Captain Phillips, Somali Pirates, and an 800 Pound Gorilla

We're just back from seeing Captain Phillips, a pulse flogging suspense and action film based on the book by the eponymous Captain Richard Phillips and Stephan Talty, A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea.

It is an inspiring and wonderful story that manages also to enlist one's compassion for the awful snake pit which is the anarchy of Somalia, wrenched by warring tribes and the pitiful situation of those pathetic, frightened and drug-pumped teenagers who are the Somali pirates.

But as you leave the movie multiplex, there is an 800 pound gorilla in the room, smiling sweetly. 

How in the name of sweet reason can it be that just four dirt-poor, ill-schooled, skinny teenagers with a few small arms and a tiny motor skiff can chase down and board an enormous cargo ship, laden with 17,000 metric tons of cargo and a crew of 20 grown men, hijack the ship, and provoke an international incident requiring a multi-million dollar intervention by a battle group of the United States Navy, with two nuclear powered destroyers, an aircraft carrier, a specialized detachment of US Navy SEALS, the able assistance from allied units operating a C-130 transport aircraft, and much more besides?

And this hijacking was not an rare aberration!  In recent years, these pirates have hijacked many hundreds, yes, hundreds, of cargo ships for ransom, in the international waters off the eastern coast of Africa.  Pirating is a thriving business for these poor Somalis.  Rows of hijacked cargo ships are moored off the coast of Somalia, their kidnapped crews sweltering in jails, awaiting the conclusion of talks for ransom.

The question, uttered once in the film, and then only sotto voce, fast and barely audible, is to wonder why the hell don't these big cargo ships have any armed guards among the crew?

Voila!... the 800 pound gorilla in the room!

One man with a rifle could have stopped the hijacking before the ship was boarded.

Well, okay, let me grant that since some of the pirates have RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) in addition to AK-47 machine guns, it would require a weapon like a .50 caliber machine gun to have a longer range than the pirates' RPGs, and therefore prevent the pirates from getting close enough to fire the RPGs.  Their RPGs would otherwise allow the pirates to remain outside rifle range while threatening to destroy a cargo ship (or at least to kill the officers and crew on the ship's bridge and other areas if they did not surrender to the pirates.)

Why can't we implement this common sense solution of employing armed crew members, Marines, or sea marshals aboard the cargo ships?

Because our hands are tied by insane international agreements signed at the United Nations.  The policies governing these matters stem from international agreements overseen by the United Nations and agreed to by its member nations.

But why have we signed such agreements in the first place?

By my reckoning, this inexcusable situation is the product of several of those crazy, cockamamie, deadly intellectual viruses which I am always lambasting on these pages.

The United Nations is the logjam that prevents the free flow of much common sense in the world.

But what's wrong with the UN?  I believe that, with respect to this matter of piracy on the high seas, there are at least three intellectual viruses that make the UN a largely ineffective body that suffers countless unintended consequences of (what one would hope are) well-intentioned policies. 

In my opinion, these destructive ideas are:  cultural relativism, pacifism, and something like an international version of gun control.

But first another word about the UN. 

The United Nations 

Sigh.  We want to believe in the United Nations.  The guiding idea for the UN is that all the countries of the world would meet there and talk with each other instead of waging war with each other.

So what's wrong with this?  Talk is better than war, right?  Peaceful dialogue instead of ballistic missiles?

Well, as always, the mischief is in the details.

Here is the essence of what is wrong with the underlying political structure of the United Nations: what outcome would you expect if our city government were run by a principle equivalent to the way the UN is run, where we have a council of members with equal voting rights that includes the Democrats, Republicans,  Libertarians, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, the Socialist Workers Party, Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the Confederacy, Islamic Jihad, Al Qaida, Hamas, Hizbullah, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Mafias of Russia and Sicily, the Hogwarts Houses of fair Gryffindor, and evil Slytherin ... and, finally, the Somali warlords who rule the pirates? 

Equal voting rights, remember!  Each group will be put in charge of the City human rights council when their turn comes up. 

Most importantly, these factions have a veto power over all the decisions of the larger group.  If, in one group's neighborhood, they start lynching members of their group, and the city council passes a resolution to stop the lynching, the lynchers can just veto the resolution.

How would you expect this mélange to vote on restraining honor killings in the Mafia, Slytherin, and Hamas neighborhoods?  Ah, that would be meddling in the internal affairs of these sovereign neighborhoods.  No can do!

Cultural Relativism

 

While the United Nations is surely a boiling cauldron of conflicting ideas about fundamental arrangements of society, and many contradictory policies have been pursued over the decades, I don't think it is overstating the matter to say that if any one idea can be named as the guiding light of the United Nations, surely it is this idea that all cultures are morally equivalent.  

By this precept, no one can say with confidence that any culture is better or worse than any other.  This notion of moral equivalence grows out of the philosophy of modernism from at least the time of David Hume's skepticism, which in due course convinced much of the intellectual establishment that there are no grounds for believing in abstract reasoning, independent of experience.  By this view, causality itself is an abstraction, so it is inadmissible to the court of reason, and therefore (Hume's words, not mine) there is no good reason to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow.  This was written after Isaac Newton gave us the math by which to predict with exquisite precision the reappearance of a comet, unseen for 75 years.  This was a profound intellectual crisis, but Hume bizarrely won this argument in the court of European intellectuals, and we are feeling its effects, amplified in ever more weird formulations, to this day. 

Hume's followers delivered us into postmodernism, which denies that one can know anything with certainty.  This denial of absolutes applies not only to the epistemological questions of what is true and false, but no less to the questions of morality, of what is right and wrong.  Truth and right are assumed to be the product not of any facts of reality to which one can appeal for validation, but are instead products of the arbitrary conventions of the tribe into which one was born, and are further defined by the accident of birth that delivered us into a particular race, class, and gender.

 

No one can live his or her life on the basis of postmodern beliefs.  You would be dead in a day if you tried to.  Moreover, postmodernism is not widely known, explicitly, by most people, not even at the UN, but these philosophical tenets have indeed filtered down from the ivory tower into the culture in ways that have a profound influence.  We see this influence in such behavior as an unwillingness to condemn the murderous behavior of other cultures. 

The UN has been infamously ineffective at restraining the genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and in even more shocking ways, in the staggering hundreds of millions murdered in the former Soviet Union and its Iron Curtain countries, and Red China.

We also see this influence of postmodernism's dizzy moral confusion in campus speech codes that muzzle any real diversity of opinion, on the premise that the only sin is to express opinions that might hurt someone else's feelings (because nobody can know which opinions are true or false, right or wrong, and the only standard by which to judge statements must be the delicate feelings of the listeners.)  This postmodern skepticism denies the possibility of knowledge, epistemological no less than moral and ethical, and shows up in such expressions as, "Who am I to know?"  "Who are you to judge?"

 

Cultural relativism can be seen at the UN in its willingness to grant equal votes to some countries that are organized as liberal democracies, and others that are totalitarian dictatorships where the citizens are denied any right to life, liberty, property, and the rule of law, and where they have murdered masses of their own citizens.  Think of Red China, Zimbabwe under Mugabe, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union and East Germany, to name but a few out of dozens of examples.

 

Getting to the essence of what's wrong with the idea of cultural relativism is one of the deepest arguments that has occupied some of the world's brightest lights for the last three centuries.  I do not stand a good chance of persuading anyone here who is not at least already dubious of this relativism, but let me point to a couple points that should at least give pause to the cultural relativists.

 

Knowledge implies belief in the truth of a proposition.  When somebody argues for the notion that nobody can know anything with certainty or confidence, let us remember that this person is taking a position on a matter that he or she believes in.  He is stating something he claims as knowledge, an idea he believes is true, not false.  Moreover, this person is counting on your ability to hear the argument and decide for yourself whether you believe the argument for this idea is right or wrong, true or false.  All belief, to be a belief, must be held with enough confidence to say, "I believe this is so."  If there is no basis for any confidence for belief, there can be no belief.

It is incoherent and crazy to assert, as true knowledge, that there is no basis for knowledge as such, that you believe there is no legitimate basis for knowledge.  You are claiming as truth that there is no basis for truth.  This is insane.  Yet this is precisely what the postmodernists declare. 

 

With respect to morality, I should begin by stating the obvious, which is of course the fact that we are indeed all born into a particular race, class, and gender, and that we are certainly influenced by the ideas we breath in from the cultural air around us as we grow up.

 

But it is another matter to say that we are stamped by these ideas in a way that is beyond our power to challenge or change our minds.  The cultural relativists assume that these forces shape us deterministically, beyond any power of free will to resist or modify.

 

I would agree that our free will must operate within some constraints and is therefore not limitless, but there is still a degree of intellectual freedom, and this can be seen all over the world whereby some people escape the common herd's beliefs.

 

Moreover, those who argue against free will, like those who argue against one's ability to know anything with confidence, are counting on your ability to listen with discrimination to the argument, and then choose to agree or disagree!  The person who argues against free will must count on your possession of the very free will which allows you to agree with him.  He counts on your possessing the very power he is a arguing against!  This position is hopeless, contradictory, absurd, and self-refuting.  In a word, crazy.  Yet another intellectual vampire.

 



Pacifism

 



Now, strictly speaking, the UN is not an organization that fully practices a belief in pacifism, but this is nevertheless an idea that figures prominently in the guiding values of so many of its members.

Pacifists claim that peace can be achieved if only we refrain from returning force with force.  Passive resistance will win the day.  They uphold Gandhi and Martin Luther King as successful examples of this policy, and they piously hold these lovely thoughts to their breasts and congratulate themselves for the heart-warming enlightenment they feel they have thereby achieved.

Of course, one must ask how things might have turned out had Gandhi faced a more determined opponent than the British empire at its enervated nadir, limping, dizzy and reeling in its dotage, wringing its hands with liberal guilt?  

How would have events played out if Gandhi had faced, say, the Communist Chinese?  Surely nobody can doubt that the Chicoms would have destroyed Gandhi with the ease of (forgive me...) taking Gandhi from a baby!

Gun Control

In Britain, not long ago, the legal owners of guns were compelled to turn in their weapons to the government.  Ten years after this confiscation of the guns in the UK, the rate of violent crime with guns was double what it had been before the legal guns were turned in.  This pattern is the same everywhere the government confiscates guns from legal gun owners.

Another aspect of the confiscation of guns in the UK is that burglars are far more likely to break into an occupied home than an unoccupied one, knowing that the owners will almost certainly be unarmed.  Why would burglars do this?  Because if the occupants are home, they can be forced to tell the bad guys where the goodies are.

Fact:  every one of the mass shootings in America has been committed in places that were already gun free zones.  Had there been anyone who was armed in those places, the shooter could have been stopped far more rapidly, sparing the lives of countless victims.  Those armed could be police officers, or trained civilian deputies (equivalent to the airline pilot volunteers who are trained as Federal Flight Deck Officers at the same facility that trains the Air Marshals and the Secret Service agents.)  As in Israel, they could also be teachers who volunteer to be trained in this special service. 

Fact: until the world universally reaches a point of enlightenment where no one wants to be a predator, there will always be bad guys wreaking violence on others unless they are restrained by force.  Such restraint is impossible without adequate weapons of self-defense.  Guns are obviously the most effective  choice, as we can plainly see if we give it a moment's thought.

Consider that nothing so evens up the match between a 98 pound woman and a 200 pound rapist as a pistol. 

Fact: the police cannot be counted on to defend citizens in time to save us in the event of a burglary, or worse.  You may call 911, but the police can be counted on only to find your corpse and state in their report, how sad, too bad  that you were murdered.  If you had been armed, you yourself could have stopped the bad guy.

Gun control advocates blame the guns, or at least the availability of guns, for the violence perpetrated with these weapons.  Yet every new mass-killing field turns out to be, as I mentioned, an already gun free zone.  In these places, the killers know they can kill unopposed.  In Israel, where common sense still prevails on matters of security, there are some teachers in schools who are armed and trained to respond to any emerging violence in the school.  Nobody can enter an Israeli school thinking that they can start shooting unopposed and with impunity. 

The facts are immutable:  gun ownership among regular citizens leads to vastly lower rates of violence.  See John Lott's scholarly book, More Guns, Less Violence.

Gun Control on the High Seas

Now, to the point here, this heartfelt belief in gun control is what lies behind the United Nation's efforts to assure that cargo ships are gun-free zones, just like schools, movie theaters, and post offices. 

Pacifists, and anti-gun advocates are deaf and blind to the kind of evidence I list above, but I invite them to think about the situation of pirates and cargo ships  on the high seas, and then tell me how taking guns out of the hands of the ship's crews will improve matters.

Pacifism and gun-control advocates are ideologues who are deaf and blind to the evidence of the real world, and I condemn them as purveyors of deadly intellectual viruses.

Now, this situation is complicated by United Nations agreements that create this absurd situation that prevents cargo ships in pirate waters from including armed crewmembers who would be equivalent to our Federal Air Marshals on international flights. 

If the UN insists on gun control in international commerce, then surely the cargo ship companies could deploy their weapons on the high seas, and then lock up the weapons while in port, just as the air marshals have their weapons secured when their aircraft block into their international destinations, and deploy these weapons again when they depart.

The United Nations has confounded countless efforts to end this piracy, and its failure here clearly shows it to be a toothless, hapless travesty of an organization with a noble purpose and a history of tragic ineffectiveness.

What We Should Do to End Piracy 

We should act independently of the UN to defend ourselves.  Government has no more legitimate purpose than to defend its citizens from foreign aggression, and if we grant this premise, which is written into the founding documents of our country, then it is absurdly self-destructive to think we need to beg from any international body the permission to act in our own self-defense. 

The pirates continue to hijack ships today because they can do so with impunity, knowing that their victims are disarmed and helpless.

A pair of US Marines or Sea Marshals deployed on American cargo ships would stop the pirates dead in their wakes.  The word would get out immediately to the pirates, and we could thereby put an end to this wave of piracy. 

There is certainly good precedent for our acting independently in such matters, if we remember that under Jefferson, we stopped the Barbary Pirates. 

How much easier it would be to stop international piracy today than in Jefferson's time-- except that the minds of most of our politicians are infected by the insane intellectual virus that makes most of them refuse to steer government into doing what it should do (and, dare I add, restrain the government from doing what it should not be doing--which would include most of its meddlesome and burdensome activities today, most of which are beyond anything imaginable by our founders.)

 

 

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Two Auto Franchises, Freedom, Oppression, and the Need for Logic Applied to the Evidence of Experience

Yesterday I had to go to two franchises dealing with automobiles, and the contrast made an arresting picture of the difference between the semi-free market in which we live, and one of those many monopolistic government bureaucracies which now dictate so many details of our lives.  

Oh, come now, you may say, but it's true:  government has dictated so many details of our lives for so long that we are now largely inured to such  intimate intrusions as having government regulators imperiously deny us the choice to purchase new toilets that can be counted on to flush reliably, or to find new shower heads for sale that will give us a heavy spray of water (see Jeffrey Tucker's delightful essay, "Hack Your Shower Head.") 

On such vital matters as the level of risk the government permits us (and our physicians) in fighting disease, I am astonished by how we accept such life-threatening controls without protest.  But it's true:  if you are given a prognosis of six months to live, neither you nor your physician is allowed to decide whether to use experimental drugs not yet approved by the FDA. 

How did this outrageous situation come to be?  The short answer is that we the people have been sold a lie, namely, that government has the power, the information, and the wisdom to protect us better than we ourselves, and we are inclined to believe government's claims because we have accepted in our hearts another lie, which is that morality commands us to sacrifice ourselves to the lives of others, any others, and this idea trumps any claim we may have to our own lives.

I hear you saying, balderdash!  But I ask you, what else can it possibly mean when the FDA denies you access to experimental drugs to save your own life?

Clearly, it means that your life is not the standard that counts.

So what is the standard that does count?

Right, the standard that counts is the lives of others.  The standard by which the FDA judges whether to allow an individual access to a drug is not that of any single individual, it is the collective lives of everybody in society ... everyone, that is, except for you, yourself.  It is the lives of the collective others that matter, in their undifferentiated millions across the land.  There is no room for you as an individual in this collective standard.  The drug has to be proven safe and effective for everybody before they will allow anybody, such as you, yourself, to get the drug that might save you in your terrified moment of greatest need.  We the people agree that this notion of self-sacrifice for the common good is the measure of what's moral, and either we dare not, or do not have any idea of how to challenge this idea.

Two Automobile Franchises, Free Market versus DMV

Now, yesterday, down at my local Department of Motor Vehicles, I suffered a frustrating, dead loss of time and money.   I needed merely to change a name on a car title, which they could not do, so I had to go back again today.  The agent was friendly enough, but the system was hopelessly clunky and inefficient.  When I went there today, the same clerk served me and apologized for a mistake she made that would have allowed her to finish the job and send the requisite bits to Albany, from where I could expect my completed  forms in about six weeks. 

This situation with the DMV illustrates the point I have often made about Air Traffic Control, where my complaints are not so much with the controllers, who, while trying hard to do a good job, are often hog-tied by their bureaucratic work design, and by equipment so old that their radar systems make ATC the world's largest consumer of vacuum tubes, if your study of history allows you to remember what electronic device preceded the invention of the transistor in 1947! 

At the second automobile franchise, I had a scheduled appointment for maintenance.  This was the dealership where I bought my car, and I came away feeling that we had done some business together that allowed both of us to feel better off than we had been before the deal.  In other words we made a trade to mutual advantage.  We were both better off for the trade.  Quite a contrast to the one-sided and frustrating experience at the DMV! 

The first building was a government office, not really a dirty room, but old and largely unchanged for 40 years.  The benches were hard, and getting face-to-face with an agent required a long wait. 

The second office was an attractive, spotless, comfortable space, offering snacks and beverages gratis, where a cheerful staff greeted me warmly and with eagerness to serve me.  They delivered the service I requested, made sure I was satisfied before I left, and then, on the day after my appointment, they called me at home to verify that I was still happy with the service.

The government office is the embodiment of a self-sacrifice for the common good.

What?  Self-sacrifice for the common good?  How does this follow? 

Because they claim that the money they extract from us by threat of force is entirely for the good of everybody driving on the road.  Do you see?  The whole enterprise is for the "common good," and you are compelled to sacrifice your money, allegedly for the good of all.    

We are commanded to pay good money in a transaction that is neither voluntary nor a purchase of a good or service we could not otherwise have enjoyed.  The DMV grants us a "privilege" to drive our own cars, but nothing in reality would otherwise prevent us from driving if there were not the guns of the police power, threatening to pull us off the road, unless we pay up and follow their edicts.  The government takes money from us by force, and we get bupkis from them that we could not have enjoyed without them. 

Permission to drive is not a good or service, it is the kind of protection racket you expect to get from Mafiosi, who take money from you in exchange for a promise not to break your knee caps.  We accept this self-sacrifice because we are made to believe that the DMV sets standards that protect everybody on the road, a dubious claim.

By contrast, the private business is the embodiment of a profit-seeking company in our semi-free capitalist system.  We voluntarily trade our money for goods and services we value more than the money we give, and the company provides goods to us that they value less than the money they get from us.  We are both made better off for the deal.

These experiences inspire a few thoughts.

Why Both Democrats and Republicans are Dismaying 

 

So here it is, now more than a year since the re-election of our communist occupier of the White House.

Does this phrase shock you?  It should not, if you have read Obama's books, particularly Dreams From My Father.  The man is a self-avowed Marxian.  Not my libelous contention, but rather his own label, worn as a badge of pride.  His books clearly reveal a man who despises the idea of America, and now he has been elected twice.  

I've hardly posted anything for a year because the re-election of Obama so badly reduced me to intellectual vertigo and to shaking my head in astonishment and dismay. 

Mind you, I thought the Republican alternative was just terrible, but in a contest between a looming disaster and an epochal crisis, how are you going to vote ... if at all. 

As the title of a book by P. J. O'Rourke puts it: don't vote, it just encourages the bastards!  The trouble is that the winner takes his victory as a mandate to impose his whole agenda on the country.  Well, that's part of the trouble. 

The bigger trouble is that there are no candidates (who stand a chance of being elected) who are talking about chaining down government to its legitimate purpose, namely, the protection of every individual's right to life, liberty, and property.  

And then there was this week's election!  Geez!  What's the point, I sometimes wonder.  Shall we have government of huge, bloated, ever-growing,  ginormously oppressive size?  Or a government that is merely enormously oppressive, and growing bigger every day? 

The Republican mainstream, with respect to the important matters of freedom  and individual rights, is a pitiful, whining, toothless, clueless, unprincipled gang of compromisers.  They may talk about some of our problems, such as the ruinous debt levels, out of control spending, and the staggering, unfunded obligations of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, but they have done nothing, absolutely nothing, to address these problems in a serious way. 

Moreover, speaking as the father of two daughters, when one looks at the mainstream Republicans and conservatives on their ideas regarding the reproductive rights of women, and the people's freedom to marry on the basis of love and commitment, regardless of one's sexual persuasion, the Republicans are Neanderthals. 

(Footnote:  Yeah, yeah, one's opinion on abortion is entirely a matter of where one comes down on the judgment of where life begins.  Anti-abortion religionists claim that God arranged life to begin at conception, but I believe this is a matter for science, not the wildly disparate claims of religions, to determine.  Moreover, the essence of the matter seems clear to me in the contrast between a germinated acorn, a sapling, and an oak tree:  the acorn is potentially, but clearly not yet a tree, and the sapling is.  The zygote and the embryo are potential, not actual human beings, just as the germinated acorn's  relation to the actual tree.  Only faith can lead religionists to their zealous opposition to abortion of an early pregnancy.)

Having thus condemned Republicans, let the record show that communists, whose kissing cousins are American liberals in general, and the committed Marxist in the White House in particular, are worse than Neanderthals.  Communists in the last century murdered hundreds of millions of people.  Conservative Neanderthals are mostly just obstructionist big jerks, meddling sanctimoniously with other people's love lives. 

Again, if you doubt that Obama and company have communist tendencies, read his books.  All his most important mentors and heroes, including his father, were communists. 

The White House communications director, an Obama intimate, of course, Anita Dunn, achieved a certain notoriety for her talk to some school children in which she praised Chairman Mao as one of the two "political philosophers" she admires most, and to whom she turns most often for inspiration (the other one being Mother Teresa.) 

I couldn't believe my ears when I heard this remark of Anita Dunn! 

Imagine a White House official addressing a group of school children and citing Adolf Hitler as one of the political philosophers she most admires, and to whom she turns most often for inspiration, on the grounds that he, like Mao, faced tremendous opposition in his quest for power, and then, in a courageous statement of moral independence, told his opponents that he would fight his battles, and they could fight theirs. 

Mao, let it be remembered, was the world's all-time champion mass murderer.  Nobody else comes close, not even Stalin, and certainly not Hitler, who lags a distant third place, according to the authority on these matters, University of Hawaii professor emeritus R. J. Rummel, whose book, Death by Government sets the matter straight.

I am going to make the point below that perhaps the worst problem in the world is the alleged ideal of self-sacrifice for the lives of others.  I will argue that this  ideal leads to the notion of individuals as sacrificial animals who may rightly be eviscerated on bloody totalitarian alters.  So Anita Dunn's choice of the atheist Mao and the Christian Mother Teresa as her heroes is not so strange after all, no matter how ironic, because these two shared a belief in self-sacrifice as the moral ideal.

As an important footnote here, one might argue that Nazis were on the far right, and that the millions of deaths they caused are part of the pedigree of the political right side of the aisle. 

However, I am persuaded that Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Yaron Brook, and Don Watkins (among many others) are correct when they demonstrate that fascism is just another species of socialism.  How can this be true?  Because socialism is the broader concept here, having to do with government control or ownership of the means of production in a country.  Under communism (which is international socialism, let it not be forgotten) the government has outright ownership of the means of production.  Under fascism (or national socialism, which is the full term from which we get the contraction "Nazi") there is nominal private ownership of the means of production, but the government dictates every detail of who can produce what, in which quantities and qualities, employing whom, of which gender and race, at which wages, etcetera, etcetera. 

If the soul of ownership is control, then there is no significant difference between any of these forms of socialism.  Socialism entails massive government control of everything.

I can't leave this subject without a word on this week's jaw-dropping election of a Marxist as the Mayor of New York City.  Bill de Blasio is a self-described "democratic socialist," a progressive who, in his youth, raised  funds for the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas, and visited them in Nicaragua in 1988.  When he got married, de Blasio could think of no lovelier place in the world to spend his honeymoon than in that socialist workers' paradise, Cuba.  Wow. 

De Blasio's election brings to mind the similarly left-wing politics of John Lindsey's disastrous mayoral tenure, which brought New York City to bankruptcy.  The difference between Lindsey and de Blasio may be that de Blasio is farther to the left than Lindsey was, so his potential for awfulness looms even bigger than Lindsey's. 

By definition, lefties are more inclined than conservatives to put bureaucratic central planners in charge of everything.  These central planners exude a robust and righteous confidence that they know better than you how to run your life, a confidence which is exceeded only by their failure to make things work as promised.

Sorry.  It's true.  And don't tell me that Clinton's budget produced a surplus, which was, like most of the government's numbers, a big lie based on creative accounting and, in this particular case, the use of government trust funds, like the airports and airways trust fund, that were counted on the side of the ledger that would mask the full enormity of the federal plunder. 

As more evidence for the ineptitude of government to make things work the way they are promise, just look at the unintended and awful consequences of nearly every well-intentioned government program ever devised.  I grant, of course, that these terrible outcomes are not peculiar to liberals--the same unintended consequences attend the programs of Republicans too!  And it is certainly no longer true that Republicans can be counted on to be champions of freedom, but they tend to be just a hair more modest in their claims for what it is possible for government to do.

So I am not arguing for the virtue of Republicans over Democrats, I am lambasting both parties, and arguing for the virtue of free markets over the clueless machinations of government bureaucrats and politicians.

Two Automobile Franchises: Government Versus the Free Market

Now, back to the matter that galvanized me into writing today: the contrast I found between these two vastly different outfits dealing with my automobiles.

At the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, my goal was simply to get my wife's name changed on a car title, from her old name to her new one.  I had a stack of paperwork to document and authorize the change, including a letter authorizing the name change from the bank which made the auto loan, the already updated name-change of my wife's driver's license, and photocopies of the documents, just in case.

After taking a number from the crowd-control dispenser, I had a lengthy wait, sitting on a hard bench in a dreary, windowless room.  The clerk who finally took my case told me, not without good manners and a hint of apology in her voice that she couldn't help me finish this matter off today. "Nope, sorry, you can't do it today, sir.  You need to fill out another form, sign and date it, and return it to us here with copies of your wedding license and certificate of title," etcetera.  I protested that I already had everything except a fresh signature from my wife!  The form she was required to have me complete would have given the state no new information.  My intuition suggested that the change I needed would require someone to type three words in a single field on a computer screen and press the Enter prompt.  Shows how much I know about government red tape!  Nope. Sorry, can't do it today, she said.  Come back tomorrow.  My wasted time?  Sorry, sir.  Next!

Common sense would have suggested that everything was already in order.  But no, we're dealing with a government bureaucracy here.

And ... Exactly What Benefit Do We Derive From a DMV?

Now I ask you, of what earthly benefit is there for having a department of motor vehicles in the first place? 

They exist to take your money, so the government is surely happy to get another source of income, and they ... what do they do for us? 

Ah, I see, they give us permission to drive on the government roads!  They don't build or maintain the roads, they grant permission to drive on the roads created by another agency. 

And what good is this?  If you say that the DMV regulates the quality of driving and thereby keeps everybody safe, then I counter that this view on regulation and safety reflects the ubiquitous poverty of imagination of our contemporary mindset, which is saturated to the dripping point with the statist assumption  that, absent a government regulatory agency issuing edicts and threatening punishments, people would have no interest in learning to drive safely. 

This mindset believes that if left free, people would have no incentive to learn how to drive safely. 

This nearly universal bias against freedom leads people to assume that without the government to boss everybody around, the roads would be a bloodbath of confusion, anarchy, destruction and death.  Hell, without the government, people wouldn't even agree on which side of the road to drive!  Without the DMV, could the people be counted not to drive down the road in reverse gear? 

This bias is ridiculous, but nearly everybody shares the belief that only government regulation keeps us safe from predators who would otherwise be trying to stay in business by killing their customers. 

Consider a little thought experiment on this assertion:

Think about it:  in a competitive market, a business needs to attract customers,  and then keep them coming back again and again.  So imagine the following line of thought, and the insanity it would require to arrive at this conclusion: 

"How can I keep my customers coming back again and again?  I know!-- I'll kill them!" 

But people actually believe this is true because they believe that capitalism is evil and must be controlled by the saintly regulators, who, of course, are assumed to have no interests of their own, such as empire building.  Absurd.  

Now, by contrast, an hour after I left the DMV, I drove up to the Subaru dealership for my appointment.  They welcomed me, directed me to the waiting room where, as I mentioned, I found comfortable seating with drinks and snacks.  The staff could not have been more eager to please me and make sure that my every wish was attended to.

We are led to believe that the public sector is devoted to civil service and the promotion of the common good.  It is widely held that such noble service is the opposite of profit seeking. 

For example, a radio ad for a Jewish funeral home, long broadcast in the New York City market, captures this bias by its closing words, proudly proclaiming that the company "is run as a service, not a business."  The word "business" is delivered with a lowered tone that buzzes and hisses with an audible contempt normally reserved for words like Nazi, holocaust, KKK, profit, and capitalism. 

Now, Subaru is a profit seeking, capitalist business.  The point to remember is that the continued existence of such a company vitally depends on pleasing their customers, who are free to take their business elsewhere.

The DMV does not have to bother itself with the dirty business of profit seeking.  They are not run like a business that stands a chance of going out of business for failing to satisfy their customers, so why should anybody be surprised that they don't? 

Not to mention that the DMV offers nothing to their so-called customers except for their kindly refraining from jailing all who enter their offices.  

The business model of a mafia protection racket has nothing over the DMV, in this regard.

If Subaru, or any other private company, treated their customers as the DMV does, they would be punished by having their customers take their business to other companies.  Subaru stands a real chance of going broke and disappearing altogether for failing to please their customers for any length of time.

 

Freedom Works Better than Government Coercion, But Try to Tell People!



Picture this famous satellite picture of Korea taken at night.  Here, have a look:

https://www.google.com/#q=satellite+picture+of+korea+at+night 

North Korea looks as dark as the ocean.  It looks like a country at war which installs black-out curtains on every building.  Except that there are just no lights to black out.  Their darkness is because communism has rendered them so unspeakably poor that there are virtually no lights to turn on in the first place!
 
South Korea, by contrast,  presents a dense array of shimmering clusters of light, filling the country from border to border.

This contrast between the two Koreas is like a lab experiment of the rarest kind in the social sciences, an opportunity to test for an active ingredient, where only one factor is varied.  Korea, like Germany, east and west, after the second world war, is a country with essentially the same population, the same culture, and the same values, before the communist takeover of one side of the country.   The primary difference between them lies in the difference of freedom enjoyed in the two regions of the country.  In Korea, the north is destitute and starving as a result; the south is thriving and waxing fat and happy.

So everybody knows that freedom works better than government coercion, and as Yaron Brook puts it, they know it works better across all times, all places, and all cultures. 

But lefties don't give a damn about this evidence because they are pixilated by a crazy vision of "fairness" above everything else, a fairness they feel is utterly lacking in the working of free markets.  This unfairness cries out for the government's redistribution of wealth.  This egalitarianism is the same thing as Obama's idea that among the main purposes of government is to "spread the wealth around." 

The left holds that our duty is to be our brother's keeper, but they strangely believe that this charity should not be a matter of an individual's choice.  Lefties of the caliber of John Rawls, Robert Bella, Amatai Etzioni, to pick a representative  smattering, seem to believe that government is properly the agent of the citizens' charity.  The funding of such charities should be discreetly directed to the recipients so as not to have to call it charity, which might injure their delicate sense that they are entitled to the money.  Any demand that the recipients display outright gratitude for such assistance would damage the social fabric, in the opinion of these lefties.  So charity should not be left to the vagaries of an individual's voluntary choice to give it.  On the contrary, charity should be extracted from us by the police power, against the individual's will, if need be, as might be the case with, say, retrograde conservatives with big hats from Texas.

By contrast, the right tends to be nearly as ignorant of sound economics as the left, and they display no more understanding than lefties for why freedom works.  "We're all Keynesians now," left and right, as (the Republican) Richard Nixon openly declared on that momentous, long ago day in 1971 when he  imposed wage and price controls, and severed the last tie to the gold standard in America.  Now they nearly all believe that the road to prosperity lies down the path of government deficit spending, government control of the monetary system ... and this eternal "quantitative easing," in the current argot of the thieves down at the Federal Reserve System.

What Unites the Left and the Right, Secular and Religious



And besides, nearly all the moral leaders of left and right, secular and religious, share the same essential belief in the fundamental virtue of self-sacrifice for the lives of others, so why should anybody expect anything but a government that demands ever more sacrifice?

 

The Insanity of Believing Humans are Sacrificial Animals, and its Antidote 

This is the essence of the matter, another one of those crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses that I am always talking about, spreading misery, madness, and mayhem throughout the world:  the idea of Homo sapiens as a sacrificial animal on the alter of the common good, to be disposed of according to the judgment of the authoritarians in charge.  This is an idea as old as the philosopher kings of Plato's Republic.

The True Meaning of the Morality of Self-Sacrifice

Until a better moral code is widely accepted, we will never get beyond a system in which gangs of predators fight each other for control of what they believe is a zero-sum game, where one person's gain is seen as necessarily coming at someone else's expense.

Being a sacrificial animal is not the answer to our problems--it is itself the very problem that must be solved. 

The idea of sacrifice is a conundrum because there is an equivocation on the meaning of the word, two variant meanings that confuse the matter.  Sacrifice is commonly believed to mean working hard, or delaying gratification in pursuit of a greater value.  But the literal meaning of the word sacrifice means giving up something of greater value in exchange for something of lesser value, like taking a penny in exchange for a dollar.

Rational Self-Interest:  a Cure for World Insanity and Misery

The world is suffering from this terrible infection, the morality of self-sacrifice.  The best antidote I know for this raging fever is Ayn Rand's morality of rational self-interest.  Rand's system of morality validates the understanding that all of us can flourish by pursuing our own happiness in a climate of voluntary trade of genuine values for mutual benefit.  So long as we respect the idea that everybody who lives peacefully and responsibly has an inviolable right to his or her own life, liberty, and property, we could have a hugely and rapidly rising tide of prosperity.  But this prosperity is choked off by these destructive demands for sacrifice.  Moreover, as Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, and others have pointed out, when such sacrifice is held as the moral ideal, there are predators who are inspired to come crawling out from under their rocks, eager to collect these sacrificial offerings.

So which is it?  The DMV, backed up by the police, happy to steal your stuff and operate at their convenience and your loss?

Or the car dealership, desperate to please you, so that they can win your money in a peaceful, voluntary trade of the stuff you both want, for your mutual pleasure.

Freedom, Oppression, Happiness, Prosperity

You can have both oppression and freedom, as we do today, but the presence of an oppressive government vastly lowers the level of happiness and prosperity that would otherwise be available to us.  Worse than this, as von Mises pointed out so presciently a century ago, this oppression tends to feed on itself and cause things to become more oppressive as time goes by.  Why do we put up with it?  Ignorance.  And these crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses... 

There is no good reason to tolerate being shackled by the government apart from the fear of punishment, and feeling helpless to change the world by ourselves.  But I do what I can to spread the best ideas I know, in the hope that someday an improvement in our stock of wisdom will cause enough people to demand politicians who will respect the freedom of all, and unlock the shackles we all wear. 

We get totalitarian-minded politicians because we do not clearly know how to articulate a better alternative that respects freedom.  Such ignorance kills.

Getting the World (and the Politicians) We Deserve 

We will get politicians who respect our freedom when we ourselves, enough of us anyway, learn how to articulate a clear and powerful vision of our inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and property.  We ourselves must learn that our rights are rooted in our nature as human beings, and are common to every  individual on the planet (so long as they respect the same rights in others, and do not lash out with a first-strike force against others.) 

We will get better politicians when we abandon the crazy idea that there can be an entitlement to take other people's property.  We must learn that it is wrong to initiate force against peaceful others.  We must learn that it is evil to use other people against their will, for predatory advantage. 

We will get politicians who practice all these virtues when we ourselves embrace them and learn how to put these ideas into words with clarity.

We will get a better world when we abandon the notion that self-sacrifice for the lives of others is the highest moral ideal (which leads to the blood-stained use and abuse of others as sacrificial animals.) 

We will get a better world when we uphold the idea that all of us should strive for our own happiness by unfolding our talents, by our own lights, and making our way in the world through peaceful, voluntary trade with others for our mutual benefit.

I believe that we can get all these good things when, for starters, we demand of ourselves that we believe in nothing that does not make sense by the light of reason, meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience.

The crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses make no sense!  This is why they are crazy ideas!  Moreover, the crazy ideas are unmasked and destroyed when exposed to the light of reason!

Dragging Mental Vampires into the Light of the Intellectual Dawn,  

These intellectual viruses are like vampires who are doomed to die when they are pulled out of the midnight shadows of the mystical and the epistemology of faith (faith meaning belief in the truth of a proposition when there is no evidence for its truth.)

But we seem to live in a time that is helpless to dispel these crazy intellectual vampires because our age is pixilated by the abysmal condition of philosophy.

An auspicious intellectual dawn will be on the day the world begins to embrace a philosophy of reason and logic applied to the evidence of experience.

Philosophy, the mother of everything, after all, ought to be the solvent that cleans out all the crud in a mind made gooey by the insane ideas to which all of us are exposed while growing up. 

All human beings are vulnerable to the evolutionary fact that as children we are hard-wired to believe whatever our parents and teachers tell us, and as youngsters we are ill-equipped to test these ideas for validity.  And it may be that a huge percentage of the ideas out there are crazy intellectual vampires!

How to overcome this terrible problem?  Philosophy is this technology of intellectual validation, but, as I say, philosophy remains in a condition of largely raggedy-ass ineptitude and incoherence.

Philosophy, any decent philosophy, ought to offer standards by which one can judge whether an idea makes enough sense to be worthy of discussion. 

Let me hasten to add that we should remain open to revisiting our existing beliefs by the light of new evidence, but there are nevertheless standards of plausibility for evidence and argument. 

If this sounds like the closed mind of a bigot who would create his own mental echo chamber, let me assure you that it is not, and here is the explanation for why this is so:

Suppose you assert that the earth is the center of the universe, and the sun therefore orbits the earth.  Good epistemology demands that the burden of proof lies on those who make an assertion.  So why do you believe the sun orbits the earth? 

If you say you feel it's true, you have not advanced any plausible evidence for your claim.  You said you feel it's true.  We now know that emotions are automatic, psychosomatic reflections of what we already believe to be true.  Emotions do not give us new knowledge, they emphasize what we already know, or think we know anyway.  So your emotions are not a good reason to defend your assertion.  Emotions are out, as a standard by which to judge what is true.  By themselves, unaided by logic and evidence, emotions can lead us into the arms of crazy ideas.

If you tell me that you believe the earth is the center of the universe because Psalm 93 tells you that the earth does not move, you have recapitulated the argument that Cardinal Bellarmine, Galileo's persecutor, made against Galileo in the inquisition against the great scientist's claim that truth is discovered through evidence and logic.  Bellarmine said, no, if one wants to know the truth, truth is what is revealed to us in the Bible.  Galileo said, just look in my telescope and you will see for yourself.  Nope, don't need to, said the Grand Inquisitor, and added that you better recant or we're gonna burn your buns alive at the stake, just as we did to hapless Giordano Bruno.  Believe!  Have faith.  Questioning is a sin, obedience a virtue.  If Cardinal Bellarmine's is your line of reasoning, then you are making an argument that depends on faith, which, again, I remind you means belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence.  Faith is not an adequate basis for establishing the truth of an idea.  Faith is out.  So faith, in this technical sense of the term, like emotions, can also lead us into the arms of crazy ideas. 

Making the case for good philosophy requires volumes of thought, but the essence of the matter is simple:  knowing the truth about anything requires logic applied to the evidence of experience.  Anything less can lead us to fall down rabbit holes into the world of vampire ideas, and thereby to a world of crazy death and destruction ... something like where we are in much of the world today.

Logic applied to the evidence of experience.  This is intellectual shorthand for volumes of life-serving philosophy. 

This idea of logic, evidence, and experience, is the life-saving stake you need to drive into the heart of these intellectual vampires, these blood sucking killers of human potential and happiness. 

You can live for a time with steel shackles on your ankles, but it makes dancing much less joyful than it should be.  And may the gods (metaphorically speaking) help you if you ever have to swim to safety. 

E P N

A Surreal Visit From the Police State

A Surreal Visit from the Police State

Eric Paul Nolte

 

 

It's been a year and a half since my eldest daughter's surreal encounter with a branch of the police state, and I am still outraged by the behavior of the Northampton police.

Early on Sunday morning, 2 October 2011, Devon was ARRESTED by FOUR aggressive, pistol-packing policemen who shattered the peaceful ambiance of the Haymarket Cafe, where she works as a barista, and descended on Devon -- yes, my darling 20 year old daughter, who is a sweet, gentle, thoughtful soul, and perhaps the most compassionate person I know. Devon was entirely compliant and willing to leave with this little platoon of policemen, but these meatheads brusquely twisted Devon's arms behind her back, clicked handcuffs around her wrists, and man-handled her out of the cafe and into the back of a police cruiser.

Can you believe it? Down at the police station, they finger-printed her and locked her in a jail cell for hours before she was given the opportunity to post bail and go back to work.

What's going on? Was Devon caught dealing drugs? Mugging old ladies? Burgling houses? Smuggling Freon for old automobile air conditioners?

No, of course not.

This outrageous and idiotic display of police state muscle flexing was prompted by ... a traffic ticket ... but not even a moving violation ... that Devon got for ... AN EXPIRED INSURANCE CARD, which led the gendarmes mistakenly to conclude that Devon was not insured, when in fact her car IS INDEED insured.

Now, alright, the situation is a little more complicated than I've allowed thus far, but still ... CHEEZZ!!! We're talking about some red tape, a silly little clerical matter that the authorities got wrong in the first place!

Here's the story: Devon had a tiny little fender bender with her Oldsmobile in August. When the police arrived on the scene, they issued Devon a ticket for failing to have insurance. While her insurance card had expired, she WAS, in fact, still insured through GEICO! For some reason the police data base couldn't pull up this fact, and they could not be bothered to speak with an insurance rep who could have told them the car was insured, so the cops wrote her a ticket and gave her a court date. Then Devon spoke with a GEICO Rep about the problem and got the mistaken impression that the insurance company would handle everything and that the police matter, namely, the ticket, would be dropped ... somehow .... Poor girl, this tender naif who had never before run up against a problem with the government.

So, of COURSE the matter was NOT dropped, because we're dealing with a relentless, box-checking, paper-pushing, dogmatic, one-size-fits all government bureaucracy! One might expect that anybody with a dram of common sense and a dollop of humanity would dismiss the ticket because it's obvious that there was NO VIOLATION ON WHICH TO BASE WRITING A TICKET! God!

But we're dealing with the government, not a business that still has the right occasionally to use some common sense, when it's not in violation of some dumbass regulation spelled out in the 75,000 pages of the Federal Register.

So, Devon mistakenly thought the insurance company had arranged for the ticket to be dropped, and come the court date, Devon happened to be out of town. Whoops ....

Devon doesn't check her mail very closely unless she is expecting to receive something, and she lives in a big old house with five other young people, which makes the whole flow of mail a little loosey-goosey under the best of circumstances.

To the point here, Devon was not aware that the police sent her a notice about her failure to appear in court.

And of course the police could not be bothered just to TELEPHONE her and ask what's going on.

But the police damn well COULD be bothered to dispatch four big burly police bruisers in their cruisers to scare the hell out of my darling little baby girl and create this ridiculous and reprehensible public display of police state tactics!

The authorities kept Devon locked up in a jail cell for hours! Eventually, she was allowed the opportunity to pay $40 bail and go back to work. On Monday, she appeared in court and settled the matter by paying the $50 fine (but a fine for what, I wonder? -- she was NOT uninsured, and it was the insurance question that was the basis for her ticket!)

So what would you do in my situation? Write or call the police to complain about this absurd and humiliating overkill in dealing with some red tape -- a stupid little misunderstanding over some paperwork? Write Devon's political representatives as a citizen who is outraged by how these armed, knuckle-dragging fatheads in the police handled this matter so callously?

It won't help to tell the authorities why I already felt contempt for the way security is handled, even before Devon's experience with the police.

As an airline captain in uniform on my way to greet 300 souls who entrust their very lives to me so that I can fly them from New York to, say, Hong Kong, I am daily subjected to the indignities of being treated like a criminal every time I come through an airport security plaza. I already believed that we have ninnies in charge whose capacity to grasp the true nature of airport security is exceeded by children who have only just learned how to use the toilet by themselves.

Before Devon's run-in with the Northampton police, I was already outraged by the security apparatus in this country, which remains too coarse and crude an instrument even to begin figuring out who the hell are the good guys and the bad guys, much less how to deal with all these people effectively and with common sense.

Yet ... you know, I've always felt that stupidity is a largely forgivable lapse ... we all do occasionally stupid things inadvertently ... but crusading, militant, righteous stupidity, armed with guns and handcuffs, and bossing us around with the threat of jail time ... just makes me see red. Red tape, here, I guess. Maybe I'll just have to get over it. Surely there's some explanation for it in the Federal Register, if not the Constitution.

Anyway, Devon came through this experience pretty much unscathed, as far as I can tell. While she told me that she was initially shaking with fear, when the police appeared at the cafe to haul her away, she soon began to see the surreal insanity of the matter, and with her wise serenity and ironic humor she just rode down these crazy whitewater rapids on which she had been cast off. It speaks highly of Devon's wisdom and healthy perspective on life that she would ride it out so unruffled.

 

E P N