Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Category: Opinion

  • We’re Living in a Post-Digital-Evidence Age

    Revelations from Wikileaks have far deeper implications than have been covered by the media as yet. The CIA has lost control of not only a trove of documents about the organization’s cyber warfare capabilities. It’s lost control of the weapons themselves.

    WikiLeaks has dropped a bomb on the CIA

    In digital warfare, there exists the concept of a zero-day exploit. In hacker/information security parlance, a zero-day is an undisclosed vulnerability in software that has been discovered. Ordinarily, watchdog groups and the organizations that produce software have procedures in place to discuss vulnerabilities and issue patches before releasing details of exploits to the general public. Only in the extreme circumstance of an organization deliberately ignoring reports by security researchers of exploitable weaknesses do ethical hackers resort to releasing details of the attack to the general public. The obvious ramification of knowledge being openly available before a patch is released is that anyone can use it prior to patching.

    There is the obvious issue, raised by Wikileaks itself, that the CIA has duplicated the functions of the NSA, but very likely with even less oversight for the use of their arsenal. This is not only a waste of taxpayers’ money, but possibly a revelation that unconstitutional attacks on the privacy of American citizens may be taking place by more than one government agency. If that is the case, it is a clear violation of the CIA’s mission, as laid out by Congress.

    The ultimate effect of losing this digital arsenal, which may now be in the hands of anyone, is that literally any digital evidence may be called into question. The scope of who may have access to it is completely unknown, and this genie cannot be put back into its bottle. The evidentiary value of criminal activity stored on computers could be disclaimed as planted evidence. This has wide-ranging implications not only for cases under consideration, but for future cases which may be brought.

    The CIA now has an obligation to the American people to disclose all of the methods of its infiltration to software developers in advance of the coming storm. It must shatter the weapons it created and, if Congress deems it necessary, it may rebuild a new arsenal.

    Furthermore, Congress must probe the agency deeply and potentially reform the country’s spying agencies completely. There is evidently far too much overlap for which the taxpayer is expected to foot the bill. It is also evident that there is too little civilian oversight and too much delegation of powers in the name of national security, a long-standing problem which has now become an emergency. Ethical considerations of spying on foreign powers aside, this lapse has made it clear that our own spying agencies are as much a danger to our own citizens as they are to the rest of the world.

  • Property Taxes are the Single Worst Form of Taxation Ever Devised by Man

    NO! And the HOA president says your shrubs are too big
    Sorry, we’ll just rent it to you and increase the monthly payment on an annual basis.

    I could take a few different paths to back up my claim that property taxes are the most evil form of taxes, but I’ll stick with the angry rant. There is no topic that gets me hotter under the collar than property taxes, and I’m flummoxed when so-called libertarians are pro-property taxes. I’m not big into purity tests for libertarians, but I may just make an exception for the Georgists.

    Instead of doing a comparative analysis of different types of taxes, I’m going to explain why land is no different than any other sort of personal property in the realm of justifying taxation, and I’m also going to explain why land is different from other property in the realm of personal liberty. Perhaps if I can be persuasive in showing that there is no good reason to single out real property for a possession tax and there is plenty of good reason to single out real property for protection from government, I can make a decent case for deep-sixing property taxes.

    The Marxist Fallacy of Labor as Value

    Cutting to the chase, the single most glaring flaw of Georgism is that it’s predicated on the labor theory of value. It ignores the value of capital, the value of ingenuity with regard to capital, and the value of taking on risk. In a simplistic Georgist view, we can somehow separate the value obtained through labor from the value inherent in a product. See, to the Georgist, sand is sand, and it’s owned by the community. If you bag it up and sell it, you’re only entitled to be compensated for the service of bagging it. If you melt it into glass, we somehow have to separate out the value of the sand from the value of the glass, and the value of the sand goes to the government to be used to the benefit of the community. Of course, like any other crypto-communist solution, the Georgist government is going to have to appoint omniscient superhumans to staff the boards and councils used to determine exactly how much of the $100 for the glass pane is for the communal sand and how much is for the transformation to glass. Nevermind the fact that the guy buying the pane of glass wouldn’t have even paid a penny for the untransformed sand. You know, because he needs a pane of glass, not a sandbox. Nevermind, also, the next-door neighbor who wouldn’t pay a penny for the pane of glass, but would pay $20 for the untransformed sand.

    Tearing this down to its most basic, Georgist economics suffers from the same misconception as socialism, that there is a “true price” for a good, and that the “true price” reflects some “true input value” of capital and some “true transformative value” of the labor put into the capital.

    Can’t Quite Describe It

    I can't grab my weenie!Much like the ubiquitous water weenie, it’s near impossible to grab hold of the difference between land and land-derived goods in the Georgist philosophy. What makes land community owned but my coffee table mine? This is where the stupidity of the property tax shines through. See, if the coffee table is 100% mine, then I had to have, at some point, paid the community for the portion of natural resources (trees) that were used to build my table. Assuming that a sales tax was this theoretical payment, it still makes no sense that I must pay a yearly remittance on my land. The TOP MEN have decreed that 6% of my table was community owned, and I paid 6% tax to purchase the table. However, property tax is infinite taxation. It is countably infinite, but it is infinite nonetheless. If I were to own the land forever, I would pay property taxes forever. If it worked like the table, a property owner would be allowed to pay a one-time fee to the community for the value of the underlying natural resources (standard “there’s no such thing as true value” disclaimers apply), and then own the property sans encumbrance.

    The fact that property tax is infinite taxation leads to one of two conclusions. Either 1) natural resources are infinitely valuable and labor sullies that infinite value (a premise that can be dismissed without discussion); or 2) something magical happens when you transform natural resources that makes them no longer property of the community. Even if we were to accept the second premise, it still does not explain why improved land is still subject to property tax. Like the water weenie, any coherent classification of what is subject to property tax seems to slip through our hands.

    Property Ownership as Deprivation of the Community’s Right

    The single most unconvincing portion of Georgism is this pervasive hostility to private ownership of natural resources. This concept that the “community” owns the land and all value inherent therein. This neo-feudalist idea that the modern Crown grants the modern peasant a tenancy on the land to make public good come from the land is antiquated and hostile to natural rights theory. It amazes me to see so many otherwise brilliant libertarian thinkers fall hook, line, and sinker for this magical thinking that bestows upon the government special rights and privileges made up wholecloth, rather than granted from its constituents. Basic application of the NAP says that 5 guys with guns and badges can’t do anything that 5 guys with guns and torches can’t do. Similarly, the “community” (or society or the government or whatever name we give a collection of people) does not have a claim to the property unless members of the community, in the aggregate, have at least that same claim to the property. If no other person has a legitimate claim to the property, then who could? God? Gaia? The government is ill equipped to adjudicate ownership conflicts between man and God (much good it would do, anyway).

    I have found no convincing philosophical argument establishing a communal right to land. In fact, most Georgists seem to shift to a more utilitarian mode of argumentation when this comes up.

    Property Taxes: the Original Penaltax

    I see that my rant is running long and getting incoherent, so I’ll quickly wrap it up. Property taxes are a tax on inaction, much like the O-care penaltax. Broadening that out, if government were truly a product of a Social Contract, and that contract were to be said, with a straight face, to be voluntary, there would need to be some course of action able to be taken to openly reject said Social Contract. No action is more clearly a refutation of society and the Social Contract than hermitage, and the modern equivalent: homesteading. A self-confinement to one’s dwelling, self-sufficiency, nearly non-existent use of the community assets. One’s dwelling is their retreat from the “community.” Furthermore, it is a mandatory part of human existence. People can exist without incomes, without commerce, without vices. However, even the homeless have a cardboard box and a sleeping bag. To tax one’s dwelling is to reach into that last corner of their life untouched by the “community” and say “we still own you, even when you try to get away.”

    Appeals to fairness be damned. Ones right to property ownership is not subject to some balancing test against the desires of the community. Either land can be owned outright, or we are slaves captured by a do-gooding master.

    Sorry for the sloppy article. I may address property taxes as payment for community services in the comments, but needless to say, I think it is just petty rationalization. Selling one’s soul to the Devil isn’t less Hellish just because they got a few trinkets in return.

  • The Origin of Poverty and Prosperity

    Let's be honest... the tentacles between the eyes is basically an elephant trunk.
    The benevolent octopus of capitalism reaches out to comfort all.

    Poverty is the default state. It requires no explanation for its origin.

    Prosperity comes from improvements to the means of production. Those improvements require capital, which accumulates through savings. Savings are the result of under-consumption. To put it another way, if nobody saves, there is nothing to borrow or spend on improvements.

    When people are able to save, produce, and trade freely, prosperity tends to come automatically. Unfortunately, the free market has many opponents. There are two main groups. One is groups seeking to stifle competition, such as established businesses, cartels, and labor unions. The other is control freaks upset that people are buying what they want instead of what the control freaks want. The amount of power these groups have set the limit on how prosperous a community can be.

    Instead of letting the market create prosperity automatically, these groups stall the process with absurd, self-serving rules and then demand that the government step in to stimulate the economy when stagnation results. A good example of one such rule was a former law which outlawed the sale of margarine colored to look like butter. Dairy farmers complained this was “unfair” competition, and so demanded a law to stifle their competitors. Some states even passed requiring margarine to be dyed pink to make it less appealing. A margarine dye law stayed on the books in Quebec until 2008. Margarine was invented in 1871.

    The stagnation that results from the accumulation of stupid laws creates pressure for a central bank and periodic attempts to “jump-start” the economy, usually by expanding credit artificially and/or increasing government spending. These credit expansions create a temporary boom followed by an inevitable bust.

    The best way to understand this is to imagine a restaurant owner in a small town. One week, the circus comes and he has many new customers. For some reason, he doesn’t notice they are all clowns and lion tamers. He decides to open another restaurant to handle all the new business. But soon the circus leaves town, and he is forced close the second restaurant. In this example, it is all the fault of the restaurant owner’s poor judgment.

    In another case, bad weather can cause farmers to lose money. But if every farmer in a country has a bad harvest for years on end, it is unlikely that the weather is the culprit. The farms of the USSR had been some of the world’s most productive for centuries. Yet as soon as the communists took over they proceeded to have 70 years of bad harvests, which the communists blamed on the weather. A common joke in the USSR was that if communists took over the Sahara, in a year, there would be a shortage of sand.

    It is the same in a recession when thousands of businesses of all kinds lose money at the same time. The question becomes: why did all these different businesses make the same mistake at the same time? Why did so many people choose to start or expand businesses doomed to fail? The answer is that credit was expanded artificially by a central bank.

    Poverty and economic crises are man-made. When the Roman emperors wanted more money without raising taxes or cutting spending, they issued coins with less silver. But since the new coins were worth less, prices rose. The Emperor Diocletian tried to stop inflation by fixing prices. A Roman historian at the time observed he might as well have commanded the wind not to blow.

    Just as inflation has been blamed on everything except an increase in the amount of money, economic crises have blamed on everything except credit expansions by central banks. The worst economic crisis in history happened a mere 13 years after the creation of the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank.

    The idea that printing money, expanding credit by fiat, or increasing government spending will somehow magically lead to prosperity is no different than trying to drink yourself sober or put out a fire with gasoline.

    It is high time for the proponents of flat earth economics to relent and repent.

    Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

    This is known as “bad luck.”

    ― Robert A. Heinlein

  • Raise the Minimum Wage & End Robot Unemployment

    This robot killed thousands of humans in the Emoji Wars and was paid a non-living wage. Now he is penniless and works as a night guard in a toy store for room and board. His name is Gilbert.

    America’s robot unemployment rate is a national disgrace. All across the country, robot engineers sit idle and schematics languish on drawing boards. And why? Because robots are priced out of the market by cut-rate human labor. All this in spite of the presence of millions of dull, repetitive, low-skill jobs which are perfect for robots.

    Yes, robophobia runs rampant–it’s the last acceptable form of discrimination. It’s time to move forward and strike a blow for machine rights. By raising the minimum wage, we can ensure that robots and humans will compete on an even playing field.

    Moreover, more robots mean jobs for engineers & technicians. Moving to a robot-based economy will revitalize America’s manufacturing base. Imagine going through a drive-thru and being served a perfectly cooked hamburger from a gleaming robot with “MADE IN THE USA” proudly stamped on its metal chest. Picture factories in cities like Cleveland and Detroit bustling once more as they churn out robots. Think of all the happy teenagers and college students liberated from the drudgery of summer jobs.

    Other nations like Japan have embraced robots. And Japan’s economy has been in a non-stop boom ever since. All thanks to the magic of high labor costs and robots.

    In the US, robots have largely replaced humans on customer service hotlines, much to everyone’s delight. I know I get a thrill up my spine whenever I hear the robot voice say “for English, press 1”. And I never have to repeat myself to a robot the way I do with people. They get it right the first time, every time. Honestly, who prefers talking to a person over a machine?

    Raise the minimum wage–it’s good for robots, good for business, and good for America.

  • Just a Few More Laws

    The US constitution is 4,440 words long. It is the shortest constitution in the world and the oldest still in use.

    Unfortunately, the Constitution was not quite enough, so over the years, we added a few more laws. By 1925, all of the country’s laws fit in a book 7 inches thick–much more impressive than that flimsy old Constitution. Later came the IRS tax code. It is around 4 million words, but no one really knows for sure because it gets longer every year. It is now longer than the Bible (788,000 words), War and Peace (587,000 words), and the complete works of Shakespeare (884,000 words)–combined.

    Not bad, but still not quite enough. Obamacare added another 387 thousand words and its regulations another 11 million words. It is important to remember that laws include both statutes and regulations. The regulations are often much longer than the law (statute) itself. I tried and failed to find a word count for all US laws, including federal, state, and local. I failed because it turns out there are so many of them, no one knows how many there really are. A rough guess is that there are probably around 100 million words total in all the country’s laws.

    Now we’re getting somewhere. A Roman orator named Cicero famously said “more laws, less justice.” But those were ancient times. Things are completely different today. The record of history clearly shows that as laws grow more numerous and complex, corruption and crime decrease. This is especially true for vice laws which have successfully eradicated prostitution and drugs. And with no unintended consequences whatsoever.

    You see, with every law we pass, we inch ever closer to utopia. That’s why we should be passing as many laws as possible and never, ever repealing them. To repeal even one law is to risk plunging the nation into anarchy. So the next time you hear someone complain about laws, just remember that laws are the only things stopping people from killing and eating each other. Even the laws like the one which banned pinball machines in New York City from 1940 to 1976. Those are the most important of all.

  • Kulturkampf: The Importance of Sculpting Society

    Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
    ― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

    Bastiat’s words have been quite obviously true from the day he wrote them, but the socialists and statists of today have laid bare their complete inability to distinguish between society and the State. The Orwellian newspeak of the modern left has rendered the distinction between the public sphere inhabited by the State and the one inhabited by culture difficult to describe. One example highlights an old semantics battle fought and won by the left. Over a decade ago, 17 year-old me struggled with the question posed in civics class: “What is the difference between civil rights and civil liberties?” A quick flip in the dictionary to “Civil Rights” yields this answer:

    Personal liberties that belong to an individual, owing to his or her status as a citizen or resident of a particular country or community.

    Another quick flip to “Civil Liberties” yields this answer:

    rights or freedoms given to the people by the First Amendment to the Constitution, by common law, or legislation, allowing the individual to be free to speak, think, assemble, organize, worship, or petition without government (or even private) interference or restraints. These liberties are protective in nature, while civil rights form a broader concept and include positive elements such as the right to use facilities, the right to an equal education, or the right to participate in government. (See: civil rights)

    Needless to say, the competition this question was based on didn’t go well for me. However, this question has stuck in my head for years. It wasn’t until studying 14th Amendment jurisprudence in law school that the answer dawned on me. There is no difference between civil rights and civil liberties . . . but there was!

    In the original formulation of the 14th Amendment, the politicians and thinkers of the time split rights into three relevant categories: civil, political, and social. Civil rights were what we would recognize today as negative rights (1st Amendment, etc.). Political rights are those limited positive rights (voting rights, etc.) that are focused on the procedural aspects of running the government. Social rights are recognized as positive rights (no private discrimination, welfare, cultural identity, etc.). However, this all seemed foreign to somebody like me who had no exposure to these classic definitions. Today, they are all lumped together as civil rights, giving us libertarians no easy “handle to grasp” when discussing these issues. It would be an easy mantra for us to say “legislate civil rights, not social rights,” but the phrase has no meaning to a modern audience.

    Reflecting back on Bastiat’s quote from The Law, it is clear that libertarians have just as difficult of a time separating society from the State as statists do. Many times we jump to the conclusion that the only hurdle for “goodness” or “morality” is that something should not be legislated against by the State. We’ve all heard the slur that libertarians are just libertines.  Many libertarians take a weak stance (if any at all) against encroaching cultural changes. Some even hold open disdain toward participation in the “Culture War.”

    This is exactly the wrong tactic to use in defense of liberty. While the abstaining libertarians spend their time and effort staying “above the fray,” the Culture War wages on beneath them, dragging them further and further away from their end goal. Prominent libertarian thinkers sprint full-speed, grasping and lunging for the elusive Libertarian Moment. All the while, they’re stuck on a bullet train headed straight for Statist Station. Without addressing the elements of our society most hostile to liberty, any handful of progress made will be fleeting, meaningless, and overwhelmed by the dump truck load of totalitarianism that has accumulated in the same duration.

    Andrew Breitbart observed that politics is downstream from culture. I believe this to be very true. The statist shift we have seen in the last 100 years isn’t because politicians have tricked well-meaning citizens into supporting growth of the State. The cause and effect is flipped. Our culture has created these politicians. Only when we internalize this can we understand the importance of the Culture War. Libertarians will be nothing until we engage in evangelism, organization, disruption, and institutional control to the level that the Progressives have for the last 100 years. No standard libertarian disclaimers apply here. We need to seize the positions of power for our culture, and we need to exert our influence on society.

    This feels dirty and unlibertarian. It feels downright statist. However, this is because the line between society and the State has been so blurred. We can influence culture without abandoning our principles. Usually, this is where libertarian thinkers fall flat on their face. In courting the libertarian feels, they’ll say things like: It’s as simple as challenging somebody when they mindlessly spout off about how “there should be a law!” It’s as simple as giving a few dollars to a liberty-loving non-profit that supports victims of the State. It’s as simple as teaching your children to view government with a healthy skepticism.

    If the last 100 years have taught us anything, it’s that winning back liberty isn’t that simple. Liberty loving individuals aren’t ones to use the Alinskyite playbook to get our way, but we’ve been eaten alive for a century. It’s time to ratchet things up. We need to establish the organization and infrastructure required to mount a counter-assault against the Statist-held institutions of society and the State. We need to organize on local levels to make sure that things like unfair zoning, over-restrictive HOAs, and abusive eminent domain are met with protest. We need to establish a cost-effective alternative to the public indoctrination centers so that families aren’t forced to choose between sending their kids to a daily Progressive church service and having enough money to eat. We need to offer entertainment and news that is completely detached from the legacy media, especially their agenda-setting powers. We must cover events that actually matter rather than the ones personally groomed by Statist elites. We must free the studies of history, economics, and philosophy from the shackles of postmodern leftism by better promoting libertarian academicians.

    The answers to many of these problems are not imminently forthcoming, but putting our fingers in our ears and chanting “shouldn’t be illegal, not my problem” is going to lead to only one place. . . totalitarian ruin. It’s not only okay for libertarians to wade into the Culture War, it’s necessary. If we don’t, we’ll wish we were only as irrelevant as we are today. Only, we won’t have the words to describe what happened.

  • FCC Chairman Calls For Rollback Of Net Neutrality “Mistake”

    Proponents and enemies of net neutrality can stop guessing what the new head of the FCC will do.  He has made it abundantly clear that he will move to dismantle the rule.

    “It has become evident that the FCC made a mistake,” Pai said at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, according to a copy of his prepared remarks provided to CNNTech. “Our new approach injected tremendous uncertainty into the broadband market. And uncertainty is the enemy of growth.”

    Reality!

    Thank God we have someone that understands market realities and how consumer choice is better facilitated when agencies get out of the way and let firms compete.

    According to CNN:

    The net neutrality rules, approved by the FCC in 2015 amid an outpouring of online support, let the agency regulate the Internet as a public utility, placing greater restrictions on broadband providers.
    The rules prevent Internet providers like Comcast (CCV) and AT&T (T, Tech30) from deliberately speeding up or slowing down traffic from specific websites and apps. In short, the rules are intended to prevent providers from playing favorites.

    Bullshit!

    Except there was no “outpouring of online support when people understood the issue and the uncertainties it placed on ISPs.  It existed based solely on how the question was asked and what pony the respondent thought he/she’d get by supporting it.  What it did, however, do was to stifle innovation, expansion, competition and relationship-building within the industry’s varying sectors that would reduce costs.  It was going to retard progress that had been made, it would have imposed content restrictions and requirements and it would have increased costs for everybody downstream of the regulators.

    Mark another one down in “garbage that the current admin has started the process of fixing in a way libertarians should be satisfied with”.  I know it pains some people, but its the truth.

  • Identity Politics Part 2: Let’s You and Him Fight!

    By Suthenboy

    A divided people are more easily conquered. The Imperialist European powers were well aware of this and commonly drew borders in their overseas colonies to encompass competing indigenous peoples so that those groups would fight with each other and not the conquering Europeans. Additionally they gained political capital by putting themselves in the position of arbiters of the disputes and alleviators of grievances for those indigenous people. The political left in the modern United States is also well aware of this strategy.

    Their most powerful weapon today is identity politics and the trump card in that deck is racial identity. They actively and deliberately fan the flames of racial animus and stoke grievances among minority populations. By playing the part of arbiters and alleviators they gain loyal voter support of minorities and by cobbling together a number of those minorities seek to gain a majority. They use the threat of labeling one a racist as a gag for those that disagree with them. The problem of course is that it is injurious to our society and culture to set a common people against themselves. Fortunately it appears to be a failing strategy of late yet they are doubling down on it.

    They have targeted every minority but the primary recipients have been Blacks. Until recently Black Americans were the largest minority in the United States. Constant reminders of the history of slavery, of real and imagined grievances, and relegating them to second-class citizenry have divided our country politically along racial lines. Over time and with great effort many of the rifts between Black America and the rest of the country had largely healed but they are intent on re-opening those wounds. Their post-racial America looks more like the mid-nineteenth century than the early twenty first.

    My own children belong to groups of friends that include mixed couples and members of all races, including a number of Blacks. In their direct experience those rifts don’t exist, but ask them about it and they can tell you all about the ignus fatuus that animates their politics.

    The left has actively and deliberately perpetrated resentment among the races for their own political gain successfully for decades. Many of them focus exclusively on that goal and profit handsomely from it. In order to do this they necessarily must cast away the very foundation of liberty – self-ownership. Self-ownership does not tolerate the assignment of collective guilt – that some are guilty of the sins of others. Personal responsibility is an anathema to those pushing to redistribute wealth from the descendants of slave holders to the descendants of slaves. No members of either group are victims or perpetrators and one of those groups barely exists at all.

    Their assignment of guilt is built on the absurd assertion that one is guilty of acts they neither performed or had any hand in deciding. The inevitable conclusion of the assertion that whites are guilty by mere virtue of their skin color, something they can cannot decide or change, refutes the agency of a large portion of the human race. Simply put it is the very dehumanizing bigotry that gave rise to slavery in the first place.

    How then to remedy this? What would be enough? If mere whiteness is guilt then nothing will ever be enough because we cannot change the past nor can anyone change their skin color. The repugnant answer to that question can only be total theft and extermination. Their answer is not to end oppression but to have the oppressed and oppressors exchange places. The morality of our society would decay to the primitive.

    The most grotesque aspect of this strategy is that the very premises of it are smoke. Racial differences are will-o-the wisps and focusing on them distracts us from solving real problems. It deprives all of us of the benefits of solidarity with our fellow countrymen. It wastes vast amounts of human potential. It creates unnecessary strife and poverty.

    The first step in solving this problem is to identify the problem. What if it turns out the problem is not a problem at all. That in a calculated way the left has manufactured straw giants and murky definitions which is a much bigger problem than race or class?

    See that Black dude over there? We have a common humanity. He isn’t a Black dude. His name is John and he is my countryman. So I ask you what does race mean?

  • UnCivil Doesn’t Like Anything : Low-Flow Toilets

    Once again a premature curmudgeon yells at clouds.  You have been warned.

    Always appropriate. -sloopy

    When I bought my house the toilet that came with it was too small, to the point of being uncomfortable, and prone to clogging.  So when I had a contractor fixing some exterior woodwork (I knew it would need to be done at the time of purchase, so this was not some shock) I inquired about people to replace the toilet.  (It was a general contractor, so they had plumbers either on staff or in their contact list).  The price quoted was cheap provided I got the actual replacement unit.  Fair enough, it would let me pick what I wanted in a replacement.

    Except for a proper water volume.

    It is illegal to sell a new toilet that uses more than 1.6 gallons per flush.  The canned answer I get to the question “Why?” is always “to conserve water”.  This annoys me on three counts.

    Low flow toilets: scourge of ISIS

    Count one – If a toilet clogs I end up cycling it three to four times in the process of clearing.  Meaning 4.8 to 5.6 gallons go down the drain.  This ends up using more water anyway while wasting my time unclogging the system.

    Count two – I live in New York.  New York is a literal swamp.  Admittedly, one that was drained before the founding of the EPA.  It gets more precipitation per annum than Louisiana (one of the random facts I learned in our less than stellar public schools).  My house in particular is near the confluence of two rivers.  Millions of gallons of water flow past it towards the sea each minute undisturbed.  (The Mohawk spits an average of 5,900 cubic feet of water into the Hudson per second.  Or 2,651,694.5 gallons per minute.  Then add in what’s already in the Hudson from up north…)  We have water to spare.

    Count three – I get billed by the gallon for my water usage and that amount is doubled to cover sewerage.  I am paying for what I use.  I should be the arbiter of how much gets to be allocated to what purpose.  A rule that was written by econuts living in a desert with no idea how physics works just isn’t appropriate to my circumstance in a swamp.

    The only upside of the tale is that innovators will find a way to work around horrible rules until they literally fly in the face of the laws of physics *cough*automobile emissions*cough*.  So the new Kohler is actually fairly reliable.  But just because there are people smarter than the regulators out there is no excuse for stupid rules to be on the books for stupid excuses.

  • Identity Politics Part 1: If You Can’t See the Chains Does it Mean They Aren’t There?

    By Suthenboy

    Without modern mechanized methods of farming it is necessary that humans hands perform that labor. That doesn’t mean mass human labor is necessary to become wealthy; without sophisticated machinery, daylight to dark toil is necessary just to have enough to eat. This economic reality gave rise to forcibly capturing people and coercing labor from them. It goes by the common name of slavery and it was universally practiced by all cultures on earth at one time. It was seen as a normal practice and though everyone would object to becoming a slave, neither slave nor master objected to it as an institution. It was just considered the way things are. As technology advanced and our means for creating wealth became greater, the need to co-opt the labor of others lessened. With the spread of the ideas born of the Western Enlightenment slavery quickly became regarded as less the way things are and more the way things should not be. It is now rightly reviled by Western Civilization, but in many ways its shadow hangs over us. The cost of slavery was high in lives and in moral currency. Slavery debases not just those held but the slaver as well. Slaves are deprived of their freedom and the slaver of his humanity. The stone age indigenous peoples of the Americas could not be successfully enslaved. The kind of confinement and structure it required was so alien to them that they simply died when it was imposed on them. The solution was, of course, to replace them with Africans. The slave trade was as old as time in Africa and still thrives today. Europeans desperate for labor in their new colonies eagerly stepped into that market.

    I live in the deep south. The Antebellum plantations that pepper my state mostly operate as tourist attractions these days. A few are still profitable as farms but tractors perform the backbreaking work, not humans. If you drive the River Road between Natchitoches and New Orleans, braving the stifling heat and humidity to tour some of these vast forerunners of modern industrial agriculture, you will get an idea of what a monumental struggle it was to produce wealth in the wild and expansive Mississippi flood plain. If you have ever worked in agriculture, your experience will give you a better idea of the scale of the superhuman effort that required.

    Of the 12-13 million Africans brought to the Americas as chattel, only a small fraction, some 400,000, were transported to the United States. Right from the start, this practice was controversial. Western European culture was more enlightened than any on earth at the time. The idea of individual liberty blossoming here and the glaring conflict that holding men as property presented with liberty was…I won’t sugarcoat it… problematic to say the least. Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence, summed up the prevailing opinion nicely when arguing against slavery “Why keep alive the question of slavery? It is admitted by all to be a great evil.”

    In the United States, the slave trade was somewhat unique in that it had strong racial overtones. Everywhere else, a person’s race had little to do with slavery. Historically, slavery was an equal opportunity employer. The slaves here, aside from those held by the indigenous people, were exclusively Africans. The feeble justification was that blacks were inherently inferior, that exposure to western civilization would improve them and advance their race.

    That evil practice was ended and not just by the advent of modern machinery and cheap energy or the dawning of a new morality. The intractability of those advocating for slavery eventually had to be overcome with powder and shot. The scale of that destructive war, both in lost property and blood, exceeded anything up to that time and every war after it until WWI. With that the barbarism of enslaving human beings was extinguished in the United States.

    Still, the ghost of slavery haunts us all. The advent of 1863 saw President Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, and after the war he attempted to repatriate those who had been enslaved by birthing the nation of Liberia on the west coast of Africa. Still, there are remnants of that ghastly practice with us. The gussied up corpses of those plantations are still here. Driving south from Alexandria on the old Baton Rouge highway, you will see cabins that housed slaves still standing, now housing renters. The fields and orchards are still here, worked by the relentless plodding of tractors.

    At the end of the Civil War, the vast majority of those that had failed to perpetuate a primitive and outdated economy gathered what they could in wealth and property, fleeing to lands more amenable to their culture. The war had brought to a head the animosity between the conflicting cultures of enlightenment with primitivism, so they slipped away from the wrath of the victors. They would have been fools to stay and dead ones, at that. Anyone curious enough can travel to remote towns in various Latin American countries and find bizarre places where Antebellum America still lives, places where those seeking to escape revenge found a refuge to perpetuate that way of life.

    Despite the reminders around us, are those ghosts really ours? There is not a person alive in the United States today who has been held in bondage, nor a person alive today who has held another in bondage. Though the struggle was great, every descendant of slaves today enjoys equal standing before the law, on paper anyway, to every other citizen. Those that care too often thrive on equal footing with every other ethnicity.

    The vast majority of the white population here does not even have ancestors who held slaves. I can trace my own family back to the late seventeenth century in the Americas, and not one of those individuals held slaves. On my mother’s side, there are only abolitionists, and on my father’s side, no one wealthy enough to afford the purchase of slaves. The majority of white Americans are descended from immigrants that arrived on these shores after slavery was abolished. This is the most common legacy of white Americans today.

    In history, the United States is remarkable in the social and cultural progress it has achieved. In less than 200 years, we progressed from a culture that more resembled the old world order, to one that is most unique, one that holds liberty and the sovereignty of the individual above all else. Our founding principles allow us to cast off the yoke of history and forge ahead to new, better cultural ground. In many ways we have dragged the rest of the world with us, though they still have some catching up to do.

    These days, my old bones are more comfortable at home. I prefer good food, a warm fire, and, most of all, the company of my wife; but this was not always the case. I have travelled to many places in the world, and one of the things that struck me was the racism and tribalism outside of the U.S. The perception of the U.S. by the rest of the world of America as a country eaten alive with racism, appears to me to be projection. Racism as it exists here in America is mild in comparison to the rabid, virulent racism almost everywhere else.

    Why, then, we still struggle so much with the question of race is an interesting and important question. Go ahead, give it your best shot.