Happy Fourth, Everyone

July 4, 2008

I was looking for a YouTube video of Anti-flag’s “Stars and Stripes” in celebration of July 4. Despite Anti-flag’s sometimes overzealous idolization of “democracy”, the band is pretty consistently and vehemently anti-nationalist, bringing us such songs as “No Borders, No Nations” and “Die For Your Government”. They’re anti-nationalist, anti-propagandist, anti-plutocratic left-anarchists. My query didn’t return anything other than some kid’s clip-art slideshow.

Anyhow, on one of these videos, I saw in the comments:

anti-flag loves the USA they just disagree with the bush administration and its policies, and also with previous evils committed in the name of america, however they are all for the freedoms and rights which america was founded on, dont place your hatred on the usa as a whole but rather on the hi-jackers who are trying to turn this country into a police state

They’re all hijackers. Let me rephrase that: Every government ever known in the annals of human history has been a hijacker of man’s individual freedom. Every government, by definition, is a police state to one degree or another.

These comments (e.g., Anti-flag loves the USA) are indicative of a complete lack of independent thinking. People are confusing the so-called American ideal, with the band’s messages of liberation and freedom. If these ideals resonate with you, it’s a mistake to identify them with any particular brand of nationalism or patriotism.

Anti-flag doesn’t love the institution of “America”, but one can identify many of their messages with some forms of the so-called American ideals of life, liberty and equality.

If you are going to fly a flag today, and you acknowledge these ideals, of freedom and prosperity and liberty and equality (setting aside that whole “slavery” thing) you might consider making the statement by flying it with the union down^#.

This is a sign of distress, flown for anyone who will listen. The people who don’t throw bricks through your window will probably be inexplicably angry with you. Ask them why they’re mad, that is, if a police officer doesn’t break in to your house, choke you, and then arrest you for assault and “desecrating” the flag . They’ll say something like, “You hate America” and they’ll conclude that you must also hate all the things which they associate with America.

But “America” is a conceptual package deal.

this country named “america”, is built on graves
of the natives who lived here before, genocide took place
the word “america” means “freedom” - as in, “free to kill the free…”

don’t fly those stripes, those stars-and-stripes for me

You can’t just sit there and look lovingly at a 232-year old parchment that declares freedom, and ignore the rest of the historical record. It’s possible to love and practice the ideals of equality and freedom, while hating the government to which most people mistakenly attribute these notions.

I love my freedom, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want more of it.

#US Code Title 4 Section 8 Paragraph (a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.

Posted in: Government is Slavery, Anarchy!, American Politics | Be the First to Comment

{P = 0:n} The Game is Rigged

July 3, 2008

In response to State-sponsored lotteries coming under fire for selling scratch-off tickets after the grand prize has been awarded, Tony opines:

Reflexively I side with the state’s position in this case as long as the practice is disclosed…

Or I could be totally wrong and the state’s engaging in shady practice. I seem to be in the minority in thinking the state shouldn’t be in the gaming business, to say nothing of imposing a monopoly. Maybe I’m also being a silly here in thinking the contract is the contract.

[ Insert Libertarian rant contra State Lotteries, here. ]

To the extent that the State is involved in the gaming business, it should not have a monopoly on the practice. Honestly, isn’t a monopoly on violence enough for anyone, anymore?

Although I concur that the State shouldn’t be in the gaming business, I think the rest of Tony’s analysis is wrong.

I’m going to simplify for the sake of argument, and assume that there are no lesser prizes to be awarded. I think a game like this, aside from being an oppressive instrument of the State, is at best a pseudo-contract for a couple of reasons: Because one winning ticket is known to exist ex ante, there’s no lawful consideration given by the State to the vast majority of participants whose true “odds” of winning were 0:n from the get-go. This problem is compounded by the fact that such an instrument is necessarily a deceptively ambiguous adhesion contract.

Each individual ticket does not have an equal probability of winning. It could be argued that each individual purchaser has equal probability of buying the winning ticket; but these things aren’t quite the same, since this condition only holds when late-comers are unaware of the changing odds. In a free market, the odds are the same for everyone, regardless of when they enter the game.

In a normal draw lottery, where a winner is chosen at random from a pool of participants, the amount of the prize is determined by the number of tickets sold, and the odds of winning that prize are determined primarily by the number of participants. This game, on the other hand, can only generate profit when all tickets are sold, which can only be done when participants are kept in the dark. Imagine going to a high-school football game, or church social, or Elk’s Lodge meeting, and being asked to participate in the 50/50 raffle, only to find out that Jim from Accounting had already been declared the winner.

A simple question could be posed:

Would you play the lottery if you knew that your odds of winning were 0?

Of course, you would not. All else being equal, knowledge of the winning ticket having already been sold, the odds are (no pun intended) that nobody would buy the remaining tickets, the game would be constantly under-funded and go bankrupt as a result. Once the winning ticket is sold, the proprietor has an obligation that can only be met by selling more tickets, but there should be no willing buyers.

Posted in: Blog Reactions | 4 Comments

All Your Property Are Belong to Uncle Sam

July 1, 2008

Sometimes people say that if you don’t like your taxes, your government, their wars, their policies, etc., that you should just go somewhere else. This is an argument used by redneck right-wingers and quasi-commie social democrats; the “if-you-don’t-like-it-get-the-fuck-out” argument. Reasonable adults should be able to agree to disagree, without resorting to violence.

No, they tell me, If I don’t like being stolen from, I should just leave. If I try to defend myself from the thieves, they’ll shoot me. You see, the penalty is always death. This is what passes as a legitimate method for solving problems: if you don’t like it, we’ll fucking kill you. Yeah, that’s mature.

But this argument has been exposed as absolute bullshit for some time^#. The U.S. government has levied, or attempted to levy taxes on wealthy expats, for some statutory period (I think 5 years) on the presumption that they are expats solely because they are trying to avoid paying U.S. taxes. This strikes me as a pretty suspect argument, insofar as it violates the two most-commonly cited justificatory arguments in favor of one’s obligation to pay taxes.

The justification for taxes is usually: the government provides these things which you should pay for because you use them.
Sometimes the justification is more sophisticated: if you didn’t pay for them, they wouldn’t be provided at all; it is necessary for all to pay so that some may benefit, the greater good and what-not.

For starters, does it matter why someone renounces citizenship? As a matter of equity and fairness, it ought not. A non-citizen is not using the government, is not “protected” by the government, and so on. But, whatever. I’m not going to belabor the merits of these arguments at present. I’m just going to conclude that for years, the government has essentially been saying that they don’t have to justify any level of taxation with even a pretense of benefit or obligation. (How’s that for “progressive”?)

If that hasn’t got you all worked up by now, it’s about to get a lot worse. If you don’t like it, maybe you should leave.

Except, you can’t.

You probably didn’t notice this little provision inserted into the Heroes Act of 2008, passed by Congress on June 17.

[A]nyone voluntarily giving up his or her citizenship will be taxed on ALL of his assets as if he or she had sold them — paying capital gains on assets that have increased in value, even though they have not been sold!

Does anyone still disagree when I say that Taxation is Theft? Can anyone, anywhere, honestly explain how this amounts to anything more than ransom for permission to live?

We don’t need a Berlin Wall to keep people enslaved. The government can simply expropriate their properties (a practice generally admonished by “civilized” politicians) and take whatever they damn please. This government, the Land of the Free government, has finally succeeded in erecting an imaginary wall that keeps everyone imprisoned. You can’t really leave, not anymore.

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1. The not inconsequential question of why one is obliged to move, simply because he does not like what others are doing to him, without his consent, and
2. As others have noted, pretty much every territory on earth is controlled by one state who wants to steal from me, or another, and is populated by citizens cut from the same cloth as the idiot who tells me to get out of this particular country.

Posted in: Government is Slavery, Taxation is Theft, American Politics | 2 Comments

The Effects of Minimum Wage Hikes

July 1, 2008

Yesterday night I was grocery shopping at the local Meijer. When I went to check out, it dawned on me that they had replaced about a dozen more cashiers with self-scan registers. I will spare you another tirade about the so-far-imperfect technology: it’s nice to be able to check out without waiting in line for the two cashiers on duty at 10pm, but it’s a pain in the ass when the register gives you an error after every item. Even when there is nobody else in line, and I only have one or two items, I’m still not convinced that these machines are saving me time.

But I’m fairly convinced that these machines are saving Meijer stockholders a boat-load of wage expenses. Installing a dozen more U-Scan registers was probably a substantial initial capital outlay, but it’s also eliminating a number of low-wage employment opportunities. Because the minimum wage is in the midst of a 40% hike, which came as no surprise to anyone, a number of people who were making $10 an hour (plus incidental benefits, taxes, etc.) scanning groceries are now unemployed (or about to be unemployed) and watching a machine scan groceries that they can no longer afford to buy without welfare assistance. When the wages due to labor are held artificially high, a few lucky employees are able to reap the benefits, but the rest of them are out of luck as labor-substitutes like capital equipment are made artificially more attractive from a profit-and-loss POV.

Posted in: Economics Lessons, Seen and Unseen, American Politics | Be the First to Comment

The Packaged Ice Monopoly

July 1, 2008

Three companies in packaged ice (i.e., the sort you pick up at a convenience store or gas station on your way to a barbecue or beach party) are facing conspiracy and collusion charges (permalink ice.pdf) under Sherman. Now, wherever I go packaged ice is somewhere between $1 and $2 a bag. That seems pretty reasonable to me, but let’s examine:

“The ice companies behaved as you would expect market allocators to behave: They basically charged whatever they wanted for ice because there was no competition,” said Kendall Zylstra, a suburban Philadelphia lawyer who filed the first suit in Detroit on behalf of suburban Philadelphia gas retailers that sell ice.

Zylstra would have us believe that packaged ice sells for $100 a bag.

I know a bit about anti-trust regulation, and a bit about economics, and a bit about cartels. This is the all-important consideration: cartels are inherently unstable, because the incentive exists for each member to reneg on the illicit agreement.

In all fairness, I know practically nothing about the wholesale market for ice, but consider the actual problem here. There is an alleged monopoly on the production and transportation of ice.

Ice is frozen water.

Water is everywhere.

Refrigerants are everywhere.

Transit companies with refrigerated trucks are everywhere.

If, in-fact, there was “no competition”, it’s not primarily because three companies conspired and colluded to keep prices high.

If it’s not possible to compete with one of three oligopolistic companies, it’s not because the actual market forces for the production, packaging, and transportation of ice are atypical and require some specific degree of business acumen, and a penchant for bearing greater-than-normal risk. What’s infintely more likely is that legislation and regulation are prohibitive, and new entrants have a difficult time establishing themselves.

Posted in: Legalese, localized | Be the First to Comment

Comments on Comments #19

July 1, 2008

Joe McHugh left a comment on McCainomics:

All good points, but your article ironically assumes that the gov’t will somehow be efficient with that $300m if it’s not spent on his little contest. We both know, that’s simply not the case.

I made no implications to that effect. I assume, as per usual, that if the people weren’t robbed of their $300M, everyone would be better off. The point is that politicians shouldn’t have the power to use money they took from you, against your will, and use it to bribe people to build things that they want to see built. When, (not “if”) there is a $300M profitable investment to be made in alternative energy, people will make that investment. In fact, people will start making those investments even though some of them will fail.

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Someone submitted one of my old posts about a man who was evicted from his homestead to reddit. I have no idea how sites like that work, and I don’t spend any time trying to get play there. Maybe I should: This post was the source of a considerable, one-time traffic spike. Like a 400% traffic spike. If you like my blog, submit posts to reddit, my blog is only as effective as the number of people who read it.

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Will celebrates the five year anniversary of his blog and notes that Bob Murphy’s Chaos Theory was instrumental in his intellectual development. I read Chaos Theory in early 2006, and it was the breaking point, beginning a phase shift that would take me away from the Randian, capitalist brand of libertarianism, to something much better.

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In Reader Mail #57 FSK notes that I missed several big points in my chain about Credit Card Scams, the most recent installment of which is Part IV: The Penalty Rate Scam.

David Z missed a big point. A credit card debt contract is a no interest contract. When you borrow via a credit card, the bank literally prints new money and loans it to you…

David Z missed another big point. Bankruptcy law was recently changed. It is much harder to discharge credit card debt in bankruptcy court…

Regarding the bankruptcy code, early this month, I wrote A Few Thoughts on the Credit Situation, mostly as a note to myself so that I would not forget for future purposes to reference it.

It is convenient that immediately preceding the current credit-crunch, a few notable things happened. The bankruptcy code was changed, and the laws surrounding the payment structure for unsecured debt were changed, which resulted in minimum payments that are about twice what they previously were. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Reserve began targeting higher short term rates (the discount rate) which results in contraction of the monetary base, and a diminution of the supply of loanable funds. If you were a politically connected banking insider, you probably knew all about these turns of events before they happened, and were able to profit immensely.

Despite my best intentions, it seems I forgot, anyways. My post on credit card scams omits this detail. I could backtrack and say that it wasn’t topical, since the bankruptcy code isn’t one of the scams (like trying to force people into negative-amortization debts) that they use, but it is relevant and I should’ve mentioned it.

I didn’t miss the first point, either, I just haven’t gotten there yet. I’m covering credit card scams one at a time. The ideas of ex nihilo currency has been mentioned in several of my gold-bugging posts in the past, the relationship between our current financial institutions, debt and no-interest contracts are forthcoming in the series’ conclusion.

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Hans Hoppe has practically made a career out of deconstructing the Hobbesian myth, the alleged “war of all against all” that most people envision as life without a government. His latest:

There is no way out of this predicament [the Hobbesian War] by means of agreements; for who would enforce these agreements? Whenever the situation appeared advantageous, one or both parties would break the agreement. Hence, people recognize that there is but one solution…the establishment, per agreement, of a state, i.e., a third, independent party as ultimate judge and enforcer.

Yet if this thesis is correct and agreements require an outside enforcer to make them binding, then a state-by-agreement can never come into existence.

Thanks to Stef at Democracy Sucks

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Regarding Heller (my opinion, here) and the presidential candidates’ statements in response thereto, Chris at The Liberty Papers concludes:

So either play the game by the rules, don’t play the game, or change the rules.

I have a couple questions, Chris:

What does that even mean?
What?

Don’t you see the problem inherent in this empty rhetoric? You’ve presented three options from which to choose, when in-fact, only one of them is actually possible. There’s no choice. Not playing the game is simply not an option. I don’t want to play the game, but I have to. I can’t change the rules so I play by them. Just because you chide me not to “play the game” doesn’t mean that it’s actually an option. That’s the damn problem, Chris!

Posted in: Democracy is Great!, Blog Reactions, American Politics, Gun Control, personal finance | Be the First to Comment

Thoughts on Heller, Collective Rights

June 30, 2008

There has been a lot of good commentary on the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Heller. I have to admit that I was not following the case because I wasn’t terribly optimistic about the Court’s ability to strike a blow against tyranny. I was wrong (sort of).

As a libertarian, I’d be remiss if I neglected to comment on the ruling, so let’s review. The ruling affirms an individual right

The Second Amendment, Scalia said, “surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.”

This conclusion makes a nice sound-bite, but it kinda leaves you hanging, doesn’t it? Individuals have a constitutionally protected right to defend themselves, from whom?

My standard response, of course, is that “people need to be protected from the government.”

Don’t jump so quickly to conclusions, some chide:

Mark Tushnet, a Harvard law professor who recently wrote a book about the Second Amendment, said the debate “showed why lawyers shouldn’t be historians,” noting that Scalia and Stevens each wrote as though “there’s only one way to view what happened in 1791.”

Well, there may be more that one way to view what happened in 1791, but the reality is that there is only one way that those events actually transpired. Viz., you can look at history through whatever colored glasses you’d like, but that doesn’t change the facts of reality; history only actually happened one way.

The Revolution was for all intents and purposes, an act of treason against the Crown, and one interpretation is that the Founders wanted to enshrine in the constitution of their government-to-be, the right of the people to protect themselves from their own government by force, if necessary.

A Constitution of government (including amendments incorporated therein), is allegedly a compact between men and the government. It says to the men: your government may do A,B and C, but it may not do X,Y, or Z. If the people, jointly or severally, are dispossessed of the ability to enforce this alleged compact, then the government can do whatever it damn pleases. If the government can do whatever it pleases, there was no need to make pretense of a compact, as evidenced by a Constitution.

It was as obvious to Spooner who writes more forcefully than yours truly:

[T]he object of all bills of rights is to assert the rights of individuals and the people,as against the government, and not as against private persons. It would be a matter of ridiculous supererogation … [I]t would be unnecessary and silly indeed to assert, in a constitution of government, the natural right of individuals to protect their property against thieves and robbers…The legal effect of these constitutional recognitions of the right of individuals to defend their property, liberties, and lives, against the government, is to legalize resistance to all injustice and oppression, of every name and nature whatsoever, on the part of the government.

In practice, of course, a government never recognizes the rights of its people to overthrow it, but it sure looks just and equitable and good on a piece of parchment.

For further analysis, in The Founders and Firearms, Stephen P. Holbrook deconstructs the etymology of the Second Amendment, and notes:

During most of our history an exhaustive analysis of the Second Amendment would never have been necessary. The meaning of each word would have been obvious to citizens of the time…

It was only in the late 20th century that an Orwellian view of the Second Amendment gained currency. Within this distorted language prism “the people” would come to mean the states or state-conscripted militia; “right” would mean governmental power; “keep” would no longer entail custody for security or preservation; “bear” would not mean carry; “arms” would not include ordinary handguns and rifles, and “infringe” would not include prohibition.

I wrote a paper to this effect (second amendment) in my Sophomore year of college. The English Professor gave me a D on the paper, because I “didn’t present both sides of the argument.” It was a research paper. Apparently she did not know the difference between a college-level research paper and a junior-high-school-level “compare and contrast” paper.

I told her “This is a research paper, my topic is the meaning of the Second Amendment, my topic is not the debate surrounding the Second Amendment.” In a nutshell, my research did not turn up anything that could be used to construe any other meaning—and after she sent me packing with that “D” and asked me to re-write the paper, you better believe that I tried to find something, anything.

But. It. Didn’t. Exist.

I resubmitted the same paper, with a one-page disclaimer, and accepted my “D”.

On this note, Wulf asks:

I am begging for anybody who believes that the Second Amendment addresses a collective right to explain their position.

I’ll tell you Wulf, it’s not that I haven’t heard a convincing explanation for the “collective right” version. I haven’t heard any argument for the collective right version that isn’t simply, “Well, it’s not an individual right, but since I can’t deny its existence, I’ll call it a collective right.”

In my estimation, people argue for the “collective right” version of 2A, simply because it’s convenient. If it were up to them, they’d probably argue that the Second Amendment doesn’t exist. But it does. So making up some fairy tale about a collective right is an easy way to acknowledge it, while basically dismissing it in entirety. The “collective rights” explanation simply doesn’t exist.

Am I satisfied with the outcome of Heller? It’s better than the alternative, I suppose. I’m certainly not satisfied with the fact that we rely on a government court to determine what are our rights. And, I’m still cautiously pessimistic,there’s a lot for which it’s probably too early to tell.

Posted in: American Politics, Gun Control | Be the First to Comment