Liberty

Aggressive Swimming Rabbits: Conservative Violence, Abortion

Jacques Delacroix History, Liberty, Politics ,

When he was President, Jimmy Carter reported that while he was hunting in some swamp, armed to the teeth of course, a rabbit had swam toward him and acted threateningly. (Would I make this up?) The current orchestrated media reports about violence and threats of all kinds against Democrats remind me of this glory moment in American liberal history.

Several black Representatives affirmed that they had be called “nigger” on Sunday. Today, as I write, almost four days later, I have been looking in vain for visual or audio evidence of this alleged episode. Let’s think things through: Tea Party activists are demonstrating outside Congress in their thousands against a bill that enrages much or most of the population. There is no hostile press, there are no mikes, there are no television cameras to record the historic event and the precious “n” moment? Among the thousands of counter-demonstrators, in the Congressmen’s entourage, there is no one with the presence of mind to whip out his cell-phone camera and recorder to catch the insults? What is this, 1958?

With each passing hour without evidence, I become more persuaded that the insults story was fabricated and disseminated by a supine and complicit media.

It’s like Pres. Carter’s rabbit story: It probably did not happen; if it did, it’s regrettable but insignificant. Somewhere between 50 and 70 million Americans are angry because of the contents of the law (those small parts of it they know), and even more angry because of the way it was passed. Under the circumstances, if only two, twenty, or two hundred of them allow themselves intemperate language, it’s a cause for celebrating our collective reasonableness. Continue reading →

Obama’s Haitian Policy

Jacques Delacroix History, Liberty, Religion , ,

A strange symmetry of irrationality and meanness in the news about Haiti: Pat Robertson declares that God is punishing the Haitians for their sins; two days latter, Denis Glover, the activist of all Leftist causes observes that the Haiti earthquake is somehow connected to the failure of the climate conference in Copenhagen. It turns out that Gaia is just as mean as God the Father! Why bother to switch, I wonder. I have been telling you, friends, for a long time that climate warmism is a cult.

I have cool thoughts about the human catastrophe in Haiti, almost inhumane thoughts. I suspect the Haitians will end up coping better than many others would have under the same terrible circumstances. The population is so damned poor that it’s trained to do with little. I worry about water mostly because humans can’t make do without it but for a short time.

Parallel reasons lead me to predict that the 2010 earthquake will turn out to be a blessing in disguise for the survivors. Port-au-Prince and the rest of the country were so dismal that it would be impossible to restore them to their former awfulness if you tried. It’s difficult to rebuild massive quantities of housing without accompanying infrastructures, including roads, water pipes, and sewers (which are almost lacking today). I am betting, of course, that there is going to be a serious international effort to “rebuild.”

Another uncharitable thought: I will be curious to see how the population of Haiti stacks up, in energy and in entrepreneurship, with the population of New-Orleans post-Katrina. In case, you wonder, my money is on the Haitians. Continue reading →

Methodological Individualism

Warren Gibson Books, Liberty , ,

I am just now rereading Ludwig von Mises’s magnum opus, Human Action.  What a joy it is to get reacquainted with Mises’s masterful work and to use it as a benchmark to gauge my own intellectual odyssey since first reading it more than 40 years ago.

Early on the reader encounters the term “methodological individualism.”  This mouthful may seem at first to be some abstruse epistemological concept that can be forgotten once the foundations for Mises’s economics have been established.  On the contrary, revisiting Mises has made me realize just how thoroughly I have internalized the concept and what a big difference it has made in my thinking about political and economic controversies.

Let’s start with what methodological individualism is not.  It has nothing to do with “rugged individualism.”  It is not ideology at all.  It is a term that describes the essential nature of human thought and action.  It is a bedrock principle on which Mises grounds his entire exposition of economics.

“The Hangman, not the state, executes a criminal.”  This is Mises’s pithy summary of methodological individualism.  Mises does not deny that the hangman acts under the influence of his relationships to others in society.  He is an employee or a servant of some penal system and is obliged to carry out executions when so ordered. He may fear consequences if he fails to act as ordered.  He may have a family that he provides for.  He may wish to secure his place in Heaven. None of these conditions alters the basic sequence of events: The hangman ponders the action he is set to perform, thinking carefully or hardly at all.  He believes his best choice is to pull the rope that opens the chute.  He causes his arm to move and the deed is done. Continue reading →

An Act of Self-Defense: A Review

Warren Gibson Books, Liberty , ,

“The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” said Thomas Jefferson.  Erne Lewis does a terrific job of adapting this theme to 21st-century America in his new novel, An Act of Self-Defense.

Like Atlas Shrugged, his story is set in an immediate future where the economy is collapsing, and more so than in Atlas, personal freedoms are vanishing.  Unemployment is at 20 percent and all communications are recorded and tracked by the NSA.  RFID badges are worn by all federal employees and will soon be required for all citizens.  A small group of patriots takes matters into their own hands, and the action is fast and furious.

Lewis draws the correct battle lines of our time: not left versus right but libertarian versus fascist.  The f-word correctly describes anyone on the left or right who would use government power to suppress personal or economic freedom while leaving nominal ownership in private hands.  The novel’s villains are of both stripes, some of them decent people who entered politics with good intentions but became corrupted.  That leaves libertarians as the only consistent defenders of what Ludwig von Mises called the “Free and Prosperous Commonwealth” founded on the rule of law, particularly respect for property rights.

I had to wonder, when reading his portrayals of  atrocities committed by government agents: How much of this is fiction?  Can they do such things?  Are they close? Have they already?  The Patriot Act is law, so the atrocities seem disturbingly plausible. Continue reading →

L’ Anarchisme et la recherche de la liberté: recommendations des Déserts du Nouveau Monde.

Jacques Delacroix Books, Current Events, Liberty ,

Je suis vieux mais j’ai quand même un copain lycéen à Paris. Je l’ai rencontré un Quatorze Juillet justement, en Californie où je vis depuis déjà longtemps. Ugo a quinze ou seize ans. Il me dit par courriel qu’il lit Bakounine et Kropotkine. Cela me fait plaisir à deux titres. D’abord, cela signifie qu’il a échappé à la malédiction du relent de totalitarisme collectiviste qui habite toujours de nombreux Français comme une croûte en Octobre colle encore aux lèvres des revenus de la colonie de vacances du mois d’Août.

La deuxième raison de ma réjouissance c’est que de telles lectures ne peuvent qu’allonger l’aune à laquelle Ugo mesurera la liberté. (J’allais dire la “liberté individuelle” mais, il n’y en a pas d’autre, c’est une mauvaise manie verbale.) Il me semble en effet que quand on vit dans le brouillard d’une societe étatique comme la France il doit être difficile seulement de reconnaitre le simple fait de liberté. Dans une telle société, on doit être menéinconsciemment à une mesure de la libertéétriquée pour la simple raison que les nombreux “droits” des autres ne peuvent que limiter naturellement, automatiquement les siens propres.

L’un de ces soi-disant droits est le droit de vivre correctement sans avoir jamais às’efforcer, c’est-à-dire aux crochets d’Ugo et d’autres qui ne rechignent pas à travailler ou àinventer. Continue reading →

Horse Meat and the European Union

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , ,

Big scandal in the European Union about horse meat masquerading as beef. Neither in Europe nor in this country do people really understand the story. Good thing I am here with my cross-cultural skills!

First things first and a confession: I ate much horse meat as a child, something like twice or three times a week. It was cheaper than beef. The horse butcher was half a block from the beef butcher. Horse meat was cheaper. My mother was concerned that her sons would not develop the right kind or quantity of hormones if they didn’t get red meat at every meal. Well, I don’t want to appear immodest or lacking in humility but it appears that my mother was right about the effect of horse meat on virility!

We ate ground horse meat barely singed. It tasted good, a lot like beef, in fact but also a little sweet. We did not feel sorry for the horses. There was a horsey set in France but it did not live in the government housing where I grew up. We did not know any of them although we read about some of them in the tabloids. Long story short: There is no particular health hazard associated with horse meat if it’s normally inspected. It’s probably less dangerous than say, chicken. Continue reading →

Possession Two (or too)

Jacques Delacroix Liberty

Part Two: No Place to Stay

Update: In a previous blog (“The A.A President,” posted 10/7/09 ), I argued that President Obama’s current string of failures was not surprising because he had never accomplished much of anything in his life under his own power. I mentioned that his passing the bar exam might prove me wrong. There is nothing on Wikipedia about his having passed the bar anywhere. There is nothing I could find on the Internet. Not trusting the thoroughness of my search, I went straight to the source. Nine days ago, I emailed the White House website asking when and where the President had passed the bar. No answer to-date.

In the first installment of this essay, I began to attempt to use a small-scale entity to explain the damage done by innocent government intervention. The small-scale entity is my town of Santa Cruz (population about 40,000). In Part One, I showed how the municipality’s practice of taking possession of buildings downtown to shelter social services impoverished the tax roll. There is worse.

Santa Cruz has two main parallel arteries. On one side of the river, lies Ocean Street, leading to the Boardwalk, a permanent carnival near the beach. Ocean avenue is appropriately lined with fast food joints and motels. It’s as devoid of interest as any similar commercial artery anywhere in the US.  Continue reading →

Possession

Jacques Delacroix Economics, Liberty , , , , ,

Part One: Drying up the tax fountain

I suspect many people have troubling getting a good grasp of the on-going conservative struggle to prevent large-scale takeover of the economy by the federal government. I think there are two main obstacles to their understanding.

First, the idea of the virtuousness of the market as a regulator and organizer of economic life is difficult to communicate. It’s an abstract idea and it does not correspond well to people’s own experience. In their personal life, people think that when good things happen it’s a because someone (some one) made good decisions. First, it’s Mom, and then, it’s the “leadership” of the many organizations within which they live, schools, churches and especially employing organizations. To an extent, the one is themselves.

In daily life, there are few occasions to reflect upon the fact that the myriad decisions made by anonymous decision-makers, including bad decisions, aggregate into good outcomes. The market processes involved are both too magical-seeming and too abstract.

At any rate, for some reason, schools and universities do a bad job of explaining these processes. Liberal Arts teachers don’t understand them themselves and they are hostile to them. Most of them are born socialists. If you eat the King’s bread long enough, you become a monarchist.  Continue reading →

I Have Been Summoned (Poll!)

henrymoore Law, Liberty , , , ,

So I have Jury Duty tomorrow morning. Early. I don’t know any of the details of the trial. I’ve been dreading it all week long but have gradually come to accept that there is no way out of it (or at least out of showing up the first day) so I might as well make the most of it. The problem is I don’t know what to expect. Will the lawyers cross examine me first? Or did that form I filled out a few months back suffice to make me a good juror (this is Montana after all, I’m sure we don’t have big-city standards)? I don’t think the form contained enough information about me for the prosecuting and defense teams to decide I am a good juror.  So I am inclined to think that there will be additional questioning. And if so, that would be my ticket out of it because if just one team of attorneys thinks that I would make a decisive, respectable, impartial juror, the court will probably dismiss me. And I would likely never be summoned again. To be honest, I don’t think I would make a “good” juror because I don’t like authority all that much. Not cops. Not judges. Not elected officials. And I absolutely loathe lawyers with rare exception. If they ask my opinion about any of of these things should I tell them or hold back?

Should I be honest (assuming they ask me the right kinds of questions) and tell them I think their courtroom — no, their entire system — is running a racket? This would basically be the cowardly way to reclaim my rights to my own person because they can’t do anything to you for expressing an opinion. The less cowardly way would be to refuse to show up, but that could put me in a world of trouble since all commands handed down by the state are in essence backed by the barrel of a gun. Talk about judicial fiat! (Pardon the monetary lingo.) Continue reading →

Global Warming: Be Skeptical

Warren Gibson Current Events, Liberty

I have been teaching advanced high school physics as a substitute teacher recently and enjoying it very much. But I was disturbed by what I saw in the text chapter entitled “Waves, Light and Climate Change.”

First of all, I don’t think a discussion of climate change belongs in an introductory chapter on light and its wave properties. Elementary texts should stick to firmly established science and mention complex, controversial issues as footnotes if at all. The authors thought otherwise – not only did they tack this topic onto the light/wave chapter, they headed the chapter with this alarmist quote:

Quite simply, I think it is no exaggeration to say that climate change is the biggest problem our civilization has ever had to face up to in its 12,000 years, because it requires a collective response.

What does “collective response” mean? Such bland phrases often translate into coercive wealth grabs by politicians. More importantly, the notion that human activity is having or will have a significant deleterious affect on our environment, which is what “climate change” means these days, is not firmly established at all in my view. (I have no expertise in climatology.)

There is a spectrum of viewpoints on global warming, ranging from outright denial at one extreme to hysteria on the other. Neither position is defensible. At one extreme, I was very disappointed to hear Ron Paul, a long-time hero of mine, describe global warming as a massive hoax. It’s not. The other extreme is represented by quotes like this, one of many printed in the margins of the physics text:

We are playing Russian Roulette with our climate … the Earth’s climate system is an angry beast subject to unpredictable responses …

Some facts that are not in dispute:

  1. There are “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere that block some of the re-radiation of solar energy; that is, light that bounces off the earth’s surface and would otherwise escape into space. This blockage increases atmospheric temperature, other things being equal. Without any greenhouse gases, so much solar energy would be re-radiated that we would freeze to death.
  2. The primary greenhouse gases, in order of their importance are H2O (water vapor), CO2 (carbon dioxide), CH4 (methane) and N2O (nitrous oxide).  Water vapor is self limiting – when its concentration reaches saturation, it rains. So there is no point in to trying to reduce atmospheric water vapor concentration. So if global warming is significant and we want to do something about atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, we have to concentrate on CO2.
  3. It is a fact that concentrations of CO2 have increased substantially, from about 280 parts per million in pre-industrial times to about 380 at present. Most of this increase can be attributed to burning of fuels.
  4. The arctic ice sheet has exhibited marked melting in recent years. But some reports have ice increasing in the antarctic.
  5. Solar flares are a major driver of climate change on earth.

Now it gets murky. To begin with, it is very difficult to generate a meaningful average temperature for the entire earth. Temperatures vary widely from place to place and from time to time. Therefore extreme care must be taken in aggregating and interpreting temperature data.

Secondly, computer modeling is a very tricky business. I know; for many years I did computer modeling of systems far simpler that the entire earth’s atmosphere, and there are lots of pitfalls, notwithstanding the sophistication of contemporary methods. In finite element analysis or computational fluid dynamics the analyst lays an imaginary gridwork over the system in question, with independent variables like temperature and pressure at each node point. He makes simplifying assumptions about the behavior of variables between grid points and may end up with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous equations to be solved repeatedly as the virtual clock is stepped forward in time. If the grid is too coarse or the time steps are too large or the assumptions too gross or the starting conditions are inaccurate or the integration algorithms are not robust or the software has bugs – the whole undertaking can go haywire.

Third, increases in temperatures or sea levels must be put in perspective. A small amount of warming – one or two degrees C – would be a benign outcome for almost all of us – perhaps reduced heating costs or shifts in agricultural production. A one foot increase in sea level would be trivial almost everywhere.

But what about the strange weather we’ve been having? Given the media propensity for focusing on disasters, it’s no wonder it seems that way but hurricane intensity, for example, compares with that of past seasons. Recent weather isn’t particularly strange.

We need to think through all sorts of approaches, including geo-engineering, and conduct cost/benefit analyses for each. The end goal – human welfare – must always be kept in sight. I highly recommend Bjørn Lomborg’s thoughtful book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” Lomborg is a careful scientist who acknowledges the reality of global warming and pleads for careful examination of all plausible approaches.

Lastly, we must realize that this is a global problem. Anything the U.S. might do to reduce CO2 emissions would be dwarfed by increased CO2 emissions in China, where automobile ownership is surging and new coal-fired power plants are being built. Certainly California’s program, which went into effect this year, will have no noticeable effect on global concentrations, unless it sets an example that the Chinese decide to follow. Even if they do, cap-and-trade schemes such as California’s may not work out as theory says they should. Such has been the record in Europe.

Taking Guns by Executive Order

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , ,

I wrote recently about one of the American attitudes and set of beliefs about private ownership of firearms. (“Guns” ; “America and Firearms…“).

I need an addendum in view of current developments.

First, I want to confess that I wouldn’t be all that opposed to banning high-capacity magazine guns and rifles that can be turned into the currently illegal assault weapons, if I thought that would be the end of it. Nevertheless, I would never agree to such ban in the current cultural context. That’s because I think American gun-banning organizations are mostly in bad faith.

Let me put it in more clear words: I suspect they lie all the time. They are not merely after my so-called “assault weapon” (already illegal). If I let them have anything, I think, they will be after my duck shotgun next. Then, they will want the handgun that never leaves my house. Then, they will demand that I turn over the b.b. gun (very small-bore compressed-air rifle) that I use to sting marauding raccoons in the ass. (I do this because they insist in defecating en masse under my grape arbor, near where I sit outdoors in the summer. If they learned to shit on the neighbor’s lawn for example, I would let them be.)

To summarize: Gun control advocating organizations are liberals-led organizations. Not all liberals are liars but liberals leaders almost all are liars. That’s in addition to having no respect for the US Constitution. Continue reading →

Religion and Liberty

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty , , ,

I’m not a religious person. I have an unconventional Mormon background but rejected the faith of my parents for a large number of reasons. I’m not hostile to religion, either. At least, I try not to be (it’s hard sometimes!). I’ve seen first-hand what religious organizations can do for humanity. When I was living in a Ghanaian village of no more than 300 people, I had access to no more than two hospitals in the village. One was run by the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the other I cannot remember (the SDA hospital was closer). It was most likely a Catholic one. Religious organizations representing Islam, Judaism, Christianity and even Buddhism were ever-present in Ghana, and they all provided much-needed skills and supplies to that magnificently socialist state.

I attribute my atheism and my libertarianism to my skeptical nature. If you can prove to me that God does indeed exist, or that paternalism is good for me and my fellow man, then I will turn on a dime. I don’t know very much about anything, after all.

Anyway, religion has been under attack in the West since the Enlightenment. There are both good and bad reasons for this. One of the best reasons is that religious authorities often burned dissidents at the stake for opposing their claims to authority. In much of the world today, especially in some Muslim regions, non-believers are subjected to stonings, beheadings, and torture when the authority of the ecclesiastical class is challenged. However, in today’s Western world, the war on religion is a rather petty affair. Most skeptics don’t want to argue about the existence of God, they simply want to denigrate believers at best, and persecute them at worst. Continue reading →

Gold and Money, II

Warren Gibson Economics, Liberty , , , , , ,

Last [blog post], we examined some propositions about gold as money, drawing from theory and history. [In] this [blog post] we ask whether and how gold might once again serve a monetary function.

Money of any sort, commodity-based or not, derives its value in large part from what economists call a “network effect.” Like a fax machine, whose value depends largely on how many other people have fax machines, we value money because other people value it. We feel confident our money will buy us what we need tomorrow. A strong network effect means that something drastic has to happen before people will give up their familiar form of money.

Something drastic was happening when U.S. Rep. Ron Paul’s Gold Commission was set up in 1979. By the time the commission’s report was issued in 1980, inflation had reached alarming levels: The consumer price index was at 14 percent and rising. The prime rate was over 20 percent, and in 1980 silver exploded to $50 an ounce and gold surpassed $800 (about $2,300 in today’s dollars). Bestselling books urged people to buy gold, silver, diamonds, firearms, and rural hideouts.

We now know that inflation was peaking and that the silver price spike was a fluke caused by a failed attempt to corner the silver market. But none of this was apparent at the time, so it was reasonable to wonder whether our monetary system would survive. What did happen, of course, was that the new Fed chairman, Paul Volcker, stepped on the monetary brakes hard enough to break the back of inflation. Two back-to-back recessions resulted but were followed by a long period of recovery in which both inflation and interest rates dropped steadily. The Gold Commission was largely forgotten, though the U.S. Mint did get into the business of producing gold coins in a big way. Continue reading →

Gold, Interest, and Land

Fred Foldvary Current Events, Economics, Liberty , , , ,

Three seemingly unrelated variables are in fact deeply connected. Gold has been the most widely used money, and in a pure free market, gold would most likely come back as the real money. Free-market banking would mostly use money substitutes such as bank notes and bank deposits, but these could be exchanged for gold at a fixed rate. Free banking would combine price stability with money flexibility.

Interest is ultimately based on time preference, the tendency of most people to prefer present-day goods to future goods, due to our limited lifespan and the uncertainty of the future. In a free market, the rate of pure interest would be based on the interplay of savings and borrowing. Interest is not just income and payment, but has a vital job in the market economy. The job of the interest is to equilibrate or make equal the amounts of savings and borrowing. This also equalizes net savings (subtracting borrowing for consumption) and investment. Investment comes from savings, and the job of the interest rate is to make sure that net savings is invested. Continue reading →

Gold and Money

Warren Gibson Current Events, Economics, Liberty , , , , , , ,

Nothing seems to arouse passions—pro and con—quite like suggestions that gold should once again play a role in our money. “Only gold is money,” says one side. “It’s a barbarous relic,” says the other. Let’s turn down the heat a bit and look into some propositions about gold. That should lead us to some reasonable ideas about whether or how gold might return.

Propositions About Gold

Gold has intrinsic value. Actually, nothing has intrinsic value. The value of any good or service resides in the minds of individuals contemplating the benefits they might derive from it. What gold does have is some rather remarkable physical properties that make it very likely that people will continue to value it highly: luster, corrosion resistance, divisibility, malleability, high thermal and electrical conductivity, and a high degree of scarcity. All the gold ever mined would only fill one large swimming pool, and most of that gold is still recoverable.

Only gold is money. Although gold was once used as money, that is no longer the case. Money is whatever is generally accepted as a medium of exchange in a particular historical setting. Right now, government-issued fiat money, unbacked by any commodity, is the only kind of money we find anywhere in the world, with some possible obscure exceptions.

Perhaps people who say this mean that gold is the only form of money that can ensure stability. That’s what future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan thought in 1967, when he wrote “Gold and Economic Freedom” for Ayn Rand’s newsletter. “In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation,” he said. When later asked by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul whether he stood by that article, Greenspan said he did. But he weaseled out by saying a return to gold was unnecessary because central banks had learned to produce the same results gold would produce. Continue reading →