Year: 2013

Bête et méchant et bête.

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , , ,

“La dégradation de l’environnement favorise la logique du profit.”

Je continue à éprouver du mal à prendre les Français officiels au sérieux, sérieusement.

J’ai entendu la phrase ci-dessus, exactement, prononcée par un présentateur français de TV5, la télé francophone. C’était il y a environ une semaine. L’occasion: L’annonce qu’un vaisseau commercial chinois avait rejoint Rotterdam par le Nord, par les mers qui longent la Sibérie. (l’océan arctique, la Mer de Barents, le mer norvégienne). Il avait profité du fait que ces mers septentrionales paraissaient dégagées, libres de glace.

Le problème c’est que cette phrase ne veut rien dire, je crois, rien du tout. (Cela parait vaguement marxiste mais seulement pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien lu de Karl.) Ou bien je suis plus con que les autres, ou bien les francophones (et les Français) possèdent un immense réservoir, un réservoir inépuisable de non-criticalité.

Je penche pour la seconde réponse.

Le problème en dessous du problème ce n’est pas que les Français racontent des trucs qui ne sont pas vrais. Le probléme c’est qu’ils ne sont plus exercés à reconnaitre le non-sens, qu’ils distinguent mal les affirmations vérifiables du simple bruit de fond. Cela permet à des commentateurs sans qualifications évidentes de proférer des conneries bêtes et méchantes, (malveillantes sans objet) à tous bouts de champs. Ils pullulent aux informations de TV5 et dans les documentaires que présente cette chaine francophone inernationale mais lourdement française.

La compagnie de transports maritime chinoise avait donc tenté le coup de profiter de la fonte des glaces polaires pour emprunter la route la plus courte, pour économiser, le fuoule, entre autres choses. Fieffés salauds de Chinois!

A propos, en fait, il y avait beaucoup plus de glace polaire dans le Grand Nord cet été (2013) que l’année derniére, 30% de plus selon le Wall Street Journal du 11/9/13, encore plus selon d’autres sources.

Je me demande ce que va dire Le Monde à ce sujet. Je me demande si je vais comprendre.

Oh hell yes, Philadelphians being racist, corrupt and belligerent again

muricaderp Current Events, Law, Politics , , , , , ,

Of course this happened in Philadelphia. It’s a derpfest: an immigrant from Uganda running a dive bar and getting behind on his taxes, yuppies moving into the neighborhood and then expressing shock, shock! that there’s a dive bar in their part of West Philadelphia, probably some selective law and code enforcement, and accusations of racism.

No party to this mess is holy. Just look at who they are: Noel “I want to pay my taxes if I have the money” Karasanyi; a bunch of whiny SWPL agitators who colonized Karasanyi’s neighborhood on the bizarre expectation that, being in West Philadelphia, it would be clean and orderly; the Philadelphia Police, Streets, Licenses and Inspections, and Revenue Departments; the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and its investigative arm in the State Police. The Karasanyi bar empire is a tar baby; all who touch it will be licking sticky off their fingers for years to come, and it will be just as pretty a sight as the New 3rd World Lounge. This is high quality, multilevel sleaze in one of America’s most delightfully vulgar cities.

My guess is that racism is only one of two major components to this donnybrook. The race of Karasanyi’s clientele must put the white neighbors on edge, but they’d be awfully sore about the local Irish bruisers if they had instead colonized White Kensington and found themselves trying to abate their dive bars. I know some raunchy Irish girls from the Northeast, and believe me, they are NOT bashful about pissing in the streets. It’s just one of those things that seems reasonable and expedient at the time, kind of like decking one’s boyfriend because he was being a lying cheating douchebag again. These things are a lot more reliable than access to toilets in Philadelphia’s rundown neighborhoods, but let’s not dwell on structural contributors to the filth. It’s obviously less gross when bougies do that kind of thing in Old City and Manayunk. For they, and as a consequence their favorite clubs, have lots of money, a solvent much more universal than urine.

This Karasanyi/Spruce Hill Association spat isn’t just about racial fears and animosities. It’s also about abatement of the poors. The Spruce Hill activists bought into a very depressed and dilapidated housing market in a very poor neighborhood, knowing full well that their new property was in the midst of a miles-wide swath of decay and dysfunction stretching into the suburbs (Karasanyi’s current hometown, Yeadon, is pretty crappy itself), and now they’re sore that Karasanyi’s dive bars are getting in the way of their efforts to inflate their real estate prices. If anyone in that part of the roaring forties had adverse possession of the neighborhood, it was Karasanyi and his clients. They were there first. The Johnny-come-lately SWPL aren’t happy about this, but colonists never are happy when there are natives squatting on their land.

Here’s why I say that this spat isn’t just about race. Some family friends who lived in East Falls at the time were involved in a prolonged effort to abate their own local nuisance bar, the Four Horsemen. As far as I know, every party to the fight over the Four Horsemen was white, except for Michael Nutter. Nutter was drawn in because he was then the city councilor representing East Falls. Ed Rendell and Arlen Specter were drawn in as powerful politicians who happened to live just up the hill, in a much nicer part of East Falls. All three of them came down on the Four Horsemen and demanded that its owner clean house so that its customers weren’t spilling out at 2:30 am, yelling obscenities at the top of their lungs, leaving trash all over the neighborhood, kicking in the windows of strangers’ cars because they were mad at their girlfriends, that kind of thing. Nutter, Rendell, Specter and the PLCB couldn’t do anything about Lunchbox, the dimwitted neighbor kid who stumbled into cars all the time when he played football in the streets, but they were able to scare some sense into the Four Horsemen, and into its protectors in the Philadelphia Police Department’s 39th District.

Kind of. Your activist friends never had as much fun with “intersectionality” as the 39th District did when its notoriously crooked cops were hired to moonlight at a bar named after four of their former colleagues who had been drummed out of the department for official corruption and brutality. The real Four Horsemen were some of the PPD’s worst. These guys were so bad that they went to prison for police misconduct, and were subsequently honored with their very own dive bar.

One of the police commanders who was assigned to the 39th District in the midst of this mess, a Captain Glenn, tried to nip the snitching against the Four Horsemen in the bud by using a Neighborhood Watch volunteer contact information sheet to call one of our family friends at home and harass him for bringing state authorities into the fray. It seems that Captain Glenn wasn’t so much in the pocket of the Four Horsemen as he was annoyed by the barrage of correspondence from and meetings with people more powerful than he over a nuisance bar. So he got this friend of ours on the phone and menacingly told him, “I’m getting heat from above, and I do not like getting heat from above.”

Our friend put the Captain in his place: “You listen to me: I’m a lieutenant in the United States Army, and you DO NOT talk to a lieutenant in the United States Army that way!” The commanding officer of one of the city’s dirtiest police districts was reduced to gibberish by a guy he was trying to intimidate over the phone. Philadelphia is a city of piss and vinegar.

Vinegar in its citizens’ blood.

Piss in its subway concourses.

More gringos who won’t do farm work unless they’re told where there’s farm work

muricaderp Economics, Links ,

I’ve got mail:

Andrew,

We will let you know within two days whether or not we can use you.  We’ve had an overwhelming response.  Thank you for your interest.

This “overwhelming response” was to a help wanted ad, in English, for grape pickers in San Luis Obispo County. The ad was posted less than 72 hours ago.

I’m sure that by the Farm Bureau’s reckoning, no individuals authorized to work in the United States applied for this position. While I was driving to San Luis Obispo yesterday to interview for another job, I listened to a broadcast by an outfit called Family Radio on which the Executive Director of the Fresno County Farm Bureau, Ryan Jacobsen, intoned about how Fresno County’s farmers just can’t find enough native-born help to get all their field work done. Of course they can’t; they never advertise for it.

If these gigs in San Luis Obispo fall completely through, I’m of a mind to go back to Fresno, track Jacobsen down, and tell him, “Hey, I heard you say on the radio that you’re shorthanded. Are you hiring about now?” I’m mostly kidding about this, but not entirely. It’s usually Tea Party cranks who passive-aggressively apply for farm jobs, and if I were a farm manager, I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about hiring a crew of underqualified, out-of-shape ideological blowhards who enjoy wearing tricorner hats. On the other hand, I’m not a self-appointed latter-day Patrick Henry, but a humble farmhand with several seasons’ experience with wine grapes, and I dare say I’m not the only such gringo.

My pseudoapologies for humblebragging.

I keep harping on the dearth of farm help wanted ads only because Farm Bureau officials and their elected representatives (apparently not my elected representatives) keep harping on the shortage of farmhands. I could have given materially the same speech that Jacobsen gave about farm labor “shortages” and immigration “reform” yesterday. There’s a certain comforting Kabuki ritualization to it, an unctuousness that is weirdly majestic in its predictability and brazen repetition of tiresome bullshit. As a Catholic, I appreciate liturgies.

What I start to wonder is whether Jacobsen and his colleagues actually, sincerely believe their own bullshit. I doubt that Dianne Feinstein does in her capacity as their lackey; I’d be surprised if any sincerity on her part outlived Harvey Milk by a decade and a half. Jacobsen gave off a very different vibe; for what the distinction is worth, he seemed not to be an indecent man, but a decent man making indecent arguments. The labor shortage has become rote learning in the San Joaquin Valley farm country by this point. It takes a lot of effort to unlearn the indoctrination, and a lot of courage to publicly repudiate it.

Some people go deep enough into the bullshit holding tank to stop noticing the fumes. They don’t notice that the fumes are making them loopy. It happened to members of the US intelligence community (sic) in the 1950′s. Recently declassified papers show high-ranking intelligence officials using the same crude redbaiting language in private correspondence that they used in public statements. They weren’t throwing red meat to the goobers and then retiring to snicker about how they had pulled a fast one on the Bircher freaks. They actually believed their own factually challenged Comintern hysteria. I have no reason to believe that Ryan Jacobsen is nuts, but I also have no reason to believe that he’s using any kind of critical thinking about the farm labor supply in his home county. That’s the kind of thing that would aggravate the neighbors, if nothing else, and I figure that, as a Farm Bureau officer, he’s politically savvy enough not to play around with anything that looks like a third rail.

Because there are never enough gringos to get the farm work done. Except when there are too many of us.

Secession Within the US?

Brandon Christensen Law , , , , ,

“Yeah, why not?” would be my answer to this question.

Apparently, it’s a question being asked more and more lately in some states. I wouldn’t mind seeing a federal republic with twice or even three times as many states as we have now.

Conceptually, this would be no different from secession within the EU or any other federal or confederal arrangement.

Can anybody answer my answer (which is actually a question)? That is to say: what are some objections you can think of to more decentralization of power within the US?

Is the United States on “Strike”?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History , , , ,

The Economist thinks so:

To state baldly the main parallel with 1940, lots of Americans sound sick of calls to fix Muslim countries, just as their grandparents were tired of trying to fix Europe. Yet there are instructive differences, too.

A revealing contrast with the past involves broader attitudes to war. Modern Americans, especially Republicans, insist that Congress should control any decision to strike Syria—by which they mostly mean that they want a veto over Mr Obama. In 1938 the House of Representatives only narrowly rejected a much more radical idea: that future wars would have to be approved by the public, via national referendums. In those febrile days generals would wear mufti rather than uniforms to congressional committees to avoid antagonising anti-war members, records Ms Olson, while shops near army bases routinely barred soldiers.

Modern Americans are wary of war but reverential towards warriors. Troops in uniform are invited to throw out first pitches at baseball games and hailed as they board airliners. At the most bruising congressional hearings, members are careful to thank uniformed, beribboned generals for their service.

The rest is here. I think the parallels between now and 1940 drawn in this admirably well-balanced piece, and by others around the web, are disingenuous. There is nothing in the Middle East today that is comparable to mid-20th century Europe. Europe was industrialized, imperial and the various tribes of the region had all been nationalized to a large extent. It was a multipolar world, and Europe was dealing with the collapse of two large, cosmopolitan empires and a bloody revolution in a third empire. There were still imperial jealousies and the humiliating issue of reparations forced on the German state continued to dominate diplomatic (and, in some cases, domestic) discourse.

The scenario in the Middle East today looks nothing like the historical example found in mid-century Europe. We need to tread with much caution, if we tread at all.

There’s Something to be Said for Consistency, but…

henrymoore Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

It’s not the hypocrisy of (anti/pro) war (Republican/Democratic) party hacks that I mind. For at least that means they are on the right side 50% of the time, which is better than being on the wrong side 100% of the time. No, what I hate is when this hypocrisy goes unnoticed, unexposed, and unchallenged. During Obama’s first term, the hypocrisy was that of the suddenly pro-war Democrats. And for his second term, it is that of the suddenly anti-war Republicans. How hard is it to simply have a standard? One that does not depend on the context of what letter happens to be next to the name of the puppet pretending to wield power for a period of 4 to 8 years. I am personally grateful for the amount of people on both sides of the aisle who don’t think it necessary or just to waltz (whether to bombard or to occupy) into Syria on a moment’s notice. But watch most of these anti-anything-Obama-does Republicans turn on a dime when it’s Iran’s turn to face our wrath. Then watch the Democrats squirm as they try to figure out their own position.

What are your thoughts? Would it be better if people just stuck to their position, even if it was awful, or if they waffled and on occasion did something right? Both in general and as it relates to the two parties and military intervention.

To be Perfectly Frank, on Today of All Days

henrymoore Liberty

You listening, NSA?

Today is the twelfth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. If you are like most and fit into one or both of two categories — Patriotic Americans & Americans who have eyes and ears — you don’t need to be reminded of this by me. You either already started thinking about it on your own a week or more ago or in the last few days have been unable to avoid the subject, as reminders have sprung up everywhere, for example:

  • Your neighbor recently hoisted his colors. To only half-mast.
  • Google is doing that weird thing again with the black ribbon at the bottom of their homepage. Wait, it didn’t even merit a graphical transformation of their logo? Pffft! Those haters.
  • While surfing the cable, you can’t land on Fox News or MSNBC for more than five seconds without some vain idiot bursting a blood vessel — hold up, that’s any old time you surf the cable, so you might have to stop for more like ten seconds before someone says, “when I saw the twin towers collapse…”
  • That one obnoxious friend who likes to waste your time on the phone just casually brought it up the other day. Just like he did last year. And the year before. You talked for over an hour.
  • Your calendar says “September” and one of the little boxes says “11.”

Well, it just so happens that I think all of this is completely absurd. I mean, who cares?! Let me state that another way: This all happened 12 years ago, to people I don’t know, in a place that, practically speaking, is on the other side of the world and I don’t really care any more than I would about any other event that can be similarly described. And I think that were it not for generations of being spoon-fed American Exceptionalism and related propaganda, no one else in their right mind would care either, except, of course, those still dealing with their injuries or their losses.

What happened in New York City (and Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, PA) to 3000 random people more than a decade ago should have little more impact on my way of thinking or doing than what might have happened, say, in Western Siberia to 10 random people more than 3 millennia ago. The only important difference between these two events, in terms of how they relate to me, is that the former has been taken up as a cause for the erosion of my liberties and the destruction what’s left of my country. But I’m sure that if 9/11 didn’t happen there still would have been plenty of other means to that end, so like I said, the event itself is of no particular importance.

Please do not misunderstand and take any of this to mean that I don’t care and that no one else should care that innocent people were murdered on September 11th, 2001. It’s just that I realize that violent, cruel, wanton, unjustified murder is an every day occurrence and there was hardly anything special about it in this case. Besides perhaps the circumstances leading up to it (religious extremism, blowback, the incompetence of the intelligence community, strange coincidences, etc.) or the disgusting way in which the crisis was taken advantage of. Quoting Josef Stalin* never made me any friends, but here goes: “when one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it’s statistics”. It is easy to read too much into those words, especially given who allegedly said them, but there is much truth to them, I think.

Is it a given that you are or that you should be more sad when two (or 10 or 10,000) people die than you are when it is only one? And by how much, exactly? Maybe if you personally know and love those who died it makes sense to be more devastated when they die in droves, but that has more to do with the positive impact those people had on your life when they were living and the way your life is going to be without them. It has little to do with numbers. Is a serial killer with 12 victims somehow more evil than a serial killer with 11 victims? More skilled, more insane perhaps, but more evil? How much harder is it to answer such questions in the affirmative when it involves complete strangers, perhaps thousands of miles away?

It certainly makes sense for society to collectively hate greater amounts of death and destruction more than it does lesser amounts. However, this is not because greater amounts are somehow objectively more evil, but simply because society is made up of individuals who are each more likely to be harmed in these greater tragedies than they are in the lesser ones. The state and the media know this well enough and so are able to play to the fears and emotions of the people all the more easily. Throw into this volatile mix some patriotic fervor and an opportunistic president (the very last person on earth I would ever give a bullhorn to), and you can begin to understand why this awful tragedy, this mere statistic, became cause for war and the many evils that accompanied it. And continue, even to this day.

Some people maintain that we should be particularly mindful of the 9/11 attacks because they were an act of war by Islamic Terrorists against the United States. This is debatable (no, laughable), but even if it wasn’t it has no bearing on whether I should have a quarrel or an alliance with one side or the other. These two imaginary entities are mere labels for establishing collective guilt and responsibility. Everyone is expected to pick a side or have it chosen for them, even though it does not follow that an attack on “the United States” is necessarily an attack on them, or that they have some duty to aid, to sympathize or empathize with the victim (which, again, is only a figment).

If anything, 9/11 was an attack on a very specific set of targets. The World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Capitol Building. These may have represented “America” to the planners and perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, but none of them have anything to do with the vast majority of self-styled Americans. I’d even go so far as to say that the latter two targets had it coming. And they’re just going to keep on making the same mistakes and expect a different outcome. There went Iraq. There go Afghanistan and Libya. Here comes Syria. Next up Iran. What other hornets’ nests can we lob some rocks at and not expect to get stung? Do not those who live by the sword also tend to die by the sword?

*Likely misattributed, as are most of the good ones, it seems.

Editorial Duties

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Links

Hello all,

I apologize for my lack of posts lately. I’ve been busy getting ready for my big move from LA to Santa Cruz. I’m also writing one last paper for school (it’s due on Friday).

I hoped you liked the article that Dr Machan generously provided for the blog. If so, you may be in for a bit of a surprise; stay tuned!

I’ve got some stuff I’d like to pull from the ‘comments’ section and riff off of in a little bit, so look for that beginning next week. I know Andrew is keeping everybody on their toes, and Rick is currently getting settled down in Texas. Don’t know where the heck Hank is at.

A little bit of libertarianism from the young. A little bit of libertarianism from the wise. This is turning into one hell of a blog (if I do say so myself).

Toward A Selfish Left

Against Symbolic Killing

Some reflections on the Right to Private Property

Tibor Machan Current Events, Liberty , , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: the following is an essay by Dr Tibor Machan, professor emeritus in the department of philosophy at Auburn University, and current holder of the R. C. Hoiles Chair of Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California. He is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a former adjunct faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Machan is a syndicated and freelance columnist; author of more than one hundred scholarly papers and more than thirty books. We are extremely grateful for his generosity in regards to sharing this article.] 

Private Property Rights

The first step in the destruction of capitalism must be the abolition of the right to private property. Marx and Engels were clear about this in The Communist Manifesto. And many who sympathize with his idea of a socialist political economy agree. This is one reason many such thinkers and activists are champions of land use, eminent domain and related legal measures that render even the most personal of real property subject to extensive government control.

Of course, there are others who have argued that the right to private property is not only the basis for vigorous commerce but also the foundation of other individual rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press. It is arguably, in a somewhat roundabout way, the conceptual foundation of the right to freedom of political participation. Without some safe haven, one’s private domain, to return to after the vote has gone against one’s way, one will be vulnerable to the vindictiveness of the winners! And political advocacy without exclusive jurisdiction over one’s domain is difficult to imagine since advocacy, support and such political activities could not be carried out independently of other people’s permission.

Accordingly, it is no mere academic curiosity whether the idea of private property rights is well founded, sound, or just. Within American political and legal history there has been some confidence in the soundness of this principle but the basis of it has not gone unchallenged over the last two centuries. One need but consider the recent work by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership, Taxes and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2001) to appreciate how vulnerable is that confidence. Indeed, it is mostly members of the discipline of economics who see merit in the idea of private property, and then not as a feature of justice but more as a feature of an efficient system of resource allocation.

Yet, there is reason to think that the right to private property is a good idea, that everyone should be understood to have this right and that the institutions built upon it should be preserved. Indeed, they should be extended into areas where other ideas have held sway (for example, environmental public law). Let us consider this idea, then, and see whether we can be confident in its validity as a sound political-legal concept. 

From Mixing Labor to Rewarding Good Judgment Continue reading →

Another White Whine from apple country

muricaderp Economics, Links

Here’s an excellent example of West Coast planters whining about how it’s so terribly impossible to hire a good picking crew these days. It’s that classic outtake from the Gospels, the Parable of the Many Apples and the Few Pickers. Quoth the Wall Street Journal’s Joel Millman:

PASCO, Wash.—Washington state is enjoying the second-biggest apple crop in its history, but farmers warn they may have to leave up to one-quarter of their bounty to rot, because there aren’t enough pickers.

“I’m down 40% from the labor I need,” said Steve Nunley, manager of a 3,000-acre apple orchard for Pride Packing Co. in Wapato, Wash. Mr. Nunley said he has 200 pickers right now, but needs close to 400. He has increased pay to $24 for every 1,000-pound bin of Gala apples they pick, compared with $18 last year. Even so, he expects to have to let tons of fruit fall unpicked this season.

That works out to $48 a ton, or 2.4 cents per pound, up from a whopping 1.8 cents. For comparison, the minimum piece rate that I was paid as a blueberry picker last week was 40 cents per pound. Last Saturday, I and at least two other pickers were given a ten-cent bonus for the day because we were picking fruit of such consistently high-quality that it barely had to be sorted. Blueberries are more expensive than apples at retail, but certainly not by a factor of sixteen.

In many orchards (the exceptions being those that have been planted with dwarf trees), these single-digit piece rates are what pickers receive for maneuvering sacks weighing dozens of pounds down ladders propped up haphazardly against trees under dappled lighting. It’s inherently dangerous work. Blueberry harvests simply do not pose remotely similar risks of repetitive stress injuries, sprains, bone fractures, or death.

It stands to reason, then, that the labor pool takes dishwashing jobs if it can’t get a premium for piece rate jobs that hopefully won’t make them throw out their backs or get concussions when they fall off ladders:

In a standoff, growers say they can’t afford to raise wages further, and workers decline to work for what they’re being offered.

“We could lose 25% [of the crop]. Or it could be much worse,” said Jeff Rippon, farm manager of Chiawana Orchards in Yakima, Wash. Mr. Rippon’s 300 acres have enough apples on them to yield nearly 10 million pounds of fruit, if he had enough hands to bring them in. He said he needs about 150 full-time pickers to get the crop in, but right now has only 60.

“Pickers pull up, they ask what you’re paying. If they like what you’re offering, they stay. If they don’t, they’re gone,” said manager Martin Estrada of Monkey Ridge Ranch, a huge apple plantation on the Snake River.

Do tell, Mrs. O’Hara. Say, how are you managing with all the Reconstruction they’re doing these days? I must say, that General Sherman is quite a character!

It’s the curse of hiring freemen. If they don’t like an underpaid job that may get them dead or crippled under a pile of apples, they may end up taking other jobs, leaving the poor crew boss to futilely painting another “se buscan trabajadores” sign on a piece of scrap plywood. Free association is such a buzzkill when it’s the help that does the free associating. Maybe there are alternatives:

The state faced similar labor shortages last year, when growers persuaded Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire to declare a labor emergency, which allowed farms to hire prisoners to bring in the harvest. For example, about a hundred convicts from a minimum-security facility fanned out among orchards in the Wenatchee Valley. But growers aren’t currently seeking to hire prisoners, who pick far fewer apples a day than immigrant laborers do.

Or maybe not. In the Old South, if I’m not mistaken, one of the polite terms for this part of the workforce was “recalcitrant slaves.” (The impolite terms were utterly evil.) Much effort and manpower was devoted to intimidating and punishing these slackers and saboteurs, often with heinous brute force. Today, the prison population in the United States is disproportionately comprised of the descendants of these slaves. Think of it: the State of Washington deploying black small-time offenders from Seattle and Tacoma into white-owned apple plantations at a fraction of minimum wage, not in 1880 or 1950, but in 2011. What’s more, this was authorized by a Democratic governor who was widely regarded as substantially left of center. It’s barely conceivable that these crews were not blacker than the overall population of Washington State. It’s no joke that we haven’t moved as far beyond slavery and Jim Crow as decent Americans would wish.

Apparently the Wall Street Journal likes to bury its ledes:

Farm operators elsewhere in the U.S. have said they face shortages of workers, sometimes because of new state immigration laws that have driven pickers from fields and groves. Some academic researchers say it is hard to quantify an actual labor shortage in U.S. agriculture, in part because there is so little evidence of a decline in production.

Philip L. Martin of the University of California, Davis, said overall U.S. production of fruits and vegetables has remained stable in recent years. Moreover, he said, farm-labor wages have remained flat or even declined. “You would think that wages would go up” if workers were in short supply, he explained.

Yeah, I would think so, too.

I’d also think that Craigslist would be plastered with help-wanted ads for fruit and vegetable pickers. I certainly wish it were. As it is, I can count the number of current ads for pickers on the Willamette Valley boards on my middle finger. It’s a job picking squash at minimum wage that I quit mid-shift on the first day because the manners of the crew bosses verged on what I would expect of Arkansas prison trusties. I expected it to be worse than the blueberry job, but not that much worse. There are worse jobs yet in agriculture, to be sure, but at heart I really do not care to be a moral relativist.

Finally, let’s have a couple of brief words from labor:

United Farm Workers organizer Jorge Antonio Valenzuela, who represents pickers in the Northwest, said “there is no shortage” at farms that pay “correctly.”

….Not far away, outside a church in Pasco, a migrant from Mexico’s Michoacán state, 47-year-old José Carranza, said he planned to skip the fruit harvest this year. Mr. Carranza believes he can do better in construction work, which is picking up.

“Growers offer $20 per bin around here,” he said. “It’s just not enough.”

What? What about the $28 per bin–$28 an hour for the hotshot pickers–that all the growers were offering several paragraphs above? And what about the one bin per hour that the hotshots are supposedly able to pick? Management said it was so.

Whom are we to believe: the growers, who told a reporter about the generous raises they were offering, or this Carranza fellow, what with his sour grapes about the pay being shit? My guess is that Carranza is getting old and worn-out from having picked too many apples in his day, so if the growers are lucky I’ll be generous and split the difference for an average rate of $24 per bin. Honestly, that’s a wildly liberal guess. And this is for a line of work that, pursued as a full-time, permanent career, shortens life expectancies by over a decade.

There is a LOT of bullshit in this business. It’s endless. This article was published last year, in 2012, but the same complaints are made year after year, about crop after crop. It’s a perennial bitchfest about how there’s no one to pick all the crops and that it is therefore of utmost importance to admit even more foreign peasants until this nonexistent labor shortage is no more, the welfare of these peasants and of the communities where they work be damned.

That’s one gnarly old bush that overwinters just fine.

I picked crops under the hot sun all day this Labor Day. What did you do this Labor Day? Do work!

muricaderp Economics, Politics

Actually, it depends on your definitions of “all day” and “hot sun.” I overslept my alarm by nearly an hour and a half and called it quits in time to go hiking on one of the woodlots above Corvallis, and as humid as it was, Philadelphia it ain’t. But even though my poundage for the day was off by nearly half from Saturday, the bees having been all up in my fruit, I managed to bring in about 33.25 pounds more blueberries today than did any of the useless eaters who keep plastering my Facebook feed with pictures from Orlando and Sea Isle City. One of these people is mortally embarrassed that I’ve become a poor who does stoop labor, since his friends should all be doing prestigious things that reflect well on him for associating with individuals of fine breeding. He’s always pestering his fellow yuppies to buy his life insurance products, the fine chap.

I could become an earnestly sanctimonious prick about these things, and there’d be some equity in the proposition (all too much, really), but instead, I’ll note that I’m really lucky to have found another paid job less than two months after my last paid job descended into a fugue of lumpenproletarian officiousness and treachery. This fugue started my first day on the job; fun times in wine country. My current job on the blueberry farm is the polar opposite. It’s a contender for the best job I’ve ever had, the farm manager is a contender for the best boss I’ve ever had, and I have not had to deal with any asshats. None. It’s like I was sucked through a wormhole into a Jeffersonian utopia that would make even old Tom himself think he’d been taken on a gnarly acid trip.

It’s worth briefly noting how Thomas Jefferson’s labor theories compared to his labor practices. My current employer is Jefferson’s ideal made manifest, the kind of family-run, community-oriented operation that would make Alexander Hamilton of a mind to bulldoze the joint and deed the property over to industrialists. Jefferson’s actual managerial practices, of course, involved regimentation and centralization of a sort not too different from what Alexander Hamilton advised, but in the form of a brutal system of race-based slavery, enforced with a campaign of threats and beatings that Jefferson oversaw with a zeal that privately alarmed his friends. This nightmare he bequeathed to his country as a major part of its patrimony. We still haven’t gotten completely over it. Perhaps we never will.

On the West Coast, the most prolific offshoot of this plantation sociology is something that I call Mexican Jim Crow, since I don’t think any more restrained moniker adequately conveys its iniquity. Honestly, I’m surprised and somewhat relieved that relations between Mexicans and Gringos in Western farming districts aren’t much worse than they are. The racism underpinning this arrangement isn’t official, but in some places it might as well be. I find it worrisome that there’s a greater language barrier between the planter and peasant classes on the West Coast than there usually was between planters and slaves in the Antebellum South, since Southerners spoke mutually intelligible dialects of English in most places. A couple of months ago I found myself in the midst of an unwieldy workplace donnybrook that would have either been preventable or easily nipped in the bud had everyone present spoken a common language. In extreme cases, this language barrier results in de facto impunity for workplace sexual assaults committed by field managers against line employees. It is a very bad state of affairs.

The planter class wants to keep things this way. I don’t know what the dynamics are like at the county level, but at the state level in California (and probably other states) and at the national level the planters have a stranglehold on the major farming trade groups. That’s why the Farm Bureau always has a bee in its bonnet about immigration reform. It’s amazing to see major growers go on the record in newspaper and trade journal articles about how they’re 40% short on pickers for time-critical harvests, are running months late on pruning jobs that are considered industry-standard, etc., and then see not a word from the same growers on help wanted websites or on roadsides near their farms. One of the growers who’s engaged in this monkey business has several hundred acres of blueberries half an hour north of where I’m currently staying. There’s no way the farm labor contractors in their regions are running help wanted ads to take up the slack, either. Few of them are running ads at all. Believe me, I’ve checked. The growers and contractors who do run ads usually run them on state unemployment office job boards (Washington State’s is particularly laden), probably because the only Gringos who check these sites are ones who were told to do so by their case workers or probation officers. That way, the planters end up getting a lukewarm response from slackers and dregs who didn’t want farm jobs in the first place, and once these Gringos all wash out they can tell the authorities that they really, really need their Mexicans. One farm in Washington went a step further by flying a new crew in from Thailand and firing its entire existing crew of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, many of them career employees. Unless the initial ruling was reversed on appeal, this company remains in fairly hot water with the authorities over this stunt.

As far as I can tell, the much-bemoaned shortage of farm workers is mainly a shortage of two specific kinds of farm workers: at the lowest level, meek, servile, disposable, easily intimidated grunts, and, at the higher skill levels, those who can be hired by word of mouth through some foreman’s cousin’s barber’s nephew five miles past the end of the blacktop in outermost Michoacan. With Mexico’s economy improving while its birthrate plummets, even in poor rural areas, it should come as no surprise that it’s getting harder to staff farms entirely through the intimidation of illegal immigrant roustabouts and six degrees of whoever happens to currently be on staff.

As a farm worker, I heartily approve of this turn of events. Expect to hear more White Whines about it from a planter near you in coming years.

Erik Loomis has more on these topics. Does he ever. Ralph Durst and his cousin weren’t just planters; they were psychopaths.

One final social control before I go to bed: Tomorrow is the day after Labor Day, so no more white clothes for the rest of the season. You wouldn’t want to be the gauche fool who wears white into the fall. This is a fitting social convention, especially for anyone in the business of making or selling clothes in any of the many colors that are not white. On the other hand, join me in the blueberry patch and they won’t be white for long.

Obama’s Newest War Campaign: Syria?

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , ,

I’ve written about how disastrous a war campaign in Syria would be before. You can check out the archives here. At this point I think my track record for predicting what will happen when the US attacks another country is pretty damned good.

Here’s how I’ve accomplished this: government is, at best, an arbitrator of last resort (“courts and diplomacy”). If societies begin to grant a government’s scope much more than this minimum, expect to see bad things happen. Bombing another country for ambiguously stated purposes will lead to bad things. These bad things will be much worse than the bad things currently in place.

Don’t believe me? Look at Iraq. And Libya. And Afghanistan. And Vietnam. Et cetera. Et cetera.

Mark my words: if the Obama administration bombs Syria we will have much more to worry about than “projecting weakness.” An onslaught of chemical weapons, horrific ethnic cleansing campaigns, and decades of civil war will be in the books. The war would have been over by now if the Obama administration had not armed Islamist rebels. I wrote at length about Syria and the US’s strategic blunders here. Feel free to check it out.

Islamists, by the way, are people that adhere to the same type of philosophy as al-Qaeda, the organization responsible for 9/11. These are the people the Obama administration and Republican hawks support, and have supported, on and off again for five decades.

I Supported Ron Paul Because of Weed… So What?

nickfong2013 Current Events, Liberty , , , ,

When Ron Paul campaigned for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, I had no idea who he was nor did I care much for politics, let alone his. Like many recent high school grads, the extent of my interest in politics didn’t go much further than the U.S. Government class I was required to take to graduate. I was what you would call a single issue voter.

The only issue that I really cared about at the time was, admittedly, marijuana legalization. Yes, I was one of the kids that spent his days before–sometimes during–and after school smoking weed. I literally sat through school sleeping until I could leave and go smoke. You could say I was bored with my education. I tired of listening to teachers and their sometimes ludicrous assignments and consigned myself to sitting in the back of the classroom so that I would be allowed to sleep, undisturbed. Apathy dictated my high school years. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy learning, but I was bored and didn’t really give a shit.

Fast forward to the 2012 Republican primaries. It was campaign season, and the debates between Republican candidates Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, and Paul were just starting to heat up. To be honest, I was mostly interested in seeing if any of these candidates embraced marijuana legalization. President Obama had never actually opined for the plant’s legalization, but his pro-marijuana statements were enough to get many young peoples’ votes, crucial to his being elected in 2008. This somehow led to the erroneous belief that Obama would push for legalization of the plant, which never happened.

Personally, I wasn’t disappointed. I mean, it’s not like he had promised to legalize. No promises were broken. With the Republican primary race in full swing, I wanted to see whether I actually had any real hope of seeing marijuana legalized, or if I would have to wait yet another four years to get my hopes up. It was soon after that I started to pay attention to Dr. Paul.

Here was this stoop-shouldered, old Texan with a slight stutter who spoke with such passion and reason I couldn’t help but pay attention. Mostly, he talked about economic and foreign policy issues that I had little knowledge of. Even before I knew his stance on ending the War on Drugs, for some reason Dr. Paul’s honest delivery and conviction stood out to me. I knew that he had been in Congress for years, but beyond that I defected to my parents’ opinion of him: crazy.

I started to do some research on Dr. Paul’s background and found that he was a man of extremely reputable character. He was an anomaly from the get-go. Defying conventional opinion of politicians; a brief look at his voting record betrayed the saying that all politicians are liars. With voting records now published online and easily accessible, I would have been able to find out right away if he had voted contradictorily to what he said. Here was a politician that held an ideology that sometimes went against his personal views, yet defended it to the death because of his conviction in its power to affect widespread positive societal improvement.

I suppose at this point it’s important to iterate my own opinions on liberty. Mostly, I don’t think it’s proper to glorify the idea of liberty to the extent that some do, and I think that it even hurts the movement as a whole when some consider themselves missionaries of the ideology. I don’t worship liberty, but I do see it as a fundamental right for humanity—and liberty to me means the ability to make decisions regarding your own social, economic, and political lifestyle, as long as they’re peaceful.

I researched Dr. Paul online, found YouTube videos of him speaking, and was instantly hooked. Beyond marijuana legalization, I found that I agreed with everything that he pushed for: his main issues that stood out to me were a non-interventionist foreign policy, ending the War on Drugs, returning to some semblance of budgetary balance, accountability of the Federal Reserve, and free markets. As I know now, these very ideas form the primary backbone of the liberty movement. Before, liberty was just something I included in the Pledge of Allegiance and was told that it was somehow crucial to being American. I had never bothered to ask why. Once I did, I came upon entire organizations devoted to spreading the ideas of liberty. They’re dedicated to educating any who might listen on the importance of social, economic, and political freedom.

Since initially paying attention to Ron Paul and happening upon the liberty movement, I feel like it is almost my civic duty to at least inform others of these ideas, even if they disagree. These ideas are founded in reason and logic. These days, you’ll find me telling any like-minded friends who will listen how a lazy stoner like me was motivated by liberty not only to get off my ass, but to learn. I’ve come to the conclusion that the ideas are ultimately important beyond me. Although I find it wrong to tell others they hold erroneous opinions, all I can do is to try to help inform and see where that takes them. I don’t think I’m alone in finding Dr. Paul’s passion contagious. At the same time, I’m not glorifying the man, but the ideas that he manages to deliver are powerful, and it’s these ideas that are worth paying attention to.

Even though Dr. Paul did not win the 2012 Republican primary, he instilled something far more important, affecting an entire generation still in its intellectual infancy. I truly believe that these ideas will come to reach more people in the future and will affect many in the same way that they have moved me.

I think it’s only fitting that I end this article in Dr. Paul’s own words:

Ideas are very important to the shaping of society. In fact, they are more powerful than bombings or armies or guns. And this is because ideas are capable of spreading without limit. They are behind all the choices we make. They can transform the world in a way that government and armies cannot. Fighting for liberty with ideas makes more sense to me than fighting with guns or politics or political power. With ideas, we can make real change that lasts.

Path Dependency and the Republican Party

Michael Adamson Current Events, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Let’s apply path dependency to the plight of the national Republican Party and see where it takes us:

Writing in Fortune in the run-up to the 1962 congressional elections, Max Ways asked, “Is Republicanism a Losing Cause?” Arguing at the height of JFK’s popularity that there was nothing wrong with the party’s two main convictions, namely that individual liberty is best served by a strong, yet limited, federal government, and that “market capitalism is a beneficent force in the world,” Ways insisted that Republicans would never “reinvigorate their party so long as they let the Democrats set the terms of battle.”

After a drubbing in the 1964 election, the party was able to set the terms of battle as America’s cities burned and the war in Vietnam headlined the evening news. In Ronald Reagan, the party’s reinvigoration was complete. His ability to communicate the party’s convictions and win elections suggested that Republican dominance of the White House might be sustained. It wasn’t. But even in the aftermath of defeat, in 1992, the party could take solace in Bill Clinton’s declaration that the era of Big Government was over. Perhaps the party had truly won the battle of ideas.

But now the Republican Party has come full circle, and is again in crisis, having suffered defeat in the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. As was the case in 1962, there is no end to prescriptions for saving the GOP. To the accumulating heap of advice, I add this to the pile: Consider path dependency before formulating policy, conducting politics, and making appeals to voters.

California’s Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger famously promised to “blow up” the boxes of a bloated government in Sacramento—and then not much happened. At the national level, Republicans have been promising to repeal, dissolve, and defund laws, agencies, and programs since the 1930s, with little overall success, notwithstanding the odd victory here and there. The yearning to begin anew may be alluring, but there ain’t no going back.

In rhetoric, Republican Party leaders still call for ratcheting back Leviathan, at least on the economic front. Yet, just as Governor Schwarzenegger did, they falter when it comes to actually blowing up the boxes of government. Republicans make poor revolutionaries. At the same time, they seem to have eschewed democratic politics as a means to their ends. Perhaps, in their view, playing politics would constitute an exercise in making “socialism” more efficient, in which they allegedly hold no interest. But by failing to reconcile ideas and ideals with path dependent history, the party is becoming ever more out of touch.

Gaining an appreciation for path dependency may help the party connect with voters: a prerequisite to articulating effectively a vision of a political economy based on individual liberty, limited government, and market capitalism. After all, if no one is listening, it doesn’t really matter what you might be saying.

Another problem: It’s rather difficult to figure out what the Republican Party stands for these days. Since the 1980s, its calls for racheting back Big Government have been long on promising a return to some ideal state and short on mapping a pragmatic path toward reining in the actually existing state. Interestingly, the rhetoric heats up when the party is out of power, casting doubt on the sincerity of those spouting it. When they have occupied the Oval Office, Republicans have had no less a penchant increasing the size and scope of government than the Democrats they accuse of being enthusiasts for socialism. The Bush administration used the crisis of 9/11 to increase government surveillance of private citizens and expand Washington’s interventions overseas. The crisis of the Great Recession served as occasion to bail out Wall Street. Indeed, in economic terms, Republicanism has come full circle, not from the free soil, free labor, and free men days of Lincoln, but from the Gilded Age. Where the rubber hits the road, that is, in terms of implementation, there is little evidence that the Republican Party holds individual liberty, limited government, and market capitalism as core convictions. But let’s stipulate, for the sake of this post, that Republicanism at its core remains grounded in the two main convictions identified by Mr. Ways.

So how might a consideration of path dependency help to right the listing Republican ship?

In a previous post, I applauded Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson for their effective deployment of path dependency in Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. They showed that “critical junctures” that disrupt the existing political and economic balance in society launch nations down their respective dependent paths. And once embarked on a dependent path, the weight of history makes it extremely difficult for a nation to change course.

In America, as Robert Higgs has shown, two world wars, with a great depression sandwiched in between, constituted the critical junctures—or critical episodes, as he calls them—that resulted in an immense expansion in the scale and scope of the U.S. government. With the passage of time, the American people have accepted most aspects of Leviathan—especially when it comes to social insurance—as the norm. In Higg’s view, there is no going back because the federal government’s responses to successive crises engendered a sea shift in ideology among the people. Writing in 1987, Higgs doubted that the Reagan Revolution would live up to its billing. And he was spot on.

For an intraparty conversation on the appropriate scale and scope of government to be productive and persuasive, it ought to begin with coming to terms with the state as it “really is” and reflecting on how it came to be (including the many contributions of all postwar Republican administrations to expanding said state).

Take Social Security. Opposed on the Right, it was passed in a form that didn’t please the Left. But over the years, Social Security expanded in scope and size under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. It’s now been around for more than 75 years. Talk of entitlement reform as Baby Boomers age, at least in terms of assessing, funding, and perhaps adjusting future liabilities? Absolutely. But apocalyptic talk of Social Security’s impending bankruptcy as prelude to overhauling this mainstay of middle-class entitlements surely has lost more votes than it has gained. And to what end? Leaving aside the question of individual liberty, replacing mandated contributions to a government plan with mandated contributions to private ones introduces risk for which future retirees seemingly have no appetite. Path dependency does not mean that all doors to reform are shut for all time. But Republicans have little hope of blowing up this box.

So, what to do? First, acquire a deep appreciation for the path dependencies embedded in America’s laws, regulations, policies, and political institutions. Use the exercise to identify potentially winning issues that align with core convictions, as stipulated. Then embrace the democratic process as a platform from which to win hearts and minds and accomplish realistic goals.

From the Comments: The New Internationalism

Brandon Christensen Comments, Current Events , , , , , , , ,

My dear, brave friend from Iran, Siamak, takes issue with my recent musings on the state of affairs in the Middle East:

I’m completely against this. Any changes in mid-east borders could start a Religious-Ethnic Oil war that brings years of savagery and massacre. The problem of middle-east can be solved with tolerance through diplomatic acts. I can’t believe that some libertarian agoras are supporting breakaways in mid-east. As a libertarian person living in mid-east, I’m telling that this political view is so dangerous and can demolish little advances for peace in mid-east completely. Instead of trying to make a new geopolitical order in mid-east (as neo-cons) tried to do, Isn’t it better to try to recognize the mid-eastern countries and try to deal with them? You think new states will bring new nations?! No! Nowadays discussions about creating new countries in mid-east are states predicated on Ethnic differences. Some Kurds want their states! Some Azeris, Some Ashouris, Some Arabs, Some Jews, etc… I’m pretty sure that any changes in the geopolitical order of mid-east will start a big and long long war.

I thought I’d pick this apart for a couple of reasons, but the main reason would be because so many people read the words ‘decentralization’ or ‘secession’ and simply go into autopilot. Rick Searle shares his eloquent thoughts here. Moussa Cidibe shares his pertinent critiques here. Wbwise shares his criticisms here (some of Dr Delacroix’s well-informed thoughts are here, and in the same thread). Dr George Ayittey dedicated quite a bit of energy to tackling my argument (that’s two academics in a row, in case you lost count). Neenergyobserver is skeptical as well.

Each of the objections listed above look very similar to the objections raised by Siamak. I figure now is as good a time as any to go through my argument again, and I’m going to break down Siamak’s pertinent protestations to do it. First up is a concern about changing borders in the Middle East:

Any changes in mid-east borders could start a Religious-Ethnic Oil war that brings years of savagery and massacre.

This may have some merit to it, especially if one looks at the Balkans in Europe or the wars in the Horn of Africa. Yet one can also point to the velvet divorce in Czechoslovakia (and under the umbrage of the EU) or the dissolution of the Soviet Union as peaceful separatist movements. One thing that we can all agree on, I would hope, is that today the world is already witnessing years of savagery and massacre in the Middle East. Additionally, this savagery and massacre have only been dampened by American imperialism in the region, thus bringing my taxes into the picture.

If this last statement seems rather bold, think about the various balancing acts that occur in the Middle East (Iran v Iraq; Saudi Arabia v Iran; Israel v Egypt; etc., etc.) and how much more brutal these conflicts would be if the US were not pulling the strings behind them.

This observation should not be taken to imply that I support US imperialism. I do not. In fact I oppose it vigorously. Yet it goes without saying that the US arrived in the Middle East when the current borders were intact as they are, and that these current borders (created by Europeans) were recognized by some but by no means all. This struggle for legitimacy, in turn, is the major cause of political, economic and social strife in the region.

To reiterate: the Middle East is already a mess, and looking at alternatives is neither a crime nor a dangerous precedent (especially on a blog as humble as our own). I think some of these reactions to my argument for more decentralization can stem from a misreading of what has actually been written. For example, when Siamak writes:

Instead of trying to make a new geopolitical order in mid-east (as neo-cons) tried to do, Isn’t it better to try to recognize the mid-eastern countries and try to deal with them? You think new states will bring new nations?! No!

He is not grasping my argument. At all. Most of the criticisms of my argument have fallen into this camp, so Siamak the individual is not to be faulted. I think it goes back to those keywords identified earlier in this piece (decentralization and secession). Here is what I actually wrote:

the West should emphatically not go around breaking up the states of the Middle East into smaller ones, but it should recognize breakaway regions as soon as they, uh, break away. This’ll give these states a little bit of breathing room on the international scene and deter older states from trying to reclaim their old territory.

Can everybody see how this argument is very different from the one Siamak (and others) have attributed towards me? The article that I originally riffed off of argues no such thing, either. This is not to say that Siamak’s fears are unfounded. In fact, the original article argues that the Middle East needs to embrace decentralization as a way to protect itself from the West’s own plans to break up the states in the region in order to better play them off on each other. Both imperialists in the West and the anti-imperialist factions are now at a point where they recognize the states as they are in the Middle East need to be smaller to be effective.

I understand that when states break up there can be turmoil. This is why I believe it is best that states break up within free trade zones (like the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the EU, or – potentially – Scotland, Catalonia or even California doing the same). However, even without free trade zones in place, recognizing the independence of breakaway regions (away from Russia’s and China’s peripheries, of course) saves lives. Think of the amount of violence that Sudan and South Sudan have contributed to since the latter’s independence, and then think of the violence that occurred before South Sudan’s independence.

Siamak is right when he states that “the problems of Middle East can be solved with tolerance through diplomatic acts,” but is it not also true that secession and the creation of many smaller states out of a few large ones can be achieved through these very acts as well?