those rules are in place. Simply arguing that the rules are the rules is not very persuasive. It doesn't create a real constituency for freedom. It also means that if they merely managed to change the rules, you'd have no further objection to use.
Ron Paul is also overly focused on sovereignty, to the point where it's ridiculous. He wants states to have the authority to decide whether murder is a crime, he wants foreign powers to have the power to murder, rape and destroy their citizens with absolute impunity (provided they don't kill Americans or cross an imaginary line). I could chalk this up to an anarchist's purity (something I'm also afflicted by, though differently from Ron Paul-itarians) except that Ron Paul is happy to deviate from total anarchism in some rather anti-libertarian ways:
- he supports tariffs as a means of raising revenue (sure the Constitution supports is taxing foreign businesses any less immoral than taxing Americans? and Americans just have to shoulder the extra cost anyway)
- he supports clamping down on the border by 'any means necessary' because Americans are supposedly losing work (so Americans being displaced as hotel maids is a justification for a vast military presence in TX, NM, AZ and CA but the unchecked tyranny and genocide in Afghanistan and Iraq is insufficient justification for a benevolent military presence elsewhere)
- he wants to rejigger citizenship rules by amending the Constitution in order to exclude children of immigrants from the benefits and protections of citizenship, even if they are born here (if he were an anarchist, he wouldn't buy so completely into borders and he wouldn't be so gung-ho on using citizenship to exclude people with the wrong parents)
- he opposes the War on Terror, the Civil War and is shaky on World War II (Japan probably would have ignored us if not for our embargo against them)
That last one is more important than you'd think because it's an indication of a libertarian's larger views. Among libertarians, the paleolibertarians are against the Civil War - paleos don't care about the effects of the Civil War, any justifications or the fact that the South obviously and admittedly seceded simply for slavery. Most paleos just care about the size of government becuase of the war and the fight for black civil rights. They almost always judge the Civil War negatively because in a few ways the government expanded its power afterwards. Perhaps not coincidentally, a lot of prominent paleolibertarians are from the South, like Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul. Many, however, are not Southern and simply apply an isolationist or anarchist viewpoint to the Civil War.
Neolibertarians, or at least those libertarians whom I'm claiming as neolibertarian for the purpose of this discussion, are more willing to accept that, though the government did not start out with the most libertarian argument at the outset, the Civil War was decidedly about slavery and achieved many good things. The expansion of government was unfortunate but if a federal government is to exist at all, surely it must police oppression within its own border instead of merely watching for foreign armies invading.
Most paleos and other anti-Union, anti-Lincoln libertarians trend closer to anarchism than Ron Paul, though. Ron Paul is not much of a libertarian, but rather more of an extreme conservative. He ends up very close to libertarian, but he thinks the Constitution is the highest goal, not liberty.
Since almost all libertarians operate largely on the principle that people precede laws, they end up arguing one of three things:
a) freedom is morally paramount, so laws must be created to protect it
b) freedom is most utilitarian, so laws must be created to protect it
c) freedom is morally paramount, and laws must not be created as they would hinder it
Ron Paul is in a different category, which isn't strictly libertarian in the philosophical sense:
d) the Constitution exists, so we must follow it
Rather than a discussion of why, how and when the laws come into place, Ron Paul just cares that the Constitution is here. This is a conservative argument, that the rules must be followed for their own sake. While he takes it in a libertarian direction for the most part, his argument is not philosophically libertarian. It's philosophically conservative - follow the rules, follow tradition. Coupled with his reactionary (even socialist-compatible) views on immigration and globalization, Ron Paul is very conservative. He's much more reactionary and anti-trade than most of the Democrats and much more reactionary and anti-immigration than most of the Republicans.
If Ron Paul just said that the Constitution should not change, but society can change and be fluid, that would be a libertarian political stand. But Ron Paul says that he wants the Constitution AND the society to stay unchanging. That's a very conservative stand.
He's also clearly appealing to those with anti-libertarian motivations and aims. Appealing to anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, anti-trade, anti-war, anti-immigrant types is a pretty depressing and even spiteful campaign strategy. Accepting the support of 9/11 Truthers and various Bircher/neo-Nazi types with a wink is worse. This is not the kind of campaign I want to support or be associated with, no matter how good a President Paul would be on taxes or privacy.
A vote for Ron Paul will be interpreted as a vote against free trade, a vote against immigration, a vote against the war on Muslim fascists, a vote against engaging the world in a meaningful and effective way. Ron Paul is pushing some good ideas, but whenever he gets a chance to decide for himself what he wants to say and choose to emphasize, he'll always focus it in a pessimistic, anti-change, anti-status quo.
Good libertarians need to realize that Ron Paul is not our salvation or even a step in the right direction. He is WORSE on issues where's it's comparatively easy to be pro-capitalist and anti-state.
Ron Paul may be a libertarian in some ways, but he's the reactionary-conservative candidate in this race. A vote for Ron Paul is a vote against modernity and against a dynamic society.
Statehood: Form or Function
by neolibertarian
California is a big state. It's incredibly diverse and enormous among the states - the largest population, the most agriculture, the biggest economy, etc. It's also very unwieldy and closed in its politics.
Term limits make state legislature races very expensive, with contested races often topping a million or several million spent on each side. Term limits and districting make the parties quite powerful. Special interests in California, mostly the public employee unions, are incredibly powerful.
It's also just hard to cram tens of millions of people into one state, a form of government designed for a far smaller number of people. When the US was formed, the free population of most states was measured in the hundreds of thousands. While it's hard to say there's any perfect ratio, and certainly technology has decreased the difficulty of have large state populations, smaller states would be more representative and responsive.
California could be better off in many ways as two states or maybe more. Maybe a neat line between north and south would be simplest; the San Luis Obispo-Kern-San Bernardino county lines form almost a straight border across. CalVoter identifies eleven regions within California. I'm not expecting divisions to happen; people are too attached to the forms of states, and not to the functions.
Why is there any special legitimacy to the particular borders or branches of a given state? We simply grow attached and forget that governments exists for higher reasons, not for themselves.
If we were to stop valuing states for their own sake and simply value them for the good they can possibly provide, we'd see that they need some serious reform. California, for example, has only 80 Assembly members and 40 State Senators to represent over 36 million people. The number of Assembly members hasn't been changed in a century, when the state looked very different (most of the population was in SF, and it was a much smaller total). Just as having more states to represent California's population would be a net positive in terms of voter efficacy, increasing the number of California state legislators would make government more responsive to the people here.
It would probably be useful if state borders and government forms were reorganized periodically as a rule. Whenever an organization lasts too long, it becomes protected in its own right. This is true of almost any institution. This is why the Catholic Church acted to protect its institutional reputation instead of protecting the young children its priests were molesting. It's why the Army protected its institutional reputation and portrayed Pat Tillman as a dead hero killed by the Taliban instead of admitting that he was killed in a friendly fire incident even after identifying himself. Attachments to institutions should never exceed or override attachments to ethics and principles.
Progress or Decay?
by neolibertarian
One of the fundamental questions on the nature of humanity and existence is very general: as time passes, do things tend to get better or worse? There are related questions, as well:
Are people basically good or basically bad?
Is history mostly cyclical, without any real progress made for good or ill?
Will history progress to some end-point of ultimate achievement or degradation?
Christianity and Islam argue that history is teleological, leading to some purpose: Yahweh's salvation of humanity; Buddhism believes that reincarnations of the Dalai Lama are intended to help others achieve final enlightenment; the Hindus, however, traditionally believe that all history goes through four stages of growth and decay, akin to the ebb and flow of the tide.
Since the Enlightenment, there have been many people who argue that people are basically good and things are basically getting better. The Romantics, however, are the counter-revolution to the Enlightenment, arguing that people are basically too smart for their own good and that the future has brought and will continue to bring more pain than misery.
Unfortunately for those favoring clarity in politics, the good-bad division in modern US politics is anything but neat. For simplicity sake, I'll summarize the position that people are generally bad and the future is generally bad as the pessimist position. The pro-Enlightenment ideas that people and the future are both generally positive I'll summarize as the optimist position.
First, more politicians are generally optimist than anything else, at least in this country. It plays better, first of all. Reagan was the model optimist politician, believing in the positive power of people, ideas, the future and so forth. So in the center, on the left and on the right, optimist politicians play better than pessimists.
Second, whoever has more power is likely to be optimistic. Democrats are pessimistic about President Bush. Republicans were pessimistic about President Clinton. SO that can skew results.
But beyond that, there are pessimists and optimists on both sides of the 'aisle.' You have your pessimist righties: those who remember the good old days, who think society is too perverted, drugged-out and new-fangled to be of much use. The extreme-pessimist righties will join groups like the Phelps church or Neo-Nazi churches, telling us that the country's embrace of gays will bring hellfire on all who do not oppose the sodomites. Or whatever.
Then you have your pessimist lefties. In my opinion, lefties wear the pessimist label better because even an optimist lefty still thinks average people are pretty weak if not straight-out stupid. Pessimist lefties think that corporations are controlling everything, wars are always for sinister reasons (except when waged against the US or its allies), and that eventually we'll all be consumed by global warming - no, wait, climate change - no, wait, bovine growth hormone - no, wait... insert something corporations do here.
What's unfortunate, though, is pessimists in general. They're just wrong.
People are basically good. Why else would we complain when people do bad things and applaud when they do good things? No matter how many evil things some people do, most of us are basically good and we value goodness.
The future is also a positive thing. Technology saves lives, amuses and entertains, brings families closer together, and provides information to businesses and citizens. A century ago, I would have had little contact with my family members; the closest ones are nearly 900 miles away, and others are over 3,000 miles away (by freeway). Today, I can talk to them all the time for the cost of monthly Internet and cell phone bills. Technology has improved our lives countless ways, and for every bit of evidence that implies it makes us dumber or lazier, there are more instances where it makes us smarter, healthier and happier.
What set me off on this rant? This piece in TCS. I wouldn't say the author is a pessimist, though he does offer some pessimistic contentions (or merely questions). But the idea that, to use his example, a large difference between the US and EU constitutions is that one was written in the age of paper and the other in the age of TV and Internet, strikes me as both pessimistic and missing the point.
If technology like television and the Internet makes people seem to have less of a grasp on deeper issues, maybe it's just reflecting the way people are instead of changing the way people are. Also, we have a real-world test on the subject. The written political documents of 18th and 19th century Europe were hardly liberal in the American standard. Even the French Revolution, explicitly based in many ways on the American model, was clearly less liberal (and horrendously crazier) than ours. Rather than attributing so much of the difference to technology, we should place the bulk of the blame for the difference on the respective political climates of late-1700s America and early 2000s Europe.
Of course, the author (Kling, whom I should note that I respect) has two opposite contentions based on TV and Internet. His main point seems to be that style, speed and simplicity are valued in the modern era of instant media. But if that's the case, then modern media should have had the opposite effect on the EU Constitution Treaty. Rather than a laborious and exhaustive effort to include every last opinion, interest group and demographic, as well as every word of all previous EU treaties, the new media should have pushed Valery Giscaird D'Estaing (former French President and head of the drafting effort for the treaty) to make a shorter document. For example, one that could be simply explained in a three-minute news story on the Treaty.
Back to my main point: technology and the future are positive developments, and we should embrace them for their effect on magnifying free will. If you disapprove of technology, it generally signals a deeper disapproval of human nature itself.
Bleeding California
by neolibertarian
California is a state in decline. California has sprawling Los Angeles, picturesque San Francisco, world-famous Hollywood, the largest population of any US state and the largest economy of any US state. As Tom McClintock said in his recent (losing) campaign for Lt Governor, this state is blessed with a mild climate and abundant resources, yet policy has helped drive down the prospects for California.
California was a pioneer in freeways, having a large, developed freeway system and a special police detachment to monitor it. Now, the CA state freeways are neglected for repair, and even though the population has grown steadily, few new freeways have been constructed since Jerry Brown as governor killed them. The CA state freeways are literally crumbling, Los Angeles has one of the lowest levels of roadspace per person than anywhere else in the country, and yet the most momentum on transportation was Prop 87 to tax CA oil production.
California owes its existence as a state to immigrants - both to the Chinese and Mexicans that came here and contributed to a growing US state and to the speculators and gold rushers who came here to turn a promising territory into a new state. Today Latino immigrants are met with either condescension or isolation, and Americans are more likely to leave CA than move here.
California was a free place, even into the 50s and 60s. The state had much of the identity that other Western states have retained. People were free to work, play, grow and transact. Now this is a high-tax state, where bureaucracy and unionism are powerful and budget quotas and reckless spending force the state into further debt to serve special interests. In November, Californians voted for several bonds on the ballot, which increases our state debt to an astronomical figure somewhere in the neighborhood of $90 billion, which has to be repaid by taxpayers every year for decades.
This state is just full of a lot of statist-caused problems. Taxes are burdensome, driving out businesses to NV, AZ, ID and elsewhere. Bureaucracy is omnipresent. Unions, especially public employees (teachers, especially) have inordinate control over political processes, siphoning off public money for their own members. In general, there are just laws and regulations all over the place.
California has lost much of its flavor as a free, Western state. Rather than being a place where your energy and creativity are the only practical limits on your potential, California is more and more a place where your potential can only be determined by filing form C-34-90, paying a seventeen thousand dollar fee, and checking for compliance with the Repeal Of The American Dream Act.
All states probably have these problems, but in California the problem combines with a general disinterest in the future and in achievement. California just has a fatalistic air about it.
I last lived in Florida in a county that borders Lee. Florida, especially Southwest Florida, is a growth region - the governor embraces tax cuts (JEB cut taxes every year he was in office) and Latino immigration. Development, though limited by wetlands preservations and NIMBYism, is brisk on the west/Gulf coast. Florida has an atrociously bad education system, especially compared to California's UC and CalState systems, but in terms of looking to the future, Florida is light-years better than California. Lee County, FL was the 63rd fastest growing county from 2000-2004, and had the number 1 fastest Hispanic growth rate of any county nationwide. Housing development is a big deal there, and towns like Naples and Fort Myers have grown considerably in size and in cost of living (though it's still several hours from major Metro areas in either Tampa/Sarasota or Miami).
I have also lived in North Virginia in a county that borders Loudoun. Like Florida, there are still vestiges of Dixie that hold the state back, but ultimately NoVa is a growing an exciting place. CD8 in Virginia has the highest concentration of Muslims of any in the country. Immigrants from all over are appreciated in NoVa, and contribute heartily to the growing business climate there. Taxes are on the lower side and growth and development are strong. In Loudoun County, the fastest-growing county from 2000-2005 as well as the richest by median HH income).
Of course, both VA and FL have taxes, bureaucrats, socialists and environmentalists to control people. Growth in Florida and Virginia has spawned laws to 'retain the feel' of some particular place. Taxes continue to be widespread. Immigrants still meet hostile citizens and wary politicians. Neither of these places is at all perfect (in fact, there are a number of reasons why I left both of them). By the same token, CA is far from all-bad.
But still, CA's ultimate problem relative to places like Loudoun, VA and Lee, FL is that this state is not being very friendly to ideas of growth and accomplishment. California is not very friendly to the future.
Campaign Finance Strikes Again
by neolibertarian
Bringing an idea to its natural conclusion, the California Democrats are pissed off that Arnold was a guest for Leno last week:Arnold Schwarzenegger will receive from NBC and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno what can only be described as a free multi-million dollar infomercial when the Governor appears (in violation of FCC equal time rules) on The Tonight Show.
Right now, Coyote has a stickied post about McCain-Feingold's chilling (more like deep-freezing) effect on free speech. He points out that now, "only members of the media, including intellectual giants like Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann, can legally criticize sitting politicians on TV and radio in the runup to the election." But since the CADems have taken campaign finance rules to their logical conclusion (non-monetary contributions, like hotel accomodations or refreshments are counted, at least under California campaign finance rules), now even media folks are hovering closer to a ban.
If Arnold appearing personally isn't exempt, then a bit that's pro-Arnold or anti-Arnold (or pro-Angelides or anti-Angelides) would logically count, too. So every time Conan has that bit with the mouth-cut-out Arnold saying KALIFORNIA and FANTASTIK, that will also be a non-monetary contribution (presumably to Angelides). I mean, come on.
Let's go to a simpler rule: no donation limits, only reporting requirements. Everybody can say whatever they want, wherever they have permission, including TV and radio. The alternative solution is yet more limits.
This is an example of the regulation by half rule spilling over from strict economics into life more generally. The rule is that simply regulating a free system is detrimental to the free system, often without producing the results desired from a controlled system (my example is California energy deregulation or the flu shot system - read the article to get it a little more in-depth). The situation with campaign finance is this: regulations prevent people from speaking, but they don't prevent everyone from speaking. A more complete, draconian crackdown on media personalities, newspapers, and the Internet (youtube could send an unrestricted ad to millions worldwide) would complete the control regime and fulfill the centralizing intent of the 'reformers.' An unrestricting approach would allow honesty of the regulations (as they are no longer readily circumvented) and free speech. But in between allows neither freedom nor effective regulation.
The easiest solution is to follow the First Amendment and let people have as much information as they want and decide for themselves what to believe or disbelieve.
Free speech, people! Free fucking speech.
Politicians Don't Care About Gas Prices
by neolibertarian
Lots of news today about prices consumers pay at the pump and how it affects families and businesses. Of course what's unstated is the level of taxes, state and federal, at the pump. While Congress is busy spending the general federal revenue on any and all pork projects with the right zip codes in their addresses, they could be cutting taxes on gas and using other taxes to fund highway maintenance and construction.
They are not concerned with the prices we pay, at least not if it means cutting taxes. They are intensely concerned with grandstanding and using this issue to expand their power - collectively and individually. Rather than doing things that would genuinely lower prices for gas consumers, like deregulating energy production, cutting taxes and so forth, they want to hold on to those powers for the government. Instead, they seek to expand their powers by bullying energy providers into lowering prices and even making laws against gouging. Both Frist and Hastert have petitioned Justice to look into gouging.
Of course nobody seems to know what gouging is except that it's a profit somebody makes and somebody else wants. We can already see where this is going. The politicians have already argued that they can tax oil companies to take away their profits and then spend that money on the rest of us. Of course, that will just increase prices (unless Congress goes for price controls) and the money will get spent on whatever Congress wants - and then we'll be told that the History of Swine Slaughtering museum in Benson, NC is money spent on The People.
So they will expand powers collectively, increasing the amount they have to waste in revenue and increasing the power they wield over the economy and individuals. They will also serve themselves individually, using demagoguery and pork spending as reasons for their reelection.
It would be far more to the point to cut the taxes consumers are paying and to encourage state governments to do the same (maybe including a highway-funding penalty for states that correspondingly raise gas taxes in the aftermath of federal cut). But that would mean they had less to spend and less of a role in events that don't concern them.
Rule 1 for being in Congress: everything is your concern.
Rule 2 for being in Congress: everything is in your power.
Rule 3 for being in Congress: nobody else can solve problems without your involvement, be they private individuals or government entities, and even if your involvement is nothing more than hearings.
Remember these three rules and you have all the values and priorities of your local member of Congress.
Uh Oh
by neolibertarian
Looks like TIA, the Total Information Awareness Database, wasn't canceled after all. It was alone as one of the few constitutional violations that Congress nixed in the year after the attacks.
The plan was to build a database using all available information - records from libraries, travel agencies, banks, credit cards, ISPs, and so forth - and thereby to have information on all citizens in the US. The information could be used for intelligence purposes in the war on terror, presumably for evidence and connections, and for finding ostensibly innocent behaviors with statistical connections to terrorism (for example, having a large amount of money in a checking account, booking flights to certain airports, etc.)
Obviously this is a huge infringement of privacy, since all this stuff requires warrants. So, a constitutional no-no that Congress defunded. It was run by Poindexter, of Iran-Contra infamy, under DARPA. Perhaps creepiest of all was the logo.
How Orwellian; and the "TOTAL" part doesn't help. It was later changed from 'terrorist' to 'total.' Also, 'Iao' is allegedy the name of some Masonic-related god. Basically, it's like somebody was trying to scare people.
DailyKos has the story
here. He presents this problem as the executive subverting the legislative (only natural, for one whose main issue is hating the current occupant of the White House), but that's horribly simplistic. The suggestion is that it'd be ok if only Congress had authorized it.
The real breakdown here is that Congress regularly authorizes, participates in and demands constitutional violations itself, and pays little attention to issues of rights or privileges that don't play to pet issues or inmterest groups. Congress doesn't pay attention to the Constitution, why should the White House?
So now we're stuck in a very scary situation, made scarier by the fact that government in general doesn't faithfully abide by the limitations of the Constitution. If the ends justify the means, as many on the left have suggested happens when the Constitution seems to not authorize or to forbid certain of their pet projects, then all somebody needs is a good intent. Since it's obvious that defending the country is a good end, the established precedent allows unabashed privacy invasion.
The ends, of course, don't justify the means. But it's awfully hard to explain that when government is infested with people who selectively decide that REALLY REALLY WANTING TO! is a valid argument for overriding natural liberties and constitutional rights.
Fortunately, this is such a scary project that I think Congress will act more decisively to stop it this time. Here's hoping.
Clothing and Freedom
by neolibertarian
Examining the Arab standards of female dress lead me to a conclusion about America: we need to allow public nudity. I'm not saying we should have like public orgies, open-air bathrooms and lewd gestures toward children in parks. nothing of the sort. It just seems to me that decency statutes are arbitrary, and if we're going to speak with any credibility on the injustice of female dress requirements in the Arab world, we should tend to our own statutes at home.
At the very least, we should have comparable and effectively identical standards of public dress for men and women. That might help the situation, but is it really fair to force people to have pants a certain, arbitrary length? To fine people for dress that others find improper? What if some communities decided that there was a maximum state of dress and fined people for wearing too much, or too long clothing?
No, I don't think I'd accept that sort of thing. If there's a law forcing me to change my dress from what I'm comfortable with, I'd be pissed off about it. Why then can't those who feel most comfortable topless or nude get the same treatment?
At some level it's just about the comfort of others and what we're accustomed to seeing. If we were used to seeing naked people then it'd wouldn't be really a big deal, just as our current situation of seeing women's faces, hair and arms and legs is considered perfectly normal.
We can't look down on Arab clothing rules if our own are just a more relaxed but still arbitrary standard. It reminds me of a California third-party gubernatorial candidate running against Davis and Simon who argued that any taxes above 20% was slavery - as though 19% was somehow non-enslaving while 21% was brutally criminal. Just because he had a better standard doesn't mean it wasn't still, at root, arbitrary.
I wouldn't want to travel to a country and be expected to wear certain clothing or facial hair for the comfort of strangers, and so it seems to me that ultimately what we choose to wear or not to wear is a matter of personal taste and style, not of law or coercion.
Of course, nudity is hardly all that important in the grand scheme of things - genocide, slavery, bigotry, theft, taxes, corruption, and so forth. But I still think that we should allow people to be naked - even if it means we have to be uncomfortable. There's no right to be comfortable with the looks of others; if there were, then old people would be placed under house arrest right when they hit the half-tucked-shirt-and-publicly-drooling stage.
Classical Tolerance and the Danish Mo' Cartoons
by neolibertarian
Those who wish for their personal beliefs to be tolerated (read: not banned or physically threatened) ought to in turn grant the same tolerance of others. It was Locke's Letter on Toleration that really covered this subject for the Western world, and argued for the separation of church and state (probably in no small part because Locke was a Puritan/Protestant a pre-Westphalia Catholic Europe).
To sum up the classical liberal belief of tolerance: there exists right and wrong, and good and bad. Right and wrong are the rules governing interaction between people, and exist to protect the rights and liberties of individuals. Liberty's most valuable attribute is allowing each person to find the good and the bad within the framework of right (lawful) actions. In other words, I am free from others' obstructing my search for good or moral living because the law protects me. This is what lets me find my own religious, social, political and theological beliefs and observations - and to state them publicly where others might hear them.
Perhaps one of the most important rights, especially in a religious society, is the RIGHT to be blasphemous as long as one is not violent towards others. I have a natural right to (potentially or with certitude) endanger my immortal soul. That's part of each person's search for 'the good.' As long as we obey 'the right' (laws protecting life and property) then we can live very different and unconvential versions of 'the good.'
The problem with the Muslim mindset (I can personally vouch that not all Muslims share the same values or perspectives on the world) that protests the Danish Mohammed cartoons is they don't allow people to really endager their souls or be blasphmeous. Muslim editors that reprinted the Danish cartoons have been arrested.
This is an especially virulent and dogmatic strain we're dealing with, though. The theoretical objection to depictions of Mohammed is that it leads to idolatry - but nobody here is arguing that the newspaper editors are intentionally engaging in or encouraging idolatry. This is really about respect for the letter of a rule, rather than what the rule was meant to protect.
In the same way, dietary codes (kosher and halal) were created as religious codes with social purposes; since certain foods are potentially unhealthful, the rules were created to protect believers and promote healthfulness among the faithful. The rules have long since taken on lives of their own as inherent morals, though they began as pragmatic concerns regarding diet. Of course, nobody ever rioted at an embassy over the serving of non-halal food (though Israel and Arab countries do have various importation bans on non-sanctioned foods like pork or alcohol).
So the rule is being rigidly enforced for the sake of the rules, and blasphemers 1,000 miles away are being protested and rioted over. Ridiculous.
I have the right to endanger my health with potentially unhealthful foods, to endanger my body with exposure to the sun and other carcinogens, to endanger my life by driving on highways and interstates, and to endanger my very soul with blasphemy, alcohol and delicious pepperoni (pork product!).
That's the classical tolerance that laid the foundation for Mill's Harm Principle and libertarianism. Unfortunately, it seems to be completely lacking in the minds of too many Muslims.
Presidential Authority: Means vs. Intent
by neolibertarian
The Bush Justice Department and Administration proxies are arguing that the wiretapping of international communications crossing US lines is justified - despite FISA (and the 4th Amendment) - because of the president's Article II authority to defend the country from attack.
That's interesting, because they're claiming a concrete, controversial power to completely ignore warrants and the incredibly weak FISA law, based on a vague imperative.
Now first of all, let's remember the 4th Amendment. Remember that one? Well, apparently Democrats don't because they've been pushing FISA as the legal alternative to the president's authority - even though FISA was created explicitly to monitor unconstitutional searches of FOREIGNERS ONLY. That way diplomats and foreign journalists, etc., could be searched for evidence of espionage and expelled from the US. But since the invasion was unconstitutional the evidence couldn't be used in criminal court, and the target had to be a foreign national inside the US. Both those restrictions on FISA warrants are gone, as well as the right to have a chance to contest a warrant before third parties (banks, travel agencies, whatever) had to turn over your records. So this incredibly weak warrant requirement has to go through a notoriously pro-government court, and that's the Democrats' favored alternative.
Well, the Fourth Amendment makes it pretty clear that only a person can do something to limit or impair his Fourth Amendment rights - either expressly by permission or criminally upon probable cause.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Nothing about being a foreigner, nothing about war or national security. The framers were very good about being explicit, so if they only meant citizens then they would have said that. Instead they said people, a plural of person. And if they wanted it to be limited, they would have written in more situations where it could be limited. In fact, the main thrust of the Fourth Amendment is to describe when and how privacy may be violated, so this is the perfect place for a wartime exemption.
They wrote in an exemption to habeas corpus, and to the Third Amendment; if they wanted an exemption for warrants in time of war, why couldn't guys like Mason and Madison just look at the Third Amendment? Obviously, they weren't intending any sort of war-time exemption, they just wanted to forbid a return of the terrifying writs of assistance.
But the Administration is arguing that the INTENT behind the President's actions are sufficient justification under the Constitution. That's simply absurd. What if he suspended Congress for a day with the intent of protecting the country, or what if he restricted freedom of speech for Muslim radicals, or the right of Arab-descended American citizens to bear arms, with the intent of defending the country?
The Constitution is not a psychic document; you can't close your eyes, think happy thoughts, and plow right through constitutional checks and liberties.
Good intent is a nice thing, but it's constitutionally USELESS. Intent is a social and political matter, not a constitutional one, certain Supreme Court decisions notwithstanding. The Constitution never tasks the President with defending the country explicitly, nor does it ever call to attention his intent to defend the country. The first part of the first clause in Section @ of Article II is "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States..." which is a hierarchical and administrative title, not a psychic or intent-based imperative.
He runs the military; that doesn't mean it's his job and his job alone to defend the country. After all Congress is the one imbued with the power to declare war and grant letters of marque and reprisal, to make the rules for capture of soldiers, to control the budget of the military, to both define and punish priacies and felonies in international waters, to make the rules governing the military, to provide for arming and then activating the militia, and to create the army and the navy. In fact, the Congress has seven separate clauses within Section 8 of Article I relating to the defense of the country and its citizens, or to the military. The general constitutional directive to 'provide for the common Defence' is given to the Congress, including the power to make legislation to execute that (and other) powers.
The President's job, according to the Constitution, is to tell the army and navy where to go after Congress creates them, arms, them, funds them, makes rules for them, and authorizes their engagement in planned conflict. The President is just the General of the Generals, and is given no other general or specific powers for defense or the military.
The President is, however, tasked with an intent in the oath of office:Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
He is tasked with defense of the Constitution, not of the country. It's Congress' job to see to practical mattters of that sort. It's the President's power to be the Administrator-in-Chief of the military, but his real job is defending the Constitution.
It's too bad Presidents are more concerned with promoting themselves to American Caesars than with fulfilling their oaths of office.
My point here is that the President's intent to do one thing or another is not constitutionally sufficient to do anything not authorized by the Constitution, let alone to override EXPLICIT restrictions on government power. However, the intent is not even granted to the President, but rather to Congress.
The President's INTENT to defend the country is no more constitutionally persuasive than New London's INTENT to improve their town through expansive use of eminent domain, or Congress' INTENT to help people by banning intrastate commerce like gun or drug sales. Sure, everybody thinks he has a great intention, but the Constitution doesn't pay attention to that. Good intent is worthless precisely because everybody claims it (and most probably have it).
The law and the Constitution are dispassionate and describe the ACTIONS which people and government agents may undertake. If we let self-declared intent become a free pass to get by the Bill of Rights, then the Constitution is meaningless.
Gateway Marijuana
by neolibertarian
THe argument against marijuana is pretty much always that it leads to harder drugs. It's pretty hard to make a case against marijuana itself being illegal, since most of what it causes is forgetfulness and laziness. If that's it, then alcohol might as well be illegal as well. But cocaine and heroin seem scarier, so linking marijuana to them is a guilt by association.
I'd argue that the problem is the reverse. Marijuana is a gateway drug BECAUSE it is illegal. Since people have access to marijuana and see that it's not that big of a problem and that there's a lot of propaganda surrounding it, they're more likely to do harder drugs. Once they've broken the law and not felt a lot of consequences, the law-breaking seems less significant.
If you wanted to make marijuana less of a gateway drug, I'd say that making it legal would help. Once peoople aren't crossing a legal barrier to do it, it makes the jump to other drugs more substantial.
Of course, I think drugs should be legal anyway, but I still think it would make marijuana far less of a gateway drug.
Substantive, Procedural or Nonexistent Liberty
by neolibertarian
The Bush Administration, like every recent Administration, has claimed that the power to spy in times of war and insecurity without warrants is an extension of his Article II authority. In other words, the fact that he's commander in chief means he can do whatever's necessary to protec the country and advance its interests (using the President's judgment on what's necessary).
The same argument was advanced by the Truman Administration when Truman seized the nation's steel mills (they threatened to strike) during the Korean war. He argued that he could simply draft the steel mills and workers because of his Article II powers as commander in chief.
The argument is of course the same, and it's only natural that people in the White House want broad, ill-defined executive powers, just like people in Congress want virtually unlimited legislative power. It should truly startle all of us that these insane and ridiculous arguments could be treated as credible by so many smart people for so long.
A lot of the American legal system revolves around procedural due process - the right to trials, the necessity of warrants, right to counsel, etc. We have the procedural liberty so that we can better experience substantive liberty, the actual choices and freedoms that are each individual's right. Except for the bill of rights, some SCOTUS precedent and a few acts of Congress, there really isn't much in our system geared for substantive due process, or protecting liberty for its own sake. Of course, it's still the most important part of our political life, and gets brought up all the time (the 1st Amendment is always popping up), but the area of contention tends to be procedural liberty.
The problem with procedural liberty is that you can still lose your freedom as long as the law is followed in depriving you of it.
But what the President argues is that there isn't even a procedural protection. Nobody is standing there even to make sure rules are followed as freedoms are trampled. Even the pitiful almost meaningless FISA check has been circumvented. For his part, the President is fairly honest: warrants just aren't high on his list of priorities.
My Thoughts On Education
by neolibertarian
Over the years I've accumulated some insights into education policy and what I think could be helpful for improving it. The three most important things about education, are 1) maintaining parental involvement, especially at home, because at young ages parents are the ones who have to make school a priority, 2) get the government out of the way, because flexibility and innovation die when government monopolies rule the land (when you have to please a majority of the voting public, innovation is often frowned upon), and 3) come up with a goal for education.
The third one is incredibly important, yet it's often ignored. Is the point of school to send us to college and graduate school? Is it supposed to make moral people, learned in philosophy, or religion, or rote dogma? Is it supposed to train kids in the skills of a career or to get a job? Is it just a babysitter and social indoctrinator, just a part of society that we all go through? This question needs to be answered, because how can you design a good school unless you know what you're designing it to do?
The babysitter answer is obviously not a satisfactory one, because there's so much more schools can and schould do. The moral/religious one can't be ignored, because obviously schools have some ancillary role in shaping kids into adults, but all the real moral questions must ultimately be made by their guardians, those responsible for most of the moral-shaping of children.
The real question for high school is whether it should be preparing kids for careers or for further education. The vocational versus professional question is a common one, and also one that need not be decided from the top-down. Assuming a sufficient amount of funds (generous, but reasonable) schools could offer some instruction for both vocational-track and professional-track students, and supplement their education with other institutions. This idea has already been used at some high schools (my high school did it) by allowing kids to go to programs at firehouses and so forth, or to take some college courses for credit. So it's entirely possible to make high schools fit individual student's needs. That should be the goal of education, to fit the educational needs and desires of each student as an inividual, and to instill the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful in the future.
But where I think we need some improvement is in structure. First of all, high school grades (freshman, sophomore, etc.) should be done away with. Personally, I think year-round schooling makes sense, but with or without it, we need high schools to be based on achievement rather than age. This would hopefully dampen the stigma of being in high school for five years, and allow more ambitious students to leave in three years. Since the cutoff point for grades is arbitrary anyway, why should kids be made to feel out of place if they progress at a different speed than 'grades' allow? Of course, flexibility is already present somewhat in that kids can take classes of different difficulty in subjects. But if that's the case, then there's little need for grades anyway, just classes.
To help guide the students without tracking them by 9th through 12th grade, we could have 'majors.' Every student would have to meet the basic graduation requirements, requiring all to take at least a class or two in most areas. But then students would have extra requirements based on the major of their choosing. Those majoring in English or Math would take more of those classes, while others could major in drama, music or vocation and take those classes. This allows the school to provide some sort of guidance to the kids on what classes to take and to monitor their progress, while also meeting the skills and needs of individual students.
It also has the effect of forcing the kids to focus on one area and be good at it. Hopefully they'll actually put some thought into what they're good at as people and then apply it to their futures. The abolition of age-based grades, and the establishment of majors, would hopefully get students involved. It would not be so easy to just show up for four years and graduate without putting some amount of effort into the process. I hope that it would additionally provide the students with some feeling of control over their educations, thus emotionally enrolling them into it.
Obviously this is starting to look a lot like college, and I guess that's the idea, though I thought of these ideas individually without the intent of ending up with a college atmosphere. But having a college atmosphere is a good thing - both for the students who will one day go to college, and for all the students just because a college-like structure is more flexible and individually-suited.
I must add, though, that students should be required to also have two minors. This would prevent them from being stunted in their education, as well as allowing a fallback - in case they want to change majors, they could use progress established for a minor as the basis for a new major.
To be honest, I don't know exactly how to get parents involved. In the end, it strikes me as something they either can and want to do, or something they can't or don't want to do. But I do believe that eliminating year-grades and instituting major-minor programs would draw parents into it. I think a good idea would be some sort of parent orientations, allowing parents to come in for a little speech to hear about how these changes work, about what is expected of their students, and about what they as guardians could be doing to help. Other than that, maybe a monthly parent-administrator night could help get some interaction and communication going; holding it monthly, but at different times of day and days of the week, would allow parents with awkward schedules to come and get involved.
Earlier than high school, I'm a strong believer in foreign language and/or music instruction from an early age. Younger kids are far more able at learning languages than even teens are, so starting it early would give later teachers a head start. Speaking from personal experience, I had almst no idea what infinitives and the accusative tense were until I took college German (for some reason, I didn't really understand grammar in high school Spanish or English at any grade). A foreign language can really give you the perspective on your native language to help you excel in both.
Music, aside from the dramatic and fine arts applications, is connected to language and to math. While the mathematical connections of music are probably a little too abstract for elementary schoolers, I think the subconscious benefits of music instruction are similar to learning a foreign language. While music won't help you with grammar, it does teach you to understand another way of communicating and reading, and to use your mind in new ways. The kids probably don't realize it, and if anything that's a benefit. But giving kids some music classes, even if it's just stupid stuff like the recorder, can really move them along.
Moreover, letting younger kids see more subjects, especially music, lets parents and teachers recognize and identify talents and strengths earlier. If a child has a real gift for music, but the parents are not so musical that they would've noticed, then it's better if it's identified by teachers at eight rather than twelve.
Getting the young kids early with a variety of instruction, especially music and foreign language, can play to their strengths, can expand their minds, can get them more interested in school, can teach them about other subjects, and most of all lays a better foundation for future study in their teen years.
If I had to summarize my views on education, it would be liek this: get the parents involved, teach the younger kids foreign language and music, and let high school be geared toward the students as individuals, getting them each involved in determining their own education and career paths.
Patriot Act Reauthorization
by neolibertarian
Here's hoping that the Patriot Act is not reauthorized, considering the way it sidesteps critical Fourth Amendment protections, and is at best neutral toward the war on terror. Most of the provisions are either innocuous or unsurprising, of course.
But the idea that we can have a major lasting effect on terror by weakening the Fourth Amendment is ridiculous. My stock response is that criminals in maximum-security prison, who can be searched at literally any time, are still able to operate drug rings in prison. If we can't control these people in strictly limited environments without any 4th Amendment rights to speak of, how is a little rollback on the 4th Amendment supposed to make a dent on a far less overt activity? Drug activity is a lot easier to notice because it requires interaction and a customer base, and all those customers are potential roads back to the producerts and distributors (especially since drug use often produces very visible results for us all to see). But terrorism only requires a quiet stockpiling and production of weapons, not the recruiting of customers or advertising that goes along with it.
It would take an enormous leap in Big Brother powers to think we could stomp out drug activity in the country by police action, and so it would take even more police powers to stop terrorism that way.
We need to focus on fighting terrorism beyond our borders, where it lives. Fighting the existing terrorists where they train, where they get funding, and where they're created. Most of our efforts need to be focused there, because it is incredibly difficult to get terrorists once they're here. It doesn't take a lot to hide your activities, and I'm not prepared to simply round up everybody with 'Mohammed' in his name.
The most effective thing the Israelis have done to stop terror lately is the security fence, because it prevents terrorists from getting in. The principle is the same: stop them before they get here.
Of course, all this is in addition to the fact that fiddling with the Fourth Amendment (like changing the warrant process, or greatly expanding FISA powers) is unconstitutional, at least without an amendment to the Constitution.
Just for review for those who think there aren't constitutional violations within the USAPATRIOT Act (like, say, Hugh Hewitt, who appears to be emotionally invested in favor of nearly anything the President does) let's remember the changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Though it was established to violate the privacy of foreign nationals within US borders (such as journalists or diplomats) it could only be used to expel somebody, not to convict them. Since we broke the Fourth Amendment to spy on them (out of fear they were themselves spies) we couldn't prosecute them, only expel them if they were guilty. Moreover, the records checked would be held by a third party (like a bank, if it's bank records that we'd break the 4th to view) and they wouldn't have to turn over the records until the targeted person had a chance to contest the warrant.
The changes to FISA mean that now, it applies to citizensa as well as non-citizens. It also applies to criminal cases (instead of being off-limits to the FBI, DOJ and others, the CIA is now obliged to turn such information over), not just to expulsion of spies. And the third parties who hold the records are prohibited from telling you, rather than required to do so. Your ability to contest the warrant is intentionally eliminated. In other words, no privacy, no due process.
It gets worse, of course, since the Patriot Act and other laws have brought secret judges, secret warrants and secret searches into play. This is entirely inappropriate, because free government dies behind closed doors, to paraphrase somebody smarter than myself.
This is not just about the Patriot Act, it's about the unconstitutional and unnecessary powers that the government has granted itself at the expense of our freedoms.
Rioting French Muslims
by neolibertarian
The days-long rioting of French Muslims had a lot of people searching for causes and solutions. Here's my take.
First of all, Michael Savage and some other talk radio types are idiots. France is not 'liberal.' The collective French standpoint on immigration is that it's not a good thing. They don't even like the "Polish plumber" coming under EU rules, let alone Muslims and blacks coming in for welfare. They have relatively draconian immigration rules, including a plethora of detention centers for migrants to wait while being processed.
They do not like immigrants. Virtually every French party has had major politicians insult immigrants. The National Front under Le Pen is of course known for essentially racist opinions on foreigners, and the FN splitoff under Bruno Megret (though he's not a racist, with a Greek-Jewish wife) is very anti-Muslim. The French Communist Party has also used anti-immigrant literature and propaganda, as have the mainstream parties (Chirac himself once said something to the effect that immigrant slums were filthy, the blacks themselves foul-smelling, and that they had lots of kids living on welfare).
In America, citizenship is a legal concept, and a political ideal. A person born anywhere can become an American, legally and socially. In Germany and other European countries, nationality is tied at least somewhat to heritage and ethnicity; Turkic migrant workers have difficulty being considered Muslims. France is even worse, having a hyper-nationalist sense of pride in their country (just because Frenchmen hate Bush doesn't make them 'liberal'). Even being Jewish can often interfere with being considered fully Jewish, and Jews were never officially French until the Revolution changed the laws.
So it's VERY hard to assimilate into a culture that does not like flexibility, does not like change, and does not accept your ethnic heritage as compatible with Frenchness. That's not to say all French are racist, but it's very hard to consider yourself French when most French people would consider you a resident alien.
Laura Ingraham was in the right direction here, when she criticized the non-assimilationist French tendencies. The French don't assimilate their immigrants. However, that's not due to multiculturalism,as she suggested - quite the opposite. It's due to a sense of cultural elitism and that foreigners aren't suited to their ways.
So here's what I think. By excluding Africans from even a reasonable possibility of becoming legitimately French, it greatly alienates them from loyalty to the country or their neighbors. Instead, they seek identity elsewhere, with their fellow African-extracted Frenchmen, with people from their country of origin, and with their religion. They are going to tend to exaggerate their identification with these areas, as when European-born Muslims being far more zealous and violent in their religion than many Muslims in Arab countries.
Unemployment has to be a contributing factor, since an employed person is less likely to waste time rioting, less likely to feel so disaffected, and more likely to have something to look forward to. But I think it's really the sense of identity and rejectiont hat propels this problem, and if the French could simply accept non-white people as potential Frenchmen, this sort of problem would be greatly diminished.
Of course, capitalism is also a big factor here. A closed and anemic economy is not going to provide a lot of opportunities for immigrants, especially unskilled or semi-killed ones. In contrast, the US economy has loads of jobs and opportunities for those willing to work - construction, hospitality, agriculture, and more. Hell, here in Southwest Florida we wouldn't be half as far along rebuilding from Charley last year if it weren't for Hispanic migrants (generally Guatemalan or Central American). Simply giving the French Muslims and Africans jobs, though, is a horribly incomplete solution.
They're being treated as less than full citizens, less than full human beings. When people feel they're being abused, neglected or isolated, they often resort to strange, violent or counter-productive activities in reaction. I believe that feelings of inferiority factored greatly into the rise of German Nazism, and the rise of Arab Islamism, and that the same situation is a factor in the French riots.
There's no doubt that the rioters need to be dealth with swiftly and decisively - there's no excuse for the violence they've perpetrated on their neighbors. But the lack of justification is not the lack of an explanation. French socialism, elitism, racism and xenophobia have to be recognized as contributing factors to the situation, even though the moral and legal fault for the actual rioting must fall without a doubt on the rioters themselves.
Wikipedia
by neolibertarian
If Wikipedia, the online wiki-based encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute with articles or revisions, gets more popular then will it 'come under attack?' When Google got popular it became the target of google-bombing, various attempts to make certain sites have higher rankings (especially a variety of phrases that, when you click I'm Feeling Lucky, take you directly to the White House site).
Some organizations may start mildly-organized attempts to write articles about subjects they're related to, or self-promotional pages for people and places. Other groups might want to see some bias eliminated or injected, and go through articles to make the proper changes. The problem is not that incorrect or horribly biased information might persist (Wikipedia seems to have a pretty good system for dealing with that stuff, at least at current levels) but that prolonged or sustained activities along these lines might forces a great deal of pages to be locked. Locked pages prevent abuses by just anybody, but it also prevents additions and revisions - thus negating the wiki concept.
I don't think it will happen too often. I tend to think that generally people are pretty good and won't blatantly take advantage of a system. I mean, you could argue that people would just steal toilet paper from public restrooms rather than buy it themselves, but I don't see that happening (granted, toilet paper is fairly inexpensive). A surprising number of things in our lives exist and maintain themselves without guards or enforcement.
Still, it's interesting to at least consider the future of a resource I use virtually every day (I probably end up looking at as many as a few hundred entries in a given week). Wikipedia will probably be safe with the methods in place (locking, reversion, deletion, etc.), with the respect people tend to grant such ventures, and the fact that most of the people who would go to such lengths to make (correctable) attacks aren't the sort of people who realize how important encyclopedias are.
The Truman Show
by neolibertarian
Aside from its entertainment value and the surprising performance from Jim Carrey, I really like the Truman Show. I like the messages it sends.
1) Human life is ultimately uncontrollable, answerable to no power on Earth. Despite all the machinations exerted upon Truman to make him get the selected friends and family, job, house and so forth, he still wants a girl (Sylvia) who's not even supposed to have speaking parts. The show's creator brags that Truman is real and experiences genuine emotions, but these emotions were not coerced into existence by the show; the good things about Truman, his thirst for adventure, his love for Sylvia, his unflappable human decency, are things that the creators didn't produce, and either try to stamp out or exploit. Truman, of course, wins out in the end.
You cannot dictate to human beings. That is by far the overriding message. There are others, too, of course.
2) Objective truth is critical to the human experience. The show creators try to explain away all the incidents and so forth, and to kidnap and then erase unwanted elements, but the truth does not die. They try to lie in order to create a perfect world. Truman knows it isn't true, he knows it's all somehow off, that the world doesn't quite make sense. Not only that, but he has an invincible drive to discover the real truth.
The movie is a powerful rejection of subjectivism. Even though the island in the show is the only world Truman has known since birth, he still possesses the capability to tell that the world is wrong; objective truth trumps all. Even though the world they create is beautiful, clean prosperous, safe and easy, truth wins through. The various flaws and mistakes in the Truman Show (the faked things the actors do) represent the inconsistencies and contradictions of an untrue, subjective world crumbling down. Truth will not be denied.
3) The whole movie is an excellent allegory for 1984-style totalitarian government. In fact it's almost impossible to understand the movie without this perspective. The concept of a place under 100% surveillance, with secret agents everywhere, is obvious. But what's slightly less obvious, yet more important, is the way every mistake, every lie, every half-truth, is covered by propaganda and yet more lies. When something goes wrong, they have to come up with an excuse; the excuse, however plausible or implausible, is then sent out through the media - usually some prominently-displayed newspaper headline very conspicuously read in Truman's line of sight. This of course intersects neatly with the bit about objective truth, as well as humans being in the end independent and uncontrollable.
The creators really are soulless and inhuman in their treatment of Truman. They manipulate him, make him do things he doesn't want or doesn't like, and ry to bend him to their will. They try to scare him away from adventure, badmouth anything beyond their control, manufacture a fake version of the world to play into their plans, and shame and guilt him into complacency or resignation. More or less just like dictatorships do.
Further, although the Truman Show starts out as an attempt to entertain people with a new form of reality TV, it eventually degrades into a continuous effort to simply keep the system (the lie, the Truman Show) moving at all. Again, just like dictatorships often start out with all sorts of ideals and goals, land reform being the most common, and then degrade into little more than organized oppression that was started to maintain the goals but now seems to exist solely for its own sake.
It's justice that in the end the creators are 'toppled' by Truman, brought down by crashing weight of their lies, by Truman's unendable questing nature, and by the absurdity and cruelty of their premise for existing.
4) The movie is also somewhat metaphorical in the relation of an individual to society. Truman's society is both unprepared for and horrified by his uniqueness and unpredictability. This element is one of the weaker ones, but I do believe it's meant to be there, as when Truman shouts out "Imagine that, I'm being spontaneous!" He's an individual, and when he acts out in a spontaneous or unqiue manner, society (meaning the show) doesn't know how to act.
In this element, Truman represents the human desire for spontaneity, flexibility, self-expression and self-control.
5) Sylvia is the unification of most of the elements of the show. She tells him that the world he knows is a lie, so she represents truth. Her 'father' tells Truman that she's moving to Fiji, so she represents the greatest motivation for adventure. She naturally also represents love, one of the highest states of human goodness.
6) But I think my favorite element, and I love all these elements, is the way Truman is just a good guy. He's not perfect, but he's kind, decent, polite, genuine, and innocent. Even though he grew up being toyed with, coerced, manipulated and controlled, and is surrounded by people who feed him nothing but lies and damned lies, he's a good person.
At the same time, other people in the show are evil. They're not evil for torturing animals, butchering families or raping children. They're evil for the way they can constantly lie, manipulate and control Truman without a hint of guilt or feeling for him. He is not a person to them. At best, he's a sickly child or a beloved pet. But he is not a real person to them. They are all the more evil for not being traditionally evil. Without being violent psychopaths or corrupt tyrants, they still proceed to assist in the theft of a man's free will. He is a pseduo-slave and they are all his willing slave-masters. They're evil for not being truthful.
Truman is a metaphor for humanity's goodness, our fundamnetal disposition being toward good. But the rest of the people in the show are selfish and controlling (no cast members in the Show ever show genuine emotion for Truman, but they do show emotions for themselves) and they represent the unfortunate truth that all too often people, even in enormous numbers, can be complicit or active in acts of grave inhumanity. [edit: there are a few exceptions, like Sylvia, but also two of the creators in the last scene who plead with the head guy to save Truman from drowning; that can also be cast as another complexity of human nature, when ostensibly bad people show an underlying good side]
I love the movie for what it says about life, about the world, about human independence, about truth, about goodness, and of course because in the end the best parts of life win out over the worst.
National Health Care And Shared Burdens
by neolibertarian
As I've argued many times in many places, making health insurance a shared cost gives other people an interest in your life. If you have a lot of sexual encounters, your risk of sexual diseases goes up; if you smoke or drink, then your risk of certain other heart and liver ailments increases; if you're fat or eat a high-cholesterol diet, you have certain other risks to your body.
Now if you're allowed to choose between insurers and coverage plans, you choose your own burdens. If you're a non-smoking, non-drinking, vitamin-popping, celibate vegan then you can take a plan that doesn't make you pay for expected costs from people with habits associated with health ailments. By the same token, people with dietary or social desires considered risky can take the financial burdens of those risks as they come.
But if the government takes the burden of insuring everyone (not even just the indigent or elderly) upon itself then our personal habits and risks become community business. If our neighbors and countrymen have to pay for our lung cancer, our stomach stapling, our antibiotics and our liver replacements, they have an interest in the risks we choose to undertake.
With an insurance company, they charge you more for a risky lifestyle - smoking, fat, risky activities in general can make your rates go up. But if the government, out of some socially-guided desire to 'help,' takes on the responsibility of providing health insurance, they won't be nearly so happy to charge us for what we cost. The government doesn't even allow insurance companies free reign to charge us what we cost. If the socialist-minded folks got to create a program of their own, they're probably going to do it from tax revenue and not from premiums charged to us. That way they can claim it's 'free' just because we pay for it indirectly rather than directly.
And since they can't charge us what we cost, the health insurance program will be under enormous pressure from health advocates, busy-bodies and socialists to legislate away our choices before the risks translate into higher health costs to the government. Certain foods, tobacco, alcohol and so forth will be more heavily taxed, regulated into smaller portions or even banned outright. The busybodies already want this sort of thing to happen. The health advocates want a message sent and would be fairly compliant and helpful in getting consumer choices limited. The socialists in part because socialists are largely busybodies anyway, but especially if they want to present a lower bill at budget time to preempt libertarian objections to continuing it.
It's definitely happening already. Watching Aaron Brown on CNN there was a piece I saw with a factsheet on the screen. It was presented to show how tons and tons of Americans are disgusting fatasses (accompanied by the usual neckdown shots to remind us that being unattractive is even worse than alleged health risks), how it causes an unending list of ailments, and to top it off it had a big price tag over $100 billion that these lardbags cost in health ailments. Most egregiously the report declared that we're all carrying the burden in higher premiums and so forth.
It's incredibly furstrating to deal with the hypocrisy and vanity of the subject without the busybody overtones. After all, some of the same personal-choice advocates who think you should be allowed to have sex or be gay at your preroagtive jump at the chance to look down on being overweight. And even after all the problems and societal 'awareness' about eating disorders, it's far easier to find social concerns about being fat than being skinny. It's especially ironic that health advocates in the media focus on being overweight as a health problem when being underweight is far more dangerous and deadlier.
We need to go the other direction to allow personal choice - even if it means people will be of a body shape you find displeasing, or smoke cigarettes in your line of sight, or otherwisemake personal choices you disapprove of.
We need to deregulate insurance, especially health insurance, and allow companies to set plans and premijms and so forth differently. Health insurance should be allowed to not cover weight-related ailments, so that some people can get plans unrelated to fat (or skinny) people problems. Prices should be allowed to float so that the reverse is true, and people can bear the burden of the risks they take on. The process will never be exact, since its meant to spread the risks among a larger pool, but at least we can allow freedom to choose insurance.
The analogy that keeps popping up in my head is of a large party going to eat dinner at a restaurant. If the patrons get different meals at different prices then the people who ate less will complain at having to pay more. But it's not hard at all to just get separate checks or to add up the different entrees from one check. If for some reason it were impossible to get separate checks, there would be pressure for everybody to get the same cost of food and drink. Imagine that the financial stakes were increased dramatically and throw the social biases and prejudices that exist against smokers, fat people, etc.
Yet another example of how individualism is individualism, whether economic or social.
Bravo, Government Intervention
by neolibertarian
I'd like to take a moment to thank government regulation and intervention for all it has accomplished.
I'd like to thank the government for establishing ebay, Amazon, google and all the other wonderful services on the Internet. Only the government could ever have founded these critical services at such reasonable prices. Especially the way it oversees transactions on ebay, which could never be done through a voluntary, decentralized model.
Next, I want to acknowledge the wonderful work the government's done in music. Everybody knows that art and music can never be supported through the market. Thank you, bureaucrats, for CDs, Napster, music award festivals and supporting the musical arts. Without the good work of government agencies to support art, we'd live in a world without artistic expression like these. In the same vein, only the government could produce quirky, independent-style films like Being John Malkovich and all the rest; nobody would ever risk making these films without government intervention. Certainly the major studios would never try to imitate the success of independent films. No form of art could ever last in the harsh rigors of the heartless marketplace.
And of course where would we be without the Federal Bureau For Social Events? Well, we'd never have cocktail parties, and everybody would watch the Super Bowl alone and without adequate amounts of chips and dip. Most importantly, thank goodness for the Romantic Relationships Agency, without which nobody would ever date, fall in love or marry.
A few naysayers disagree with government intervention. They seem to think a lot of the "free market," "private initiative" and the alleged "free will." But all right-thinking people know that anything more complex than tying your shoes requires a government grant to study, plan and implement properly. Let's all give thanks that the government has provided us with so much, for without a central authority to coordinate all interpersonal activities we would surely be lost.
