Logicology

And then this happened...

2012-01-28T21:13:00.000-08:00

Yeah... Sometimes, religious people are remarkably insulting.

Awesome, huh.

It only occurred to me a bit later that the first comment meant "where are the atheists now" as in, they all got killed and he was gloating over the idea that they aren't in heaven.

Mythbusters, Markets & Awesomeness

2012-01-28T12:28:00.000-08:00

I just posted this on Facebook, but it's something I've been thinking about for a few weeks, so I'd like it to be around for posterity's sake:

Watching a lot of Mythbusters in a row has made me really feel great about markets. Almost every commercial product they test not only does exactly what it's supposed to do, but does it safely and reliably, while almost always being affordable by the average person.

As one example, I give you this Emergency Hammer.

Not only does it do exactly what it's supposed to do - according to Mythbusters' test of commercial car escaping products used to escape a car submerged under water - incredibly well, it does so reliably, and perhaps best of all, it costs just $9.99.

So... Here you have an amazing safety product that could literally save hundreds of lives a year (thousands if you get the kind like this that also cuts seatbelt straps), that is small, portable, efficient and is within the reach of literally every person who owns a car in the United States.

That's remarkable.

I was thinking about this regarding internet security last night as well. Had you put the state in charge of coming up with a way to limit or stop spam or deal with other internet security issues, what would they do?

My bet: They'd have spent an inordinate amount of money on hiring experts to form a committee to research the problem, and they'd spend a few years coming up with options that will then be approved through a multi-stage voting process and sent up the chain to some executive branch official with the authority to implement the solution, and then they would force this one-size-fits-all decision on millions of American internet users, most of whom would find it useless and annoying and which - almost inevitably - hackers will work their way around in 4 seconds.

In my experience, this is not only what the incentives of government operations are likely to produce (and absolutely do produce in reality), it's also really just a pretty straight-forward expression of the central-planning mentality.

And the market solution? The Captcha.

Elegant, simple, maleable, completely effective, affordable and best of all: totally voluntary.

Alternet is an Idiot v2.0

2012-01-28T11:49:00.000-08:00

Quite a while ago, I wrote a blog called "Alternet is an Idiot", discussing one of their writers' pieces explaining how people on "the right" are distorting reality on the economy.

Now... As most everybody knows, I have huge criticisms of "the right" on a lot of issues, but if we use the benchmark set out by politicians like Paul Ryan or proper conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation, if anything they don't go nearly far enough in exposing the reality of our economic problems and particularly the state's role in creating and perpetuating them.

Paul Ryan's budget, just as one example, was called "draconian" by his detractors, yet all he did was propose a very slight decrease in the rate of growth in Federal spending & borrowing. Not only was this not even a "cut", it was barely even a fix.

Even Ron Paul's discussion of cutting a trillion dollars from the Federal Budget if he becomes president just puts us back at the levels of Federal spending we saw just 10 years ago. This doesn't even seem all that dramatic to me, and it would actually do some real good. Plus we got one of the most fun political ads I bet politics will ever see out of the deal:

In any case, you can read that whole post... But here Alternet is at it again, with a new article from Michael Lind, called: "Right-Wing Lunacy: The Shameless Lies Conservative Media Tell Their Audience", loquatiously subtitled: "From Social Security hysteria to "Obamacare" madness, right-wing propaganda is increasingly divorced from reality."

There are a ton of great LOL's here, and though I don't want to spend all day doing this, I'd like to go through a few examples.

"In the real world, of course, today’s national debt has nothing to do with Social Security, whose trust fund has a surplus that will last for decades, with the precise date of the trust fund’s exhaustion depending on the rate of general economic growth. True, the federal government has to raise the tax revenue to repay the money it borrowed from the trust fund — but then, the federal government has to repay all of its creditors, domestic and foreign. What’s wrong with that?"

I'm not really even sure where to begin with this. There is no "trust fund" dedicated to Social Security. The second half of Lind's own damn paragraph expresses this as clearly as I could. The money we pay in FICA and other payroll taxes was supposed to go to programs like Social Security - which were originally supposed to work basically like a forced savings account financially managed by the state (a remarkably stupid idea in any case) - but that's not how it works. In reality, politicians use those funds however they want, drawing from those revenue sources to fund other projects and returning IOUs.

Even people who don't mind this arrangement at least understand it (i.e. this Forbes piece by Steve Vernon).

For a writer like Lind to say that A. There's a "trust fund" that's all paid up and secure for decades, and B. Politicians have borrowed from that "trust fund" and will need to impose new taxes to pay back their IOUs is just really, spectacularly stupid.

Here's another thing:

"If Klein were honest with his readers, he would point out that the main causes of federal deficits in the last generation have been the Reagan and Bush tax cuts..."

Really?

Would those be the tax cuts after which Federal Revenues went up? I've just spent a ton of time reviewing tax data for a video I'm working on, so this one is particularly funny to me. I'll wait until that video is out to really talk about that, but seriously... The only way you can say that we lost a lot of revenue from the Reagan-era (or Bush, or Kennedy for that matter!) tax cuts is if you assume that real human beings simply pay whatever taxes you demand of them.

In reality, there's a somewhat obvious inverse correlation to tax rates (particularly marginal rates on incomes), and revenues. I wish there was a better way to talk about this besides the Laffer Curve, but I'm not sure that the theory behind this needs to be any more complicated than that.

If you have really high tax rates, say 70% as you had in 1980, and an accountant offers you a tax-free investment (say off-shore, or in some asset, or what-have-you) that costs you 50%... Then guess what, keeping 50% of your money is a better deal than paying income taxes and only keeping 30%. If you take the tax-shelter deal, the government gets 0% of your income.

And that's exactly what rich people were doing across the board, especially by the 1980s when international markets made even more of those kinds of options available. Sure the rates were high, but nobody actually paid anything close to 70%. Why would they? That's actually kind of insane to expect them to do that, and the fall-out was that Federal revenue was actually a lot lower than it would be when tax-rates dropped. Not that I'm supporting more money going to the state, but reality is what it is.

If you believe that rich people aren't - by and large - smart enough about their money (or greedy enough) to figure this out and avoid actually paying the high rates, then you might be Michael Lind.

I, however, assume that rich people are smart enough to figure out how to engage in tax planning, and thus I do not assume that merely by raising tax rates, you will get higher tax-revenue. And indeed..... Here are some charts you should have a look at to understand this a little better.

1. Top-Marginal Rates for Federal Income Taxes:

2. Federal Revenue from Income Taxes:

3. Share of Federal Income Tax Revenue by Income Bracket:

Take note, note-takers!

As rates have dropped since the 1960s, not only has Federal revenue from income receipts shot up, the richest Americans actually paid a larger and larger share of the overall revenue, particularly since the 1980s.

For all the constant discussion of how "unfair" our tax system is - and the last chart makes an incredibly clear case for that being true - it's not unfair in the way most people want to believe it is. The income tax system is horrendously skewed towards the very richest individuals paying by far the most.

Consider that after the 2004 tax cuts, revenue from income taxes didn't disappear, nor did the rich suddenly pay a smaller share of the overall income tax revenue. Quite the opposite, in fact! Tax revenue continued its upward trajectory and the share of that revenue borne by the richest Americans grew... And grew a lot.

As you can see, from 1980-2007, "The 1%"'s share of income tax revenues went from a little under 20% all the way up to nearly 40% (I believe it's actually at about 39.6% today).

So Alternet's Michael Lind is clearly wrong. It's not tax-cuts of any kind, regardless of the President responsible, which have resulted in increasing Federal Deficits. What is? Well... That has a pretty darn clear answer as well. And I can show you in one more graph.

4. Federal Expenditures vs. Revenues (1980-2012):

Note how we have continued to balloon spending even when recessions have caused predictable drops in revenue. What's more, and this the chart doesn't show, our wild attempts to deal with recessions with huge government interventions into the economy (beginning in 2001-2002, by the way, not just in 2007-2008) are actually causing bigger problems with our revenue stream. As I show above, it's not an issue of tax-decreases.

Also... Holy crap, that chart is scary to me. We cannot simply tax our way into fixing that gap in spending vs. revenue. It seems pretty obvious to me that we'll be taking huge drops in our potential standard of living growth just to pay for what the Federal Government has put us on the hook for as it is.

And.... I have one more chart for you before I move on to some other stupidity from the Alternet idiot.

This is Federal spending as a percentage of GDP. This is to say, here's a chart showing how much government activities are in proportion to the rest of the economic activity in the US:

For my money, all of this is basically demonstrating that the Clinton years were pretty darn good in terms of the trajectory of the economy.

That, by the way, is not to say I credit Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich or anyone else in politics in the 1990s for this... In general, I actually think people forget about how huge an explosion of economic growth the development of the internet in the early-mid 1990s actually created.

For the most part, I credit innovation and a near-unprecedented wave of creative destruction caused by new mass-communication tools for an exploding private sector during that time. As a result, government expenditures - which clearly continued their upward trajectory (albeit a little slower) in the 1990s - were out-paced by private economic growth.

And the future at that time was pretty darn bright.

Government-surpluses, the ability to afford social programs, a booming private sector (mostly, it would appear, for completely sustainable reasons with a handful of pocket-bubbles thrown in)... It all looks good to me, at least compared to today.

Next up!

"The only number that conceivably would matter would be the overall federal-state-local spending as a share of GDP, which in the U.S. is well below the average for industrial democracies that are just as competitive and prosperous."

Yeahhhhh.... Here's the thing about that.

Spending as a share of GDP matters - as I noted above - and it has exploded over the last 50 years. But there's another number Alternet omits that's kind of important: Revenue as a percentage of GDP.

We don't get nearly the kind of Revenue as a percent of GDP as many European nations do. In fact, we're pretty much historically capped at about 19%.

Sooooo......... yeah.

Here's that chart:

You may note the drop at the end of the chart here. Huge recessions will do that for ya, as will massive increases in government spending, and huge regulatory turn-over that is starting to seriously harm our economic success.

Honestly, I could go on with every single sentence in Michael Lind's piece. It's utter nonsense from beginning to end, largely built on ridiculous assumptions and ignorance of real history. He says not to worry about increases in entitlement spending as if it's ever been a linear problem. Just to take one example on entitlements, predictions for Medicare in 1966 were laughably wrong... From Reason Magazine way back in 1993:

"The cost of Medicare is a good place to begin. At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $ 12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly "conservative" estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion."

The real cost was 10 times greater than the predicted cost. And it's like this for virtually every government program because that's how the incentives and the process by which government operates works.

And this is really the big problem with these kinds of idiots.

There's utterly no comprehension of the fundamental lessons of economics, particularly of the public choice variety. There is no consideration what-so-ever that perhaps politicians have the incentive not to be very good about reining in spending, or being frugal with other people's money (that they get by force). There's no consideration that perhaps the predictions politicians make for the cost of their programs aren't all that accurate... and there's always the assumption that people don't change their behavior based on new conditions.

Want more revenue? Raise taxes!
Want more health care? Force people to buy insurance or force them to pay for a government-provided system via taxation!
Want more _____? Make someone pay for it!

...or they go to jail.

It honestly shocks me sometimes when I think about it how simple-minded you actually have to be to believe that forcing people to do what you want even works the way you intend it to... much less is a morally good thing to do.

"Should we have copyright laws?" I don't know.

2012-01-21T09:26:00.000-08:00

The other night I wrote an op-ed for the Daily Caller, which got titled, "Should copyright laws exist at all?". As I was limited to just 500 words, there are a few things that people - in the comments particularly - have brought up that I'd like to address on my blog.

First read my "controversial" piece here (I've modified it slightly so that the video links appear embedded as videos, rather than as hyperlinks like they did in the original):

"Whenever politicians get especially excited in naming a piece of legislation, it’s a pretty safe bet that the bill will do the opposite of whatever the name says.

With a bill as gratuitously titled as the “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act” (otherwise known as PIPA), you can be certain that the only “economic creativity” being protected here is that of the special interests pushing the bill.

In this case, the special interests behind PIPA, and the equally disturbing “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA), are mostly media and entertainment industry giants like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.

But contrary to the industry claims, these bills do nothing to protect artists and creators like me and actually make it harder for us to innovate and generate new works.

I’ve spent my entire adult life in the media and entertainment industries — as a composer and musician, as a writer and as a video producer. Yet every year as I see more and more examples of cronyism where big media companies work with politicians to squash small producers and consumer freedoms, I grow increasingly skeptical of the very idea of “intellectual property.”

Copyright and patent protections and anti-piracy laws are always couched in language of property rights and fighting “theft.” As a libertarian working in the field of libertarian activism, it’s probably fair to say that no one believes in private property rights more than I do. But there are two big problems with this framework when applied to IP.

First, copying isn’t theft.

If I steal your bicycle, the harm done to you is not that I now have a bicycle to ride, but that you don’t and all the time you took working to earn money to acquire that bicycle is gone too. But if I copy your bicycle, we both have something to ride.

In economic terms, copying increases the supply of a good that’s available to consumers whereas theft is only redistributive. That’s a big distinction conveniently glossed over by the IP laws’ supporters, who generally want you to believe that copying an MP3 and stealing a CD are the same thing.

The second major problem is that you can’t actually “own” an idea unless it stays in your head.
The minute you share an idea with anyone, it’s no longer “yours” in any meaningful sense. Ideas replicate, mutate and evolve when they’re shared from one person to the next. This is what Matt Ridley (author of “The Rational Optimist”) calls “ideas having sex,” and this is exactly what has taken human culture and material wealth out of the Stone Age and produced the amazing standards of living we all enjoy today. New ideas in art, music, science and technology — or in any other field — don’t come fully formed out of nothing; they’re incrementally built on the shoulders of previous inventors and creators.

So when you try to stop people from sharing ideas (which is exactly what SOPA and PIPA would do), you’re putting a damper on the spontaneously ordered innovation that will make our lives even better in the future.

You’re also setting up incentives for some creators to spend more time and money suing people ($31 billion a year, according to Stephan Kinsella) than they spend producing better-quality products. In this way IP law stifles creativity and keeps potential innovators chained down.

If you want an example of this, go check out “Beauty and the Beast in 3D,” which is in theaters now."

Now, I understand that for a lot of people, these kinds of arguments engender a lot of knee-jerk rejection, but rather than calling me a "marxist", as one commenter did, let's actually get into this a bit more.

First of all, it's one of the more hilarious things that happens to me on a relatively regular basis that when I take a position that is out of the mainstream "conservative" vs. "liberal" standard manual of talking points, someone inevitably gives me a counter argument that I first heard in 2nd grade as if it would blow my case out of the water.

For example, the guy who called my piece "marxist" writes:

"If I spend $100 recording a song and 100 people buy a copy for $1, I can afford to make another song. If I spend $100 recording and 100 people copy it off of the internet for free, I can't afford to make another song."

...and along the same lines, another commenter wrote:

"take a three or four years writing a novel and then have somebody slap their name on it and see if it seems like you've not been harmed."

Because, of course, there's no possibility that I have considered either the basic math or what it feels like to produce creative works. Never mind that I've spent the last 10 years - my entire adult life - working in media and entertainment as a video producer, a musician, a composer, a music supervisor & editor and as a writer. Never mind that I've done these jobs working with multi-million dollar clients & accounts like McDonald's, Honda, Chevy, Holland America and others... Never mind that I have written & recorded literally hundreds of songs, classical/jazz works, and film scores, and produced at this point a few hundred video products.

I obviously just don't know what it's like.

Was that too snarky? Ok. Maybe a bit... But seriously... I get that some people were going to find my viewpoint a little controversial, but this stuff gets really ridiculous very quickly. Moreover, those are seriously flawed arguments for two fundamental reasons.

1. They mistakenly presume a Labor Theory of Value.

This is to say that they presume that merely by doing some action, like writing a book or recording a song, you are entitled to compensation for that work. But that's not actually how value is determined in society.

Value is determined, primarily, by the end-user of a product and there are many factors that go into the end-user's final determination. This is a key insight of the Austrian school economists from Carl Menger through Ludwig von Mises that has been a major contribution to the field.

As most of the commenters innately understand, supply availability matters. If you can only watch a particular movie at a theater, where everybody is watching a single copy of one print of the film then you may be willing to pay more for it. However, if you can see that same movie on your phone, your computer, your TV, your iPad or iPod, etc. and the supply is so widely available that you can see the film anywhere, anytime, that movie isn't scarce and really can't command a particularly high price.

I think most people realize that when supply has been expanded to near infinite capacity of any good, the price drops precipitously.

As I got to thinking about this issue today, I realized that what we're really dealing with here is the Diamond-Water Problem or the "Paradox of Value" which mystified classical economists like Adam Smith & David Ricardo, but which was finally really cracked by Eugene Böhm-Bawerk and the widespread understanding of Menger's theory of Marginal Utility.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, the point is that for any good that you might ordinarily value, each additional unit of that good is worth less and less.

So for example, if I'm particularly thirsty, a liter of water might be very valuable to me in terms of trade (I'd pay a lot for it). But after I've quenched my thirst with that first bottle, each subsequent bottle that is available to me is worth less and less until it's worth nothing at all... Meaning, I'd pay you say $10 for that first bottle if I'm insanely thirsty, and I'd pay $5.00 for the second bottle when I'm much less thirsty, and once I was no longer thirsty at all I might still pay you a few dollars for a third bottle to plan ahead for being thirsty in the future... But unless I want to walk around with your entire supply of water bottles (I don't), a fourth or fifth (let alone 100th) bottle is not valuable to me at any price.

This explains why scarce diamonds are worth thousands of dollars to people who want to get a girl to marry them, but water - which is generally available most everywhere in abundance - is worth very little in dollars, even though it's a major requirement for life.

The literal reality of innovations in digital distribution of media is that movies and music, paintings and even ebooks just aren't worth what they are when the only places you could get access to them were in movie theaters, concert halls, galleries & libraries.

On the upside, all of this stuff gets a distribution network that artists and creators even 20 years ago could only dream about. So while maybe you won't make as much money (or sometimes even any) off of distribution, your exposure potential is far higher - which certainly in my case, has led to more work-for-hire doing projects I actually want to do.

I experimented once with a business model that involved getting people to buy videos I made for a $2.00, and the fact is, the handful of people who were willing to pay such a small price considered it a donation, and not a payment (and most of those actually paid a lot more than $2.00).

The point of all this is to say that the price of my work - and yours, and everyone else's, no matter what field your'e in - has nothing to do with how much time, effort or skill went into it. The only thing that matters is how much other people value it, and that's a purely subjective concern on the part of a potential buyer.

Marx got this point way wrong and built a remarkably flawed philosophy around the idea.

If you spend $100 recording a song, and that song is worth $0 dollars to all prospective buyers, you have either spent $100 doing something you wanted to do for yourself as a passion project, which is just consumption spending (and isn't a bad thing!)... or... you've missallocated your resources on an investment that didn't pan out. Nobody owed it to you to pay you back for the money you put in.

Now... It is true and sometimes unfortunate that when creative destruction happens, people get displaced (I've been displaced myself more than once by changes in the music business), but this only brings me to the other crucial point my commenters seem to have missed...

2. Nobody is guaranteed a living off of their actions

This aspect might seem harsh, but here's the point: You have a fundamental right to pursue a livelihood doing any old thing you want, but no right at all to be able to force other people to pay you. If that's being a fancy investment banker, a race car driver, a musician, a street juggler or a plumber, the choice is up to you.

You're probably going to make that choice on the basis of a ton of factors, such as what skills you have, what your interests are, what your threshold for stress is, whether you like to be outside or inside, whether or not you want a boss or you want more flexibility in your day, and of course how much you need to get paid to fund the type of lifestyle you want to have.

If you are a composer (like me), and you want to be some kind of jet-setter... your options today are:

Write seven #1 chart-topping albums in a row and get a knighthood.
Don't be a composer.

Seriously... Not to be too blunt about it, but if you want to make a ton of money, then maybe a career in music just isn't for you. Those who do make a giant pile of money in the arts are doing so in a field that has always been insanely competitive and in which success on the level of an Elton John (whose net worth is like $320 million) or a big-name film composer (John Williams and Danny Elfman, for instance, can bring in around $2,000,000 per score) tend to be the result of an nigh-impossible combination of skill, perseverance, tenacity, supportive friends & family and preternaturally timed good luck.

If you're going into the arts as a career, as I often tell younger guys interested in going to film & music schools, then you need to go in expecting to be poor and to struggle.

It's not a career path for people who want to make a ton of money.

The simple reason for this is because, going back to point #1, value is subjective - and the value of art to potential buyers is far more widely disparate than almost anything else. At least with something like energy (however it's produced), people all tend to need it. Some need more than others to meet their desired ends, but everybody is vying for it on one level or another.

A lot of this just comes down to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, right? You need energy because the base planks in that pyramid - food, shelter, income through work, etc. all require energy production to be created. So all the goods that go into those base needs are going to be pretty widely and consistently valued by a lot of people.

But it's only at the top of the pyramid - after (most) people have met all their other needs - that they get to creative pursuits.

And once we're talking about creativity, it gets even worse for artists because consumer tastes vary so much.

This is why commercial artists who appeal to the "lowest common denominator" with pop music and big popcorn summer blockbusters get paid a ton, and modernist classical composers who write weird aleatoric or atonal music, documentarians and art-house filmmakers tend to make nothing. I had a professor as an undergraduate who always seemed a little bitter about not being widely rewarded for his compositions... He was an excellent composer, no doubt, and his knowledge of music was substantial. But he also wrote music that was weird and unintelligible to laypeople. So... For my money, any expectations of financial reward were always unfounded.

At the end of the day, making a ton of money is really just a function of how many people value what you create, and how much of their own efforts they're willing to trade for it. If you want to see this in terms of a formula, it's really just about as simple as:

n(P) = I

Here, "n" is the number of people who want to buy your product, "P" is the price they're willing to pay, and "I" is your income.

You can get a millions of people to want to pay you a little bit or you can a couple people to pay you millions (or any combination in between), and your income will be huge. But what you can't do is get rich by creating a product few people are willing to pay for at all. When competitive pressures push prices down to the level they're at in film & music, then you are going to get paid less unless you can get more customers.

This doesn't seem like a particularly radical statement, but apparently (given the comments on my op-ed) it's not very clearly understood.

Like I said above, you have every right to compete with anyone you want in making a living doing any job you want. But you can't force people to pay whatever you want them to for your product. So, if the market has valued your good at $1.00 a unit as iTunes has demonstrated over the last several years with MP3s, then you need to figure out how you can work out a business model based on that (essentially, you need to find a way to get a lot of customers).

If you can't do that, then you need to make a living some other way.

* * * * *

Now... There's one other comment I want to deal with here, because it's yet another major misunderstanding of the issue and actually a really interesting point. The comment was this:

"What if I copy a dollar bill? Is that theft? If I copy your music and use it in my films, stage shows and night clubs, you get nothing - is that your business model? So, your thesis is that you (and everyone else) should work for free. Should doctors and dentists work for free too? You can do what you want, but reasoning from your particular to our general is not convincing."

First of all, I do like that the implicit recognition is that printing a ton of dollar bills renders each individual dollar worth less. Not to go on a whole tirade about the inevitable results of expanding the money supply like Ben Bernanke has tried to do the last 3 years, but the fact is when you balloon the supply of anything, the value of each unit drops - including money.

So that's a good point... although it actually supports my case above in terms of understanding supply & demand and their effect on monetary value. Supply of intellectual property since the internet has exploded. Thus, the price dropped. Hardly anything unpredictable from an economic standpoint.

But counterfeiting is different precisely because money is the medium of exchange and not the end goal of the exchange. So increasing the supply of a currency in that way harms people because it distorts their ability to to acquire the goods & services they value and improve standards of living...

However, increasing the supply of goods available raises people's standards of living.

Surely that's an important distinction to anyone who understands that the point of production is not to give people "jobs", but to give people valuable goods & services like food, shelter, clothing and eventually music, art and other forms of entertainment, enlightenment & fun. If you increase the number of dollars in circulation, but not the amount of goods, all you do is make goods more expensive - this is bad for everyone. If, however, you increase the supply of goods in circulation but not the amount of dollars, you've made goods less expensive. As long as we can agree that people having better standards of living is the goal, this is good for everyone!

And that brings me to the final point regarding this comment... Should everyone work for free?

Yes and no. I would love it if we lived in a world where medical and dental services were so widely and easily available that they could be acquired for almost no cost. High cost is, after all, the big impediment in America to people accessing quality health care, is it not?

If, for example, someone could invent some kind of Star Trekian "replicator" for medical devices, or even just for splints and band aids, we'd be much much better off as a result. If cancer medication was produced at such a scale, by so many different producers that it cost $10 a treatment instead of thousands... this, in my view, would be wonderful!

But the implication of the comment above is that this would be bad because some people would have to change jobs or wouldn't get paid as much as they do today.

This copyright-infringing picture Captain Picard & Commander Riker sum up my feelings on that idea:

Anyway, no... People should not be conscripted into working for nothing... But if their job becomes outmoded then they can't force people to pay them like the relic gas station attendants in Oregon or New Jersey. So yes, people should get paid when they are doing something the market values... No, they shouldn't get to compel you to pay them when they aren't.

Creative destruction happens, and we all need to get over the scary aspects of it because the benefits are huge. The infinite reproduction and free-flow of information is an amazing thing that should not be underestimated as a source for human innovation and development going into the future. I used to not appreciate the OpenSource community as much as I do now, but I'm starting to see how cool it all really is. Unless some huge draconian government crushes information exchange, we're poised for a fantastic explosion of innovation.

Yes, some people are going to have to find other ways to make a living off of creating information products. I do it by working for hire, and getting paid on the front-end of my projects rather than in drips and drabs through royalties. Then I move on to the next project.

One other way to keep revenue coming in as an artist is to provide better quality live experiences which people value and want to buy. For instance, take the comedian and radio/TV host, Adam Carolla. His podcast is recognized by the Guiness Book of World Records as the #1 most downloaded podcast of all time. But he doesn't charge listeners a cent for it.

Distribution to the end-user is free. He is paid by advertisers (which is an obvious answer) and by doing live appearances - which are rivalrous and scarce, and thus command about $90 a ticket (or so the concert hall down the street where he'll be appearing next week would like me to believe).

There's nothing wrong with that and perhaps that's the right model for some people going forward.

However, I should be clear that it's a giant mistake for people to ask me what the "right" model is, and it's an even bigger mistake of me to try to guess.

The only correct answer is: I don't know.

The point of a free market economy is that it's a system where people try different models in a competitive environment and see which ones work and which don't. There are feedback mechanisms in prices, in profits & losses, and in observing the revealed preferences of consumer choices. All I know at the moment is that the 20th-Century media distribution model isn't working. It's up to a new generation of entrepreneurs and artists to figure out how to be professionals in the 21st-Century, not up to me to decide for them.

It's spontaneous order, not central planning, not... So we'll see what emerges!

At any rate, this is a monstrous continuation of a 500 word piece, so I want to close by just saying that everything I said at the Daily Caller was itself a copy of ideas that were never originally "mine" at all. Like everyone else, I built my ideas on those of men and women who came long before me.

Here's Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Isaac McPherson, wrote in 1813:

"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance.

By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

Jefferson - the father of American IP law - understood what I'm talking about now pretty well, it turns out.

Funny.

2011-12-16T18:15:00.000-08:00

There's almost nothing that makes me happier than this tonight. Two friends, Alex Pappas and one of my favorite people, Jeff Winkler made it into a Funny or Die Caption Contest.

I'm so proud :)

1968? Really?

2011-11-28T07:33:00.000-08:00

New York Magazine has a wonderfully positive piece today about Occupy Wall Street/etc. centered around a main figure in their activist community. The whole thing is pretty predictable ("OWS had scored plenty of victories" vs. "provided the right with fuel for feral slander... and casual caricature."), but it also highlights something that has been really annoying me for weeks now.

The article reads:

"It’s perfectly possible that... the raucous events of November 17 were the last gasps of a rigor-mortizing rebellion. But no one seriously involved in OWS buys a word of it. What they believe instead is that, after a brief period of retrenchment, the protests will be back even bigger and with a vengeance in the spring—when, with the unfurling of the presidential election, the whole world will be watching. Among Occupy’s organizers, there is fervid talk about occupying both the Democratic and Republican conventions. About occupying the National Mall in Washington, D.C. About, in effect, transforming 2012 into 1968 redux."

It seems to me that it's probably true that the Occupiers believe that they are the second coming of the Civil Rights Era... Talking to many of its more fervent supporters over the last couple months, I have certainly gotten that impression.

But let's look a little more closely at a key difference, shall we?

In 1968, everyone - from Martin Luthor King, Jr. to Malcom X to the Black Panthers, to the cops turning fire hoses on protesters - knew what they were there for. Not as a matter of abstract "outrage", but as a matter of clearly defined principle, with clearly defined end goals.

Simply put, it goes a bit like this:

Problem: African Americans were being systematically denied access to the American political system, and in the market.
Solution: Amend the Constitution to be explicitly include and define the requirements of government to protect the rights of African Americans as well, use Federal government resources to enforce these changes at the state & local levels which had been the main violators of rights at the time.

Now, I know this is simplified and that many people disagreed on both the methods of protest, and the specific details of the final changes... and, for that matter, the final implementation also included a handful of rights-violating provisions of their own. But one thing that I think is relatively undeniable here - even when different visions collide (i.e. MLK vs. Malcolm X), they are still defined visions! There were always relatively concretely outlined goals and recommended courses of action.

Can we say anything even remotely like that for Occupy Wall Street?

As far as I can tell, a few months in at this point, not only does every single 10-person "occupy" group around the country have its own "General Assembly" and official positions (maybe), every single individual member takes whichever positions they want a la carte anyway.

Ok............ How?

Do they want redistribution of wealth from "The 1%" to "The 99%"? Is there any universe in which that is not anything but a nonsensical and bullshit platitude? Do they want to prevent corporations from having Political Action Committees and lobbying Congress? How does this square with free speech, freedom of assembly and the freedom of individuals (make no mistake, corporations are - like OWS - still just a collection of individual people banding together for a common purpose) to petition the government for redress of grievances?

Do they want to overthrow "Capitalism" and replace it with... Communism? Social Welfare State? Direct Democracy? Do they want to simply increase the already staggeringly large number of regulations already on the books? If so... Which regulations?

Let's say that all of OWS agrees that the "problem", so to speak, is that "corporations" are too powerful and a corrupting influence on government. I could even agree to a limited degree... but even this type of statement is far too broad to be meaningful. Which corporations? All of them? Even the sole-proprietership bakery in say, McCool Junction, Nebraska, which has no lobbying connections or capability?

The whole OWS movement is one giant ball of contradictions, conflicting (or outright confused) intellectual viewpoints, and meaningless platitudes that only serve to obscure reality. The whole idea that it's leaderless and that it's very individually based entirely misses the point. If you want to be a bunch of individuals, each with his or her own unique set of values, goals and ideas on best courses of action - then do what I do: Don't join a freaking group!

The whole point of joining a group is that the increased numbers can help provide some "oomph" behind a unified message or set of goals... But if you don't have a message, much less a single concrete goal... Then......... What's the point, guys?

I am getting really tired of having to ask this, but... to all the Occupiers out there: What's the action item? What's the goal? What are you hoping to accomplish?

At some point, it'd be really cool to get an answer.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-25T17:53:00.000-08:00

It's Thanksgiving again, and I find that my reflections on this holiday are mixed.

As I write this, I sit with my family watching Ken Burns' "Prohibition"... which, thusfar, has been a perfect example of the way "good intentions" destroy other people's lives (frequently the lives of the most vulnerable) when backed by the state.

But still... I am thankful, for example, that I just enjoyed an amazing meal cooked by my father which included not only a wonderful local Columbia Valley Semillon, but an Ice Wine for dessert as well - and no government thug prevented us from doing so.

Great book!

I am also immensely thankful that yesterday I read virtually the entirety of Matt Ridley's powerful book, "The Rational Optimist". As disheartening as much of the world appears to me to be these days, Ridley reminds us how good we all have it today, and how much prosperity has exploded for human beings all across the planet. He also provides an amazing amount supporting evidence for what good economists would have surmised - that human cultural and economic development, and our amazingly sharp increase in wealth bringing literally billions of people steadily out of the "natural" living conditions that reflect absolute poverty by modern standards, is a result of freedom & trade. I will likely write more about this later.

Today, in the spirit of Ridley's book, I want to take a minute to express my thanks for the people and events that are usually, incorrectly, vilified.
I want to thank the "robber barons", for bringing prices of everything they touched down and thus bringing products & services previously only available to kings within reach of the poor. Specifically I want to thank Andrew Carnegie for making transportation and steel accessible to most, and I want to thank Rockefeller and oil for saving the Whales from certain extinction by introducing a vastly superior alternative to the prevaling energy source of his day.

This cute "energy source" still exists today
because their blubber was outmoded through
creative destruction.

I want to thank oil and other "fossil fuels"... for being amazingly efficient and indeed, one of the most sustainable and even clean fuel sources the world has ever seen. I want to especially thank it for providing a cost-effective alternative to mechanical work which would otherwise be done by (mostly enslaved) human hands or animal hoofs. The reliable abundance of energy has not only made humans incalculably better off, it has spared untold millions from crushing, miserable lives of slavery and poverty as well as spared horses, oxen and other fine creatures broken bones, cruel owners and painful deaths. At some point, perhaps a new fuel will be employed that does even more to alleviate world-poverty, but without oil, coal, natural gas and the like, you can be assured that everything I have done in the last 24 hours - not to mention the computer I am writing all this on - simply wouldn't exist. Instead, we would be as poor as anyone in the Dark Ages.

Earned his Nobel Prize by saving a billion people from starvation.

I also want to thank genetically modified foods. Without the vastly superior crop yields generated by these innovations, most of the world would be starving to death instead of continually becoming better fed with each passing year. In addition, without these advancements, the land would be environmentally devastated... to feed a growing human population without increasing output per acre as we have would require more and more area of land given over to agriculture, and that would wreak havok across the world. We would have more erosion, more deforestation, more disease. Disaster. Norman Borlaug and his colleagues prevented this.

I want to thank Walmart, Target and other typically hated "big box" retailers, and in fact I must thank every innovator of business systems to bringing down the price of goods and services through advancements in supply and distribution networks, and throughout the production process. These advancements have brought higher productivity (and incomes, regardless of the common myths to the contrary) to American workers while dramatically falling prices benefit consumers everywhere - especially the poorest among us.

Villain? Hardly.

On this note, I also want to thank Target - I'm spite of their recent bad press - for opening early on Thanksgiving and today, "Black Friday". It is true that some whiny middle class kids who don't want to work are probably missing some family time... of course, if they valued their family time more, they could certainly quit and seek (or create) employment elsewhere. But... I suppose this would all be very sad if it weren't for the other side of the story. Target and their other competitors opening in the middle of the night for Black Friday sales means that truly poor people who work there and who don't have the luxury of complaining about getting up early have an opportunity for earning more this month - even getting a seasonal job that woukd not otherwise exist - as a result. It would also be an injustice to fail to mention that Black Friday sales not only keep retailers afloat and provide jobs and hours to people who may need them the most, they also allow many, many people the opportunity to save a lot of money - particularly on gifts for their friends and family.

It is unwise to undererestimated either the cumulative effect of lower prices (allowing people to get more value from each minute of their working lives thus obtaining higher standards of living and/or more free time) or the importance of social traditions like gift-giving at Christmas time.

If a handful of rich people who would rather complain than work succeeded in restricting the hours of operation of stores like Target - purely on the aesthetic view that "it sucks to work on a holiday" - it would be the poor worker and the poor consumer hurt by far the mostm via the loss of work opportunity (or even the decline in seasonal jobs overall) and a rise in prices. Don't be fooled by comparatively wealthy people imposing their luxury values on everyone, regardless of how noble their cause may seem. The net result is inevitably terrible for anyone who is actually poor.

And lastly, I want to thank... Freedom, mutually respected property rights & trade. Without them, everything else I have thanked above doesn't exist.

So to borrow directly from Ridley himself... I want to thank "ideas having sex" for making the truly fantastic living conditions enjoyed by continually more & more modern humans throughout the world possible - by any comparison to the conditions available to us at any time previously in our history. In spite of how dispirited I can become watching the same terrible arguments crop up over & over - ready at a moment's notice to destroy, impede or prevent prosperity - I find that taking the long view today keeps me optimistic.

There is still much to be thankful for.

Political Spending Reminder: Statists Win.

2011-11-17T16:50:00.000-08:00

I posted this a while back when I was talking about who actually makes up the bulk of political lobbying & political donations... But after a brief exchange on Twitter where I was told that it's always the "capitalists" who control everything, it's worth putting up again today.

Here, you will find the top political donors between the years 1989 and 2012, as compiled by www.opensecrets.org:

At least for me... Here are the major take-aways:

Unions dominate political spending, and have for a very long time.
Pretty much all unions, but particularly the public sector unions (who - in a spectacular conflict of interest to the taxpayer - are spending members' money to elect the people on the "other side" of the apocryphal bargaining table), give almost exclusively to Democratic politicians.
Predictably and by contrast, when you look at the corporate political spending it is split fairly evenly between Republicans & Democrats.
To the extent that any organization within this list of the top 30 political donors contributes most heavily to Republicans, the split is not overwhelming in the way that union spending is.
It is not "capitalists" who have the most influence, but rather any well-organized special interest groups.

Indeed, if you break down the support by political party... You find that of the top 30 groups within the last 23 years, 70.2% of that money went to Democrats, and thus just 29.8% goes to Republicans. Interesting breakdown, but aside from the mythbusting aspect of this (in that the common misconception is that Republicans get all the money, when that's absolutely not the case), I'm not interested in whining about the uneven distribution of political spending... Cause Republicans also suck.

Here's my thought on this:

We all already know Democrats are abysmal on limiting the power of government. That's more or less their raison d'etra as far as i can tell. "They" (by which I guess I mean the Democrat political class) favor expansions of state power in literally every aspect of our lives. Even when ostensibly allowing for more freedom, such as marijuana legalization (which the current crop of Democrats is pitiful on), they still favor centrally managing and taxing those things. So we're looking at more state power over education, health care, transportation, the market in general, finance/banking, etc.

But Republicans as well are generally awful on everything too (if your goal is limiting the state)!

More state power over people's relationships, over their bodies... More state power to wage wars internationally - even without declaring them or having the slightest shred of moral justification. In virtually any area in which Democrats aren't aggressively trying to expand political power over people's lives, Republicans tend to pick up the slack.

And all groups work tirelessly to dole out special benefits to favored special interests... Because, well... That's the whole point.

So what do we learn?

Statists win, and they win BIG. In fact, it might even be fair to say that the more statist your political platform, the better you do in the long run - particularly when it comes to control over the economy. The other thing we learn is that libertarian ideas don't even warrant an honorable mention.

I think Philosoraptor got it right: If big businesses love the free market so much and have so much control over politics... Why don't they support libertarian candidates?

Holy Cognitive Dissonance, Batman!

2011-11-16T21:42:00.000-08:00

My twitter feed is filled with all kinds of interesting, odd, surreal, insane, hilarious and sometimes upsetting things. I tend to like it this way because I get a lot of viewpoints and a lot of ideas. But sometimes... holy cow. You get something as unexpected as this interview/debate, from Playboy Magazine, with the notorious conservative blog-tycoon Andrew Breitbart... and famed liberal journalist, Paul Krassner.

First off... Huh? Breitbart?

But no. That's not even the interesting part! The interesting part was when Krassner blew my mind with a stunning display of cognitive dissonance - the likes of which I've almost never seen so clearly before ever. Feast your little eyes at this:

KRASSNER: It’s revealing that Norman Thomas ran for president six times as the Socialist Party candidate, and though he was defeated in each election, over the past several decades every one of his platform planks has been adopted by both Republican and Democratic administrations. The laws they passed just weren’t labeled socialist. Now, I have no economic ideology, but I realize there is something wrong with capitalism. I realized it as I read the business section all those years before the recession was officially declared. I noticed day after day these news items about hundreds of employees being let go by different corporations, and yet their shareholders were pleased because the value of their stocks went up. There’s something wrong with that. In the insurance industry especially, greed became a preexisting condition.

Let me just go back over that once more so your brain has time to fully digest the comment...

"...over the past several decades every one of his [Socialist Party] platform planks has been adopted by both Republican and Democratic administrations."

and............

"I realize there is something wrong with capitalism."

Wow. Explain how a 79 year old man can say these things without a trace of irony. Please? I mean seriously. He outright acknowledges that we've moved in a distinctly socialist direction, adopting literal planks of the Socialist Party platform, and yet still manages to blame "capitalism" for failures in the economy.

I'm speechless.

Thing I learned today: HuffPo users are idiots

2011-10-30T19:24:00.000-07:00

I'm not even going to go into much detail here, as I think the comments and my replies will speak for themselves. On an article which had linked video of Jon Stewart interviewing Andrew Napolitano, "Huffington Post SuperUser" ScreenName05 wrote some incredible nonsense in multiple places which I responded to. I'll present just two examples here, because he (assumption) actually replied to my response.

First, is this...

ScreenName05:"I think he also ignores that without governments we would all be getting guns and blowing each other's heads off whenever we felt offended.

Oh yeah, that is what we used to do in the wild west. That is what people do in Afg. That is what people do in Somalia.

At what point do libertarians realize that the only reason they get to spout their silly, naive and foolish ideas is the government protects them from the rest of us."

Me: “Cept... Umm....

That didn't actually happen, Super User... Even Cracked.com figured it out
http://www.cracked.com/article_18487_6-ridiculous-history-myths-you-probably-think-are-true.html

More on that: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-non-existent-frontier-bank-robbery/

Perhaps you shouldn't get your history from movie & TV 'Westerns'? It's not very accurate.”
ScreenName05: "So you are dumb enough to believe that Billy the kid (the Lincoln country wars), the James brothers, the Cole brothers, Quantrell's raiders and a host of others did not exist, and didn't really kill people?

You might try real history instead of silly web sites."
Me: "Did I say they "didn't exist"? Nope.

What I said - or really implied in the rather short comment - was that the "wild west" you see in movies is bullshit.

There were not a huge amount of murders, and in fact the amount of murders in the so-called wild west states like Arizona (where Tombstone is), had far FEWER murders than the more "civilized" Eastern states.

The lawlessness and danger that you think existed in those parts of the country were a myth ginned up by Hollywood because Westerns are romantic and gunfights are good TV.

Nice of you to call me dumb though. Go figure."

I figured that by pointing out that even a silly site like Cracked has better information than the HuffPo "Super User", it might be enough as a rebuttal. But no... I guess I'm "dumb".

More on the "Wild West" that wasn't so wild here, and in this book.

We also have another amazing point, and subsequent response from our new friend, regarding a point by another (I'm guessing) libertarian commenter defending Napolitano. I assume the original poster was a libertarian as he referenced, and recommended reading Murray Rothbard's "Conceived in Liberty". I also recommend checking that book out... But again, Huffington Post Super User strikes back with this bit of amazing intellect...

ScreenName05: "You are confusing libertarians with civil libertarians. Different animals - civil libertarians are staunch advocates of the constitution, especially the bill of rights and the 14th amendment - as they are the basis of civil rights in the United States.

Libertarians on the other hand simply want the government to stop interfering with their property rights. They generally have no concept of the need for laws that deal with increases in population - as long as they are left alone. This worked when you had 3 million people in America - it does not work when you have 330 million. You need urban planning when you have 10 million people living in 100 square miles. You need police making sure the strong do not steal and kill the weak. You need laws that protect consumers from con men and frauds.

Ignore reality if you want, but do not try and confuse us with ignorance."

Me: “Actually, the fact that there are 307 (not 330) Million Americans is not an argument for more urban planning but - in fact - less. The more people you have, the more it becomes utterly impossible to plan out how those people should act in ways that are actually value adding.

Consider that if I have a family of 4 people, central planning isn't so tough. I could coordinate use of a car, dictate when my kids go to bed, set established rules of order for the house, dictate when and what will be for dinner, etc. And everyone can be reasonably ok with this.

Now try to do this with 400 people. Even with 100x the resources to scale everything up equally, there is simply no way for me to dictate how each and every one of those people acts in a way that encorporates their unique goals, values & preferences. If you scale that up again to the level of a city, it's even less possible still.

Now, of course, I'm talking about full on central planning - but even simply planning out streets, zoning and other aspects of "urban planning" have resulted in innumerable disasters in urban areas. See: Robert Moses with New York... Rampant eminent domain abuse...Disastrous "urban renewal" projects that often include giving giant subsidies to owners of sports teams for new arenas... Zoning that has created permanent "poor" areas devoid of trade, residential communities with no immediate access to stores, and countless other problems.”
ScreenName05: "It is hard to argue with indignant ignorance like yours. And pointless."
Me: "MMMMMMmmmmm... Ad hominems are fun, aren't they?

Bad form for debate though. Thanks for letting me know that my taking the time to present you with a real argument and references to actual historical and modern events was a complete waste of my time, though."

I'd cite more on this too, but honestly, how hard is this to understand? Urban planning resulted in Robert Moses destroying a huge chunk of New York City and putting in a bunch of crappy highways, as well as resulting in low-income housing we now know as "The Projects" in most major cities around the US which did nothing except concentrate poverty & crime in certain areas that were also conveniently devoid of jobs, schools & services.

Plus, go see the Battle for Brooklyn, to check out what Urban Planning is doing to New York right now. It's not pretty.

And then, there's this... Which I wrote music for:

Honestly... Fail, buddy. Fail.

Anyway, I spent like half my day today reading other comments on HuffPo and found them all to be distressingly devoid of intelligence, historical knowledge and almost everything against libertarianism came down to "Hey guys, why don't you just go live in that number one libertarian paradise: Somalia!".

Ugh.

Robert Reich: Clear, Simple & Wrong

2011-10-30T11:38:00.000-07:00

By now, you have probably seen Robert Reich's cobbled together series of weak talking points cut together in a video mistitled "The Truth About The Economy". Honestly, I haven't written too much on Robert Reich, but today (by which I mean - at this point - 3 months ago!) my buddy Isaac did a breif point-by-point dismantling of Reich's video... which, in case you haven't seen it, looks a lot like this:

Now... Here's Isaac:

1) "Since 1980, the American economy has almost doubled in size."

I'm presuming he means GDP? I don't know where he gets this:

Absolute GDP growth:

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG/countries/US?display=graph

Per capita GDP growth:

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG/countries/US?display=graph

2) "Since 1980, most people's wages have hardly increased"

Wrong:

http://visualecon.wpengine .netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/avg-income-2006.jpg

2) "Almost all of the gains have gone to the super rich"

This is misleading if you just look at raw numbers and averages:

The lower quartiles have actually experienced a faster growth of income than the rich, if you track individuals over time.

http://www.youtube.com/wat ch?v=vDhcqua3_W8

3) "All this wealth has given the rich lots of power, including the power to lower their tax rates."

True, the super rich do exercise a gross amount of political power, but I think there's a chicken and egg problem here. Most of the extremely wealthy families have been so for some time and have been exercising political power for at least as long. It's a self-feeding cycle, but I think his implication is that "these people got rich without government and then manipulated government." That certainly is true some of the time, but many of those wealthy families got rich *by* manipulating government power.

4) "This leads to huge budget deficits"

The idea that the only reason we have budget deficits is because the rich have lower tax rates is (sorry) FUCKING RETARDED. You could tax the rich 100% and *still* not cover the deficits our government is facing.

http://freerepublic.com/fo cus/f-news/2688472/posts

5) "Instead of joining together for better wages and jobs many people are so scared that they're competing with other working people for the scraps that are left behind."

Uh, what? Firstly, being "scared" has nothing to do with labor competition. People compete for jobs because it's the natural thing to do. Improve your skills, education, etc. Apply for better jobs. What exactly does this guy expect people to do? Politely step out of the way so someone else can have that job? How does that even work?

Secondly, the whole "scraps left behind" thing just screams zero-sum game reasoning, which jobs are not.

"So we get union vs. non-union... public vs private"

Ohh, he wants everyone to unionize... Right, because union states are doing *so well* against non-union states.

http://www.safehaven.com/a rticle/21577/jobs-income-data-show-right-to-work-states-have-advantage

6) "The vast middle class unable to borrow as it could before no longer has the purchasing power needed to get the economy growing again."

Firstly, I'm not convinced that the middle class is unable to borrow. I can't find any stats either way. But this is sort of beside the point. Purchasing power comes from income and savings, not borrowing. Borrowing only allows you to spend now what you'll have later, with a net *decrease* in total purchasing power (due to interest). The idea that borrowing is essential to economic growth is absurd.

And now for a little ad hom :P

http://mises.org/daily/733

I have virtually nothing to add here, but I will say that a week or so ago, Reich's video made it around my new office and all the Economic Freedom team people were both moderately irritated by Reich's willingness to play fast & loose with the facts, and to gloss over important details like income mobility; while also being a little shocked that the thing has been viewed by so many people.

Neither of those things surprises me, though. In fact, to a degree, they are related.

HL Mencken said:

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

And when Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich claims to be able to explain what's going on with the economy in 2 minutes... You can be sure that his clear, simple solution is just... Wrong. Way wrong, in fact.

Keynesian & other mainstream economists who rely heavily on macroeconomic modeling always make the mistake of operating far too much with aggregates and rarely dig into the details of their data sets in ways that they really need to do to actually understand what's going on.

Smooooooooooth.

So much of economics works that way, though. If you look at general statistics on compensation for men vs. women, you find that women make around 75% of what men make. Except, when you dig into the details and start controlling for hours worked, amount of time spent at the same job or in the same profession, full time vs. part time employees and marital/child status of men & women you find that that pay discrepancy disappears. This is how we should all know how to weed out bad economists from good ones.

Guys like Reich will take an incredibly complex national or even global economy and reduce it to a handful of aggregate numbers, and then make false conclusions without actually understanding the human elements operating within that system. No accounting is made for incentives, for the effect that monetary expansion and low interest rates - not to mention the numerous regulations and subsidies government has put in place - have on creating bubbles and their subsequent crashes.

Human action matters. Incentives matter. And aggregating all your data and drawing stupidly simplistic conclusions isn't a good way to do economics. Use all the math and the statistics you want, but you have to understand that these things are devoid of context and given the right inputs, you can get whatever output you want... Simply because the data sets are too big and the variables far too numerous to actually do anything meaningful with without zooming in.

Reich needs to zoom in.

But the tragedy here is that the video Reich made is incredibly convincing for people who are looking for an easy answer, and looking for a scapegoat and finding ways to blame their own dissatisfaction with their situation on someone else. As a video producer, I'm always looking for good ways of explaining and characterizing information in ways that are effective and convincing to people with no knowledge of economics.

Unfortunately, as one of my coworkers put it regarding Reich's video; the take-away from this video is that if you're willing to toss out reality, you can get a lot of views.

Note: This blog was originally drafted in July... But the demands of my job at the time prevented me from completing it. I'm just now catching up.

S-S-Something from the Comments: Occupy the 1%

2011-10-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

This morning, I got a well-written comment from "Jackylhunter" on my recent post, "Dear, Occupy Wall Street. You are the "1%" too.". I didn't go into a ton of detail on that post, since it was really just highlighting a great info-graphic on Americans' comparative wealth versus the rest of the world. I didn't do much in the way of explaining the points I made in addition to that.

So... I left myself open to some obvious points, and commenter Jacky took the time to question a few things that are worth responding to directly. I'll just go through bit by bit here. First:

"You may want to check your definition of socialist state, or at least define what type of socialist model you are referring. Versus a totalitarian state. Which I feel is your real grievance."

The real grievance isn't at all exclusively about totalitarian socialism, but in fact, socialism as an idea - as a concept.

If this were actually true, it would just be one
more reason to ignore Jesus.

As I hope most people who know me understand, I try my best not to deal in strawmen or make bad-faith arguments, and after a decade or so of interacting directly with self-described socialists, debating, I feel confident that I do have a very firm grasp on their best arguments in favor of the system and their best definitions. According to socialists, the easiest definition of the term is that socialism is a system in which the "means of production" are collectively managed and operated, and resources are shared "equally".

There are innumerable reasons why this is a concept that is doomed to - and has a historical track record of - failure. The biggest, and most crucial, among them being that it is impossible for any individual or even any group to know what they need to know to effectively manage resources and allocate them to their most highly valued use.

You need prices generated by free people trading with each other to do that, because knowledge in society is dispersed, and value is subjective and based on every individual's wants, needs and constantly-evolving preferences... These are two important things that Marx & Engels, not to mention their hordes of modern-day disciples fail to understand.

Socialism is an intellectually bankrupt concept... a bad theory... and practically, much worse in reality. I don't just mean the handful of totalitarian socialist states that exist either, I mean all of it - including the infusion of faulty socialist assumptions into "mixed economies" as well.

It's not something to be "balanced" with capitalism, it's a drain on humanity that is propped up in each case by the productivity generated in more free market elements in those societies. Sweden - for instance - for all it's hype as a socialist country has largely free trade with all of its neighboring countries, and a robust, entrepreneurial private economy which is taxed heavily to support the welfare state. It's always the "capitalist" part of the economy dragging the socialist part along for the ride, not the other way around.

"BUT that doesn't mean that the minority within the first world should actively be allowed to continue to increase wealth at the detriment to the majority. It is ok to be rich and recognise [sic] this."

It's definitely ok to be rich by world standards and point out the inequalities that exist in your own country and others.

Except here's the thing... What Jackylhunter said simply isn't how economies work.

Economies aren't zero-sum. At least, not without government forcibly redistributing wealth that already exists to politically favored groups... which of course, the OWS crowd is largely calling to increase (to the extent that any of them are actively "calling" for anything specific).

On a basic level, if economies were actually zero-sum as your statement assumes (people get rich "at the detriment" of others), then we wouldn't have progressed beyond prehistoric standards of living.

50 years ago, Hong Kong was as poor as any place on the
planet. Today, they are among the richest with no
natural resources to speak of: Free markets win.

Wealth is created (not merely distributed) by utilizing resources that are less valued, and converting them into products & services that are more highly valued - through production. This takes thought, ingenuity, creativity, hard work and responsiveness to economic signals provided through trade. It's not magic. It's a repeatable, predictable process that relies on the dispersed knowledge and economic interaction of people who are free to pursue their own individual goals using their own unique skills & knowledge - and who have well-defined and respected property rights.

As nations get more economically free, they get more prosperous - not less, as would happen if in fact economies didn't grow.

As we've seen an increase in markets and freedom of ordinary people to trade with each other in places like China, India, Southeast Asia, Central America and even parts of Africa over the last several decades, poverty rates worldwide have dropped dramatically... to the point where they've almost been cut in half in the last 30 years. For that you can thank an INCREASE in free markets and capitalism.

Which brings me to my final major point... Jacky said:

"The occupy wall street protesters are raising an inherent problem with society, with capitalism."

They may believe that that's what they're doing, but they've missed the mark by a mile.

Capitalism is not the system that is being (or should be) rebuked by the current financial crisis. Socialism, and more specifically its cousin - Italian-style corporate "fascism" is.

Talk to any capitalist, free market economist, and they'd have told you - as I did (repeatedly) on this very blog - that the right thing to do over the years was not to guarantee loans, and bail out banks, but to let companies that took on inappropriate risks and over-leveraged themselves to take their losses and either go bankrupt of *CHANGE* the way they did business.

That's not what happened, however. What happened instead was that we had a Federal Reserve pumping the economy chock full of new money while politicians were constantly guaranteeing our giant corporations and financial firms against any risk.

In a capitalist economy - or rather in a free market - greed is counterbalanced by fear of loss. But that only works when you allow the firms to fail. As even George Stiglitz said recently, the banks were able to "socialize" their losses (never mind the fact that for all his outrage, he is on record supporting the bailouts, claiming we could pass it and then "change it later"... cause that always works, right?) and points out now that this isn't capitalism.

This guy...

That's not a feature of a capitalist economy, it's not a feature of free markets. It's a feature of exactly the opposite - state control over the economy, and collectivizing risk.

Every free market economist I know personally, or have ever talked to (and I work with dozens on a daily basis) predicted all of the consequences of the bailouts - most of the good ones pegged the housing bubble long before anyone else to boot. I'd put their record against the records of socialists & Keynesians any day of the week.

We - if I can now include myself among the ranks of "free marketers" - all understand that big corporations don't like competition or eating their duly-earned losses... and we all understand that the more power the state has to manipulate the economy - the easier (not harder!) it is for those big companies to avoid responsibility for their actions. One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from that infamous economist Milton Friedman, who the left routinely accuses of being a corporate shill, but who - in 1978 - said:

Milton Friedman: "Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger....Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. We have to have that tariff to protect us against competition from abroad. We have to have that special provision in the tax code. We have to have that subsidy."

I've referenced this quote numerous times on this blog and elsewhere.

We see it all over the world. There's even an entire school of economics (Public Choice) devoted to better understanding how the process works, and it's a school of thought dominated by largely free-market economists... Not because they don't understand that corporations and government have a symbiotic relationship but because they do understand it extremely well. And more importantly, unlike supporters of more powerful government, Public Choice economists accurately understand the cause of corporatism/"crony capitalism".

The Occupy Wall Street guys don't. So for the most part, they seem to be advocating policy changes or agitating for ideas that will do exactly the opposite of what they claim they want.

Thus... When Jacky challenges me as such...

"But do you care enough to Occupy Wall Street, and try instigate change peacefully?"

...I have no choice but to challenge the premise!

I definitely "care enough" to try to instigate change peacefully. That's why for the past several years I've completely refocused my career towards advocating for individual liberty and free markets. I won't be Occupying Wall Street (or DC, or anywhere else) because I don't believe that that movement itself is instigating change at all.

Wall Street sought bailouts to absolve themselves from their financial mistakes. They were only able to accomplish this through a friendly and powerful state. Many of the "Occupiers" I've spoken with and read about believe that - somehow, with absolutely no evidence to speak of - if only we establish an even more powerful government with more control over the economy, a less friendly environment to big corporations will spontaneously appear... At no time anywhere in history can I think of an example of a situation where substantially increasing the importance & incentive to take one action (i.e. manipulating the government) has caused less of that action to take place.

I'm not a fan of wishful thinking, so in spite of my long-standing outrage at bailouts, and corporatism... I will not be joining Occupy Wall Street at this point in time.

* * * * *

Addendum: I omitted a chunk of Jacky's comment, because the response to it wouldn't really be as directly related to OWS. It related to starving children in the third world and about America's health care system. On poverty world-wide, I think the above post should make it clear what I believe should be done about that. On the American health care system, the insinuation of Jacky's comment was that America has a "free market system" and that it is "a joke". But... Unfortunately, America has no free market in health care at all. Not even a tiny bit. Government controls everything from pricing and availability to the number of doctors allowed to practice and hospitals that are built.

Matt Taibbi: Bad Economist.

2011-10-20T17:21:00.000-07:00

If by "people powered", Rolling Stone meant
"Goldman Sachs people" powered... Sure.

It's obviously fairly predictable that a guy who writes for Rolling Stone magazine wouldn't be the greatest economist in the world, but hey... I'm just a musician, and I turned my media production skills towards advocating on behalf of sound economics, right? Just saying, you never know.

However, recently a progressive guy I interact with from time to time on Twitter suggested that I read a Matt Taibbi article titled "My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters"... He starts off nicely by asserting that:

"The protesters picked the right target and, through their refusal to disband after just one day, the right tactic".

I beg to differ, Matt.

The protesters picked exactly the wrong target, actually. And their tactic of refusing to disband, as far as I can tell, has way more to do with the protesters desire to have a big 60's come-back party than any sane attempt at initiating real, systemic change.

Taibbi really gives up any hope of making sense by admitting:

"No matter what, I'll be supporting Occupy Wall Street. And I think the movement's basic strategy – to build numbers and stay in the fight, rather than tying itself to any particular set of principles – makes a lot of sense early on."

Here's the difference between me and guys like Taibbi. If the Wall Street protesters had occupied, say, the Federal Reserve, I'd more or less support their mission. I'd still be mocking them for being ridiculously privileged people - certainly by world standards, but even quite often by American standards - whining about how "poor" they are. I'd still be mocking the stupid signs, and confusion... but of course, in the alternate timeline where they're "Occupying" the Federal Reserve or the United States Congress, I have a feeling the signs wouldn't be quite so dumb.

Because... They'd have picked the right target.

The key here is, I wouldn't - and don't - support anyone "no matter what". The nice thing about being independent and focusing on critical thinking is that I get to support people based on the quality of their ideas and actions, so if their ideas and actions aren't good, I'm not emotionally tied to supporting the team when they're wrong. I've read a lot of Taibbi over the years, and while he's not the worst on some of these topics, he's stuck himself with team-thinking way too often, and here's a prime example.

In any case, he gives 5 pieces of advice, and each piece needs to be addressed individually... not only because I promised to do so via Twitter, but also because it really demonstrates why it's so important to think through ideas more clearly. At the very beginning of Frederic Bastiat's seminal essay, "What is Seen and What is Not Seen", he writes:

"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil."

Taibbi - and let's be honest, most people - really doesn't think through his solutions. I think this is in part because he's emotionally invested in being angry at Wall Street, and in part because he's just not good at economic thinking. Let's go through his suggestions.

1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called "Too Big to Fail" financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term "Systemically Dangerous Institutions" – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.

Ok... Let's set aside the fact that Taibbi asserts that 20 competing firms somehow is the equivalent of a monopoly. I agree with him that the limited market dominated by a handful of giant firms is a bad thing for everyone. It is a threat to our national financial security to be sure (virtually all centralized control is... that's a major theme of this blog time and time again), and while it's a bit hyperbolic, I think it's pretty fair to say that most of the big Wall Street titans are more dangerous than "a thousand mafias".

So I agree with Taibbi about the scale of the problem.

But Taibbi doesn't actually accurately understand where the problem comes from, and thus entirely misunderstands how to solve it. He claims they're "above the law and above market consequence"... But how did they get that way? Taibbi fails to address this, and therefore he makes innacurate conclusions about how to handle it.

First, he seems to think that simply re-instituting a separation of commercial and investment banking would solve the problem, but alas, Lehman Brothers & AIG for instance never had commercial divisions - yet they were instrumental to the collapse. So... How exactly is bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act going to fix that problem? It would not have prevented the financial meltdown in 2007 in the slightest, and there's plenty of documentation to prove that - not to mention pretty basic logic. If AIG wasn't subject to Glass-Steagall rules, and it was one of the chief direct recipients of bailout funds (and was used as a major argument for why we needed to bail out banks), then that by itself is enough to know why that argument is silly.

Also, simply having the government "dismantle" companies because we don't like them omits that the government and every single action it takes is politically directed.

So you always have to say; "Who decides"? In this case, who decides which banks get dismantled and why? The absurd utopian dream that guys like Taibbi are effectively supporting is that we'll just have some impartial, all-knowing, all-benevolent group of banking experts who will be able to determine which banks are ok and which aren't, and at what point the government should "dismantle" them.

But I wish for once some progressives would get serious about how government actually operates and about understanding the limits of knowledge that prevent their fantasy ideas from ever actually working.

In reality what happens is this. Whatever "czar" or board, or panel, or whatever you want to call it that ends up with the power to decide which banks survive intact and which don't will be staffed by real live human beings. These humans will have political affiliations, and in all likelihood, they will be closely tied with both the current politicians in power and with the very Wall Street firms they're about to oversee.

News flash: This is exactly why the SEC sucks.

So all of these insiders - and of course they must be insiders, because those who haven't worked on Wall Street or have ties to it won't be capable of understanding the systems they're trying to regulate in the first place - will be relatively easily manipulated by the biggest firms at the expense of weaker firms. So whatever "dismantling" occurs, we can be virtually assured that it will happen according to political will, and according to the wishes of the most well-connected players on Wall Street - not according to which banks "need" to be dismantled.

That means that - just like we've seen throughout the last 3 years of bailouts and exploding financial regulation - the big, well-connected firms will only get bigger and more powerful, and their smaller competitors who failed to successfully influence the regulations and regulators will die off.

This is seriously "Regulatory Capture 101".

It also gets to the heart of George Will's quote that I was recently made aware of more clearly expressing the Occupy Wall Street protester's bizarro logic: "Washington is grotesquely corrupt and insufficiently powerful."

If premise 1 is: Wall Street banks own the government, then there's no world in which it makes any rational sense to believe that you will somehow overwrite that ownership in passing new legislation when the political system and all the people operating it are the same.

2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. It would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it's supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.

There are a lot of assertions here that are simply absurd, the first of which being the idea that levying a tax on all stock trades is going to generate revenue for the government, period, not to mention enough revenue to cover the effectively $16 Trillion the Fed has dropped on the banking system over the last couple years. At some point, I'd really like for progressives to understand that taxation, especially on non-human entities like businesses - simply isn't a viable solution to most revenue related problems, because the tax is always either passed off onto consumers of products, or depresses transactions to a point where any gains in revenue you've made by raising rates you've lost (and then some!) by decreasing the number of transactions being taxed overall.

The point is, Taibbi is thinking essentially of only the best-case scenario where he's smarter about tax-law & finance than the collective intelligence of bankers at all of these giant financial institutions combined. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and bet that's a pretty poor assumption. These guys tend to live and breathe money-making and the finer points of arbitrage, and Matt Taibbi is a journalist. Ish.

Translation: The real consequence of such a tax would very likely be that transactions get funneled into some other area of banking that is - in all likelihood - more risky and more dangerous to the average investers 401k; perhaps through reducing the number of transactions per day and instead pursuing bigger individual transactions. Additionally, these kinds of taxes would mean the complete and utter destruction of businesses like eTrade which allow ordinary investors more control over their accounts.

If I had to bet, the end result would be a world where big banks had more consolidated power over people's investments, and the taxes themselves would be passed off in some way to consumers. See also: Bank of America's brand new debit card fees.

The more hilariously obnoxious side of all this is that it was all of the free market economists and their supporters like myself, who explicity warned the government NOT to bail out the damn banks in the first place!
Remember this?

...cause I do.

If the government had just stayed out of this mess in the first place, it wouldn't have rewarded banks for bad behavior, thus creating even more moral hazard and screwing over the tax payers of the United States and Matt Taibbi nor the "Occupiers" would have anything to complain about. Bad banks would have gone under, their assets bought by solvent banks or written off via a bankruptcy process and the market could have recalibrated based on a more accurate understanding of real market value.

But nope... Why listen to good economists when you can listen to idiots, screw everything up and then write even worse laws when it becomes clear your policies have just created tons of problems?

And by the way, most of the banks did pay for their own bailouts - most, actually, didn't want to get bailout funds in the first place because there were so many strings attached, and thus they paid back the loans they were forced to take as quickly as possible. But anyway...

3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer's own money to lobby against him. You can either suck on the public teat or influence the next presidential race, but you can't do both. Butt out for once and let the people choose the next president and Congress.

Yet another issue that wouldn't exist without the state intervening in the economy in the first place, but whatever, what's done is done... So let's talk about the logic here, shall we?

Setting aside the reality that this kind of a law would be a grotesque violation of the 1st Amendment which guarantees the right of everyone, including those who work for and run banks and other corporations, the right to petition their government and engage in any type of speech they wish to advocate ideas - including policies - that they agree with... I'd be a hell of a lot more ok with this kind of a rule if it was evenly applied across the board.

If you get money from the government, or even if you are simply a "net recipient" of government money, you don't get to vote and you don't get to lobby.

Alright.

Know what this means? Public sector workers, and especially public sector unions... You're out. No more lobbying from the AFL-CIO, the SEIU, the AFSCME. No more lobbying from the Teachers, Firefighters, or Police Officers Unions... Actually, this is sounding pretty good.

Let's carry it out further. Something like 47% of Americans pay no income taxes at all. The bottom quintile of Americans actually are net tax-recipients, through all of our various welfare programs. So, according to Matt Taibbi logic, those groups have now lost the right to lobby or petition the government in any way. In fact, the only people remaining who get a say in how the government works are people who are both tax-payers and who do not get subsidized.

That means no farmers, no ethanol producers, no solar panel companies, no oil companies.... Definitely can't have any military contractors of government consultants. Absolutely no major auto companies. Hell, I don't even think that Tesla would make the cut.

It's a nice bit of populist nonsense by Taibbi to single out the bankers, but if his argument was even slightly consistently applied, he'd realize that he's just disenfranchised millions upon millions of people - many of whom he probably would be appalled to see losing the power to lobby.

Fail, Taibbi. Fail.

4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires. I defy any politician to stand up and defend that loophole during an election year.

I wonder sometimes if people like Taibbi are actively just retarded when it comes to understanding the tax system, not to mention basic finance - quite apart from their epic failure to understand economics generally.

There are a bunch of interesting points to be made here that I'd like to cover in the briefest time possible.

First of all, everyone who has a retirement account is subject to that 15% tax, not just billionaire hedge-fund managers. I had to pay that same tax on my silver bar that I sold last year, because it is counted by the Federal government as investment income and capital gains. If you raise that tax, or "close the loophole" (is a simple tax rate a "loophole"? Really?) as Taibbi puts it, you're not raising the tax on Warren Buffett. You're raising that tax on millions of Americans who are counting on obtaining a reasonable amount of capital gains in returns to literally fund their retirement.

Secondly, on every conceivable front, taxing people on capital gains is already double taxation... although this is apparently a hard concept to grasp.

Let me try to simplify it, and explain how this works with an example...

Example:

10 people, including you and me decide to start a company. We each put in $100. The company has $1,000 and we are each 10% stakeholders.

Cool?

Our company does ok, and... Great news!... We're profitable. We not only break even and recoup our initial investment, but after all the overhead has been paid, vendors and employees paid, we make $1,000. Now for the bad news... The government taxes corporate profits at 35%, one of the highest rates in world. Boo!

We're a small business, and not best buddies, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric, so we don't get any special subsidies or really anything else that would knock that rate down so we've gotta pay it. Now our $1,000 profit is actually just a $650 profit. Kinda sucks.

Now we pay dividends based on stock ownership from those profits.

Each of us had 10% of the company, so each of us gets $65. Except, no... We don't. After taking 35% of the total just moments ago, the government takes yet another 15% the minute the money leaves the accounting books of the corporation - that we own! - and into our own personal bank accounts. So I don't get $65, and neither do you.

We get $55.25.

All combined, you might note that the total tax rate applied to profits incurred from successfully providing a product or a service that benefited other people's lives at least enough that they were willing to pay us for it, is actually 44.75%.

So fine, Taibbi.

Claim that a mere 15% on capital gains is not enough. But take a step back and realize that it isn't 15%. It's nearly 45%! The stockholders of a company are the owners of that company, and the vast majority of people who own stock in businesses around the world are not big wealthy tycoons. They are ordinary people with a little extra cash that they put into a 401k.

We need corporate profits to facilitate the retirement accounts and pensions that need to be paid, insurance benefits that need to be funded, (barely) interest-generating savings & checking accounts, and everything else... So right now, that's 44.75% on the high end (without tax-breaks) that is going to the state rather than to ordinary people.

Yes, it's also 44.75% that isn't going back to the tiny fraction of Americans who are super-rich... But so what?

Lastly, I want to note that complaining about tax-rates in this way is a great bit of populist class-warfare, and I suppose it's convincing to the people who haven't thought this stuff through any more than Taibbi. An Obama supporter I filmed last week at the OccupyDC/Code Pink rally at Freedom Plaza asked; "Whatever happened to Progressive Taxation!?" and complained that it just "didn't seem fair" that... to be quite honest... he had to pay any taxes at all when there were rich people out there.

But I mean... What happened to Progressive Taxation? It's the defining feature of the American tax code! You literally do not get more progressive than the US tax system. Even the OECD says so. The Top 1% of income earners covers, what, 34% of our Federal tax revenues now? How's that for "fairness"?

Personally, I'd flatten the hell out of the tax system and just make it one rate for everybody. No loopholes, no breaks, no subsidies. People focus so much on tax rates without bothering to focus on what you're actually collecting nominally from people.

If I make $25,000 in a year, and pay taxes at a standard 10% rate, I pay $2,500. If you make $250,000 in a year, you pay $25,000. If you make $25,000,000... well, then you pay $2.5 Million in taxes.

I struggle to see how that by itself is not "progressive", especially considering the fact that the guy paying $2,500,000 a year (say a professional athlete) in taxes isn't using the roads or any of the other crap Elizabeth Warren believes justifies radically increasing the amount of theft in society any more than the guy who's paying $2,500 in taxes. And in a lot of cases, assuming the multimillionaire sends his kids to private schools, built a private road and plumbing system, etc. to his house and everything else that rich people like to do, he's using the tax-funded infrastructure a hell of a lot less.

5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later. It should be: You make a deal today, you get company stock you can redeem two or three years from now. That forces everyone to be invested in his own company's long-term health – no more Joe Cassanos pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses for destroying the AIGs of the world.

I feel like just mocking this outright. Taibbi's solution is to have the state start deciding what, when and how employers pay their employees? Really?

Cause that always works out so well.

Look... The more substantial issue here is that Taibbi's comment here completely ignores how we got to a point where there are these giant "too big to fail" firms in the first place. The simpleton's answer is usually "greed", but for the millionth time, greed is just a human characteristic found in every person on the planet at all times throughout history.

Wall Street didn't just randomly get way more greedy between 2002-2007. Note: If you believe that that's what happened, you're probably pretty much hopeless.

Greed exists at all times.

The issue is what are the systemic incentives that either reward or punish greedy people for acting irrationally. The free market - contrary to Matt Taibbi and the OWS crowd's understanding - is the one type of system that exists that actually punishes greedy people when they behave badly. A government controlled and highly regulated market - as we have in the United States - actually rewards the greediest and most weasely among us. I know this is counter-intuitive, but it's simply reality.

Here's why:

Government can and always needs to be defined as the one entity which maintains a socially accepted monopoly on the use of force in human society. It is funded via forced taxation, and all political decrees are backed - at the end of the day - with guns and violence. There is no other socially accepted institution that you can say this about.

Government is unique in all of human institutions purely because it is perpetuated through legitimized violence.

Please note that I'm not making any arguments for or against government here. I'm simply trying to break down the institution to its most essential characteristics and properly define it. Government is violence. Deal with it, come to terms with it, and please understand what exactly that means.

...and if the government didn't dominate most of your economic
decisions in one way or another, you wouldn't need one.

Also understand that the more violence is used to control people's actions, the more politically determined economic outcomes become and the more necessary it always becomes for individuals and companies to make attempts at influencing those outcomes.

On a small scale, everyone understands how this works.

Imagine if your high school class president had the power to choose 10 people to go on a fun class trip to Cancun, how many bribes, favors, or other demonstrations of social capital do you think that class president would receive from people who wanted to go on that trip? I'm betting quite a few... Especially from people who felt like they had a reasonable chance at succeeding. The rest of the lumpen proletariat who understood they had no chance what-so-ever might be inclined to just give up...

Everyone seems to be able to understand all this, but apparently the lesson is not learned when the class president becomes US President.

Now... This might appear like I'm saying that all powerful people are inherently corrupt and always take bribes. I'm a little cynical in that I bet most do, but certainly some don't. But even still... If you have the power to give special benefits to on one hand, or kill on the other a business or industry, how do you decide how to use that power? Do you listen to your constituents, or an economics textbook?

The point is, it's all political all the time. And the more power political officials have over the economy, the higher the stakes get... Unfortunately, there's not that many people who can handle high-stakes games.

The people who can tend to be rich, established and well-connected. People like Jeffrey Immelt, who I mentioned earlier. It should never be a surprise that corporations have influence over policy as long as policy has influence over corporations. Without a strict separation of business and the state, this trend will just continue, grow and get more problematic.

Any honest assessment of American history should have shown Taibbi that we've done exactly what he wants a dozen times over the last century, and the result has been more corporate influence in politics, and more consolidated, risky banking decisions than ever.

So again, it's a cause & effect problem.

No... It really didn't.

People like Taibbi mistakenly believe that the government is horrendously corrupt and beholden to big corporate interests, and that - in defiance of absolutely all common sense - the way to solve this problem is by giving the government even more power while simultaneously trying to regulate the people that (now more powerful) government benefits the most. It is utterly insane. And what's more, even if you did manage to pass legislation that somehow made lobbying or anything like that illegal, all you'd be doing is pushing the bribery into a seedy black market which wouldn't be tracked by sites like www.OpenSecrets.org.

Taibbi's ideas on how to fix banking are not unlike Dodd-Frank. They are simplistic solutions to complex problems made by people who arrogantly think they're smarter than people who actually do banking for a living. But Taibbi isn't smarter in the realm of finance than the whole of Wall Street, much less probably even its worst day-trader. I know I'm not and it would be horrendously hubristic of me to think that I could predict the unintended consequences of a whole host of new government powers to dictate how and when the state bails out private companies.

I can tell you this though... Whatever the unintended consequences are, they're pretty much guaranteed to be uniformly abysmal for ordinary people.

And seriously? For Taibbi it's just a forgone conclusion that the state will bail out failing companies. What?? Isn't that the problem in the first place?

The actual solution here is to take away the incentives for banks and other major corporations to lobby the political system, by removing the power of government to give the benefits that those corporations are seeking at the tax-payers' expense. Get rid of the loan guarantee programs like the FDIC, Fannie, Freddie, etc., completely remove Congress' power to give bailouts, and for godsake, end the Federal Reserve!

I've already explained the Fed at length a million times, but if you don't understand why it is the central planning of interest-rates (thus grossly distorting market behavior and time-preference) and the ability of that organization to inflate the currency that produces an environment where greed wins over risk of loss in a way that simply cannot happen in the freed market, you're just not up to speed.

Once you understand that, it will be come crystal clear why Occupy Wall Street is filled with fools who will - if they succeed at all - only create more of the problems they are currently protesting.

Until the ideas change, Occupy Wall Street is a disastrous movement.

So here's my advice to Occupiers... Learn economics. First, you need a solid grasp of the basics, and this needs to come not from the guys like Paul Krugman or Joe Stiglitz, who actively called for the intervention into the economy that sparked the housing bubble, then just 3 years ago supported massive bailouts of the very financial institution you're occupying, but rather from guys who predicted the crash and exposed the bubble early on.

These men & women would be nearly 100% of the Austrian School of Economics persuasion. Look it up if you're unfamiliar. The Austrians, you'll be happy to know, have been focused on Human Action as opposed to government action or econometrics measured with numbers that coincidentally make inflation look like the solution to everything - and they've been doing that from the beginning.

So I'd start with reading the following:

Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
The Use of Knowledge in Society by Frederich August von Hayek (this one is going to be hard, but once you understand it, you will find that it will become instantly clear why Paul Krugman and other Keynesians - apart from being hypocritical douchebags - are wrong from their initial premises on down)
What is Seen and What is Not Seen by Frederic Bastiat
Also, read the book, but simply take a few hours and watch Free to Choose by/with Milton Friedman

Once the Occupiers have completed that small survey, I hope they'll also pop over and read up on Public Choice Economics and familiarize themselves with the work of Nobel Prize winner James M. Buchanan. Dr. Buchanan pioneered the study of employing the tools of economics to view how different incentives effect the agents of the state.

Turns out, incentives matter for politicians too, and we can learn lessons about who will ultimately always have the lion's share of control over any regulatory agency when they get more power. That'll be giant, well-connected corporations typically at the expense of their lesser competitors - and ultimately, at the expense of consumers.

All combined, I hope this sets the Taibbis of the world straight.

Dear, Occupy Wall Street. You are the "1%" too.

2011-10-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

As many of you know... My greatest annoyance - by far - with the Occupy Wall Street is the privileged "white whine" on display across the country. A facebook friend tagged me in the following image. Have a look, please:

I didn't make this, but I love it.

So much of these protests are - and should be - ridiculously insulting to the literally billions of people around the world who must worry about where their next meal is coming from, and if working a 20 hour day is even going to be enough to provide for themselves and their families.

These problems aren't the failings of capitalism. Quite the opposite.

Real poverty seen around the world is virtually without exception caused by societies that fail to respect private property in any way, shape or form; societies in which the state controls the majority of the economy directly and indirectly; societies in which redistribution of wealth is common place; societies in which trade is reviled and prohibited... In short, in socialist societies.

When you must go through your politically motivated masters to get permission to start a business, or to simply trade with your neighbor... When you risk the products of your labor being stolen without recourse by the state or its operatives... When you are in constant fear of physical violence as so much of the world is... Your opportunities are vanishingly small.

When you live in a country like the United States - for all its major and minor failings, and in spite of the self-evident fact that it's guiding principles are being eroded into that of a third-world kleptocracy - you still have opportunities of all kinds. Some people have so many opportunities that instead of even attempting to work, they can hang out all day and whine about how college costs a lot and someone else should have to pay for it.

Like this girl:

I did make this. And yes, that's a real girl at a real protest I really talked to.

Yes, college is expensive. Yes, so is top of the line health care (mediocre, average health care isn't that costly though and most prevention is pretty cheap). Yes, Wall Street sucks... Though they suck for taking handouts from a government that shouldn't have power to give them out - and in other news, I have yet to meet an "Occupyer" who isn't seeking some kind of hand out for him/herself from the state as well. Of course, they are not greedy. Right?

I'll even add that it also sucks that you have to be extremely productive and add a huge amount of value in America - way more than most places around the world - to even warrant getting paid at a rate that most people consider "good" or "livable". So... Yes, when you're young, you're probably gonna need a roommate. Or two (I have two). It also sucks that between the Fed inflating the shit out of our currency, and the government adding cost after cost to people's living expenses in regulatory compliance and taxation, the bar for what is "livable" keeps shooting up and it often compels some employers to find alternatives to high-cost American labor - be that robots and other capital machinery or a part of the let's generously say 6.5 billion people around the world who are poorer than the poorest American and seeking work.

Just maybe the truly priceless young woman above could simply lower her expectations of what life owes her just a tiny bit and stop spending so damn much, and she'd be fine. Pretty sure she didn't need to go to Harvard. I know she didn't need to wear $198 Ralph Lauren boots, after all. Privileged girls being oblivious to their privilege is funny... But not that funny.

So, to wrap this up... Occupy kids (I will happily stop calling them kids when they start behaving like adults)... Stop acting like you are the new "Arab Spring". You're not.

American women are in no danger of getting whipped for wearing make-up or painting their fingernails, small children are in no danger of being mutilated or having their limbs chopped off with machetes, and families are in no danger of disappearing in the middle of the night because someone mouthed off about the government on the internet. Real people, all over this planet, have real problems. The overwhelming majority of nouveau, not-remotely-radical, pro-establishment, pro-"the man" hippies I've encountered at these events just... Don't. At all.

As far as I can tell, they are mostly college educated, middle class kids who spent between $20,000 and $200,000 on degrees in philosophy or English, that have mysteriously turned out to have not prepared them to be valued by employers in the US or anywhere else during the rough economic times we're experiencing.

So... Occupy Wall Street trustafarians: Pleeeeease just shut up about how awful your lives are before I am forced to call the waaaaambulance.

Real vs. Superficial Arrogance

2011-10-05T06:59:00.000-07:00

You wouldn't even believe what Google images returns
when searching for "Cocky"!

This is a post I've been thinking about and wanting to write for a very long time... Probably years, actually... But for whatever reason, I've been in some conversations over the last few weeks in which it's come up and I think it's finally time to really pull the trigger.

The topic for today is the very substantial difference between what I believe is real arrogance, and what is the cosmetic bravado many people define as arrogance, and mistakenly believe is a problem.

Let's start with definitions...

Arrogance:
noun
offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride.

Ok. So, this is pretty much exactly what I'd define as superficial arrogance. It's an arrogance of appearance. I'm definitely guilty of this appearance - particularly when it comes to my online presence. See: Title of this blog.

Now, some of it, in the case of the blog (and my twitter handle, etc.) is more for the purpose of snark than anything else and I hope most people who know me or who have interacted with me in a sane manner have understood that I don't take myself overly seriously. I also am pretty scrupulous about admitting when I've made mistakes and am wrong, mostly because I really do like being right. If you're wrong, clinging to that position for the sake of your ego doesn't really get you anywhere, and can often be wildly counterproductive.

But we've all known people who are over-confident, overbearingly prideful, and who believe they are better than everybody else. They're obnoxious, they get laid a lot more than they should, and in business, they're the kinds of guys who can drag a company down with stupid decisions that they won't back down from. In arguments, they're usually just blowhards and eventually you have to ignore them.

I hope not to be one of those people at all. If I ever have been, it has been a mistake, and I do apologize for it.

But as annoying as that superficial arrogance can be, on the grand scheme of things, it's really not that harmful, and it's just not that big of a deal intellectually. It's just a guy who's wrong, and who's emotionally attached to being wrong. People like that can, and often eventually will, change. Or they won't... And they'll keep going to bars and picking up drunk girls. Either way... That's fine.

What concerns me is what I call "intellectual" or "epistemological" arrogance. This calls for another definition for those not familiar with the deeper depths of philosophy...

Epistemology:
noun
a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge.

When someone is epistemologically arrogant, at least in my view, they are overly certain of conclusions they've drawn about the nature of reality and the premises from which they've built arguments. They are also overly confident about the ability of human beings - either as individuals or even in groups - to know enough about the world to plan out the future.

The epistemologically arrogant are those who believe that the economy is a machine with levers, like fiscal & monetary policy, to "pull" whenever we want it to improve (no mention of which levers were pulled to make it go bad, of course). The epistemologically arrogant are those who believe that we can, or should, dictate who gets to interact with whom and on what basis. The epistemologically arrogant are those who believe that they can predict the climate, global ice flows or animal populations 100 years into the future.

These are just a few examples...

It is also epistemologically arrogant to assume that individual human beings are capable of being perfectly objective or perfectly "rational".

The highly punchable face of astounding
epistemological arrogance.

This line of reasoning underlies virtually all of the calls for more, bigger and more powerful government. Ironically, I've found that Keynesians & "Progressives" in particular often mistakenly believe that free markets require "perfect knowledge" and "perfect competition" when they absolutely do not (indeed, imperfect & dispersed knowledge is the primary reason that free markets work best), and yet those same fans of a powerful state fail to understand that perfection in human understanding is the hidden false premise sabotaging all of their wonderful utopian schemes.

For a government to be able to effectively plan an economy (or any other aspect of human society, such as the culture, artistic zeitgeist or even a language), the people operating that government must not only have up-to-the-second information about all of a thousand variables regarding individual preferences, available supplies of raw, capital & final goods, as well as the whereabouts, current deployment & skill-set of the whole labor force under their command; they must also be perfectly, unerringly rational, not to mention perfectly "good" and wise.

But no one person or even 100 people - no matter how smart and informed they may appear to be - has an almost infinitesimal fraction of the requisite knowledge... and no one is that "good", or wise. Period.

This is just the base logic of the economic calculation problem, and it doesn't even touch on the practical (and highly disturbing) reality that if you were to hand over the level of control over an economy that full-on central planning requires, in order to get it "to work", you'd literally need to treat individual human beings as fooseball men on a stick. They must go where you tell them to go, do what you tell them to do, act how you want them to act.

Humans in that situation are parts of a machine you're trying to build, and if they don't operate "the right way" (i.e. your way), the whole "machine" doesn't work. In short, you need totalitarianism. Anything short of that and you just have a broken machine.

The epistemologically arrogant types wind up making claims like, "My new jobs policy will save or create 2 million jobs", or to be politically "fair", they might claim that a $300 ~~Tricky-Dick Funbill~~"rebate" check will get it going again. These types fail to understand the basic lessons of trade offs and opportunity costs and the role incentives play out in an economy... not to mention the reality that individual people all have different values and cannot be lumped into broad macroeconomic aggregates.

Of course, here I am mostly speaking about economics, but this is true in other areas as well - epistemological arrogance also underlies arguments people sometimes make for the power of people like scientists and other authoritative "experts" to have all the answers. Most scientists I've met and know personally are pretty good about being epistemologically humble - but reporters certainly aren't, and neither is Al Gore, so no matter what caveat a scientist puts on his work, it will often be interpreted to being the word of (no?) God.

In any case, I can no more plan an entire economy than I can effectively dictate even what you should want to have for lunch... That much should be obvious by now...

But I should also not assume that I can know everything about myself.

We all make cognitive errors, and we are all - from time to time - blinded to our own little intellectual black-outs. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to know when and why we're making mistakes in judgment or reasoning.

Now, let's be clear. Contra the absurd statists of the world, just because individuals err, and because human beings aren't perfect or even great at reasoning from time to time does not mean that someone else can do it better on their behalf.

The point here is that there is a massive difference between being a cocky jerk, and holding a core of philosophical ideas that assume knowledge to which no human has realistic access.

Here's the real kicker... A cocky jerk can also exhibit epistemological humility, and one of the most philosophically and truly arrogant people on the planet might come off as a genuine, caring, and wonderful person.

So I guess if anything, my point in writing this is to suggest that anyone who is bothered by arrogant people should take a step back and ask themselves if it is just the superficial arrogance of a type A frat boy, or it's the true (and extremely dangerous) arrogance of an overly-confident intellectual or public official imbued with the power to influence the way people act by force?

The trick is that sometimes the most humble people by outward appearances hold the most epistemologically arrogant views. This is where things get difficult. Most people pay far more attention to style, and almost no attention to substance - it's easy enough to understand why, but it's entirely unreliable.

So... Quit paying so much attention to the style of someone's delivery, or how nice they appear to be. Pay attention to the ideas, and to hell with how they're delivered!

Angela Keaton on Ending War

2011-08-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

I was in Los Angeles on the 18th-23rd attending a fantastic writing-focused film production workshop called the Taliesin Nexus. I'll probably do a blog about that later, because there's a pretty funny story involved... However, while I was in Los Angeles, I also took the time to see my friend (and former neighbor) Angela Keaton of www.antiwar.com and do an interview with her on camera.

Truth be told, I wanted to do a full interview anyway, but I'm actually working on a big piece on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and while I had the opportunity to get a serious anti-war voice for that I wanted to take it.

My article and interview are available at The Daily Caller, along with the video - which you should definitely watch - below:

Angela also posted the video at her website.

My Klout is Unpossible!

2011-08-30T12:31:00.000-07:00

Ok, so if you've never heard of "Klout" before, you're probably a totally sane human being.

Klout is a website that looks into your social media presence by linking to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc., and comparing your influence to other people who use Klout. It then assigns a score between 1-100 indicating how influential you are among your network.

My score is currently 55 59.

Not bad, I think... Especially since I've never been very good at actively promoting myself or seeking out Twitter or Facebook followers. I just go about my way tweeting, blogging (i.e. now), as if anyone actually cares what I think about anything. And don't worry, I don't religiously check the site or anything, they sent me an email today and it made me curious.

Klout is interesting because it also gives you a breakdown of your influence in other ways, such as providing you a list of people to whom you are an influence, as well as listing those who influence you. This - I believe - is determined by who is responding to and/or commenting on your posts, who's re-tweeting your tweets, and of course, whose posts you are responding to and re-posting elsewhere.

So imagine my surprise when I looked at Klout today and saw this:

No really.... Penn Jillette is among those who I most influence. What the... What!?? Cool!

Also, not to be outdone, I'm also very glad that Klout claims I influence Matt Welch (Editor in Chief of Reason Magazine), though in both cases I feel like I'm being lied to. However... It's a kind lie, and I'll take the compliment.

Sidenote: Matt Lewis, Jeff Winkler & Joe Kildea are all also awesome people who I definitely respect, but as I can hear Mr. Lewis recording his podcast interviews through our shared wall in the Daily Caller office I'm not sure it counts.

Who's the 'dictator' again?

2011-08-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

In an interview last week with Politico ("...a liberal publication based in suburban Virginia"), Debbie Wasserman Schultz - Chair of the Democratic National Committee - said that Republicans were acting like "dictators".

Quote:

"This is not leadership. This is almost like dictatorship. I know they want to force the outcome that … their extremists would like to impose. But they are getting ready to spark panic and chaos, and they seem to be OK with that. And it’s just really disappointing, and potentially devastating."

Then, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) made an identical comment also at Politico, just today:

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

...and Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden agreed:

"Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have acted like terrorists,” according to several sources in the room.

Biden’s office declined to comment about what the vice president said inside the closed-door session.

Earlier in the day, Biden told Senate Democrats that Republican leaders have “guns to their heads” in trying to negotiate deals."

So much for that "new tone", huh?

Look. If Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Mike Doyle and Joe Biden (of all people!) want to talk dictatorship, let's look at the Obama administration and the Senate, shall we?

The only part of government that has actually passed any sort of a workable (albeit still almost pointless) plan at this point is the House of Representatives.

The house is made up of 433 people from all over the US, elected throughout different rather small regions. It's as close to a direct democracy as the United States Federal Government can get, since it's a hell of a lot more localized and thus individual votes actually matter a little bit more.

They were elected, they offered a plan (which the White House has yet to do, or rather, has yet to do in any serious form since the single "budget" the President offered was a joke that even his own party wouldn't support), and they voted on the plan. This plan passed, and included not only a raise to the debt ceiling - which is what Obama has spent the last 3-4 weeks demanding needs to happen - but also a few moderate spending cuts... And let's be honest, they're not even "cuts", they're just reductions in planned increases in spending.

According to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, these are apparently the actions of "dictators".

Contrast that with the Democratic controlled Senate which hasn't passed any thing. The Senate is comprised of 100 members who have succeeded at convincing just a scant plurality of their whole state to vote for them, so even though they each have arguably more power than their House of Representatives counter-parts, they are slightly less accountable to the public. And that's still way more democratic than the election of a US President, like President Obama.

Speaking of Mr. Obama... Let's talk that, shall we?

Barack Obama got elected with 52.9% of the votes (through the electoral college system, which we'll ignore for now)... The voter turnout in 2008 was, according to the FEC (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html) - 56.8%.

That means that, as a rough sketch at least, only about 30% of the American public actually supported President Obama enough to pull the proverbial lever in his favor. And again, considering how the electoral college system works, the actual number is far lower than that.

Yet Obama, throughout this debt "debate", has actively suggested he might decide (and yes, it is a priority-based choice Obama has control over) to not send out Social Security checks by an arbitrary deadline unless the people he disagrees with do what he is demanding. And many members of his party are advocating that the President unilaterally overrule Congress if they don't agree to a "deal" and simply raise the debt limit himself via some half-assed interpretation of the 14th Amendment that will ultimately get challenged in the Supreme Court, but which by then would be too late.

So it's the 240+ people who have been elected at regional levels, and who have offered and voted on a plan of some kind vs. one guy, put in power by a fraction of the public, who is advocating simply usurping authority no president has ever had and exercising it at his own whim (oh right, and one who actively presides over the bombing of thousands of people worldwide).

Who's being dictatorial again?

And by the way, where is the media outrage about how extreme the tone and rhetoric is on the left? I'm not seeing it. Hmm.

Annnnd... More Predicted Healthcare Fail

2011-07-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

I really must thank Matt Drudge for doing the legwork here... but honestly, this pretty much speaks for itself.

Back in 2010, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about the newly passed health care reform bill. In it contained the following passage:

"A large swath of the business community opposed the changes, arguing the legislation was too broad and had too many taxes. "This will make us one of the highest-taxed regions in the world, and that's going to have an impact on the appetite for people to invest in medical innovation," said Bill Hawkins, chief executive of Medtronic Inc., which makes medical devices. He said his company could cut at least 1,000 jobs to absorb a new 2.3% excise tax on medical-device makers."

At the time, I explained to anybody and everybody precisely why all the incentives of the law would result in a serious decline in innovation and most importantly, in the overall suppy of health care goods & services. It shouldn't have been hard to understand, and of course, Mr. Hawkins explained exactly why part of the law would harm his business and those employed by it.

Lo and behold.

"Boston Scientific Corp. said yesterday that it plans to eliminate 1,200 to 1,400 jobs worldwide during the next 2 1/2 years to free money for new investments, the Natick medical device maker’s second major round of cuts since last year.

The company would not say how many jobs will be lost in Massachusetts, where fewer than 2,000 of its 25,000 employees are based. In February 2010, Boston Scientific said it would pare 1,300 jobs worldwide, but similarly did not say where."

But nope, it is probably all because the company is just mean and greedy and has nothing what-so-ever to do with the massive changes in incentives created by the healthcare bill, not to mention with RomneyCare in Massachusetts. Right?

Seriously though, this is the future of health care in America. I cannot be less thrilled.

We have created an environment where producers have little incentive to keep making the goods and services we all need if we want top-quality health care, and simultaneously an environment where consumers demand more and more without bearing any increased cost. There is just no better prescription for failure.

And just think, this was created by the same folks who are now bringing us all endless headaches with the debt ceiling!

The Economist on Friedman vs. Rothbard

2011-07-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

I read an interesting article today in The Economist (online), addressing the question of why so many "free marketers" are "hawkish" on inflation, particularly when some of the supposed heroes of free market economics - particularly Milton Friedman - believed that tight monetary policy was the cause of the Great Depression and the serious deflation that happened in the formative years of 1929 and 1930.

The editorial makes the case that without Milton Friedman being alive and available to push back against the more "Rothbardian" influences in libertarian and conservative/rightist circles, Rothbard kind of wins the day.

"As a veteran of the "free-market movement", I can attest to the remarkable influence of this line of thinking. Now, Milton Friedman was one of the 20th century's great economists as well as one its most formidable debaters. This made him a powerful check on the influence of anarcho-capitalist Austrians, obviously much to the chagrin of Rothbard. "As in many other spheres," Rothbard wrote, "[Friedman] has functioned not as an opponent of statism and advocate of the free market, but as a technician advising the State on how to be more efficient in going about its evil work." Rothbard's fulminations notwithstanding, Mr Friedman died a beloved figure of the free-market right. Yet it does seem that his influence on the subject of his greatest technical competence, monetary theory, immediately and significantly waned after his death. This suggests to me that Friedman's monetary views were more tolerated than embraced by the free-market rank and file, and that his departure from the scene gave the longstanding suspicion that central banking is an essentially illegitimate criminal enterprise freer rein. When a significant portion of a political movement's activists believe that the whole point of central banking is "systematic robbery", and that inflation is the means by which this robbery takes place, widespread, reflexive opposition to inflation is not surprising."

Of course... Murray Rothbard hasn't been around for a long while to defend his views either, so we should probably take a second and ask ourselves why Rothbard's viewpoint is perhaps more widely accepted now that they're both gone.

I have a few thoughts on this topic, and I think it's best understood from a more personal perspective.

My first introduction to the wide, wide world of economic thought came in high school. I got interested in the subject through philosophy and an ever-present tendency to theorize on human action.

As I began to read books and watch videos on the subject, one name would come up over and over again: Milton Friedman.

Eventually, I discovered books about, and/or by, Milton Friedman and then worked my way through the entire "Free to Choose" series. Not only did I watch the great original version from 1980, I have also watched the entire 1990 "update", which was introduced by none other than my former lecherous Governator himself; Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Friedman was not only every bit the phenomenal debater that The Economist notes in the passage above (and indeed, the NY Times' David Brooks made this point in an interview I recently filmed), he was also simply the best educator on economics that the high school version of me could have hoped for.

He's concise, articulate, and for just about every single question or bit of skepticism I ever had on the topics he presented, he would pre-emptively counter my objections moments later. I frankly find it hard to say a negative word about Milton Friedman as an intellectual... Or rather, I found it hard to say a negative word...

But then something changed.

I read Henry Hazlitt. I read Frederic Bastiat. I read Ludwig von Mises & F.A. Hayek... and most germane to this post, I read Murray Rothbard.

The one question that Friedman never sufficiently answered in a way that I found convincing was; "Why did the Great Depression happen at all?"... And it wasn't until I started reading the Austrians later in my undergraduate college years and when I was in graduate school that it all started to make sense to me why Friedman's conclusions always seemed so weak.

Friedman, to use his pal Thomas Sowell's words, "starts the story in the middle".

When it comes to the Great Depression, Milton Friedman only really looks into what the Federal Reserve did after "Black Thursday" on October 24th, 1929. He and Anna Schwartz don't really bother to spend much time on the cause of the underlying malinvestments and root problems that resulted in the inevitable stock market crash in their book, "A Monetary History of the United States". Instead, they just assume these kinds of fluctuations happen in a market - perhaps randomly - as if J.M. Keynes' notion of the "animal spirits" was a valid concept, rather than the evasion of an argument that it really is.

By contrast, Rothbard, in "A History of Money & Banking in the United States" and "America's Great Depression" spends quite a bit of time on that core issue.

For Friedman, his monetarism and misunderstanding of the Great Depression was not only his biggest mistake (as far as I can tell) as an economist, it's also a huge contributing factor to Ben Bernanke's misunderstanding of the current economic crisis. I've written about this kind of thing in the past, and I don't really intend for this post to be all about why Friedman was wrong on the Great Depression, and why Rothbard's position is far closer to the truth, and I'm not going to go through the copious links from Bob Murphy, Tom Woods, Robert Higgs, Joseph Salerno, et al to back up that case right now.

They're all easily accessible online anyway, so by all means, do some Googling.

What I will do, however, is offer a distinctly third option and alternative assessment of why Rothbard's anti-inflationary ideas and the more "hardcore" strains of free market theory, rather than Friedman's technocratic government "efficiency" aiding positions, are gaining popularity in the libertarian and presumably "conservative" communities right now.

Far from it being a product of Friedman being dead, and thus being unable to act as a "check" on Rothbardian ideas... I suspect it is because, like me, many people are finally accessing the Austrian School account of the Great Depression (thanks largely to the internet archives of places like the Mises Institute or the Foundation for Economic Education" and Ron Paul's political successes) and discovering it to be both more comprehensive and more plausible than the Friedman/Schwartz account.

When looking at the Great Depression and other severe economic crises, I didn't want to simplistically understand the proximate cause of the crash, for example brought on by arguably thoughtless Federal Reserve policies in New York City. I wanted to know about why the American economy was in such a fragile, unsustainable position in the first place.

Understanding the ultimate cause is way more valuable to understanding what to avoid in the future.

I think that a lot of people, particularly in the wake of the 2007 stock market crash (which can be quite explicitly and cogently explained through an Austrian viewpoint - i.e. loose monetary policy and a perfect storm of regulations blew up bubbles in housing & finance, thus causing systemic malinvestment during the boom and an inevitable "bust" to follow), find that Friedman's approach just doesn't do a good enough job of explaining what goes wrong in these situations. And I think that they're finding this to be true precisely because they want to know the bigger picture, and don't really feel like looking at a single snapshot of monetary policy as Friedman did is an adequate data point to explain causation.

And frankly, the United States' experience over the last 3 years attests to this.

Bernanke swore up and down that he learned the lessons Milton Friedman had to teach... and in some ways, I think it's clear that at least on the Great Depression, this is absolutely true. So Bernanke - and the entire political establishment - set about expanding the monetary base, loosening monetary policy, focusing on doing virtually everything possible to pump even more artificial credit into the economy, hoping to avoid the "mistake" of the New York Federal Reserve in 1929.

I think we can see how well that's actually worked out.. By which I mean to say, "not at all".

The multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages that we've gotten foisted on us in the past few years have proven Milton Friedman (to say nothing of Keynes, Krugman or DeLong) conclusively wrong on this issue as far as I'm concerned. If the real problem was lack of credit as the result of a contraction in the money supply in 1929, then by all means, then the Bush/Paulsen or Obama/Geithner (and of course Bernanke) plan to hose down the economy with cheap money should have worked to prevent a long-term recession.

But it didn't.

Most people who are paying attention at all to this kind of stuff (or who haven't been living under a rock since mid-2007) are well aware of this fact. Thus, instead of going back to proximate causes, and searching for that one magic bullet of public policy that would get all the metaphorical "gears" working the right way again, a lot of people are actually starting to try to understand the big, structural problems with the economy.

What at least a number of those people are learning is that these problems simply cannot be solved by pulling the right lever in government.

This is what I figured out after just a few days of being exposed to the Austrian School and thinking through all of the implications of their ideas - particularly on the business cycle, subjective value theory and methodology.

The intellectual satisfaction I felt after having a series of minor epiphanies based on those ideas seriously contrasted against the substantial dissatisfaction I always felt upon thinking through Friedman's viewpoint on the Great Depression, and the cause of recessions in general.

So my suspicion is that the reason Murray Rothbard may seem to be winning the argument over Friedman on monetary policy & business cycle issues today is simply because...

Wait for it...........

He was right.

Things I Wish I Wrote... But Didn't.

2011-07-12T21:21:00.000-07:00

Holy cow... Art Carden wrote a piece for Forbes this week that so clearly sums up the harm economically ignorant people do in the name of good intentions, I honestly wish I had written every word.

Just... read this:

What kinds of messages do price controls send about the kind of society in which we live?

They say that our society doesn’t know the lessons economics has to teach. Price controls create shortages, and they also drive a wedge between the price of a good or service and what people are willing to pay or accept. Suppose someone is willing to pay $10 for a gallon of gas after a storm but is only allowed to pay $2 in cash. If he values his time at $8 per hour, he will be willing to pay with $2 in cash and an hour of time spent standing in line. The cruel irony of this is that the entire difference between the legal maximum price and the price people are willing to pay for every gallon that is supplied will evaporate as people stand in line for gas. Everyone is unambiguously worse off relative to where they would be without price controls.

They say that our society is elitist. Price controls inflict positive harm on precisely the people we wish to help, and for what? So that people removed from the situation can feel good about themselves? Excusing others’ suffering in the name of your ideals is neither virtuous nor compassionate. The Foundation for Economic Education’s Sheldon Richman once said that advocating policies when you don’t understand their unintended consequences is “the intellectual equivalent of drunk driving.” If you’re advocating price controls and don’t understand what the laws of supply and dema.nd have to say about your proposal, you aren’t courageous or compassionate. You’re dangerous.

Art and Sheldon... I ~~hate~~love you both, I hope you know.

Is there anything left to say? Seriously... Today I was at the National Archives with MK. We went to check out the exhibit on how the US government has been screwing with Americans' food for the last Century. We haven't figured out exactly what to do with the exhibit yet, but one thing that stood out were pictures and recordings of Pete Seeger singing songs urging people to support the Office of Price Administration.

The OPA was Roosevelt's agency to dictate price controls.

I cannot even begin to explain exactly how disastrous these price controls were to the US economy. Among other things, they created shortages for dozens of goods & services, and directly contributed to healthcare becoming attached to employment - which has been a long-term disaster. But hey... Pete Seeger liked it...

Sheldon was right. If you advocate policies without understanding their unintended consequences, you aren't just wrong, you are dangerous. Very dangerous.

Comment Fail and Journalism 101

2011-07-11T13:33:00.000-07:00

Listen... I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me, nor do I fail to recognize that the Daily Caller wouldn't exist without readers. But honestly, sometimes I review some of the comments and I want to hit myself in the face with my monopod.

Recently, I filmed an interview with NY Times columnist, David Brooks, conducted by senior editor Jamie Weinstein.

Frankly, I think it was a pretty good interview... But here's what one reader had to say:

The Daily Caller is becoming a joke if they believe this Brooks goof is a Conservative. The Democrats have worked with their allies in the media to hire liberals that call themselves conservative Republicans.

Brooks endorsed Obama in 2008. The NYT would never hire an actual conservative pro Republican.

I think maybe Tucker is going down the same road as Brooks, Scarboroughourh, Kathleen Parker and other Liberal Republicans.

Sad.

Brooks is a moron and only offers liberal nonsense. Glad to read most of the comments here agree with me.

The daily caller is off my reading list. Need not waste my time. Too bad.

Maybe Chris Wallace can get a job at the Daily Caller."

I don't normally do this, but I did reply to this character... It's not really my habit, especially not based on the commentariat we seem to attract over here (it's mostly unthinking Left vs. Right partisan crap, if I'm honest), but I mean... C'mon.

What's "sad" here, is that any of our readers would believe that being in the same room with someone and asking them questions implies "agreement" with their espoused beliefs.

As any reader of this blog should be able to infer, I agree with approximately 0% of David Brooks' core views on anything. In general, there are few people in my entire office who agree with him on anything either, by the way... Now, granted, I don't agree with him because he's about as statist as it gets, and some over here don't agree with him because he's "not conservative enough" politically. But the point here is that just because we interview someone does NOT mean we agree with everything they say!

This is kind of journalism 101, isn't it?

I have filmed dozens of interviews since I've been doing this job, and while I agree with little pieces of some of our subjects' viewpoints here and there, for the most part I've barely agreed with anybody.

Let's run down a short list, shall we? I've been in the same room with: Michele Bachmann, Marco Rubio, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, Charles Krauthammer... and do I agree with any of them on more than a 10th of the positions any of them hold? Nope!

But my job isn't to "agree" with everyone. It's to film interviews, events, etc. and present them as accurately as possible.

To be a commenter on a website and assume that simply because a person was interviewed on that site - especially a big, "top 1000" website like The Daily Caller - that intrinsically means that the reporters, editors, producers, and everybody else working for the website must agree with the views of the interviewee is utterly insane.

I typically shoot interviews with 2 or 3 people per week, and produce videos on a wide range of different topics. If I had to "agree" with all of them on everything, I don't think I could interview any of them. Even the occasional libertarian or interview subject I actually really like who I get to do pieces with I still don't always agree with on every issue.

Andy Puzder, CEO of Carl's Jr. would be a great example of that, actually. For the most part, I think he was spot on with practical solutions to helping free up the economy and clearing the way for business development in America. But, he's Catholic... I'm atheist.

Problem.

So yeah... I don't get it. My job is to bring people information... as it is... and in fact, the biggest complaint I've had in the last several months has been focusing too much of my time on talking to "conservatives" and not having nearly enough diversity of viewpoints in terms of interview subjects.

I was glad to talk to David Brooks.

Not because I agree with him (in fact, I agree with him far less than I agree with a lot of the people I've filmed), but because his viewpoint is different.

Don't get me wrong. David Brooks, in almost one breath, claimed to be highly mistrustful of central planning and claimed Edmund Burke as a major philosophical influence, and then turned right around and suggested that "maybe Obama was right about the auto-bailouts", and argued for all kinds of central planning.

That kind of cognitive dissonance is fitting for the NY Times, if you ask me...

But here's the thing, when he was on camera... you didn't ask me! And I wasn't planning on offering the opinion. My job is quite simple. Questions are asked, I film the answers - and make all that sound and look as good as I possibly can - and then you decide what you think about the interviewee. That's it.

I don't Michael Moore anything, I don't try to take people out of context or edit the chronology to make people say things they didn't say. All I do is show up, record what happened in a professional sort of a way, come back and put it up so you can see it.

Seriously... Easy.

And yet here's this commenter who seems to believe that he would be intellectually better off, and certainly that the website would be more to his liking, if we only ever interviewed people he likes and agrees with... How pitiful.

Freedom Day 2011

2011-07-04T12:11:00.000-07:00

Happy Freedom Day, everybody!

Today is a day which every American should use each year to ponder what it means to be free people, and to reflect on the history of the United States - particularly the Enlightenment revolution that brought us national sovereignty and a Bill of Rights almost unique in the history of humanity.

Adam Kokesh would like you to wear black today (which I will probably be doing as a matter of course regardless, oddly enough) and talk to people about the freedoms we've lost, but I don't think that's the best way to celebrate this holiday.

It's no secret that most Americans have a knee-jerk belief that the United States is a "free" country, and indeed... as kind of a goofy project, the Daily Caller's senior editor, Jamie Weinstein and I went out to the washington Mall the other day and asked people why America was so awesome.

It's pretty short, so check that video out now:

The vast majority of responses we got were just simply "Freedom". Not that I'd expect much else for the kind of question and the tone in which it was asked, but there are two really interesting sides to this topic...

There's the Kokesh approach... which is to (rather correctly, unfortunately) say, "Bullshit! America isn't the land of the free at all!", and be bitter about the state of liberty in America. But there's another approach - a more optimistic one - and that's the one I think I will be taking today.

Consider that regardless of how knee-jerk the responses (and not all of them were), the truth is that virtually all Americans recognize - however superficially - that it isn't government, welfare, wars (although we did get one response claiming that America was great because of soldiers), or any of the other junk people often would like us to believe makes America "great". Nope... On at least some level, most Americans do get that it's their freedom that makes their country special.

Now... It's true that America is hardly the free country that it was, or that it should aspire to be.

We're now effectively living George W. Bush's third term in office... with added helpings of Italian-style corporatism/fascism (and yes, a wee bit of attempted socialism) thrown into the mix. President Obama & Congress have put into place economic policies which have left markets less certain and less free than they have been in decades, our domestic policies are abysmal...

The PATRIOT Act has been renewed again & again, Obama's administration is one of the least transparent we've ever seen (in spite of receiving an award nearly as ironic as his Nobel Peace Prize for transparency), his Justice Department has taken up the mantle of defending warrant-less wiretapping, indefinite detentions, and as astounding as this may seem, the President who so many on the "left" thought was going to be better on civil rights and war issues has even taken to authorizing the direct assassination of American citizens without trial.

Not to mention, this is the same president who has not only escalated the US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan (and yes, he eventually decreased the presence to some degree in Iraq), but also gotten the US involved in a brand new war in Libya! Special bonus: Not only is the Libya war completely undeclared and unapproved by Congress (Obama, the "constitutional scholar" claims he doesn't need Congressional approval anyway), it comes after Obama expanded military aid to Gaddhafi's government over the last couple years. Fun times!

The worst part of that? The aircraft that Gaddhafi's forces are using to suppress resistance right now were probably paid for by the US government...

From the Congressional Research Service report (article linked above):

"The Obama administration also requested Foreign Military Financing assistance for Libya for the first time in FY2010, with the goal of providing assistance to the Libyan Air Force in developing its air transport capabilities and to the Libyan Coast Guard in improving its coastal patrol and search and rescue operations," the report said.

The administration also approved a Libyan request for the modernization of Gadhafi's air transport fleet. Libya acquired 10 U.S.-origin C-130 aircraft, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, in 1970.

And of course, this isn't mentioning a bit of the military actions our troops are engaged in in other parts of the world like Somalia, Pakistan, etc.

If you're a "conservative" reading this, as many of my co-workers are, perhaps you won't see all of that as a bad thing - at least, you might argue, it's defending "America and her interests". I patently disagree with that assessment, but I can actually see how people who aren't effected by bombs being lobbed into countries 7,000 miles away could ignore their government's activities abroad. It's hard to see the effects first-hand, so unfortunately, a lot of people just aren't going to care.

What's really shocking is the number of people who ignore the declining liberty in their own backyards.

I write about these issues all the time, so it's easy for me to make lists like this - but we are less free today than we were last year to choose all manner of goods and services that effect our lives... from things as basic as food, to things as innocuous as the tires we put on our cars. Our banking system, is now not only less free (and please make no mistake, it wasn't remotely free to begin with), the legal structure encompassing banks is now even more complicated than ever. Our monetary base has shot up astronomically, and although we haven't seen the negative price effects of the Fed's monetary policy that much yet - we certainly will in due time.

Of all things, Obama - a man who has openly admitted to use of cocaine and marijuana, and whose Justice Department said they would stop going after non-violent drug offenders a couple years ago, particularly in states that have some level of legalized use like California - has recently cracked down harder than ever on people who's only "crime" was be in possession of the wrong kind of plant.

Here in Washington DC, people can be - and are - fairly violently arrested for dancing... Because, you know, there's no more murder, rape, theft, or any other kind of crime in the city nowadays. There's just so much that is so overwhelmingly headed in the wrong direction in America that it's hard to know where to begin... or end.

Yet as Daniel Hannan said when I filmed this interview with him (released today), the threats are almost all from within:

One thing I doubt most Americans properly understand is how dire a predicament we're actually in as a nation, both in terms of our finances and in terms of the policies that are preventing us from actually seeing real economic success. The wars cost us billions of dollars that we don't have every day... but so too does our ever expanding welfare state, and all the while, the regulatory and tax environment in the United States pushes more and more businesses out of the country, and discourages an untold number of potential entrepreneurs from even taking that great leap of faith to begin with.

With all these problems, it can sometimes seem hopeless.

But the one thing that I think just might be America's saving grace is that many of the American people do fundamentally understand that freedom is the key to our success. I do hope that it's enough.

In the meantime... Enjoy today. Regardless of what America is right now - today is about freedom, and that's what matters. In celebration of that freedom, go light some fireworks... Mary Katharine Ham & I encourage it!

Fun with Fireworks

And by the way, if you're going to light fireworks today, don't be a moron. Freedom also means responsibility... So don't burn down anyone's house. K? Cool.

It's Hammertime!

2011-07-03T20:18:00.000-07:00

Alright, I really probably shouldn't have done this this way, but as I've been working my arse off for the last few months, I really haven't had time to blog all of the videos I've done with Mary Katharine Ham, much less all the other massive number of pieces I've done for the Daily Caller in any meaningful way.

So, for the second post of my epic blogging weekend, I have decided to post a ton of Hammertime videos more or less in order, and do a quickfire "blurb" about each one.

I finally took the time to post them all over on my actual YouTube page, so I know that the embed locations will be relatively secure for some time into the forseeable future. That said, if you want to watch more of them - please visit the Daily Caller's website and search for them there as that contributes to page-views, which contributes to me continuing to be employed over there.

Anyway, without further adieu, here we go!

1. "How Four Loko Became Ethanol"

I know I did blog about this, because it was kind of a big deal as I was living in New York and was hired to travel down to DC to do the video. I won't say too much more about it here, except to say that I was thrilled to have the gig, and to kick off my association with this series with a solid pro-liberty effort like this made me very happy.

Behind the scenes notes: I was totally unprepared for how crappy an audio environment the Daily Caller offices really are. Also, our home brewed "Four Loko" was some of the most disgusting stuff I've ever had in my mouth. Truly gross... Yet again, here I am defending the right of people to do stuff that I wouldn't want to participate in in a million years.

College kids can drink all this crap they want, but count me out!

2. "The New Mother-F***ing Tone!"

Just after the Gabriele Giffords shooting, and for probably the 6th time in my life, we were all told of how "dangerous" the political climate is and how uncivil the partisan rhetoric has become... Generally, this was directed at the political "right" in America - by which I really just mean Republicans, and as always, American libertarians. Minutes later, the political "left" was back to being just as ridiculous and outrageous in terms of rhetoric and a media which scolded the Tea Party and blamed Sarah Palin for inducing violence against Giffords (which had literally nothing to do with it, by the way), utterly ignored the rhetoric of their favorite team.

MKH and I did not ignore it, and this was the first video I produced as a W2 employee of the Daily Caller.

3. "Moore National Resources"

Then came the Scott Walker protests in Madison, Wisconsin... Which of course got Michigan "native" Michael Moore to join in on the idiocy.

Moore predictably claimed that America had all the money in the world and contrary to reality and heaping piles of economic data, "America isn't broke". According to Michael Moore, all we needed to do was just needed to tax the rich!

Never mind that even if you taxed 100% of all the richest people in the nation's money away, destroying millions of jobs and companies in the process by the way, you still wouldn't even collect enough to cover just this year's deficits. Michael Moore is a crap economist, but who knew he was so bad at basic arithmetic?

...Well, yeah, ok... We all knew that too, didn't we?

4. "Japan Needs Your Help"

It's very likely that this will be one of my proudest productions for the rest of my life. Not only am I extremely happy with the production quality, which I spent some real time on to make it look really good, it's also got a powerfully important message.

There is nothing worse than bad economics being used to promote horrific ideas in the face of epic devastation, and there's nothing more offensive to me personally than watching bad ideas get used to mask the horror of something like Japan's crushing tsunami.

What is equally depressing is that the same thought process that could believe Japan's destruction has an economic "silver lining" is the very same thought process guiding economically destructive policies right here in America like Cash for Clunkers, TARP and other bailouts, and it's the same asinine idea that has led so many to believe WWII "got America out of the Great Depression".

It's a horrendous confluence of bad reasoning and misleading statistical methodology (particularly observing unemployment and GDP irrespective of what those numbers actually represent) that rightly earns economists a label of uncaring and economics itself a label of a strangely inhuman science.

The lack of focus on the individual humans and their unique wants & needs has indeed been mainstream economics' biggest shortcoming for decades... The response of men like Larry Summers in the wake of the Japan disaster only brought it to the surface.

5. "MSNBC: A Fuller Spectrum of News"

Not exactly a "Hammertime" video, but it did mark the beginning of my consistent mockery of MSNBC, and holy hell it's all so well deserved! MSNBC in this case ran a special on essentially "what black people want" in America hosted by a guy who's certainly in the running for "Whitest guy on TV", Ed Schultz.

Yes, that's the same Ed Schultz who would go on to be suspended for calling Laura Ingraham a "slut"...

MSNBC has long been one of the most lily-white networks around, and while honestly that wouldn't alarm me all that much in general, they then run idiotic collectivist specials like this one, pretentiously reducing the entire black American population into a unified group which has an identity that they can crack in a couple hours.

6. "A Taxpayer Can Dream"

A fun Tax Day video that was literally a film-school style short film shot in one day and edited pretty much the next. Needless to say, an immense amount of work for me. Although, that's pretty much a recurring theme here. All of these things are an immense amount of work for me and with almost no time.

Woot. Special appearances by Mike Riggs & Jeff Winkler.

7. "Peep Didn't Start The Fire"

Ooooooh boy, if I complained about the amount of "work" it took to do the Taxpayer Can Dream video, this one was 10x that amount of work. Literally 40-50 hours of work for me crammed into just 3 days.

The story, which I wrote about a bit already, goes like this:

Mary Katharine wanted to do something with Peeps for Easter. I agreed and thought it would be hilarious to do 20-30 seconds of stop-motion animation Peeps in the video. Mary Katharine said "aww, that's too much work". So I said... "No no, it's not so bad", and I took about a half an hour and shot a 5 second test video and sent it to her. Now, keep in mind at this point I was thinking we'd only do 20-30 seconds and have it be intercut with MK talking on camera.

The hilarious thing about it is that Mary Katharine's response was "Oh, that's great, let me think about it."

This was Tuesday before Easter.

Later that night, I get a text message that says something to the effect of "OMG I thought of something great!"

Cut to: Wednesday morning.

First words (more or less) out of Mary Katharine's mouth to me in the morning were, "Hey, can you re-do Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire'? I wrote some lyrics last night..."

Yeah... So, from there I pretty much saw where she was headed. By Wednesday at about noon, I'd completely re-written/recorded the song and by that afternoon, we had started shooting little scenes on a mini green-screen studio I set up. By the next morning, all the voice parts had been recorded and I started diligently working on the After Effects bits... Man... Honestly, it was a mess.

All this time, Mary Katharine was dressing peeps and shooting scenes and then I was processing all the footage, keying out backgrounds, adding animations, etc... Slowly piecing the whole thing together with the music.

It was utterly insane.

For the record, I do not recommend doing a stop-motion animated music video in three days... It was exhausting.

8. "ObamaCare Chatroulette"

Also not exactly a "Hammertime" video, but one of Mary Katharine's ideas... I'm pretty much always going to be up for mocking Presidents, so... I had a good time.

9. "The New Federal PLAN"

The Federal Government had this plan under Bush, I think... But good lord it's dumb. It also doesn't even make sense. The idea is that when an emergency happens, the Feds have everybody's cellphone information so that they can send out pertinent information.

Here's the thing... In a serious state of emergency - of the kind I "need" information from the government to cope with - the likelihood that cellphone networks will still be operational seems rather slim.

If the network is still available, then literally all the information I need can be obtained privately, through news, Facebook, Twitter, text messages, phone calls, etc.

In the meantime, the reality is that the only thing the Federal Government could really use people's cellphone information is tracking them. Not to get all tin-foil-hat on everybody, but I honestly can't think of another use for them to have the information they seek... My guess is that the true purpose has nothing to do with emergency services and everything to do with providing the government with an easier way of keeping tabs on it's ~~subjects~~ citizens.

Annnnyway...

That's all for now. There are four or five more recent Hammertime videos, but they actually already have their own postings

New Menace to the Economy: The ATM

2011-07-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

As I wrote the other day, I have a huge backlog of media that really needs to get blogged this weekend. One of the big ones is a short, humorous "Hammertime" video I just put together last week.

In a recent interview on NBC, President Obama continued his long-running trend of making economically illiterate statements to the press. He said:

“There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM. You don’t go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking at the gate. So all these things have created changes in the economy.”

In context, Obama did kind of, half-heartedly, suggest that there is some good to come from automation and efficiency improvements, but his overall view was that this is clearly lamentable because it "costs" jobs and is broadly harmful to the economy.

But, predictably... that just isn't true.

It made my brain explode, so I absolutely had to do a video about it, and for about a week I was trying to find the best way to mock the statement and as frequently happened, Mary Katharine Ham came through with a killer suggestion that just opened it all up for me... so... I made what may be the country's first-ever political attack ad against the Automated Teller Machine.

Check it out:

Efficiency improvement may create some (temporary) job displacement, as some workers and indeed whole industries become outmoded. But as with most bad economists, Obama's position is only looking at the seen effects (negative job displacement), and ignoring the myriad positive "unseen" effects of these kinds of changes.

Of all technological advancements Obama could have chosen to make his point, ATMs are a colossally stupid example, to boot...

For one thing, consider that the reason ATMs exist at all is because people wanted more access to their money at all hours of the day. This enables an immense growth in economic activity to occur that couldn't happen 30 or 40 years ago. Ironically, since Obama also believes that spending/demand drives economic growth, and he has said as much numerous times, then he should positively love the ATM!

It's not hard to understand how this works, but as it happens, I have a perfect real life example from just last weekend.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted a kayak. I have never really been able to justify spending the $900 or so a decent one costs new, and of course, I have been rather itinerant over the last few years so adding yet another large object to my life that just has to be moved never made much sense.

It's usually nothing more than some online window-shopping, but I often check out craigslist to see if there are any amazing deals on kayaks just for fun. But last Saturday I ran across a deal I just couldn't pass up.

A man was selling a good kayak, paddle and quality life jacket for $440... less than half the price of a comparable new boat, and an even smaller fraction of the total cost, since paddles and lifejackets aren't cheap new either. Knowing that I am about to sign a new 12 month lease, and that I have a solid 3 months of great kayaking weather... it finally made sense to me.

Problem: It was 5pm on a Saturday.

In years past, I would have called the guy (presuming I saw his ad in a newspaper or something, let's not even get into the internet as "job killer" vs. bringer of real economic growth) and when asked if I could bring cash, I would have had to say no. At that point, I would have very likely lost out on that deal, since someone else probably would have had cash and beat me to the punch. Not so thanks to the ATM! All I needed to do last weekend was say, "Hey, I will be right over after stopping at an ATM for cash"... Problem solved.

Commerce achieved!

And it's true of smaller transactions as well... Imagine being out on a Friday night and you are out of cash... Say a buddy wants to grab a slice of pizza. No cash? No pizza. And thus no money for pizza shop owner, no money to his suppliers, to their suppliers, to their families, etc.

ATMs make commerce possible today that largely was not possible before ATMs. It is the same reality of the internet and debit cards, and all the other ways people now have of getting what they need & want 24 hours a day now that they simply didn't have access to until recently.

Hilariously, though, as Market Watch pointed out the other day, not only is Obama's broad assumption that ATMs are bad for the economy wrong, the specific case of it putting bank tellers out of work nonsense as well! The amount of bank tellers has actually increased...

"The number of tellers, in fact, rose to an all-time high of 607,960 in 2007 from 493,000 at the start of the decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

Now, granted, that was at the height of the recent financial bubble... But still, it's a bit hilarious, isn't it?

With all the bloviating about other prominent political figure's historical and factual blunders lately, one would think reporters wouldn't give Obama a pass on this stuff. But of course... They do.

Technological innovation is good for an economy in a thousand different ways. It frees up labor and capital to be made more productive, it helps us all by significantly contributing to lower prices and improved quality of the goods and services we need and want on an every-day basis... and with the excess money in our pockets - assuming the government doesn't take all of it - we can start new businesses offering new goods and services and innovate new ways to serve other people's demands (current and future), and for that we will invariably need to employ more people.

Lamenting improvements in technology - particularly those which create greater economic opportunities across the board - is asinine, and should not be something we see an American president engaged in.

Alas, as my friend (and Executive Director of the Foundation for Economic Education) Carl Oberg correctly noted, it will never be in a politician's interest to see the big picture or to explain that even when a few outmoded industries die and people working in them lose their jobs, the local job loss does not mean there is general unemployment as a result of innovation. In fact, all it really means is that the economy is undergoing what Schumpeter termed "creative destruction".

And that, my friends, is an amazingly good thing.

PS. Carl Oberg also said that on further reflection he would prefer to demonstrate more sympathy tothose losing their jobs to innovation. While I do agree, I think that is better dealt with in a different video entirely. Such a video would have to cover the difference between creative destruction that happens naturally, vs. that which happens as a result of force... Obama doesn't seem particularly distraught, for example, by all of the lightbulb manufacturers and glass makers his "green" policies are putting out of work next year.

Am I Even a Blogger Anymore?

2011-06-30T19:55:00.001-07:00

Annoyingly, the time demands of my Daily Caller job have seriously hampered my ability to write anything of substance at Logicology for weeks. I am partially also getting used to doing a lot more of my typing and interneting on a tablet via touch screen instead of a proper computer, so that is contributing some to my lack of content as of late.

Rest assured, however, I am actually producing more multimedia content than I have in my entire life up to this point, so that side of my life is pure I sanity.

I am about to go on a 4th of July weekend blogging spree, however, and this spree will - of course - include an obligatory Freedom Day post as well as a host of multimedia content that has heretofore been unseen on this blog. I began the process of going through a massive backlog of media that I have produced - primarily for the Daily Caller - and uploading it to my own YouTube account. Although I have some incentive to push for page/video views at the Daily Caller website, the truth is that for long term linking and embedding... I am gonna put my faith in YouTube as a platform over Ooyala, hands down. Not only is YouTube smoother, their downrezzing more reliable and their interface much more standard across the internet; it is also searched by over 30 Billion people per month.

While I certainly get that TheDC has the need to find a format that engenders ad revenue (and YouTube is admittedly not great for that...), I would prefer my work be seen by as broad an audience as possible... So... After waiting what I believe is a perfectly appropriate amount of time I will now begin adding slightly older video content into the Blog along with my personal comments & occasionally "behind-the-scenes" notes about production.

I hope that strikes some readers/viewers as interesting, because unless something changes fairly su stantially with my overall workload soon, that's probably going to be the majority of what I actually have time to post... Even though, if I am quite honest, I totally miss writing longer form pieces.

With that said... I may also try to squeeze in a few more posts on a few big topics or events that have happened recently in the next couple days... We shall see, blog... We shall see!

PS... I bought a kayak!

"Me Libertarianism"... or "F**k you, Jim Peron!"

2011-06-03T07:26:00.000-07:00

F**k you, Jim Peron.

I've been egregiously offended by a "major" libertarian writer.

It doesn't happen often, and as with most offenses, it happened because it struck a nerve that deeply reflects how I feel about myself and how I view my own life and beliefs.

I just got called "a bigot", and a "me libertarian"... Seriously.

It started because of a post I made on Facebook (and probably Twitter? I don't know now) about a new book and accompanying short video clips by conservative writer, Ben Shapiro, on Hollywood's "liberal" bias. Shapiro appears to have a bunch of interviews with top producers and executives in the film industry getting them to own up to their bias on shows like House, Friends, MacGyver and others.

The premise of Shapiro's book is undoubtedly correct... In that Hollywood is particularly biased towards leftist ideas, and is aggressively dismissive and exclusionary to "conservatives" and Republicans. I don't know how anyone could really disagree with that point, but that's not really what sparked the argument anyway.

Jim Peron - libertarian writer, President of the Moorfield Storey Institute, and accused NAMBLA supporter (I believe he's now banned from New Zealand?) - commented first, saying something that I was actually basically in the process of writing when his post came in.

[I should note here that as I have over 700 "friends" on Facebook, most of whom are involved in the libertarian/agorist/anarcho-capitalist movements and many of whom use pseudonyms, I wasn't initially certain that the Jim Peron commenting was in fact the writer of some notoriety. Apparently, it was...]

But in any case, he wrote:

"This shouldn't particularly concern libertarians however, since we are not conservatives. And given that conservatives despise social freedom, tend to be war mongers, and really are pathetically weak when it comes to free markets and fiscal sanity, we have virtually nothing in common with them anymore."

I agreed, as I would have if anyone else had made such a comment. In fact, I was going to write something very similar to that as a disclaimer anyway, and noted as such on the post:

"ha... I was just gonna add something to that effect, James... Except, here's the problem. The liberal sensibility winds up being just as anti-freedom and unquestionably anti-market/business, just in different ways."

My point was that there is nothing that exists within the progressive/liberal ethos that is more in favor of liberty in any meaningful way. Or at least, that's certainly how I view the "left".

Mr. Peron disagrees with that assessment... Fine.

"Sean: Actually they are more pro-freedom than conservatives, so, if one of them had to dominate I'd take Hollywood liberals over conservatives any day. At the very least they tend to be anti-war and pro-social freedom and, can often see the "little guy as the victim of govt/corporate" collusion side of state regulations..."

Generally, my response to someone who disagrees with me on a point - especially when I believe that we're both basically coming from the same place philosophically speaking - is to expand the point and state my case.

And so, I did.

I explained, as did another one of my friends, that Hollywood really isn't all that much in favor of "social freedom", and they certainly aren't realistically against war. The obvious point here is that they're actually generally very big fans of war as a subject matter, and in general they wind up being immensely pro-state authority. Think of the countless glorifications of the state, and glorifications of war that we see in film and television, particularly in the abstract and long-ago historical cases.

While they appear to be more pro-liberty on "social" issues, that only applies to social activities that are approved of by the sort of metropolitan sensibilities of the producers and writers of most film & television... So they're pro-gay, but largely against all kinds of other important social freedoms anywhere from what opinions and types of speech are acceptable, to what kinds of religions are acceptable, to limiting something as basic as a persons right to decide how and where they are educated.

For better or worse, what Hollywood is really first and foremost pro-Democrat, and failing that, generally pro-big government (particularly when that government forces people to do the socially acceptable things that are popular with that crowd).

As I've mentioned in the past, I've experienced this with weekly DNC talking-point style emails sent out to all employees by the bosses at jobs I've held in entertainment & commercial music. In a big way, they are mostly New Deal/FDR nostalgia buffs - which I guess, given the mythology created by Hollywood during that "golden" era, shouldn't be a big surprise.

But this is why it is my contention that in fact, they are not more "pro-freedom" at all.

And although they do regularly feature support for the right of people to love and marry whomever they want, the total balance of their support in broad generalizations goes towards expanding the power of the state. Even within the realm of marriage equality, the idea is to have the state give special protections to another "group", rather than getting out of the business of granting marriage licenses to begin with.

Moreover, I noted to Mr. Peron; the serious damage done by the leftist bias in Hollywood by mis-educating people on economics grossly outweighs - in my opinion - the positive effects of supporting all-inclusive, multi-racial/gendered/sexually-orientated/cultural romantic relationships.

At this point, the accusations started to fly, and Mr. Peron claimed that:

""Here is the difference between us. I will fight for both social freedom and economic freedom and I find that "liberals" will listen to me because I fight for both. You seem to only care about economic issues, dismiss concerns about social freedom,"

Bullshit, I said. And anyone who knows me well should know how bullshit such a claim truly is. I proceeded to explain, I think relatively clearly, that I while I see the "economic" and "social" freedoms as two sides of the same coin, I tend to focus a bit more on the regulation and economic side in part because I'm obviously interested in and passionate about the study of economics, but perhaps more importantly because if you look at the trend, the reality is that things like gay-rights are constantly getting better.

I said, it's not quite a "dead issue" yet, but it's getting there and it will be there in less than a generation as far as I'm concerned. The only people who care about it, I said, were a small handful of religious right types that may be loud and obnoxious, but who are dying out. Quothe myself:

"‎I honestly think that like so many other issues, it [meaning gay marriage] *is* a non-issue for a majority of Americans, but it's a very big deal to a fairly small and incredibly loud minority and that minority gets amplified through a news system that likes to generate controversy."

By contrast, I see the very real danger of increased economic illiteracy and class warfare, largely propagated by the entertainment industry as an incredibly large (and this is the key part...) growing problem.

The nanny state is a larger and ever-expanding danger to liberty overall, and that is so heavily driven by Hollywood-supported "liberals". I'm painting with a very broad brush of course, plenty of conservatives are ridiculous nanny-staters as well, and they both seem to be all about the police state burgeoning in the United States.

Thing is, I can see the big trends, and they are this: Gays are increasingly (and rather quickly by historical standards) gaining ground in the culture, and in the legal system. This is wonderful news... And while they are by no means treated equally everywhere in the eyes of the law, the trend is positive if your value is liberty overall.

The trend on the other issues I mentioned - controls on what you can eat, what you can say, where you can say it, what you can produce, when and for what price you can work, whether you need a license to work, who you can trade with, etc. - is decidedly negative.

Apparently, that view is "uncaring".

Mr. Peron wasn't content to leave it at that, and he clearly wasn't interested in reviewing this blog, or any of my other Facebook posts, so he pressed on and insisted that [emphasis mine]:

"Your remarks sound just like the conservatives who are bigoted, even if that is not your intent. It is an example of "me libertarianism" where issues are mainly looked at by what impacts the lives of white, straight men, and doesn't care about issues where the state hurts others who aren't like them."

and...

"Your kind of libertarianism sounds more conservative than libertarian. You say you are not a bigot, but you sound just like the bigots and what you say will resonate with them. It doesn't sound libertarian at all. Libertarians historically defended the rights of all people who were oppressed by state power. It championed the workers when the corn laws denied them cheap food. It called for freedom of religion when state churches stifled unpopular, but loud, minorities. It led the charge for the abolition of slavery, even though only a minority of people were slaves. It supported equality of rights for black Americans who an "incredibly loud minority" who were treated like second class citizens."

Get that?

Simply because I disagreed with his assessment of broad trends, and specifically that I don't see "liberals" as big ol' champions of social freedom and that I think that the limitation of so-called "economic" liberty effects a wider array of people and is trending in a very bad direction, compared to the uncontrollable progress being made in the area of so-called "social" freedom particularly for the GLBT community... I am "a bigot".

Or at least, "I claim I'm not a bigot, but I sound just like one". Again, I said... Bullshit.

Also, by the way, Peron's reading comprehension failed him spectacularly when he quoted my "incredibly loud minority" line, as you can see. Somehow, he interpreted it to mean that I was saying that gay people were an "incredibly loud minority" who we should otherwise not care about when what I clearly said was that the religious right was a loud minority, but which most of the country doesn't really care about that much or put that much stock in.

All that was clear from the context of my writing if Peron had bothered to read it. But he couldn't, apparently, be bothered to read what I actually wrote just as he couldn't be bothered to read anything else I'd ever written on this blog or observing any of my other posts before being such a spectacularly judgmental dick to me on my own turf.

His accusations of "bigotry" and "me libertarianism are immensely offensive to me because they are precisely the traits that I have worked so long and hard to avoid.

I've spent the majority of my adult life embroiled in defending the rights of people who I have nothing in common with purely on the principles of liberty, self-ownership and natural rights. Consider:

I strongly support people who are gay, lesbian, bi-gendered, transgendered to marry and to live their lives free from state interference - though I am none of those things myself. I've even written on how freedom of association has been used by gays to improve their social situation (and how that same freedom results in eventual inclusiveness).
I support the right of people to have multiple simultaneous relationships, polyamorous or polygamous marriages - though not only am I uninterested in such things myself, I think it's an incredibly bad idea in general.
I support the right of people to use drugs and put whatever the hell they want in their bodies. I've opposed smoking bans, the drug war, marijuana criminalization, I've voted to reduce/eliminate sentencing requirements for non-violent drug offenders... And, by the way, I've taken all manner of abuse for the position because people treat you like a stoner the minute you say anything on the topic... And yet, I've never smoked a single puff of marijuana, never had a cigarette or done any other illicit drug of any type in my life.
I support the right of people to keep and bear arms, to hunt to fish, to protect themselves in their homes and to be free from state reprisal... Yet I am not a gun owner and probably never will be.
I've contributed to media production that supports cases against state abuses of eminent domain, police asset seizure, yoga & cosmetic salon "licensing" requirements... And yet, I've never been the victim of an illegal seizure of my home or property, I've never been to a beauty salon and I routinely mock yoga as mystical jive + stretching.
I've done numerous volunteer projects for www.antiwar.com, contributing to their efforts to put an end to illegal wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, though I am not a soldier and fortunately don't personally know many who have been killed in those conflicts.
I have written countless pages on minimum wage and economic issues that primarily drive unemployment in poor, minority neighborhoods... Yet... I am, as Peron noted, a "straight, white male".
I dislike most "organic" food as a matter of course, and in fact think that for the most part rich Americans' obsession with the stuff contributes unnecessarily to starvation in the third world, and yet I recently produced a video supporting the right of individuals to choose whatever products from whichever sources they wish to consume.

On issue after issue, I have an immense track record of supporting precisely those issues in which I have no personal stake. I am the antithesis of the "me" libertarian. If anything, I'm a "not me" libertarian.

I want freedom for everyone to do things that I personally have no interest in, and sometimes even strongly dislike. I want this freedom for everyone because I understand how incredibly important it is for every individual to be allowed to do and say whatever they want free from initiations of force if we want a happy, peaceful and prosperous society, and if I want to see those same rights respected for me to live the white bread, quiet, quasi-teetotaling atheist existence I personally enjoy.

I want a prosperous and peaceful society.

After calling me a "bigot" and a "me libertarian", I demanded an apology and called Mr. Peron "a dick"... And hilariously, this was his response:

"Well, that's a conservative argument, name call."

Yep... Called me a bigot, then whined about name calling.

Raw Milk!

2011-06-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

Almost two weeks ago, now, Mary Katharine and I went out to Capitol Hill to check out a rally that was held in support of Dan Allgyer, an Amish farmer from Pennsylvania who has been providing a few private "milk clubs" in the area with unpasteurized milk products.... *GASP!* Then, I made this video:

I love doing projects like this! I always enjoy opportunities to bridge the gap between people who like freedom for its own sake and people who enjoy doing things that are outside current societal norms. It always provides an excellent chance to convince some people who never considered the government as a problem before that it exists in order to limit people's freedoms.

People start with pragmatic ideas... they say, "Hey! Farmer Dan's milk never made anyone sick... why should he be prosecuted?" And then, with any luck, they start to think a bit more... Maybe they ask why government has a "right" to dictate what they are allowed to buy and consume. And hopefully, if they keep thinking a bit more, they may eventually expand this thought to more areas and more people. That's how we'll get back to a truly free society in America, and who knows... Maybe it will start with raw milk!

Lean Forward...

2011-05-31T16:49:00.000-07:00

Holy schmoly... Something I made just blewwwwwww up.... Win!

So have you seen MSNBC's stupid "Lean Forward" campaign? All their anchors and hosts are in these short, 20-30 second, bits making asinine logical fallacies and exposing their abysmal failure to understand even the most basic concepts of economics in support of a massive state.

Now keep in mind that all MSNBC's people are doing this, so there are moronic videos from Ed Schultz, Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr., Chris Matthews and all the rest... But for my purposes today, I need to single out and pick on Rachel Maddow.

Maddow claims to be "obsessively devoted to facts" in one of these videos.

Thing is... She's not really all that good with facts, as it turns out. For example, she'd also like you to believe that it isn't going to be a "profit-making venture for some company" to build... A bridge.

You heard me. Check it out:

She says, "It's never going to be a profit-making venture for some company to build this idea...", as she points behind her to a bridge... Seriously. A BRIDGE!??

Miss "Obsessively Devoted to Facts" couldn't do the 30 seconds worth of research that it might take someone to discover that virtually all the bridges in America were built by private companies seeking to profit?

Really.

Of course we should all understand that even when the government pays for the bridges to be built, most bridges are designed and constructed by private companies competing with each other for those contracts.

But in fact, once upon a time, not even that long ago, government didn't have anything to do with it at all... For example, the uber-capitalist himself, Andrew Carnegie, was the proud owner of a major bridge-building operation called Keystone Bridge Company, which built dozens of bridges "for profit".

Why, here's one of their fabulous bridges now!

Pretty nice, right? Easily as nice as the bridge in the background of the Maddow video, no?

Wanna know something else? The Keystone Bridge Company was eventually purchased by a J.P. Morgan-owned company called the American Bridge Company, which owned around 30 additional for profit bridge manufacturing firms.

But hey, that's not possible, because building bridges isn't a "profit making venture", she says.

This is the beef I have with these Lean Forward videos in general. In each instance, the host/anchor is saying something flagrantly stupid yet with the epitome of arrogance and smug, self-satisfaction. It's such a perfect maelstrom of pretentiousness and ignorance that it was crying out to be parodied... Thus... That's exactly what I did.

Check it out:

MSNBC likes to talk a big game about being news for "smart" people... But what it really manages to be in most cases is simply news for ignorant, economically and historically illiterate people. For all of the Fox hatred, I don't think Fox would have done something like this... The worst they're going to do is say something silly about how ridiculously awesome America is, and how our militaristic power gives us the right to do whatever we want - possibly on the basis that someone else would fill the void if we weren't there, and they'd be "worse".

Fine... That stuff may be wrong, but for whatever reason, it just doesn't offend me intellectually the way MSNBC's Lean Forward campaign does.

Perhaps that's because the war-mongering and fist-pumping that originates at Fox isn't a problem with basic facts, it's a problem with bad philosophy and false premises... Actually, scratch that, it's not a problem necessarily of incorrect facts, so much as a problem of incomplete facts (e.g., yes, we were attacked on 9/11, but thinking that the story starts or ends there and whatever America does in response is perfectly acceptable is insane).

At least for me, this is what makes Fox irritating as a network, but I've never seen them do promotional videos like these and honestly... it's boring talking about Fox. Everybody talks about and makes fun of Fox.

The difference for me really comes down to the smug. MSNBC's overall editorial position is based on equally (perhaps worse in some ways) bad philosophy, and equally false premises to Fox, but given how insanely smug their network and all their anchors are... You'd think they could get something as simple as the idea of private, for-profit bridge companies correct. If you're going to be a preachy jagweed, you should probably have a point that actually makes some sense.

Unfortunately, their blatantly socialist propagandizing requires them to believe that government provides all the good, big and important stuff like bridges... Even when that's simply not true.

Notes From the Past

2011-05-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

Had a long discussion with a friend today about many things, and I promised to email her links to my blog. So now that I'm home, I started thinking about what posts I thought best represented Logicology and my writing, and thus I began perusing old posts, starting with the beginning of my Blogger usage in late 2007.

I had been blogging for a few years prior to that, but not on any very good platforms, and at the time I think I was writing a few massive Facebook "notes" each week. And at the time, as I recall, my constant Facebooking was starting to annoy people.

Turns out my problem at the time wasn't the prolific amount of content I was generating, but that my audience wasn't really very interested or targeted. Apparently high school and college musician friends don't really care to spend much time talking about what's wrong with Paul Krugman's latest column.

Who knew?

Anyway... Now that I am reviewing some of these old blogs I figured it could be fun to pull some excerpts from my previous writings. Strap in, this may get interesting.

From June 7th, 2008:

"That said, we are now left with two shitty options for president, hooray! Aren't elections great???

Yeah. Ok, so Obama is a socialist who would like to "solve" our problems by contributing an extra 200+ billion dollars to the federal budget, expand the powers of the presidency some more (after 8 years of Bush doing just that, I'm a little surprised not one party-nominated candidate save Bob Barr is talking about *reducing* the scope of presidential authority!), keep us in an un-winnable war at least for a few more years, and push for more autocratic, monolithic government micromanagement of healthcare, energy and transportation industries.

Check.

McCain, by "contrast" might only raise the federal budget, according to some analysts, by about 15, Carl Sagan Billion with a "B", Billion dollars in clearly marked spending, but keep us in an unwinnable war for "100 years", advocates a lot of the same New Deal socialism that Obama does and would expand the powers of the presidency even farther in terms of military related issues.

Check."

Boy was I way off! Not only did Obama ~~fail to~~ "solve" America's economic problems, he did so far more spectacularly than I had imagined at the time. To be fair, this was a few months before George W. Bush kicked off America's version of a "lost decade" with a $700 Billion bailout.

Instead of a scant $200 Billion, Obama has increased spending by about $8 Trillion, and increased deficit spending to a whopping $1.4 Trillion per year! Just the 2011 deficit alone is well over 6, maybe 7 times what I'd predicted Obama would add to the budget.

AND, as a special bonus, he's kept us in the existing wars, expanding our presence in Afghanistan and adding a brand new war in Libya plus a huge amount of unspoken war in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Yay.

One can only imagine how much different McCain (who also stopped his campaign in late 2008 to go support the bailouts and stimulus nonsense) might have been. I struggle to see how he could have been "worse".

Later, on December 8th, 2008

"I need a presidential candidate to understand the Constitutional limitations of his power, I need a presidential candidate who will act as a legitimate check against the abuses of legislature by actually vetoing bills (as Bush almost *never* did), I need a presidential candidate who doesn't muck up the meaning of the document he's sworn in to protect by hiring teams of lawyers to find legalese loopholes in wording to do anything he damn well pleases in foreign & domestic policy... I need a presidential candidate who understands the Enlightenment philosophy that guided our nation's founders and created the framework for the greatest era of social, political, religious, & economic freedom the world has ever experienced. An era rapidly diminishing.

Still diminishing... Though we may be poised for a shift.

In one of the first instances of me talking about President Obama as Bush V.02, on March 9th, 2009 I wrote:

"Just to clarify here... Obama first blames Bush for *expanding* the government and deficit spending - a perfectly valid, and rather important criticism. Then he says that because of those policies, he has essentially no choice but to do the same thing.

Of course he also throws in the "lax regulation" bogeyman."

And.... He's still doin' that.

Then I got serious about the stimulus packages and Ben Bernanke's constant idiocy. In "Ben Bernanke's Pitiful Prognostication", on June 3rd, 2009, I wrote:

"Now, all that said, there is a much more insidious character to the fact that all this mad Government spending hasn't actually made it into the regular economy yet... What the time lag on the stimulus spending really means to us ordinary folks is that the coming hyper-inflation necessarily won't be noticeable or really "start" happening for a couple years yet. Unfortunately, that's going to lull an awful lot of people into a false sense of security and the belief that the "worst is over".

It isn't.

As inflation starts to set in and cost of everything rises, there is naturally a time lag between prices rising and wages rising and certainly history has shown that the faster the increase in inflation, the greater the gap between cost of living and wages can become. As that happens over the next 5-6 years, the real standard of living in America will continue to decrease significantly - and with it comes wonderful things like civil unrest, hunger and possibly increases in crime & violence."

Fortunately not too much of an increase in crime, but of course as I've written multiple times, inflation is most assuredly rearing its ugly head. Again, Bernanke is out there claiming that the increase in prices on raw goods & commodities, and the rising cost of living for everyone is no big deal.

Not so hilariously, a prediction I made in that blog came true a couple weeks later. On June 14th, 2009 there's this:

"A few of my predictions from the Ben Bernanke blog (below) have already come true...

Here's VP; Joe Biden spinning the "recovery" efforts as not going as well because things were worse than they'd estimated.

From this article:
"everyone guessed wrong" on the impact of the stimulus, economy was worse off than anyone thought.
Everyone, huh? Evvveryone.... Right... Everyone.

Good lord..."

This isn't fun any more...

This whole process just kinda goes on like this. I make predictions, I generally say something is a terrible idea, I explain precisely why it's a terrible idea, and then I watch as the predictable consequences unfold in real time.

On Cash for Clunkers, I originally wrote this:

"There's simply no excuse for the idiocy that is Cash for Clunkers. No, it's not a huge program compared the rest of the bailouts and the massive printing of monopoly money that we've seen in the last year. No, it's not the worst thing that's ever happened in terms of big-government stupid, but it's a perfect example of Bastiat's broken-window fallacy."

Turns out I was right about that too... Cost of used cars has gone up 30% in three years, and there was no long-term boost to demand for new cars at all - simply a shift where all the new purchases for 2009 were concentrated into a few months.

Check it out for yourself:

I really don't know why anyone is surprised by this stuff, but it seems they always are. The same pattern can be observed throughout all the rest of the government stimulus spending. Stimulus spending only "works" so long as government is continually pumping money into the program.

By the way, Cash for Clunkers wound up costing over $3 Billion... Hooray!

Now that all that money has been consumed, there is no real consumer demand driving new purchases, so the spike goes away, and sales fall... and continue to fall. This stuff really shouldn't be rocket science. People as "smart" as Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner shouldn't struggle with these realities so much.

The fact that they do suggests to me that they really aren't that bright after all.

At any rate, I could go on like this kind of endlessly until we get to the present day. Most of my predictions have been dead on. Obviously, like any sane economist will tell you, predictions in that realm are not ever going to be perfectly timed - and I don't waste my time offering to predict precisely when something is going to occur, but the logic is always clear enough to understand the likely consequences.

If you print a ton of money, prices are going to shoot up. If you give people thousands of dollars to buy a new car, those who were already planning on committing to the expense will shift their purchase into the window of time alloted for them to get the "free money". If you raise taxes, increase the burdens of regulation and generally create mass uncertainty in costs for the business community, then the business community isn't going to do much investing or expansion. They might even leave the state, or the country, for greener pastures.

I honestly wish people weren't continually surprised by this stuff. It's way too predictable... See above.

What Inflation? Round 2

2011-05-21T19:13:00.000-07:00

Last year in October, I wrote a blog called "What Inflation?", chronicling the depressing - yet meteoric - rise of commodities prices. Kitco's exposure of a 38.6% increase in the price of a basket of raw & wholesale goods really highlighted the gap between reality and the utter bullshit that Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and most of the rest of government would like us to believe.

Recently, the Heartland Institute posted a blog post on "deciphering" Bernanke's nonsense:

"Bernanke: FOMC participants see inflation remaining low; most project that overall inflation will be about 1-1/4 to 1-3/4 percent this year and in the range of 1 to 2 percent next year and in 2013. Private-sector forecasters generally also anticipate subdued inflation over the next few years. Measures of medium- and long-term inflation compensation derived from inflation-indexed Treasury bonds appear broadly consistent with these forecasts.

More broadly, the increases in commodity prices in recent months have largely reflected rising global demand for raw materials, particularly in some fast-growing emerging market economies, coupled with constraints on global supply in some cases. Commodity prices have risen significantly in terms of all major currencies, suggesting that changes in the foreign exchange value of the dollar are unlikely to have been an important driver of the increases seen in recent months.

Deciphered: The Fed doesn’t recognize a lag between its creation of money and an increase in current dollar spending. Instead we prefer to look at inflation over the past year as a guide to whether we create too much money. Just because this means we have often reacted two to three years too late in responding to any inflation threat doesn’t bother us at all."

Seriously though... Bernanke claims that inflation will be about 1.25-1.75% for this year.

Realllllllllllllly?

Well, why don't we look at a few graphs, huh? There aren't a lot of great ways to calculate price increases, but as we know, the Consumer Price Index is certainly one of them. So what's CPI look like over the last year? Let's check it out:

To be clear, I've chosen this graph, which includes commodities that standard CPI disincludes, because in my world, real people buy food and energy, and when those prices go up that actually effects real people. So let's ask ourselves.... Does it look to you like there hasn't been any inflation? Looks like that to me...

BLS is actually reporting that non-annualized inflation over the past year has been higher than Bernanke's comments would suggest:

" The 12-month increases of major indexes continue to climb. The all items index rose 3.2 percent for the 12 months ending April 2011, the highest figure since October 2008. The energy index has now risen 19.0 percent over the last 12 months, with the gasoline index up 33.1 percent. The food index has risen 3.2 percent while the index for all items less food and energy has increased 1.3 percent; both figures represent increases over recent months."

Of course, I'm only using government metrics so far, which are spectacularly weak measurements for inflation and are predictably ridiculously biased towards making the government look good... or failing that, at least to making them look not like the royal failures they actually are on economic issues.

So what's a more accurate inflation rate?

Economist, Marc Faber is calculating between 5-8% inflation. ShadowStats is calculating the real inflation rate (using consistent reporting standards from the 1990s) at around 11%. CPI measurements have drastically changed over the years, always to make the statistics seem "better" - just like the government's definition of "recessions" and their calculations for unemployment rates.

Note:

From www.dshort.com

The changes in data collection are usually packaged as "improvements", but the reality is that they make comparisons to historical economic events really tricky. People look at the 16+% unemployment rate during the Great Depression, and they think... Well hey, our 9-10% isn't so bad! Alas, by 1940 standards, our unemployment rate is around 17%.

Whoops! Metrics matter. Changing calculation methods matters. Without understanding this stuff, there's no way for people to understand the numbers the government has been churning out over the last few years.

Additionally... It's probably a good time to have a little refresher course on how ridiculously bad Keynesians predictions - who, it should be noted, make a special point of viewing economics as a "predictive" science - have actually been over the last 100 years.

Thomas Woods handles that nicely:

Yeah. They're not very good at this at all.

Yet we constantly listen to people like Bernanke, Krugman, DeLong, Summers, Romer(s), Goolsbee, Geithner, etc. and let them continually make adjusted "predictions" that turn out to be utterly false. These people are wrong time and time again, and yet each time they make a pronouncement about how the economy is doing, and what it's going to look like within the next 6 months, we act like they know what they're doing.

They don't.

Simply put, Bernanke is full of shit. I don't know how else to say it. Anyone with half a brain who has been doing their own shopping over the last year knows full-well that prices have shot up. Anyone who has remotely been paying attention to the job situation in the United States knows that the unemployment situation is still shockingly bad.

ShadowStats also provides a breakdown of unemployment rates.

Real metrics on that put us close to - if not well over - 20%. The 9% the government claims we're at right now relies on an extremely limited definition of the "labor force" and simply omits millions of people who would love to be working or who would love to work a hell of a lot more than they are currently working. If you're an engineer working at McDonald's part time.... Guess what, you count as "employed"!!

I suspect your family doesn't really see it that way though.

Get that? We're seeing consistently high unemployment (going on 3 years now). We've got a consistently high inflation rate, in spite of what the government has been saying. What does that mean to you?

Did you say "Stagflation"? Man... I did!

One way or another, I'm sick of going over this again and again and again. The government is lying. Simple as that. They've been doing it for pretty much the whole of its existence and I'm not sure why we should think they'd have stopped in the middle of a horrendous recession, caused primarily by the government's previously enacted policies. But no matter how nonsensical their numbers, no matter how much this stuff doesn't remotely line up with obvious, observable reality, a ton of people are still totally happy to lap it up.

What? GDP is increasing? Well that's great!!

Never mind that these numbers merely reflect the expansion of the currency and the inevitable price increases that have been generated as a result.

Yes friends... Inflation is real. It's taking huge bites out of your dollar's purchasing power, and the fact that you're job situation and salary hasn't really improved at all means that each dollar counts more and more.

Seriously though... It's time we all started ignoring Bernanke. He's a moron.

First Do No Harm.

2011-05-21T16:24:00.000-07:00

Boy was I surprised to find something truly excellent in the Huffington Post this evening. From the publisher of a somewhat odd website, www.watchingamerica.com, British writer Robin Koerner comes a brilliant piece titled: "'First Do No Harm': Constitutional and Conservative Liberals"

The whole piece is absolutely a "must read", but there are few passages that particularly stand out. First is:

"Over the last century, the Left have tended to harp on about the corruption of corporate and financial interests, while the Right have tended to harp on about the corruption of State interests.

Meanwhile, corporate interests have made the State corrupt by financing it, and the State has made corporations corrupt through corporatist law-making. The net effect is that the State has concentrated power, and the corporations -- and in particular banks -- have concentrated wealth. The rest of us have paid for it in liberty and wealth, respectively.

The rise of the welfare state has depended on the rise of the crony capitalism -- and vice versa, and the mechanism is not hard to understand.

Banks create money and thereby inflation under license from the government. Wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of bankers as they charge interest on the money they create. This interest has eventually to be paid by the users of that money -- workers and the middle class -- out of the wealth they gain through their labor. In other words, over time, the products of human labor accumulate as assets to those that deal only in money and make nothing good. The government's interest in this system is that it allows them to create and borrow money to fund their schemes without having to tax the people their full cost. In other words, it helps them get votes and retain power."

I've written about these issues so many times, it's thoroughly gratifying to see someone else tackling the issues in a bigger forum than I've ever had. The Huffington Post audience needs to understand this stuff.

Koerner goes on to correctly explain that the creation of money is inflation, and that the debasement of the currency is the primary driver of unjust economic inequalities. Note here that I say "unjust" deliberately, because economic inequality is also a legitimate consequence of differences in individual choice and skill.

More from the article:

"To keep the system running without riots in the street, the same government officials who license the banks to print money pass welfare laws, which keep the disenfranchised at the bottom, but off the streets.

Therefore, there is no welfarism, beloved of the old Left, without crony capitalism (which pays for it). And there is no crony capitalism, beloved of the old Right, without welfarism (which maintains the political stability that protects it).

None of this is Constitutional. And none of it is conducive to liberty or the honest pursuit of happiness."

The "left" and the "right" are culpable here, and both brands of statist work off of each other in this unintentionally (being generous) symbiotic way to erode the financial and social stability of the United States.

As bleak as this all seems, Koerner notes that there are "glimmers" of hope. At this point, his writing moves from insightful, to brilliant and essential:

"Two maxims appear to be more pertinent today than ever in American politics.

The first is, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop," known as Herbert Stein's Law.

The second is Churchill's observation that "the Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they've exhausted all other possibilities."

The last, best hope for the Last, Best Hope is that both quotes are right.

Just as the Left-Right axis has operated over time to bankrupt the nation, financially and ethically, those who are often misunderstood by the mainstream to be of the extreme left and the extreme right (but who are in truth neither) are working together, sometimes consciously and sometimes entirely by accident, to undo the bankrupt American settlement, and revitalize the country's founding promise.

For example, the man I saw on cable news waving his pocket Constitution as the anchor asked him why he thought Obama should not have gone into Libya could have been Ron Paul, but was in fact Dennis Kucinich. The man I saw proposing a cut in the military, among other things, to balance the budget could have been Dennis Kucinich, but was in fact Rand Paul. And the man who recently composed a legislative amendment with the words, ""The President does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation," should have been someone from the party of the man who said it, but was again that "extremist of the tea party" (if you listen to the mainstream media or many of the moderates from the party of the speaker of those words), Rand Paul.

Something is surely afoot when the "extremists" are advocating such extreme positions as not invading countries without declaring war, spending no more than revenues, using money that is worth something and not passing laws that allows government agents to invade the privacy of citizens without cause, and the "moderates" are advocating spending trillions more than we earn, dropping bombs on people who don't threaten us, giving money to people who destroy value, and voiding the fourth amendment without so much as a "by the way"."

Indeed.

As one who has been called an extremist many times before, I often find it an oddity. I commented earlier today, in fact, that Chris Wallace called Ron Paul's more libertarian positions, "controversial".

My friend Hannah correctly noted that the wording was accurate, in that his positions do cause controversy. But the real question is... Why?

Why is it controversial... Why is it "extreme" in ANY sense to argue for a reduction of the state's power to bankrupt the nation and to keep us in a perpetual state of warfare? Why would it be "extreme" in any way to argue against the kind of government and politicians who have failed at every turn to bring about a more prosperous or secure nation, and who believe that every aspect of people's lives should be subject to the fiat whims of a ruling elite?

I am far more "extreme" than either Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, but as fairly strict Constitutionalists, both of those men are far closer to advocating anything I find remotely sane than the vast majority of politicians who I've met since being in Washington, much less of those (others) running for political office... And yet, I find neither Paul (or his son) nor Kucinich to be remotely controversial or extreme in their positions.

How have we gotten to a point where a relatively principled defense of liberty and the Constitution is an "extremist" view? What sad world is this?

The final point, Mr. Koerner makes is yet another I have made for years. The political spectrum is divided into "left" and "right" extremely haphazardly, and perpetuating the false dichotomy doesn't really help.

"The Constitution is not left or right-wing, and both Left and Right are starting to see that the most egregious acts that have been performed in the interest of the governing and the financial classes have in common that they defy the Constitution, typically by violating the rights of some for the benefit of others.

"First, Do No Harm," is the Constitution in four words, and should be the rallying cry of conservative liberals everywhere.

The so-called "radicals" like Paul and Kucinich who appear through the old left-right filter to be so different, are more importantly defined by what they have in common -- a principled attempt to protect American Constitutional rights that, while radical in 1776, should not even be up for discussion today.

Of the men I've mentioned, the darling of Constitutionalists today is Ron Paul. He has so far out-raised all of the potential GOP candidates for 2012, even while many of the MSM continue to conduct their polls (among likely Republican voters) often times without even including his name. I don't know exactly what that means, but I know it means something, and I like it."

Sadly, I see the push to ignore Dr. Paul every day, and it's rather frustrating. Watching the media, mainstream and otherwise, deliberately disregard the man is obnoxious, though I take some solace in the knowledge that the medias days as gate-keepers to political candidates are seriously numbered.

That's right. A blimp!

One day, not too long from now, we will exist in a world where the internet will break down the barrier between potential candidates and the people who are electing them, and this will be an immensely good day. I witness a handful of reporters within Washington DC establishment effectively dictating who the American public is allowed to get to know, simply by deciding which candidates to report on and which to dismiss.

The truly disappointing aspect of this process is that their picks for people who are "electable" are thoroughly uninteresting asshats like Tim Pawlenty... So I'm going to make a prediction here about the 2012 election.

If the GOP puts up another establishment Republican... a neocon, corporatist, war-mongering jagweed... as they tend to do, they will lose spectacularly against a virtually identical Barack Obama.

Obama is every bit a neocon as anybody I've ever seen. He's been a huge benefactor to Wall Street, he's been a huge benefactor to the Military Industrial Complex. He's expanded wars, eroded liberties and bankrupted this country faster - by far - than even George W. Bush did.

But he's a masterful campaigner. Brilliant... Genius, even. He's personally likable, he's currently got "the youth vote" in droves, and he's an incumbent. If the Republican party runs somebody who is a watered down version of Obama, they don't stand the slightest chance. The only person I personally see with even the slightest shot is somebody like Ron Paul who has a record that can be taken seriously on corporatism, on the Fed, on foreign policy... I know a lot of Republicans disagree that he can be taken seriously on foreign policy, but I think they're all missing the obvious points on that score.

I think that if someone like Ron Paul was in an election against Obama, he would win. He beats Obama on every single campaign promise Obama has failed to live up to, and he does it with a deep understanding of economics and liberty.

At the very least, a guy like that would "do no harm".-

Bin Laden Killing: Yes, It WAS Illegal.

2011-05-15T20:24:00.000-07:00

Alright... I think this will be my final Bin Laden related post... I'm really just getting tired of the whole thing. What's done is done.

But the other day, Vice President Joseph Biden - when asked about the Osama bin Laden killing by CBS White House correspondent, Jake Tapper - responded:

"Are you kidding?"

People laughed, nobody gave it much thought. Both partisan Democrats (out of partisan hackery?) and Republicans (out of... USA USA USA!!) agreed.

A few people have been talking about it over the last few weeks, and most have been ignored or mocked. Judge Andrew Napolitano and Ron Paul have, of course, dealt with the issue, Salon's Glenn Greenwald as well.

But apart from a handful of outliers, it seems to me that most people simply don't care.

However, let's be real for a second, shall we? Osama bin Laden's death was unquestionably illegal, not only by the standards of international law, but by the standards of American law as well. As I wrote last weekend, "legality" of his killing is less of a concern to me than the morality of ending an unarmed man's life without any form of due process, trial, or eminent danger.

Many people I have talked with in the last few weeks about this issue emphatically remind me over and over that Osama bin Laden didn't allow any of the 3,000+ innocent men and women of the World Trade Center any form of "due process" before he ordered their deaths. True... But that's precisely the instant where Osama bin Laden - for all of his religious moralizing - ceded righteousness. It's precisely why America should NOT have responded in kind.

The thing is, justice means temperance, not revenge. Deliberate thought, not violent emotive outbursts.

America simply cannot be a beacon of freedom, consistency of principle, opportunity and justice if we don't actually act with those ideals in mind. Killing an unarmed man in his home in a country we are not actually at war with (even by the current half-assed and unconstitutional standards) is not acting within American ideals.

Due process is incredibly important to us as Americans and it absolutely needs to remain that way.

Unfortunately, rights to due process are steadily eroding around the US, and it's thoroughly been abandoned in our dealings with other nations. This is a dangerous precedent... and the Osama bin Laden killing is hardly the most disturbing event on that scale.

Recently, the Indiana Supreme Court just shockingly ruled against the 4th Amendment:

"NDIANAPOLIS | Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.

In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer's entry."

Uh... What?? In case you didn't catch that, what Indiana is saying is that if you live in their state, you have no right to resist a police officer entering your home - even if they are doing so completely illegally with no warrant, no cause and no right. Resisting unlawful behavior by the police is now... outlawed. Can you think of a better way to impose a state of fear and intimidation among your citizens short of indiscriminately shooting at people?

I can't.

And yet for so many people in America, this kind of thing seems to be ignored. Consider that Ron Paul was laughed at and scorned a few days ago for suggesting that there were other ways to get Osama bin Laden and that a nation that disrespects international law and tortures prisoners of war is a nation that might very well ignore its own laws in the pursuit of what - even a majority of - misguided individuals believe constitutes "justice" right here at home.

Ask yourself, though: How is the ruling in Indiana not EXACTLY what Congressman Paul was talking about?

If the American government feels perfectly justified in sending armed men into a foreign country and shooting an unarmed man in the head - no matter how bad that man was - then why would we expect that same government to have any qualms what-so-ever about its police officers entering a citizen's home without so much as a "Howdy, ma'am"?

PS... They already do exactly this frequently.

Sure, you might come back at me with the idea that Osama bin Laden wasn't a US citizen, so he's not protected by our constitution - and while that is technically true based on legal precedent, it's grossly missing the point. But if this is what you think, let me remind you of something Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Notice that Jefferson did not write "All people living within the arbitrarily defined geopolitical boundaries soon to be called 'The United States of America'". He wrote "All men"... which is now interpreted to mean "All people". The philosophy which guided those words is defined by a belief in "unalienable" natural rights, not granted by government, but innately a part of every human being. Thomas Paine further expounded on this idea in "The Rights of Man". He wrote:

"It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few . . . They . . . consequently are instruments of injustice."

If you believe that people have the right to life, liberty and property as the American revolutionaries did, then you should understand that those rights aren't a function of being "American", but of being human. If you understand that, then you must realize that any instance of international execution, the torture of "enemy combatants" or any other violations of rights perpetrated by agents of the United States, cannot simply be justified by saying "Well, hey, they aren't US Citizens, so the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to them."

What makes the idea of America so great is that the government is not supposed to be above the law, and that the law is defined in such a way to enshrine the protection of people's natural rights to life, liberty & property. Just because the government, or even the entire country hates a person... and no matter how justified that hatred is, the government does not have the moral or constitutional authority to simply kill that person at a whim.

Bin Laden deprived many people of their lives and for that he of course needed to be brought to justice, but the key question here is, what does "justice" really mean?

I know that analogizing Bin Laden is going to be extremely difficult for a lot of people to accept, but the name of this blog is Logicology, is it not?

So let's use some logic.

First, recognize that murder is not a crime simply because it is listed in the law books as a crime (that would be question begging), but because everybody is an autonomous, self-owning individual who has the moral right to exist and act as they see fit and murder deprives people of that moral right. Incidentally, the violation of people's individual sovereignty is the only justification for considering anything a crime (i.e. "victimless" crimes are not crimes at all by this definition).

So, by that definition (and any other I can think of), Osama bin Laden was undoubtedly a criminal - one of the worst of all time. He was a mass murderer to be sure, but to be clear, what I'm establishing here is that... in principle... he was no different than a junkie who kills his drug dealer over a few grams of cocaine. Both are murderers, but there is no principle difference between the two - only a difference in severity & scale.

Are we clear on this? I just want to talk about the principles involved.

Good. Now... Forget about Osama bin Laden. Let's just talk about that hypothetical murdering junkie.

How would you want the US government to react to the junkie who kills his dealer? Do you want cops to take an educated guess about where that junkie lives, kick the door in and start shooting until everybody is dead? Or do you want the cops to resort to deadly force as a last resort, arrest the junkie, give him a trial and send him to prison (or even execute him if you support that sort of thing)?

Now... What if it wasn't a junkie and it wasn't murder?

What if it's a shoplifter who stole a few hundred dollars worth of shoes from a popular department store? How should we go about delivering justice? Do we make an accusation of the person we think is responsible and throw them in jail without trial?

I think on these lesser crimes, most people would answer that of course we don't want the cops to go around arresting and imprisoning people without trial, and we certainly don't want a police force who feels so assured of their righteousness that they are comfortable opening fire on unarmed, non-threatening suspects purely because they are certain of guilt.

So the analogy is this: If you wouldn't be ok with the police instantly killing an unarmed man known to be a murderer, but who poses no immediate threat to the lives of the officers - why should you be ok with the killing of an unarmed Osama bin Laden? Why would you prefer that we did that, rather than capture him and hold him up for all the world to see as not only a symbol of American resolve and tenacity, but as a symbol of true justice.

We have instead demonstrated that justice was merely a secondary concern to revenge.

The framers of the Constitution recognized correctly that the state is force. Government is violence, and in spite of how poorly concealed that fact is, many people still have trouble grasping the concept. Fortunately the men who established our guiding principles as a nation did understand that, and were clear to place restrictions on the government dictating how and under which circumstances violence was appropriate.

Most of our laws stem from these ideas... and rightly so.

Police may shoot a suspect if the suspect is posing an immediate threat to the lives of the police officers. Likewise, our military can shoot enemy combatants if they are being shot at or within the context of a military engagement. Our police are not generally supposed to be allowed (although they frequently do) to break into someone's house and shoot up the place without a substantial amount of due process leading up to it, and there should (although, unfortunately almost never is) be severe punishments for any police officers who shoot and kill anyone - including known criminals - unless absolutely necessary.

Our military is generally not supposed to be allowed to do that either. For example, once an enemy has surrendered, an American soldier that harms or kills that prisoner should be subject to military tribunal and court martial.

The way we treat our enemies says far more about us than it does about them, and for these reasons and countless others, we should not be the nation that sends a team of soldiers to execute an unarmed man - regardless of how bad a guy he is. Would we like to be seen as a nation of thugs and murderers, or rapists and torturers, like so many of our enemies are? Or would we rather be seen as a force for good in the world, acting with violence only when necessary?

I don't particularly want to live in a world where the United States military is nothing more than an international kill-squad... and that is why you should care about the legality - and the morality - of killing Osama Bin Laden.

What I'm saying is, is it morally justifiable for the US military to execute unarmed men (and women, by the way)? To put it a bit more crudely, but accurately, does the severity of a man's crimes justify a lynch-mob?

Keep in mind here that we all know Osama bin Laden was guilty of terrible, terrible crimes against Americans. We all know he was fomenting even more plots to carry out even more crimes against Americans. No one disputes this... And if he was engaged in a firefight with the SEAL team that raided his estate, I see no ethical problem in the SEALs shooting him dead where he stood.

But to kill a man who was not fighting back, and who was not armed... that is a different matter entirely.

Now... One way or another, Osama's killing was illegal. I don't see how anyone, particularly the Vice President of the United States of all people, could be confused by that. There is no legal justification for a group of men entering a foreign country, breaking into someone's compound and killing him. Sometimes, of course, breaking the law is the right thing to do.

This seems like one of those times.

But what is far more questionable, to me at least, is whether or not the ethics of killing him can actually be justified. The more I think about it, and the more I listen to the reactions of people in the United States, in Pakistan, in the rest of the Middle East... The more I believe that that justification simply isn't there.

And it concerns me. We know that the US government no longer feels compelled to draft articles of war, and after Libya, it's clear that the President doesn't even feel a duty to so much as get permission from congress to get the US into still more undeclared wars. We also know that by ignoring the Bill of Rights, and the principles that fundamentally set the US apart from other countries, virtually any government action - no matter how violent, perverse and draconian - can be legally justified. We've seen time and time again that these violations will only get more and more severe.

So as our foreign policy becomes even more antagonistic, our domestic policy is too... and we're apparently at a stage in our nation's development where the Vice President thinks any concern about these things is just a big joke.

Well, Mr. Biden... I'm not laughing.

Inside an All-Too-"Common" Controversy

2011-05-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

Ok, I kinda lamed myself out with the awful pun for a blog-title, but here's the deal: I just got a front-row seat to something I think more people should know about and By now, you've assuredly heard that "The White House" invited rapper and auto-tune master, ~~Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr.~~ "Common" to some kind of stupid "poetry-slam".

Now... Aside from the fact that poetry "slams" are idiotic, and should be left to grungy basement college bars, the big controversy here is that Common has previously rapped about such engrossing topics as killing President Bush and whipping out an "uzi" and presumably attempting suicide-by-cop.

As you may have been told by basically every website & news network in the freaking country at this point, that stuff is bad, and has "outraged" conservatives and police officers and he shouldn't be allowed to visit the White House.

But what you probably don't know is how this all actually started... you totally should, though.

Cause it's funny, and because it's the best example I've ever seen of how the media fabricates its own material and its own news. It all started literally 10 feet away from my office at the Daily Caller, so I saw 100% of this unfold first-hand!

A few days ago, our White House correspondent, Neil Munro, had an idea for a story. The story was: Common was invited to attend a White House event, but Common has written and performed rap songs about unsavory topics which some people might not think appropriate for a White House guest. All, in my view, pretty fair points... Although, I personally like anything that removes the deification of the presidency and reminds people that the POTUS isn't anybody special at all.

So Neil wrote the story... And honestly, it's pretty much pure news. Check it out. As far as it goes, the story itself is simple and contains a series of indisputable facts:

Michelle Obama invited Common to a poetry event.
Laura Bush had a poetry event cancelled after criticism a few years ago.
Common has rapped about killing police and former presidents.
Here's a bunch of Common's lyrics transcribed from different performances.

Nothing really debatable in any of it. It's a silly issue, but it was unquestionably solid journalism. Neil didn't even editorialize in that first article at all. Sure, it's a jab at the White House... Neil is the White House press room guy for the Daily Caller and frankly, if more reporters were willing to take jabs at Obama's administration for real, we'd be a bit better off, so I say... Good for Neil!

By itself though, this story is not much more than a bit of humorous filler as far as i'm concerned.

But then something interesting happened. Neil's story got sucked into amachine of news & commentary fabrication... and I got emailed about virtually every step along the way.

The Daily Caller's communications director likes to send out emails letting the staff know about stories that get picked up by other news outlets, and Neil's little piece on Common utterly exploded over the next 24 hours. Here's a smattering of the subject headings of all the emails I received:

HuffPost on Neil's Piece
Chicago Tribune/LA Times - Conservatives decry White House invite to rapper Common
NBC Chicago - Palin Knocks White House Over Common's Invitation
The Atlantic Wire - The Latest White House Social Event Controversy: Common
NY Daily News - Sarah Palin, Fox, Daily Caller, rip Michelle Obama's invite to rapper Common for poetry event
Human Events - Michelle Obama's Poetry Slam
WLS 890 Chicago - First Lady blasted for White House invitation to Chicago rapper
Rolling Stone - Fox News Attacks Rapper Common Over White House Invite
E! Why Is Sarah Palin Suddenly Bashing Rapper-Actor Common

Seriously... This list just keeps going. And in each case, the article actually mentions the Daily Caller.

This is great for us of course, so... Yay! But, let's stop for a second and take note of what's actually happened here. In almost no time at all, an article merely explaining what was going on became a partisan media circus in a matter of hours.

It's like one massive game of telephone. Neil Munro said something was happening. Another reporter at another website took Neil's article and added "conservatives are upset about it!", Fox News decides that indeed conservatives are upset and broadcast it even louder, more websites & news organizations repeat it, Sarah Palin chimes in, the DC Police Department chimes in... Suddenly what was essentially a minimally important issue gets passed back and forth by news organizations and is now a national headline.

It just kind of blows my mind.

But I think we should all be a bit more aware of this process, shouldn't we? How many people out there in the United States realize that the vast majority of "news" and "issues" we get fed on a daily basis are pure fabrications of the media machine in Washington DC?

Did you? Are you surprised by any of this.

I'd always suspected and complained about some of this stuff, but being here in the middle of it, it astounds me how incredibly powerful the process actually is and how influential the whole machine is on the rest of the country, and on the world.

Reporters go into journalism so often because they want to "change the world", and well... They do. Not sure many of them understand the power they wield though.

Alternet is an Idiot.

2011-05-07T20:01:00.000-07:00

Ok... Well... "Alternet" itself can't be an idiot, lacking an autonomous nervous system and all. But its main economic blogger, Joshua Holland can be... and is.

For all those other idiots out there incapable of distinguishing my assertion just there from an ad hominem fallacy (which is something I find is increasingly common), I'm not saying "Joshua Holland is an idiot, therefore his points are all wrong", I am saying "Joshua Holland is an idiot, now let me devote a blog post on explaining the supporting evidence for this thesis".

I'm not sure why I feel compelled to make that disclaimer, but I really am getting tired of explaining the difference between ad hominem fallacies and merely saying something that some people would define as "insulting".

Anyway... Enough of that. On to the point!

Mr. Holland has provided a fantastic example of his idiocy and made it available for anyone with a brain to read. The Alternet article is titled: "Thanks to Decades of Conservative Spin, Americans Are Hopelessly Confused About Taxes, Spending and the Deficit"

Off to a wonderfully unbiased start, you only have to wait until the subtitle to start understanding where he's going to go horribly awry:

"Conservatives have spent 30 years divorcing the taxes we pay from the services they finance -- no wonder the public doesn't know where their tax dollars go."

This is already basically a strawman and most certainly becomes a red herring. I'd love it if Holland produced a single shred of evidence that supported his claim that conservatives have "divorced the taxes we pay from the services they finance", but he doesn't, and it's a nonsensical point anyway.

But I haven't even gotten into the text of the article. Holland begins his case with a pitiful argument from authority from the weakest authority on economics writing today... You know who I mean.

"A few weeks back, Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, felt compelled to take time out of what is presumably a busy schedule to explain that “taxes are, first and foremost, about paying for what the government buys.” That he felt compelled to do so is a sad reflection of the state of our economic discourse."

Yep. It's Krugman.

He's right that it demonstrates a sad state of economics discourse in America, but not at all for the reasons he thinks... The fact that either Dr. Krugman or Joshua Holland believe that explaining to people that taxes "pay for what government guys" is a remotely compelling point is what's sad. Sad, and embarrassing for both of them.

OF COURSE TAXES PAY FOR GOVERNMENT "SERVICES"!

Taxes, as I'm sure everybody who is over the age of 12 knows, exist for the purpose of funding government. Thanks for the lesson, Krugman. No one I have ever met is remotely confused on that point. No conservative I have met has deliberately obfuscated that point, or would even be capable of it if they wanted to be. It's so ridiculously obvious, that it makes almost no sense to even bring it up.

Krugman (and Holland) engages in misdirection, arguing that people don't understand that taxes are paying for "government services" in order to distract people from the fact that taxes are involuntary, and that the involuntary nature of government funding has certain incredibly important economic implications.

Holland goes back to blaming "conservatives", which I'm sure in this case would include me since it's basically anyone who isn't Paul Krugman:

"They've bent themselves into intellectual pretzels arguing that cutting taxes – on the wealthy – leads to more revenues in the coffers. They've invented narratives about taxes driving “producers” to sunnier climes, killing jobs by the bushel, and relentlessly spun the wholly false notion that we're facing “runaway spending” and are “taxed to death.”"

What evidence does he use to back up the implication that in fact high taxes don't push producers to flee to "sunnier climes"? Why... His own previous op-eds of course!

His first link borders on being a non sequitur. It takes you to an article written by Holland on how a study finds that Walmart raising wages would not have a significant impact on their productivity or require much in the way of price-increases to their consumers.

Now... Walmart, like all businesses, pays a rate for labor that affords them the greatest value for the money. This means... yes... they pay as low a wage as they can (and are allowed) and still get employees that meet their standards.

Holland goes on to regurgitate the idiotic (sensing a theme?) and completely false claim that raising the minimum wage has no effect on employment. It so happens that I have previously blogged about 50 years worth of compiled data on that topic in the past (as opposed to the single study Holland mentions produced by the blatantly "liberal" Economic Policy Institute) and guess what... There's an effect. It's also incredibly well known throughout the economics community.

The pretzel-twisted logic here is Holland's. His is a world of magical thinking where there's no negative side-effect to employment or incentive for business owners to modify their behavior from artificially raising labor costs.

It might be worth pointing out here that with the most recent minimum wage, we also now have the highest teenage unemployment rate in the history of the United States. Good economists understand the link. Economists who exist to support political interventions into the economy generally don't. Shocker.

Speaking of pretzel-logic, look how far off topic we are already!

An article that begins with a headline and a few statements about conservatives confusing people about taxes has already gotten us into a discussion of minimum wage and Walmart, and the magical thinking of people who believe that increased costs imposed on businesses have no effect on employment.

As for high tax rates driving producers to "sunnier climes", well... How about Holland asks California where its jobs are going, cause I'm pretty sure they're mostly going to Texas.

Ok, that's not quite accurate, jobs aren't necessarily all flocking out of California and going to Texas (although quite a few are). Really, what's happening is that Texas is ranked in the top 5 for "good business climate" by basically every organization out there ranking these kinds of things, and California is near the bottom of the list (often within the bottom 10 states). So what happens is that California just doesn't have the economic growth or growth in jobs that other places have and jobs grow in Texas, new businesses start in Texas at rates that should make California rather envious.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that so far, Holland has produced utter crap in support of his points.

By the way, speaking as a business owner, and knowing dozens of fellow entrepreneurs, I can speak first hand on the fact that incentives completely matter to me. I don't want to be punished for owning a business, and in California and in Connecticut, I most certainly felt that I was. If my business had been larger and grown, it would have only gotten worse.

Now... Holland proceeds from this point to talk about that ridiculously right-wing organization, Gallup. They released a poll a while back that unsurprisingly showed that people think government spends too much, but that they like everything government spends money on.

This, Holland asserts with no evidence at all, is because the "conservative message machine" has effectively mislead everyone. The assumption here is that what people really want is to have all the government services they like - although a lot of that simply has to do with poorly worded poll questions. For example, when on Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, Frank Luntz asked people on the street a series of questions that resulted in contradictory responses.

"Do we spend too much on aid to illegal immigrants?" Of course, people said yes.
"Would you deny the children of illegal immigrants health care?" People naturally like children and don't like the idea of sick kids, no matter who their parents are, so they said... No.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The problem here is that there's no way to weight which programs people want to prioritize and which they would favor cutting, and by the way, generations of idiots like Holland have pushed a false dichotomy where if government isn't providing a service, then it won't be provided at all.

People think we spend too much, but have been convinced that without welfare spending, spending on health care, or on education, etc., people won't actually have access to health care or they'll be homeless. This isn't true, but it's really the "big lie" in Holland's (and especially in Krugman's) writing.

Another key point being ignored here is that a lot of people simply believe that the big problem is "waste", and that if we could only make government expenditures more efficient and less pork-filled, we would balance the budget. This is fundamentally a problem with people's understanding of economics and incentives. Of course, that's something Holland is not even remotely qualified to opine on, given his current track-record.

Holland concludes:

"Taken together, this shows how difficult it is for law-makers to arrive at good public policies. Their constituents wants their cake, they want to eat it, but they don't think they need to pay the tab for it. Politicos offer tax cuts to get themselves elected, but then face outraged constituents when they try to cut services. Small wonder that we've only managed to balance the budget in one brief period during the boom years of the 1990s.

We do face serious issues in this country. We need a serious debate about how best to solve them. But we're having that debate in a democracy populated by citizens who have little or no clue where their tax dollars go. And you can credit the anti-tax crusaders and their habitual mendacity for that sorry state of affairs."

Yep, blame anti-tax crusaders.

Let's go ahead and ignore the obvious here... We're broke! Holland starts with the bizarre presumption that just because people want "free" stuff, that America can simply provide it to them via taxation. Nobody likes to pay taxes, and yet everybody also wants free stuff. These are contradictory issues, and they are made so much worse by the fact that we're now at a point where virtually 50% of the country pay no taxes and the other 50% pays for their services, but yet everyone gets an equal vote.

The incentive for most people is to demand more and more government services and to not worry for a second about that evil "rich" guy who's on the hook for paying it. And guess what, that results in a situation where the Federal government spends at a rate of about 25% of GDP and only take in 19% of GDP.

It behooves people like Krugman and Holland to ignore that in the last 60 years, regardless of tax rates, we've averaged only about 18-19% of GDP in revenue - and that the reason for this is because tax rates do, in fact, change people's behavior. It behooves people like Krugman and Holland to ignore that we've increased annual Federal spending by close to $2 Trillion in the past decade, while only increasing revenues by a fraction of that.

So... No Josh.

No one is "confused" that taxes pay for government services... In fact, more and more people actually understand that not only are taxes not even close to enough to covering the cost of government spending, they also are starting to recognize that government pays for a huge percentage of its activities through debt and uses inflation to pay for that debt.

What a misleading pile of crap you've written, Mr. Holland.

You've started with a thoroughly useless, rudimentary point that no one is confused about, and then made a series of idiotic assertions that you backed up with more of your own writings. You've ignored how incentives play a role in people's economic activities, including job creation & destruction. You've ignored that the Federal government spends far more than it ever has in the history of the United States and that the overall tax-burden actually including Federal, State, & local income taxes as well as the burden imposed by tariffs and consumption taxes of various kinds (like the roughly $0.50 per gallon average on gasoline) is among the highest seen in the US. It's no surprise that people always forget to include the other taxes and pretend that just because Federal income tax rates have gone down since the 50s, that all taxes combined are down.

You've also ignored the complexity and the waste in the tax-code, and the myriad and ever-expanding regulatory costs imposed on businesses, particularly in places like California, which make those places less and less attractive to job producers. You didn't even touch on the cost of the debt and the cost of wars.

You've blamed conservatives - by which, in this case, you're including basically anyone who thinks high taxes are a bad thing - but you've provided no real evidence for that assertion, and you've so clearly demonstrated that you don't have a clue what you're talking about that it's driven me to simply call you an idiot.

I could probably go on about this twisted mess all night, but I think we're good here.

Rant. Over.

I'm a "fringe Leftist" RINO. Apparently.

2011-05-07T16:21:00.000-07:00

So..... It's officially started. Republicans are starting to hate me again.

It's cool, I've been through this before. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine. As the landscape of American politics flip-flops again, and I steadfastly stand my ground where I always have before, Republicans are starting to find out that I'm not really on their team.

And I'm completely shocked (shocked, I tell you!) to find out that most of them aren't really interested in liberty, or rational thought.

Gosh am I ever surprised by this.

I was a tiny bit surprised, however, to find out on Facebook last night that I'm a RINO, and that perhaps I'm also a "fringe Leftist" Obama sycophant. I sure am surprised. To be a RINO, wouldn't I first have to be a Republican "in Name"? Whoops.

There's one thing about American politics that drives me utterly insane, and I'm about to endure the 2011-2012 version of it right in the epicenter of the idiot-storm. I'm not entirely ready for that, but I do think it will remain an interesting experience.

Consider.

When George W. Bush invaded Iraq & Afghanistan, the "left" came out in droves to protest unilateral military action. Simultaneously, much of the "right" claimed that Bush's actions were heroic, regardless of their constitutional merit.

Then, like manna from heaven, January 20th, 2009 dawns and Barack Obama is ~~crowned King of America~~ inaugurated as US President and by god, we were going to get renewed "hope" and oh-so-much "change". Barack was not a unilateral war-monger like Bush! He wasn't going to bankrupt our country and disrupt our national security with costly, reckless warfare. Oh no. He was the savior!

Cut to 2011.

Where have all the Democrat anti-war protesters gone? Why, now they're out defending Obama's (way more unconstitutional) decision to expand our involvement in Afghanistan - which has only gotten more violent and dangerous in the last 2 years, by the way - and positively celebrating Obama's choice to commit tens of billions of dollars worth of US military resources into Libya, without so much as even talking with Congress about it or, for the first several days, really even making a public statement.

Of course, Republicans, still trying to justify their opposition to Obama, continue to criticize his foreign policy decisions as being anything from confusing to unconstitutional.

Can't exactly argue with them there, but it's pretty funny to hear the critiques coming from a lot of them (most of the new guys get a pass, though).

It goes on like this on issue after issue... Democrats who were utterly horrified by Bush's illegal and frankly, Orwellian, spying on American citizens have absolutely nothing to say about President Obama who has managed to continue every one of Bush's programs and add to them with the prosecution (and inhumane mistreatment but totally "legal" according to the administration) of alleged Wikileaks whistleblower, Bradley Manning, and the attempted assassination of American citizens abroad without even the pretense of Constitutionally protected Due Process.

Oh, and by the way... The latest drone strike intended to kill American-Yemeni citizen/Al Qaeda "suspect", Anwar Awlaqi, missed... don't worry though, there's no way any civilians were killed. Our bombs are "smart".

Republicans who lauded Bush's "cowboy diplomacy" mock and criticize Obama for... Umm... Exacerbating Bush-era "defense" policies! No irony detected. Democrats also seem to see no irony in Barack Obama walking away with a Nobel Peace Prize.

Fail.

Up until the recent killing of Osama bin Laden (which many Republicans & Democrats have come together to wildly celebrate), many Republicans were still firmly disputing Obama's foreign policy as anything like their own, in spite of the completely obvious fact to people who play for either team that Obama's foreign policy was (like his economic policy), Bush on steroids.

*Facepalm*

And while we're at it... Let's talk about economic policy, shall we?

Finally there is a tiny contingent of Republicans, many associated with the Tea Party movement around the US, who are starting to grasp that endless deficits and increasing national debt is not healthy for America. Of course, the strongest of these voices, like Congressman Paul Ryan, offer "solutions" which barely scratch the surface. Ryan's plan to "balance the budget" astoundingly still manages to recommend increasing government spending substantially over the next decade, just at a slower rate than anybody else's ridiculous plans.

Of course, they spend tons of time criticizing Obama for bad economic policy (as they should), but few among their ranks understand anything beyond "cut taxes!".

Now that Republican primary debates have started up again, I've once again been forced to turn my ever-critical eye on standard Republican nonsense... most of which is, I'm sorry to inform everyone, not all that much different than the standard Democrat nonsense.

Even the minor differences in rhetoric cannot make up for the absurd similarities in substance.

So here I am... Briefly described as a scourge of liberals... A "right winger", a Fox News-watching, Rush Limbaugh-listening "dittohead", spouting Republican lies about the economy and about whatever else I was supposed to have been doing. But now that a few of the people who excitedly added me on Facebook when I blasted Obama's policies are starting to realize I'm not going to be supporting their favorite neo-con in 2012, I have suddenly been labeled an "America-hating", MSNBC-watching, fringe Leftist, socialist, commie Democrat and clear supporter of Obama... Like a chump.

Part of me thinks it's pretty hilarious to be incorrectly stuffed into a box by some idiot who fails to understand that political philosophy extends beyond Team Red and Team Blue, and then get ejected from that box by the same person a few months later as if I'm supposed to think it's a bad thing... But then... Mostly...

...Sigh...

Celebrating Death

2011-05-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

Good riddance, bastard.

There are a ton of blogs I want to write right now, and if I actually had the time, I would definitely do all of them. Unfortunately, my time is pretty limited anymore, so I have to reserve my thoughts to only a few points. The first that comes up for me is the disgusting partisanship and the rhetoric that has cropped up in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death.

In a matter of hours, primarily on Twitter, I saw the reactions of many Americans around the country to the news and what seems like only moments later, The Daily Caller is buzzing with reporters emailing each other and heading down to the White House to see the public response.

I ultimately opted not to go, in part because it would have taken me at least an hour and a half to get there from my apartment and collect my gear at the office, and in part because within 10 to 15 minutes, my friends Dan Hayes & Clay Broga of Freethink Media announced that they were already en route. I knew they would get some great footage, and put it together in an excellent way... and true to form, they did:

A lot of this is hopeful and patriotic, and not nearly as bad as the first video I saw come out of the White House "celebration", but in either case... I have a big problem with the whole thing.

Death isn't something to celebrate, the violent murder - and let's be honest, that's what the Osama bin Laden killing really was - of an evil man is still a violent murder. Being privately, quietly glad that some amount of evil has been eradicated from the world seems appropriate. But cheering wildly in the streets?

No. I don't think so.

If you actually stop and consider this point from the point of view of two radically different cultures, without morally equating the two, Muslim fundamentalists and extremists cheering the death of American soldiers is hardly any different in principle than US citizens cheering the death of Bin Laden.

I know... I know. Everybody I've talked to about this keeps reminding me that Bin Laden is credited with killing 3,000 innocent residents of Manhattan. Absolutely true, and for that, the man unquestionably needed to be brought to justice. But Muslim extremists cheer the death of US soldiers for nearly identical reasons within their own perception, do they not?

America is so often seen as a worldwide bully and our bombs have indiscriminately killed tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians over the last 10 years and who knows how many over the past 50 years! Not just in Iraq & Afghanistan, either... Drone strikes have escalated under Obama substantially, and we've seen the deaths of countless people at American hands in Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other sovereign nations as well.

So when they cheer for American deaths, they too are believing they are eradicating an enemy. To some extent, I cannot blame them.

Now... Again, let me be perfectly clear about this point.

I am NOT equivocating cultures, here. American culture is by almost every conceivable level superior to the anachronistic Muslim Theocracies in the Middle East. We do not as a matter of policy & law, enslave our women, brutally kill victims of rape or other sexual assaults, we do not enforce a state religion and we don't have an Imam or any tribal, religious dictator. We are unquestionably better than all of that.

For all our faults, we do none of that.

And that's something we should all be incredibly proud of in the United States and in the "Western", "developed" world in general. It's these major philosophical differences that we all take for granted and which, I must say, we (and I include Europe in this) are so easily letting slip away.

But the celebrations sickened me, and I think they should have sickened everyone. We should be better.

We've undergone yet another defining national moment, and we reacted with what I mostly see as bloodlust. This didn't make me happy at all. However, I was actually glad to see that Code Pink - who I have literally nothing else in common with, besides a distaste for state violence - came out to the White House on Monday afternoon to protest our continued military presence in the Middle East.

I took a camera and a reporter with me. Check that out here:

The funny thing is, if you watched the video, David & Liz are our main players and I agree with both of them. Code Pink women almost never have a clue about what they're really talking about, but I'm glad that they're relatively consistent. And I'm especially glad I got an opportunity to ask Liz to talk about what happened to all of their Democrat friends who would have turned up in the thousands and millions if Bush were still in office.

Dave was right too, though.

The soldiers in Afghanistan and everywhere else around the world are there because of "pre-instated structures". Talking about "the troops" as if they have much of any say in what their missions are is silly. The troops aren't the problem here. Fat & comfortable politicians with no skin in the game are.

As far as I can tell, the purpose of these wars and of our military operations world-wide is barely even understood at this point.

Of course... Osama bin Laden's death and the American response to it is understandable in many ways. There's revenge and catharsis, and of course the desire to obtain some closure from 9/11. All of that I get. What I don't get is how so many on the left and the right believe that taking to the streets and having a party about a man's death is righteous.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a few things on Monday that are worth repeating:

"It's already a Litmus Test event: all Decent People -- by definition -- express unadulterated ecstacy at his death, and all Good Americans chant "USA! USA!" in a celebration of this proof of our national greatness and Goodness (and that of our President). Nothing that deviates from that emotional script will be heard, other than by those on the lookout for heretics to hold up and punish."

I have been that heretic... of course, I usually am, so I was prepared for the responses I've received.

Greenwald also noted something I've been saying more and more strongly as the week has progressed and a more complete narrative has emerged from the Obama administration's varied and contradictory stories...

"I'd have strongly preferred that Osama bin Laden be captured rather than killed so that he could be tried for his crimes and punished in accordance with due process (and to obtain presumably ample intelligence). But if he in fact used force to resist capture, then the U.S. military was entitled to use force against him, the way American police routinely do against suspects who use violence to resist capture. But those are legalities and they will be ignored even more so than usual. The 9/11 attack was a heinous and wanton slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians, and it's understandable that people are reacting with glee over the death of the person responsible for it. I personally don't derive joy or an impulse to chant boastfully at the news that someone just got two bullets put in their skull -- no matter who that someone is -- but that reaction is inevitable: it's the classic case of raucously cheering in a movie theater when the dastardly villain finally gets his due.

But beyond the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice, there are two points worth considering. The first is the question of what, if anything, is going to change as a result of the two bullets in Osama bin Laden's head? Are we going to fight fewer wars or end the ones we've started? Are we going to see a restoration of some of the civil liberties which have been eroded at the altar of this scary Villain Mastermind? Is the War on Terror over? Are we Safer now?"

I can't help but thinking... No. We can't be.

The war on terror may be farther from over today than it ever has been, and Osama bin Laden's death might very well foment some serious blowback. In fact, it already has. The Taliban have redoubled their efforts in Afghanistan, and one of the more disturbing things I discovered today was that a "pro-bin Laden" event was staged by his supporters in London!

From the UK Express article about that event:

"It was organised by controversial preacher Anjem Choudary, who told reporters after the 'service' that America had created a new generation of Islamic terrorists.

Muslim women demonstrators pray outside of the US embassy in London today
He said: "There will be one million Osamas. Muslims will remember Osama as a great man who stood up against Satan. Many will want to emulate his acts.

"In Britain we have other options - like political action, but in other countries if your land is attacked or your family are put at risk you must defend yourself.

"We believe in the covenant of security that we must attack those we live with, but many do not."

The group began their march from the Regents Park Mosque where they tried to recruit some of the thousands who prayed there."

Surely this must concern all of us, not just because of the message Choudary is promoting, but that it is in the United Kingdom... These aren't the backwards sentiments of an uneducated, riled-up people confined to the mountains of North-eastern Afghanistan. Choudary might as well be right here in America.

At the risk of being even more "heretical", it's hard not to understand why this is the inevitable reaction to Osama bin Laden's killing outside the US. We know now that Osama and his men were almost entirely unarmed when the Navy SEAL team entered their compound in Pakistan.

Consider the implications here.

A United States military special forces unit entered a sovereign country with which, to this point, we were not "at war" (although that's pretty debatable given the number of USAF drones that have dropped bombs on that country in the last few years), it proceeded to kill a large group of unarmed men and even a few women, extract a few of the bodies and exit.

While this is unquestionably an illegal act by our Constitution, a pretty strong case can be made that it is an immoral act as well. It's also, practically speaking, a poor way to mete out "justice" and terrible PR for the United States - which is incredibly likely to generate even more dangers for our country in the years to come.

I'm not really one to be overly concerned with legality (which, after all, is so infrequently a true representation of justice), so I'm not so concerned about the violation of Pakistan's borders...

We had a right to bring Osama bin Laden to (legitimate) justice. Of course we did. Every individual, and of course every nation as a result, has the right to self-defense and to obtain retribution for acts of injustice and 9/11 was most certainly that. If in the service of bringing a known murderer and instigator of so much American suffering to answer for his crimes, we need to cross some arbitrarily drawn political lines, well... Fine. We will have to deal with the diplomatic mess created by such actions, but it's pretty easy to defend them. Besides... As real freedom fighter around the world would know, some laws are worth breaking.

However... Shooting and killing an unarmed man?

Not ok.

Morally, it should be obvious why killing unarmed men is wrong. But practically, I see no way not to construe those actions as a spectacular mistake.

We could have captured Bin Laden and his men. We could have tried him in front of the whole world for crimes against the United States. We could have made him a spectacle and shown him to be a hypocrite that he surely would have become. Most of all, had we captured him, there is no question that we could have learned a vast amount about the nature of al Qaeda, and of decentralized terrorist networks in general.

Had we done this, we would have learned a ton, we would have shamed a man who deserved so much to be shamed in front of his followers, we would have brought legitimate justice to an evil man and demonstrated America to be a nation guided by principle and law... not by lynch mobs.

Instead... We shot an unarmed (but yes, evil!) man in the head and dumped his lifeless body over the side of an aircraft carrier. We opted for thoughtless violence and death and eschewed the opportunity to get true justice or learn directly from perhaps the most knowledgeable person on the planet about Islamic terrorism.

...and the people cheered.

Trade is Made of WIN!

2011-04-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

The folks at the Mercatus Center producing the new LearnLiberty video series are wonderful, brilliant people. Full disclosure, I had a meeting with their director a week and a half ago to pitch my own services (assuming I actually have any time) to produce some videos for them as well.

I'd been meaning to post a few of these videos regardless, but there is actually a special reason I'm doing so tonight.

The other day, I posted a link from Cracked.com to Facebook on 5 Ways People Are Trying to Save the World (That Don't Work). The 5 things and my own comments about them, in descending order, were:

#5. Buying Organically Grown Food: More expensive, worse on the planet (because it consumes more resources to produce the same quantity of food), no healthier for you. Genius.
‎#4. Rejecting Vaccinations: Obvious, isn't it? Not to some people. Seriously though... Vaccines are a good thing. Get 'em.
#3. Recycling: This one is more interesting and more subtle... It uses enormous resources (including human labor) to recycle products. Many times, the energy expenditure - which often means carbon emissions, water usage, etc. - is way more to recycle some material than it is to just use new stuff. Additionally, the energy expenditure varies by material. Paper is easier to recycle than aluminum, for instance. The cracked article also makes the point that sometimes even *reuse* is more wasteful. I'm less convinced on that point, only because I understand that wealth is the cumulative goods & services people actually use and need on a daily basis... The more goods we have that we don't need to constantly re-make, the more human effort can be expended on creating new things and bringing produced goods to more people - thus raising the standard of living for everybody. Reuse is better overall.
#2. Using Antibacterial Soap: I'm pretty sure everybody knows about this one by now. Stop making super-resistant strains of bacteria! Let your immune system get a daily work out. You'll be healthier in the long run!
#1. Buying Carbon Offsets: If you're an idiot, then you might not understand why this is a massive fail. Al Gore and his carbon credit company is counting on there being a lot of idiots out there.

Somewhat predictably, the big one that set people off was the "organic" food one.

Over the course of the discussion I've come to discover that many people are rather confused on a number of issues related to organically grown food. But the one thing I really want to set straight right here isn't so much about whether or not your food is "organic" (it all is, by the way, as the word "organic" is nothing more than clever branding), but about trade.

One thing people keep coming back to on the Facebook thread is this idea that organic farming is better for the planet than so-called "factory" farming, and that buying "local" foods is better than buying foods produced in other parts of the world.

Yet... None of that is usually the case, and thanks to my friend Art Carden, Professor of Economics at Rhodes College and the Mercatus Center's "LearnLiberty" project, I have 3 excellent videos that quickly and effectively explain why:

Trade is Made of Win - Part I: Wealth Creation

Trade is Made of Win - Part II: Cooperation

Let's pause here for a moment. What does this have to do with local vs. non-local trade? Everything. Note how in both examples, more goods were produced with trade and with specialization (division of labor) than without... This is always going to be the case.

For example, I do not have a green thumb and embarrassing as this is to admit, I have never caught a single fish in my entire life.

When I was in Boy Scouts, I got my fishing merit badge (which was required) by going to a stocked lake, having somebody else ultimately catch a fish for me on my line, and then gutting and cleaning said fish myself to at least show that I had that skill. I'm a failure as a fisherman.

But you might not be... I don't know. Let's say that you are an excellent fisherman... If you are and we were stranded on a desert island, it would behoove you to do all the fishing, and for me to spend all my time doing something else, and then we would trade output for output and both be far better off than if we split our time doing things we were not good at.

Of course everybody pretty much gets that basic idea. But most people fail to expand it out to the rest of the world. Even if you're a great fisherman compared to your buddies, you realize that there are people who catch hundreds of fish each day as professionals working on boats in oceans and rivers world-wide. The same is true for producing anything else.

Some local farmers might produce the best food in the most efficient ways possible... But then again, maybe they don't. Maybe someone in Columbia does a better job. Or someone in Canada, or Germany, or China. Maybe people in Wisconsin, Oregon & Vermont make better cows milk cheeses than people in Florida... And maybe people in Florida make better oranges than people in Alaska, who probably produce better Alaskan King Crab legs than people in Nebraska, who might produce better USDA Prime Angus Beef than......... Yeah, you get the idea.

Local isn't always better. In fact, for probably 95% of the things you need and want on a daily basis, it's going to be much worse than non-local. But with trade, that doesn't matter. Everybody wins!

And of course, on a more preachy note... Prices help people determine what goods are being produced the most efficiently, and your own judgment will tell you if what's been produced is up to your standards, but if your local farmer isn't able to provide a better product at a lower price than a non-local farmer, not only would I encourage you not to support your local farmer, but I would say you were downright foolish if you did so.

You'd be contributing to the continued waste of resources - particularly including human labor - and the production of inferior products.

Don't do that!

If instead, you trade and cooperate with everyone regardless of where they are, prices can help coordinate the division of labor until everybody is really doing what they're best at and all over the world, people are utilizing world-wide resources as effectively as it's possible to do in this flawed universe.

Buying local regularly just results in waste... and higher prices to you as a consumer to boot, so dumb all the way around.

However... Now we come to the truly key clip...

Trade is Made of Win - Part III: Conservation

Organic farming is in many ways, primitive farming. Without taking advantage of the huge number of advances in biotechnology that make crops more robust and have higher yields, organic farmers condemn themselves to using more "inputs" for the same number of "outputs", as an economist might say.

It takes a greater land area to produce the same amount of food that modern commercial farming techniques can produce. So putting aside any complaints about the "quality" of the food (which isn't the subject of this post, but is absolutely no different as study after study confirms), on a pure numbers basis, organic farming is more resource intensive and is thus more wasteful per unit of food produced than alternative methods.

Generally speaking, it's worse for the planet in general to be producing goods at lower levels of efficiency, because we're using up more resources than we absolutely have to.

But much worse, in my opinion, is the human cost to all of this nonsense.

There are billions of hungry and starving people in this world. Organic farming produces less food by far than we know it is physically possible to produce with our available technology and resources. This means that in spite of the billions needing to eat, purely for the sake of the psychological (not physiological!) desires of a comparatively small group of incredibly wealthy "Westerners", we are under producing and contributing to a much hungrier world than we would otherwise have if we didn't have to go through this organic nonsense.

So... I'm making two big points here.

First, organic farming is a waste of human labor and resources compared to what we could be doing in food production, and that is worse on the environment inherently - since we're being comparatively less efficient. Bad for the planet in that way.

Second, organic farming is directly contributing to the continued starvation of billions of people who do not need to be starving!

I can't stress that second point enough. We have the technology and ingenuity to provide for the material needs of far more people than we are providing for as a species right now, and anything that inhibits that is, in my view, utterly cruel. So people who support all these kinds of primitive means of production, forgoing important capital developments like biotechnology - primarily due to unfounded, hyperbolized paranoia - are actively discouraging the development of a more prosperous world.

I do not like that at all.

Partisan Peeps.

2011-04-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday, Mary Katharine Ham decided that for our newest video, we should do something involving those marshmallow Peeps everybody hates because it was going to be Easter weekend, and she used to do videos with Peeps all the time covering newsy topics.

Naturally, I thought it would be fun, and being the industrious and ambitious individual I am and generally wanting to take everything the Daily Caller/MKH does to "the next level" I grabbed a couple Peeps, went into my faux-studio for about an hour and came back to MKH with a 2-3 second video of stop-motion animation.

How cool would it be, I thought, to have 20 or 30 seconds of kind of hilarious stop-motion Peeps on screen while MKH is talking about the news or doing whatever it is she wanted to do?

Pretty cool.

Well, of course, Mary Katharine saw the thing and the gears started turning and later that evening, I get an email or a text or whatever, saying something to the effect of "I have a great idea!! Talk to you about it tomorrow morning!"

That's always fun for me, since I rely on her to come up with the "ideas" for our videos and good ideas tend to me more interesting production for me.

Little did I know...

Next morning, I get into work and just about the first question I get asked is... "Heyyy.... Can you re-create Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire' so we can do a music video?", while being handed a page of lyrics.

At this point, I could already tell that MKH's great idea was going to be a hundred times more work than I anticipated, but once I'd read through the song lyrics, I knew two more things... First, that it would
actually be a thousand times more work than I had anticipated originally, and second... that it really was a cute, hilarious, fun idea and we would have to get it done by the end of the week in time for Easter.

So I went to work...

By a bit after lunchtime, I had arranged, produced and was mixing a pretty solid background track over which would be recorded the lyrics. I'd set up the vocal recording project and set up a miniature green-screen stage for our Peeps. By the end of the day on Wednesday, I had a complete breakdown of all the different shots we'd need to get to do the video.

Maybe not quite needless to say, the breakdown included about 180 seconds worth of stop-motion animation that we'd need to complete to properly pull off a good video.

Now... you may not be aware of this, but the human eye sees the world at something fairly close to 24 frames per second. That's why movies are basically all shot/played back at 24 (or 23.97) frames per second. A frame, by the way, is one single image that makes up the basis for a film. Most people get this I would assume. Film works just like a flip-book or a zoetrope. Image after image gets passed by our eyes and the brain synthesizes all that and our minds merge all the data into one seemless video.

Honestly, there's a ton of cool stuff involved here, but videos actually work mostly because our brains do fun, interesting and strange things.

This is relevant because 24 frames a second in stop motion would mean that somebody (i.e. me) would have to take 4,320 separate images (and moving little Peeps around a little stage in between each shot) to achieve 180 seconds worth of stop motion video.

Fortunately, because animation isn't "real", and your brain knows it, we don't actually need to watch stop-motion animation in 24 frames per second. We can do animation in 15 or even, on generally more rare occasions: 12 frames per second.

Still... When it's all said and done, the fact remains that at 12 fps, we needed to come up with 2,170 individual shots in order to get enough material to produce the final video. Seriously.... 2,170!

To further complicate this situation, each and every video made with these Peeps then must have had all the green backgrounds keyed out (removed) before they could be usable for anything! So I sat here at my fabulous desk, editing away for hours. Mary Katharine photographed the Peeps while I put hundreds and hundreds of single frames into my NLE, created videos, then keyed out backgrounds and added scenes and additional animation in After Effects.

All said and done, for every 2 seconds of final video, there was probably an hour and a half to two hours worth of production work needed to make it what it is.

And just so we're all clear here... That is insanely fast for any kind of stop-motion production!

But after putting in about 40 hours of work in 3 days, and even coming back in on Saturday morning to finalize the thing, I'm rather proud to say that we did get it done just in time for Easter Sunday. Here it is:

Now... I really do hope you enjoyed this little video... and I hope that the background portrayed above has helped you understand a little bit more about the challenges and diverse skills that went into the creation of the video. Maybe you don't care, but I know some people will watch it and say, "Ehh... Whatever, I've seen better", and of course that's surely true. I'm no Tim Burton... fair enough.

And indeed, looking over the YouTube comments, a few people did dislike it... For instance, "blogbat" writes:

"Wow. That. Really. Sucked. But thanks for the effort. :)"

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatever, blogbat. I'm certainly not going to cry about, or really even think about the anonymous comments of people like that... I worked incredibly hard, I'm basically a "team" of one, and I'm pretty sure there aren't more than a handful of people in the world who would be able to do music, stop-motion photography, animation, graphic effects and edit this kind of a project in the time available. I'm pretty secure on that level... But some of the comments that I read on the video have honestly baffled me.

If you haven't seen the video yet... Do so now, please.

Ok... So, reading through a few of the comments, one came in early on that I just don't understand. Commenter "angusmcphooey" wrote:

"Could have been funny, but too partisan"

Uh... What?

Another commenter comes to the video's "defense"... "JoeSquid1970" responds:

"Partisan??? Mentions Obama, Scott Brown and Christine O'donnell...I think it was fairly done...Do you think it is "Partisan" when something bad is said about ACORN or Obama? The song was mostly about celebrites and world events so I just don't see it..."

And so McPhooey goes into detail about how the video is supposedly "partisan"...

"Positive mentions of Tea Party/Pain, negative mentions of Obama and his wife. Yeah, partisan hackery. With peeps. Not surprising since the person who wrote it is a right-wing talking head."

He/she isn't the only one to think that, apparently... Another commenter writes:

"atrocious vid is atrocious. the part about michelle obama pissed me off the most. wtf is this bullshit."

...and still another chimes in with:

"Let's see- ACORN was a set up- it was selectively edited video by FOX News to implicate the employees of ACORN (didn't mentioned that after the "prostitute" left the men in the video called his police officer cousin to report it) No charges were filed once the the unedited video was reviewed. Youtube won't let me add a link to news stories about this, google "acorn set up" for more info) Other issues with video, no room to write about them. Cute idea, too much of a right wing agenda to go viral."

And on the other side of this miniature flame war, "sstrudell" wrote:

"Maybe Negative things are said about Acorn and Obama because they do negative things? Makes sense to me. Great job with the video!"

I really couldn't care less if people mock the video or say whatever they want about my work... But... Partisan?? Huh?

Seriously?

Consider this... We have a commenter who goes on at length about Fox News and ACORN (and a commenter who defends my video's "negative things" apparently said about ACORN), and the totality of reference to ACORN in the video is literally... the single, solitary word, "ACORN" in the lyrics, and a picture of an acorn... The nut, not even the logo of the organization.

The "positive" mentions of the Tea Party, for that matter include... umm.... exactly 0 direct references. The Tea Party does appear in Peep form on screen with the lines "Sarah Palin gave a speech, regulator overreach", and "Congress passed Obamacare, incumbents had to go".

Now, maybe the "regulator overreach" thing is disagreeable to some people or may seem "partisan"... although, I'm vehemently anti-partisan, and it's not disagreeable to me at all.

The rest of it is just statements... Sarah Palin gave tons of speeches. Congress did pass ObamaCare, and considering the massive incumbent ousting of the 2010 election, that seemed a bit news worthy to me too. And of course, all of these lines are surrounded by stuff about Justin Bieber, Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Lady Gaga, Helen Thomas and Mel Gibson... I mean really... There's even Twilight Peeps in this video!

So... What? Partisan??

I guess some people see whatever it is that they want to see... Bizarre.

Catching Up

2011-04-24T06:28:00.000-07:00

Hello my lovely blog, how long has it been?

Ok... Let's be honest, it's only been a couple weeks since my last post, but holy cow I've been busy. The majority of said busy-ness has come from my work with The Daily Caller and specifically Mary Katharine Ham.

So far, the past 6 weeks has raced by and I've had a pretty great time overall in my new digs. Unfortunately I've had to move all my gear from one room to another and then back to yet a third room right next to the first one in the past couple weeks, but I hope that this last move will have been the final one - at least for a good long while.

I have gotten a whole bunch of ancillary gear to become better prepared for the multitude of less-than-stellar audio & video environments that are becoming germane to my new life as a news & commentary multimedia producer.

Inside things that I am finding fun and amusing in no particular order:

Morning editorial meetings with Tucker Carlson, often hilarious, frequently interesting and informative.
Ever-changing and thus consistently-challenging recording environments and expectations. I go from shooting in front of the White House to visiting new Congress-people offices in the labyrinthine depths and murky undergrounds of House of Representative & Senate offices on Capitol Hill to quaint rural Virginia lake-houses, and back to my little make-shift greenscreen studio all within the span of a few hours.
The chance to occasionally work on videos that say some things I really deeply care about.
Working with a bunch of people who I actually pretty much like being around.

That last one is kind of a big deal for me... I tend to get along pretty well with most of the people I've ever worked with, but it's very rare that I'd have much opportunity to talk with people on any kind of a comparable level on political philosophy or economics, and at the Daily Caller I seem to be able to do that all the time.

It's a pretty good environment and although it's a lot more statist than I'd like overall, it's better than most places, and honestly - there's no way around that if you want to reach a broader audience.

And reach a broader audience I have....

The first video I produced over there was viewed around 60,000 times. And the numbers for other videos are in the quintuple digits frequently. This is good... and hey, my name is occasionally on the product too, so maybe at some point people will take some notice of that as well.

Alex Jones' Comedy Hour

2011-03-29T19:17:00.000-07:00

There's so much comedy gold on today's Hit & Run thread about Alex Jones, but this bit is probably my favorite.

sevo|3.28.11 @ 8:10PM|#

"What quote is this about WW1 history..?"

For starters, it's *WWII*. Just so you know.

Almanian|3.28.11 @ 8:47PM|#

"World War II - The Other World War I™"

sevo|3.28.11 @ 8:59PM|#

WWII; the "NEW WWI"?

Nipplemancer|3.29.11 @ 12:46AM|#

WWI Pt. II

halfdoghalfdeer|3.29.11 @ 11:22AM|#

WWII, This time it's personal!

I should really spend more time over there... and if I had the time, I totally would.

And, I'm really not going to spend any time on this, but just so we're all clear. There is nothing remotely "libertarian" about Alex Jones. He's statist to the core.

Sure I might agree with him on a few things, like the importance of ending the Federal Reserve (although that is more of an economics point and doesn't have any direct relevance to libertarian philosophy at all)... but here's a key difference, I don't think that Congress should be in the business of printing a ton of money either!

Jones' positions on most things seem to be a ridiculously stupid mix of anti-historical nonsense with conclusions that generally concentrate power right back in the hands of people he thinks are behind innumerable conspiracies.

So... No, not libertarian, although he's been described that way by people who are equally confused.

Natural Selection, Market Potpourri

2011-03-26T14:28:00.000-07:00

First! A fabulous point on Facebook by economist, Steve Horwitz:

"People need to wake up and know the history: government regulation does not "check" the power of the private sector, it enhances it. The more power you give gov't, the more that the private sector will seek to access that power and use it to their advantage and to the disadvantage of the rest of us. Regulated capitalism inevitably becomes corporatism. And "better people" in gov't won't change this."

And... Also a few excellent comments at Hit & Run (not written by me)... directed at our old "pal" Tony, of course:

"Tony, please understand: just because you believe something, does NOT make it 1) correct, and 2) so correct that it must be imposed upon others at the point of a gun.

You say people don't want the society we're selling...then why are their armed police officers enforcing bogus drug laws on casual users? If everyone wanted your society, they'd all voluntarily stop using drugs, since it's against the law.

Why does the IRS have enforcement agents? If everyone wanted the society you're selling, everyone would voluntarily pay their taxes, no enforcement required.

Here's the thing: you think we mean to impose a stateless vision on you whether you want it or not. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you and a bunch of like-minded folks want to get together, form a community, and agree to taxation in exchange for certain public services, then by all means, feel free.

What we ARE asking is that you stop assuming that you are SO superior to us both intellectually and morally that it is your right and duty to impose your vision upon us whether we'd have it or not. Our vision allows you to form whatever community you want with like-minded fellows. Your vision imposes force upon us to comply with it, because you believe a small number of educated elites know better than everyone else how things should be run, and that they should be granted a monopoly on force in order to enact their dictates. Boiled down, that is what you believe, because that is just a non-PC way of describing bureaucratic government."

More to Tony:

"Your understanding of Darwinian theory is severely limited. It says nothing about morality or even the best surviving, because it lacks qualitative analysis. The only thing that matters is that - just like in markets - cells interact with each other and those cells produce organisms through - as Dawkins puts it - selfish genes. It is not necessarily true that species survive because of selfish behavior as you understand it with your primitive sense of morality. Mammals seem to survive because they work together. As in markets, cells interact with each other at random to produce what looks like a planned whole. Just like the creationist, you assume the market must have a designer, because without one there would be - hold your breath - chaos. In fact, altruism is a good thing for human survival and the market is the ultimate expression of voluntarism and the lack of coercion or even a top-down order. It produces wealth for billions of people without a designer. Your mind is shaped to find a designer, and if you don't, you will impose one upon it. Your problem is you are fighting against Ayn Rand. We are not objectivists. We are libertarians. There are many of us who despise Rand, because she was wrong about altruism.

Secondly, evolutionary psychology shows that voluntary exchange (capitalism) is the very trait that has allowed humans to be the ONLY species to become more prosperous as we have become more populous. You see it as selfish because you have a paleolithic morality, where sharing is seen as the top goal (this works in small units such as the family). But in a market you don't realize that the profit motive is actually benefiting you and everyone around you. You only see the selfish behavior of the store owner, not even realizing that you both benefit from the exchange. Capitalism is the only reason vast swathes of humanity were able to escape abject poverty, not coercion and state power. Otherwise, North Korea would be a bastion of prosperity. You are at war with the very thing that leads to your own prosperity.

Nevertheless, you are right that people disagree with us, but that, as I have mentioned, is a result of having a primitive morality based on a false understanding of the world around. You see zero-sum when in reality it is no such thing.

The fact that you throw around Darwin's name as some sort of emotive term to criticize your opponents is shameful and betrays your ignorance of science. Markets are like evolution. It would serve you well to gain a better understanding of both."

There's a lot to be said about each of these points... But I think that one thing I'd like to talk about more often is the connection between free markets and other spontaneously ordered processes like evolution by natural selection, language & communications, and cultural customs & norms.

It intrigues me somewhat that so much effort has been spent by evolutionary biologists fighting the crude, typically creationist-led description of evolution as "Dog eat Dog" or the notion that there is a spectacularly cut-throat aspect to natural selection... and while many people like Tony may moderately grasp this point in biology (I'm being charitable), they rely on creationist fallacies in their arguments against the market.

When Biologists talk about "survival of the fittest", they don't inherently mean that the animals which survive are the most physically tough or brutal, but rather they mean animals which are best adapted to their given environmental pressures.

In many ways, markets work exactly the same way.

Being successful in business doesn't require you to be the biggest, most ruthless, liberty-violating thieves imaginable. It requires that you are responsive to the values of your customers, and that you find a niche that few other ~~animals~~ businesses are filling.

Think about the Galapagos Finches.

These little birds diverged primarily in terms of beak shape, size & strength. They didn't all just go extinct, because one super-finch developed, they diversified and branched off as some birds became better at eating certain foods, and their cousins better at others. Business environments are similar... Look at my own business.

As a multimedia producer, I am in constant competition with hundreds of other talented people. There's no way I can compete on all levels with all of them... but I do have a few advantages. I care about certain ideas, and I've got a more complete understanding of a few specialized areas of study & philosophy... so I can cater to a particular market that most multimedia producers aren't interested or capable of catering to.

That's worked out ok for me... But unfortunately for people like Tony, their "Zero-Sum" mentality leads them to think the only way to be successful is to take from somebody else.

I suppose nobody should be surprised by this - since their interaction with the world is precisely that.

But now, let's tie this back to Steve's point... Most of the time, using laws to "regulate" the market is as absurd as using law to "regulate" natural selection. Eugenics is one word people have for those kinds of policies in the biological realm, and it produces some pretty bad results too.