February 2009

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I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. (attributed)

-James Madison

July 31, 2007

Socialism: So Pretty!

The Daily Texan is the student newspaper of UT Austin. It’s one of the largest student newspapers in the country. And yesterday, it ran an opinion piece advocating that Westerners re-evaluate the wonders of socialism. Under normal circumstances, I don’t pay much attention to student newspapers and their opinion pieces, as they just aren’t that well written. But this piece is an exception, and it therefore deserves to be highlighted.

The author is history student Colin Pace, who writes:

Socialism is not a monolithic ideology and it is not a terrible, fear-driven beast that threatens the U.S. masses. In fact, it is quite the opposite. To understand this, one need not look further than Michael Moore's recent movie, "Sicko." Though gimmicky and biased, like his other movies, the film raises an important question about why universal health care systems rank so high above the United States' privatized system in a global comparison.

But Wulf! Michael Moore is a dirty propagandist and his movie is full of lies! We’ve debunked “Sicko”!

But Wulf! The US health care system isn’t actually private, it’s half government funded already!

Come on, Wulf! We have the best health care in the world! People come here from Canada for our health care! The metrics are not fair!

Oh, Wulf! It’s just an undergrad in social sciences, spouting off his dirty collectivist delusions!

Yes, yes, I know all of that. And I also know that every year there a few million kids turning 18 and getting the right to vote. And they don’t read your blog. And most of them don’t know what is inherently unjust about socialism. Rolling your eyes and dismissing them may make you feel better about yourself, but it doesn’t actually advance the cause of liberty. So let’s take a closer look.

Colin Pace represents an articulate voice pointing out that “[i]nstitutions ranging from news stations to school systems teach that socialist and nationalized programs are doomed to collapse under the weight of bureaucracy and corruption.” I would love for this to be the case, but I simply don’t agree that the prevailing theme taught to our youth is that nationalized programs are too big to succeed. Privatized education, health care, public transit, and other government services? No, that’s certainly not the predominant agenda being pushed to our youth by the sources I know of. But to an audience lacking an articulate source to the contrary, Mr. Pace can play the role of the guy who questions authority, and that gives his point the ironic advantage of being anti-authority. “Rebel against convention and think for yourself about the benefits of letting bureaucrats make more decisions for you!”

Pace then makes another appeal guaranteed to garner attention on any college campus: class warfare and rich white guilt. “Factory workers thousands of miles away are harshly exploited so consumer goods such as clothing and TVs can be sold at low prices to American consumers.” For Pace, it’s not a matter of comparing the standard of living for the workers today vs. 40 years ago. It’s a matter of comparing their standard of living to mine, or better yet to Dick Cheney’s. And again, rolling your eyes and dismissing him is not the same as refuting him - or socialism.

But the real reason I chose to highlight this article is not because it’s easy to cherry pick a couple of weak points and mock him. It’s because Mr. Pace really does make an excellent point that we should all consider:

People should not judge the word "socialism" solely by what they know of "socialist" leaders. Leaders like Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro may have upheld socialist aspects of their administrations, but they were not actually "socialists"…

Spot on. The more distant Stalin and Castro become, the easier it will be to note that they did not actually uphold socialist ideals… and therefore they do not provide an honest example of what is wrong about socialism. Those who wish to refute socialism should beware not to let their argument stop with Stalin and Castro, because it (rightly) won’t sway a collectivist who recognizes that these men were not socialists. There is a difference between oppression by a tyrant and oppression by a democracy. One is appealing to the tyrant and his cult of personality, while the other is appealing to 51% of the population. If we only know how to refute the ills of the former, we will eventually suffer the latter.

In other words, Colin Pace’s final paragraph is one that should be considered by every thinking person the world over:

Even those who are staunchly opposed to the nationalization of industry, believing that the free market is the only means for progress, should question the objectivity of the Western view of socialism. The word is loaded with connotations, but that should not stop people from asking what the system is really about.

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Hurricane History

I just know I'm going to want to reference this article at some point this school year, so I figure I'll just link it here and that will make it easier to find later. A little teaser if you are wondering whether or not you would like to read the article:

Taking the last 10 years off the table, you see quite clearly that the number of storms recorded doubled not from global warming but because of the technology used to find them.

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July 30, 2007

That Would Be Progress

Today Megan McArdle writes about the terms “liberal” and “progressive”:

The throwdown over the terms "liberal" and "progressive" in the left blogosphere has been mildly interesting to me, because I've always been dubious about the switch. I mean, I'm happy to call people whatever they want, and the corpus of moderate-and-beyond left-wingers seems to have decided that they'd rather be known as "progressives" than "liberals", so that's what I try to call them. When I remember, at least.

I wasn’t aware there was such a throwdown, but that’s probably because I haven’t been keeping the pulse of the leftosphere very well. I really ought to, but that’s a different issue. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the throwdown exists and Megan reads it correctly. I think it’s great. There is a difference between the two terms, and it would be helpful to see folks distinguish which more closely identifies them. I’m not talking about rebranding “liberal” as “progressive”, but rather splitting the Left into subgroups for the sake of clarity. And if said throwdown is serious enough, a label-splitting is exactly what will happen, since self-labeling is a market, not a democracy.

So how would such a split manifest itself? What is the difference between the two terms? I was taught long ago that the important difference between “progressives” and “liberals” is a matter of goals and methods.

Loosely, a Liberal is one who advocates freedom. The confusion in American politics comes from the confusion over whose freedom is more important (If I could just have some of your money, I would have more freedom to travel... if you didn't have guns, I would be free of the fear that you might shoot me... etc.), and what limits might be placed on it (thus concepts such as “too wealthy”, "too many guns", etc). The divide between libertarianism and modern American liberalism is that libertarians believe the boundaries to be absolute, while liberals see them as very moveable. For liberals, rights are malleable, and a degree of equality is to be sought not just in opportunity, but in outcome.

A Progressive is one who seeks to use government power to enact social change. As noted in the comments following McArdle’s post, this is specifically a interventionalist mentality. It advocates both greater democracy and greater centralization – which is exactly why it is so fervently feared by libertarians. Centralization is anti-liberty for reasons that are too obvious to go into here. More frequently, I am asked to explain how democracy is anti-liberty. It was explained well by Kip in this post a while back, if you don’t already get it.

Perhaps you don’t agree with my definitions. It wouldn’t be surprising, since traditional political labels are obsolete. But a terminology throwdown among bloggers on the Left might help us all to have a better understanding of the goals and methods being advocated – especially in a climate where so many are currently defined by what they oppose, and not by what they espouse.

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July 27, 2007

Boris the Spider

For no reason other than it's stuck in my head and I just taught it to my kids:

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July 26, 2007

The Basics

I love it when somebody lays things out in the most basic terms. So, here's three cheers for Kip, Esquire!

To review: The government has no business providing any goods other than public goods. A public good is one that is neither excludable (I can withhold a cheeseburger from you if you do not pay for it) nor rivalrous (a cheeseburger cannot be consumed simultaneously by more than one person).

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July 25, 2007

For Future Reference

WaPo:

President Bush this month is giving an obscure White House office new powers over regulations affecting health, worker safety and the environment. Calling it a power grab, Democrats running Congress are intent on stopping him.

This is great news. First, it’s an attempt to block the executive branch from acting without oversight, and instead gives the power to act without oversight to legislators and their aides, which is where that power ought to be, dammit. Secondly, and more seriously, I’ll be able to refer to this post the next time a Democrat is in the White House (cough-544 days-cough) and the shoe is on the other foot. That’s always fun.

As to the details, WaPo reports that the House voted to prohibit the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) from spending federal money on Executive Order 13422. Cutting federal spending, I suppose – so far, so good. But what is Executive Order 13422? It amends an executive order from 1993… let’s check the text:

Each agency shall identify in writing the specific market failure (such as externalities, market power, lack of information) or other specific problem that it intends to address (including, where applicable, the failures of public institutions) that warrant new agency action, as well as assess the significance of that problem, to enable assessment of whether any new regulation is warranted.

That gives me the creeps just reading it. But… I can imagine the argument that it is a damn good thing that each federal agency should have to identify in writing the specific problem it intends to address. So far, I don’t see what the Dems object to.

Unless specifically authorized by the head of the agency, no rulemaking shall commence nor be included on the Plan without the approval of the agency's Regulatory Policy Office…

The Post summarizes this as “No rulemaking can go forward without the approval of an agency's Regulatory Policy Office, to be headed by a presidential appointee.” Is it a big deal to drop the first clause? But the point about the presidential appointee is a good one. Please read “presidential appointee” as “partisan political hack”. The Right Wing would do well to imagine what their reaction to this would have been under Bill Clinton… or what it will be someday under Hillary. Why do we continually have to point this out? In fact, that’s really the bottom line regarding each and every action the Bush administration has taken to gather and centralize power. While it may be fun for some of you to cheer as Bush, Cheney, et alii thumb their noses at the Democrats, it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass.

PS - I am not sympathetic to the desire that some federally employed scientists have for everybody to shut up and let them do what they feel they need to do. When you fund your own research initiative, I’ll support your desire for the government to back off.

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July 17, 2007

Economic Growth

Afghanistan's poppy crop set another record this growing season. I mean, it won't be official until the folks from Guinness verify it of course. But unofficially, we're talking a record crop.

That's a lot of cash flowing into Afghanistan. I hope most of it is going towards infrastructure and education.

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A Challenge to Captain Capitalism

Captain Capitalism is a man who loves three things in life: Soap, Shampoo, and Graphs. Since I'm not quite the graphophile as he, I would like to extend the following challenge to Captain Capitalism:

What would a graph look like whose x-axis was the years 1776 through 2007 and y-axis was GDP (adjusted for inflation) divided by population? I am really curious to see what that looks like. My prediction is that it’d be a steady slope upwards with spikes during the industrial and information revolution. But I’m interested to see if any sort of correlation can be made with the “value” per capita and the expansion of the government, or if there are any other trends that can be culled.

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July 11, 2007

Connections

Remember James Burke's Connections? I miss this show, and was saddened to read that there hasn't been an episode since 1997, and there's seemingly none planned for the future.

I am currently going through a Thomas Jefferson phase (as I imagine most libertarians do), and recently experienced my own, personal connections. But first, a little background: The Rammage Family has recently left The People's Republic of Maryland and is in the process of building a new home in Fauquier County, VA. My excitement on moving to the Old Dominion should be apparent, and I've already traced my new property through its previous owners back to ~~King George III~~ King Charles II (with, admittedly, a few gaps here and there.) While I quickly familiarized myself with such local legends as John Marshall and John "Gray Ghost" Mosby, I hadn't researched yet the origins of Fauquier.

Rewind the clock by four years and the Rammage Family was visiting London on winter holiday. In a whirlwind tour of the city that lasted five days, we caught the two most popular churches, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral, along with a Christmas Eve service in a less touristy church, St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

Fast-forward to present-day and my ongoing Jefferson phase, and I'm currently reading Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder by Jack Mclaughlin. The author takes somewhat of a different approach to biographies, and analyzes Jefferson through his owner/builder architectural design and construction of Monticello. A young Thomas Jefferson befriended the royal governor of the Virginia Colony, Francis Fauquier, who was, as McLaughlin wrote, "important in establishing Jefferson's artistic and architectural tastes."

And here's where my personal connections came to light while reading the following excerpt:

But Fauquier may also have encouraged Jefferson's interest in a more direct way. In London, before coming to the colonies, Fauquier rented a house in a fashionable section of the town, now Argyll Street near Oxford Circus, from none other than James Gibbs, one of England's most illustrious architects.

Like Fauquier, Gibbs was a member of the Royal Society, and in the close-knit circles of the privileged classes of London, the two men were quite likely social acquaintances. Gibbs had designed some of the most impressive buildings in England in the [Christopher] Wren style. His masterpiece, St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, remains one of London's architectural landmarks, its monumental Corinthian portico and soaring baroque steeple overlooking Trafalgar Square.

His reputation was increased throughout England and the colonies by two publications, A Book of Architecture, a pattern book of his most popular buildings, and Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture, a textbook to be used for designing orders correctly. A Book of Architecture was the most popular style of book of the eighteenth century, and Jefferson had a copy of it, quite possibly purchased at the urging of Fauquier. He also owned Gibbs's Rules and used it to set the proportions for the earliest drawings of the porticoes at Monticello.

So there you have it: from Gibbs to Fauquier to Jefferson to my Jefferson Phase and the subsequent building of our own "monticello" in Fauquier County. Now if only I can convince Mrs. Rammage the desperate need to include a Palladian double portico on our new 4-bedroom colonial, the circle of my own personal connections will be complete.

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