Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

The Cause of Increasing Severity of Forest Fires

2012 has been quite a year for forest fires with a great portion of the western and southeastern parts of the country ablaze. Many of these fires, including one in Colorado, have been record breakers as far as span of the fire and the cost in property damage. As you can expect the progressive environmentalists are blaming the increased number and severity of these forest fires on global warming climate change:

As the climate warms, moisture and precipitation levels are changing, with wet areas becoming wetter and dry areas becoming drier.

Higher spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snow-melt typically cause soils to be drier for longer, increasing the likelihood of drought and a longer wildfire season, particularly in the western United States.

These hot, dry conditions also increase the likelihood that, once wildfires are started by lightning strikes or human error, they will be more intense and long-burning.

The progressive environmentalists are correct in part, the increased intensity of forest fires is manmade. What they’re incorrect about is what manmade phenomenon is causing the headaches. I wrote about the water shortages caused by denser forests that exist due to human efforts to fight all forms of fire. On top of water shortages there is another unintended consequence, more fuel exist to feed the fires:

For most of the 20th century, U.S. federal fire policy focused on suppressing all fires on national forests. The goal was to protect timber resources and rural communities, but this policy ignored the ecological importance of fire. North American forests have evolved with fire for thousands of years. Fire returns nutrients to soils, encourages growth of older fire-resistant trees, and promotes establishment of seedlings.

Decades of fire exclusion have produced uncharacteristically dense forests in many areas. Some forests, which previously burned lightly every 15-30 years, are now choked with vegetation. If ignited, these forests erupt into conflagrations of much higher intensity than historic levels. Grasses, shrubs, and saplings in the understory now form a fuel ladder, through which flames can climb to the forest canopy, killing entire forest stands.

The intensity of modern forest fires is due to the arrogance of central planning. Some guys in Washington decided to decree that fire is bad and that all forest fires that breakout in the United States will be suppressed. This arrogance has lead to a vicious cycle. Water is used to prevent forest fires from occurring, forests become more dense, more water is needed to prevent further forest fires due to the increase in available fuel, forests become more dense, etc. Property damage also becomes a bigger issue because fires that do breakout burn much hotter, burn longer, and cover much more ground than they naturally would. Like our economy, our issue with forest fires is spiraling towards a disastrous collapse. In order to prevent future forest fires we need to use a great deal of water, which creates a further water shortage. If we don’t prevent forest fires they have enough fuel at this point to cause great amounts of property damage (the ones have been been breaking out recently have been causing record amounts of damage already). We’re effectively stuck between a rock and a hard place… if we rely on the state to resolve this issue.

What can be done to stave off disaster? In a twist of fate I find humorous the solution to our forest fire problems and our economic problems is the same, the free market. A great deal of forest fire fuel happens to be a valuable resource, wood. Why not let logging companies go into the forests and get rid of a great deal of the fuel that is currently lying around and waiting for a mere spark? We can harness this valuable commodity for the benefit of all instead of letting it go up in smoke, taking much of our valuable property with it. Unfortuneatly the state has been doing quite the opposite, they’ve actually been reducing the amount of logging:

The fire problem is exacerbated by decreasing federal timber harvests since the late
1980s.1 In the absence of fire, and with reduced timber harvests and thinning, numerous smalldiameter trees have proliferated. Stressed trees compete for scarce water, sunlight, and growing
space. In this weakened state, trees are not only at greater risk of catastrophic wildfire, but are
also more susceptible to disease and insect infestation (Fretwell 1999).

We can see the Achille’s heel of central planning, when a central planner makes a bad decision everybody suffers. Combine the central planner that issued the decree against forest fires with the central planner that issued the decree against logging and we get a cascade of unintended consequences. Increases in wood prices, water shortages, and more property damage from hotter burning fires are all thanks to a handful of politicians in Washington DC dictating decrees that everybody in the United States is forced to obey. At least if these decisions were made only on a state level the chances of containing major damage to said states would be possible. In fact the need for clearing out forest fire fuel was well know:

The Forest Service was created in 1905 to manage the nationís forest reserves, and soon thereafter the agency adopted a nation-wide policy of fire suppression. Fire historian Stephen Pyne notes that in the early years, the Forest Service needed to prove its qualifications. Many foresters at the time recognized the value of “light burning” to clear out understory vegetation, but the Forest Service wanted to set itself apart from this common practice of rural farmers and Native Americans. “The Forest Service had insisted that it should manage the forest reserves precisely because it offered something different from frontier practices” (Pyne 1982, 106).

Native Americans and frontiersmen periodically practiced “light burning” to clear out current underbrush and reduce the severity of any forest fires that may breakout. Then some idiots in Washington decided they knew better than the people living in forested areas and decided to arrogantly force their central plan on the entire country, which lead us to the problems we face today.

Progressive environmentalists continue to demand state intervention in environmental matters and it only results in more environmental damage. You would think that they would have learned their lesson by now.

The Cap and Trade Endgame

Yesterday I wrote about the failure inherit in the idea of carbon taxes. What about carbon rationing, more commonly referred to as cap and trade? If there is a hard set limit to the amount of carbon that can be outputted by an individual or company won’t that solve the problem? Won’t the issue of carbon being emitted into the atmosphere be a thing of the past (also, why to progressive environmentalists spend all of their time focusing on a compound necessary for plant life, I can think of far more dangerous compounds to be concerned about)?

While progressive environmentalists love to parrot political solutions to environmental problems they fail to see the fact that political solutions are never actually solutions, they’re merely mechanisms of plunder. How can a system of hard set limites be used as a mechanism of plunder? Through the punishment wielded against those who surpass their ration. All political solutions have a common problem, enforcement (which isn’t the only problem mind you). Who is going to enforce a carbon ration? Either a currently existing agency or a newly formed agency. My money would be put on the Environmental Plunder Protection Agency (EPA) being given the task of enforcing a carbon rationing scheme in the United States although legislation could create a new Carbon Enforcement Agency. Either way the same point of corruptibility will exist, the desire to plunder.

Government agencies are the same as individuals and businesses in one respect, they want more wealth. Unlike individuals and businesses, government agencies are only able to get more wealth through expropriation. One form of expropriation is taxation, another is through fines. Let’s look at a piece of existing legislation that affects the same realm as a proposed carbon rationing scheme does, the Clean Air Act [PDF]. What happens when an individual or business violates the Clean Air Act? They’re fined:

Section 113 of the Clean Air Act allows EPA to seek penalties of up to $25,000 per day for each violation. EPA may in appropriate cases accept less than the statutory maximum in settlement.

The maximum amount a violator can be fined is $25,000 per infraction per day but the EPA maintains the ability to issue lesser fines. There is an entire section of the document that deals with “calculating a penalty.” Reading through it various criteria exist for determining the penalty issued against a violator including the perceived economic benefit gained by the violator, the gravity of the violation, and the potential for harm. What interesting is that the supposed economic benefit is based on a computer model while the other criteria are determined by enforcement agents. Giving enforcement agents the right to determine the severity of a violation and set a fine according to that set severity opens the doors for cronyism.

Of course we would need a motive for an individual or business to violate a carbon rationing law. For the motivation we need to only look at basic economics, namely supply and demand. Creating a carbon rationing system would create a supply of carbon ration units (CRU) which would be in demand by any entity that emitted carbon. So long as demand remains the same prices have a tendency to increase as supply decreases. Likewise, so long as supply remains the same, prices have a tendency to increase as demand increases. In the case of a carbon rationing system the supply of CRUs would likely remain constant or decrease over time (as the law is trying to discourage emitting carbon into the atmosphere) while the demand would increase (as the demand for electrify and consumer goods increases). Therefore it would make sense that the cost of CRUs would continue to increase with time. Therefore CRUs would become a valuable good (although a fiat one) that holders would have cause to sell while emitters of carbon would have cause to buy.

A third factory of this grand scheme that needs to be looked at is the way CRUs would be distributed. Two methods would likely exist: either those wanting to emit carbon would have to buy CRUs from some government agency or some government agency would grant CRUs based on some kind of formula. Either scheme is likely to favor larger polluters. Let’s consider the first method, companies had to purchase CRUs from a government agency. As stated above, as demand for CRUs increased or supply decreased (or both) the price of CRUs would increase. An increasing price would favor established individuals and businesses that had access to enough excess capital to soak up the additional costs of purchasing CRUs to continue with business as usual. Meanwhile a new barrier to entry has been placed on markets that involved emitting carbon into the atmosphere, the cost of purchasing enough CRUs. Now on top of having a place of business, a method of manufacturing goods, a method of getting those goods into the hands of consumers, the cost of complying with current regulations, etc. a new market actor also has to purchase CRUs. Effectively the established market actors are further shielded from new competition because the bar to enter the market has been raised. If the prices of CRUs continued to increase the bar would be in a constant state if rise, further shielding currently established market actors from potential competitors.

Now I’ll consider the other method of distributing CRUs, a government agency doling them out. The information about the Clean Air Act I linked to earlier demonstrates the problem with allowing government agencies to determine things, they get to determine the criteria their determinations are based upon. A government agency in charge of distributing CRUs would have a plethora of criteria to use including economic need (for example, power plants are necessary for modern life so it would make sense to give power plant holders enough CRUs), economic benefit (a large company can be said to provide more economic benefit since they serve more customers), necessity for the security of the nation (obviously defense contractors would need to be given enough CRUs since they build the weapons that allow the state to plunder foreign countries protect our nation from the terrorists), etc. Such a system would be ripe for cronyism. In fact it would be very possible, and I would even say very likely, that new market actors would not receive enough CRUs to manufacture enough goods to turn a profit. Due to this they would likely be forced to sell their CRUs to already established market actors in order to simply keep the doors open. Since they would be unable to manufacture goods they would be unable to compete with established market actors and the established market actors are once again protected from possible competition by the state. Regardless of the method chosen to distribute CRUs established market actors would have a major advantage over new market actors.

So we have three factors to consider: the mechanism of punishing violators of a carbon rationing scheme, the motivation a business would have to violate a carbon rationing scheme, and the method in which CRUs would be distributed. All of this combines into a nasty system that favors currently established market actors and hinders new market actors.

Going by historical examples it would be likely that violators of a carbon rationing scheme would be fined and the amount of that fine, although capped at a maximum, would be determined by an enforcement agency. The law of supply and demand would likely cause the price of CRUs to increase over time. At some point the price of CRUs is likely to exceed the common, or even maximum, find of violating the carbon rationing scheme. There is when it will be in the best interests of carbon emitters to violate the rationing scheme. In fact such a scenario wouldn’t be dissimilar to one where British Petroleum (BP) was able to buy permission from an environmental enforcement agency to dump more mercury into the Great Lakes. The state doesn’t care if it gets its money through fines or selling permission, and neither do businesses that are able to soak up the additional costs. Unfortunately for new market actors they are unlikely to have the additional capital to pay the fines that would almost certainly be involved in violating the rationing scheme.

Of course the state could just keep increasing the fine, right? Technically yes, although they would be shooting themselves in the foot by doing so. The state exists through theft and is unable to continue existing if they run out of victims to steal from. What motivation would the state have for increasing fines to a point violators couldn’t pay? Doing that would ensure the end of continued payments, effectively it would kill the cash cow. The state, like a tick, only takes what it can get away with without killing its host. A tick that bled a host dry would find itself having to go through the trouble of finding a new host and eventually would fact the harsh reality of having no hosts left to suck blood from. The state is the same way, they don’t want to bleed their cash cows dry, they want to bleed them as much as possible without killing them so they can continue the parasitic process. It’s unfortunate for new market actors that they don’t have enough excess capital for the state to take otherwise they could get in on the scheme.

A carbon cap, like a carbon tax, is a mechanism of plunder. It won’t accomplish the goal of lowering carbon output because the state won’t create a system that will kill its cash cows. All a carbon cap will accomplish is rewarding the state and its cronies at the cost of everybody else. No new competitors will be able to enter the market meaning currently established market actors will be free to increase their prices (don’t forget that any additional costs, such as needing to buy CRUs, will be forwarded onto customers) without concern. Overall quality of life will be reduced as individuals are unable to afford many of the goods and services they normally would if competition forced a lowering of prices (like many state policies this one affects the poor the most). On top of that we probably won’t have any reduction in carbon emissions anyways so the whole point of the system would go unfulfilled.

By demanding a “cap and trade” system progressive environmentalists have once again allowed themselves to be suckered into helping the very people they oppose (namely large polluters).

How Carbon Taxes will Harm Renewable Energy Production

If there are two things progressive environmentalists love it’s carbon taxes and so-called green energy. What’s ironic about this is that one of those things directly hampers the development of the other. A carbon tax is nothing more than an additional cost for emitting carbon into the atmosphere and almost every form of energy production and many forms of manufacturing emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Effectively carbon taxes increase the cost of energy and manufacturing in one fell swoop.

This cost increase is beneficially to currently established carbon emitters, namely it prevents new competitors from entering their markets. Unlike the already established carbon emitters who can afford to soak up the cost of another tax, new competitors in a market do not enjoy the same excess capital. The picture becomes more clear when we look at the currently established energy producers, namely coal and natural gas facilities. Current coal and natural gas-based power plants need not worry about carbon taxes because they will just forward the cost onto their customers, many of which are manufacturers.

By increasing the current costs of energy carbon taxes increase the cost of manufacturing solar panels and wind mills. Manufacturing solar panels isn’t a zero-sum carbon game either:

In the best case scenario, one square meter of solar cells carries a burden of 75 kilograms of CO2. In the worst case scenario, that becomes 314 kilograms of CO2. With a solar insolation of 1,700 kWh/m²/yr an average household needs 8 to 10 square meters of solar panels, with a solar insolation of 900 kWh/m²/yr this becomes 16 to 20 square meters. Which means that the total CO2 debt of a solar installation is 600 to 3,140 kilograms of CO2 in sunny places, and 1,200 to 6,280 kilograms of CO2 in less sunny regions. These numbers equate to 2 to 20 flights Brussels-Lissabon (up and down, per passenger) – source CO2 emissions Boeing 747.

According to the researchers, producing the same amount of electricity by fossil fuel generates at least 10 times as much greenhouse gasses. Checking different sources, this claim is confirmed: 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity generated by fossil fuels indeed emits 10 times as much CO2 (around 450 grams of CO2 per kWh for gas and 850 for coal). Solar panels might be far from an ideal solution, but they are definitely a better choice compared to electricity generated by fossil fuels. At least if we follow the assumptions chosen by the researchers.

The article then continues on to explain how the amount of carbon produced by generating electricity from solar panels isn’t necessarily lower than producing it by burning fossil fuels. You can continue reading the article if you’re interested but the main point I want to bring up is the fact that producing solar panels comes at a cost of carbon emissions, which will increase costs if carbon taxes are implemented.

Wind generators aren’t free of this issue either [PDF]:

Though CO2 emissions from wind are very small compared to coal, they are still responsible for some emissions. The amount of electricity produced per turbine, which is a factor of the number of years the nacelle operates and the capacity factor (which is a factor of both wind and nacelle availability), has the greatest impact on the CO2 emission factor of wind-generated electricity. The amount of CO2 emitted per GWh of electricity generated has a range of two, but it is still 50-100 times less than coal-generated electricity.

Although the amount of carbon emitted by generating electricity from wind (which includes everything from construction to decommissioning a windmill) is lower than burning coal the companies invested in producing electricity by burning coal are established and thus have the capital required to soak up the cost of any carbon taxes.

Let’s not forget that while “green” energy producers receive buckets of government money so do coal burning power plants [PDF] (man I love the progressive environmentalists’ sources against them):

The United States is the single largest contributor to the World Bank and a major supporter of other international financial institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank. The United States also provides subsidized financing internationally through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the U.S. Export Import Bank. Together, international financial institutions have helped finance 88 new and expanded coal plants since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came into effect in 1994, providing more than $137 billion in direct and indirect financial support for new coal-fired power plants.

Obviously owners of coal burning power facilities are in favor with the state.

Carbon taxes will harm all forms of production, including those required for the new wave of “green” energy the progressive environmentalists want to bring in. Such additional costs will, like most taxes, favor currently established market actors (power producers that use fossil fuels) while hampering new market actors (power producers that use renewable sources of energy). If history is any indication we can also assume that the currently established fossil fuel industries will receive other forms of benefits that will hamper the well-connected but not as well-connected “green” energy industries.

When you rely on political solutions to solve your problems you enter a deadly game where victory isn’t determined by facts but by political connections and money. Of course one could increase the costs of polluting, which would increase the costs of generating power by burning fossil fuels, if they supported actual property rights.

We’re all Terrorists

When it comes to politics there are large perceived divides. One of the most notable today is the apparent divide between the Tea Party and Occupy movements. Members of the Tea Party movement accuse members of the Occupy movement of being godless communists who want to redistribute the country’s wealth. Meanwhile members of the Occupy movement accuse members of the Tea Party movement of being fascists who advocate violent solutions and hate the poor. What could these two organizations have in common? They’re both fall under the state’s criteria for potential terrorist organization [PDF]:

Extreme Right-Wing: groups that believe that one’s personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack and is either already lost or that the threat is imminent (for some the threat is from a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group), and believe in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism. Groups may also be fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation), anti-global, suspicious of centralized federal authority, reverent of individual liberty, and believe in conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty.

Extreme Left-Wing: groups that want to bring about change through violent revolution rather than through established political processes. This category also includes secular left-wing groups that rely heavily on terrorism to overthrow the capitalist system and either establish “a dictatorship of the proletariat” (Marxist-Leninists) or, much more rarely, a decentralized, non-hierarchical political system (anarchists).

Religious: groups that seek to smite the purported enemies of God and other evildoers, impose strict religious tenets or laws on society (fundamentalists), forcibly insert religion into the political sphere (e.g., those who seek to politicize religion, such as Christian Reconstructionists and Islamists), and/or bring about Armageddon (apocalyptic millenarian cults; 2010: 17). For example, Jewish Direct Action, Mormon extremist, Jamaat-al-Fuqra, and Covenant, Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) are included in this category.

Ethno-Nationalist/Separatist: regionally concentrated groups with a history of organized political autonomy with their own state, traditional ruler, or regional government, who are committed to gaining or regaining political independence through any means and who have supported political movements for autonomy at some time since 1945.

Single Issue: groups or individuals that obsessively focus on very specific or narrowly-defined causes (e.g., anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, anti-nuclear, anti-Castro). This category includes groups from all sides of the political spectrum.

One thing is for certain, if you’re not an obedient dog of the state you are a potential terrorist. This is something we all have to realize, it’s not about left versus right or conservatives versus progressives, it’s about us versus the state. According to the state the Tea Party movement are right-wing extremists while the Occupy movement are left-wing extremists. Are you a single issue voter or a member of a single issue organization? Then you’re a potential single issue terrorist. Do you strongly believe in a religion? Then you’re a potential religious terrorist. Are you an advocate for secession? Then you fit the criteria of an ethno-separatist terrorist.

Many people in the gun rights community have raged at the statement about individuals “suspicious of centralized federal authority” and/or “reverent of individual liberty” being a sign of terroristic potential but didn’t seem to bat an eyelash at the other groups. When I read through this document I realized that, according to the state, we’re all terrorists. It doesn’t matter if you’re left-wing or right-wing, a Tea Party member or an Occupy member, an advocate of individual liberty or a believer in collectivism, we’re all enemies in the eyes of the state. Anybody who rocks the boat is a potential enemy. To quote George Carlin:

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests.

Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it…

That’s what the state wants. Anybody who doesn’t fit their mold is automatically considered a potential threat. What really hurts is that the state is either brilliant, the majority of the human race is incredibly stupid, or both. Instead of fighting those who are currently taking our shit, putting us in cages for disobeying their decrees, and actively killing people they dislike we’re fighting each other. The state has us fighting each other instead of fighting them. They say the enemy of my enemy is my friend, in which case we’re all friends of the state because we’re all enemies of the state. The right accuses the left of wanting to take everybody’s shit while the left accuses the right of wanting to throw the poor out onto the street. While this debate about hypotheticals is waged the state is actively taking everybody’s shit and throwing the poor out onto the street while also convincing both the left and the right that it’s the only thing stopping their opponents from achieving their goals. It should come as no surprise that an entity built entirely upon violence and deception is so exceedingly good at violence and deception.

Perhaps we should stop fighting amongst each other and start fighting our common enemy, the state. One thing we can all agree on whether we’re anarchists, socialists, progressives, or constitutionalists is this: the current state of affairs is unsuitable. So long as the status quo is maintained our debates are hypothetical since we’re not free to enact the plans we believe are best.

The State Protecting Big Tobacco Interets

One of the things that amazes me are people who cite regulations against big cigarette companies as an example of regulations working well. They believe that the state’s actions against big tobacco companies that required printing warning labels on cigarette packs, taxing cigarettes, and restring the smoking at to 18 years is undeniable proof that the state wants to protect us against companies that peddle poison. In actuality big tobacco companies, like all other businesses, receive a great deal of protection from the state. Take the recent passage of legislations that taxes owners of roll-your-own cigarette machines the same as cigarette manufacturers, it basically destroys the roll-your-own market and further protects the interests of large tobacco companies:

But a few paragraphs added to the transportation bill changed the definition of a cigarette manufacturer to cover thousands of roll-your-own operations nationwide. The move, backed by major tobacco companies, is aimed at boosting tax revenues.

Faced with regulation costs that could run to hundreds of thousands of dollars, RYO machine owners nationwide are shutting down more than 1,000 of the $36,000 machines.

Not surprisingly Philip Morris backed this legislation:

“I feel it’s kind of shaky,” Wiessen said. “The man who pushed for this bill is Sen. (Max) Baucus from Montana, and he received donations from Altria, a parent company of Philip Morris. Interestingly enough, there are also no RYO machines in the state of Montana. It really makes me question the morals and values of our elected speakers.”

It’s obvious why Philip Morris supported this bill. Large cigarette manufacturers can easily soak up the cost of additional taxes but small shops cannot. While the large cigarette companies have to pay more in taxes, which negatively affects their profits, they also don’t have to deal with many of their former competitors, which greatly increases their profits as customers of those small operations are forced to move to the larger competitors. The state giveth and the state taketh away. While they hurt the interests of large tobacco companies in some ways they’ve also moved to protect those same companies from competition on a free market.

In other words the state doesn’t care if you smoke so long as you’re buying their crony’s stuff.

That’s Quite the Rap Sheet

It’s good to see that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) manages to find time to deal with real criminals like Matthew Swaye and Christina Gonzalez who have the audacity to film police officers being tyrannical dicks:

The flyer featured side-by-side mugshots of Matthew Swaye, 35, and his partner Christina Gonzalez, 25, and warned officers to be on guard against them. It was spotted by multiple people, including the couple, when it was taped to a podium outside a public hearing room in the 30th Precinct house last Thursday, where residents met for precinct council meeting.

“Be aware that above subjects are known professional agitators,” read the flyer, which bears the NYPD shield and a seal of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. It also gave the home address of the couple.

“Above subjects MO is that they video tape officers performing routine stops and post on YouTube,” the sign said. “Subjects purpose is to portray officers in a negative way and too deter officers from conducting there [sic] responsibilities.”

How dare they film public officials, who are paid by the individuals through taxes, while they’re performing their work in public places! If citizens start holding the police accountable for their misdeeds the police state could be put at risk.

In all seriousness I find it funny that the NYPD are putting so much effort into “warning” officers about these two instead of realizing what the officers are doing is deplorable and should be stopped. The police have no right to stop and frisk individuals and any officer performing such action should themselves be arrested. Imagine what would happen if you stopped a police officer, threatened force against him if he didn’t submit to your authority, and began frisking him.

Good on Matthew Swaye and Christina Gonzalez, I hope other individuals follow in their footsteps. I would love to see police officers under constant surveillance by the people.

Happy Fourth of July

236 years ago the Declaration of Independence was sign. Today we celebrate this historical occasion by barbequing, shooting guns, launching off explosives, and basically being Americans. While this country has certainly gone downhill since we tossed the British out I still enjoy the holiday because it really celebrates the overthrowing of tyranny, an idea I’m entirely behind.

What better way to celebrate this day than some good old cheesy ’80’s music? Here you go, Real American by Rick Derringer:

That’s all you’re getting today, I’m going to be busy blowing shit up (or staying indoors because the weatherman said 100 degrees was going to be the high and the humidity percentage will be almost the same).

The Violence Economy

Recently I’ve been working on an economic idea of sorts, one on the economy of the state, or as I like to call it the violence economy. It’s an expansion of my previous idea regarding the value of fiat currency.

The base of the idea is the fact that the state is an entity that exists entirely by violence. As explained by Albert J. Nock in his book Our Enemy, the State there are two means of obtaining wants, the political means and the economic means. The political means is voluntary trade amongst individuals whereas the political means it the use of the state’s violence to extract wealth from others.

Because of the state’s method of obtaining wealth it has a keen interest in helping and protecting the wealthy. Likewise the wealthy have a keen interest in protecting the state. The state requires the wealthy to leech off of while the wealthy desire the state’s gun to prevent competition and otherwise increase their wealth through political means. A good demonstration of this is how the state treats the poor.

Many people on the political “left” demand the state help the poor. This isn’t surprising as it is typical of a cooperative species such as our own to help those in need. The “left” believe the state is the best mechanism to assist those in need. Their belief is a mistake though because the state has no interest in the poor since the poor have nothing to take. Of course this doesn’t stop the state from claiming to help the poor, after all they are able to gain popular support for wealth stealing programs if they are disguised as methods of assisting those in need. With such justification the state is able to get public acceptance for new taxes, fees, subsidies, and other wealth stealing mechanisms.

Let’s look at subsidies for a second. During the New Deal the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 was passed into law. This act established subsidies for various agricultural goods. One of the provisions of the act was to limit the area farmers could dedicate to growing wheat. This restriction created an artificial shortage of wheat, which increased the price. The act was passed under the guise of helping poor farmers eek out a better living but the shortage it created meant many could not afford wheat-based products such as bread. The Supreme Court upheld the law, claiming it was Constitutional under the Commerce Clause in Wickard v. Filburn.

What benefit did the subsidies have? Making the farmers money. Why would the state want to make farmers money? To take a portion of that wealth. Farmers are producers of a needed good so it’s a safe assumption that they will continue to generate wealth. The more wealth they can generate the more wealth they have for the state to take. To ensure the farmers continue to give wealth to the state they are allowed to keep a portion of what they make (usually a greater portion). The state learned its lesson during feudal times when the nobility took almost everything form the peasants causing them to revolt periodically.

Looking at the economy of any developed nation leads one to realize how tightly the state and big producers are tied together. Every industry eventually gets regulated in such a way as to protect established producers. In turn more wealth is given to the protected businesses, a portion of which the state takes as “protection” money.

What we end up with is a vicious cycle, a violence economy. I plan to expand on this idea over time but I think the foundation of this idea is pretty solid at this point.

So Much for Conservative Supreme Court Judges

I’m not trying to turn this blog into wall-to-wall healthcare coverage but there are many things to be said about last week’s Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Healthcare Act. During the ramp up to this year’s presidential elections many people have been saying we must elect Romney because two Supreme Court justices are getting up there in age and will likely retire. Proponents of this argument claim that Obama would pick left judges, which would lead this country even further towards socialism. Thanks to judge Roberts dissent in the Affordable Healthcare Act we have come closer to socialism, and he was one of George W. Bush’s picks.

As far as I’m concerned this ruling entirely invalidates the argument that we need to elect Romney in order to prevent Obama from picking new Supreme Court judges (not that I gave any validity to the argument before). People still buy into the right versus left view of politics. It’s not about right versus left, it’s about us versus the state. Whether the state is right or left is irrelevant, it’s still an entity that is using a monopoly on force to take our stuff and make us obey its decrees. It won’t matter who picks the next Supreme Court justices because the picks will be statists. We’re not going to see Supreme Court judge Andrew Napolitano because he opposes the statist agenda.

Regardless which of those two clowns gets elected we’ll be in for more war, more debt, and more tyranny.

More Thoughts on Single-Payer Healthcare

Even though a wrote a posted explaining why opponents of capitalism should oppose publicly funded healthcare I’m not done with the subject yet.

In this post I want to talk specifically about single-payer healthcare. Single-payer healthcare, for those unaware, is a system where everybody pays into a single insurance pool that is administered by the state. Proponents of the system generally believe it would be an effective solution to the healthcare issue facing the United States. These people are either ignorant of history or psychopaths.

Publicly funded healthcare is another example of trying to use the One Ring of government for good. Unfortunately the One Ring is malevolent in nature and therefore can’t be used for good. Let’s consider the entity that would be granted administration over the insurance pool in a single-payer system, the state. How responsible would the state be with the insurance pool? Would they use it for altruistic purposes? We need not speculated on this because the state is the administrator of another pool of collected money, Social Security. The idea behind Social Security was to have a “safety net” for the elderly. When you were no longer capable of working you would begin collecting money from the Social Security pool you previously paid into. How has that pool been managed? Poorly:

What bothers us the most is the opposing view by Jacob Lew, director of White House office of Management and Budget (“Social Security isn’t the problem”). He states, “When more taxes are collected than are needed … funds are converted to Treasury bonds — backed with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.”

What he doesn’t say is “converted” means the excess is being spent by Congress and replaced with potentially useless bonds. He then says the bonds “are held in reserve for when revenue collected is not enough to pay the benefits due.” He evidently didn’t have the nerve to say where the money would come from to convert the bonds into cash.

That’s the catch-22. According to the Social Security Board of Trustees:

The assets of the combined OASDI Trust Funds increased by $69 billion in 2011 to a total of $2.7 trillion.

The assets are those Treasury Bonds. Whenever there is a surplus paid into the Social Security pool the federal government “borrows” that money using an interesting system of trickery. Surplus money is replaced by Treasury Bonds while the actual money is then spent by Congress on items not related to Social Security. Congress claims that the Treasury Bonds are as good as money but that’s not true because the money to pay those Treasury Bonds has to come from… the federal government!

In other worse Congress has taken that money, replaced it with Treasury Bonds, and spent the money so they don’t have it to make good on the Treasury Bonds. This would be like a bank replacing all of the money in your account with an IOU and spending that money. No guarantee can be made that the bank will be able to make good on the IOU because the money is gone.

What does Congress use the money for? War. OK, they may use it for more than war but the defense budget is a major part of the federal budget so it’s likely a great deal of the borrowed money flows there. Through Social Security Congress has developed yet another way to claim taxes from the populace to buy the necessary war materials to expand the empire. This is the only outcome when using the One Ring. Those who demanded Social Security likely had good intentions but they used the state, which is malevolent by nature, and thus ended up killing people by giving more money to the war effort. In my book a system that is used to kill people under the guide of helping people isn’t a good system.

It’s easy to see that the state has been somewhat irresponsible with its control over the Social Security pool. Returning to the economic argument, some will bring up the fact that Congress is only taking excess money so the program is still able to run effectively. That may be true but Social Security is slightly different than healthcare.

Social Security is paid out to those who surpass retirement age or are disabled. In general the amount of people Social Security is being paid to remains relatively knowable. The state knows who will exceed the retirement age and they know the number of disabled people in the country. There is some variance as a person can be involved in an accident and end up disabled but the influx of unknown individuals isn’t terribly high. Healthcare is an entirely different beast.

The number of people who will develop cancer, break bones, need an organ transplant, suffer a heart attack, have a stroke, etc. will wildly fluctuate. It’s not a predictable number and therefore it’s impossible to know how much money should be put into the insurance pool. This is a risk all insurance companies run, their entire model is based on the idea that fewer people will collect from the insurance pool than pay in. While the risks are the same the consequences are entirely different. If an insurance company fails only those who have policies with them are affected, while policy holders of other companies will remain unaffected. What happens if there isn’t enough money in the state’s single insurance pool? Everybody suffers and they have nowhere else to turn to. This usually results in rationing and some groups of individuals become “less valuable” than others (namely tax payers become more valuable than non-tax payers). The two countries that are held up as the pinnacle of state managed healthcare, Canada and Britain, both practice rationing and tax payers are given priority over non-tax payers.

Single-payer healthcare systems are a sham. Like Social Security they end up being another source of funding for the state’s desires, which are usually destructive, and when the system fails everybody suffers. There are no good arguments for single-payer healthcare unless history and long-term effects are entirely ignored. All ends the require the state as the means are destined to be malevolent.