Off for a While Don't expect new posts for the next week or ten days. I'll be on the road and probably won't have the chance to get on-line very much. Take care everyone.  7:59 AM permanent link 0 comments   

  Life, the Universe, and Everything As I wrote a few weeks ago:

I'm beginning to think that all of life's mysteries, and all scientific, philosophical, ethical, and spiritual questions can be boiled down to three:

1. What is energy?
2. What is consciousness?
3. What is money?

And I suspect that the more we learn about any of them, the more we learn about all of them.

One undeveloped thought I was getting at is that the more conventional formulations, like:

1. What/who is God?
2. What is happiness/the good?
3. What is justice?

actually throw us off track because we presume what the answer is going to be. We end up arguing the proper definitions of abstract ideals, rather than discovering the source of the actual forces in our lives. I suggest that the answers to the questions about God, happiness, and justice might be better found by studying energy, consciousness, and money.

By thinking about these things, I don't think it was an accident that I came across this mind-blowing page.

I'm not smart enough to understand or explain all of it. I may even be totally off in my interpretation. But here's my personal interpretation of some of its concepts:

Numbers are normally thought of as representations of the quantities of things we've identified as similar. We have one apple, two apples, or seventeen apples. Even though we understand that no two apples are exactly alike, we (properly) identify them as apples. We count everything that way, understanding that no two of the things we count are ever exactly alike.

But perhaps the "representations of the quantities of things we've identified as similar" is just the expression, not the essence, of numbers.

Perhaps the essential feature of numbering is not quantity, but progression. A number is a point in a progression. A progression is movement from one point to another. But what makes something - anything - go from one point (whatever that is) to another (whereever that is)?

That comes in, well, degrees. Degrees don't count similar objects, they count an increase, a growth, in one single essence or phenomenon.

Degrees count energy. Numbers aren't differences in quantity, they are differences in degrees.

Whether we count because we move, or we move because we want to count, it hardly makes a difference. Numbers don't represent objects, they represent energy. And energy is made known to us by degrees, expressed in numbers.

No wonder Marko Rodin thinks he has discovered the fingerprint of God.  11:51 PM permanent link 2 comments   

  I Wish i Could Say, "This Is Unbelievable!" In a $2.7 trillion criminal enterprise like the government of the United States, it's hard to keep on top of things.

And I know that things have gotten so bad, that nothing shocks us anymore. Are they really that evil? Yes.

But I do reserve the right to be surprised by how the evil manifests itself. Not shocked, but surprised in the sense of not expecting the unexpected, in not knowing how they'll be evil.

Logan Ferree gives us another example. Is it "shocking" that John McCain would support the forced relocations of Navajo and Hopi families for the benefit of the largest strip-mining coal company in the world? Thinking about it a little, not really. But that doesn't mean you anticipate it. You can't. The enterprise is so vast, you don't know what is going to happen next. You don't even know what is happening right now.  11:22 PM permanent link 0 comments   

  Immigration: A Symptom, Not the Disease My latest at the Partial Observer.  7:51 AM permanent link 0 comments   

  Don't Mark the Beast I've already written here and here about the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). It is unimaginably bad, and DownsizeDC.org has now lauched a campaign against it. With your participation, which takes just a couple of minutes, we can stop this thing.  12:25 PM permanent link 0 comments   

  The Ten Most Harmful Government Programs Paul J. Gessing directs us to the conservative Human Events Online's Ten Most Harmful Government Programs.

Personally, I'd have put the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Defense in there somewhere, but I didn't have a vote.  4:42 PM permanent link 0 comments   

  States' RIghts Not Just a Southern Thing Or should we say, especially not a Southern thing, not any more. Mike Tuggle reports on several encouraging developments. Among them is HomeFromIraqNow.org which intends to use "binding statewide ballot initiatives around the country to pressure the administration to bring our troops home now," specifically state national guard troops. As Tuggle points out,

This is squarely in the New England tradition. New England States saw the War of 1812 as an attempt to annex Canada, and invoked State sovereignty to resist it. Massachusetts refused a presidential order to send its militia, and declared that the power to send a state’s militia is “reserved to the states.” Connecticut also refused to commit its militia for what it ruled to be "an offensive war," and resolved it would not release its militia unless the State was threatened "by an actual invasion of any portion of our territory." The Iraq invasion and occupation is certainly "an offensive war," as opposed to a defensive war. Connecticut was quite right to withhold its militia in 1812, and any State that proposes the same today would also be right – morally and constitutionally.

  4:27 PM permanent link 0 comments   

  The French Connection While we were watching The French Connection tonight, my brother-in-law suggested a theory behind these ridiculous smoking bans. In Washington State, even bars can't allow smoking - no indoor place of business can. But they do have one effect: people can now stand around outside without raising eyebrows. In other words, it makes it easier for cops to stake out a joint. You'd probably have to see the movie to understand the difficulty of the stake-out. It ain't easy.

In any case, while I'm no film critic, buff, or historian, it seems to me that The French Connection has to be among the fifty most important movies of all time. It set the standard for the "gritty crime drama." I don't even know how many such flicks predate it (1971), or how many focused on a major drug deal. But I know there weren't many.

One thing that impressed me about the movie is that it reminds me of the musical compositions I'd play the French horn for in high school concert band. It starts quiet and slow, and then builds and builds in intensity, so that even after the most riveting part is over you are totally engrossed right through the end.

And as a movie, I think it set the tone for what Roger Ebert has called a Golden Age for Hollywood that ended when Star Wars (1977) changed the rules. And I appreciate The French Connection as a time capsule, capturing the look and feel of New York City of the early '70's. And what's striking about the movie is that, while it isn't a bloodbath, innocent people die as a result of the police's attempt to catch drug dealers.

But more than that, I gather lessons from The French Connection probably unimagined by its makers. It's a throwback to another time, before cell phones and video cameras. Yes, with a warrant the police could tap phone wires, but otherwise it took some effort to track "suspicious characters." And the bad guys catch on.

It made me think of the trade-offs we've made. Back then, one had to go to a library and ask a reference librarian to track down an obscure piece of information, and had to go through the risk of being recognized to get access to porn. You were legally free to get the porn, but there was social pressure against it. Now, both are immediately accessible with a few keystrokes. But back then, nobody was watching, or at least most people would have confidence that they weren't being watched. In that sense, they were free to do whatever they wanted. The reference librarian wouldn't have batted an eye if you wanted to find out about, say, anarchist movements in the late 19th century. Just another research topic. Today, we don't know who's tracking our Internet activities, and which keywords or sites provoke "alarm bells" that would get the attentions of Homeland Security agents. Or what sites people may visit - even inadvertently - that government agents can use as blackmail.

I will admit that even in a society without government intrusion our public movements could still be caught by other people's cell phone video cameras. And we would definitely want to read the fine print on all Internet "terms and conditions" we'd come across. But government wouldn't track our movements and activities, and we'd have no fear of mandatory "Big Brother" tracking of our every movement, through national ID cards, RFID tags, or whatever means. Privacy may be the inevitable price we pay for convenience. If that is the case, the least we should demand is that the decision to pay it be left to individual choice.  12:25 AM permanent link 2 comments   

  More on Progressive Neo-Liberalism I'm still thinking about the subject of my last post and the score I got on the moral politics quiz. I still don't like the questions given, and I'm still unconfortable with the connotations of both "progressive" and "neo-liberal" which the quiz says is my ideology.

(Progressive neo-liberal sounds to me like the warmongering wing of the Democratic party, who are arguably worse than the Busheviks and neocons because they celebrated our unprovoked war against Serbia and fault the war on Iraq only only because a Republican is waging it.)

Many of the names given ideologies in the quiz are strange. And what it means by "moral rules" and "moral order" is confusing, especially since it is evident that the horizontal axis is about individuality vs. conformity, and the vertical is about private ownership vs. communal ownership.

But I must give the designers credit. They are definitely on to something in how they conceived their political map and for correctly placing me on it (5.5 spaces down from the horizontal line, half a space left of the vertical line).

And their definition of liberalism appears right in line with Ludwig von Mises, who called liberalism "an ideology that advocates the preservation of private ownership of the means of production." The consequence of this - the minimal state - is how ultra-liberalism is defined in this quiz.

But some of Mises's intellectual heirs added a moral and philosophical dimension to his "economic" liberalism to create a moral individualism that veered left of Mises's own bourgeois outlook. They fall more into the "libertarian capitalist" area while Mises himself would probably remain somewhere in the "ultra liberal" area.

What I like about my placement is that I am definitely in the "economic liberal" area, but have enough enough concerns about the land monopoly and the disruptions caused by mass migration to be an ideologue.

And while I definitely endorse libertarian ends regarding individuality and non-conformity, I am also convinced that paleo-conservative means, such as judicial restraint, states' rights, and anti-globalist measures, are essential for preserving liberty. The test got that right: I managed to score right in between "libertarian capitalist" and "paleo-conservative."

I am also pleased that I haven't come out as a purist or dogmatist. I don't live in a world of absolutes. Instead of total belief in a particular system, or loyalty to a particular philosophy, I thnk it's better, after considering both theory and fact, to ultimately decide for myself:

1) What I honestly believe will make most other people better off overall.
2) What are the costs, who should pay them, and how.
3) What are the risks, who is put at risk, and how.

My conclusions are almost always in favor of much smaller government, but they are also almost never in favor of abolishing all government right now. Actual gains in shrinking government's size, cost,and power now mean more to me than conformity to libertarian doctrine.

The questions on the test do not, it seems to me, address any of these issues. But when it comes to who I agree with and why, and who I disagree with and why, this quiz has me pegged pretty well.

That doesn't mean I am not libertarian in my overall outlook. Throw any other quiz at me, and I'd come out strongly libertarian. (And this quiz has a very "libertarian" definition of liberalism.) But this shows that there is greater diversity and variation in our outlooks, even when we're largely in agreement about the main issues and are fighting for the same things.  11:27 PM permanent link 0 comments   

  Progressive Neo-Liberal Kevin at Indie Castle alerts us to a unique political quiz, the Moral Politics Test.

The test asked a bunch of questions that I do not believe have anything to do with politics. It thus shouldn't be a surprise that I scored as a progressive neoliberal:

Neoliberalism is a political philosophy and a political-economic movement beginning in the 1970s that de-emphasizes or rejects government intervention in the economy, focusing instead on achieving progress and even social justice by more free-market methods, especially an emphasis on economic growth, as measured by changes in real gross domestic product.

Progressive Neoliberalism is Neoliberalism associated with non-conforming moral values.

I don't agree with this, which I think is a problem with the questions. My "moral values" really are quite remote from my political values, because my focus politically isn't what people ought to do or think, but rather, how to minimize the damage inflicted by the State.

That said, the political map they've created is quite interesting. Note that libertarians, of both capitalist and socialist varieties, are on the far left. So in that sense this quiz gets it right.

I'm still waiting for a quiz that takes into account not just economic and moral issues, but also foreign policy and centralization of authority. That would provide a more complete picture of anyone's ideology.  4:48 PM permanent link 2 comments   

  Six Degrees of Separation My Partial Observer piece on Stanley Milgram did not discuss his "six degrees of separation" experiments. The theory is that "anyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than four intermediaries."

I don't know how specific it must be. I'm assuming what is meant by "acquaintence" is that two people would be able to remember each other and their first name - even if their relationship was from the distant past, like childhood classmates. On the other hand, shaking hands with a politician or getting an autograph from an athlete probably wouldn't count.

If that is the case, six degrees is easily believable. I have no idea how many people I've known, and I haven't a clue who all they're acquainted with. And I've known countless missionaries, soldiers, sailers, peace corps workers, and foreign exchange students.

Even if the definition of "acquaintence" was fairly narrow, I could see the six degrees easily working for the entire country if not the world. I bet everyone in the country has acquaintences who are acquainted with a Congressman, a prominent athletic coach, and a famous entertainer, and I bet that every American is at most two steps away from the President. Famous people's own networks of acquaintences, famous and non, span the entire country if not the globe.

The only reason we don't know for sure about the six degrees of separation, is that we don't know who all the people are that our acquaintences are acquainted with. But I'm sure we'd be quite surprised. The numbers would be staggering, and the names would be surprising.  11:16 AM permanent link 2 comments   

  Obedience and Authority My latest at the Partial Observer.  9:44 AM permanent link 0 comments   

  Real Conservatives and the Petrocrats Go to Indie Castle to see what I'm talking about.  10:52 PM permanent link 0 comments   

  Padilla and Solzhenitsyn, or, We Have No Rights Mike Tuggle shows us that, thanks to Bush and the Supreme Court, citizens of the USA are now as free as were citizens of the USSR.

Tuggle asks the right question: "Wouldn't it be a great idea to create a system of dispersed power that could check a runaway centralized government?"  4:13 PM permanent link 1 comments   

  What an Amazing Coincidence! It passed me by, but March 30 marked the 25th anniversary of the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life.

One thing I either didn't know, or had forgotten, was that the Hinckley's were family friends and donors of ex-CIA chief and Vice President George H.W. Bush, and son Neil Bush had dinner plans with Hinckley's brother before the shooting:

Bush Son Had Dinner Plans With Hinckley Brother Before Shooting
The Associated Press Domestic News
March 31, 1981, Tuesday, PM cycle

HOUSTON
The family of the man charged with trying to assassinate President Reagan is acquainted with the family of Vice President George Bush and had made large contributions to his political campaign, the Houston Post reported today.

The newspaper said in a copyright story, Scott Hinckley, brother of John W. Hinckley Jr., who allegedly shot Reagan, was to have dined tonight in Denver at the home of Neil Bush, one of the vice president's sons.
The newspaper said it was unable to reach Scott Hinckley, vice president of his father's Denver-based firm, Vanderbilt Energy Corp., for comment. Neil Bush lives in Denver, where he works for Standard Oil Co. of Indiana.

In 1978, Neil served as campaign manager for his brother, George W. Bush, the vice president's oldest son, who made an unsuccessful bid for Congress. Neil lived in Lubbock throughout much of 1978, where John Hinckley lived from 1974 through 1980.

On Monday, Neil Bush said he did not know if he had ever met 25-year-old John Hinckley.

"I have no idea," he said. "I don't recognize any pictures of him. I just wish I could see a better picture of him.

Sharon Bush, Neil's wife, said Scott Hinckley was coming to their house as a date of a girl friend of hers. "I don't even know the brother. From what I know and I've heard, they (the Hinckleys) are a very nice family and have given a lot of money to the Bush campaign. I understand he was just the renegade brother in the family. They must feel awful," she said.
The dinner was canceled, she added.

George W. Bush said he was unsure whether he had met John W. Hinckley.

  6:13 PM permanent link 0 comments   

  Beyond Reason Rabbi Michael Lerner, interviewed in Grist Magazine, on the importance of spirituality, something libertarians have been neglecting:

It's not that mentioning the capital gains tax is inappropriate; it's just not sufficient. It doesn't create a sustainable movement. A sustainable movement has to have a larger vision that is hopeful and positive. Along with truths about the dangers of destruction, it has to have a vision of what kind of world is possible. That's what this movement doesn't have.
[on the next page...]
There are a lot of people with similar intuitions about the need for a world based on love, kindness, generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, awe, and wonder, who never heard that articulated in the libertarian world. The only place they heard anything vaguely like this was in religious-right communities.

Okay, okay, he wasn't talking about libertarians, but environmentalists and progressives. And he didn't say "capital gains tax," he said "global warming."
Even so, Lerner makes some good points:

The anti-spiritual consciousness was first developed by the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, in its struggle against feudalism. It tried to undermine the feudal order by adopting a narrow form of empiricism: that which is real is that which can be verified through sense data. It was a powerful tool against the feudal order. However, once capitalism succeeded in undermining the belief system that underlay feudalism, it had a problem. Namely, the capital class wanted to control people, and they thought religion would be a good vehicle for controlling them. So what they said was, we'll make a compromise. You can have this religious stuff -- in fact, we want you to have this religious stuff -- on the weekends.

There is much to agree with Lerner in the interview. The troubles are pretty much left unsaid, but one gets the idea when he mentioned supporting smoking bans in public places. While Lerner criticizes a "rationality" based on power and money, he seems to take for granted coercive measures (power) to get what he wants. And he doesn't say how resources could be rationally distributed without the price mechanism (money):

We are agnostic with regard to economic theory. We don't care what you call it. What we care about is that when you get down to making a decision, whether it's in the board room or in a school room or in conference committee, that your criteria are ecological sanity, love and kindness, generosity, and awe and wonder at the universe. Enhancing those: That's what a spiritual politics is.

That sounds possible only through radical decentralization and Georgist economics, and the Left's downfall has been its abandonment of these ideas.

What is true, however, is that there is more to politics, and to life, than reason. If we don't feel right about what we're doing, we won't be able to persuade others -- precisely because we're not fully persuaded ourselves. We must be both comfortable and enthusiastic in whatever we do to be effective.

Via Freeman, I found Lady Aster, who has this to say:

I have come to the conclusion that the most important effect of a political movement is not in the existing institutions it changes or captures, but in the culture it creates within. In the case of social injustice, an easier alternative to changing the laws is often to appeal to existing desires to create a culture within which such laws do not exist. In matters of social injustice, the manner in which one treats others is really more important and equally "political" as the laws and power structures one might wish to change. Indeed, at the largest level laws and power structures *are* nothing more than opinions and values, mediated through wholly epiphenomenal pieces of paper. Convince enough people that a law is unjust enough not to be unforced, and it actually *doesn't* exist. And history shows that successful social movements, from the 1960s protests to Christianity, are precisely those that change things widely enough that eventually the institutions opposed to them crumble or embrassingly accomodate them (while claiming credit in the official history books, of course, as the agent of social progress).
[...]
What would happen if we built social institutions the way we approached falling in love? That is, instead of asking what a 'just' political order is we asked what kinds of families, businesses, marriages, or communties we'd really like to live in. The formula for a miserable relationship is to ask what one's partner 'ought' to be, and to ask the same question of oneself, all the while angling for instrumental advantage. But this is exactly the manner in which most radicals approach politics- and the result in that conformist comfort and privatised consumerism look more attractive to most people than freedom and liberation. Something is wrong here. And the problem is that radicalism has failed to show people how a free society could help them emerge into the brightness they have always wanted. Instead, progressives nag people that their existing dull happiness is already hurting someone, while libertarians promise boundless opportunity to enjoy the same pattern of existent dullness. Instead, I would have both ideals present themselves and ask their potential converts: would *you* rather live this way?
[...]
And I suggest it is the same in political activity. When going to politics, do not query what cause is most important or most 'right', but what cause you would most like to be part of, what struggle you would most like to imagine yourself in, what aspect of existence you would defend because it most calls you.
[...]
Listen to the voice within you. If you need reasurrance from history, look at those did effect social change for the good, and ask if their writing and rhetoric reflects the soul of a miserable disciplinarian or someone who followed their passion and did what they loved. We have become too convinced- again by authoritarian propaganda- that what we really desire is something small, petty, pointless, vain, expolitive, evil, or impractical. I ask you to have the courage to look at what you truly love, and in politics what state of affairs attracts you, and place that as the first counter on the map from which to expand your holdings.

  3:17 PM permanent link 0 comments   

  Values and the Border Question I think I can summarize my political values into seven points. If I ever became a citizen of Canada, Russia, or Nigeria, I would still like to see these values advanced whereever I'm at. And if the USA broke up into independent states, regional confederations, and city-states, I would still promote these values in the new political setting I'm living in:

1. Free enterprise: The right to enter a career field or start a business without restrictive licensing or regulation; private ownership of the means of production.
2. Non-intervention: non-interference in internal affairs of other countries; neutrality in foreign conflicts; peace, friendship, and commerce with all countries.
3. Freedom of expression: The Internet, the public airwaves, the soapbox, public support of political candidates and ideas - all should be unregulated.
4. Freedom of association: The right to enter into business or personal relationships for any reason that pleases one - and the right to refuse such associations for any reason.
5. Right to self-defense: unregulated access to firearms or other weapons one may want to have.
6. Individual autonomy: medical freedom, drug freedom, sexual freedom, freedom of movement, etc.
7. Subsidiarity: political decisions should be made at the most local level possible.

Since I am living in the United States, the question is how I would advance these values in light of America's problems and political realities. That would include, for instance, balancing or prioritizing these values when they seemingly conflict. But how?

Kevin Carson writes that "a specific policy must be evaluated ... in the context of the overall system of power, how it promotes or hinders the class interests that predominate in that system." In the same post (excerpted from Chapter 9 of Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy), Carson quotes Arthur Silber:

there are two basic methods of thinking that we can often see in the way people approach any given issue. One is what we might call a contextual approach: people who use this method look at any particular issue in the overall context in which it arises, or the system in which it is embedded….

The other fundamental approach is to focus on the basic principles involved, but with scant (or no) attention paid to the overall context in which the principles are being analyzed.

Like Silber and Carson, I try to use both approaches. Of course, the conclusions I reach may be entirely different than what either of them would draw on any particular issue.

In commenting to my previous post on the border question, Eric Lemonholm writes, "Jim - follow the money. In whose interest is it to keep up the supply of cheap, non-organized, expendable labor? Who does not mind seeing wages depressed and rents driven up?"

I view Bush's immigration policy in the context of a larger globalist agenda. The President doesn't give a whit about Latin Americans coming here seeking a better life. He cares more about maintaining the interests of global aristocratic elite and creating a class of global serfs. Importing cheap labor is part of that program. Bring in the Mexicans because unemployed black men who would do similar work are instead rounded up and fed to the Prison-Industrial complex. Unlike Bush's claims, the illegals don't do the work "Americans won't do;" as Ilana Mercer points out, they do the work that poor Americans are prohibited from doing. The surplus workers makes jobs scarce, which in turn drives wages down. Combine this with the erosion of America's manufacturing base, and the inflation of the money supply through record deficit spending, and it appears Bush's program is to turn what were once the most productive and prosperous people on Earth into another race of serfs.

This is all to say that immigration, like national security or the best means of tax reform, must be considered not only in light of the political values I want to advance, but also of the system in which we live under. And I perceive the "two sides" of the immigration question not to be xenophobes and libertarians, but nationalists and globalists. That is, those who want to preserve national sovereignty, and those who want to absorb the United States into a hemispheric confederation as a step toward a World Government.

In that contest, I believe the best tactic is to side with the nationalists - at least on the border security question. (I firmly oppose violating the freedoms of American citizens in the hunt for illegal immigrants.) If the border disappeared because the State is dissolving into irrelevence, that would be something to celebrate. But it is disappearing instead to create an even bigger and more authoritarian State.

As a believer in subsidiarity, I must resist this surrender of our sovereignty.  6:47 PM permanent link 0 comments   

  Who Is This Guy and What Country Is He From?
This is William Norman Grigg, editor of the John Birch Society's magazine The New American.

On his great Birch Blog, Grigg writes:

As a large brown male of Mexican ancestry, I have passed as an Egyptian, Iranian, and Saudi. This process can certainly work in reverse. The illegal immigrant stream from Mexico has almost certainly been seeded with radical Islamists who would have no difficulty blending in among the radical Chicanos until they're called into action. If their supervisors are smart – and nobody has ever accused them of stupidity – the next terrorist strike may well be designed to capitalize on the growing ethnic tension between Mexicans and Aglo-Americans, which would leverage the incident's impact dramatically.

There is no quick and tidy fix to our immigration imbroglio, but the “Well, duh” element of the solution involves a serious effort to reclaim control over our borders. Yet the same jut-jawed Dear Leader who never ignores an opportunity to pose as our heroic Protector is perversely determined to tear the screen door off its hinges and usher in as many desperate people as Vicente Fox sees fit to send through our back door.

This “Mi casa es su casa” approach to border enforcement would be disastrous even in normal times. These aren't normal times, of course. Washington has been whacking at every middle eastern hornet's nest it can find, and now it's making sure that the hornets have unimpeded access to their potential victims in this country.

It's been said many times that the State is an artificial construction and that the borders are essentially imaginary. Maybe so, but then so are the property boundaries created by the State's zoning laws. It doesn't make a trespasser any less of a trespasser.

It is against both Politically Correct dogma and Libertarianism to authorize the State to control its own borders. But ultimately, the problem is not in the coercion of keeping people out, because individuals are free (or at least should be free) to do that on their own property. The real libertarian complaint against immigration enforcement is really a complaint against the State itself. The final answer to everything is to abolish the State.

But if that is the case, then the State is out of line even when it prosecutes a murderer. It would violate principle to suggest the State should protect us at all, from anyone or anything, even in the absence of alternative forms of security. Because the State is so evil, it shouldn't even repel invasions.

In contrast, I am inclined to support the State's efforts to protect the territorial status quo - if indeed the State makes the effort. Mass migration to an already-populated area depresses wages and drives up rents. The border is meant to stop this from happening. And the border is also intended to keep undesirables - such as terrorists - out. The State's refusing to guard its borders is akin to the State refusing to investigate a murder. It is the abandonment of a responsibility the State claims for itself, one that it denies individuals from taking on themselves. It leaves the people without any protection at all.  5:04 PM permanent link 1 comments   

  Make Basketball Like Tennis Yes, I'll be rooting for George Mason University in the NCAA Final Four. It's the classic underdog, etc. etc. Plus, the University's named after a man whose proposals should have been more closely followed at the Constitutional Convention, and whose opposition to the new Constitution instigated the adoption of the Bill of Rights.

That said, ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd had a good point Thursday morning. The best team wins the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA Finals, and, yes, even college football's unofficial national championship. The same could hardly be said if George Mason wins the NCAA Tournament - and in this Final Four, they can.

On the other hand, GMU did beat the #'s 7,3,6, and 1 seeds in their own 16-team region to make it this far. No one else had a tougher road. If they reel off two more wins like this to end the season winning six straight against good to very good opponents, they certainly "deserve" to win the NCAA Tournament.

But do they "deserve" to win a national championship, to go down in history as the finest team of the 2005-06 basketball season?

That, I'm not so sure.

A George Mason-like run happens maybe once a generation. Every year, a "dark horse" can win any of the Triple Crown races - and often does. In golf and tennis, anyone in the field can "come out of nowhere," play the tournament of their lives, upset the Tiger Woods's and Roger Federers of the world, and win a Grand Slam event. It can never be taken away from them. But winning one major tournament doesn't establish that they were the player of the year. Even winning the Daytona 500 doesn't make one the NASCAR champion.

But in NCAA basketball, it all rides on the one tournament. The conference regular season crown, the conference tournament crown - they mean nothing. The NCAA's are like saying that Pat Cash was the best tennis player of 1987 because he won Wimbledon. Never mind what Ivan Lendl, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg, or Mats Wilander did. Never mind the other tournaments, major and minor. In the NCAA's, if one team is just good enough to make the Tournament, and then get hot during the tournament, we are supposed to assume it is the best team in the land. No - it was the best team only at that time of year.

Again, I don't want to diminish what GMU's accomplished. I'm rooting for them. I'm just saying that two or three other major tournaments of 32 or 64 teams, and other tournaments of 16 teams, and even smaller round-robins would establish a more interesting picture of the season.

I could say the same of amateur and pro baseball and hockey. The football season is one long tournament, because one game a week is enough. But if it is possible to play on two, three, or even four consecutive days, then the sport is made for the tournament format.

That's what I'd like to see. George Mason would get their due for playing this well in the NCAA's, but other teams could boast of their victories in other "major" tournaments, or of collecting trophies in several "minor" tournaments.  10:33 PM permanent link 3 comments   

  Totalitarianism Through the Back Door My latest at the Partial Observer.  9:35 AM permanent link 0 comments   

  Top Ten Mistakes If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend that you read Ivan Eland's Top Ten Mistakes the Bush Administration Is Repeating from Vietnam.

Of course, Bush is fortunate in one respect. Unlike during the Vietnam War, today the USA does not have a draft. This is the biggest reason the anti-war movement barely exists; both young people and their parents know that they won't be drafted. In other words, there isn't a lot of self-interest in stopping the war, or in making it priority #1.

In that sense, the President and his neo-con and Religious Right backers are lucky.  5:34 PM permanent link 0 comments   

  Bush Shuns Patriot Act Requirement I don't know if I should bother saying, "Bush must be impeached for the Repubic to survive," because I think it's already dead. But his track record of disregarding federal law when it deems it convenient is absolute proof. The latest atrcoity is reported by the Boston Globe (login now required):

When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.

We should remember that this is not new:

After The New York Times disclosed in December that Bush had authorized the military to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without obtaining warrants, as required by law, Bush said his wartime powers gave him the right to ignore the warrant law.

And when Congress passed a law forbidding the torture of any detainee in US custody, Bush signed the bill but issued a signing statement declaring that he could bypass the law if he believed using harsh interrogation techniques was necessary to protect national security.

According to Bush, the War on Terror makes the President a dictator, who can ignore any law passed by Congress just by saying "national security."

It's only a matter of time before this or a future President postpones indefinetely a federal election and justify it by saying "national security!" I wonder how many Americans will be sufficiently softened and tolerate the measure, and how many will take their guns to Washington to teach the President what a real "national security crisis" looks like.  11:24 AM permanent link 0 comments   

  Makes Sense If the vast majority of U.S. troops in Iraq believe they are there in retaliation for 9-11, but the Bush Administration now denies making the connection, then, as Mike Tuggle writes, the next time you see or write to a member of the armed services, tell them that Iraq is not about 9-11 and the President himself says so.

They might then ask themselves, "Then why are we in Iraq?"  11:16 AM permanent link 0 comments   

  Free Market "Reform" in France [I put this together in response to a thread in a genrally non-political email list I'm on, where someone chimed in on the French situation. The writer implied that the protesters had a cradle-to-grave mentality. And maybe a lot of them do, but I thought it would be informative for that list to see another side of it. And since I did it, I might as well blog it.]

I'm not informed enough to have a strong opinion whether France's employment reforms are good or bad, but there is interesting discussion about it among some pro-free market bloggers. (To avoid confusion ofmeanings, "capitalism" as used by these writers does not refer to the free market, but rather to a system of government benefits and protections rigged to the advantage of the few.)

Sheldon Richman writes,

The French law letting employers fire young workers without cause during their first two years on the job is a freeing of "the market" only on the surface. France is a cartellized and concentrated economy thanks to heavy goverment intervention on behalf of the country's elite. Whether we call it state capitalism or state socialism is a mere detail. Thus giving the beneficiaries of state privilege a bit more leeway in firing employees hardly constitutes freeing the market. Why is there no talk in France of removing the myriad deep restrictions on free competition? That is what would really give workers bargaining power.

Kevin Carson writes,

[T]he decision of what aspects of statism to dismantle first should be guided by an overall strategy of dismantling state capitalism as a system. That means we go first after the central structural supports of privilege, that enable the corporate-state ruling class to derive profit by political means, and go last after palliative measures that make such corporatist exploitation humanly tolerable for the non-privileged. As Thomas L. Knapp said, that means dismantling welfare from the top down and cutting taxes from the bottom up. If we allow the state capitalist ruling class and their pet "free market" think tanks to set the priorities of what to go after first, and welcome every incremental reduction as a "step in the right direction," we're allowing the free market to be adopted in a way that only makes statist exploitation more efficient.

Brad Spangler writes,

The overall economic environment in France is so thoroughly statist that they quite reasonably expect no tangible benefit from this one small so-called market reform — and quite probably a fair amount of pain.

Young people in France currently often have to live at home for several *years* while job hunting. The consolation that sustains them is that once they’re in, at least they have job security. We ought to be able to express sympathy for their plight and point towards a better way — a revolutionary way.

The CPE is technically market liberalization — but representative of perhaps the worst possible choice of priorities, I would counter. Such is the nature of political reformism — to subvert the market toward the interests of the political class and bring it into unjustified disrepute.

In an open letter to the protesters (found in the same
post) Spanger writes,

Under such circumstances, state-sponsored market liberalization is a cruel joke. The legislation you protest and rebel against seeks only to increase the latitude given your overseers, while maintaining the overall restrictions on your own liberty that, if abolished, would empower you to seek your own prosperity.

Roderick Long writes,

Whether something counts as a reduction of restrictions on liberty depends on the context. Remember when Reagan “deregulated” the Savings & Loans – such deregulation could be a good thing under many circumstances, but given that he didn’t remove federal deposit insurance, “deregulation” amounted in that context to an increase of aggression against the taxpayers, licensing the S&Ls; to takes greater risks with taxpayers’ money.

So in this case: when government passes laws giving group A unjust privileges over group B, and then passes another law giving B some protection against A, then repealing the second law without repealing the first amounts to increasing A’s unjust privilege over B. Of course a free society would have neither the first nor the second law, but repealing them in the wrong order can actually decrease rather than increase liberty.

  10:34 AM permanent link 0 comments