no third solution

Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics

Category Archives: American Politics

I Responded to the Census Today

March 16th, 2010

The answer was “2”.

That is all.

The public announcement commercials I hear on the radio say that they use the census data to determine our “fair share” of funding. One commercial says something like,

If a town had 100 students, they’d need about 5 school teachers.  If next year they had a lot more students, but nobody filled out the census, they’d still have only 5 teachers.

Don’t you think that the townsfolk (i.e., the people impacted most by changing demography) would realize their town’s population was booming, and plan accordingly? Why should the people living in the neighboring town (or State, for that matter) pay to subsidize their growth?

You know what’s fair? Not having to give all that money away to the bureaucrats in the first place. If we didn’t give it to them, they wouldn’t need to worry about whether we got our “fair share” or not. If they didn’t have all this stolen money with which to bribe us, they wouldn’t be able to bribe us. Simply, our “fair share” is whatever we earns we keeps.

The Lightswitch Mentality

March 9th, 2010

An old thread on a forum I participate in was revived the other day, and I had an (ahem…) interesting discussion with a self-described police officer about drug legalization. Can you see where this is going? I’d rather not bore you with the ins and outs of the discussion (if you could call it that…), but suffice to say he was no stranger to shifting goalposts and reductio fallacies. I won’t rehash that, chances are you’ve had similar “discussions” with similar people in the past.

At one point, someone else must’ve asked him how he can possibly sleep at night. The guy says he turns off “cop mode” when he goes home, and sleeps soundly every night. Apparently, he thinks “cop mode” is a lightswitch. Turn it on or turn it off, at will.

Thing is, his words indicated otherwise—that he was completely incapable of flipping that switch to the “off” position. You know, like, everyone who’s ever smoked pot is a “thug” or a “worthless hippy” and they’re ruining ‘Merica and they all deserve to go to jail and when he goes to work tonight he’s just itching to bust someone for “possession of marijuana”. That’s how irate, how flat-out vindictive he gets when people challenge the legitimacy of a law—he wants to bust some kid merely because some other people on the internet disagree with him.

Too bad his “dickhead mode” didn’t come with an on/off switch. But I digress.

This lightswitch mentality is a huge part of the problem. It’s compartementalization, it’s what sociopaths do. It is what leads people down the path of “I was just following orders,” or “I was just doing my job,” or “I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them,” and so on.

The idea that you become something other than a belligerent with a gun and a club the moment you punch out at shift’s-end is how people rationalize, how they convince themselves that what they’re doing isn’t wrong at all. When they leave work, they’re just a “regular guy” like you and me; they have families and feelings and they like baseball and apple pie.

No, you’re fucking not a “regular guy”. A “regular guy” isn’t vindictive and belligerent. A “regular guy” doesn’t make thinly-veiled threats on internet forums (he actually said he was going to report the thread to local law enforcement—as if talking about legalization is a crime!). A “regular guy” doesn’t get a hard-on every time someone says that just maybe the war on drugs is a stupid idea and just maybe responsible adults should be allowed to be responsible on their own time.  A “regular guy” doesn’t think it’s OK for people to be shot to death for smoking a joint.

No. You’re pretty fucking far from “regular”.

Government Employees Are Overpaid

March 5th, 2010

A lot of people make a big fuss when the federal employee salary and benefit figures come out. There’s an article in USAToday that highlights the ever-widening gap between public and private compensation.

For occupations that “exist both in government and the private sector,” government employees took home an average of about $68,000 in salary, compared to only $60,000 for their privately-employed counterparts. That’s a pretty sizeable gap. What’s more alarming is the value of fringe benefits: pensions, health insurance, vacation allowances, etc. Government employees took home an average of about $41K, compared to only $10K for comparable private workers.

Do the math: that’s about a 50% premium. Many of them also get such unheard-of-in-the-private-sector benefits as: all federal holidays off work, four or more weeks paid vacation, 20-and-done for retirement, etc.

Now, I’m all for people getting paid what they’re worth. But that’s exactly the problem with any of the government functions—there is no market for the ditch-digging that most of them perform, and so it’s impossible to gauge the value of their work. And even if we could, they have one unique advantage which they use to exploit the rest of us: those of us who are paying their salaries do not have a choice as to whether we want to keep buying from them. As long as they show up to work, we get stuck with the bill.

Most of them are nothing but leeches, consuming and destroying wealth, draining productivity from the economy. The fact is that most of these occupations shouldn’t exist in the first place, but they do, and they’re being paid extravagantly for doing non-work.

Most of them don’t know it, because they’ve never had an honest, reflective thought in their entire lives, but they’re all thieves.

no third solution

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