no third solution

Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics

Category Archives: metablogging

Where Have I Been?

March 10th, 2008

I have been away from blogging, and hope to make a triumphant return in the very near future. I have recently been contacted to do an interview for another blog/podcaster, and I’ve never done one of these before so i really have no idea what it might entail. I’m looking forward to it, though.

I recently returned from a vacation in Jackson, WY which was amazing. Also, the weather has been reasonable in Michigan the last week or two, so I’m considering this “bonus winter” and using these last few opportunities to hit the slopes before A) the snow melts and B) my first mortgage payment is due. In other news (I may or may not have mentioned it) I closed on my first house at the end of February, right after I returned from vacation, and I’m in the process of moving in, updating fixtures, replacing light bulbs, garage door-opener batteries, etc., so it’s been a rather busy past few weeks.

I have a number of drafts I’ve been working on, but none of them are a very high priority at present. I wish that weren’t the case, but I can’t force good blogging. I haven’t read very much recently, but now that I don’t have a TV, I might pick up one of the several books I’ve been meaning to read. I also have a queue of on-line reading to do, but I don’t have the cable installed at the house yet, and the neighbors’ wi-fi signals are all encrypted.

I have no idea what’s been happening in the world lately.

The headlines haven’t changed much.

New York Governor Linked to Prostitution Ring. I bet he’ll apologize for it, claim to suffer from some “sickness,” seek “help” from a religious organization, and repent for his sins. Oh, and he’ll continue to send other people to jail for the same thing.


Elected official + sex scandal sound familiar? Yeah, we have our own high-profile scandal in Detroit, where the Mayor’s combination of connivery and infidelity has cost the City taxpayers over $9M.

Five American Soldiers Killed in Baghdad. “The blast was one of the worst single attacks on the U.S. military in months.” Seems like every time I read this sort of article, the lede is the same: one of the worst single attacks… What are they fighting for, again?

Democrats Request Blackwater Inquiry. Because they’re unaccountable thugs and murderers? No. Because the government doesn’t like the fact that Blackwater classifies its employees as “independent contractors” which deprives the government of the taxes they might collect were Blackwater to consider them “employees.”

Looks like more of the same shit, different day…

Comments on Comments #6

February 15th, 2008

In comments # 5 I continued the discussion of why I (generally) do not “hate the troops.” Franc replies:

Your argument seems to be that ignorance of morality is an excuse to be immoral. This does not seem very defendable to me. After all, the facts about the morality of the military are easily accessible to all. If they were not, you might have a case (as in for instance the fact that ignorance of the law should be an excuse, since every point of law is not easily accessible to the average person), but not here.
If you surrender your moral compass, either by joining the military or by putting faith in the government, then you should be blamed for everything that follows. You have abdicated your mental independence, and that’s a cardinal sin.

(I hope you mean a “cardinal sin” figuratively, because the essence of religion is abdication of mental independence!)

I do not support them, but that doesn’t mean I want them to die. I do not hate them, and that doesn’t mean I excuse their actions. Most of these kids (and they’re mostly kids) have been brainwashed to the point where they’d probably point a gun at your or me, if they were ordered to do so. They wouldn’t do this on their own. If monsters they’ve become, it’s because of the State—they’re victims, too, pawns as they are.

I do not mean that their actions should be excused, nor do I mean to suggest that ignorance is an excuse for immorality. But it certainly mitigates these factors, IMHO. People are bound to make grievous errors in judgment when the foundation for their decisions is a lifetime of propaganda. I deny that the facts about the morality of the military are easily accessible to all, precisely because I don’t believe for a second that the plain facts about “morality” are easily accessible to all. Living rightly is a conscious decision which requires knowledge of the right way to live, and practice/repetition or right actions. Sure, most people have some inkling of what it means to be moral, and what decisions are or are not right. But morality isn’t, I don’t think, something entirely innate, it is a learned behavior.

One’s moral compass can only be calibrated by consistent application of right reason and action. (If this goes any further, I’ll have to dig up my notes from Ethics class…) The State’s interference is like a magnetic field which imperceptibly alters the indications given, and sends you off course.

This post at Tranarchism brought me back to Tyler’s post at Marginal Revolution, questioning the validity of a gold standard. (see my previous response) This time, I perused the comments.

Bernard: “What is all this business about legal tender? All it refers to is something that must be accepted in payment of a debt. If you owe me money, what is it about “legal tender” that prevents me from accepting gold in payment if you offer it?”

Bernard, nothing prevents you from accepting gold as payment. Capital gains taxation, however, is an impediment. But more generally, legal tender laws preclude you from enforcing a gold-denominated contract. As creditor, you may be forced to accept paper dollars (i.e., legal tender, for all debts, public and private) at an unsatisfactory, but statutory exchange ratio.

Mike: “The biggest problem with the gold standard is that once the central bank commits to maintaining convertibility at (say) $800 per ounce, the central bank becomes vulnerable to a bank run.”

He then encourages people to read up on the real bills doctrine. I think Mike needs to read up on the gold standard. There is no practical need for a “central bank” or “lender of last resort” where notes are backed by specie and fully convertible.

Also related to gold, George Reisman has responded to critics (I count myself among them) of his recent post on the insertion of gold clauses into contracts.

What the insertion of gold clauses into existing contracts signifies is the use of government power to determine the purchasing power of what is paid and received in the fulfillment of contracts in a way that diminishes the further such use of its power.

As an aside, the logistics of this are sketchy, at best. I still maintain that the insertion of gold clauses is effectively an ex post facto order, which is facially unconstitutional. Limited government proponents (I assume Reisman is one) should be consistent with their reverence for the constitution. Furthermore, expecting the government to voluntarily restrain itself through legislative or regulatory processes is patently absurd: if the government were so inclined, it could simply stop the presses and refrain from “determining the purchasing power of what is paid and received”, in the first place!

Of course, as Reisman argues, no creditor lends money anticipating the future cash flows to be decimated by inflation. But similarly, no debtor has the ability to create money out of thin air, and then to lend it at for a profit! I just don’t see the justification for protecting the banking cartel’s Dr. Jekyll from its counterpart, Mr. Hyde. If we are interested in protecting small, non-institutional lenders, e.g., land contract vendeor, inter-personal loans, etc., from the negative side effects of declining purchasing power, we can do so by eliminating impediments to free contracts. As a policy proposal, I would begin by removing the obligations imposed by “legal tender” laws, a step which must necessarily be followed by reducing or eliminating the capital gains tax which must be paid on transactions denominated in certain terms (e.g., precious metals).

Regarding the appalling display of force against a quadriplegic man, commenter dwz says: “Pathetic. Ssimply pathetic.” Exactly. Although it’s not nearly as bad as this old incident in Detroit, where an emergency operator refused to dispatch anyone to a house where a five-year old boy was calling and reporting that his mother had passed out, because the boy was unable to put his mother on the phone. The boy’s mother, Sharon Turner, died of heart failure.

Kip wants to know if he’s saying it right: “Gnarly, dude!” in response to a snowboarding video I recently posted. Sounds good to me, Kip.

Citing my post, “Taxation is Theft!”, Stephan contributes Competition in Bads.

Proposing government by democracy is like saying ”Let’s have a competition to find out who’s the best at whipping the slaves! And the winner gets to be the slavemaster”. This is precisely what we don’t want.

Right! We don’t want to provide an opportunity for the most cunning, calculated, power-hungry con-artist to succeed at defrauding 300 million people. That is precisely what the democratic process is.

Note to regular readers: I will be on vacation from Thursday, 2/21 through Tuesday, 2/26. I may or may not pay attention to the interwebs during that interval.

Submissions to the blog carnival are due NLT 2/27.

Quick Hits

February 11th, 2008

Lawrence White recently wrote a paper (.pdf) debunking many of the myths alleging that a gold-standard economy is simply not feasible. I highly recommend the paper. At Marginal Revolution, (h/t: FSK), a blog I used to read but which became inundated with posts about Ethiopian cuisine and vacation pictures, Tyler Cowen responds:

My main worry with the gold standard is simply the pro-cyclicality of the money supply and for all its talk of money demand the paper doesn’t much address this concern. For instance would you really want a contracting money supply in today’s environment?

Perhaps I’m reading this a bit out of context, but to my knowledge, spanning about seven centuries for which we have reliable data, there has never been a global contraction in the supply of gold. Never. Fiat money of course, is a different story. If Cowen fears that a commodity-based currency would lend itself to contraction, I think he’s mistaken.

At Democracy Sucks, Stephan answers the critics who say, “there aren’t any real world examples of anarchy“:

“But I prefer democracy to anarchy”

It doesn’t matter what you prefer, since whether other people consent to it is not up to you. Nobody can own another person, so clearly its wrong to impose that choice on another person.

The free market is only a suggested (but highly probable) alternative to government, it doesn’t really matter what happens after government collapses, so long as self-ownership rights are respected. You can go and live in a socialist commune, you can go and start your own business, you can go off and live in the mountains. Just don’t impose democracy and governance on other people without their prior consent.

Could you claim adverse possession against the State? Of course, they’d want to contest your claim in a court of their choosing, and you would lose. But this defeat would ultimately demonstrate that the State claims to be the unequivocal owner of all land within the arbitrary confines of their imaginary borders, and that you, the alleged landowner, are really just a feudal tenant. I have been meaning to write a brief post about this for quite some time, although not related to adverse possession. Instead, it seems like one ought to be able to make a lump sum payment against all future property taxes, effectively creating a sovereign freehold. That property would never again be subject to taxation, unless a future owner chose to submit to government. This may not work terribly well in a subdivided area, but if you have rural property with your own well, and run a septic tank which is cleaned and maintained privately, you could probably generate enough power to maintain a pretty decent living on your own.

Vin Suprynowicz opines on the sad state of public education in America. George Washington, he says, was not a genius by any stretch of the imagination, yet he rose to command an army which defeated an empire, and presided over the freest nation ever governed.

There were no “school projects” gluing together pictures clipped out of magazines when Washington was 11. He immediately took up geometry, trigonometry, and surveying. Before he turned 18, Washington had been hired as the official surveyor for Culpepper County.

“For the next three years, Washington earned the equivalent of about $100,000 a year in today’s purchasing power,” Mr. Gatto, the former New York state Teacher of the Year, reports.

How much government-run schooling would a youth of today be told he needs before he could contemplate making $100,000 a year as a surveyor — a job which has not changed except to get substantially easier, what with hand-held computers, GPS scanners and laser range-finders? Sixteen years, at least — 18, more likely.

George Washington attended school for two years.

“We know he was no genius, yet he learned geometry, trigonometry, and surveying when he would have been a fifth or sixth grader in our era,” Gatto reminds us.

Vin argues that the current education system could never produce another George Washington, and he’s right.

You may have noticed a recent trend here, that I’m often saying something like, “I’ve been meaning to blog about such-and-such a topic for quite sometime.” I regret that I can’t post at will… Much of the time, I can only hack together some quick comments and references for the reader—like this post and others like it. I do try to hold myself to at least one or two quality, full-length posts a week. Sometimes it’s more than this, sometimes less.

Sometimes I start drafting what I think will be a relatively short and easy piece to write, and before too long, I’m off on several tangents, and exhausted. These posts usually develop into two or more separate posts. Often, it takes quite a while for a post to finally coalesce into something I deem worth of publishing.

no third solution

Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics