Opportunity to Reflect

This being Memorial Day in the U.S., I thought it appropriate to address the complexity of the acts meant to be highlighted on this day. In short, it is a day for remembering those who have fallen in the liberation and defense of this nation.

Liberation is an easy thing to justify as it specifically deals with the acquisition of freedom. That is, in my opinion, the only reason for which any of us should ever take up arms: our own freedom. While people around the world have too often taken up arms to acquire their freedom only to have one despot replaced by another, this country enjoyed the fruits of an enlightened few who put forth a system under which freedom could be retained, at least for a short time. These founders even had the foresight to guard against the slow decay of freedoms they saw as inevitable.

Defense is a different subject entirely. The term itself opens the discussion to subjectivity. Against what have we defended ourselves? After all, other than 1812, Pearl Harbor and September 11, 2001, there have not been any direct attacks on U.S. soil. Yet we have engaged, almost continuously, in some conflict or other.

Now I am not arguing against engagement without direct provocation. We all know that Nazi Germany would have continued its pursuit of global domination had the U.S. and other remotely interested countries not joined the fight, almost preemptively, against them. Sadly, it is arguments such as this that are leveraged to justify other engagements. According to many at the time, Vietnam became a mission for the same reasons that WWII required our involvement in the European theater: the spread of communism. However, the domino theory ignored the very fact that the communist system against which we were to take up arms had little hope of sustaining itself. So many Americans died defending a system of democracy and capitalism against an idea that has no potential in reality. While we should memorialize their individual sacrifices, we should also take this opportunity to understand the pointlessness of the overall action.

Today we find ourselves in a similar position. While our dispute with The Taliban and their protection of Al Qaeda warranted a response, the continued nation building exercises hardly garner the same justifications. Had Iraq indeed proven to be a source of weapons, our involvement there would have had some substance, particularly in light of the goals of entities such as Al Qaeda. However, using the spread of democracy and the freeing of a nation is hardly the same as claiming defense. As each American who dies in these conflicts earns the remembrance designated for this day, we who remain must make a better effort to ensure that future sacrifices are made only in the name of defending the liberty to which we so tenuously cling.

Another Case of Do As I Say

It's not as though I need to work hard to find examples of government abuse. Case in point, Congress's reluctance to admit that access granted by virtue of their position does not constitute the same sort of insider knowledge that is afforded board members or executives of the same companies about which that knowledge pertains:
Congress Refuses to Outlaw Insider Trading For Lawmakers.

While each of us would argue that we would not succumb to the elixir of influence and power, we are equally vulnerable to the dictates of human nature. This is why it is so important that the limitations prescribed by the Constitution are adhered to. Despite (or perhaps due to) their position, members of Congress should have no more access to sensitive information than should the average person. Yet they not only have such access, they also have the ability to make that access legal. Had this concerned an evil executive or a greedy industrialist, there would be no question about this fact.

Actually, the idea of insider trading should be revisited. Instead of prohibiting this activity, there should be public access to the actions of those intimately involved in the workings of a company. In this way, any benefit of insider trading would be eliminated and the activities of those in a position to know would do what they should: benefit all investors.

Get out yer galoshes

I feel I have to ask the question: does anyone really pay attention to hurricane forecasts? The brain trust at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has predicted as many as 14 hurricanes for the coming season. Not that I need to dig up examples of shoddy government work, but when was the last time we had even ten actual hurricanes in a given year?

Meteorology is the only profession where you can be wrong a majority of the time and still keep your job. This being said, what makes us think that the same people who are unable to predict tomorrow's weather can come close to predicting storms as much as five months out?

Before I assume that most people are smart enough to know how ridiculous these predictions are, I guess I should pause. Most people think that the federal government has money, that politicians are acting in our best interest, and that those in power are immune to it's lure. On second thought, maybe I'm one of the few who scoffs at the NOAA.

Tanstaafl.

Double plus ungood

There has lately been added to the lexicon a phrase which defies justification: “too big to fail”. The claim is that there exist companies whose impact is so broad and thoroughly integrated into the fabric of our economy that failure of such a magnitude would be unsustainable. The argument is no less specious than those which defend government itself. Not that I am an anarchist by nature, but I do think that government is overrated and, were ours to collapse, people would find a way to survive without it.

As for these companies that supposedly must be saved I say: follow the money. Sure the politicians will tell us that the loss of jobs, the collapse of financial markets and the gap in services will be too great, but what they mean by these things are the loss of government jobs, the collapse of financial support for their next campaign and the gap of services they will be unable to parade before the electorate. Creating the illusion that certain companies are so critical that government intervention is necessary to keep them afloat is akin to claiming that the collapse of McDonald’s will bring starvation.

While many people would be suffering had GM gone into bankruptcy protection, those people would be the unionists forced to renegotiate contracts that would make GM more competitive rather than the taxpayers who have yet to gain a dime from being forced into an unneeded rescue. The bailout of companies like AIG speaks more to the origin of political fund raising than it does to the need to persist financial institutions which practice flawed policies. Compounding these actions is the fact that it is the self-same elected officials who, having passed ill-conceived legislation, created many of the risk pitfalls into which these companies fell.

Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, creating a culture in which companies believe that they will be saved from demise should they fail means creating one where the natural influence of risk is removed and decisions are made with less regard for their downside. The government already enjoys such a cushion from failure and now, thanks to the misguided actions of our politicians, so does big business.

Leon's Getting Larger

Despite the best efforts of the Ministry of Information, clues to the future of our economy continue to leak out. As I’ve said all along, nothing this administration is doing will benefit our economy in the long term. Further evidence of this fact can be found here “Private pay shrinks to historic lows”.

While our government has the ability to print money, it does not earn it. The money spent by the government is taxpayer money acquired through force. As this article shows, that money is now increasingly spent on the system under which we are all subjected. Rather than implementing policies which build jobs where money is generated, the administration continues to build the infrastructure where money is drained.

While this ultimately leads us to the likelihood of a one-term presidency, it comes at a cost for which we will all continue to pay indefinitely. The growth in government has historically been remarkably resilient to abridgment. Compounding this is the fact that no one of integrity has risen to a position of power in a very long time, so the next incarnation of big brother is likely to bring more of the same.

Econ 101

While there is virtually no end to the examples of how government regularly proves both its ineptitude and redundancy, this particular instance warranted inclusion in the “you’re literally too stupid to insult” category: Raleigh to raise water rate?. Seems the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, is struggling to fill a fiscal gap left by a successful water conservation campaign. While governments regularly ignore the principles of economics, this case involves the complete subversion of the law of supply and demand. Taking a page directly out of the U.S. Postal Service playbook, Raleigh is looking to raise rates BECAUSE people are using less water.

Of course, the proponents of this change will argue that the increase will amount to a very small charge per household. We can all understand the need to keep government running, can’t we? And who couldn’t afford a few extra dollars a month to ensure that government has sufficient funds to persist? Of course, as is generally the case with government, the idea of cutting back on spending has yet to enter the discussion.

More Of The Same

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate passed a Wall Street "reform" bill aimed at curbing the greedy appetites of the nation's investment class, proving once again that the current batch of elected "representatives" know nothing about either the Constitution, for which they've sworn an oath, or economics.

Sure, their rhetoric will be all about the abuses of the investing elite and defense of the downtrodden citizen, but make no mistake about their actual intentions. Remember that they are all supported by many of the same people they claim to be "correcting" with this legislation. Remember also that demonizing the wealthy is modus operandi of the elected elite. We can be sure that the current bill is laden with pork, that it is riddled with loopholes, and that it provides covert support for those self-same people against which it is presumably targeted.

What this country needs are more people like Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey and lone gunman against government ineptitude. Christie has proven, in his short tenure, that he isn't concerned about getting reelected. He has made enemies on both sides of the aisle in a state suffering under the yoke of massive deficits, oppressive taxation and burdensome entitlement. While the yahoos in Washington carve up a pie that has less to do with reality each day, he is vetoing new tax proposals that will drive away investment in his state (N.J. Gov. Chris Christie swiftly vetoes 'millionaires tax,' property tax rebate bills). He routinely chastises both elected official and private citizen alike for questioning his unflinching efforts to reign in out-of-control spending and abuses of power. Had we several dozen of his ilk, we could return common sense and the Constitution to their rightful places within our government.

Don't Let Them Eat Cake

“Any time you want to institute a behavior change, policy changes are really quite effective,” said Lisako McKyer, a professor at Texas A&M in response to a decision by the San Antonio city manager to ban sugared sodas, among other things, in city facilities (San Antonio city manager wages war on sugar). Why stop there, I would ask. If behavior change is your goal, why allow anyone entering or utilizing these government facilities to be overweight? For that matter, we should start requiring all users of public facilities to perform some feat of strength before being granted access. After all, improved public health is our goal.

In fact, there’s no reason to stop there. Each person needing to wade through some bureaucratic red tape should first be required to prove a minimum number of community service hours. Depending on the complexity of the need, they should also be forced to perform some function specific to offsetting their carbon output. Better yet, require them to surrender their time in a state sanctioned charitable endeavor.

As long as we have the power of the government, and its implied force, there’s no limit to the number of behavior changes we can achieve.

No Freedom for You

The Supreme Court has once again proven its willingness to eschew constitutionality in order to advance social or political goals. The issue in question concerns the most unsavory members of our society: sex offenders. A synopsis can be found here: Supreme Court: Sex offenders can be held indefinitely.

Naturally, I do not support providing these particular criminals with additional opportunities to ply their specific perversions. If our legal system adequately dealt with these people, that would be sufficient. If prevailing wisdom holds that these people are beyond reform, then laws should be written to include either permanent incarceration or capital punishment in response to their acts.

However, what this ruling does is allow for an arbitrary application of "danger to society" to be applied at the discretion of some federal representative. Today, the danger comes from sex offenders who are "beyond reform". Tomorrow, the litmus test will include those who will be repeat offenders of other crimes (i.e. 90% of current prison populations). Next week, the danger will be found in those who refuse to accept the "established science" that man is the sole cause of climate change or it will include those who have stubbornly chosen to believe in the absence of a higher power, depending of course on the dictates of those in power at the time.

As the fifth amendment clearly states:

"No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."

By electing to place in the hands of bureaucrats and functionaries, independent of due process, the ability to extend incarceration indefinitely, the court has again decided to ignore the very document on which our system was built, a document to which each of these justices has sworn an oath to uphold.

Ignorance is Strength

It comes as no surprise that the current incarnation of big brother, having ridden the wave of technology into the White House, is now descrying the evils of those same media and the information they provide: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era.

When I heard the line "information becomes a distraction" I could think only of the title of this post which, of course, shares the same origin with the term "thought criminal". To be fair, Mr. Obama's quote is partly an attack on entertainment diversions of the Xbox and PlayStation variety:

"You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter," Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.


"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama said.

Had he limited his comments to entertainment, he might have had a valid point. Instead, he pointed out that we are bombarded with content that is often not true. Of course, being a man of unquestioned integrity and considerable intellect, he would be happy to perform his big brotherly duties by shielding us from those things which he believes not to be true. He proves once again that the First Amendment to the Constitution was written for a specific reason: to ensure our ability to speak out against those who would exceed their constitutional mandate. What's next on his hit parade, "Freedom is slavery"?

Slice the Pie

When the rich get richer, the poor must get poorer, right? Well, as with many of the assertions of the sound bite era, this is simply not true. It is, instead, an oversimplified summarization of economics used to push an agenda. The argument can be generally described as a zero sum gain view of economics where a finite amount of wealth exists and the only means for one group within the system to increase their wealth is to somehow take it from others. It is the basis on which much of the social engineering arguments are built. Wealth cannot be created, they’d have us believe. Instead, it can only be displaced from somewhere else. So, in order to bring fairness to all, money from the wealthy must be taken and distributed to the poor.

In fact, wealth is created every day. In simple terms, every time someone invents something new, they’ve created wealth. If we consider the iPod (or any such MP3 device) we can see how this works. Before the iPod, there were any number of gadgets used to carry music around. These included both tape and compact disc devices specially designed to increase convenience. The iPod supplanted each of these devices by bringing a smaller, more stable format to the industry.

On the surface, this would seem to have proven the position of the zero sum gain camp: iPod stole market share from other products, thereby shifting wealth from one party to another. However, what iPod also did was enable other media industries. For example, the new generation of devices carried ever greater volume of music, both helping the environment by lessening the need for compact discs and increasing the choice of the user. Additionally, a burgeoning medium, podcasts, was given a new, more convenient vehicle by which to spread. On top of these came the ability to add audio books and video, again increasing both availability and convenience. So the iPod increased the number of products available to consumers, thereby increasing wealth potential. Yet none of this was done at the expense of the poor.

The Baby With the Bath Water

Yesterday, Joe Lieberman, Independent Senator from Connecticut, proposed legislation that would remove a citizen's rights based on their affiliation with, or participation in, alleged terrorist acts. While this is clearly a political move driven by the past week's activities in Times Square, it is no less a shining example of the steady, if sometimes subtle, erosion of rights to which we should be accustomed.

The fact that I considered voting for the dark lord, Al Gore, solely based on his selection of Lieberman as a running mate aside, I must say that few proposals have been more glaring assaults on our civil liberties than was this. Lieberman proves that even "moderates" are susceptible to the lure of power and the elixir of public whim (note: quotes should surround all things associated with Washington, not just descriptions of Lieberman's supposed political positions). Fortunately for us, even those on the far left see this suggestion for what it is: both unconstitutional and dangerous to the basic idea of individual rights.

Following 9/11, I read of the Philippines passing legislation similarly worded to this. At the time, all I could think of was the malleability of words. What is constructive criticism today is terrorism tomorrow. No, we do not want terrorists freely carrying out their violent agenda in this country. Nor do we want politicians and bureaucrats exercising the degree to which terrorism can be defined. I would ask Mr. Lieberman to consider his proposed legislation a terrorist act against the constitution, but I'm afraid he proved his redundancy long ago and the message would be lost on him.

The Cost of Citizenship

Primaries will be held in North Carolina tomorrow to select the nominees for November's mid-term elections. As is usually the case, these primaries will likely involve limited participation by the voting public. Similarly common is the populist mantra which reappears around these events insisting that those who fail to vote have no right to complain about the situation.

It is with this last point that I take issue. While there is no doubt that people who fail to vote are less justified in vocalizing their displeasure with the outcome, their right to complain is in no way impacted by their lack of participation. While we as citizens have prescribed rights protected by the constitution, there are no limits to those rights based on our willingness, or lack thereof, to vote.

Of course, many might think I'm overreacting based on idle chatter. Perhaps I am, but I see ample instances of populist rhetoric growing teeth. This issue in particular has had a history of debate, such as is currently occurring in Colorado among other places. What we tend to forget is that rights are not requirements. While we might tire of non-voters complaints, their right to vote, much like their right to free speech, implicitly includes their right not to vote.

Behind the Plow

I recently listened to a Cato podcast detailing the insanity that is Cap and Trade. Some of you have heard of this, the latest attempt by the left to modify our habits in order to address the well-disputed issue of man-made global warming.

Whether you believe that global warming is man made or not, you must avail yourself of the lunacy contained in this bill. The legislation I speak of can be found here: H.R. 2454. As you'll find in the section 703 ("REDUCTION TARGETS FOR SPECIFIED SOURCES"), the following goals have been outlined by our elected officials:

(a) In General- The regulations issued under section 721 shall cap and reduce annually the greenhouse gas emissions of capped sources each calendar year beginning in 2012 such that--

(1) in 2012, the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions from capped sources does not exceed 97 percent of the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions from such sources in 2005;
(2) in 2020, the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions from capped sources does not exceed 83 percent of the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions from such sources in 2005;
(3) in 2030, the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions from capped sources does not exceed 58 percent of the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions from such sources in 2005; and
(4) in 2050, the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions from capped sources does not exceed 17 percent of the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions from such sources in 2005.

In case you're wondering, 17% of emissions in 2005 generally equates to emissions from our forebears living prior to the start of the previous century. The brain trust previously known as the House of Representatives decided upon, and passed (by seven votes), a bill that proposes to reduce the emissions of the average American to levels not seen since the 1800's. Even those who believe that climate change is caused by man are unlikely to expect this or any country to return to an agrarian society.

Perhaps I should give our elected sycophants a modicum of credit. It's entirely possible that they believe that innovation will bring about such vast improvements in fuel economy and reduced consumption that we can maintain a lifestyle resembling that of the current century without the matching carbon output. Of course, if this were their intention or belief, why is it that everything they've done to date, including this legislation, has carried business and innovation stifling taxation and burdensome regulation? I suppose it's because they chose to prove, once again, that they don't have a clue how to enact any meaningful legislation without further expanding their power base.

Tanstaafl