Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

Unpredictable Government Actions Encourage Short Term Profit Seeking

A lot of people, socialists especially, like to criticize market actors for prioritizing short term profit gains over anything else. I actually agree with this sentiment. However, unlike most critics, I don’t believe that the solution is more government because I believe the government is the cause.

Let’s say your company spent 10 years of research and development time to create a new product. You’re happy as can be with it and all signs point to it being a tremendous success. But just as you’re about to release the product the government creates a regulation that makes the product as it currently exists illegal. You’re now faced with a decision, do you redesign the product to make it compliant with the new regulation in the hopes the regulatory environment won’t change again or do you abandon the product?

This problem is a tremendous burden, especially in countries like the United States where the party in power can change every handful of years. One moment the party that favors your product is in power and things look good but then the next year the other party comes to power and things look grim.

I’m sure you can see how this kind of environment favors immediate profits over longterm profits. If you cannot predict what the regulatory environment will be four years from now you will have a hard time making plans that extend longer than four years. So you’ll probably seek as much profit as you can within those four years just in case your product line becomes illegal after that.

Anybody who wants companies to stop prioritizing short term profits at all costs should be demanding that the government step aside and allow the market to be free.

A Nice Place to Live

I’ve been keeping an eye out for a nicer place to live. For me, a nicer place to live is a place where taxes are low (preferably nonexistent) and the government is ineffective (or, again, preferably nonexistent). I may have found such a place:

The story examines repeated voter rejection of tax increases in Oregon’s timber counties—Douglas, Curry and Josephine—and the resulting cuts in basic services.

Douglas County is closing its libraries. Josephine County has a catch-and-release policy for nonviolent criminals because voters defunded the jail. Curry County has no sheriff’s office staffing after midnight, and is running out of money to conduct elections. The Times reports: “Even conducting an election this fall could be beyond reach, said Reneé Kolen, the Curry County clerk, who has one full-time staff member left in her elections division, and is facing another possible 30 percent cut in funding this year in her budget.”

The police have to catch and release nonviolent criminals? The horror! And democracy may not be able to continue because there isn’t a money to have a poll to ask residents how other people’s money should be spent? That’s a shame!

The people of Douglas County appear to be some of the few people in this country who have their heads screwed on right. If everybody had the same attitude this would probably be a pretty nice country.

The Socialist Hiding Behind the Curtain

It seems like there’s a socialist hiding behind almost every libertarian. If you prod most libertarians enough you’ll eventually find that one hot topic where they’re willing to put a bullet in the head of individualism and hang its corpse for all to see. For a lot of these libertarians that topic is international socialism. While they claim to be against socialism in all forms they will gladly join the ranks of the national socialists if they’re fighting international socialists. Another one of these topics that’s starting to creep up is universal basic income. A few libertarians have fallen for the automation scare and are using that as justification for why society must implement universal basic income.

Interestingly enough, this tendency of self-proclaimed anti-socialists to have very strong socialists sentiments isn’t isolated to libertarians:

I’ve critiqued that idea elsewhere, but what I find interesting about it is that for all these years, Murray wasn’t really an opponent of big government or the welfare state. He was just looking for a more effective way to administer it. So his legacy as a critic of welfare is in danger of being eclipsed by his advocacy for universal welfare.

You could make similar observations about how it was the Heritage Foundation that cooked up the “individual mandate” at the center of Obamacare, how “cap-and-trade” global warming regulations were dreamed up under the Reagan administration and pushed as a “free-market” solution, and how it was Milton Friedman who helped develop income-tax withholding.

I believe one of the reasons socialism has enjoyed such great success in spreading (even though it has been an abysmal failure when implemented) is because it has been able to infiltrate its opposition. Even people who consider themselves ardent anti-socialists have been infected with socialist thinking.

How could socialism become so pervasive in society? I attribute it to statism. Individualism is the antithesis of statism. That being the case, believers in the State have to believe in at least some amount of collectivism. If a person claims to be an anti-statist but advocates some amount of statism they have already established the cognitive dissonance in their head that allows them to claim to be individualists while promoting socialist ideas. Statists then push their belief onto children through the public education socialist indoctrination system. After all, it’s always good to them while they’re young! The children who were subjected to the indoctrination system then grown up, become teachers, and being the vicious cycle anew. Within a few generations the idea that individualism can even exist is almost completely removed from society.

Libertarianism can’t hope to win the fight against socialism if its biggest supporters are advocating socialist ideas.

The Religion of Science

One might get the impression that I’m opposed to science based on how much I’ve been harping on scientism as of late. Truth be told, I’m actually a huge advocate of science, which is why I’m investing so much time into criticizing scientism.

Science is supposed to be about using observations to develop hypotheses and testing those hypotheses through experimentation. It’s supposed to be different from faith. But most of the people cheering the greatness of science are treating it as a religion. Scientists are being treated like priests, their words are being treated as law and their characters are being treated as sacred. This has lead to religious zealotry:

In late July 2014, a Twitter user named @dogboner posted a photo of a man on a subway train working on his laptop, accompanied by the caption, “Some guy using his laptop on the train like a dumbass nerd lol.” The “dumbass nerd” in question was astrophysicist, author and TV host Neil deGrasse Tyson. Instantly, “@dogboner” (whose real name is Michael Hale) faced a tweet-storm of abuse and haranguing from social media users for whom Tyson has emerged as a kind of messiah of modern rationalism.

The photo was shared on the popular Facebook page “I Fucking Love Science” (which currently engages some 25 million-plus users), leading to even more angry call-outs. Hale was called “stupid,” an “underachieving burnout,” and worse. One person encouraged Hale to “fall into an ocean of A.I.D.S.” Few had bothered to consider that the original tweet was nothing but the sort of stupid, ironized joke that savvy Twitter users major in. Legions of self-satisfied rationalists and armchair logicians who pride themselves on their superior intellect were effectively fleeced.

Beyond being (really, really) funny, the incident was revealing. It spoke to the vehemence and belligerence science seems to inspire in popular culture. It also laid bare the frothing cults of personality surrounding people like Tyson, Bill Nye, Canadian astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield (who live-streamed parts of his 2013 mission to YouTube, including a much-shared acoustic guitar rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”), and other modern pop-star scientists.

The irony, of course, is that most of the people who lashed out at Mr. Hale probably don’t know any scientists who don’t regularly appear on television. In this way they mimic many self-proclaimed Christians who are only aware of popular televangelists and wouldn’t recognize the names of even well-known historical theological scholars.

I’m going to blame the government indoctrination system that is often mistakenly called an education system. Government indoctrination centers tend to teach by authority. What the teach says is supposed to be accepted by the students with blind obedience. Everything written in the textbooks is supposed to be accepted as truth. Students who question the teachers or the textbooks are often dismissed with a wave of the hand or outright punished. Unfortunately, imprinting this system on children at a young age likely makes them seek out authority figures instead of seeking out knowledge.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, who I have never met but would enjoy getting a beer with sometime, has become one such authority figure. People seeking out an authority figure on science have latched onto him, as many Christians latch onto televangelists, because he’s charismatic and entertaining. However, it’s no crime to be entirely unaware of him, especially if one’s interests aren’t in astrophysics. Likewise, it’s no crime to be entirely unaware of Aziz Sancar. Who is Aziz Sancar? He’s a microbiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I’m not a chemist so I was also unaware of him and only found him when doing a search for scientists who have made notable accomplishments but haven’t enjoyed appearing on every television channel known to man. My point is that most self-proclaimed lovers of science are probably entirely unaware of his existence and that’s OK.

Science ceases to be science when it becomes blind faith and cults of personality. The masses currently demanding science-based policies appear to be primarily composed of worshipers of scientism, not people with an actual understanding of the scientific method. They don’t want science-based policies, they want policies inspired by the sermons of their priests.

Continuing to Debate Insanity

This article sums up my attitude towards Marxism succinctly:

Every Marxist government in history has been a repressive nightmare. Marxists — aside from the ones who defend the remaining Marxist regimes — consider this a strange coincidence that has no bearing on Marxist ideology. I recently pointed this out, in light of the resurgence of Marxist thought among some left-wing intellectual circles. In an essay in In These Times, Tyler Zimmer writes what he purports to be a response, but that in fact confirms my point for me.

The problem with Marxism, I argue, lies in its class-based model of economic rights. Liberalism believes in political rights for everybody, regardless of the content of their ideas. Marxists believe political rights belong only to those arguing on behalf of the oppressed — i.e., people who agree with Marxists.

There are still advocates for Nazism so I’m not at all surprised that there are still advocates for Marxism. Of course the advocates for Nazism are far more likely to own what they’re advocating. Seldom do I hear a Nazism advocate claim that Nazi Germany wasn’t real Nazism. Marxism advocates, on the other hand, seem to have a strong tendency to wash their hands of the terrible things Marxism has wrought upon people by claiming Marxist regimes weren’t real Marxism.

Unfortunately, the Marxists had better public relations people than the Nazis so we’re still left having to deal with widespread debates about their tried and failed philosophy.

Marxism advocates like to claim that Marxism is about establishing equality for everybody but they seem to believe that doing so can only be achieved by first making people unequal. Marxism, like Nazism (yes, I’m going to continue to compare the two since they only differ in minor details), divides people into groups. An individual’s group membership, which is arbitrarily decided by an all-powerful government, determines what privileges they enjoy. If an individual is lucky, they’re categorized into a group with significant privileges. If an individual is unlucky, they’re categorized into a group that gets hauled off to death camps.

The idea that some animals are more equal than others is the foundation upon which tyranny is built. Statism in any form creates at least two classes of animals: the rulers and the ruled. Classical liberalism at least attempts (although it always fails) to limit the inevitable damage by saying that the same privileges must be granted to every member of the ruled class. If, for example, free speech is granted to one member of the ruled class then it is granted to every other member. Marxism and Nazism are different in that they divide the ruled class into a bunch of subclasses. Members of the Communist or Nazi parties respectively may enjoy the privilege of free speech while members of the other subclasses may not.

This means that it’s far easier under Marxism and Nazism for the rulers to cement their power. If a group of individuals are criticizing the ruler’s actions they can be labeled counterrevolutionaries and effectively stripped of all privileges (including the privilege of living). Through this process the rulers can easily eliminate almost all challenges to their power. Without any challenges to their power the rulers can begin doing what every ruler ultimately does: expropriate wealth from the ruled.

Classical liberalism at least recognizes that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. By making it more difficult for the rulers to eliminate their opponents, classical liberalism adds speed bumps between rulers and absolute corruption. Marxism and Nazism, on the other hand, build a multilane highway between the two and the results are predictable.

Logical deduction shows that Marxism is unworkable if the end goal is anything other than establishing a tyrannical regime. History has shown that the deductive logic plays out in reality. Yet we’re still debating this insanity.

Fighting Fascism

A lot of people have expressed an interest in fighting fascism here in the United States. Most of the people expressing such interest like to start off a lot of their sentences with, “We must…” “We must stand together!” “We must shutdown fascist speakers!” “We must run fascists out of town!”

Fascism is only made possible through collectivism. Using words like “we must” is where the disease begins. By using the collective term “we” it establishes a group identity, which is the beginning of developing an “us” vs. “them” mentality. By using the word “must” it establishes a requirement one must meet in order to be a member of the speaker’s collective.

Fascists love starting sentences with “We must…” “We must secure the fatherland.” “We must eliminate the immigrants who are the source of our strife.” “We must give our loyalty to our nation first.” In the case of fascism, the “we” is generally citizens of a nation and the “them” is everybody else. The use of the word “must” indicates that being a member of the nation requires securing it from “them,” removing “them” from “us,” and ensuring people’s loyalty is with the nation before anybody else including family members.

By identifying themselves first and foremost with a group, individuals can begin to justify any action, no matter how atrocious, so long as it benefits the group. This is the most dangerous aspect of fascism and the people who claim to want to fight fascism seem determined to rely on it.

I have a proposal for fighting fascism. Instead of relying on the very collectivism that makes fascism possible, why not rely on radical individualism? Perhaps people would be less susceptible to collectivism philosophies like fascism if they recognized themselves first and foremost as individuals instead of members of a group.

Supreme Court Rules Against Colorado’s Exoneration Act

Civil asset forfeiture laws are some of the most egregious violations of human rights in existence. The existence of these laws means that one cannot own property in any sense, they can merely possess things until the State claims that those things are tied to a drug crime.

Colorado’s Exoneration Act created a similar environment to civil asset forfeiture. Under the law the State was allowed to keep any seized property even if the suspect was declared not guilty of the charges brought against them. The only way for the rightful owner to retrieve their property was to file a civil suit and prove that they weren’t guilty of the crime (which is different than being declared not guilty). The Supreme Court decided that that process was bullshit:

The case arose after two defendants, Shannon Nelson and Louis Madden, were convicted for sexual offenses and ordered to pay thousands of dollars in court costs, fees and restitution. Between her conviction and later acquittal, the state withheld $702 from Nelson’s inmate account, while Madden paid Colorado $1,977 after his conviction. When their convictions were overturned, Nelson and Madden demanded their money back.

Although a state appellate court sided with them, the Colorado Supreme Court denied their refund request. Instead, the court ruled that Nelson and Madden could reclaim their money only through the state’s Exoneration Act, which requires filing a civil claim and proving “that the person was actually innocent of the crime for which he or she was convicted.”

[…]

Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 7-1 ruling, ruled Colorado’s law was unconstitutional. Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg held that “the Exoneration Act’s scheme does not comport with the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.” Nelson and Madden are “entitled to be presumed innocent” and “should not be saddled with any proof burden” to regain what is rightfully theirs.

Ginsburg forcefully rejected Colorado’s argument that “[t]he presumption of innocence applies only at criminal trials,” and not to civil claims, as under the Exoneration Act: “Colorado may not presume a person, adjudged guilty of no crime, nonetheless guilty enough for monetary exactions.”

I hope that this ruling can act as precedence against the practice of civil asset forfeiture. So long as that set of vile laws exists the concept of innocent until proven guilty can’t exist.

The Specter of Unscientific Public Policy

There needs to be more science-based public polices, right? According to a lot of people, there does. According to me, the entire idea that there should be such a thing as public policy is absurd. But, much to my chagrin, most people still seem to be worshiping at the alter of statism so I find myself having to shoehorn ideas into that frame of reference. So I will say that I don’t believe there needs to be more science-based public policies because science is not the appropriate tool for determining public policy. What is the appropriate tool then? A healthy respect for individual rights. Let’s take a brief look at what happens when science is relied on for creating public policy instead of individual rights:

Throughout the 1930s (but actually continuing beyond that), at least 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized. American eugenics research was later put to use by Hitler’s Germany and was even cited at the Nuremberg Trials.

Many books and articles have been written about the eugenics movement more broadly, including some popular books of a recent vintage. The American experience with eugenics, as well as the Australian experience with stealing children in order to quicken the demise of the aborigines, to cite just two examples, demonstrate that concerns about the misuse of science are not confined to totalitarian, murderous regimes.

The science of genetics allowed us to better understand how certain traits are passed down from parents to offspring. After acquiring this new understanding people started arguing over what to do with it. This is where philosophy came into play. One camp, the pragmatists, thought that this knowledge must be acted on by passing legislation that legalized forcibly sterilizing people with undesirable genes. Another camp, what we might today refer to as classical liberals, thought that forcibly sterilizing people was a violation of their individual rights and therefore unacceptable even if they contained undesirable genes.

Today the predominate belief appears to be that the eugenics-based public policies of the past were a mistake. But humanity is still arguing about what to do with our scientific knowledge. Pragmatists are still arguing about what public policies to implement based on the latest scientific knowledge. Supporters of individual rights are arguing that that public policies should be based on individual rights, not scientific knowledge. As somebody firmly in the latter camp I agree with what the author wrote:

Science has also been part of debates over questions where a little respect for individual rights and good sense was all that was needed. We don’t need scientists to discover a “gay gene” in order to conclude that prohibiting consenting adults from having sex is wrong, and we don’t need scientists to show us that children raised in same-sex households are well-adjusted in order to allow same-sex marriage and child-rearing. To even endorse such arguments is to imply that only genetically determined sexual preferences should be protected (sorry BDSM community) and that the state has the power to use “science” to generally determine (as opposed to specifically removing children from dangerous households) who is allowed to raise children. Finally, we don’t need science—and we especially don’t need horrible dance numbers from Bill Nye’s show—to tell us that transgendered people deserve our respect and care.

Having a healthy respect for individual rights means you respect, even if you don’t necessarily like, the rights of everybody. Pragmatists, on the other hand, will only respect an individuals’ rights if they believe doing so will provide the most good to the largest number of people. What rights they’re willing to respect and for what groups largely depends on what they consider to be good.

Unscientific public policy shouldn’t be a specter. Public policy, if we’re going to have it, should be based first and foremost on individual rights, not scientific research. That’s the only way to guard against the pragmatism that lead to forcible sterilizations under the name of science. Whenever new public policies are being considered the question of whether or not such laws would bring the violence of the State upon nonviolent individuals should be the guiding principle. If they will then the policy should be dropped regardless of scientific research, if they won’t then the policy could be considered and scientific research could then come into play.

Government Introduces Instability

Now that the Republican Party is in power it’s working to repeal Obamacare… and replace it with Trumpcare or whatever they’re going to call it. How will Trumpcare differ from Obamacare? If I take the claims being made by my friends who support the Democrat Party at face value, Trumpcare will basically make acquiring health insurance impossible for everybody. Truth be told, they’re not offering any specifics and neither are my friends who support the Republican Party when asked what Trumpcare will bring to the table.

Will healthcare coverage providers be allowed to deny customers coverage based on preexisting conditions? Will employers still be required to add contraceptive coverage to their insurance plans? Will everybody still be required under penalty of a fine to purchase healthcare coverage? These are the questions that people are asking but they’re the wrong questions.

The important question to ask is, why should healthcare coverage change every time the ruling party changes?

One of the biggest problems with involving the State in the healthcare market is that doing so adds a great deal of uncertainty. The greater the State’s involvement the greater the uncertainty becomes. All of the questions I mentioned above are being asked because the Affordable Care Act created rules regulating those aspects of healthcare and now those rules may change.

Herein lies the problem with involving the government in healthcare (or anything else), rules change arbitrarily and at unpredictable intervals. The Affordable Care Act was an initiative pushed primarily by the Democrat Party. Since the Democrat Party is the rival of the Republican Party and rivals must always work to undermine each other’s efforts, now that the Republicans are in power they’re repealing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with something that will carry their name. When the Democrats return to power they will then repeal the Republican’s healthcare law and replace it with something else. On and on this cycle will go.

Unpredictability makes longterm planning infeasible. How can you create a plan for the future when you have no idea what you will be required or prohibited from doing in a year’s time? All of the time and money spent by healthcare coverage providers to bring themselves into compliance with the Affordable Care Cat may be rendered worthless under Trumpcare. That means all of the efforts previously made will likely have to be made again. I’m sure you can see how this constant cycle of doing the same thing over again adds costs to the healthcare market, especially since the effort is primarily being done by expensive lawyers.

It doesn’t matter what Trumpcare will mandate or prohibit because it will be undone as soon as the other part comes into power again. This is the real problem. It’s also the problem that ends up being ignored because people are more concerned about their political affiliation than working to improve the situation.

A Business Opportunity

Us Americans love instant gratification, which is part of the reason so many of us are on several different medications. It’s far easier to pop a pill for our heart conditions than to lose the weight that is causing our heart conditions. Of course, this means that we expel a lot of medications and those expelled medications end up in our sewage and by extension in our ecosystem:

The United States of America is a highly medicated country: almost seven in 10 Americans take prescription drugs. That translates to 4.4 billion prescriptions and nearly $310 billion spent on medication in 2015. Painkillers, cholesterol-lowering medications, and antidepressants top the list of drugs most commonly prescribed by doctors.

Needless to say, the work of biologists like Lee may prove to be crucial.

[…]

Americans aren’t just putting these drugs into their bodies; they’re also putting more drugs into the environment. A growing body of research suggests all types of drugs, from illegal drugs to antibiotics to hormones, enter the environment through sewage and cesspool systems across the country. And while pharmaceutical drugs—when used as prescribed—are capable of curing disease and alleviating symptoms in people, they can wreak havoc on nature.

Here’s the difference between an agorist and pretty much everybody else. Most people look at this situation and see a pollution problem and likely want the government to step in and fix it. I, on the other hand, see a lucrative business opportunity. Many of the drugs expelled discussed in this article are difficult to acquire due to regulations. If somebody was able to develop a method of extracting these drugs from the water system and recycle them into consumable drugs again, they would have the perfect black market business. It would be difficult for the State to identify and shutdown and it would remove these valuable chemicals from the ecosystem.