Gus Van Horn

Kings of the Barbie

2009-11-20T06:47:00.006-06:00

As a transplanted southerner who is learning to appreciate Boston (but still occasionally finds himself missing his grill), I smiled when I saw Eric S. Raymond describe himself as "a Boston-born northerner" who has "eaten barbecue all over the U.S. and the world" en route to commenting on an interesting article from Australia that forthrightly and manfully admits that Americans are kings of the grill. (But I must say that there is zero disgrace in acknowledging a master.)

Even, and this is gonna hurt, the Americans have it all over us when it comes to cooking with fire, iron and tongs. In fact it's arguable the American barbecue, or rather its plethora of regional variations on barbecue, set the gold standard worldwide for applying heat to meat while out of doors. While the popular image of American cooking, at least as practised by average Americans, involves squeezing a plastic sauce packet over something nasty in a chain restaurant, the truth is their barbecue specialists would put ours to shame. Undying, unutterable shame.

As Raymond notes, American food culture has improved drastically over the last generation, and it's refreshing to see someone overseas get past tired stereotypes and say as much. As I have to fly out the door this morning, I'll toss out a short list of barbecue links (Hah! Get it?) and take very brief note of an interesting comment exchange from Armed and Dangerous.

First, the links:

Wikipedia, which deserves a post of its own on some "Love of Life Friday," has good articles on barbecue as well as its regional variants in the United States. In the latter article, see specifically how the form varies across Texas. My main quibble with Raymond is that I found his "farther south is better" rule of thumb too one-dimensional, although this could just reflect his personal taste.
Finding an old post here about celebrating (Life on This) Earth Day by firing up the grill, I also was reminded that the practice made headlines briefly as a measurable component of Houston's local air pollution.
Oh, and to round things out, another post here on the rites of spring discusses chimney starters, my bottle opener and cork puller of choice, and my favorite book on grilling, which I highly recommend.

Now, the smack-down:

JessicaBoxer: Is it really necessary to eat all that meat? ...

Eric S. Raymond: Well, since you ask, no. But most sex isn't 'necessary', either.

Nice comeback, but he could have gone further, and I'm not even talking about the absurd notion that eating meat is unhealthy.

Man is an integrated being of mind and body, and mere physical survival is not the same thing as living a life proper to man. Pleasurable activities like sex -- including some that are risky or dangerous if performed carelessly or to excess -- are necessary to an enjoyable, properly human, life. I recently found someone make this same basic point very succinctly at Objectivism Online about smoking, of all things. (The first two words also very economically yank the discussion into its proper context: i.e., What is philosophy for?)

Pokarrin: ... I'm a smoker, which I know for a fact does not advance any possible purpose I might choose for my life...

Tito: Oh really? ... [I]f you enjoy the occasional cigarette, and don't mind running the risk of a slightly shorter life because of it (Though the risks of occasional 'casual' smoking are overblown by just about everyone) then by all means smoke. If it adds no value to your life, and you just do it because of some irrational chemical craving, then just who are you trying to fool?

You could make exactly the same point about any number of other hobbies or activities. And with that, having survived anaesthesia and surgery last week, I move on towards the next stage of fixing a nearly life-long mouth problem...

Cheers!

-- CAV

PS: Via email, Martin Lindeskog has informed me that he is soliciting links for a new enjoyment-themed blog carnival.

Updates

Today: (1) Corrected some typos and formatting glitches. (2) Linked to Tito's Blog and ARL entry on happiness. (3) Added PS about new blog carnival.

Quick Roundup 484

2009-11-19T05:55:00.012-06:00

Israeli Oath-Fakers

Pursuant to a recent post of mine on the so-called "Oath Keepers," who advocate mutiny by the military and the police as a means of "protecting" the Constitution, it is noteworthy that Israel is already suffering from the consequences of a similar direct assault on rule of law:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced concern on Tuesday over a mutiny by pro-settler soldiers that raised fears of more rebellion in the ranks in any future land-for-peace moves with the Palestinians.

The solution to bad laws and foolish policies is to promote better laws and pro-freedom policies, not eroding rule of law.

Paul Hsieh in RCP

I'm late to this party, but still very glad to see that a good, pro-freedom op-ed on the physician slavery debate was linked by RealClear Politics.

Republican Dark Horses

The good news, such as it is, is that there seem to be multiple viable alternatives to Sarah Palin in the GOP. The bad news is that none is terribly exciting, and David Brooks likes John Thune, the first listed.

He doesn't have radical plans to cut the federal leviathan. He just wants to restrain the growth of government to bring deficits down. He doesn't have ambitions to restructure the tax code. He just wants to lift burdens on small business.

Or: He just wants to have his cake and eat it, too.

Sigh.

Happy Birthday, Motown!

According to a blogger at Mental Floss, Motown Records recently turned fifty. The post has several embedded YouTube videos of its author's favorite Motown classics.

Real gentlemen don't scream, "Bitch!"

Nor do they feel the need to self-apply the label, "gentleman."

This magazine piece and this blog post can be thought of as snaggletoothed, inbred descendants at the end of the line of Whitaker Chambers' non-review of Atlas Shrugged at National Review. Even some of the sympathetic commenters at the blog post could see that these weren't really about Rand or the intellectual movement she started.

The high point of the blog posting comes when Barry Ritholtz easily gets backed into a corner by a commenter who hasn't even read Rand. Ritholtz does all he can do: dare him to call his bluff. "You should definitely read Atlas shrugged [sic] and than make up your own mind." Yes. Please do that, Kimble.

It's getting to where anyone who writes such tripe might as well spare himself some effort by appending a "Kick me!" sign to his posterior at the beginning of the day. (HT: Brad Harper)

Objectivist Roundups

Some time while I was under the knife or loopy from painkillers, Rational Jenn hosted last week's Objectivist Roundup. I believe C. August will host this week's edition.

As an interesting aside, this morning I googled "Polian Godboy" and saw that Rational Jenn had hit the 75,000 site vist mark. Congratulations to her!

Submarining is scary.

Hehhh-yep!

To Serve Man

Insert your favorite altruism-as-cannibalism joke here, tie it in to Barack Obama's desire to control the Census Bureau and his newfound concern with public debt, and then fill in your new census long-form questionnaire here. I scored seven.

Memo to Barack Obama: Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was a satire. This, my short version, is also a satire. I only mean the take home message, "Eat me!" figuratively.

-- CAV

Why They Trust

2009-11-18T08:54:00.004-06:00

Stephen Bourque makes some incisive commentary about a recent change in the government's recommendations on the timing and frequency of breast cancer screening. His post deserves a full read, but one paragraph in particular caught my eye:

It has always amazed me how much trust the general public puts in government recommendations of this sort. The group in this case, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, is characterized as an "independent panel of experts in prevention and private care appointed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services." But what exactly is this group independent of? The implication is that they are independent of individuals and corporations that have a vested interest in the guidelines. However, what the panel is entirely dependent upon for its existence is the federal government, an institution that has absolutely no incentive to meet consumer demands. The panel is independent of responsibility and accountability. [minor format edits]

I suspect that the amazement may be at least partially rhetorical, but it is worth noting where such blind trust originated and considering its full ramifications. The above paragraph reminded me of the following warning from an essay by Alan Greenspan in his better, younger days:

To paraphrase Gresham's Law: bad "protection" drives out good. The attempt to protect the consumer by force undercuts the protection he gets from incentive. First, it undercuts the value of reputation by placing the reputable company on the same basis as the unknown, the newcomer, or the fly-by-nighter. It declares, in effect, that all are equally suspect... Second it grants an automatic (though, in fact, unachievable) guarantee of safety to the products of any company that complies with its arbitrarily set minimum standards. The value of a reputation rested on the fact that it was necessary for the consumers to exercise judgment in the choice of the goods and services they purchased. ... [bold added] ("The Assault on Integrity" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, pp. 119-120)

In other words, over the past few decades, people have become less and less accustomed to acting as their own "consumer watchdogs" even as the government slowly gobbled up larger and larger swaths of the medical and scientific sectors, slowly making the independent advice of scientists to the government less so. Consider this the informational equivalent of the illusory "access" to medical care the Democrats are promising us.

This affects everyone and even confounds the efforts of those of us who are inclined to distrust the government to establish our own opinions on medical matters. For example, at the site Quack Watch is a list of "Twenty-Five Ways to Spot Quacks and Vitamin Pushers." Reading through the list, I noticed that ten of the items on the list (1, 2, 9, 10, 16, 18, 21, 23, 24, and 25) included reliance on the government in some way: e.g., mentioning government nutritional guidelines, alluding to the role of the government in regulating the practice of medicine, or linking to a government web site.

Of course, since the government funds so much research and "educates" so many people about science, the truth is that every single item on the list is affected in some way by government interference in the economy: Both the information under consideration as well as the ability of an average person to evaluate it have often been undermined from the start.

The immediately possible debacle of a government takeover of the medical sector would be a bad enough pit for America to have to have to climb out of, but the truth is that we need only turn around for a moment to see that we are already in another.

-- CAV

Two Hair-Pullers

2009-11-17T08:20:00.008-06:00

Via Glenn Reynolds is a Jennifer Rubin piece that asks the question, "[I]f [Barack Obama's] so smart and well-educated, shouldn't he have come up with something better than the stimulus boondoggle?" She gets frustratingly close to the right answer, but ends up whiffing:

[F]inally, as Ronald Reagan said, "The trouble with our liberal friends isn't that they are ignorant; it is that they know so much that isn't so." In other words, they have a set of views at odds with the way the world operates (meekness will endear us to our enemies, terrorists will be impressed with American legal procedures), the American political scene (the public wanted a lurch to the Left), and basic economic realities (you can load mandates and taxes on employers without impacting employment). These views are a great impediment to a successful presidency.

True enough, but Rubin ends on the following note: "[H]e has time. Maybe with experience, he'll wise up." I'm not so sure about this, because Rubin overlooks the fact that among the ideas one holds are the standards for what constitutes "success."

On the one hand, I applaud Rubin for seeing the importance of ideas in shaping the actions of the President, but on the other, I'm still unsatisfied with the level of analysis. What if Barack Obama's fundamental ideas are telling him that what he's doing is the best way to realize "equality" not only among all Americans, but among all people in the world? No pain, no gain -- and we haven't even gotten around to asking whether Obama sees suffering as a good thing, as many Christians do. Maybe he thinks the pain is the gain.

Conservatives who happen by here should not dismiss me for nit-picking. One need only open the digital pages of City Journal to see altruism/collectivism infecting even their own ranks. Luigi Zingales, attempting to argue for small government, seems to think that our government should be in the business of addressing income disparities, of all things!

Though American GDP has doubled in real terms over the last 25 years, median real income has grown by only 17 percent. While the richest 1 percent of the population has almost tripled its real income and the richest 0.01 percent has more than quintupled it, the bottom 10 percent has increased its income by only 12 percent.

So what? If the government didn't meddle with my personal choices and have its hands in my pockets all the time, I'd be thrilled to have any kind of income increase. Bill Gates hasn't picked my pocket or broken my leg if he is a trillionaire instead of a billionaire -- assuming, of course, he earned it rather than having been handed loot by the government.

Zingales goes on to praise "Republican" Theodore Roosevelt for creating the FDA and trust-busting. This he does on the way to counseling that, rather than, "give these poorer citizens entitlements disguised as rights," like the Democrats, the Republicans "should focus on providing" welfare state programs of their own disguised as "opportunities."

What's going on here? Rubin naively assumes that Obama has the same pro-prosperity goals she has, and Zingales seems to think that his goal of small government is compatible with egalitarianism. Why?

Because neither sees morality as having anything to do with life. Rubin's tack is that Obama will eventually see the "impracticality" of his idealism and back off on his destructive agenda. She underestimates the power of Obama's ideas to guide his actions. Zingales, on the other hand, fails to see the power of his own altruism (an apparently "compassionate" conservatism) to turn his enthusiasm for small government on its head and, in the process, transmogrify him into a "Democrat lite."

I strongly suspect that both hold an altruistic moral code and see morality as a matter of duty. On such a score, Ayn Rand made the following profound observation:

In order to make the choices required to achieve his goals, a man needs the constant, automatized awareness of the principle which the anti-concept "duty" has all but obliterated in his mind: the principle of causality--specifically, of Aristotelian final causation (which, in fact, applies only to a conscious being), i.e., the process by which an end determines the means, i.e., the process of choosing a goal and taking the actions necessary to achieve it. ("Causality Versus Duty," in Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 98)

Conversely, a means causally incompatible with an end will fail to lead to that end. Altruism does not inform political choices (i.e., the selection of means) that lead to the protection of individual rights, whose purpose is to enable men to live for their own sake.

Thus, to the extent that one's goal is altruism or egalitarianism, that end (and not individual rights) will guide his actions and his thoughts, meaning it will obliterate his ability to make use of his intelligence for the means of furthering his own life. And further, to the extent that one's goal is freedom, that end will be frustrated by the means of achieving altruistic or collectivist goals.

In the political sphere, this means that one will regard individual freedom (and the economic prosperity that follows from it) only as means to that end (if that), and not as the proper end of government. The result will be that one will fail to see the danger of those more consistent than oneself, and that freedom will fall by the wayside when it frustrates egalitarianism.

This is why Jennifer Rubin underestimates Barack Obama's effective stupidity and Luigi Zingales fails to offer a real alternative to same.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Corrected a typo. (2) Added a word in clarification (HT: Cogito).

Quick Roundup 483

2009-11-16T06:43:00.010-06:00

Brothers, you asked for it!

Reader Dismuke emails a link detailing the fact that Venezuela's equivalent of Fox News is now the only media outlet that is reporting the widespread discontent of the supporters of its equivalent of Barack Obama upon experiencing its equivalent of "hope and change" on their own hides.

Extrapolating to how such a scenario would play out here, Dismuke comments rightly that:

[T]he discontent of such people [won't] do us much good. One, such people are discontented even when times are good. Two, they will just complain that "socialism is not being applied here" - (replacing the forbidden S-word with something along the lines of "fairness" or "change") in hopes that Obama himself might be watching and make the corrupt officials destroying his vision accountable. They are too stupid, of course, to know that socialism IS being applied and that that is the source of all their complaints. They will stand by Chavez and they will stand by Obama no matter what - because both are against "The Man."

Such is the nature of the dictator fantasy when a large proportion of the body politic is afflicted.

The government's postal service is also in upheaval. Workers carp that their rights are being trampled upon, saying that "socialism is not being applied here." Unions are being harassed and so they are sending a message to "Comrade Hugo Chávez" ... in case he's watching Globovisión. The union leader interviewed rues that all media has been invited, but only Globovisión came, bitterly singling out a State media that won't air their views.

News flash: If Chavez watches very much of this and doesn't understand the value of letting his idiot supporters blow off steam once in a while, Globovision gets shut down.

Nobody will save Venezuela from Hugo Chavez but the people of Venezuela.

Making a Virtue out of a Consequence

With sporadic food shortages already occurring due to his price controls and high inflation, it should come as no surprise that Hugo "Kip's Ma" Chavez is mobilizing his underlings for a national "battle of the bulge:"

Chavez suggested rice pasta instead of spaghetti made from wheat, and recommended drinking soy milk, saying soy products help fight aging.

Translation: The upcoming food shortages are for your own good.

For anyone who hasn't read Atlas Shrugged yet -- and so doesn't feel deja vu any time he follows the news or know who "Kip's Ma" is:

Emma Chalmers, better known as Kip's Ma, was an old sociologist who had hung about Washington for years, as other women of her age and type hang about barrooms. For some reason which nobody could define, the death of her son in the tunnel catastrophe had given her in Washington an aura of martyrdom, heightened by her recent conversion to Buddhism. "The soy-bean is a much more sturdy, nutritious and economical plant than all the extravagant foods which our wasteful, self-indulgent diet has conditioned us to expect," Kip's Ma had said over the radio; her voice always sounded as if it were falling in drops, not of water, but of mayonnaise. "Soybeans make an excellent substitute for bread, meat, cereals and coffee--and if all of us were compelled to adopt soybeans as our staple diet, it would solve the national food crisis and make it possible to feed more people. The greatest food for the greatest number--that's my slogan. At a time of desperate public need, it's our duty to sacrifice our luxurious tastes and eat our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to [this] simple, wholesome foodstuff..." (862)

Depending on my mood, I find such parallels somewhere between amusing and depressing. For comic relief, I can offer only the man-crush of long-time Chavez idol Fidel Castro on Barack Obama.

Then and Now

Scott Johnson of Power Line says just about all that needs saying about the following pair of photographs:

"Ashamed of his country but arrogant about himself--what a disgusting combination."

Who Watches the Watchers? (Part 5,084,631)

In response to several recent major accidents occurring on government-run transit systems, President Obama has reconsidered the idea that only government officials disinterested in personal gain can assure us of our safety and has decided to align the profit motive with passenger safety once and for all. Right?

Wrong again:

The federal government would police safety on subway and light-rail systems after a series of deaths and injuries in accidents, a Department of Transportation official said, citing an Obama administration plan.

He's concerned about my safety just like he's only a tall guy shaking hands with the Japanese Emperor above.

And a Message for Newt (and Sarah)

Just in case anyone doubts my recent reading of the electoral tea leaves, some new poll data from South Carolina backs it up:

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham's public support is collapsing in South Carolina -- driven by a wholesale revolt among the GOP electorate and a steady erosion of his support amongst independents.

Jennifer Rubin adds:

This contradicts the favorite narrative of Democrats and their media handmaidens, namely that in order to stay relevant, Republicans must compromise with Obama, move leftward, and adopt policies at odds with conservative principles. It turns out that doing so alienates not only Republican voters but also independents, who themselves are not enamored of Obama's leftist agenda.

All I can add to the above is (1) to include "Newt Gingrich" with "Democrats and their media handmaidens," and (2) to note that Lindsey Graham is also a social conservative.

I guess (again) that this means that the public does not see theocracy as a desirable "alternative" to socialism, either.

An Interesting Startup

Although I have done pretty well adapting to a car-free life in the Northeast, an interesting startup may save me lots of time and money yet. I live across the street from a grocer, but still find that I occasionally have to hop on the T or check out a ZipCar for occasional purchases of household goods.

But then I read about an interesting startup called Alice while flying home from a surgery last week.

Consumer packaged goods like toothpaste, toilet paper, and trash bags are a $1 trillion industry, but less than 1 percent of it is online. After Microsoft purchased our last venture, Jellyfish, my partner Brian Wiegand and I started wondering how we could change that. That’s when we came up with Alice.

Aside from groceries, which it doesn't really make sense for me to order online, I've moved to buying almost everything else online. As soon as my household goods purchase list builds up just a little more, I'm giving Alice a try. If this works as well as it sounds, that's another three-hour chore or two per month I can kiss goodbye.

-- CAV

Soccer

2009-11-13T07:34:00.004-06:00

Soccer was just catching on in my part of the country when I was growing up, and as a result, I started playing only at the age of eleven or twelve. This meant that although it was too late for me to become especially good at the game, I did develop an appreciation for it.

I don't follow the game religiously, but I do keep an eye on how the US National team is doing, follow the World Cup every four years, and occasionally will watch an English Premier League game when I find a pub -- like the Richmond Arms in Houston -- that makes a point of showing them live.

So I was pleased to see the national team finish first in the North American/Caribbean qualification tournament for the 2010 World Cup, and hope to see -- dare I say, look forward to seeing -- it fare better than it did in 2006. (Ugh. Looking back into the archives, I see that a draw with Italy was the high point of that one...) I hear that the team has a more challenging schedule of friendlies leading up to the tournament this time, so between that and the team having no other direction to go, I am cautiously optimistic.

In any event, the game brings back fond memories of my youth, as did three videos I found recently, which present the good, the bad, and the ugly of soccer: amazing goals, goalkeeper blunders, and own goals.

I'm posting the video of goalkeeper blunders here because it reminds me of my favorite goal. My brother's team and mine were playing against each other once, and I was playing halfback as usual at the time. His team was controlling play most of the time, to the point that their goalkeeper thought it would be cute to sit down at one end of his goal.

I eventually noticed this and so, the next time I got the ball, I shot on goal from midfield and enjoyed watching their keeper scurry to his feet and miss the ball, which sailed in untouched and stretched the net on the opposite side of the goal. I also enjoyed seeing him standing up and acting like a goalkeeper for the rest of the game. (With that in mind, it should be easy to guess which of the above is my favorite goalkeeper blunder.)

-- CAV

(Non-)Buyer's Remorse

2009-11-12T06:45:00.004-06:00

A friend from Houston emailed me a link to an article titled, "Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw," at Forbes. Its author, Sramana Mitra, grew up in pre-liberalization India, and once:

... embraced Ayn Rand as the one who best articulated a philosophy that rang true to my naturally entrepreneurial mind. Capitalism, meritocracy, individualism, self-correcting market economics, innovation, excellence, integrity, fairness, work-ethic, justice--many of the values that I worship are also those that Rand celebrates in her fiction through her unforgettable characters.

Fair enough: Ms. Mitra no longer "embraces" Ayn Rand. At least she admits what many libertarians and a self-proclaimed "Objectivist" here and there will not. I'll give her that much.

But I have an interesting question to ask. Did Mitra ever embrace Rand in the sense of fully grasping her philosophy on the inductive level? Based on her description of that philosophy and her reasons for rejecting it, I think the answer is: No.

In her next paragraph, Mitra complains that the "flaws" she now sees with her "deeper understanding of how capitalism works today" are unlikely to "correct themselves." Already, there are several flags. While it is true that capitalism is self-correcting (more on this shortly), this is an economic description of what happens under capitalism, and is neither fundamental to grasping the nature of capitalism nor even for making a case for it. (It is also worth noting here that there is no capitalist economy in the world today: Mixtures of free market elements and state controls are properly called, "mixed economies.")

Capitalism, as Ayn Rand herself put it, is, "a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights..." Its justification lies in the fact that for man, the rational animal, to survive and prosper, he needs to be able to profit from the use of his own mind and trade with others. The only system that gives him the opportunity to do so is capitalism. All other systems involve the forcible transfer of wealth, and so are ultimately not conducive to man's survival. Implicit in the recognition that one must be free from threats and harm from others is the acknowledgment that nobody else owes one a living.

It is this last fact that Mitra loses sight of as she builds her case for rejecting the philosophy of Ayn Rand and, with it, capitalism. She starts out talking about self-correction in the field of venture capital and even gives a succinct outline of how that market self-corrects: "Investors and limited partners come to realize that funds are not performing, and they pull the plug on them. Non-performing funds die, those that do well survive, new funds crop up..."

Mitra gets the problems with the auto industry partially right, although she should have mentioned the government's role in setting up GM's failure, from putting its muscle behind the labor unions to distorting the automobile market via such measures as fuel efficiency regulations. Nevertheless, she does at least refuse to stand behind the government bailout of GM. Whether GM fully "deserved" to go bankrupt (or would have even gotten to such a brink under actual capitalism) is an interesting question that Mitra leaves unasked.

It is when she discusses banks, however, that a fundamental flaw in Mitra's grasp of Objectivism becomes readily apparent. Mitra complains that the behavior of "looters" and the government's response to same has resulted in, shall we call it, a "cycle of economic violence."

The government has intervened to save many of them, and now, these bailed out banks want to hand out billions in bonuses to their non-performing employees. Capitalism gave way to welfare economics, and now the government has to intervene further to limit these looters from behaving badly by imposing taxes and regulations. A whole messy cycle that brings me to the core "bug" in the system that Rand once sold me on...

Mitra neglects the government's role in setting up the current economic mess, but that is actually not the fundamental point at which she goes wrong. Here is where she goes wrong:

[T]here is another less obvious bug in capitalism that I don't believe regulation can quite handle. It is the fundamental flaw that our celebrated system rewards speculators much more than creators. A relatively junior hedge-fund manager or a bond trader on Wall Street makes a great deal more money in his career than Charles Kao, who invented the basic physics making optical communication a reality. Dr. Kao, now 73, won the Nobel Prize this year, but his net worth would not compare favorably with that of George Soros.

Yet, who added the real value? Soros or Kao?

Mitra answers (b), apparently failing to notice that "(c) both" is an option, which blows my mind coming as it does from a entrepreneur, and one who has studied Ayn Rand to boot.

Implicit in the question of value, as Mitra may recall, is the question of a value-er. Kao identified facts of reality in physics, but these facts were and would remain value-less to large numbers of people were they left undiscovered, unpublicized, and unapplied. True, Kao discovered some things, many beyond the abilities or determination of most people to grasp.

But how would any inventor or scientist offer anything of value to the general public? He'd have to build a prototype, manufacture a product, and sell it. For all of these steps, the inventor has to convince others that his idea has enough merit that the man on the street will eventually be receptive enough to pay for it out of his own pocket. This is no trivial proposition! (I'm sure Orville and Wilbur Wright endured plenty of ridicule for tinkering around with airplanes in their time...)

All of the steps from discovering a theory to implementing it in marketable ways require information about things such as business, intellectual property law, and markets that few scientists are likely to have, and sums of money, which few scientists will have had time away from their studies to earn. The errors in his political thinking aside (and assuming, arguendo, that Soros's fortune comes only from sources actually possible under laissez-faire), individuals like George Soros are rare indeed: They combine financial resources with business knowledge (or the ability to locate needed business knowledge) and make it available where it might not otherwise be.

Nobody owes anyone else a living. That includes John Galt when he needs a means to market his famous motor and Midas Mulligan when he needs a productive way to invest capital he has sitting around doing nothing.

The fact that Soros is richer than Kao or (to use a better example) a Mulligan is usually richer than a Galt -- under capitalism -- is not a flaw, but a consequence of a virtue of capitalism: Division of labor, which is what allows someone good at finance to work in finance and someone good at theoretical physics to work at theoretical physics. The reason a financier will generally be wealthier than a great physicist is because, generally, a financier is better able to offer more value to more people at any given moment than a physicist. (For example, he can offer the same kind of help to a chemist, a biologist, and a tinkerer in a garage, while the physicist either has a marketable idea or he does not.)

Mitra's former idol, Ayn Rand, was famous for invoking the phrase, "Check your premises." It sounds like Mitra would do well to consider that advice before condemning her apparently unexamined purchase as defective.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 482

2009-11-11T05:00:00.002-06:00

I like to stop by the web site of computer programmer/venture capitalist Paul Graham from time to time because he'll occasionally post essays there. He covers a wide variety of topics, always insightfully.

Conveniently for me, I haven't been making it there as often as I'd like to lately, so this week's mess of traveling afforded me an excellent opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: (1) Catch up on his site. (2) Write up a blog post ahead of time during a flight.

So call this installment "The Paul Graham Edition," if you like, ...

... but don't call it "6 Things by Paul Graham!"

I found Graham's take on what he calls a "degenerate case of essay" quite interesting, although I'm not sure that I agree with calling it that, and not all of what he says about "The List of N Things" applies to the "Quick Roundup" feature of my blog.

The greatest weakness of the list of n things is that there's so little room for new thought. The main point of essay writing, when done right, is the new ideas you have while doing it. A real essay, as the name implies, is dynamic: you don't know what you're going to write when you start. It will be about whatever you discover in the course of writing it.

If you do grant the premise that such a list is a degenerate essay for a moment, or at least concede that many teachers treat essays like lists, though, you see that he makes a valuable points about pedagogy for beginning and experienced writers alike.

Determination

In attempting to understand why some startups succeed and others fail, Graham concludes that "the most likely predictor of success is determination" and comes up with an "Anatomy of Determination."

If determination is so important, can we isolate its components? Are some more important than others? Are there some you can cultivate?

His answer is interesting and pertains to why Julius Caesar considered thin men dangerous!

The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

No! I'm not planning on jumping into that pool any time soon, but this older essay has something worthwhile for anyone with plans for bigger and better things.

Mind or Body?

Graham makes some good points about writing as an exploratory process versus writing as a means of persuasion, but I must emphatically disagree with the endorsement of the mind-body dichotomy implicit in his use of the technospeak term “xor” in the title of his essay and confirmed in this passage.

... I'd rather offend people than pander to them, and if you write about controversial topics you have to choose one or the other.

This is a direct result of the author's acceptance, at one or more levels of the philosophical hierarchy, that reason is not man's means of cognition, or at least a cynical rejection of the premise that most people can be open to reason.

I think that etiquette can be perfectly rational, and that there is a difference between politeness and pandering to irrationality.

Incidentally, the term "xor" reminds me of a gramatical pet peeve: the term "and/or." "Or" already means "and/or" by default.

And Speaking of Pet Peeves...

I'm in the Paul Graham's "amen corner" regarding the Segway:

If they'd had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they'd have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I'm sure, but they didn't have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.

Oh, and you can count me in Maddox's amen corner, too.

"Post-Medium" Publishing

What opportunities does the world of publishing hold for writers?

The reason I've been writing about existing forms is that I don't know what new forms will appear. But though I can't predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser.

The business, at least in how it has been traditionally run, looks like it's between the rock of bankruptcy and the hard place of government bailouts to me. At least this is something to go on.

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on November 11, 2009.

Updates

Today: Fixed links.

A New Anti-Concept?

2009-11-10T06:57:00.002-06:00

Switching planes at Washington National Airport yesterday, I was surprised to find printed copies of Politico in a waiting area. Until then, I had thought it was strictly a web publication. Needless to say, I took a copy and thumbed through it during takeoff.

Within was an installment of a feature called "Arena Digest" titled, "Should GOP worry about tea parties?" I found the following comment by law professor Sherrilyn Ifill interesting:

Tea party conservatism is a help to the image of the Republican Party as an opposition party in a time of Democratic control of the White House and Congress. That's great for TV appearances. But tea party conservatism is a hazard for Republicans seeking a return to power because the kind of anger, vitriol and take-no-prisoners tactics of tea partyism is not a recipe for electoral success or for governing. A majority of Americans still want leaders who want to, and can, actually govern -- that means talking to people across the aisle, compromise, counting votes and advancing policies that bring positive results in the lives of constituents. Tea partyism is not a set of governing ideas. It's a nonstop protest against whatever is the status quo. Unless tea partyism can lose its fringe sensibilities and have as a central animating principle the idea of governance and not just protest, it will never return Republicans to power. To the contrary, it will continue to function as a barrier to "governance" Republican[s], who are the only hope and future of a party that has lost its way.

"Governance Republicans," eh? I've never heard big government Republicans called that before, but Ifill's comment did remind me that I have seen the term "governance" used by certain big-government conservatives here and there. (See David Brooks for a particularly sickening example.) Furthermore, I recall the usage always being in ways that seemed to mildly suggest that the government ought to be running our lives, while at the same time, not putting it quite so bluntlyl. The dictionary gives an ambiguous pair of definitions, and Wikipedia suggests I could be right to be suspicious of the term.

In any event, Ifill is half-right, half-wrong. She corrrectly identifies the Tea Party Movement as a somewhat blind rebellion in need of intellectual leadership, but speaks as if she is oblivious to the idea that laissez faire could be a viable political philosophy. Indeed, she even seems to equate it with anarchism up to and including imagining the same angry type of spirit that animates the anarchist running amok within that movement.

If I am correct that the term "governance" is (or is being used as) an anti-concept, then it would appear to serve mainly to obliterate the proper concept of a government that solely protects individual rights and replace it with statism. As the Tea Party movement evolves, so are its opponents, who are smearing capitalism even before the tea partiers themselves fully realize that that is their natural goal.

-- CAV

Pelosi's Betrayal

2009-11-09T10:47:00.002-06:00

As this leg of my travels draws to a close, I connect to the Internet just long enough to see that Nancy Pelosi scraped together just enough votes to ram an unread, 1900-page physician slavery bill through the House of Representatives during the night on Saturday.

History will not be kind to Pelosi or to Barack Obama. Their unpopular, immoral, impractical, and anti-American effort will fail in its stated goal whether or not it passes. Whether they are quickly forgotten or achieve lasting infamy as traitors depends only on whether it finally becomes law.

But neither the health of the American people, nor our gratitude, nor even perpetual political power suffice to explain the motives of the reptilian Pelosi. Even the last is too clean and innocent to explain her.

Nancy Pelosi is an egalitarian to the core, and the simple fact that some people in America can have good health, when others do not, or even that Americans generally have the best medical care in the world, rankles her, and not because there are some who lack medical care.

She does not simply feel that the good fortune of some people in the world is morally wrong; she hates America for this and intends to cure the problem once and for all, our actual health, our considered judgment, and her continued hold on power be damned. She's holding a dagger and sees a bare back.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo.

Traveling Man

2009-11-06T22:17:00.002-06:00

Already having a pair of out-of-state trips scheduled for the week, I suddenly have had to add a third this evening -- between the other two -- due to unforeseen circumstances.

I think I'll be able to post a little bit during that time, but I am not completely sure. If you don't hear from me much (or at all) until next Thursday, that would be why.

I found the above reggae song while looking for this other Dennis Brown classic, but find since I find it more apropos and actually embedding one such (non-)video is my limit, it gets the nod.

Hit "play," open a new tab, and enjoy!

I'll be back soon.

-- CAV

Marrakech Lamb Stew

2009-11-06T07:17:00.009-06:00

This is my version of the Moroccan lamb stew I mentioned about a month ago when I wrote about cooking as a hobby and posted a recipe for Chicken Tikka Masala that always turns out really well. LB had fellow "Rearden Metal Chef" SB make that and wrote back that they enjoyed it. (Actually, based on what I've read, I suspect that he's a far better cook than I am.) At the time, LB expressed interest in hearing about this stew some time, so here it is with the following caveat: This is my first time to present a recipe I may still tinker with. (I have a couple of others -- a Greek cinnamon stewed chicken and a chicken curry casserole -- like this on the backburner, too, but neither is as close to being set in stone.)

I would say that the recipe as I present it here is good, but it is not as good as the Chicken Tikka Masala for the following mildly frustrating reason: While it's fine right after I make it, the leftovers are far superior in flavor, to the point that I wonder whether I should incorporate a new step like the following into the recipe. "Mix with rice and refrigerate overnight. Microwave and serve." I'll probably end up doing that or perhaps see whether making it in a crock pot helps. The flavors evidently need to meld or mature. That said, it certainly smells great while I'm cooking it.

So, without further ado, I present my version of this Marrakech Lamb Stew. Aside from my usual rewrite for ease of execution, my changes were to: halve the amount of rice, double the amount of almonds (and stir them in after crushing them), double the amount of beef stock, use only one turnip, and add dates. (This Middle Eastern/Saharan dish already includes fruit, so why not?) It worked well with either a 50/50 mix of lamb and beef or all lamb meat. It would probably be okay with all beef, but since lamb has a distinctive flavor, I think it wouldn't be quite as good.

-- CAV

***

Marrakech Lamb Stew

Preparation Time is 75 minutes.

Ingredients (List: mls)

beef bouillon cubes, 2
salt, 1 tsp
cinnamon, 1/4 tsp
cumin, 1 tsp
coriander, 1 tsp
cloves, 1 tsp
turmeric, 1 tsp
cayenne pepper, 1/2 tsp
nutmeg, 1 pinch
allspice, 1 pinch
boneless lamb or beef, 1.5 lb
olive oil, 2 tbsp + 1 tsp
onion, large white
minced garlic, 2 tsp
carrots, 5 medium
stewed tomatoes, 1 can
turnip, 1 medium
potato, 1 medium
chickpeas, cooked, 1 can
prunes, pitted, 1 cup (16-20)
dates, pitted, 1 cup (16-20)
raisins, 1/2 cup (about one small box)
parsley, chopped, 2 tbsp
rice or couscous, 2 cups
almonds, slivered, 4 tbsp

Directions

1. In parallel with the nest few steps, bring 2 cups water for broth to boil, dissolve beef bouillon cubes, remove from heat and cover.

2. Measure salt and spices (except parsley) and set aside in bowl.

3. In parallel with step 4, prepare the meat: If necessary, thaw and chop meat into bite-sized pieces. Heat 2 tbsp oil in large soup pot, brown meat in batches and set aside.

4. Chop onion and set aside in bowl with garlic.

5. In parallel with step 5, stir onion and garlic into meat drippings and sauté until translucent and tender.

6. In parallel with steps 5 and 7, chop carrots, turnip, and potatoes. Set chopped items aside in bowl (if still sautéing onions) or add to pot (if cooking stew).

7. Return meat to pot. Add carrots, tomatoes, turnips, potato, broth, and spices and bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat and simmer 40 minutes.

8. In parallel with step 8, toast and crush the almonds.

Heat 1 tsp olive oil in a small skillet.
Add almonds, and cook over moderate heat while stirring constantly, until golden brown (about 5 minutes).
Transfer the almonds to a plate and allow them to cool.
Place cooled almonds in plastic bag. Crush with knife handle or rolling pin.

9. Chop and, if necessary, separate pits from prunes. Set prunes and raisins aside.

10. In parallel with the remainder of step 7, prepare rice or couscous.

11. Stir in chickpeas, dried fruit, and almonds. Cover and cook about 10 minutes more.

12. Stir in parsley.

13. Serve on a bed of couscous or rice.

Notes

1. To carry on the theme, serve with olives and warm pita bread--and for dipping, add some good olive oil, baba ganoush and/or hummus.

Quick Roundup 481

2009-11-05T07:19:00.005-06:00

The Houston Tunnel System

Over at Live Oaks, Brian Phillips discusses one of Houston's hidden jewels, its privately owned and operated downtown tunnel system.

The tunnel is essentially an underground mall with restaurants, retail stores, doctors, and other services available for downtown workers. The system also allows pedestrians to travel from building to building without confronting traffic, rain, or heat. These amenities have become so important to downtown workers that new buildings downtown consider it crucial to connect to the system.

As he correctly points out, the success of the tunnel system demonstrates the falsehood of the common argument that we need the government to coordinate major infrastructure projects.

His post reminds me of a similar favorite triumph of capitalism from Houston's history: Its swift and painless finishing-off of desegregation. The idea that the government has to do everything big in scale or importance is wrong, and is only as viable as it is because the government has a stranglehold on so many areas of our lives. Such an extent and ubiquity of control starves the imaginations of ordinary people (including some advocates of capitalism) through want of positive examples.

Intellectual ammunition takes many forms, and one of them is concrete examples of proper abstract ideas put into practice. Head on over to Live Oaks and stock up!

Objectivist Roundup

And speaking of intellectual ammuntion, there's some more over at Noodle Food.

How Not to Oppose Government Controls

Don Watkins on "Net Neutrality:"

A proper critique of net neutrality would reject ... the notion that the Internet is some collective product of society's that "consumers" have the right to dispose of however they choose. It would recognize that the Internet is, in fact, the product of voluntary associations between millions of individuals and companies, all of whom have the right to use their private property as they see fit. It would recognize that an Internet Service Provider has a right to manage its network according to its own judgment, and that its only power is the power to offer willing customers a service more valuable than its competitors. A proper critique of net neutrality would say that the government has no right to place shackles on the Internet, and that its only legitimate function is to protect Internet freedom.

The example of "opposition" to Net Neutrality Watkins quotes has to be read to be believed.

Perkins on Libertarianism vs. Objectivism

With the unprecedented popularity of Ayn Rand's work and the equally unprecedented effort by libertarians from all over to crawl out of the woodwork to parasitize her, short, sweet examples of the difference are worth keeping in mind. Greg Perkins provides just such an example.

[T]he libertarian framework fails to capture crucial differences. Consider a powerful government that performs all and only its proper functions in the defense of man's rights, and one that happens to have all the same laws and institutions but also has, say, conscription on the books just in case war breaks out. These two governments are all but indistinguishable (and neither is smiled on) in the libertarians' basic classification scheme based on size. But Objectivists see these two as moral opposites because one is committed to the essential task of the defense of man's rights and the other is not. Even though not currently violating any rights, the government with conscription laws clearly rejects the key principle of the field. It has no principled defense against the slippery slope to serfdom we've seen play out in history all too many times.

The libertarian approach is fundamentally anarchic, which means that libertarianism ultimately smiles on you getting attacked, defrauded or killed -- so long as the crimes aren't committed by a government. Libertarians won't admit this in words in part because their anti-principled approach makes it hard for them to see the point. Nevertheless, it is amazingly easy to catch them evading the point once you point it out.

That said, I know from personal experience that not all libertarians are so far gone that they can't be convinced to abandon that anti-freedom movement, but such individuals are rare.

-- CAV

Loser Takes All

2009-11-04T07:28:00.011-06:00

The "off-off-year" elections went about as well as one could expect: The American people essentially rejected both of last year's presidential candidates. Glenn Reynolds offers what I think is a pretty good overall integration of how voters probably weighed local concerns and discontent with a far-left Congress and Obama Administration:

All politics is local, they say, and Tuesday's off-off-year elections certainly had their local angles. Jon Corzine has been a terrible governor even by the undemanding standards of terribly governed New Jersey. Creigh Deeds, though he looked good to Democratic Party recruiters not long ago, turned out to be an undistinguished campaigner, more driven by the concerns of Washington Post editorialists than of Virginia voters. And NY-23 Republican nomineee Dede Scozzafava was a bizarre choice, bizarre enough to inspire a seemingly quixotic third-party run by Doug Hoffman.

Reynolds rightly notes later that, "[I]f [Obama] were the political marvel he was thought to be, these races wouldn't have been contests, but walkovers. So one consequence of this Election Day is the end of his special political magic." Reynolds sees Obama's problem as part-agenda and part-competence.

Maybe so, but I find myself both dubious and ambivalent about the latter. First, Obama's agenda, being demonstrably bad for America, will masquerade somewhat as incompetence to the extent that he can enact it. This will both magnify the problem he has with inexperience (that Reynolds notes) and make it too easy to excuse his actual policy failures: I shudder to imagine a future Democrat President reintroducing the Obama agenda and, thanks to this perception of ineptitude, getting away with an assertion like, "Obama was incompetent. Socialism will work this time." Second, to the extent that Obama really is incompetent, I find this mostly a relief since he spends much more time trying to re-shape America than doing his actual job, anyway.

Reynolds' short-term prognosis is that there isn't any longer any steam behind the locomotive of that train Obama keeps trying to herd us all onto: "It'll be politics as usual from now on, and we can thank Obama, at least, for making politics-as-usual seem not so bad after all ..." I hope he's right in the short term, but wrong in the long term. Politics-as-usual hasn't looked so good in a long time, but since "politics-as-usual" means a mixed economy, and mixed economies trend towards dictatorship, America is going to have to reject "politics-as-usual" sooner or later.

Fortunately, NY-23, where Bill Owens became the first Democrat to win in over a century yesterday, offers some hope that Americans are waking up to this idea. Recall that Newt Gingrich lost his argument that the Republicans should run as "Democrats Lite," to Sarah Palin when many Republicans started backing the Conservative Party candidate in that election.

It would appear, though, based on the huge Republican margin in that district reflected in the seven previous elections, that Sarah Palin also lost her (Reaganesque) argument -- that a little bit of theocracy is okay with the American voter -- last night. Doug Hoffman mixes a small government economic outlook -- which should have been a sure winner -- with a very socially-conservative one that I, for one, find completely unacceptable. Eric Scheie expresses similar "misgivings" on Hoffman and adds:

Perhaps the voters had had it with all the national hype, and finally decided they'd rather just vote for a Democrat who said he was a Democrat rather than be dragged against their will into a much-hyped "referendum" on a "bloody Republican civil war" they never asked to fight.

That kind of exhaustion, too, should tell the Republicans something: Just because Americans don't want the government's hands in their wallets doesn't mean they do want to let the government back into their bedrooms. Or, as one blogger memorably put it, "Your rights end where my pockets begin."

I think Scheie is premature to ask whether this was, as his post title put it, a possible "victory for laissez-faire," but that (or at least progress towards it) is what was missing from the ballot. It will be a long time before Americans have that option, but the time for "moral suasion" as our nation's first anti-slavery movement called it, does appear to be ripe for advocates of individual rights. (Ayn Rand called this "intellectual activism.")

Yes, it is good news that this election possibly represents a big loss of momentum for the Democrats, but that last is even better news. In terms of the ballot choices, there was no way for Americans to win politically last night. So we did the next best thing: we stalled for time instead.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 480

2009-11-03T07:44:00.008-06:00

Hsieh on ObamaCare

Another masterful piece by Paul Hsieh at Pajamas Media exposes ObamaCare as the dangerous threat to our well-being that it is. This time, he notes its similarity to a plan already in place in the Bay State, and where such a plan is inexorably headed: rationing.

[One proposed cost-control measure] would also create a dangerous incentive for physicians and hospitals to render as little care as possible. Under the Massachusetts proposal, if your care costs less than your annual allotment, then the providers would keep the unused portion. If your care costs more, then the difference would come out of their pockets. Such a system thus pits your doctor's interests against your own.

Read the whole thing, and don't forget to spread the word.

A Bestiary of Office Second-Handers

Dustin Wax of Life Hack calls them "vampires," quite appropriately. Then he packs the garlic and takes you on a guided tour loaded with information on how to dispatch four kinds of them quickly so they can't suck away your time and mental energy.

Fortunately, the detail demon is easily dispatched. Like the time-sucking fiend, under no circumstances give the detail demon any control over your time! Instead, ask them to write up an itemized list of their concerns and email it to you (or otherwise deliver it) so you can review them thoroughly. Since most of their concerns will not matter much, you can usually just give them a simple "go ahead" on the changes they suggest; anything of actual importance they bring up actually does need to be addressed, so they've just saved you some time! Turning the vampire's power against them -- that's ninja-level stuff!

He calls the first type on his list the "time-sucking fiend," but this label really applies to all of them, as does the general advice he gives there: "[D]ealing with the time-sucking fiend relies on powerful boundaries -- and ... you can only count on yourself to maintain those boundaries." The trick is to use tactics appropriate to the type of situation to set and maintain those boundaries.

Set Theory Meets Theology

And speaking of the undead, I've never seen such a short, sweet case for the triune God. Chortle!

Russian "War Games"

Remember how much Russia used to bellyache any time America showed any sign, however feeble, of self-assertion before Barack Obama came along and filled the world with love and good vibes? If you had any doubt that Russia actually felt threatened by any of this, the below should put that to rest:

[Russia's] armed forces are said to have carried out "war games" in which nuclear missiles were fired and troops practised an amphibious landing on the country's coast.

The name "Obama" is mentioned only once: not with a quote objecting to the action, but regarding the fact that he was warned in an open letter about just such a thing by Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel back in July.

Perhaps, in Obama's case, one man's warning is another man's assurance that things are going smoothly.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Corrected a link. (2) Corrected a typo.

Too Late!

2009-11-02T07:59:00.003-06:00

Over at Fresh Bilge, Alan Sullivan points to a rather lengthy story about one David Rubin, whose occupation in government finance has landed him in hot water for "conspiracy, wire fraud and obstructing federal tax authorities." Sullivan remarks, "The more money that government hands out, the more opportunities for corruption multiply." True enough, but this fire rates more than one alarm, and this shouldn't have been the first: The time to complain about corruption is whenever central planning of any kind is proposed or implemented.

I haven't finished the story and am not sure I will, but two things strike me as worth bringing up. First, the story is as long as it is in part because of the byzantine financial regulations it has to explain, and that make the David Rubins of the world possible -- both in terms of creating a need for people willing to navigate said regulations and in terms of these regulations representing a space at the public trough. I note further that many measures are already in place to prevent earning "too much" profit in these transactions, while at the same time it is absurd to expect municipal investments to grow without compensating the investors.

Second, I am unimpressed by the $6 billion estimate of the annual cost to taxpayers reported to be due to "public corruption, officials' mistakes and lack of disclosure." Every billion is only about three dollars per head in America. This is chump change compared to the enormous existing price tag for central planning at the federal, state, and local levels -- more commonly and variously known as "entitlement programs," "regulations," and "infrastructure." This "non-corrupt" tab is set to expand by trillions on Barack Obama's watch -- after George W. Bush got the ball rolling in 2008 with his financial "bailouts."

Certainly, I do not condone corruption, which would exist (albeit on a much more limited scale) even under capitalism. However, for the same reason I oppose the focus on reducing "earmarks" at the Congressional level, I find that concerns about corruption too frequently and easily distract from the real problem, which is that too many Americans regard theft as legitimate when performed by government officials in the name of central planning. The reason for this is the widespread acceptance of altruism, which excuses such theft on moral grounds.

Unsurprisingly, altruism -- being impossible to practice consistently by anyone interested in remaining alive -- demands its own version of corruption on the moral level: hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, too, is wrong, but too many people for too long have allowed that breach between words and deeds to distract them from asking whether altruism itself is a moral problem.

That would kill two birds with one stone.

-- CAV

Fats Waller

2009-10-30T05:55:00.004-06:00

I don't recall exactly where I got the idea to post on my favorite jazz musician, but it has already paid off twice beyond the enjoyment that Fats Waller's music always brings me.

Speaking of which, I'll start this post by embedding a couple of videos of his performances of "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "This Joint is Jumpin'" from the movie, Stormy Weather, which I'd never heard of until I found the videos. That movie's already in the Netflix cue, though:

[The movie] is considered a time capsule showcasing some of the top African-American performers of the time, during an era when black actors and singers rarely appeared in lead roles in mainstream Hollywood productions, particularly of the musical genre.

In addition to its rarity and its all-star lineup, the film also seems to capture the general benevolence of American culture of the time and with it, that of Fats Waller himself.

Lena Horne shooting down a guy with the phrase, "thank you" is a very amusing touch in the above video.

I'm looking forward to seeing the whole movie.

In addition to learning about a Hollywood classic, I also learned/was reminded about remastering. The audio of the below YouTube video of "All that Meat and No Potatoes" comes from a collection of remastered hits. My next trip to Amazon for music will include some remastered Fats Waller.

I'll close with a vignette from Waller's life that I recall from about a decade ago when I read Ain't Misbehavin': The Story of Fats Waller, by Ed Kirkeby:

As it happened, they got there on time, but even Fats' eyes goggled when he saw, standing awaiting them in the studio, a large Scotsman clad in kilt and sporran, and with a set of bagpipes under his arm. Mr. Watson welcomed the three musicians, then rather hesitantly said, "This gentleman wishes to make some jazz records with you on the bagpipes. The records will be for his private use only -- they will not be released." The three stunned musicians nodded.

After some discussion as to the tunes to be played, the session finally got under way. To the amazement of Fats and Bubber Miley the piper played jazz, and knew what it was all about. Hot bagpipes was not exactly what they expected, but the music began to sound better the longer they progressed. Zutty laid down a solid beat, and with Bubber's growling horn and Fats' pretty figures on the piano, the jive was really jumping. On playback, they were astounded at the good jazz that had been played, and so finally they cut a few more. Later that evening in Harlem, Fats and company found themselves telling their story to unbelieving ears, and it was a long time before they could get anybody to take the story seriously, there being no proof. The records and the piper disappeared, and were never heard of again by either Fats, Bubba, or Zutty -- but the last-named still sticks to the story that this was a session that really happened. The records, if they still exist, probably remain the proud possession of some Scottish collector, who, if he chances to read this, might do jazz a service by making them available for issue. [minor edits]

Waller died young from pneumonia: Louis Armstrong cried for hours upon hearing the news. Fortunately, his benevolent spirit lives on in a highly creative and enjoyable body of work.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 479

2009-10-29T04:08:00.004-06:00

Social Networking Bleg

Apparently, my last post both impressed and disappointed. On the one hand, I got backlinks (that I know about) from Rob and Trey. On the other, I was asked by commenters why I didn't make it easier to alert readers to the post with Twitter, FaceBook, or NetworkedBlogs. Blog template editing time is nigh. If you see your favorite social network missing, let me know.

Thanks in advance.

Precautionary Principle and Pascal's Wager

Via HBL I learned of a ridiculous video whose creator regards it as an unassailable argument in favor of global warming legislation. Binswanger called it an application of Pascal's Wager to environmentalism and notes its more common name: the precautionary principle, which Wikipedia describes as:

... a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action. [links omitted]

I find several things interesting about the precautionary principle. First, it basically means that one has to have (or beg for) approval of anything he wants to do from government officials. Second, as it is being used by global warming alarmists, it is clear what the pecking order is between "the public or the environment" whenever there is a conflict. (Just see how little attention the clown in this video pays to the depression he admits these taxes and laws would bring, and note that he makes zero mention of political freedom at all.) Third, this principle is basically a way for people who take Pascal's Wager to force the rest of us to do the same by smuggling in arbitrary criteria of harm to excuse government action in situations where it is not warranted.

Objectivist Roundup

Head on over to 3 Ring Binder!

"GoodThing in Life" Carnival and Chat

Inspired in part by a recent post of mine on cooking as a hobby, Martin Lindeskog is attempting to bring back something along the lines of the old Carnival of the Recipes, but not limited to cooking. He's targeting Thanksgiving weekend as a start date.

Like a Kazoo at a Funeral

The glomming-on-with-cum-backstabbing-of Ayn Rand by Libertarians continues as Reason TV (of all hosts) plans to "celebrate" the enduring legacy of Ayn Rand by interviewing two of her most famous detractors, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden.

Maybe it was something she said...

Actually, it wasn't that, but her insistence that the fight for freedom begins with intellectual rigor that ~~earned~~ exposed their enmity.

-- CAV

Free Market Rhetoric, Indeed!

2009-10-28T06:01:00.006-06:00

During college, I had an elderly professor from Hungary who, it was rumored, still had fragments of a bullet in his back because he had the temerity to vote against Communist rule with his feet. That bullet came to mind yesterday when I ran across a pair of news stories about people avoiding confiscatory tax rates in America and what governments are starting to do about it.

First, New York is hemorrhaging productive citizens:

More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country.

The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City -- meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out.

"The Empire State is being drained of an invaluable resource -- people," the report said.

Except for the story's emphasis on how much loot these people are taking with them, I agree with that last line. Were I a New Yorker, I'd be concerned that there were fewer opportunities to trade with those who left. Forget my taxes or the replacement of those who left with the less productive and parasites: These new people would mostly not be a problem but for the fact that the welfare state turns many of them into problems by chaining them to anyone who hasn't left yet.

Fortunately, New York can't prevent people from fleeing, but if you haven't left yet, your state might take a cue from Chicago and do what it can along these lines:

Chicago and Cook County residents aren't the only ones about to get shocking tax news; the city is debuting a "tax whistle-blower" plan that could turn neighbor against neighbor in Chicago's business community. [minor format edits]

The bullets haven't started flying yet, but on a national level, the gun is already cocked. Recall that there is already an emigration charge for people who renounce their American citizenship for tax purposes and that both parties collaborated on the law, which Bush signed. Interestingly, the bill includes a measure to confer benefits to soldiers, giving it a pro-American veneer that will mollify the unobservant.

That bone tossed towards the patriotic and the fact that a Republican President signed the exit tax into law remind me of something else: Glenn Reynolds points to a Libertarian's blog posting on a Robert Samuelson piece about the physician slavery debate in Congress. Specifically, Samuelson notes that Democrats are now using terms associated with the free market to re-brand socialized medicine.

Samuelson calls that "genius," and the Libertarians seem pretty impressed with that observation, but this is nothing new or rare at all. As another example look no further than the Chicago story above, where a tax official quoted about the new tax snitch program refers to the bounties as an "incentive."

More to the point, I've been on this scent for a very long time.

Has anyone ever heard of "cap-and-trade?" That government fuel rationing scheme sounds enough like capitalism for Arnold Schwarzenegger (who once fled socialism himself) to back it and tout it as a "free market" solution to global warming. Or "privatization" of infrastructure that merely replaces a socialist arrangement with a fascist one?

Republicans have been branding statism as capitalism for a very long time. There's no "genius" in the Democrats applying new labels to their various schemes. That's just monkey see, monkey do -- and by a monkey very slow on the uptake at that.

If you want to call a deception that will make America less free if people fall for it "genius," you will have to dig a little deeper. Anyone can see the veneer peeling from the wetted, dripping particle board in the above examples. Think of a freshly-varnished chair made of fine, but rotting wood and you'll get the idea of what "genius" is really like.

For "genius" of this kind, consider a group that makes lots of hay out of the similarity between our two big government political parties and the fact that their policies will lead to tyranny. Consider further that in the process of doing so, this group is constantly plagiarizing the conclusions of a brilliant political philosopher, even to the point of glomming on to the popularity of one of her most famous works -- while at the same time smearing its author as "intolerant" and "dogmatic" as a means of belittling the principles she used to reach the conclusions they're plagiarizing. Such a group will pose as an "alternative" to the main two parties, while selling the exact same product not just in a different bottle, but with different flavoring. That group is the Libertarian Party.

To start to comprehend this deception, one must ask: "What is the essential thing wrong with tyranny?" To appreciate the answer, "It violates individual rights," one must know what rights are, which means knowing what man is and why rights are important. (This is just where one has to begin.) One must also understand the nature of physical force and the moral difference between initiating it against another man and using it in retaliation in self-defense. Only after one has done this can he see why this question is important, consider how best to protect himself from others who will seek to harm him through physical force, and consider whether and how to delegate his retaliatory force to others in order to form a proper government.

The Libertarians pretend that no such careful thought is necessary, and that one can simply destroy all government to achieve freedom. They take the moral principle that Ayn Rand discovered that man should not initiate force against others out of context and misapply it to politics in order to pass off anarchism as capitalism. (The ones who do not actually advocate anarchy help those who do by pretending that this is a minor quibble.) To them, government as such is a bad thing. This is not true.

A hint of the rot comes when one tests the chair: Since Libertarians reject thinking in terms of principles, they frequently react to the fair question of how an individual will be protected from the initiation of force under anarchy any better than under a dictatorship with smears like that the one noted above and with insults. As Nick Provenzo once put it so well, "Want to enrage a Libertarian? It's easy. Just have standards." (Obviously, this is no refutation of Libertarianism, but it should cause one to wonder what exactly is going on.)

Caveat emptor. Just because someone can correctly point out the deficiencies in the products currently on the market does not mean that what he is selling is any good. Just because someone says that freedom is cheap doesn't mean it is. The struggle for freedom is difficult and will be lost without careful, principled thought on the part of pro-freedom intellectuals about fundamental issues, of which non-initiation of force is neither fundamental enough to serve as a starting point nor even meaningful outside such a context.

If a slave market is not capitalism, neither is anarchy freedom. Capitalism does not exist when rights are violated and rights are not protected without a proper government. And I don't care how good that might sound: Do not take my word for it. Do not take Ayn Rand's word for it, either. She can make your thinking easier, but obviously, she can't do it for you. Your agreement will mean nothing unless you understand what all of that means for yourself.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 478

2009-10-27T05:22:00.004-06:00

I'm more outraged than they are!

The following news story, out of Norway, is impressive (in a very bad way) on several levels:

It's the moment nosy Norwegian neighbors have been waiting for -- the release of official records showing the annual income and overall wealth of nearly every taxpayer in the Scandinavian country.

In a move that would be unthinkable elsewhere, tax authorities in Norway have issued the "skatteliste," or "tax list," for 2008 to the media under a law designed to uphold the country's tradition of transparency.

As outrageous as this Obamaesque variety of "transparency" is, I find the ethical code that makes it possible doubly so. Note the focus on the fact that children of the poor might be taunted at playgrounds, which is bad enough, to be sure. Worse still is the lack of empathy for the successful, for whom the nosy will indulge envy -- exemplified by this "journalist's" serving-up of details on a few notable individuals.

The crowning jewel of the outrage -- as well as my greatest gasp of astonishment -- came, however, from an "opponent" of this law:

"What each Norwegian earns and what you have in wealth is a private matter between the taxpayer and the government," said Jon Stordrange, director of the Norwegian Taxpayer's Association. [bold added]

No. It's nobody's business but his own.

The moment you grant that the government has any business knowing your exact income is the moment you give moral permission for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to paw through your wallet.

Nude at Home

An article at Pajamas Media on a man apparently arrested for being nude in his own kitchen raises some very interesting issues, but the most important is that our privacy at home may no longer be protected by the law as well as it ought to be.

Unfortunately, neither the facts of the case nor Catalano's exact views on indeceny laws are clear to me from the article. I will say that indecent exposure should be illegal, countless "hippies of the right" to the contrary notwithstanding:

Only one aspect of sex is a legitimate field for legislation: the protection of minors and of unconsenting adults. Apart from criminal actions (such as rape), this aspect includes the need to protect people from being confronted with sights they regard as loathsome. (A corollary of the freedom to see and hear, is the freedom not to look or listen.) Legal restraints on certain types of public displays, such as posters or window displays, are proper—but this is an issue of procedure, of etiquette, not of morality . . . "Thought Control," in The Ayn Rand Letter, III, 2, 2.)

If any normal person walking just barely in this guy's yard -- inches from his sidewalk, say -- could see him without making any special effort to do so, it was right that for him to be arrested, or perhaps warned. If not, not.

The moral to this story could be as prosaic as, "If you live near heavy pedestrian traffic, don't forget that people can see through your windows when it's dark out."

The Stages of Man's Life

Sure, we've all seen illustrations of the stages of life like this one, but my Mom recently emailed me the humorous take at right.

Midas Mulligan Shrugs

Memo to Barack Obama: Being a CEO is more than about saying, "You're fired." Gaining and keeping good people is even more important:

The administration had tasked Kenneth Feinberg, the Treasury Department's special master on compensation, to evaluate the pay packages of 25 of the most highly compensated executives at each of seven firms receiving exceptionally large amounts of taxpayer assistance.

But Thursday, he ruled only on slightly more than three quarters of the pay packages that were to be under his purview. The balance reflected executives who have left since he began his work in June or will be gone by the end of the year. [bold added]

Aside from this properly belonging in the "get this off my chest" file, it can also be cross-referenced under, "The fact that you have to say it means it probably won't be understood." Nearly a year after he was "hired," Barack Obama has, in a sense, never actually shown up for work. (But he does know how to look busy!)

And to think this man means to run our entire economy! I blame a poorly-trained and uninformed hiring committee. Fortunately, there is a way to start addressing the problem.

-- CAV

Upstate New York Again

2009-10-26T06:03:00.009-06:00

Six months ago, I wrote of a special election in New York's Twentieth Congressional District:

If [Jim] Tedisco is any indication, the GOP has learned exactly the wrong lesson from its resounding defeat in November, and has begun me-tooing the Democrats. This is why Tedisco is not exactly trouncing his Democratic opponent. What does he offer to voters genuinely opposed to Obama? More of the same, at least to the ones who are paying attention. And what about voters who are impatient with Obama for not having already nationalized everything? Tedisco is a good protest vote because, if he wins, he'll probably squeak by, he won't have anything of substance to say against Obama, it's just one vote, anyway, and other GOP candidates fundamentally opposed to big business will be emboldened.

That was then. What about now?

Again, there's an election coming for a conservative district in upstate New York, the Twenty-Third this time. The Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, is atypical for her party, although at least equally offensive at first glance to theocrats as to advocates of individual rights. (As a "social liberal," she supports protecting a woman's right to have an abortion and gay marriage, but she may be inconsistent with this in her economic views: She appears to be in bed with the labor unions.) And, of course, the Obama Administration is stinking up the joint with its blatant statism so badly that one might think that such an election would be a cakewalk for any non-Democrat.

But this time, the Republican leadership does not appear to have all boarded the Me-Too Train. (Predictably, that didn't work too well for them last time.) Several prominent party members are campaigning against Scozzafava by supporting Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. So there's finally substantive debate going on in the Republican Party, right? Maybe, maybe not.

The most prominent Republicans to back Hoffman are Dick Armey and Sarah Palin. The latter correctly notes that, "Political parties must stand for something." But what is that something, and is Palin standing for it, or something else? Let's take a look.

Palin continues. "When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of 'blurring the lines' between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections." So far, so good, but recall that Ronald Reagan did some blurring of his own -- between economic freedom and religion, which is not the intellectual basis of freedom and which has proven no better than leftism when implemented as public policy by the Republicans.

One might be inclined to give Armey, best-known as a fiscal conservative, and Palin, a relative newcomer to the national scene, passes here. Not having thought deeply myself about whether religion and individual rights were compatible at the time, I, too was taken in by Reagan back then. Or maybe Armey and Palin aren't even really thinking about religion at all. To answer that question, we have to consider exactly what the kind of backing they are giving to the Conservative.

In many districts, simply endorsing Hoffman would have decent odds of splitting the vote against Bill Owens and handing the seat over to the Democrats, which is about the extent of what an advocate of individual rights ought to do, if he does not want to endorse the Democrat, assuming Scozzafava's views on economic issues are really that far to the left. I say this because the Conservative Party of New York is not really a "small government" party: It is a religious party, as Ayn Rand has noted on several occasions. At most, one could actively campaign, but properly, only for the Democrat. (The district is so heavily Republican that Armey and Palin might easily cause Hoffman to win.)

Unfortunately, Palin, who has strong grass-roots support and is an excellent fund-raiser, has stated that Hoffman "stands for the principles that all Republicans should share," and Armey plans to campaign for him in New York.

It would be, as Rand indicated ages ago, a major mistake to go along with this:

Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to "do something." By "ideological" (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E.g., the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the "libertarian" hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies. (For a discussion of the reasons, see "The Anatomy of Compromise" in my book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.) ("What Can One Do?" in Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 202)

I never though I'd see the day that I'd agree with Mary Matalin, but that day has arrived: "[L]osing seats to articulate, conservative Democrats has proved to be the best defensive line holding back Obama's expansive ambitions." Conversely, me-tooing socialists (a la Gingrich) or bringing false friends of freedom to power (a la Palin) will not succeed, and runs the risk of prematurely ending a long-overdue debate within the Republican Party and preempting one from ever starting within the Democratic Party.

It is interesting that Gingrich warns renegade conservatives that, "if you seek to be a perfect minority, you'll remain a minority," while others advise "small government" types to avoid "picking a fight" within the GOP for similar reasons. Those are fool's prescriptions, as the eventual abolition of slavery -- due in large part to the efforts of principled Americans who refused to join or form a party -- shows.

Furthermore, we see that neither Gingrich nor Palin has learned to appeal for the votes of individualists by standing up for individual rights. Appearances to the contrary, there is not yet a full-fledged coming-to-grips among either faction of the Republican leadership with the grievances of the so-called tea-partiers.

If you value your freedom, never put yourself in the back pocket of a politician. He'll forget about you soon enough and sit on you. Learn how to defend freedom in an argument. Win the minds of your countrymen. In the meantime, play the politicians off against each other to buy time until there are enough advocates of individual rights that even the politicians understand that if they do not move America substantially back towards greater freedom, their name is mud.

-- CAV

Gus Van Horn Turns Five!

2009-10-25T16:09:00.004-06:00

It is hard to believe that I started this blog five years ago!

I've lots to do today, but I would like to take a moment to thank my family and pre-blogging friends; my regular readers, past and present; and the professional contacts, renewed acquaintances, and new friends I've made over the years since starting this blog.

My exploration of writing (from doggerel all the way to professional work now!), the intellectual and spiritual development, and whatever else I may accomplish through this blog or because of it would not be possible without your encouragement, support, and feedback -- positive or negative.

Thank you very much for your support! I really appreciate it.

-- CAV

A Free Press

2009-10-23T06:10:00.006-06:00

Today's post will deviate somewhat from my recent practice of making the Friday post about things I enjoy, in part due to an early dental appointment.

Reader Dismuke emails me a link to the following clip and notes:

It is pretty amazing when even other Leftists start to grasp the thuggish nature of the Obama Administration. All of the other television networks stood up against Obama's attempt to kick Fox out of the White House press pool. And that David Zurawick fellow interviewed in this clip - he used to work as the television critic of the old Dallas Times Herald during the 1980s and was and is a hardline Leftist. So when Obama has this man being critical, that is pretty bad. Of course, what all of them have in common is they, on some level, grasp that what is being attacked is the very basis of their livelihood and that efforts by Obama to do a Hugo Chavez on a major media outlet could end up biting them in a very big way[.]

That comes as both a relief and a pleasant surprise after I saw the Obama Administration singling out Fox News as somehow not really being a news organization a couple of times the other day -- and when not paying particularly close attention to the television set either time at that.

It's nice to see evidence that even among some on the left there is some appreciation of the danger posed by the Obama Administration and some resistance to same, although the very fact that there even is an "Executive Pay Czar" has, "You're next," written all over it. That said, just imagine what it would be like if the press were once again predominantly pro-individualist and pro-freedom.

Perhaps this wasn't such a big departure from my new Friday theme after all: I do enjoy good news. I also appreciate tips from readers, especially when I'm in a hurry. And, if the process I'm starting today goes well, I'll enjoy finally having an old, very troublesome injury repaired for good.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 477

2009-10-22T06:40:00.010-06:00

Word for the Day: Repeal

I realize, of course, that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will never attempt to repeal his state's onerous environmental regulations. He favors them even as he tacitly admits that they harm the economy, and the rest of his party is too ashamed of or opposed to self-interest to be of much help, but stories like this offer the opportunity to reintroduce a word to the public debate:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he's going to sign an environmental exemption bill that will clear the way for construction of the LA Stadium.

State senators approved the bill, which would nullify a lawsuit over the project's environmental impact report by citizens in neighboring Walnut. Schwarzenegger is expected to sign the bill in support of the stadium because its impact on the local economy and its ability to generate jobs.[link dropped]

Think of all the other economic development that could occur in California without the initial barrier of having to fund studies that would form the basis for lawsuits to prevent whatever it is one wants to do.

And yet, this did not cause the Governator to question whether the law ought to be on the books at all! Perhaps if enough people start calling for the repeal of regulations such as this, a few astute up and coming politicians will hear the word...

Try Getting out of the Way, Barry.

(To be filed in the "getting it off my chest" folder...)

If it's true in ultimate frisbee, I'm sure it's true in basketball: A big part of learning the game is mastering the art of getting out of the way of your teammates.

It's also true in politics, something even Arnold Schwarzenegger -- but not Barack Obama -- seems to have figured out.

Standing at the site of a highway project funded by his economic stimulus plan, President Barack Obama said Wednesday he is committed to exploring all avenues to create jobs.

When the government stops a thief, it is getting that thief out of my way as I attempt to go about my daily business. When the government commits theft by taxation or inflation, it gets in my way (and violates my rights). Indeed, the government is in the business of keeping people out of each other's way. Unfortunately, every dime spent by Barack Obama to "create jobs" comes from the pocket of someone who might have wanted to do just that or caused that to happen simply by using the money as he wished.

Barack Obama has just pledged to do anything except his job in response to the government-created economic crisis.

Our Preexisting Condition

I recall that Ted Kennedy was a big proponent of making insurance companies pretend that customers with preexisting medical conditions weren't riskier customers, and one of the alleged benefits of physician slavery is that everyone will have "access" to medical care.

It's interesting to see that as the debate over physician slavery develops, not only does the "access" myth fall by the wayside, but so does the egalitarianism that suckered so many people in the first place:

President Obama and members of Congress have declared that they are trying to create a system in which no one can be denied coverage or charged higher premiums based on their health status. The health insurance lobby has said it shares that goal. [This is a very bad concession on their part. --ed] However, so-called wellness incentives could introduce a colossal loophole. In effect, they would permit insurers and employers to make coverage less affordable for people exhibiting risk factors for problems like diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

Well. I guess the government can't magically provide the same level of care for everyone for "free," after all. As with any other rationing scheme, people are going to discover themselves being shorted. Wishing away preexisting conditions (or forcing people to act as if they are doing so) -- or the fact that patients with these conditions often cost more than others -- will not make them go away. In fact, here we see people with conditions that simply correlate with preexisting conditions being penalized! (That insurers may choose to do this is immaterial: The point here is that, once again, the government is being caught failing to deliver something it promised.)

And don't forget that proponents of socialized medicine constantly natter that opponents who note that things like this happen all the time in other countries that have enslaved their physicians are lying or being alarmist.

I don't want an entity this dishonest or inept in charge of my medical care.

Objectivist Roundup

Head on over to Rule of Reason for this week's installment.

"Snoopology"

I found this article about a researcher interested in deducing personality traits from an individual's possessions quite interesting.

"What are the processes by which personality gets translated into physical elements in your space?" [Professor Sam] Gosling asked. That key question can spawn others: How do you define personality, anyway? Can you really separate personality from the person?

One's values and philosophical ideas, explicit and implicit, affect what one does, and part of that "what" would include such things as orderliness and choice of decor. That sounds straightforward enough, but the devil is in the details -- like that bong his group found in the otherwise orderly dorm room of one subject.

-- CAV

The Oath Fakers

2009-10-21T06:17:00.021-06:00

Pat Buchanan writes a sympathetic column about a rather disturbing phenomenon emergent in what he calls "the age of Obama."

In the brief age of Obama, we have had "truthers," "birthers," tea party activists and town-hall dissenters.

Comes now, the "Oath Keepers." And who might they be?

Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are "either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia."

Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey. [minor format edits]

Except for the truthers, the groups Buchanan lists here are all examples of rebellion , some more blind than others, to Barack Obama's nakedly collectivist, anti-American agenda of expansion of the role of the federal government into every area of our lives. (Buchanan is wrong to speak of an "Age of Obama:" The inappropriate use and explosive growth of government was going on thanks to both parties long before Obama showed up to cash in on it.)

I sympathize with the last three groups, but emphatically disagree with the way the birthers and the so-called oath keepers are trying to save America from dictatorship. Only the tea partiers are acting in a manner appropriate to the situation we face, although many of them are low on intellectual ammunition.

The birthers, who believe that there is a massive conspiracy to cover up the "fact" that Barack Obama is not actually an American citizen are clearly the blindest of the lot. At best, they're fishing around for a bombshell revelation that will serve as a real-life deus ex machina to deliver our country from this (particular) menace. In the meantime, they waste their effort deluding themselves to the effect that such a huge conspiracy is even possible, as well as time they could spend learning what they can do to slow or stop him (and other dangerous politicians) now.

But at least the birthers, universally dismissed as nuts and impotently spinning their own wheels, aren't really hurting the cause of liberty. The oath takers are another matter entirely. These people are preparing to take action, and their timing indicates that they do not really know what they are doing.

First, consider what they plan to do: They -- members of the executive branch of the government -- plan to disobey orders based on their own interpretation of the law and the Constitution. That is, they are planning to usurp the function of the judiciary branch on a case-by-case basis as they work, and to bypass the legislative branch as well as the electorate, rather than to persuade lawmakers and other voters of the proper course of action for their country. (Part of this work consists of learning for oneself the principles behind proper government.) And, oh yeah, they're setting a very, very dangerous precedent in doing so: They are weakening one of the few good things left in this country: rule of law.

It is not immoral for someone to disobey an order -- in a dictatorship or during an open rebellion against a tyrannical regime. But, as horrendous as Obama is, we do not live under a dictatorship. We still have freedom of speech, and many of our rights are protected enough that we can act to turn the tide of public opinion back towards the direction of increasing government protection of individual rights.

The so-called oath keepers clearly fail to understand this because they are acting as if this is not an option -- as if we are already in a dictatorship. In addition to their failure to appreciate the importance of rule of law, they -- unlike the Founding Fathers -- clearly fail to understand the value of rational persuasion and this is due to a failure to grasp the role of rational principles in guiding man's actions.

To see this, let's do a thought experiment. Sergeant Arnold, a born-again Christian who thinks gambling is sinful and an "oath-keeper," is a member of his state's national guard. Suppose further that his state has passed a law banning gambling, which had just been legalized in the United States. The bill was very controversial, and because the governor knows that a large number of casino owners are planning to defy this law, he has called up the National Guard to keep them closed. Conveniently for the governor, some religious fanatics have threatened to bomb any casinos that remain open, so the governor claims to be "protecting" them from terrorism.

The President federalizes the guard and orders them instead to stand watch over any casino that wishes to remain open. Hoping to provoke a test case, James McGillicuddy, a casino owner, weighs his risks and does just this. Someone calls a bomb threat in to him as soon as he gets wind of it. Unfortunately for him, his business is being guarded by Arnold's unit, which has been briefed about the threat and given instructions on how to head it off.

That night, Arnold, a sniper, relieves watch in a building behind the casino. Just as he was briefed might happen, a bearded man in camouflage carries something out of the woods behind the business. Because he thinks that states' rights (a part of the Constitution) override federal power (another part) in this circumstance, though, Sergeant Arnold has decided he will not guard the casino. He's entertaining himself with an iPhone instead.

So he never sees the man, never calls on anyone to stop him and see what he's doing, and never has him in his sights. Instead, he has decided that not guarding the casino is the best way to protect America from Barack Obama and "secular humanists" like McGillicuddy. Since he happened to be the only person who could have seen the bomber, the casino bursts into flames while he's surfing the Internet on his iPhone. McGillicuddy and twelve of his employees die in the blast. All he had wanted to do was make a living, and to have his day in court.

If that scenario seems contrived, replace the casino with an abortion clinic, and recall the use of the Arkansas National Guard during Little Rock's desegregation crisis. Consider further the fourth item on the list of orders the "oath keepers" will not obey. We are a lot closer to personal harm than we might care to imagine with self-appointed constitutional "experts" like this in charge of enforcing the law.

At least the tea partiers understand that America remains free enough that moral and political debate can preserve the freedom we have left and bring the government back around to its proper purpose of protecting individual rights. Many of them are wrong about particulars, but they at least appreciate the proper approach to political change in a nation founded on the principle -- apparently forgotten by the "oath-keepers" -- of consent of the governed, and in a nation of laws, and not men. The tea partiers offer their views for the consideration of others, and, from what I have heard, many are actively seeking the intellectual ammunition they need to better understand what went wrong with America and what they need to know to appeal to the best within their countrymen before the next election.

Someone who does not understand an oath can only mouth its words: He cannot be trusted to uphold such an "oath." These are not oath keepers, or even oath takers. They are oath fakers.

You cannot protect the Constitution in any meaningful way by subverting individual rights, consent of the governed, rule of law, or any other principle which must be generally accepted in order for it to be anything but words on paper. Mutiny on the part of the armed forces or law enforcement is not the way to protect the Constitution, but -- at best -- a concession that it is no longer in force.

To anyone who has mistakenly joined this movement, I ask that you reconsider: It might help to imagine someone patriotic that you completely disagree with on one issue as an "oath taker" -- and that person being in charge of protecting someone you care about, where that issue plays a role.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected some typos.