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?

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , ,
  1. Guidelines on writing a philosophy paper (or any kind of paper!)
  2. Sen, Nozick and “Breaking Bad”
  3. On David Graeber’s “bullshit jobs”
  4. Math in Economics: Useful and Over-used
  5. The Problem with Delhi’s Rich Kids
  6. Straussian civil wars: It’s East coast versus West

First World Camping Problems, USDA Tyranny, a Fish Story, and Some Epic Snapshots

henrymoore Liberty , , , , , , , ,

[A slightly updated version of a post that first appeared on The Libertarian Liquidationist]

I went on a 50 mile hike in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness (Montana) the week before last. The trail is called “the Beaten Path”. That doesn’t really mean much. It wasn’t rock climbing or cliff scaling, but it wasn’t far removed at times. Or at least it seemed that way with our heavy backpacks and the average of ten miles we covered each day. Two good friends (from Cheyenne, Wyoming) and I camped below the mountains on Saturday night (August 3rd). A $9 fee and the roads on the way there were still super-crappy. What gives? Wasn’t that supposed to be one of the things governments were good at?

Add to that my $26 fishing license (right in the middle of the year-long season, and just past the height of that season) and we’ve already been taken for 35 Federal Reserve Notes. I understand the need for wise management, but does licensing really solve it (to say nothing of the natural right to catch fish)? I’m not so sure. Charging everybody the same fees for what end up being different costs imposed by them can’t be anything but inefficient. In my case, it incentivizes me to go out and fish more than I otherwise would, imposing more costs, just to make it worth getting the license. Considering that I never catch anything, I have a lot of fishing to squeeze between now and the season’s end.

Just how bad is my fishing? I brought a nice little pole that comes with a cast reel and a fly reel. I stimulated the local economy by purchasing several fancy new lures (having temporarily misplaced my other good ones). What could go wrong? Well, within the first five casts my lure got snagged on a rock at about 6 feet depth. I had to wade out to three feet of depth and alternately jerk and loosen my line from several positions to get it unstuck. Nothing I hadn’t had to do before.

I should have quit while I was ahead. Maybe another five casts later I outdid myself. If it weren’t for the fact that my reel had become loosened from the rod I know it would have been my farthest cast yet. Instead, the entire reel went flying out into the lake and the rest of the line hung up on the rod. Not wanting to lose my reel, I panicked and dove in after it. I figured, “8 feet? This will be a cinch!” After going head first to the bottom (the sun was behind the clouds and I was stirring up the mud, so I couldn’t see it) four or five times I decided it would be best to pull on the line until it was completely unraveled and hope that it was tied to the reel. Luckily it was. I was happy to recover all my gear, but I was soaking wet and the sun wasn’t out. Luckily no one witnessed my floundering. No doubt my friends would have gotten a kick out of it.

On my way back to camp, dripping, shivering, holding my tangled line and my dismembered pole I was stopped by some ranger chick (the US Forest Service is an agency of the US Department of Agriculture). Just what I needed. She detained me for about five minutes to ask me where I was from, where I was going, how far away our campfire was from the lake, whether we knew not to burn our soup cans, etc. She was at least nice about it (heck, she didn’t even mention the Glock 40 belonging to my friends’ brother, strapped to my belt, or ask to see my fishing license) and eventually realized how uncomfortable I was and said she would come to our campsite later to finish her lecture. Which, of course, she did. She had no problem telling us that we were her worst demographic, three young men. Can you imagine a police officer saying that to a black teenager in a large urban area? I’d say that’s profiling, but I digress. She told us she was going to be off for the next two days but when she came back she would be checking up on us. Add to the profiling some harassment. We had yet to be told or to admit that we had broken any “rules” (which, of course, we had). Luckily we managed to evade her the rest of the hike, but we made sure not to have any extra fun lest we incur her wrath.

So I was basically done fishing on the first day unless I wanted to fly-fish or untangle my other line. I did try a little fly-fishing at one lake a few days later but didn’t catch anything. Luckily, four or five gentleman from Chicago (with thick former-Soviet bloc accents) whom we camped near saw I had no luck and offered us some of their surplus. Five fresh trout. Of course, we had to gut them ourselves, but it was worth it. I wrapped them in aluminum foil and seasoned with lemon juice, garlic, dill, black pepper, red pepper, and salt. Then I put them on our grill over our camp fire for 20 minutes. If I swallowed any bones, I didn’t notice. As a courtesy, in the morning we gave them a package of noodles we would have otherwise eaten the night before. Does that qualify more as reciprocal gifting or as barter? I hope for their sake those boys had their Montana fishing licenses (better yet, that they didn’t have them but managed to dodge the rangers), though as out-of-staters it would have cost them an arm and a leg.

We camped again the night we got back down. Another $9. 46 FRNs total. Roads were still pretty bad. No hand sanitizer or lights in the bathroom facilities. Almost no good firewood other than some dead, dried pine boughs and a giant old stump which we put set aflame around 7:30 PM. It took two of us to drag it to the fire and all three of us to lift it into the fire. A lot of the weight came from the few large stones that the root system had wrapped itself around. It was 3:30 AM before I decided to douse the fire. The stump was still there. It was a lot smaller, and in two pieces, but still could have burned another hour or two on its own. My one friend had turned in around 11, the other one was up with me until about 2. I knew if I went to bed as early as they I would be awake, tossing and turning after only a couple hours’ rest. Plus, being a night owl, I couldn’t help it.

I’m not sure what our backpacks weighed, but even a week after we got back (on August 9th), my shoulders were still a little stiff, and even now, two weeks later, my right knee aches when I straighten my leg out. Even with all this, I had a great time.

Relative or Absolute Gains: A Question of Conditional Cooperation

Brandon Christensen Economics , , , ,

From Mastering Space…:

The Harvard political economist Robert Reich […] asked a set of groups of students, investment bankers, professional economists, citizens of the Boston area, and senior State Department officials this question: for the United States which of the two following scenarios is preferable? (1) one in which the US economy grows by 25 per cent over the next ten years, while that of Japan grows by 75 per cent or (2) one in which the US economy grows at 10 per cent while the Japanese economy grows at 10.3 percent (132).

Before I continue, I guess it would be better to ask this question to readers as well. I’ll post the rest of my thoughts later (as well as the answer), but right now I am genuinely curious as to which option NOL’s humble readership would pick.

More Dramatic News on Climate Change

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , ,

I am giving this link as a small public service. I am trying to do my little bit to counter the media swamping, the totalitarian endeavor by climate change proponents. I perceive the bulk of those proponents as totalitarian because they use various devices to silence their opposition. They are forever declaring the subject of the reality of man-made global warming that is also catastrophic closed.

I can hear them salivating about the fantasy of owning their very own gulag (a Russian word; look it up.) They are positively drooling (like me before a nice cheese tray).

I am unable to vouch for the scientific validity of the contents of the article of reference, of course. I am only able to recognize a calm contrarian voice and, in general, I respect the Cato Institute. (For those who don’t know, Cato is conservative, libertarian tendency.)

Racial murder and dereliction of duty by the press

muricaderp Current Events, Links

A collegiate baseball player from Australia by the name of Christopher Lane was recently murdered by three black teenagers in Duncan, Oklahoma. One of these teens, James Edwards, Jr., had previously posted violent, racist language on his Twitter account. According to police, Lane was jogging near his girlfriend’s house in Duncan when Edwards and two accomplices, Michael Jones and Chancey Luna, followed him out of their house and shot him in the back. Edwards and Luna have been charged as adults with first-degree murder, and Jones, their getaway driver, has been charged as an accessory after the fact.

The racial angle to Lane’s murder has become extremely inflammatory, and the police and the media have been slow to face it. Jones has been identified in police and media reports as white. In a strange sense, this is at once true and false; he’s apparently mostly white and part black. Luna and Edwards are indisputably black, and Edwards is fairly dark-skinned. Questions about the precise race of any of these young men, however, are red herrings. Edwards proudly cast his lot with the black underclass, and Luna and Jones joined him in the racially motivated murder of an innocent white man who happened to be in their neighborhood. They were three racists who tried to assuage their festering boredom and grievance by shooting an innocent stranger in the back because he was white and within range. This was by all appearances a racial crime. Even had they somehow brought a dead ringer for John Denver into their gang and used him as an accomplice, the crime would still be a racially motivated murder of a total innocent in cold blood.

There appears to have been at least an incipient campaign by police and media outlets to sanitize the racial angle of this murder.  Early on, at least two Duncan police officials fastidiously described the murder as “random.” According to a commentator at Chateau Heartiste, the CNN website aggressively censored users’ comments about the racial angle of the murder and the subsequent coverup:

I was following the story yesterday on the CNN website. The comments section was going crazy. I’d never seen anything like it. Literally every thirty seconds there were fifty or sixty new comments posted. This went on for hours. And I’d say 90% were SERIOUSLY pissed off white people questioning why CNN hadn’t posted pictures of the perps, why they hadn’t mentioned race, why Obama hadn’t gone on TV to discuss the case, pointing out that these three boys “could be Obama’s sons”, etc. The moderators couldn’t keep up with deleting all the “crime think”. The comment count would go up to 19,000. Then it would be down to 18.000. Then back up to 19.000. And on and on. It was quite a site to behold. The funny thing is that, by the time they’re done, all the comments that will be left will be those calling for more gun control laws. The comments section will have been scrubbed as clean of any mention of race as the original article. Reminds me of the Ministry of Truth in 1984. Anything conflicting with the narrative just ceases to exist.

CNN has since extensively edited its main article about the Lane murder to include discussion of the racial angle. I assume that pressure from readers and scoops from competing independent bloggers persuaded CNN’s editors to provide more honest and thorough coverage. They must have been embarrassed and, more importantly, worried about their company’s viability when they realized that they were losing credibility and their audience to marginal outlets that they normally wouldn’t even conceive of as their competitors. If I’m correct about this, it means that American journalism is healthy, resilient and competitive enough to force even craven and cowardly outlets with huge market shares and ulterior motives to behave responsibly.

Sometimes, that is. CNN is still prone to rampant journalistic corruption and dishonesty. The trouble doesn’t take root when news organizations try to execute blatant snow jobs on major news stories; it takes root when they execute subtle snow jobs on relatively minor stories. In other words, most of the time.

And who are these marginal players that scoop big outlets like CNN? You probably don’t want to know. CNN can be disingenuous and slippery, but it has the decency–the responsibility, really–not to aggressively traffic slurs about “orcs,” “pavement apes,” “uruk-hais,” and “mudsharking.” I assume that Chateau Heartiste is not operating at the lower bound of this kind of racial incitement, either; it is only incidentally a racist site, not a dedicated white supremacist organ like Stormfront. Even so, it is all too reminiscent of Radio Mille Collines on the eve of the Rwandan genocide; it’s much closer to Georges Riggiu than to George Wallace, who merely demanded that the races live separately, and did so with much more restrained public language.

If the rabid peanut galleries on these sites are just loners masturbating to revenge fantasies in their parents’ basements, perhaps no harm will come of the inflammatory language. My concern is that some of them weapons, military training, sympathetic military or police contacts, and the physical fitness and organizational acumen to act on their hatred. It is not safe to assume that they’re all a bunch of goosestepping potbellied clowns like the most ridiculous “citizen militias” of the 1990’s. We forget at our peril that Timothy McVeigh ran in those circles, too.

If this racist constituency can’t get honest, responsible news about racial violence from mainstream outlets, it will turn to abettors of communal bloodletting. Mainstream news organizations absolutely need to reestablish their credibility and reclaim their audiences from marginal provocateurs who encourage their peanut gallery proxies to call for genocide.

From the Comments: American Politics without the Romance

Brandon Christensen Comments, Politics , , , , ,

Longtime reader (and prolific blogger in his own right) –Rick riffs off of the Obama administration’s latest attempt to flaunt the rule of law:

Many of the tactics being used by Democrats and President Obama, today, derive from past tactics approved by Republican majorities and Republican Presidents who sought to avoid the difficult role of governing properly by seeking work around exceptions to the Constitution by reassigning or allowing the usurpation of powers between branches or though Constitutional amendments on requirements that stood as roadblocks.

So, neither party is better or more moral than the other in this regard.

Read the whole thing. Upon second thought, I probably should have titled this post “politics without romance” and just omitted the “American” part of it. In fact, you can pretty much use –Rick’s comment to explain every social conflict imaginable if you just make sure that the words ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ are replaceable by any faction and the word ‘Constitution’ is interchangeable with the word ‘power.’

I got the phrase “politics without romance,” by the way, from Nobel laureate James Buchanan.

What Obamacare is Really About

Warren Gibson Liberty ,

The good folks at the Reason Foundation, who have the stomach to follow such things, tell us that the bureaucrats entrusted with implementing Obamacare have missed half their deadlines. Even well-connected consultants, they tell us, remain largely in the dark. And for sure, the general public is totally in the dark and generally suspicious.

This I can predict with confidence: there will be train wrecks but some parts will work well. Some people will be happy and others won’t. Republicans will holler I-told-you-so while Democrats will hail the successes and call for patience while the glitches are fixed. How could it be otherwise? Such a complex piece of legislation, even as it falls way short of Obama’s initial promises, will inevitably stumble into a few successes, if only for the short term.

But does anyone believe the perpetrators of Obamacare didn’t know that? While playing up its seeming successes, feeble as they might be, they will blame its failures on the greedy private sector. A mixed system won’t work, they’ll say, and they’ll be right. (A central theme of the great Ludwig von Mises was the instability of a mixed economy.) They will then trumpet the slogan they’ve kept under wraps for some years: single payer!

Single payer, of course, means total government seizure of the health care sector. Having already achieved near total control of the education and financial industries and a heavy grip on energy, they will be one step further along the road to their real goal: the extinguishment of the last of our freedom and prosperity and the establishment of total fascist dictatorship. That’s what Obama, Hillary, et. al. are really after, folks.

Jean Bethke Elshtain: 1941-2013

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , ,

Prominent international relations theorist (and hawk) Jean Bethke Elshtain has died. She is most famous for bringing gender into the field of international relations and for being an ardent hawk in the post-9/11 world.

I came across her work when she had a spat with philosopher David Gordon over at the Mises Review. You can read most of the exchange here, and then pick up the trail from there if you wish.

A Problem with Political Authority

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Politics , , , , , ,

As a libertarian with deep anarchist leanings, I have plenty of problems with political authority myself. Nevertheless, I find the society in which I live to be libertarian enough, and that any deviation from the rules and procedures in place can be considered to be a threat to my freedom. With this being said, the Wall Street Journal has a great editorial out on the Obama administration’s increasingly authoritarian and cavalier approach to the political process. What I like best about this editorial is that it focuses on one of the Obama administration’s less well-known attempts at consolidating power: that of granting regulators powers that they don’t actually have. Observe:

In re: Aiken County is another episode in the political soap opera about spent-fuel storage at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, an Energy Department project that requires the approval of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission […] Yucca has since been infamously stop-and-go amid opposition from the green lobby and not-in-my-backyard Nevadans and Californians. This particular application was submitted to the NRC in June 2008.

Mr. Obama promised to kill Yucca as a candidate and the Energy Department tried to yank the license application after his election. But an NRC safety board made up of administrative judges ruled unanimously that this was illegal unless Congress passed a law authorizing it. Mr. Obama then teamed up with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to stack the NRC with anti-Yucca appointees.

Although Congress appropriated money to conduct the review, the NRC flat-out refused, in violation of the three-year statutory deadline.

The explanation continues:

A federal court is stating, overtly, that federal regulators are behaving as if they are a law unto themselves. Judge A. Raymond Randolph notes in a concurrence that former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who has since resigned, “orchestrated a systematic campaign of noncompliance.” If Mr. Jaczko worked on Wall Street he’d be indicted.

Judge Kavanaugh then offers some remedial legal education in “basic constitutional principles” for the President who used to be a constitutional law professor. Under Article II and Supreme Court precedents, the President must enforce mandates when Congress appropriates money, as well as abide by prohibitions. If he objects on constitutional grounds, he may decline to enforce a statute until the case is adjudicated in the courts. “But the President may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections,” writes the court.

That is especially notable given that ObamaCare’s employer-insurance requirement and other provisions are precisely such unambiguous statutory mandates, with hard start dates […] All of this highlights that Mr. Obama is not merely redefining this or that statute as he goes but also the architecture of the U.S. political system.

Indeed. Dr Delacroix has suspected the Obama administration of authoritarianism from the beginning, and it looks as if time has proved him right (which is a good thing for him, given his penchant for missing the mark in foreign affairs). Stay tuned. This blog is just warming up.

Legitimizing Terrorism in Egypt

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , ,

Mr Morsi is president of Egypt through valid and hotly contested elections. I don’t like his Islamic Brotherhood. I like even less his extremists Salafist allies. There is almost nothing to like about that crowd.

There is every reason to dislike Morsi and his coalitions. Reasons include: they would end up stopping the pretense of separation of religion from government in their large Arab country; eventually, they would implement a severe downgrading of the status of women; immediately, Morsi’s followers are venting their rage brutally persecuting Egypt’s remaining minority:the native Coptic Christians.

As I write, at least 500 of Mr Morsi’s followers have been killed in the streets by the Egyptian police and by the Egyptian army. That’s the same army that was displaced through a popular revolution only two and a half years ago. A couple of weeks ago, that army staged a coup to overthrow the properly elected government of Egypt. The Obama administration declined to call it a coup although everyone in the world knew that it was a coup. That was another way Mr Obama reconciled America with the World in general and with the Arab World in particular; through shameless lying, through a lie so gross there is zero chance anyone will believe it.

The army coup was triggered, encouraged, applauded by my natural buddies: The Egyptians – mostly urban, I guess – who are secular, and the many moderate Muslims who do not aspire to a religion-ridden government. My natural friends couldn’t resist the temptation: Take the easy way, ask the armed forces to do what they did in Egypt for forty years: Be the government, supplant the will of the people as expressed through proper elections.

The latest military coup achieves two things:

First, it will stand as a sort of proof that Arabs do not really want a democracy or that they are unable to sustain democracy. The reasoning will go like this: If democratic habits cannot take place in Egypt, a country with a long deeply rooted tradition of secularism, where will it?

Second, the current massacres in the streets of unarmed (or almost completely unarmed )civilians are planting the seeds of fifty years of future rage. Rank-and-file Islamists will have the right to say, “We tried their democracy; it was only a trap to defeat us, to make us cower in fear of our lives, of our children’s lives. We now know that only the fear of us will bring the kind of society we want.”

The current repression in Egypt sounds like a declaration of legitimacy for terrorism.

Now, I know that elections, even fair elections – such as the elections that brought Pres. Morsi to power do not, in and of themselves, constitute democracy. Other institutions matter, some matter more. It would be easy to convince me that the rule of law, for example, is more important than elections. Yet, if you love democracy, if you hate authoritarianism, close your eyes and ask yourself which side is acting heroically in Egypt today. Is it the narrow-minded, bigoted obscurantist religious party that was removed militarily, or is it those who have clamored for and obtained another twenty or thirty years of military dictatorship for their country?