Barack Obama

Unequal Pay: For Women Only – Part Two (There really is a Part One.)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

Editor’s note: this old essay by Dr Delacroix might be worth reading in tandem with this article. It’s titled “Sasquatch and Liberal Academe.”

I agreed in Part One of this essay that there may be a small average pay difference of five percentage points between employed American women and men. It’s possible that even after you take into account all the facts mentioned before, lower education, less seniority, lesser presence in well paid industries, women, on the average, earn 95 cents on men’s one dollar. (That’s also on the average.) I agreed that this may be evidence of discrimination against women in the work place. But is it the obvious explanation? Is it the only explanation? Is it even credible at all?

There is a reason this is an essay for women only. I want to help you evoke forbidden topics, topics never or rarely approached in the social sciences or in the newspapers. It’s time to muster everything you know about your sisters, ladies; we are going into taboo territory!

I am not a woman myself but I have had occasion in my 30-year teaching career to observe hundreds of women. I have also observed women in various workplaces in two countries. What follows is not (NOT) supported by any study.* It’s a thinking exercise about what I suspect you know. See if it jibes.

Female students obtain better grades than male students in college. However, they don’t get to good grades the same way. Males take more risks, on the average. In my observation, for example, they are many times more likely to wing it than their female fellow students. In general (on the average), males are more forceful, much more likely than women to demand their due (even when nothing is due to them at all).

If you don’t ask for a raise, often, you don’t get one. If you are timid about organizing, you will earn less than those who are well represented by unions. Is it possible that women, on the average…. (Finish the sentence) and that this would account for the remaining possible five percentage pay differential between women workers and their male counterparts. Is it possible?

I have personally seen a few cases of discrimination against women workers. They consisted in creating work conditions that would make it difficult for the targeted employee to produce a work performance that would make raises likely. (Poisoning the water.) As I said, I have only seen a few cases perhaps fewer than ten. Every single time, the discriminator was a female supervisor. Perhaps, my limited experience is atypical. Or is it? What do you think? Do women in positions of power ever persecute other women? Often? Seldom? Never?

Now, I want to talk briefly about productivity in a manner that is especially proscribed in polite society. I think I have observed hundreds of time that women in a group with an assigned task spend large amounts of time in activities that seem unrelated to the task. Women tend to socialize at length where it’s not called for. The socialization often includes plotting against one another and excluding some. Perhaps the socializing is a kind of disarmament conference without which work cannot even proceed. Again, those are a subjective observations possibly based on women who are somehow different, not representative, different from the average. What do you think?

Here is what I observed when teaching, specifically. Most of what follows is based on teaching the same, clearly elite class every winter for 22 years. The classes were small and they involved important group projects. The projects were done mostly in class. The sample these 22 classes give us is obviously biased, unrepresentative. It’s biased because it was composed of students markedly superior to the run-of-the-mill student. The women in that class were probably more productive than most female undergraduates (and than most male undergraduates as well).

Here is what I saw: Insofar as it’s observable, groups of males engaged in a collective task, achieved the same results as women with considerably less time expenditure than women. It’s as if a straight A cost guys three hours, and women nine hours. (Those numbers are subjective, of course. I am holding myself back; I wouldn’t be surprised if the gap in time investment were wider.)

Is it possible that my observation is not in some way nullified by bias? Is it possible that what I think I have observed in connection with the time cost of doing something is somehow related to the earlier observation that women tend to socialize when doing so does not appear to contribute to the accomplishment of the task ? You decide.

My informal observations are surely not (NOT) equivalent to a formal, rigorous study. This does not mean that I should keep quiet about them. If they don’t ring a bell with your experience, ignore them. If they do, maybe it’s worth thinking about alternative explanations to the widespread belief in the general existence of uncalled for, arbitrary discrimination against female workers. Keep in mind that, at this point, we are talking about a five percentage point differential; we are considering 95 cents on the dollar, not the president’s 77 cents.

Now, let me switch angles of vision a little bit. The actual, residual difference between women’s and men’s remunerations after you have accounted for the obvious factor, (Part One of this essay.) is so imprecise that it leaves open the possibility that women earn more than men in the same jobs.** Again, I am frankly wading into the subjective and I am inviting you to wade in with me.

During thirty years of teaching, there were about ten times when I fielded female students’ complaints that they were discriminated against in some fashion just for being female. That was always in my role as an adviser rather than as a classroom teacher.

Every time, I would ask the complaining student if it were not possible that she was angry because her male counterparts seemed to be getting grades they did not deserve according to her judgment. I will let you guess what answers I received to this particular query.

Then, I would look the student straight in the eyes and I would propose the following hypothetical:

Suppose you are completely right, suppose the instructor discriminated against you simply for being female, let me ask you: Has it ever happened in your whole life that you got an undeserved pass just because you were a girl?

I did not have the presence of mind to keep exact tabs, of course, but I can’t remember a single time when the conversation did not dissolve into a smile!

Adding subjectivity to subjectivity, doing it consciously, I would guess that male instructors by and large prefer female students. They are less likely than males to be grossly disruptive; they are nicer; they are more polite; they smell better. (It matters in a room of forty in June.) Female students also often flirt with the teacher in unconsciously charming ways. (Disclosure: I am married to a former student.)

Would these behaviors tend to cause male instructors to treat female students negatively? Women instructors?

Maybe this is all my own private self-delusion. Maybe this preference for women employees does not exist in the workplace, as a far as male supervisors and male decision makers are concerned. Or maybe, I am not that deluded, or maybe males in positions of power have a built-in preference for female subordinates as much as they do for female students. How surprising would that be?

Take my case, for example: My mother was a woman, my daughter is a woman, my granddaughter is female, my sisters are female. They all love me, without exception. I addition, I am married to a woman. She cooks for me, very well, almost every day; she does my laundry (even when I don’t want her to); I talk with her more than I do with anyone else on earth. When times are tough, she is always, every single time, in my corner. I don’t want to get X-rated but it’s also true that 100% of my sexual satisfaction, in my whole life, was somehow connected to women. (Like many California men, I also have an ex-wife somewhere but she does not cause me any grief. I am lucky; she just moved on instead of exacting a just revenge.)

Is my experience different from that of most or all men? Did they have male mothers? Were their sisters guys? Are they all married to other men who love them and spoil them? Is a very high percentage homoerotic? You see my point.

Is it possible also that a lifetime bath of estrogen predisposed me to a positive bias toward women or, is it more likely that all these good treatment left me prejudiced to the point where….

…to the point where I would take care- with someone else’s money, most of the time – to pay female employees only 95 cents when I pay their men colleagues a full dollar for the same work?

Or, alternatively, is it possible that my unchecked, unthoughtful, mindless tendency is to treat them better and to pay them more, say, $1.05 to males’ $1.00 ?

When you take a sketch and you take the trouble to draw in all the details, often suddenly, you come to see that you misunderstood or mis-perceived the meaning of the original sketch.

Three big questions to finish.

If the good research (that I did not do) confirmed my speculation that women may earn on the average one dollar and five cents ($1.05) to men’s one dollar would there be big demonstrations to protest the disparity? Would anyone have the nerve to initiate legislation to close the pay gap by force? What do you believe?

Discrimination against women in any way, shape or form has been illegal in this country since 1964. Is there any one who thinks that if legislation has been inoperative for fifty years, unable to correct (alleged) pay discrimination against women, more legislation under a weakened president, imposed on a deeply divided nation will now solve the problem? This is a real question. Please, answer it in your own mind.

And if it were possible to pay women less for equal work, with the same quality of workplace attention, the same performance, the same results, isn’t it true that a rational hiring policy would require discrimination against men? If this were true, all employers would try to limit labor costs by hiring only women until there were no more women available for hiring in the relevant pool. Or is there some magic male solidarity that trumps everything, including business competition and the search for profits?

By the way, the last time I looked, in the USA, women had most of the wealth and most of the votes. (If it’s not true anymore, I don’t worry; someone will surely correct me.) Why don’t women, on the average, use their votes and their financial resources to erase the pay differential, to turn the 77 cents into at least one dollar?

Here is my stake in all this. First, I detest government policy based on lies and on deviousness. Second, my daughter is rearing her own daughter alone. The last thing I want is that my adored granddaughter should be cheated because her mother is being short-changed on her paycheck merely for being a woman. Are other men different? Am I a brilliant and inimitable exception?

Some stories have been told so long and so often that people don’t think of subjecting them to even the slightest of reality checks. The 77 cents on the dollar story does not stand up to scrutiny. It’s a purely political story designed to keep alive an artificial sense of grievance in an important segment of the electorate.

The 77 cents on the dollar story exploits women. It’s insulting.

A good tale to finish, the second funny thing that any feminist ever said:

Ginger Roger was Fred Astaire’s dancing performer for twenty or thirty years. The couple dominated movie screens in the forties and fifties and beyond. Fred was more famous than his partner, Ginger. At one point, irritated by the fuss over her partner, Ginger is said to have declared,

“I did everything Fred did backward and in high heels!”

* Such studies are practically proscribed in academia. If they were not, their findings would be boycotted by major journals. Political correctness reigns where it shouldn’t exist at all. Nevertheless, there are a few brave academic researchers who venture where no one is supposed to tread. Most are women.

** In the early 2000s, black women earned more, on average than black men. The case I pose to you is thus not completely absurd or imaginary. I don’t know if this disparity continued after the crisis beginning in 2008. It does not matter. I just wanted to impress on you that women sometimes earn more than men.

Unequal Pay: For Women Only – Part One.

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

American women who work for wages or a salary, on the average, earn 77 cents when American men earn one (1) dollar, also on the average.

You have to be careful of averages. They are not naturally vicious but they are often used to deceive. That is, people routinely overestimate themselves and don’t slow down enough to understand what they are seeing and hearing when an average is mentioned.

Here is a little practice exercise: Suppose all women who lack education beyond high school quit work completely. (They might go on welfare or they might find hard working husbands, maybe currently illegal immigrants – Not a bad idea actually, if I say so myself!) If this happened, what would become to the 77 cents on the dollar?

(The answer is several paragraphs below.)

Consider also that “on the average” means, of course, that there are many women who earn more money than many men, women in government, for example. Take the female toll-takers at the Golden Gate Bridge, for example. They earn about $100,000 a year for very low-skill work. They thus earn much more than male cable-television technicians who do things most of us don’t even know enough to think about. (There are female cable technicians of course, but that’s not the point, right now.) That’s compatible with the 77 cents on the dollar figure.

That women earn on the average 77 cents when men earn a full dollar speaks of rampant and rank discrimination against women where it matters most, the workplace. Or does it?

Below are some relevant facts that all of President Obama’s economic employers know. I mean that the facts are so well-known that it’s inconceivable that they don’t know them.

  • Fact: On the average, working women have less education and less seniority than men. That’s on the average.

As it happens levels of pay, in many industries depend largely on seniority (rightly or wrongly). Access to the best paid jobs in a given industry also depends much on level of education. Access to superior and well-paid jobs also often depends on achieving seniority. That’s a double-whammy on low education!

Answer to the question near the beginning of this essay: If women who had no college dropped out of the workforce, female workers would, on the average, suddenly have higher educational achievement. Then, the average pay of women nation-wide would go up. If all the women with no college education dropped out of the workforce, the 77 cents on the dollar would immediately disappear. I don’t know what the resulting number would be; it might be 80 cents on the dollar, or 90 cents on the dollar. What is certain is that it would be a higher, better number.

Repeat: If all the low-skill jobs requiring a modest level of education disappeared all of a sudden, if all the women holding such jobs lost their jobs, the average pay of women, including as compared to me, would immediately go up.

This is not some sort of foggy speculation, it’s an arithmetic certainty.

Similarly, if more women in the workforce had high seniority, the average pay of women nation-wide would also be higher than 77 cents on men’s dollar. Here too, it’s a mathematical certainty although I don’t know by how much the figure would change. This is all by way of remembering what averages mean.

  • Fact: Working women concentrate in economic sectors where wages are historically low.

That’s low wages for both men and women. Sometimes, there are no understandable reason why pay is low in such sectors. Often it’s a sort of historical accident connected with an early union activity in those sectors of the economy. Sometimes there are good direct reasons for the high pay in sectors where women are rare. Blue collar work on oil platforms and commercial fishing are both examples of activities where few women are found. They are also dangerous activities. They are also physically strenuous activities. In those two particular sectors, pay is much higher than it is say, in the health industries, or in retail where many women areemloyed. This means that both men and women employed in fishing and on oil, platforms earn more money than either men or women in many other industries.

The average lower pay of women nationally is at least in part the result of their low participation in these highly paid industries. If there were equal numbers of women in those high-pay sectors as there are men, the national average pay of women would be higher than 77 cents on men’s dollar.

  • Fact: Among those who work forty hours a week or more (“full time”), men work much longer hours than women on the average.

It’s often the case that, other things being equal, those who work longer hours earn more money than those who work shorter hours. They earn more for the total number of hours they work. (They may also be promoted faster but that’s not my point here; one thing at a time.) Incidentally, this is true both for base workers, such as assembly line workers and sales associates, and for so-called “exempt personnel,” personnel in supervisory and management positions. The mechanisms are different, union rules, formal pay scales and government-mandated requirements (think overtime pay), in one case, alleged “merit pay,” on the other. The results are similar: Work more; earn more.

Women earn less money than men on the average than men because they spend less time at work than men do.

Now, close your eyes and let me describe two imaginary workers. One has 25 years of seniority and three years of post-high school education. The same worker is employed in mining. Over the course of a year, this worker puts in 46 hours a week on average.

The second worker has one year of junior college and has been on the same job for eight years. That worker’s occupation is in one of the health industries. Calculated over one year, this second worker puts in 40 hours plus twenty minutes a week on average.

Now, keep your eyes closed and forbid yourself from stereotyping. You don’t know the sex of either imaginary worker. Keep in mind that they may well be of the same sex, for example (for example). One or the other, or something else…

Which of the two fully employed workers do you think earns the most money in one year in actuality?

Which do you think should earn the most money according to your own standard of fairness?

You get my drift?

It turns out that when studies compensate for these important factors, American women’s remunerations are about the same as men’s. That’s still on the average. I wouldn’t be too surprised if you could find a female fisherman with 25 years seniority and a doctorate who earns less money than her husband, a high school dropout who works in a candle shop. The relevant numbers are simply too small to affect comparisons of national averages.

Yes, women earn less than men but it’s not a case of unequal pay for equal work. It’s a case of unequal pay for unequal work.
It’s worth asking why women would heap upon themselves so many of the factors that result in comparatively low pay? I mean low education, low seniority, and working in less generously paying sectors.

You probably have your own hypotheses (plural) about why this is. Let me help with an additional fact:

  • Fact: Women who are not married, have never been married, and have no children earn as much as men. Are you really surprised?

Many other studies confirm what we all already know: Women are the primary caretakers of both home and children by a long, long shot.

The care of children interferes vigorously with women’s ability to reach for higher paid jobs, and with their attention to their paid work, and to their ability to work long hours. It’s that simple.

Women workers fail to accumulate seniority because they quit working earlier and more frequently than men. They tend to move in and out of the workforce; that’s inimical to the accumulation of seniority, of course.

Women workers have less education than men workers, on the average, for slightly (only slightly) more complex reasons. At the lower end of the pay-scale women who work outside the home are not equivalent to men workers in general. For one thing, many low-paid working women, and increasing numbers of them, are single women raising their children alone. But we know that women with lower educational status are more likely to find themselves in that situation than women with more formal education.

Married women with children have on the average, more education than single women with children. Such married women are less likely to be in the workforce at all . Instead, their husbands are. Their husbands’ higher education and seniority enter into the national statistics. Their non-working wives’ also high numbers don’t because they are not in the labor force, precisely.

If all married women joined the labor force, the gap in education between employed men and employed women on average would shrink. It might even vanish altogether.

That would raise women’s average pay nation-wide, although the fate of poor ly educated, low seniority, women employed in badly paying sectors would not improve one bit.

If all married women joined the labor force and stayed in it, employed women’s seniority would equal men’s after a while. That would raise women’s average pay nation-wide.

The pay of women with low seniority would….
(Complete the sentence; this is a test!)

Conclusions:

Those who claim the 77 cents on the dollar figure are comparing apples and oranges.

Those in government who do this know the facts. Why are they doing it?

Now, once you have taken account all facts above, the things we already know about different ways in which women and men deal with work, women on the average still earn a little less than men. The difference is much smaller than the difference between 77 and 100 (77 cents and one dollar). Nevertheless, as I write, I think it’s possible to argue that this small difference – maybe something like 5 percentage points – proves some degree of pay discrimination against women.

By the way, I don’t play down at all this kind of pay differential. If you gross $30,000/year, 5% more would be $1,500. Even with standard deductions, that’s a round-trip ticket to someplace, even someplace interesting.

In Part Two of this essay, I will leave the domain of what’s well know, of what the president ought to know, and I will take you with me on a trip of honest, frank speculations about women’s work.

Don’t forget to come back. The best portion is yet to come!

Tech. note: Anyone is welcome to challenge any of the assertions above. Here are the rules I play by: I you give me a general reading assignment, I won’t do it. It’s too easy to waste someone’s time on a wild goose chase. If you don’t bother to say, “Read this because it shows ‘this assertion of yours…’ to be false ,” don’t expect me to make the effort either. Also, evidence that does not come from a respected refereed journal is unlikely to make much of an impression on me.

A very illuminating comment over on Reddit.com

Adam Magoon Current Events, Liberty , , , , , , , ,

User “Three_Letter_Agency” put the current NSA issue in very clear focus today with the following:

We know the NSA and their UK buddy GHCQ can:

  • Collect the domestic meta-data of both parties in a phone-call. Source[1]
  • Set up fake internet cafes to steal data. Source[2]
  • Has intercepted the phone calls of at least 35 world leaders, including allies such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Source[3]
  • Can tap into the underwater fiber-optic cables that carry a majority of the world’s internet traffic. Source[4]
  • Tracks communications within media institutions such as Al Jazeera. Source[5]
  • Has ‘bugged’ the United Nations headquarters. Source[6]
  • Has set up a financial database to track international banking and credit card transactions. Source[7]
  • Collects and stores over 200 million domestic and foreign text messages each day. Source[8]
  • Collects and has real-time access to browsing history, email, and social media activity. To gain access, an analyst simply needs to fill out an on-screen form with a broad justification for the search that is not reviewed by any court or NSA personnel. Source[9]

“I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”. – Edward Snowden

  • Creates maps of the social networks of United States citizens. Source[10]
  • Has access to smartphone app data. Source[11]
  • Uses spies in embassies to collect data, often by setting up ‘listening stations’ on the roofs of buildings.Source[12]
  • Uses fake LinkedIn profiles and other doctored web pages to secretly install surveillance software in unwitting companies and individuals. Source[13]
  • Tracks reservations at upscale hotels. Source[14]
  • Has intercepted the talking-points of world leaders before meetings with Barack Obama. Source[15]
  • Can crack encryption codes on cellphones. Source[16]
  • Has implanted software on over 100,000 computers worldwide allowing them to hack data without internet connection, using radio waves. Source[17]
  • Has access to computers through fake wireless connections. Source[18]
  • Monitors communications in online games such as World of Warcraft. Source[19]
  • Intercepts shipping deliveries and install back-door devices allowing access. Source[20]
  • Has direct access to the data centers of Google, Yahoo and other major companies. Source[21]
  • Covertly and overtly infiltrate United States and foreign IT industries to weaken or gain access to encryption, often by collaborating with software companies and internet service providers themselves. They are also, according to an internal document, “responsible for identifying, recruiting and running covert agents in the global telecommunications industry.” Source[22]
  • The use of “honey traps”, luring targets into compromising positions using sex. Source[23]
  • The sharing of raw intelligence data with Israel. Only official U.S. communications are affected, and there are no legal limits on the use of the data from Israel. Source[24]
  • Spies on porn habits of activists to discredit them. Source[25]

Possibly the most shocking revelation was made on February 24, 2014. Internal documents show that the security state is attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with “extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction.” The documents revealed a top-secret unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Unit, or JTRIG. Two of the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in an effort to discredit a target, and to use social sciences such as psychology to manipulate online discourse and activism in order to generate a desirable outcome. The unit posts false information on the internet and falsely attributes it to someone else, pretend to be a ‘victim’ of a target they want to discredit, and posts negative information on various forums. In some instances, to discredit a target, JTRIG sends out ‘false flag’ emails to family and friends.

A revealing slide from the JTRIG presentation.[26]  

Read the whole JTRIG presentation by Greenwald, just do it. Here[27]

Now, consider the words of former NSA employee turned whistleblower Russ Tice:

“Okay. They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial.

But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials.

They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House–their own people. They went after antiwar groups. They went after U.S. international–U.S. companies that that do international business, you know, business around the world. They went after U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business. They went after NGOs that–like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups.

So, you know, don’t tell me that there’s no abuse, because I’ve had this stuff in my hand and looked at it. And in some cases, I literally was involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. And you know, when I said to [former MSNBC show host Keith] Olbermann, I said, my particular thing is high tech and you know, what’s going on is the other thing, which is the dragnet. The dragnet is what Mark Klein is talking about, the terrestrial dragnet. Well my specialty is outer space. I deal with satellites, and everything that goes in and out of space. I did my spying via space. So that’s how I found out about this… And remember we talked about that before, that I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on.

Now here’s the big one. I haven’t given you any names. This was is summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with, with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator from Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It’s a big white house in Washington, DC. That’s who they went after. And that’s the president of the United States now.” Russ Tice, NSA Whistleblower

Chilling.

The Internet Needs a Multitude of Firm Guiding Hands Like I Need….

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , ,

The Internet is an American invention depending on a specifically American vision of society. It was built with American seed money. It represents the best about the way we used to do things: Tell the folks what you want; spring a little money on them; most of it produces nothing; some of it turns out to be the very best investment of the century, perhaps even the best investment in history. Let it run itself as much as possible. Refrain from giving it a captain.

Other countries are utterly incapable of doing anything like this. How do I know? None but one even tried, France. Its government-managed (Post Office owned) Minitel was even accessible to the general public earlier than the Internet. The French closed it about two years ago. It had ceased to serve any purpose side-by-side with the Internet. That was as clear a case of competition between two ways of doing things as might be devised in a real scientific experiment.

The French Minitel (which I used) did good service for many years as an electronic phone book and address finder and it housed a prodigious amount of porn. I almost forgot: It was also a prime venue for prostitutional dates. In spite of these attractions, it was to the Internet as Wisconsin blue cheese is to real, cave-aged French Roquefort (not the stuff they put on your salad, the $26/lb stuff). The main fault in this comparison, of course, is that American cheese makers can only improve their act. Non-Americans are not going to catch up on items such as the Internet because they lack the vision thing.

Other countries claim that they have a right to co-manage the Internet because their citizens use it. That’s it! So, if I clear a path in the bushes for my own use and I let the nice guy next door use it, and also the child molester two houses down, it’s not my path anymore?

Note that this sharing in the name of the often-poisonous concept of sovereignty need not happen, even by their own argument. Other countries’ governments can always block it if they wish. They can and do occasionally deny access to their citizens and take the blow-back. In many countries, the blow-back is also indirectly a blow for freedom.

Letting other countries have a say over the management of the Internet is likely to produce no improvement that I can think of. (But I keep an open mind; please, instruct me.) It’s extremely likely to facilitate despotism in many countries. Try a mental experiment: What’s Vladimir Putin, or the Chinese Mafia masquerading as people’s party going to contribute? The tyrants simply want to do their best to close the windows that let in any fresh air at all.

In other parts of the world, the desire for partial control of the Internet is motivated by cultural jealousy. That would be the case in France, in Spain and in much of Latin America, also to an extent, in China. But governments in those countries don’t need more power over the Internet to combat their citizens’ regrettable proclivity to listen to American music and to buy primarily tickets for American movies (in spite of prodigious government subsidies for the national cinema in France and in Spain). They already have full power to put anything they want on the Internet. I mean loads of bad French movies, even erotic movies where the naked women are pointedly vaguely repulsive. (See my piece “French Movies, Sex, and the Welfare State” [and also “Can Protectionism Ever Be Respectable?” (pdf) in the Independent Review – bc]). The Spaniards are free to place on the Net four or five Spanish-made movies each year and even to try and charge admission. And the government of the so-called “People”, so called “Republic ” of China is always welcome to transmit live on its blog the full sessions of the Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party, for the pleasure of all.

There are plenty of ways with the existing Internet arrangements to combat the poison of American Cultural Imperialism. Best of luck to them. (For God’s sake, with a handful of major exceptions, even our disasters are better than theirs!)

You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of countries where moderate government involvement and decentralization are understood by any significant fraction of the populace. Others don’t know how to do anything decentralized, won’t know for years or centuries.

The worst case scenario is also the most likely, I think: Following the Obama administration’s capitulation, the Internet will end up being “managed” by a UN-like international body run by faceless, brain-dead bureaucrats.

What bothers me in yet this other American retreat at the hands of the Obama administration is its sheer mindlessness, its obvious abandonment of common sense. Contrary to may other conservatives, I don’t think Mr Obama is evil. He is acting pretty much as you would expect from a man who had never accomplished anything in his life before becoming president. I said this during his first campaign in 2008 (but I am too lazy to look for the relevant link . I said it many other times since, including this one).

It’s not that President Obama is bad or even stupid; the problem is that he is ignorant and lazy, including intellectually lazy. And he and his wife sure like their vacations at public expense.

Yeah, I must be a racist: “lazy” is just another racial stereotype, after all. See if I care!

And I am a little ashamed of the dig about the presidential family vacations. I mean his wife was severely deprived for 250 years; she is only catching up. He was not that deprived himself though. His name indicates a coastal origin among the slaving tribes on his father’s side. On his mother’s side he comes from reformed and moderate hippie stock. Hippie like me.

Ukraine

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , ,

The Russian gangster state is about to take the Ukraine apart as I write.

This is not our fight, I think. There are no big American interests at stake. American lives are not endangered. As I write, there is not big humanitarian crisis (as there is in Syria, and continuing) either.

I hope we  mostly agree in this country that national borders are not sacred. We are not sworn to go to war to have them protected. If the Ukraine becomes two states  or if a part of it becomes incorporated into Russia, that’s alright with me. I hope it happens quickly and with little bloodletting.

The argument that we are on the side of Ukrainian democrats is not very convincing, right now. I just don’t know. I don’t think they know.

The main downside of this crisis, as I see it, is that President Obama was not able to keep his big mouth shut. He just gave another reason for political mafiosi, tin-pot dictators, savage tyrants, and pure fascist states such as Iran and North Korea to consider the US a paper tiger. That is very dangerous. It leads to gambling miscalculations, a la Saddam Hussein.

Obama: “I can do what I want”

Adam Magoon Current Events, History, Law, Liberty, Politics ,

Obama: “I can do what I want”

Let us contrast this to the president that the founding fathers of America intended.   As Alexis de Tocqueville put it in the early 19th century, the president “has but little power, little wealth, and little glory to share among his friends; and his influence in the state is too small for the success or ruin of a faction to depend upon his elevation to power.”

How far we have come…

SOTU: a Masterwork of Co-option.

L. A. Repucci Liberty , , , , , , , , , ,
Sheila Broflovski ‘solves’ the ‘problem’ of ‘obscenity’.

A professor of Political Science at my school described the modern left-right paradigm for the class today — to paraphrase, he summed up the political landscape of the US with the all-too familiar perspective: ‘conservatives want less government, and liberals want more government’.

I opined, silently, in my seat.  Sensing my disapproval, the professor asked if anyone had a differing perspective on the country’s political spectrum.  I raised my hand and pointed out the perspective of this oft-regurgitated axiom of political theory.  rephrased the point: Conservatives want liberty, and Liberals want safety.  When it was suggested by a classmate that I was coloring the axiom to suit my political bent, I defended my choice of language.  This phrasing, I argued, is the happy middle ground between the original, popular formulation that the professor used, and a statement that more closely aligns with my actual opinion: Conservatives want freedom, and Liberals want slavery.

When placed together, these three phrasings of the same observation illustrate the powerful effect nomenclature can have on a statement — and sheds a pinhole of light onto the vastness of the power of language analysis with respect to ideology:

Conservatives want less government, and Liberals want more government.

Conservatives want liberty, and Liberals want safety.

Conservatives want you to be free, and Liberals want you to be a slave. 

The words we chose to use when we frame our thoughts betray our underlying perspective.  Language is the seat of understanding, and can be deconstructed to suggest motivation and perspective.  Analyzing the language used by self-styled ‘progressive liberals’  (forgive the quotes — the term itself is completely removed from cogency as a representation of meaning, as is ‘conservative’.  These two terms as used in modern US politics do not come anywhere near connoting accurate definitions) yields a lexicon that I dub the language of Co-option.  This liberal dictionary is used by a vast majority of the public out of rote; most people do not consider deeply the meaning of the language they use.  Those that speak this dialect knowingly craft the language, and therefore, the thinking, of the larger public who adopts the dialect and spreads the meme and built-in collectivist programming therein.

This Language of Co-option is the language of our classrooms.  It is the language of our politicians.  It is Hegel.  It is Sociology.

Let’s vivisect the following liberal sociological speech pattern:

“X is bad for society.  We should do y so that z happens instead.”

To make the point that much clearer, let’s translate the above formulation into political rhetoric:

“For American families, x is a real problem, so our administration is committed to y policy so that z will result.”

To define our terms:  the value x in this construction represents a ‘problem’ — to be specific, some suggested verifiable disadvantageous phenomena, that would be mitigated by taking y action.  These instances exist; we can plug in some terms for our variables to create cogent statements:  Suffocating is problematic for humans, therefore humans should breathe.  This construction is cogent because human beings need to breathe in order to avoid suffocation, which is indeed, harmful to humans.  However, such statements rarely provide people with new insights, because cause and effect tend to be plainly apparent; most everyone knows that they need to breathe to live.  It seems tedious to think such obvious statements would warrant comment, let alone, say, a State of the Union address.

The power of this statement only manifests when coupled with action — the y variable.  The point of x, of stating an obvious ‘problem’, is merely to gain the agreement of the audience to the y that will follow.  In fact, in political speech, x and y need not have any real connection at all.  This effect has been pointed out by others, including the research of behaviorist Ellen Langer, who’s research suggests merely by adding any explanation to a request one can improve the chance of a ‘yes’ in response.

For example, take this phrase from the State of the Union Address last night:

“There are other steps we can take to help families make ends meet, and few are more effective at reducing inequality and helping families pull themselves up through hard work than the Earned Income Tax Credit.”

to simplify:  “Poverty (x) is a problem for people, and we can fix inequality (z) with the EITC (y).”

Let’s break it down critically.  Poverty is always a problem for a family, as it is averse to survival.  If you don’t eat, you starve — as obvious as the sun shining in the sky.  This statement alone is almost as bereft of importance as ‘nice day, huh?’ or ‘how about those (insert local sports team name)!’ The President must have had a reason to make the comment.  The statement made in this way implies poverty is a fixable problem in society, rather than a product of the human condition or the laws of our natural world.  The first law of the human condition is scarcity; there is never enough of any resource to satisfy demand in any economy.  When coupled with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, any natural system in the universe behaves the same way.  POTUS makes the statement about poverty implying a collective problem that can be solved by some action.

The showstopper for libertarians is usually y.  The solution to the problem offered by the state is ALWAYS aggressive force.  In the above example, that aggression is in the form of extortion — specifically, theft of property through threat of violent action via taxation.  This is stated in a positive light as phrased; the Earned Income Tax Credit is sold to the public as a tax break for some people, but comes at the expense of everyone else.  The fact that your government is extorting less money from some than from others is aptly defined as ‘inequality’, but this obvious truth is distorted and reversed completely with Co-optive language to masquerade as benevolence, yielding the aberration cited.

This construct is the essence of the Hegelian ‘crisis, reaction, solution’, and is a hallmark of Co-optive speech and thought, and permeates our zeitgeist.  Freedom-minded individuals hear this language and know just how ubiquitous it is in society — keep it in mind the next time you hear someone spray about what ‘We’ must ‘do’.  Co-option is built in to the culture and mindset of authoritarianism, and in fact, the democratic process itself as naked tyranny of the supposed majority.

Please, feel free to post your co-optive, authoritarian quotes in response below!

Narrating the Decline from a Classroom Desk,

L.A.Repucci

The State of the Union and the State of our Liberties

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , , , , ,

Nevertheless it is important not to fall into the delusion that President Obama presents the greatest danger to the culture of liberty. A historian looking back a hundred years from now is likely to group the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton presidencies together as an era when the state receded or at least did not grow, as measured by regulatory and fiscal burdens on our lives. But Bush II relentlessly increased domestic spending and created more government involvement in health care with the Medicare D program for prescription drugs. It was President Bush who initiated many of the NSA programs.

In short, there are more similarities between Bush II and Obama than their supporters or detractors care to acknowledge. And almost all of the similarities suggest that the risks to our liberty today transcend the actions of any particular politician.

From John McGinnis. Read the rest.

Is President Obama the culmination of American Marxism?

Brandon Christensen Liberty , , , ,

I recently tried my hand at prodding Jacques to blog more often about Marxism and Marxist thought. As an immigrant from a country with a strong Marxist tradition and – more importantly – with his educational background (Stanford’s sociology department in the late 60s/early 70s; arguably the time period with the most sophisticated understanding of Marxist thought ever), I think he provides readers with a nuanced and sharply critical glance into Marxism, something that is very tough to do. Alas:

Brandon: Thanks for the suggestion and for the incense. However, the charm of blogging has much to do for me with following whatever my inspiration whispers at any one time. Once in a while, it lands on Marxism, not often. When it does, it’s often in the context  of conversations in French with French speakers. (You may have noticed something on my blog called, “Le dernier Communiste.” )

To the extent that I am impelled to do the needful rather than the natural, I direct my steps to whatever I think I do well and that is also in demand. In general, I am not sure waking up Marx for the benefit of young Americans is useful or much in demand. Almost no one in America calls himself a Marxist anymore . (There were many when I was young.) The people who would have been Marxists in 1974 call themselves “environmentalists” today.  Aside from this, I suspect
that the Obama administration is the result of wet dreams by Marxists of my generation but I don’t know how to talk about it. It’s just my sense of smell telling me.

I make a mental note of your expressed demand for Marxist critiques. In the meantime, feel free to pillage whatever you find on the subject in my blogs.

Oh, I’ve pillaged. His knowledge of Marxism is too important for me to ignore it. You can find Jacques’s thoughts on Marxism here. Jacques is also working on his memoirs, and you can find excerpts of those here (it’s also located on the top right side of the blog’s navigation bar).

As far as President Obama being the culmination of American Marxism, I think Jacques is woefully wrong. However, I also think Jacques’s assessment of Marxism in the US today (it’s irrelevant) is spot on. There is a recent, well-written essay in Dissent by a political scientist at Columbia arguing that the Obama administration is simply kowtowing to a neoliberal (and, by extension, racist) agenda, and this, I think, suggests that my suspicions are correct.

Inequality: the Solutions

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , ,

There is going to be talk of inequality for three straight years. It’s the Obama administration’s strategy to help voters forget the horrors of the implementation of Obamacare. (It’s not optimistic about the rest of the plan either, it seems.) Of course, the word “inequality” resonates well with young people who have been impoverished by the administration’s bad policies since the current economic crisis (which it did inherit). When you can’t get a job, nearly everyone is better off than you are, and inequality is concrete.

Besides, you can always find inequality somewhere by cherry picking: Since 1990, the top ten per cent have increased their share from X to Z while the bottom 17% have seen their share decrease by W; since 2001, the top twenty percent have grown their share from M to P while the bottom 50%, blah, blah, blah. See what I mean? The only situation where you cannot find inequality is when everyone one, every person, every household has exactly the same as every other. This would be hard to achieve if you tried, because people would become unequal again at one end (on the one hand) before you had finished at the other end (on the other hand).

Yet, it turns out, it’s not difficult to do something concrete and decisive about inequality of income and/ or of wealth on an individual basis, through personal initiative. (Inequality of looks is a tougher proposition.). I advise how below.

First, if you are rich, you can easily dispose of your share of the social burden of economic equality. Just give away your money until you reach a median position or below. If you can’t help but earn more money, just keep giving it away. Problem solved.

Second, if you are poor, just decide to become Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, both multi-billionaires who started from nothing. If that’s not your cup of tea, just become a millionaire athlete or actor. If that won’t work, and speaking of tea, start a Starbucks for teas. Hurry up, Starbucks itself is doing it right now. Don’t blame anyone: You had more than twenty years to take the initiative.

In general, the healthy poor in American have a lot of explaining to do. Go ahead, explain.

If you fear you don’t have the talent, or the education, or anything to help you qualify to do any of the above, here is a plan:

In every developed country including the US, there is a chronic shortage of plumbers, has been for at least forty years. One plumber I employed about ten years ago was grossing $60/hour. That was although his phobia prevented him for working in dark confined places. (Would I make this up?)

My suggestion is that you should apprentice yourself to a plumber for a year or so. After that span of time – which you might finance through a loan, don’t be shy, go right ahead – go into business for yourself. Plan for thirty hours a week of actual work because you need time to relax and a little time to get organized and to do the billing. Take a French-style one month vacation each year. Charge as much as I was willing to pay the phobic ten years ago, $60/hr.

You should gross about $85,000 a year. Count $15,000 for taxes and other deductions if you insist on keeping books. You are left with $70,000 to spend. According to the Census bureau, the gross household US median income was under $52,000 in 2011. It’s probably not much higher now. Since we are comparing net to gross, these elementary calculations put you actually well ahead of the average. And, remember, we are comparing your projected income to the median household income. So, under my plan, your spouse need not be gainfully employed.

With this kind of income, if you are that kind of person, you should be able to salt away in savings $5,000 each year. Placing the savings at a safe 3%, you re likely to be able to give your children something like $140,000 after only twenty years. Nice down payment on a house in California, nice house in Arkansas, even with inflation. Yet, more choice!

If you end up finding your superior plumber’s income distasteful because it violates your belief in equality, see above. Or you might just decide to work less each week or to take longer vacations.

On inequality, see also: “Equality and Fairness“.

Any questions?

A Conspiracy of Debacles: the Advent of Single Payer?

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

I don’t believe much in conspiracies. For one thing, they require secrecy and belief in the other guy not to spill the beans. Often, information connected with conspiracies has value, economic value or simply psychic value (“I already knew it yesterday!”) Hence, the frequent betrayal. Moreover, people in general mess up, the conspiratorial group tends to amplify the mess. For all these reasons, mention the conspiracy against Julius Caesar and I will tell you it’s not obvious it happened. I am skeptical about conspiracies in general but I can make exceptions.

Today, in December 2013, my skepticism is vacillating. I am skeptical about my usual skepticism, you might say. The reason is that I have never seen a governmental debacle of the magnitude of the current roll out of the Affordable Care Act (It’s “Obamacare.” Don’t even try to correct me on this. I heard the president with my own ears claim the nickname.) The present demonstration of incompetence is so out of proportion with everything I have experienced in my life that a part of my brain is whispering to the other that it can’t just be simple incompetence. To begin with, it seems to me that an average nerdy company would have done a better job of the electronic exchanges: WSJ says 12/12/13 that in all of Oregon 44 people have enrolled. (My friend Scott from Silicon Valley will correct me if my assessment of the ease of setting up the exchanges is wrong.) Furthermore, in an operation of this complexity and of this magnitude at best, some degree of failure was to be expected. Any normally prudent person would have set up a fail safe mechanism, a second chance device, or, at least, readied a large lifeboat. None of the above exists it seems. I have trouble believing in a simple oversight.

Beyond the electronic failure -which is guaranteed to induce sneering hostility in the young who use EBay and Amazon with their eyes closed – the same people desperately needed to join, there is the deleterious substance of the reform: Many people find themselves saddled with larger premiums, higher deductible and often both. I don’t know how many. I don’t think anyone knows how many. It does not matter but those reporting that they are so affected are not, cannot all be Tea Party fanatics.

Even the main redeeming virtue of this disaster has been largely withdrawn. I heard that the Congressional Budget Office had estimated that 30 million people would still be off the health insurance roles after the whole Obamacare law is implemented. It’s as if a malignant hand had deliberately withdrawn the last consolation from the disaster: It will make you poorer; it might leave you with a doctor you don’t like (“might”); it leaves you exposed without health insurance although you used to have a plan with which you were satisfied; and it won’t even help that much those it was supposed to help.

Digression on Tech. source note: The first numbers come from an editorial in the 12/12/13 Wall Street Journal. The notion that millions of non-insured will remain uninsured even under the best hypothesis is all over the media. I am not able to cite a precise source. Make a note that I will not consider any lazy and irresponsible denial of this assertion. If you think that’s not true, that I misheard or heard well something false, just say so here, explain why you are sure it’s wrong, and sign your name. I will publish any denial in bold letters. Girlish snickering is not welcome.

By the way, I don’t want you to think that I am implicitly legitimizing the Democratic claims about the number of real uninsured. I never bought the “millions of uninsured” argument. Two reasons. First, it confused “no insurance” with no “health care.” It also confounded and confounds “inefficient way to deliver care” with “the poor dying on the hospital lawn for lack of care.” More importantly, I became convinced that the poor, powerless abandoned souls imagery the Democratic Party uses to characterize the uninsured is largely an invention. Many of the formerly uninsured are people already legible for existing programs who were not enrolled, many children of the irresponsible and incompetent, for example, probably some isolated older people. Other non-insured are clearly rich enough to afford health insurance and simply don’t take he trouble to buy it. Others, mostly young people who are not rich, make the rational calculation that they are quite unlikely to become seriously sick. They engage in low-stake gamble about their proximate health. Once you added the three subgroups of the uninsured, the pathetic-sounding category “ uninsured” melted to little, to next to nothing.

I can ignore my disbelief about this for the time being. I just assume that millions of Americans thought the reform was necessary for reasons of compassion toward the more vulnerable among us. Absent or diminished this justification and this rationalization many of the same Americans will feel disappointed or even cheated. (I am charitably ignoring the claim that the scheme would make health insurance cheaper.)

Now, let’s project ourselves only four to six weeks, to the 2014 State of the Union Address. By that time, by law, most everyone is supposed to be covered. The insurance companies have continued withdrawing plans that are non-compliant, or that they fear may be judged non-compliant with the new law. The number of people between insurance plans has grown from an estimate of 4 million (the WSJ 12/12/13) to ten million. There are reasons to believe that the numbers of those left out will yet grow. The forty or fifty millions original uninsured remain mostly uninsured. The young that the new law unaccountably counted on to finance the new project stay away in droves. The fine they incur, after all, is not much higher than the beer bill for three average parties. Discouraged by the mess, the shamble, the unpredictability, small businesses nearly all shed their health coverage.

In this scenario, in a matter of weeks, the number of Americans without legally required health insurance rockets up to some large proportion of the population, perhaps to one American in four, even one in three. At that point, according to the implicit liberal narrative, we have a national life-and-death disaster, an event that makes Katrina look like a Cajun picnic. According to the same implicit narrative which the Democratic hierarchy cannot suddenly denounce, people are going soon to begin dying in the streets. What was but recently a controversial reform has become a national emergency.

What’s a normally compassionate, responsible president to do under the circumstances? I mean any president?

The answer is blindingly clear: In this emergency, the president will announce that all Americans not otherwise covered are now under the existing, reasonably functional Medicare program. And, he will leave the accounting for later. And this accounting will not seem like much of a new problem because it’s just an enlargement of an old problem. (“The devil we know….”) The president could decree on such a radical measure without fear of much criticisms from the opposition. What Republican official will have the fortitude to insist that proper constitutional form must take precedence over the imminent distress, and possible death from neglect of millions? Which elected Republican will have what it takes to face the first media story – true or false – a single story of a youngish person dying for lack of care?

Many ordinary Americans will opt for the simple solution: Instead of digging around for an elusive insurance plan that suits them and that is also compliant, they will ask to join Medicare. Once nearly half of Americans are covered by Medicare, the private insurance companies will quietly surrender. Some will begin to specialize in luxury coverage for the very rich. Others will just re-focus on areas other than health care. Many will simply go bankrupt and then vanish (as happened in other countries under similar circumstances). Soon, the US too will have a single payer government run health insurance system. The Obama administration will have reached the Graal of all liberals since F.D. Roosevelt.

This would be an easy conspiracy to carry out because it does not require that explicit instructions be given to the co-conspirators. Hence, there is no possible leak, no chance of getting caught red-handed. It’s also a conspiracy that does not require extraordinary skills but only the subtle encouragement of government’s normal low standards of performance. Much of the deliberate sabotage of a real implementation of the new law would only have to take the form of inaction, for example, of the administrator in charge of the reform. This does not require talent but good nerves, or indifference. Ms Sebelius, the person in charge of implementing Obamacare has been reported by conservative media to have had no (zero) meetings with the president. If they are wrong, the real number must still be very low, lower than you would expect given the centrality of the scheme to the Obama presidency. That is if the president really wanted the implementation of the 2,000+ pages of the Affordable Care Act to go smoothly. If!

The most successful socialist revolution socializing more than 15% – and growing- of the largest economy in the world will have been achieved quickly and without much real opposition. Hurrah!

Now, this is all speculation. I am just connecting the dots. I hope I am completely wrong, that we are all facing an ordinary debacle, one due entirely to gross but innocent incompetence.

Personal note: I have seen the French single-payer system at work under trying circumstances. My subjective evaluation is that it works quite well. On the objective side, there is the fact that French men live two years longer on average than American men. (Yes, I too would like to believe it’s the red wine but I know to keep my inner child in line.) My objection to a government health sector is of a moral and political nature: We just don’t need more government; we need much less government in order to be free. Besides, one should not take for granted that we can do well whatever the French do well. Take ratatouille, for example, take pâté de campagne, etc.

Inequality

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , ,

President Obama’s signature achievement is in shambles. He believe himself that it cannot be saved. He is going for left-radical broke. Today he denounced “inequality.”

I am not sure younger people have the sophistication to realize that there are thousands of ways to measure inequality and that, therefore, you can always find one that serves your political purpose.

I don’t know how many could tell me what’s wrong with inequality.

By the way, I am far from rich myself, although I have worked all my life, not very hard, it’s true. (Did you notice how I often give you the answers to the questions I raise?)

Blind Faith

Adam Magoon Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

By Adam Magoon

On November, 26th Eric Liu, founder of “Citizen University”, a pro-government think-tank, wrote a telling article about having faith in government on the CNN opinion page. He begins the piece with a story about leaving his suitcase in a New York City cab saying:

“I had an experience recently that reinvigorated my faith in humanity — and bureaucracy.”

Keep that equivalency in your mind for a few minutes. Humanity and bureaucracy.

He goes on to explain that he did not even realize he left the suitcase in the cab for twenty minutes and only then began calling people for help. He explains this process in detail, emphasis mine:

“For almost three hours, various people tried to help me — two folks at my bank, whose credit card held the only record of the cab ride; three people at two yellow cab companies based in Long Island City; a service rep at the New York City Taxicab & Limousine Commission; people in my office back in Seattle.”

So Eric was helped by no less than eight individuals (counting the cab driver) in his successful search for his luggage. Eight people helped improve Eric’s business trip. He then claims this experience taught him three lessons.

First:

“Always, always get a receipt.”

This, as he says, is obvious.

Second:

“Another is that New Yorkers, contrary to popular belief and their own callous pose, are essentially nice.”

As someone born in New York I would like to think this is true, but I adhere to the maxim that terms such as “New Yorker” can only describe places where someone lives or is born. Saying “all New Yorkers are nice” is equivalent to saying “all Scots are drunks” or “all Scandinavians are attractive”. Essentially it is a non-statement that is easily refuted. There are just as many people who would have taken anything of value from his case and threw it into the nearest dumpster.

That is just the appetizer though, here is the main course.

His final lesson, and where the train totally leaves the rails, is this:

“But the third, even more deeply contrary to popular belief, is that government is not the enemy.”

Wait, what?! What kind of logic is Mr. Liu using? Of the eight people who helped him only one (the service representative at the New York City Taxicab & Limousine Commission named Valerie) even worked for a governmental organization and “she insisted she was just doing her job”. How did Mr. Liu get to “government is not the enemy” from that series of events? He goes on to claim that:

“Government is not inherently inept. It’s simply us — and as defective or capable of goodness as we are”.

Mr. Liu tries to rationalize his faith in government with a single good experience with a few select people. What he ignores though, is that many people are not “essentially nice”. If that were the case crime, corruption, and violence simply wouldn’t exist. There are people in the world who only seek to exploit and profit from the work of others and to quote the great classical liberal theorist Frédéric Bastiat:

“As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose — that it may violate property instead of protecting it — then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder”

Even if we were to assume that most people in the world are “essentially nice” the very nature of government attracts precisely the opposite type; the corrupt, the malevolent and the lazy. His agenda finally becomes clear nearly two-thirds of the way through the article when Mr. Liu unabashedly asks us to not wonder what our country can do for us, but rather what we can do for our country in response to the failed Obamacare launch.

Individuals are expected to bail the government out when it fails at intruding into our lives? How can we expect the government to run healthcare without kickbacks and corruption when they cannot even get someone to build the website without it being a disaster?

Mr. Liu fails to offer any helpful advice on how to improve things but he does offer one revealing suggestion. He says that citizens should not expect the “state…to serve us perfectly” and that individuals should not “forget how to serve”.

The argument often goes that taxes pay for services provided by the government but Mr. Liu suggests we shouldn’t expect too much from those services. That we shouldn’t get upset when we pay a third of our labor to the government and it spends that money on things we do not want; in fact he implies we should fix for free the broken things they have already spent our money on.

If Mr. Liu goes out to dinner and his silverware is dirty when he sits at the table does he go back to the sink and wash them? Or does he expect more from the things he spends his money on? At least in that situation Mr. Liu could choose to spend his money elsewhere. With the government spending our money for us we aren’t even afforded that meager victory.

Obama’s Utilitarian Foibles

Tibor Machan Law, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , ,

The utilitarian insists that the morally right way to act is to promote the greatest good for the greatest number (of people but perhaps of all sentient beings). This goes for public policy as well! The goal overrides any individual rights, so if to secure it some people’s rights to life, liberty and/or property need to be violated, so be it!

For example, if to provide health insurance for elderly folks it is necessary to coerce young people to purchase health insurance, then coerce them! Never mind their right to liberty and property. Those are irrelevant, even though they are supposed to be unalienable rights no one may violate, not in the American political tradition.

Here, then, is a clear example of how the Obama regime departs significantly, in its political philosophy and program, from the uniquely American framework. This framework supports securing the protection of individual rights as the primary job of government. Read the Declaration of Independence and see for yourself. That is indeed the central feature of the American Revolution, with its Bill of Rights and its Constitution.

Not only does that render the country one that’s free – under which all citizens may live as they choose provided they do not violate anyone’s rights – but is responsible for the great prosperity of the country, its freedom from arbitrary government intervention in people’s lives. Even the public good or interest does not permit it. While this may appear to be a restriction that stops the country from achieving utilitarian objectives, the very opposite is the result! That’s because free men and women make the most productive use of their liberty.

The idea is that human beings are by their very nature proactive. They think of ideas that they will implement and these are usually good ideas, ideas their fellows can make good use of. This is the essence of entrepreneurship. They don’t just daydream but think purposefully, which is to say their ideas can be marketed to others. Out of this process arises the bustling economy of a country and, indeed, of the world.

So long as men and women are free to think creatively and productively, they will make sure their work will have payoffs, either economic or personal or even charitable. This is how a free society works, creates products and services, and leads to high employment to boot.

But the likes of Obama & Co. want to step in and regiment how free men and women act and they believe or pretend to know what others should do to be productive. And that means, usually, that they misguide the economy. (The most notorious recent example of this was all those five-year plans Stalin and his gang unleashed upon Russia and its satellite states, which brought the Soviet Socialist system to its knees!)

But Mr. Obama & Co. fail or refuse to grasp any of this. Shame on them!

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , ,
  1. John Locke, President Bush and the Jesus Pushers
  2. (More) on the legality of the latest ObamaCare fix
  3. Israel is wigging out; One of the fairest assessments of Israeli foreign policy I’ve seen since my own musings!
  4. Has Barack Obama told the biggest (dumbest) lie ever?
  5. Are real rates of return negative? Is the “natural” real rate of return negative?