The US incarcerates more persons per capita than any other nation.
Watch these two videos. As the boys scouts would say, Be Prepared.
Protecting Yourself from the Justice System
Posted: 06/16/2009
Individualism versus Collectivism
Posted: 06/15/2009
Core Beliefs
Often times people will attempt to understand individualism or collectivism by comparing the “symptoms” of each system. For example, one might to to make sense of the systems by looking at, say, positions toward government funding of NASA.
Individualists oppose government funding of NASA. Collectivists usually support government funding of NASA.
A non-analytical thinker might attempt to draw conclusions based on these “symptoms” of the belief systems instead of looking at the core beliefs.
Individualists hate science and think we shouldn’t go to space, one might think. Or collectivists think that conducting silly experiments in space is worth risking the lives of many fine young men and women.
Both assumptions would miss the mark. The truth is to be found in the core beliefs, not the symptoms of those beliefs.
At the Core: Equality
Larry is a farmer. He gets up at three in the morning every day and works the land until six in the evening. As a result, he is a very wealthy man. His house has 5 bedrooms, 3 baths and a ten car garage.
Bob is also a farmer. He thinks Larry is a mental case. Bob wakes up at noon every day, plays some video games, catches his favorite daytime drama on the boob tube and exerts just enough energy to get by. There are a lot of things he’d rather do than toil in the sun. He is of course poor. His picture appears next to the word “poverty” in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Is this economic inequality fair?
An individualist will say yes. They are both afforded an equal amount of individual freedom.
A collectivist (”Liberal” in America, or Socialist in Europe) will say no. When one person has more wealth than another, it is economic injustice.
Shouldn’t people be free to keep the wealth they earn?
No, the collectivist says, because wealth is the result of “racial and sexual discrimination”, “some undifferentiated, collective process”, “exploitation of the poor”, ”intergenerational wealth transfer” or “wage slavery”.
While individualists believe that most wealth is earned and rightfully belongs to the person who earned it, collectivists do not believe that individuals consenting to employ or be employed is legitimate. It’s an illusion, and all earnings belong rightfully to society collectively.
So, while collectivists see economic inequality as a problem, individualists do not. Individualists may see poverty as a problem, but – like obesity, foul breath and sexual perversion – not a problem for the government.
For collectivists like Paul Krugman, economic inequality is not just a problem insofar as it tolerates poverty. According to Paul Krugman, it is a gross injustice for a CEO to be paid more than an upper middle class white collar worker.
The collectivists offer two solutions to the perceived problem of “economic inequality”. One is communism. The other is socialism, or “Liberalism” as it’s known in the US. (”Liberal” in Europe still means “liberal”, as in less government regulation.)
Communism purports to create economic equality by paying everybody, ideally, the same wage no matter what work they do.
Now, is that really equality? If I do back-breaking work all day under a blazing sun and get the same wage as a person who travels the country taking pictures of nature for the ministry of tourism? No, that can’t be equality.
“Socialism” originally meant communism. Communism ultimately killed hundreds of millions of people and even its greatest defenders abandoned it. Today communism is defended by only the most fringe elements of the Left who fancy themselves “idealists”.
The newer forms of socialism, first expounded by Henri De Man, allowed capitalism to continue operations. Socialism would come in after capitalism had worked its magic, in the form of income redistributive taxes.
Today this is the most common form of socialism, known as social democracy.
Some folks may suggest that social democracy has respect for individual freedom, but the truth is that social democracy only respects individual freedom so long as that freedom cannot be sacrificed for the perceived good of the ruling majority.
Next up, more on the collectivist answer to the perceived problem of inequality.
Honesty or Fraud
Posted: 04/22/2009
In recent decades, “morality” has become a bad word. Truth is relative, they say. So what may be morally wrong to you isn’t necessarily morally wrong to others. Indeed, if you mention morality, I’ll immediately suspect that you are an un-enlightened bigot.
That’s all good and fine for morality. The problem is that in our democratic state, idiots on both the Left and Right universally believe that law should be determined by morality. I’ve spoken about this in the past elsewhere; suffice it for me to say now that morality is no better a foundation for law than astrology.
What I want to talk about today is lying. I believe honesty is always the best policy. Some people think I am making a moral statement. I’m not. I am saying that when we deal with others, there is an implied, tacit agreement to deal with others honesty. We do not say, “I’m telling you the truth” every time we start to speak, but it’s implied. When I ask my child if he did his homework, I’m not asking for any response; I’m asking for the truth.
One thing I really hate to hear is that honesty is the best policy because if you lie, you lose all credibility. No matter what the cost benefit analysis, honesty is an entitlement of those with whom we choose to communicate.
But we all lie nonetheless. I certainly do. It bothers me to lie, but I do it in certain cases. Usually when telling the truth would be too painful for the person asking the question.
For example, say you have a girlfriend who fancies herself a good cook. In fact, cooking is her paramount area of pride; an area from which she derives confidence and emotional support.
Within the realm of cooking, let’s say she has particular pride in her veal parmesan. Now suppose she asks you if your ex’s veal parmesan was as good as hers, and the truthful answer would be that your ex’s veal parmesan was the best you’ve ever had - would you answer honestly?
In this case, I do not think the girlfriend is asking for an honest answer. She’s asking for affirmation of her cooking skills. She has assumed that her cooking is superior, and simply wants to hear “yes, yours is the best”.
In this case, I would lie. Indeed, I would. I would not want to cause emotional damage to the girlfriend for the sake of honesty in answering such an inconsequential, trivial question.
When I was a young man, decades ago, I was a hopelessly inept lover. I asked a girlfriend if I was the best she had ever had. She was pained to answer, but did so honestly, and told me specifically that her last boyfriend had been much more adept at love-making. I was extremely hurt, obviously. I can appreciate the honesty of it now, but at the time it the painfulness of the answer was debilitating. I think a more considerate course of action would have been to educate me in love-making and then answer the question after my skills had surpassed those of her previous lovers. Or simply not answer. Or just lie.
Why did I ask in the first place? Considering the pain the truthful answer caused, I cannot think that I was asking for truth in the first place. In my immaturity I was simply asking for affirmation of my value to the girlfriend. Surely I was doing so in an improper manner.
To take it to an extreme, if your 4 year old daughter asks you if she’s the prettiest girl in the universe, when in fact she’s butt ugly, are you going to tell her the truth?
I have a daughter who is quite attractive. In fact a state patrol officer let me off with a warning once stating that it was because my daughter was so beautiful. But even if she were not so beautiful, if she were a four year old and asked me that question, I would tell her she is the prettiest girl in the universe. I would of course raise her to understand that physical appearance is not important. But I think that lying in that case is acceptable because she’s not really asking if she is pretty - she’s asking how much I love her.
Still, it’s painful to put forth an argument that lying is okay in some situations. It seems like a slippery slope. Where does the train stop next? Lying is okay whenever and however as long as nobody is hurt?
RIP Man in Well
Posted: 02/19/2009
Today I read an all-too-typical blog post. Nothing unique about it. Just the same old collectivist whining about “freedom” not being enough.
Our friend Richard Chappell, who wants us to know that he is currently studying at Princeton, offered this critique of the libertarian perspective:
There’s much that’s misleading in politics. But perhaps the worst offender is the common claim that Right-wing “libertarians” (e.g. ACT) champion the value of individual freedom. They stand for non-interference, but this “negative freedom” is only half the story. The more important aspect of freedom is opportunity.
Imagine you find yourself stuck down a well. Libertarians claim that you are perfectly free so long as everybody else leaves you alone, since that way you suffer no interference. But surely we can see that this is mistaken. If left alone, you would dwindle and die. That’s not any sort of freedom worth having. Real freedom requires that you be rescued from the well. Until that happens, you lack any opportunities to act and achieve your goals. And that is clearly what really matters.
Of course, most of us aren’t stuck down wells. But the example proves an important point. If you agree that the person stuck down the well lacks freedom, then you are committed to the view that freedom requires more than mere non-interference, for they suffer no lack of that!
For a more politically relevant example, consider the consequences of poverty. It is not enough to leave poor children alone: by letting them starve, we do not thereby make them “free” in any worthwhile sense. The fulfillment of basic needs is a prerequisite to any form of freedom worth having.
First off, we must mourn the man down the well. He died a horrific death. He remained down in that hole for a total of three months. Hundreds of villages visited him daily, so he wasn’t exactly lonely; but they all refused to help him out. You see, the man in the hole lived in a collectivist state. In a collectivist state, common daily morality is assigned to the government.
Several times during his stay in the hole, villages brought ropes and ladders to help him out. They were all rebuffed, “it is the role of the government to help him out. That is why we force people to pay taxes, because the government, and only the government, is qualified to help out people. The thousands upon thousands of people we keep in prison for not paying taxes - they would be sincerely offended if their incarceration was in vain.”
So he sat there. Waiting. Eventually, the villagers were prohibited from bringing him food. After all, only a government can effectively feed people who have no food.
But the government never came. The villagers called 911, but the line was busy. Evidently, emergency services was short-handed, due to the government giving trillions of dollars to foreign governments (which ended up in the hands of dictators), the National Endowment for the Arts (millionaire Robert Mapplethorpe was certainly more of a worthy cause then some proletariat down a well) and a Government Health Care scheme that is the single biggest money maker for organized crime in America - fraud estimated at $35 billion a year.
Yes, he died a painful death. One citizen suggested that helping him was a human obligation, a “moral obligation” and not a governmental one. More reasonable minds prevailed, however, and they have risen up to demand higher taxation to fund a new 911 call center.
The resultant increase in taxes will put 2% of small business out of business the first year, and is estimated to result in 300,000 jobs being moved overseas. Tax related convictions are expected to increase by 5%. Oddly enough, the majority of tax evaders are former Barack “Tax ‘Em Till They Bleed” Obama’s cabinet picks.
And if this wasn’t good enough of a response to Mr Chappell’s silly argument, I’ll post an actual argument tomorrow.
The Ambiguous Collective Fallacy
Posted: 02/10/2009
The use of a collective term without any meaningful delimitation of the
elements it subsumes. “We” “you” “they” “the people” “the system” and “as
a whole” are the most widely used examples. This fallacy is especially
widespread and devastating in the realm of political discussion, where its
use renders impossible the task of discriminating among distinctively
different groups of people.
(The term “as a whole” is an assertion that a group of people somehow
becomes an entity endowed with attributes other than those attributes
possessed by an aggregate of individuals. It would be better to use the
expression “composite” than “as a whole” as this preserves the awareness
that the group is merely a collection of independent elements.)
Social problems are difficulties resulting from the interactions of
groups of people. Before a social problem (or indeed any kind of problem)
can be solved, it is imperative that the problem be precisely identified. To
identify a social problem, you must delineate exactly the groups of people
who are involved in that problem. The Ambiguous Collective fallacy prevents
this identification.
An antecedentless pronoun is an example in the singular of the Ambiguous
Collective fallacy.
I often challenge those who commit this fallacy to eliminate from their
discussion all general collective terms, and each time they want to use such
a term to use instead a precisely delimiting description of the group the
term is intended to subsume. Very few people are able to do this.
One reason this fallacy is so prevalent and difficult to deal with is
that it is built into the English language. Consider the question “Do you
love anyone?” The ambiguity arises from the fact that the word “anyone” can
denote either of two completely different meanings:
1. An individual, specifiable human being. A single, particular person,
in the sense that there is some one person whom I love.
2. A non-selected unitary subset of the human race, in the sense that I
love whichever person happens to be in my proximity.
Here are some examples of the Ambiguous Collective fallacy:
“Last November, 77% of us voted in favor of term limits.”
In this statement, who exactly are the “us”? The speaker wants to convey
the idea that term limits are very widely supported, but if in fact the 77%
refers only to those who voted, the supporting subgroup may well be a quite
small percentage of the total population.
“We need to train doctors to teach us how to get and stay healthy.”
In this statement, who are the “we” and who are the “us”? Is the speaker
trying to promote socialized medicine by advocating government control of
the medical schools? When he says “we need to” does he really mean “the
government should”? And is the “us” merely a subtle way of saying “me”?
South Africa sanctions as an example of the consequences in real life of
the ambiguous collective fallacy:
“I imagine you support your government’s sanctions against South Africa?”
“Of course. Every decent person does.”
What about disinvestment of American business from my country, you are
all for that too?”
“I campaigned for it on campus. I never missed a rally or a march.”
“Even if it means a million blacks starve as a direct consequence? Your
plan is similar to trying to convert a country by withdrawing all your
missionaries and burning down the cathedral. You forced your own businessmen
to sell their assets at five cents on the dollar. But it wasn’t the
impoverished blacks who purchased those assets. Overnight you created two
hundred new millionaires in South Africa, and every one of them had a white
face! That’s maliciously stupid! We would be grateful to you if your efforts
had been failures!”
Perhaps the most widely-known example of the Ambiguous Collective fallacy
is the statement:
“Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
In this statement “the people” has three distinctly different meanings:
One group of “the people” (the victims, or producers) are ruled by another
group of “the people” (the bureaucrats, with their action arm, the police)
in order to achieve the goals of another group of “the people” (the
politicians).
Here is an excellent demonstration of the significance of the Ambiguous
Collective fallacy (from THE TEN THOUSAND by Harold Coyle):
Dixon was ready. “Who, Colonel Stahl, would you be betraying?”
Stahl looked at Dixon with a quizzical look on his face before
responding.
“Why, I would be disobeying my orders. I would betray Germany.”
Dixon switched tactics. Leaning forward for dramatic effect, he looked
into Stahl’s eyes as he spoke with a clear, sharp voice. “Whose Germany
Colonel Stahl? Chancellor Ruff’s Germany, the Germany of his dreams and
ambitions? The Parliament, who are at this very minute debating the
constitutional right of Chancellor Ruff’s authority and actions? The mayor’s
Germany, one of working people and their families who have had no say in the
past weeks over Chancellor Ruff’s provocative actions and unreasonable
demands upon my government? Or your Germany - a theoretical Germany that
knows only blind duty to orders and traditions? Who, Colonel, will you be
betraying?
The concept that a soldier is honor-bound to obey Orders without question
allowed the German Army to be drawn into helping the Nazis create the
nightmare that led ultimately to the death of millions of Germans and the
near total destruction of Germany.
The Individualist Social Contract
Posted: 02/09/2009
Governments have killed more people than all individual murderers combined. Governments take more of our earnings than we all, collectively, spend on food. Governments imprison large portions of society.
Considering these facts, it behooves us to ask, Is the government legitimate? Am I obligated to abide by its laws? Do I have a right to break the law? Do I have a right to resist law enforcement?
In non-democratic governments, the governments are usually justified by nonsense such as Divine Right. Conveniently enough, God is never around to answer questions about monarchy.
In democratic governements, including constitutional republics like the US of A, the governemnt is justified by the supposed “consent of the governed” in conjunction with some sort of social contract, to which it is assumed we tacitly consent.
In America, the social contract to which we are alleged to have tacitly consented is the Constitution.
Now, just for the sake of keeping you involved, let me ask: Did you ever consent to be governed by the Constitution? I didn’t.
If given the choice between the Constitution of the United States - a document that has witnessed horrific levels of government sponsored bloodshed, slavery and incarceration - and anarchy, I personally would choose anarchy in a heartbeat.
But now I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let’s take a look at that to which we are being asked to consent. The social contract, after all, is just a contract. When you get a home loan, you read the contract, don’t you? When you buy a car, enter into an employment contract, or even sign up for cellular phone service; you read the contract. You, as an intelligent human being, want to know precisely what your rights and obligations are, so you read the contract. Some people even “study” their contracts. That may be taking it a bit overboard.
Common sense would tell us we can read the Constitution and learn what our rights and obligations are. That would be a rookie mistake. The Constitution of the United States gives power to the Federal government and gives certain, easily discarded rights to the people. Taxes? Not too clear there. Right to life? Only if you’re a “person”, a status denied to Native Americans, African Americans and the unborn at differing times.It’s equally ambiguous on every other topic you might want it to address - property rights, employer and employee rights, marriage rights, animal rights, health care rights, women’s rights, gay rights, immigration, education and vouchers, etc.
It’s pretty much a lot of nice words, not so much substance.
So, you’re thinking, what kind of contract is it that they are offering?
The contract can best be understood by the laws that have been enacted and are currently being enacted. If we look at the laws, we see that there is no part of your life that is protected from government intervention. From the moment of conception until you breathe your last, the government reserves the right to tell you what you can and cannot eat, what you can and cannot smoke, which kind of architecture your home will conform to, how you may make a living, how you may raise your children, how you may employ others, how you may enter into employment yourself, when and how you can leave the country, and how you will finally die.
In other words, the social contract being offered up is a social contract of totalitarian democracy.
All members of this society agree to renounce any and all individual sovereignty and subject themselves to legislation passed in a democratic - majority rule - fashion. The majority may or may not agree to allow you certain freedoms, but those freedoms are not guaranteed. Any freedoms allowed are allowed only so long as they are supported democratically. If the people choose to democratically remove any freedom, you are bound to abide by the laws that deny you that freedom.
And it so happens that people love to democratically impose their morality on others. When cities limit the size of new homes to 2,500, you have democracy to blame. When cities ban fast food restaurants, they do so in the name of democracy. When states ban gay marriage, again, it’s democratically. When 26 of Alabama’s 67 counties ban the sale of alcohol, it’s democracy in action.Although nobody has ever been killed by the sight of a nude woman, strip clubs are banned all across the nation. That is democracy.
When the democratic rules reach into every area of one’s life as they do in America, it’s totalitarian democracy. In order to achieve totalitarianism, whether it’s autocratic or democratic, all it has to do is be morality-based.
And morality-based describes the vast majority of American laws. A good part of Americans believe they have the right to impose their morality on others in a democratic fashion. If their morality is popular, the chances are good that it will become law.
Consider the case of prostitution. Legal in New Zealand, it is illegal most everywhere else, even though law enforcement in the United States often looks the other way. When we consider the sole legitimate role of government to be the protection of individual freedom against impingement by others, we see that not only should prostitution be legal, but the state’s democratic violation of that freedom is criminal.
We’ve seen that the democratic social contract is morality based and leaves the individual with no sovereignty whatsoever. It is totalitarian to the degree that it represents the morality of the constituency.
At this point, you likely have two questions. First, what is the alternative to a democratic social contract? Second, what, if not morality, is the basis of law?
The individualist social contract is thus: I will refrain from impinging upon your freedom and protect your freedom from impingement by others in due consideration of the same from you.
That’s a contract. It’s not a moral statement. Contracts are written up - and consented to - for reasons of mutual benefit. When I contract with a builder to build my home, I am doing so because I want a home and the builder wants money. The same principle applies here.
When I contract with a builder to build a home, I’m not making a moral statement. I’m not giving up all my money, nor am I giving up all my freedom. I’m exchanging a very specific amount of money for a very specific service.
The same should go for a social contract. Why would any sane person give up their 100% of their sovereignty in exchange for totalitarian democracy? What specifically is it that I get in exchange for giving up my right to eat the food I want to eat? What specifically is it that I get in exchange for giving up the right to drink what I want to drink, or smoke what I want to smoke? What specifically is it that I get in exchange for giving up my right to distribute my earnings as I see fit? What, specifically, do I get in exchange for giving up my right to build a house according to my own preferences?
The answer, of course, is nothing. The democratic social contract is one-sided. It’s the majority imposing, with the use of force, their will on others.
Now, I know what you will say. You’re going to say, “but America is a free country. The freest country!”
Actually, America is a world leader in totalitarianism and the world’s undisputed leading jailer. The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s incarcerated population.
One problem with the democratic social contract is that it isn’t even a valid contract. It isn’t valid for the same reason every un-signed contract is not valid: for a contract to be binding, it must have each party’s consent.The vast majotity of Americans would not consent to the social contract. They live under it, as victims of it, in much the same way that North Koreans live under their dictator’s rule.
Next time a city code enforcment officer tells you to re-paint your house a different color, you may just tell him that you didn’t consent to the contract. He has no more authority to command you than I do.
Paul Watson’s Cultural Imperialism, Intolerance and Bigotry
Posted: 02/07/2009
The anti-whaling terrorist Paul Watson presents an interesting case study in the absence of logic in the animal rights movement.
A little history first:
Paul Watson allegedly co-founded Greenpeace, an organization from which he was expelled for his failure to adhere to that organization’s policy of nonviolence.
He claims to have sunk ten whaling ships. He claims to have been shot at by the Japanese Coast Guard - a claim almost universally regarded an incredible, perhaps because Paul Watson not only lies, but recommends that others do so as well to promote the cause.
Watson advises readers to make up facts and figures when they need to, and to deliver them to reporters confidently, “as Ronald Reagan did.” Watson possesses Reagan’s intuitive grasp of the media, and, like Reagan, at times he seems astray in the labyrinth of his own illusions.
Paul Watson- he forces his morality on others
Paul Watson, if you watch enough of his media, loves to contradict himself. One minute he claims to be concerned about the lives of the fishermen he endangers; the next, he is disparaging Canadian sealers who died when their ships sunk as “sadistic baby killers”. One minute he’s claiming to be non-violent and accusing the Japanese Coast Guard of violence in the form of throwing “grenades” (actually, flash grenades); the next, his own crew is throwing flash grenades at Canadian fishermen.
Paul Watson wants the human population drastically reduced, saying “no human community should be larger than 20,000 people.” He wants human populations confined to “parks” and human breeding subject to restriction. “Sea transportation should be by sail.”
“We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Mennonites survive without cars and so can the rest of us.”
“Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.
It won’t be easy but then it’s better than the alternative.”
In other words, Paul Watson demands a totalitarianism that would make North Korea look like a hippie free-for-all. And, Paul, if you think humans are a virus, do your part and stop making kids.
And he has supporters.
Brigitte Bardot, Martin Sheen, Terri Irwin, Daryl Hannah and other mindless celebrities line up to hypocritically support Paul Watson’s Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, while eating animals, driving cars and even reproducing without authorization.
The problem with animal rights is the same problem we find in the “natural rights” theories. There are no natural rights. As Jeremy Bentham famously put it:
“natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts.”
Natural rights do not exist amongst humans. One human can kill another without lightning striking him dead. The only punishment he may receive, if at all, is fabricated by society.
The same is true in the animal world. Animals kill one another with impunity all the time. Humans, being animals, do the same.
Rights are created, not by nature, but by contracts. In the case of the rights of man, rights are the product of the social contract. The social contract gives the right to protection from aggression in consideration of the party’s pledge to protect the freedom of others.
Insofar as nonhuman animals cannot be a party to the social contract, they cannot be imagined to have any rights.
What Paul Watson is attempting to do is to use force to impose his morality on others. Legitimate law is restricted to protecting individual freedom. Legitimate law does not legislate morality, despite what Paul Watson thinks law should be.
Now, if Paul Watson wants to stop people from eating whale meat, he is entirely free to go out and campaign against it. If Paul Watson really wanted people to stop eating whale meat, surely he knows he could campaign against it in the Japanese media; if the consumers stopped demanding whale meat, the whalers would stop hunting whales.
But Paul Watson doesn’t do that. He would lose millions of dollars in support if whalers stopped whaling. Most likely, he prays every night that more countries start whaling. It would make him a very rich man.
One has to wonder, though, why this man and all his supporters - mostly white - get their jollies attacking Japanese whaling? If they are so concerned with animals being killed, why not start in the obvious place: your own back yard. Oh, I’m sorry, is attacking beef eaters not profitable? My bad.
Some links you really ought to visit:
Penn and Teller - PETA Bullshit