Category: Libertarianism

Tab Clearing

May 17, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I’m borrowing Tam’s title and clearing out articles that I meant to do full posts on.

Teaching Situational Awareness to Kids – Because I have two in my life, and I’d kinda like to keep them out of danger.

The Economist saying how wonderful universal health care is for all nations. This was one I wanted to fisk, but I’d recommend reading it to understand how the proponents think.

Syrian Metal Is War – Yeah, like I could scroll past that article.

[Finland ends its universal basic income experiment.](https://fee.org/articles/finland-ends-its-experiment-with-universal-basic-income/?utm_source=zapier&utm) I like the concept of a basic income that replaces all other welfare programs. It just doesn’t seem viable in the real world.

Start-ups make an alternative for braces, and the dental groups rent seek. – I hate when businesses use the violence of government to keep others out of the market.

The Volokh Conspiracy has an excellent column on not supporting laws you wouldn’t kill someone to enforce. Honestly, that would be an interesting bit of mandatory language in any law that assesses a criminal or civil penalty. Make the legislators affirm that this is important enough to possibly kill someone over.

A surprising column from The Atlantic on cultural appropriation. I swear to FSM that I would laugh in the face of any person foolish enough to accuse me of that. Or denigrate.

That’s all for now. I’ll probably need to do this again.

Children Doing Dangerous Work

May 17, 2018 / / 0 Comments

This Bloomberg article on a proposed relaxing of certain regulations is so full of pearl clutching, the damn string should break.

The DOL will propose relaxing current rules – known as Hazardous Occupations Orders (HOs) – that prohibit 16- and 17-year-old apprentices and student learners from receiving extended, supervised training in certain dangerous jobs, said the two sources. That includes roofing work, as well as operating chainsaws, and various other power-driven machines that federal law recognizes as too dangerous for youth younger than 18.

You mean, the jobs that are in demand? And they’ll be supervised? I’m not seeing a fucking problem here.

For fuck’s sake, every state allows sixteen and seventeen year olds to independently operate cars. You know, those two-thousand pound machines that can hurtle themselves down the road in excess of a hundred miles an hour? The ones that routinely kill 30,000 a year? If we can trust them to operate those machines, why couldn’t they operate others?

Rights and Goods

May 15, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Right to life. Right to property. Right to keep and bear arms. Right to free speech. Right to free expression. Right to healthcare. Right to education. Right to religion. Right to associate. Right to clean water. Right to clean air. Right to privacy. Right to feel safe.

Some of these “rights” are not like the others. Can you spot the difference?

Rights, by their nature, are inherent to sentient beings. We have them because we have ownership of ourselves. So, the very first right – the bedrock of everything else is the right of property. I own myself, and by extension, I own what I create. I own the fruits of my labor or the fruits of my trade. The right of free expression protects my ability to create and trade. The right to self defense protects my ability to prevent others from forcibly taking my property – including my own life.

Because rights come from that fundamental property right, they cannot require the abrogation of others’ lives, labor, or capital. There can be no rights to food, education, and healthcare that are based upon the requirement that others are forced to surrender their time, knowledge, and resources – only the rights to produce and trade for education, healthcare, and food. Et cetera.

Usually at this point, I get lambasted by those who do believe in the rights to other people’s property that I want the less fortunate to be uneducated and die from a preventable disease caused by malnutrition. Or something similar. Because “muh rightz.” If they wanted to commit a straw man fallacy.

This is where social goods come in. By goods, I’m not denoting morality, but rather a product/service that is purchased to further social goals. Such as making sure every member of the society has a minimal level of education, healthcare, and food to function and be productive. Or to care for those who can’t care for themselves. Social goods are not rights. They are the cost of being in a society. As people have differing opinions of the value of market goods, they can have differing opinions on the value of social goods. They can also have differing values of how those goods are paid for and distributed.

My personal preference for social goods should be as much done through private means. Businesses and charities are more responsive to the needs and desires of their customers. Are they perfect? No. Businesses and charities are not some force of nature, but collections of people, and people can screw anything up. At the end of the day though, businesses and charities primary means of engagement is through voluntary exchange with their customers.

I’m very cautious about what social goods I think should be provided by government. Unlike businesses and charities, the government doesn’t require voluntary exchange. The government has the ability to enforce it’s (or more to the point, the people in power’s) desires through violence. That difference means that the government is not as responsive to its customers or efficient in the use of its resources.

Income Inequality- Bogus Statistic, Real Issue

May 14, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I was listening to the Reason podcast with Jonathan Rauch was being interviewed about his new book. Of course, I’m going to recommend that you listen to the whole thing. I found it very enlightening about the nature of happiness, particularly for those hitting middle age.

One item that came up during the interview dealt with how most people view income inequality. In my opinion, I’ve always considered income inequality a bullshit metric. Something used to gin up the masses and sell papers and clicks. IMHO, the far more important metric is how are the people doing year over year or over time. It’s not like the economy is a closed system. As long as people’s lives are consistently getting better, then why should it matter if some segments are increasing more than others?

This is not normal human psychology. People tend to base their happiness on how they are doing compared to others. It really is important to keep up with the Jonses. When people don’t think they are improving as fast as the rest of the world, unhappiness abounds. This becomes intensified with all the media streams blaring out conspicuous consumption of the various media whores – I mean, celebrities.

This unhappiness is what unrest is made of. Or at least, one thing that can contribute to a restless population. It also appears to contribute to the rise of populists – on both sides of the traditional political spectrum. Note the rise of Trump and Sanders. Both of them tapped into the unhappiness of the population by promising the people to make their lives better. To either bring the people’s livelihoods up – or bring down those the people think are doing too much better.

I’m not going to pretend that there’s an easy solution. It’s a psychological issue, and nothing about psychology is easy. People are just too fucked up. IMHO, there are some things that should be done. We need to look at economic policies that help increase people’s standards of living. My personal hobby horses are free trade, low taxes, and limited regulations. I don’t see how trying to redistribute wealth by taxing the top earners would help grow the economy and increase standards of living.

Although I still think it’s a bullshit metric, I’m going to take a more careful look into income inequality – but more as a gauge of the populace. This may be one of the leading indicators of a real civil problem. One that might require me to make sure I’ve got enough ammo and storm shutters on my windows.

Fix Roads? Let’s Blame an App Instead

May 10, 2018 / / 0 Comments

From Reason, comes this article on how local governments are trying everything they can think of to punish drivers for using navigation apps like Waze to escape congestion. Everything except maybe adding more roads and lanes.

The cause of worsening congestion, says Moore, is pretty simple: more people wanting to drive on the same amount of road.

This description fits Los Angeles pretty well. In 2001, Los Angeles County boasted 21,085 lane miles of maintained highways. In 2016, that number had not budged much, growing to only 21,826 lane miles. In the same period of time, the number of vehicle-miles traveled by Los Angeles commuters rose by some 10 million per day.

Even though the number of vehicles is surging, road availability barely increased. Which forces drivers onto roads not designed for heavy volume in order to try and shave some minutes off of an onerous commute.

Of course, I’m sure that the answer the local government wants will be more mass transit. Except mass transit is inefficient in using taxpayer dollars, in addition to not being available on demand like a personal vehicle. Autonomous cars will help, but they’re at least five years away, and probably closer to a decade before full implementation.

So, here’s an idea – private highways. Let firms build highways that they can collect tolls on. My biggest concern would be rent-seeking, but I don’t see how that would be any worse than what we have now.

Diversity Is A Good Thing, As Long As You Know What To Diversify

April 19, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Reason put out this article earlier this week on the dangers of Silicon Valley’s burgeoning ideological conformity. Let’s look at the first couple of paragraphs:

When it comes to software, Silicon Valley understands the threat of monocultures. If 100 percent of computers run the same code and malware authors discover an exploit, 100 percent of computers will be vulnerable to the same attack. Fortunately, the way to reduce such risks is straightforward: Increase diversity.

Alas, this insight seems limited to software. Technology executives have yet to fully recognize the risks posed by the potent political monocultures forming inside their own companies.

The problem is that so many who push “diversity” fail to understand what they need to diversify. For these tech companies – and other places pushing diversity for diversity (cough, universities, cough, literary circles) – they are mistaking the biological for the mental. In essence, they are saying because they have both golden labradors and chocolate labradors, they are diverse – and they don’t see the problem when large numbers of their dogs die off. For tech companies, the biggest threat from this failure to recognize they are not really diverse is going out of business because they’ve alienated enough customers.

However, the same issue is impacting the RKBA. I keep hearing how we do we get more women, POCs, young people, etc. involved in the gun rights battle. Too many times, I see the RKBA making the same mistake of substituting outward diversity with inward diversity. You can’t invite people with one breath, and with the next demand they immediately conform to every thing you believe outside of RKBA – such as God, abortion, economics, and/or the current issues of the day.

We’re not breeding stronger livestock, so we shouldn’t be looking for biological diversity. We’re trying to breed stronger ideas, so we need ideological diversity.

Rules and Harm

April 13, 2018 / / 1 Comment

The girlfriend and I were out shopping because she needed a new pan. In the parking lot, we came across a truck that had taken up two parking slots. The GF harrumphed and said how she hated people who did that. I saw the same thing, but it didn’t bother me so much. Why? Because the truck wasn’t in a premium area of the lot, and there was plenty of other parking.

My girlfriend was annoyed because the driver was breaking the rules. I wasn’t annoyed because (s)he wasn’t causing harm. I’ve found that such criteria has become much more important as I’ve matured.

Criminal Justice Reform in Philly

March 28, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Philly’s new DA is doing some interesting things. Normally when I hear “progressive civil right attorney,” I cringe a bit. Generally, the “progressive” outweighs the “civil rights”.

So far, he’s fired a bunch of prosecutors and outed a bunch of cops who were deemed “unfit to call before a jury” due to numerous infractions and some for outright lying.

Then comes this memo. Yes, you need to RTWT. The basic crux of the memo is reducing the number of people sent to prison, particularly for non-violent crimes. This is a good way to approach prosecutions, because going to jail is a quick way to destroy a person’s life. Not just for the time (s)he is confined, but for the rest of his/her life.

Prosecutors have immense power at their fingertips to destroy lives, and not much in the way of accountability when they bend or break the rules of their profession – much less actual laws. It’s nice to see someone reigning in one office.

H/t Denada

Another Good Item From This Year’s Legislative Session

March 14, 2018 / / 0 Comments

For the crap of the “School Safety” gun control law, the Florida Legislature did manage to pass some worthwhile bills that the governor signed.

For those of us who support free speech, this is a win.

Florida becomes ninth state to ban restrictive campus free speech zones

Of course, there’s still the problem of the heckler’s veto in the form of aggressive “demonstrations” and high “security” fees for controversial speakers.

One step forward.

Yes, Please Roll Back That Mess

March 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

From Reason and the Volokh Conspiracy comes word that the Cato Institute is starting a new civil rights and police accountability initiative.

https://reason.com/volokh/2018/03/07/the-cato-institutes-new-civil-rightspoli

Qualified immunity is one of those things that make it hard to reform the criminal justice system. I’m even more incensed since learning that it was more or less invented out of legal whole cloth.

Police and prosecutors are supposed to be just like everyone else under the color of law. It’s why they don’t have special tribunals like the military. Hell, I’d be happier with special tribunals if I thought it would make them be held to a higher standard. With great power…

I’m really liking the idea of cops and prosecutors being required to buy and hold personal indemnification policies, like doctors or other professions. I don’t like the fact that I have to pay to protect bad apples from the consequences of their actions. Insurance companies are really good at quantifying risk. It would be interesting to see what they would do with that pool.