Author: muricaderp

Life underground

muricaderp Economics, Liberty, Links

Fabius Maximus tweeted an amazing series of links yesterday to articles about people literally living underground in US cities. Few manifestations of homelessness really surprise me, as opposed to merely saddening or disturbing me; these did.

The preceding link is to an article summarizing the others that Fabius Maximus publicized. The tone of this summary article is m0re breathless than it need be, as might be expected from a blog called The Economic Collapse, and it jumps to some of its conclusions in a manner that might be considered paranoid or conspiratorial, but if nothing else it’s fun reading, and quite illuminating to boot. The other caveat to keep in mind is that it’s probably erroneous to imply that these underground encampments are uniquely American or solely the result of uniquely incompetent and cruel US social services policy. I’d be quite surprised, in particular, if there are no such encampments beneath Paris, which has a renowned community of egoutophiles, who might be called “sewer lovers” in English, and a homeless problem of its own, which the authorities have been known to address by rounding up transients and busing them to the suburbs.

The “Tunnel People” may be down-and-out addicts and losers, but they’re damn well resourceful. Some of the people living in the storm drain system of Las Vegas (estimated at about 1,000 in all) have outfitted their living quarters with beds, closets, office chairs, and bookshelves, usually elevated on crates for protection from runoff. Check out the pictures. One of the couples living in this environment supports itself in part through “credit hustling,” i.e., collecting gambling credits that absentminded gamblers have left on slot machines: not particularly honorable, perhaps, but it takes some gumption.

Another population, known locally as the “mole people,” lives in access tunnels fronting passenger rail tunnels in Midtown Manhattan. According to the New York Post, “Travolta, originally from the Dominican Republic, claims to have lived in these dark, rat-infested spaces beneath Manhattan for the past 20 years.” The other John Travolta owns a Boeing 707; this one uses a 7:15 am train as his alarm clock.

The most enterprising group of tunnel dwellers, however, is probably the group that was recently evicted from a network of apparently hand-excavated tunnels on the northeast side of Kansas City, MO. Police and social services believe that infants were being raised at that site because they found soiled diapers there.

The Kansas City and Las Vegas cases are unconscionable for another reason: these cities have lax housing markets. In contrast to New York, housing supply exceeds demand in these cities. To be succinct, and maybe a bit pat, about it, the original failure to house the residents of the underground encampments in Las Vegas and Kansas City is not a logistical problem, but a cultural and policy problem. I fear that it is one that will not be fixed until Americans stop thinking of housing as an investment and start thinking of it as a utility.

Socialism as an insurance policy for the wealthy

muricaderp Economics, Politics

I’d like to very briefly expand on one of the recurrent themes here at Notes: complaints about the posh backgrounds and attitudes of socialists, or, as Brandon often puts it, their tendency to “only care about the rich.”

There’s no shortage of paradoxical examples of wealthy socialist politicians and activists, socialism being most vigorous in the wealthiest parts of a given country, etc. These paradoxes became a lot less baffling to me once I started considering what the wealthy stand to lose in the event of disaffection among the poor. They stand to lose more than the middle classes, and certainly much more than the poor. Conversely, the wealthy stand to gain more than the middling or the poor from a stable, prosperous society. A great example of this is the lengthy vacation allotments for employees in much of Europe, which poorer beneficiaries often spend at modest vacation spots within a few hours’ drive of home but wealthier beneficiaries often spend at much more luxurious establishments in Asia or the Americas.

This calculus gets much more compelling when one considers government measures to nurture a broad middle class as an insurance policy against social unrest. That’s really too kind a term for the rioting, assault and retaliatory murder to which a badly mistreated working class can be provoked, to say nothing of the much nastier behavior of goons under the auspices of the demagogic governments that take root in destabilized societies. The Nazis controlled most of Western Europe within living memory, so the threat of war and genocide as a response to bad economic conditions is less of an abstraction to the average European than it is to the average American, sheltered as the United States has been from domestic warfare for over a century.

War, no matter its magnitude or duration, is not something to be romanticized or celebrated as something worthy in its own right. It is a necessary evil, one that is absolutely hellish for all but the most sadistic. For the purpose of not getting people traumatized, maimed and killed, rioting, vigilantism and the like should be regarded as tantamount to warfare; they’re certainly precursors, and they’re certainly dangerous and destructive. These truths are all too easily lost on people who have not lived through civil unrest or war, and on those who choose to live in atavistic fantasy worlds. These segments of the population have a huge overlap, and both are very widespread in the United States.

Offhand, I’d say that privation in some form or other has been the most common trigger for unrest throughout human history. Astute leaders recognize this, as Otto von Bismarck and Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when they implemented social insurance programs that were unprecedented in their countries. Other leaders, however, assume that they’ll always be able to beat the proles into submission. In a good decade, such leaders keep their heads; in a bad decade, ask Marie Antoinette.

The United States has more than its share of the latter sort of leader, which has a long history of questioning the patriotism of the former sort among its compatriots. The bareknuckle robber barons assume that if they hire enough Pinkertons, none of their number will end up with his head in a basket on the town square, but history has disproved this assumption on a number of occasions. Sure, it’s the history of other countries, but Europeans were aghast to see the United States, that beacon of peace and freedom, descend into internecine bloodletting in 1861. These things are unimaginable until they happen, or until one comes across some imagination, and maybe some humility. We aren’t that special as a people. In the right conditions, those we’ve mistreated can really do us harm.

Or, as Abraham Lincoln said, “I’d like to have God on my side, but I need Kentucky.”

Some introductory links

muricaderp Law, Links, Politics , , , ,

It’s a great privilege and honor to be invited to write at Notes On Liberty. Brandon’s invitation for me to join the team actually came as something of a pleasant surprise, since my economic politics tend to fall pretty far to the left of the consensus here. I cast a straight libertarian ticket in the 2000 general election (the first election in which I was eligible to vote) and I voted for Gary Johnson last year, but I much more often vote for Democrats, generally because I find the social and civil liberties policies advanced by their Republican opponents absolutely frightening and the economic policies advanced by their Libertarian opponents naive, unduly dogmatic and hence unfeasible.

That said, I believe I’m what one of my favorite bloggers, Fabius Maximus, usually regards less as an accurate self-description than as a self-serving pretension: a true nonpartisan. Fabius occasionally posts survey data indicating that the incidence of nonpartisanship in the electorate is exaggerated, an exaggeration that he attributes largely to voters’ desire to be hip. By contrast, one of my most common reactions to the two major US political parties (probably to the annoyance of many of my Facebook friends) is that they’re both overdue for the federal death penalty, and that there’s room for both of them on the prison van to Terre Haute. There’s a certain facetiousness and poetic license to my peddling of this imagery, but it does not exaggerate the disgust and exasperation that I all too often have with the behavior of both parties, and especially that of their leaders.

I’ll probably have more on that theme in future posts. Tonight, however, I’m going to devote the rest of this post to links that I’ve found inspirational, resonant, or too ghoulish to resist, from various corners of the internet. The only caveat is that the links are going to have a more disjointed appearance than they would in a standard list format; I like to provide some context for links that I include in my writing, especially since the links themselves can be longer than some readers have time to read, so tonight I’ll be providing a synopsis for each.

Fabius Maximus

Fabius Maximus is the pseudonym of a geopolitics blogger who, as far as I can tell, is based in the Washington, DC area and employed in something pertinent to the federal government, although he is extremely coy about himself. His tone can be authoritative and brash, rather like a less screechy literary version of John McLaughlin, and he can be very cynical. But cynicism, I’d say, is warranted in times such as ours, particularly as an antidote to the saccharine earnestness that many mainstream journalists and commentators seem to regard as the only appropriate approach to the world.

The liberty of local bullies

This piece by Noah Smith is one of the most provocative broadsides on Ron Paul and libertarianism that I’ve found. It takes a more strident tone than I’d be inclined to take, but I have to support any essay that includes the phrase “my freedom to punch you in the face curtails quite a number of your freedoms.” That’s a pretty succinct articulation of one of my longstanding critiques of the libertarian movement and likeminded classically liberal movements abroad: that they all too often ally themselves with thieves and other unsavory, predatory characters. These unholy alliances strike me as a big reason that libertarianism has such trouble gaining popular traction as an alternative to the two-party status quo, manifested by the tendency of Libertarian Party candidates to win less than five percent of the vote in three-way contests. This is a very unfortunate situation, if for no other reason because libertarians are damn near the only people willing to take a serious stand against the erosion of civil liberties in the United States.

The Lazarus File

A Case So Cold It Was Blue

Dateline NBC, formerly a respectable news magazine, has taken to devoting Friday nights to lengthy reviews of sordid murders, a great thing for those of us who find that Keith Morrison’s hushed tones and ever more skeletal face appeal to our dubiously maudlin tastes. I don’t see why I shouldn’t do the same, especially for a case involving Brandon’s fellow Bruin, LAPD Detective Stephanie Lazarus.

I actually don’t remember whether I’ve ever seen a Dateline NBC special on Lazarus or just saw the 48 Hours version, but the pieces above, in the Atlantic and Vanity Fair, respectively, are better in any event. (I can’t exactly recommend my own television viewing habits.) The Lazarus case wasn’t spectacular just because the suspect (since convicted and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison) was a highly regarded police detective. The intricacy and sensitivity of the investigation were also far beyond what I’ve ever seen a broadcast account do justice. The investigation was started by a cold case squad at the Van Nuys Division (in the provinces by LAPD standards) before being reassigned to the Robbery-Homicide Division, the elite squad at LAPD headquarters that is responsible for high-profile murder investigations. That posed an even touchier problem: Stephanie Lazarus worked across the hall from RHD at Parker Center and was friendly with many of the division’s detectives. The detectives ultimately chosen for the case, Dan Jaramillo and Greg Stearns, were in effect chosen because they were out of the loop socially. (Judging from their portrait in Vanity Fair, Det. Stearns is also out of the loop sartorially, and proudly so. The portrait suggests that those two are classics, and know it.) On the morning of the arrest, teams were posted in Simi Valley, Lazarus’ hometown, with sealed envelopes instructing them to execute search warrants on her house and car. One of their colleagues surreptitiously trailed Lazarus downtown on a Metrolink train. It was the LAPD at its best, in contrast to the original investigation of Sherri Rae Rasmussen’s murder, which was the LAPD at its most incompetent. Lyle Mayer, the lead detective in the original investigation, will be forever remembered as the idiot who let a murderer stick around at the LAPD for another 23 years after telling her victim’s father that he watched too much TV. (Unless he was crooked. Reasonable people disagree on this point.)