About Me

Name: Non-Average Joe
Biography
Loading...

Create Your Own Blog Find Other Townhall Blogs

Comments

Blog Roll

 

Labor Luddites

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Monday, May 23, 2011 2:39:55 PM
As we move on toward a more controlled society, it seems to have become acceptable by a great portion of the public that the government has its hands in the directing of resources, through the use of regulation, subsidization, taxation, and general edict. Much of the less-than-widespread support for these actions of government spring from people who see these actions not as manipulative, but as benevolent and helpful, providing a greater amount of good to the economic circumstances of the American people than would otherwise occur in allowing the marketplace to direct resources. They seem to forget the fact that Marxism as a social policy wasn't the end in and of itself, but the means to an end which never occurred and indeed, attainment of that vision is entirely precluded by the nature of man.

This oversight may be why a great number of people who don't believe themselves to be communist support the methods that, historically, are communist. They can call themselves socialists because they want to use the social manipulation of the communists, while eschewing the Utopian communist ideals. To do this, the means must be the end goal, rather than the mythical arrangement that Marx supposed to be the final solution of all the manipulation.

Few Trojan Horses have ever been so effective as the green/environazism movement at promoting the Marxian method while feigning to be something else entirely. Under the rubriks of job creation and environmental quality, eco-radicals have had a fair amount of success establishing a spoils system where unfavored businesses are punished and favored industries are supported, often to the creation of entire marketplaces which wouldn't otherwise exist.

As an end, the creation of new marketplaces cannot be laudable in that it required the confiscation of property from other markets, in order to generate revenue in efforts considered a waste by those from whom the funds are taken. The problem isn't merely that government is picking winners. By definition, marketplaces that didn't exist but for government are not merely being propped up to become winning propositions. They were picked to be losers by people and because bureaucrats and eco-marxists didn't like that fact, consumer decisions made in the marketplaceare overridden for the supposedly greater wisdom the of the left's power-wielding elites. Never mind that you and I own our own property and are careful what we do do with it. Our choices must comply with the left of those busybodies will force compliance. There really is no other way to describe the eco-job market but to say that it is a wholesale of appropriation of rights away from the individual to a conglomeration of enviro-statists and government strongmen.

Whatever the moral depravity, the left has sold its big-government ideas by convincing some people that such change has created good, high-paying jobs for people and maybe it has. But if the measure of value, by which 'high-paying' is brought into a real-life context, isn't the measure of the marketplace (as Marx insisted) then exactly what distinguishes one job from other, in terms of the value of what is being produced?

Here's an easier way to think of this; the left praises windmill subsidies because more people are getting into the windmill industry than have since the medieval technology was abandoned. But measuring the number of megawatt hours produced per hour of labor can create a problem for windmill aficionados. In exchange, things have real costs and when it takes more man-hours to produce electricity by windmill than it does by coal-fired plant, those costs must be borne by the customer. At least Don Quixote tilted at windmills rather than tilting with them. So brazen are these radical greens, they pretend that costs don't matter.

It brings us back to the direct link between modern day Marxists and the eco-nazi movement. Marx's big argument was the labor theory of capital which basically said that things are worth what it took to produce them. That may sound good until you start to give it some real thought. It takes work to produce typewriters but that doesn't mean you'll be able to sell a single one. You know why? Because they're not worth anything until someone is willing to pay for them!

That's how the marketplace guides people into the most productive behaviors. If it doesn't pay someone to be unproductive in how they work, then they'll change their behavior until it does pay. Value is determined solely by what someone is willing to exchange for something. If Marx's labor theory of capital was correct,then who is to decide whether a bricklayer's hour of work is worth a doctor's hour of work? Both require human effort for a specific period of time, but to set values only on labor ignores the entire communication of information the marketplace, supply and demand, without which shortages of many products and gluts of many others are disastrously unavoidable.

What modern Marxists don't seem to understand is that value is subjective. Whereas someone can work for an hour and accomplish nothing in the eyes of the marketplace, the leftist seems to think that such an effort is laudable anyway, and ought to be subsidized. To the leftist mind, profit is bad because it charges above and beyond the value of labor, no matter that profit is the cost of capital. To the leftist mind, any job is good, because value springs from effort, not from exchange, so forget about being productive. Just put forth a little effort and who cares about productivity!

Therefore, it doesn't matter what it costs to produce electricity, the benefit of jobs to more people than would be provided at a coal plant is reason enough to support the less efficient energy over the more efficient. This hinges very close to the broken window fallacy that was destroyed over a hundred years ago by Frederic Bastiat. Having more people employed at a windmill to produce the same thing that could be produced by fewer people at a coal plant is unproductive, even counterproductive. It takes more people out of the labor market who could otherwise be used to produce other things, while still having the same amount of electricity (although the greens want to throttle electricity down as well). See the Candlestick Maker's Petition.

If the number of jobs per megawatt increases, so must the price and concurrently, other industries may lack the labor pool necessary to expand. The real economy is not the flow of dollars, but that which the flow of dollars is measuring; products. If we tie up more people in windmill jobs, through the economically-blind hand of government, the only result is that of more poverty for the nation as a whole. If windmills are economically viable, they will compete with other forms of electricity, rather than requiring enormous, immoral government backing just to be presented as a bare option.

The way the left has sold all of these green jobs screams of Marxist dogma which has destroyed tens of millions of lives in the past century and never once even came close to working. Let's quit this charade of thinking the environmental movement is anything else but a vehicle to install socialist control over people's lives.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

War and the Victor-Depricating Descendants

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Friday, April 15, 2011 1:22:18 PM
Recently, a video was sent to me illustrating the the battlegrounds of history for around a thousand years. It reminded me of the continued glazing that history receives in order to defend a specific worldview. The viewer is initially struck by how often the battlegrounds flare up in the areas which have been recognized, during those time periods, as the foundations of Western Civilization. I was reminded of a common leftist gripe about Western Civ; 'don't you know that X percentage of the wars in history were fought by these people you revere?'

Initially the evidence may seem condemnatory, but if you consider more than the bare surface, it's really not; quite the opposite in fact. The video includes biases of history which are actually resultant from the tameness and social progress of the societies which founded Western Civilization. Think about it, even if history is only written by the victor, then the only way for a qualitative physical record of the battle that took place is for there to be qualitative means of preserving information in linguistic form. Many tribes in Africa and then-undiscovered North America simply had no method of recording information with long-term accuracy because they lacked the cultural refinement of a written language. Thus many more battles in these other areas simply were never committed to a history which can be effectively researched and studied, perhaps not even known of.

What's also interesting about these European battlegrounds is that they weren't attempts to wipe out the opponent. His army, sure, his royalty and his lords, perhaps; but not the people of a given land. Most of the conquests were undertaken to expand the kingdom and the population of the serfdom, not for extermination. It is under those exterminating campaigns that we lack an understanding of who the losers were, because everything they had was stolen or destroyed, and the entire races of people were wiped out, leaving little to no knowledge of their existence in the first place.

When early Western-Civ explorers came to the Americas colonized by those 'gentle native-American tribes that were pre-Marxian socialists' (bilge of the first order), they found evidence of entire cultures that were erased from the map in recent, stone-age-barbarous massacres. In fact, it was this pure villainy that brought missionaries to the Americas to bring God and modernism to the lives of these people groups who were quite literally living in stone-age societies. Whereas the modern history line is one of condemnation for the white oppressors, it was the horror of the genocide practiced by the natives that shocked the explorers, encouraging them to conquer or convert these peoples for their own good, whether we see that as misguided or not. Albeit not what we may want today, but then who are we to pretend we could've laid a better foundation of justice then, lacking the thousands of years of history that we now have access to. The absence of records is not a proof of peace. It is the certainty of a prehistoric society, which cannot be civilized by current measure, and is just as likely to engage in atrocity as any other. The only bulwark against the horrific slaughters of the modern age was the limitations of capacity that have since fallen by the wayside with technological advancement. It was not the good will of African tribalism or native-American communitarian pantheism which keeps us from splashing battleplace icons across their lands. It's the complete backwardness of those societies that has preserved them from criticism in general.

Furthermore, when we study European history, we can find writings from many societies going all the way back to the Roman Empire, and before. Battles amongst those peoples are not evidence of mass genocide and mayhem, as a general rule; it is evidence of the political power struggles between people groups who were the most advanced in the world (yeah, yeah, I know, China. We'll debate it later).

It may seem that a stunning proliferation of combat through which our current social climate was forged would be evidence that our societies are horrible. It's much more likely that the information by which those societies are condemned is the very reason we ought to give them a fairer look. At least they weren't willing to wipe out all evidence of their misdeeds! Perhaps they did things which we now abhor, but that's no reason to write off our history. It's the best reason to study it! Whereas the simple mind sees many battles as a darkness, an honest assessment of the human condition reveals that darkness is ever-present in every culture. What makes Western Civilization different is that it has provided worth to every individual and has taken an openness to information of any sort, including those sources of information that anti-westernciv types use to condemn Western Civ. The question isn't what's bad about Western Society; the question is what can be made better. Those who oppose Western Civilization seem little interested in improvement and completely devoted to the task of replacing it with one or another form of totalitarianism or elitism. I think our society is worth fighting for, even if it puts a few more battleground markers on the map, someday.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Religion of the Self

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Saturday, April 09, 2011 1:10:45 PM
The socialist, Utopian principle is one of total equality in every measurable way, elevating equality as the supreme ideal above all other things. I think this becomes laughable if one asserts the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but we don't even have to go to that length to show how absurd this notion is. The fact that there is voluntary trade at all is sufficient evidence to unseat the socialist vision of equality.

Of course, they will deny that and state that they understand exchange exposes the relativity of value; they only mean to advocate that people have their needs met. Such guarantee, they assert, is a natural human right, encompassed in the right to life, as espoused by Jefferson and uncountable other figures in history.

But the right to life isn't of a higher order than the right to property. That a man needs bread to continue living doesn't provide him authority to burglarize a bakery; what it does incorporate into the man is the right to make provision for himself, without undue interruption; he is free to pursue his interests without force. The right to life is not a right to do anything which keeps you breathing; it is a right to make your choices for yourself. Thus, the right to life and the right to property are really two sides of the same object.

Were the right to life merely license to engage in any behavior so long as the end goal is survival, cannibalism, genocide, imperialism, plunder; all of these things would be morally upstanding, because the end result is survival. Such an animalistic society is certainly not the stated Utopian ideal, and yet the Soviet Union, in implementing true socialism, found it necessary to slaughter and starve millions of people in attempting to institute social change. For this reason modern socialists swear off most of the regimes which have engaged in wanton murder, but they still fail to point out a single example of an actual Marxian society, which has moved past the stage of social revolution by elite-run police-state, and moved to the post-government Utopia where people equalize themselves.

Perhaps these socialists wouldn't be considered such scandalous people if they stopped trying to be enforcers of a police state, stopped trying to steal money from everyone else, and satisfied themselves to merely socialize their own property.

For those who adhere to true morality, the means justify the ends. If a businessman earns his money fairly, in free trade where all the transactions are voluntary (if not the best deal according to each party), then the results of those interactions, success or failure of the parties involved in their own eyes, are morally acceptable. The only alternative to voluntary interaction is force, which brings us to the leftist vision; the ends justify any means. For the left, it doesn't matter what we do, so long as the goals we have in mind are pure, even if those goals never even come remotely close to arriving.

The Utopian ideal is simply not feasible without massive changes to the human character far beyond the ability of science to undertake. The problem is spiritual.

We may talk about human equality, but the question remains; equal how? It's not sensible to believe that Babe Ruth was equal to FDR. In comparing the two, the 'how' question pops up right away. Well, are we talking about baseball or are we talking about politics? So, how can these two men be equal? Spiritually, dear reader. It's the human spirit which gives men their equal worth. Ruth may have been able to smack homers unlike anyone in history, and Roosevelt, stricken by polio, meddled with the affairs of the nation, but what is usually taken for granted is that they both hold human value. A man murdering either would've faced approximately the same penalty; trial and execution.

For you see, when man is mere material, the coalescence of chance, change, and carbon; worth is a relative concept at best. Even worse, concepts themselves might merely be delusions. The materialist must account for the consciousness and finds himself at a loss.

I suspect a few readers are blinking and saying, 'Wait, we were talking about socialists and now we're talking about atheists? I don't get it.'

The issue is more plain. I mean both; that you cannot have one without the other. When men insist that there is no God, they are establishing themselves as the arbiters of truth, and therefore the beings supreme enough to reshape the way we live. If God created man (and continues to create man in the womb as I think it's fairly obvious that the material origins of each child are tremendously amazing), then each man is subject first to God. For the elite socialist to establish himself as a ruler would be no different than the sin of the people of Israel in demanding a King, someone to rule over their nation besides God.

Thomas Paine wrote of this sin in Common Sense and I think it is still the sin which most plagues mankind; the replacement of God with the self. (You may say, no they replace Him with an ideal, but the creator of the ideal is the ultimate object of worship).

Just as well, for the materialist, since mankind is mere accidental byproduct of particulate interaction, the elite have every right to do as they see fit with the rest, because they're the highest consciousnesses to yet evolve, and are therefore superior. It only follows that they should create an ideal and enforce it upon the rest; for they are our betters. And like a god, they justify their actions with intended results, and banish judgment based upon actual results, since judgment is for the most supreme to decide. How could we, the lowly who need their guidance and mercy, possibly stand in judgment of them the most high intellectuals?

The true God, of whom Jesus Christ is a manifestation, doesn't have to worry about means in the manner we do, because He isn't subject to the physical laws of this universe; He created them and may act outside of them. But the socialist and the materialist must both operate within the framework of the universe, and so long as the laws of thermodynamics are scientific certainties, the charitable actions of government will only occur after the immoral confiscation of property from other parties.

Man didn't kill God, Nietzsche; man substituted himself in God's place and he was doing so long before Nietzsche's great-grandparents were ever born. Man continues to do so today. The problem with conceit and arrogance isn't that it raises the idea of the conceited man over the rest of mankind; it's that it raises that man to God's level or places him above. The greatest problem with mankind is the replacement of God with self, and the subsequent ordaining of the self as a deity. I only know of one way mankind can be changed away from the deluding tyranny of the sin-nature, and that is only through the person and the power and the work of Jesus Christ.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Gods

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Friday, April 01, 2011 3:53:45 PM
The expression of property rights may be the best way to look at all interactions between man, and even all non-interactions. Many libertarians and anarchists seem to take the philosophy of property rights out to its Utopian measure; assuming that we could have a world of perfect interaction, when men simply have acquired an intellectual understanding of this morally superior social concept. It's worth noting that Karl Marx and Frederic Engels believed in an force-less world, when man is made to accept the truths of willing communism. The difference between these two delusions is the means used to get there. Communists and socialists believe man should be changed by the force of the governing elite and anarchists believe that man would be changed by the absence of government force.

However, for anarchists to regard the state as the source of all evil undermines their own position in the first place. The American state, the modern western ideal, arose as a societal means by which legitimate force may be cooperatively wielded to repel illegitimate force. Whereas government in general may have had its origins in the banding together of men to raise force against others, it can hardly be said that this is what the western state is meant for.

Ah, the agorist says, but the state has become destructive to its own ends, for the federal government is now, in the main part, a means to redistribute wealth by force, and so he is right on this count. Man's ultimate sin is to place himself as god and therefore exempt himself from the moral underpinnings that govern all men. So, the real question is; how can any anarchist, knowing of the ancient history of tyrannical force by the unionization of men toward an immoral goal, support the abolition of state power which was clearly created to defend the civil society against the initiation of such force?

Frankly, anarchists seem to be pouting dreamers, who complain that man isn't perfect, and in such complaints advocate that man be set loose to be brutally imperfect in how they interact with one another. It is not a lack of intellect that keeps man from perfection, as we can see with the stunning support for Marxism which remains entrenched and almost unaffected by the repeated failures of communism the world over. D.L. Moody once said, "If a man is stealing nuts and bolts from a railway track, and, in order to change him, you send him to college, at the end of his education, he will steal the whole railway track."

What plagues man is not insufficiency of knowledge. It's the first two laws of thermodynamics which limit the resources available at any time, thereby confining man to engage his faculties and encouraging him to take advantage of others by the use of force. The greatest sin is rejecting God and by rejecting God placing oneself as superior to all other things (as an authority sufficient to establish rejection of the supreme being). This understanding comes into play far more often than we might think. Looking at Thomas Sowell's view of intellectuals, we can understand this through the Biblical perspective of sinfulness (though I have no idea whether Sowell would agree with this assessment considering he has not made anything close to these assertions).

Some men believe mankind can be reshaped to fit a perfected ideal, or as it pertains to the Marxists and the anarchists, sociologically manipulated to remove sin from the human spirit, that character flaw which keeps some portion of the population stealing and killing. Others believe mankind is flawed in a certain way (sin, force, what have you) but that this flaw can only be mitigated to a certain extent. Thus, some government will always be necessary, and proper when limited to the preservation of universal self-ownership property rights.

Too often, libertarians berate conservatives for advocating government action in interactions which are absolutely voluntary between the parties involved, such as: illicit drug sales, homosexual marriage, airwave regulation, pornography, etc. I'm actually sympathetic to the libertarian view on several of these issues. However, libertarians see any regulation of any voluntary behavior as an improper use of force by the government, whereas conservatives see the continued maintenance of a free society to necessarily involve the greatest encouragement to a religious worldview which understands the sin-nature and the ultimate foundation for morality, which atheist libertarians take wholly for granted.

If an atheist libertarian says that his interpretation of genetic heritage is that all of mankind is of equal worth, then a Christian must ask of equal worth to whom? Certainly, the mentally retarded are not going to be as great producers as someone whose genetic heritage has provided them above-average skill sets. So, what worth is it that stretches over all mankind that encompasses a universal value to life, ignoring economics? Short of a Creator God, any altruism or axiom which attempts to assign equal value to all of mankind is merely ignoring history and ignoring the basis of their idea: their opinion. Without God, valuation becomes a relative concept and it is only the will of the strong who will see their opinionated value-ascription be maintained. One is quickly reminded of the Third Reich or Rwanda or Maoist China or Stalinist Russia. These mass slaughters were not the result of a backward way of thinking. Notably, only one of the horrible genocides that I've mentioned were at the hands of people not well educated. It is the logical outworking of an atheistic, Utopian, statist government to establish the most bountiful crops by weeding out the sicker plants. Darwin made such assertions with regard to biology in his Origin of Species (By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life). The history of Planned Parenthood and the international eugenics movement are examples of a amoral logic carried to its natural end, and should provide a terribly unsettling nausea in the stomachs of those who deny the existence of of a moral law Giver and thus deny the existence of moral laws.

Absent a deity, worth is a relative concept. And if America were to finalize this abandonment of the Originator of all principles, she will find herself forever wandering in the wilderness, with no ultimate hope. Fortunately, that means the first thing we, who think America should be great again, can do is to find that faith ourselves. It's not merely the sociological aspects which drive me to be a Christian. The greatest defenses of faith are in the realms of science, logic, and Biblical authority. I won't make any friends with the above statements, but hopefully a few people will gain some perspective on our 'enemy': self-worship.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Government Clad With Good Intentions

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Friday, March 25, 2011 11:11:42 AM
One of the main thrusts of Marxian dogma is the redistribution of wealth, so that those who need may have, and those who have may provide. This is a very ends-justified means, essentially providing virtue to theft granting that the thief is acting more benevolently than the victim of his crime would have. This begs several questions, the most obvious of which is who determines what act is more benevolent than another?

Expanding upon that question, this type of socialist simplicity tiptoes around some very crucial facts. Isn't the thief acting benevolently toward himself by confiscating property that does not belong to him? Conversely, if a wealthy man keeps his property and does with it as he sees fit, it's very likely that his actions can be perceived as charitable unto himself. Whether or not you and I would prefer one or the other is quite beside the point. (Although, it should be very obvious that those who have become wealthy in the legal marketplace are far more charitable than those who have become wealthy through immoral means.)

We're still dealing with the same distinction, even if the efforts of plunder are sterilized through the auspices of government. It may seem easy to many people to have government pay for those charities that they believe ought to be funded, but what they are really doing is telling a the taxpayer, 'no, your property rights are not superior to the will of the people, in that you are the subject of the whole group'. In effect, many people seem to be advocating an absolute democracy where the dictatorship of the majority vote is king and no other power reigns supreme.

But how can we reconcile such views with the natural understanding that everyone is an individual and as such has individual rights? The majority cannot merely vote for every able person to fund a particular charity and then find it accomplished. After the vote they must initiate force in order to make sure that the will of the decision is carried forward, and that is an exposition of how morally defunct absolute democracy is.

In cladding government with good intentions on the one hand, those who believe themselves to be charitable have no choice but to exact harm upon other people, on the other hand. That's why government is a system of plunder when it is acting outside its proper boundaries.

To summarize Frederic Bastiat, government is force and force may only be used to repel illegitimate force, i.e. invasion, crime, contract violation, etc. But when government steps past this domain and commences efforts of assisting one group of people, the only means it has to engage in such an activity is to forcibly do so at the expense of another group of people, most often those who may be easiest to vilify.

No matter Marx's belief that mankind could be repaired of his greed, no matter his view that utopia could be achieved wherein no government would be necessary once equality is established; we should be wary of any effort to plant beneficence in the hand of government, for it is not charity which the government distributes, but property. It is not goodness that the government provides, but the life's work of someone from whom it was first stolen away. And considering that the value of all items are always relative between people (thus the basis for mutually beneficial exchange), Marxian dogma, at its very core is antithetical to the human experience and condition.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

The American Dream

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Saturday, March 19, 2011 6:13:54 PM
Many times throughout my life, I have heard statements regarding the American Dream. When I was young, listening to people speak, the idea held a mystical justice to it, an ethereal quality that seemed to couch reality in a pantheon of optimism, to the point of surreality. Of course that could merely be the perception of a child. Since I have grown older, a different set of people have described the concept to me, generally in derisive terms, stating that it was something which never existed and if it did, was bigoted and condemnably exclusive; the sort of description of the American Dream you get from an analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books. Regardless from whence it sprang, my understanding was that the American Dream was financial success, the wealth that seems to naturally accompany life in the United States. How wrong I was...

Ultimately, that understanding would lead to a definition of the American Dream as little more than profit, which in the context of an end result, may be indistinguishable from plunder. Thus bringing me to the real definition of the American Dream, as I see it. Opportunity.

You see, there are two ways someone can become wealthy. He can produce or he can plunder. One of those is morally laudable and the other is ethically bankrupt. If you ask our friends on the left, getting right down to the brass tacks (or tax depending on which phrase origin you believe), they don't think there is a real difference between profit and plunder, so long as the results are unequal, in their opinion.

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's look at opportunity in America as it relates to world history. America was colonized by people who sought to distance themselves from the European powers that were. The natural striving of humanity is to control oneself and the natural sin of mankind is to control oneself as god, thereby giving oneself the right to control others as well. Whether this is a conscious effort or not, it is the great conflict that has raged for thousands of years and is no closer in being put to rest. Totalitarian party states are little different in their arrogance from totalitarian monarchy states; whereas the later pridefully believed itself as being superior, the culmination of the worth of the subjects; the former superficially believes itself to be altruistically acting on behalf of their subjects (though, like a monarchy of party, they place their own well-being ahead of the objects of their feigned charity, often never arriving at this oft-preached intention because the spoils of plunder are expended before they are finished lavishing themselves, as the elite, intelligent, and most important class, without which the rest of the subjects would be lost for survival).

The American Dream was a real breakaway from the ideas that governed history. Our nation was founded on the prospect that no man is fit to rule over any other, that each man is naturally subject to himself, and that the moral argument, as well as the logistical argument, are for self-ownership which manifests itself in a personal responsibility for one's actions, logically including an obligation to leave others alone, to not harm them. (Some may say this history couldn't be the case because of slavery and the lack of women's rights and so forth, but the ideas are well-established facts as espoused by the founders. One can hardly fix that which is broken when the brokenness springs from a morally bankrupt system. The system had to be replaced first and then the ills reminiscent of the older system could be vanquished, and many were.)

In short, the American Dream is the absence of immoral force in the life of the individual, or the opportunity which God afforded unto each man that he creates in the ownership of our individual consciousnesses. While this manifests itself as an increase in economic output and financial success, as proposed by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, to leave it only applicable in the financial realm is to confuse young people, such as my earlier self. Frankly, the idea is unconcerned with it's impacts on the holding of wealth. The American Dream is concerned with the self-ownership of every person.

We don't believe in slavery, therefore wealth, having to be produced, cannot be redistributed arbitrarily under a moral system. It can only be distributed according to the values people individually set on each of their individual choices. This is an extremely hard fact for many people to grasp for a number of reasons, relating back to many of the things I've been writing about. It seems easier to arrange for the restitution of whatever ails mankind, by the machinations of government and even justifiable in doing so, if your logical framework doesn't descend to a real foundation. The fact that the modern socialist in America doesn't usually advocate for the tactics of socialists from fifty years ago seems to give them cover. But it's not manipulative death that makes socialism morally depraved; it's the separation of the individual from owning himself which liberates the socialist to kill the man, or to steal from him, nowadays.

The American Dream is a wonderful thing, because it changed much of the world, brought much of it out of the plagued caste system. It established for the first time that which every man has always known instinctively; that no one has a moral right to own him. The human flaw comes after that, that other men don't have a right to own themselves, whether for the benefit or the harm of those other men.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

The Debilitating Prison of Group Identity

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Friday, March 11, 2011 11:57:01 PM
Ambitious as the title to this post may be, it is simply not possible to cover this topic on a blog. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books have been written on this topic, not to mention essays, theses, lectures, speeches, etc; with a tremendous range of disputed facts, not to mention every available opinion. So, as always, I'm restrained to making a few comments that I think are important.

My parents raised me to believe that there's only one race, that is the human race, within which there are ethnic differences, manifest in the phenotype, springing from the genotype. Essentially, the differences we see between people don't change the value of the individual person, nor the spiritual characteristics.

Ultimately, you can find the uniqueness of an individual by adding together those things which make that person distinctive. I once described to a good friend my concept of identity; that it is those things which, combined, could only comprise a single person from the entirety of history. We can make that notation about genetics and heritage, but I prefer to make it a matter of choices. My friend is a mathematician, a teacher of calculus, a blackbelt of Isshinryu karate, a cartoonist, and dozens of other things; but if you take some of those things on the list, you can narrow down an identity unique to only one person who has or will ever live.

Back to my raising, I had little context from which to fully understand the strife which plagued the world in the curiosities of racism and slavery, which seem to be less understood conceptually than driven emotionally. My parents taught their children not only to respect people individually, but to be individuals, ourselves. They taught us that everyone is responsible for their choices, the natural outworking of which means that people's actions are worthy of evaluation.

So, it was somewhat confusing as I tried to understand why slavery existed and why racism existed even after slavery, why it persists in the minds of some people, even now. In that actions are what count in the real world, I am still somewhat flummoxed as to how racism of its many sorts survives, realizing that mankind is going to be forever plagued by such distinctions.

If disparities exist within a given environment, that alone is insufficient evidence that a problem of racism or of race relations exists. It may only be evidence that people don't operate as simple units. It shouldn't surprise anyone that there is voluntary segregation or the concept that people of similar ethnicity, heritage, or nationality prefer to congregate as a group. When Chinese people move to America, it may be very cost effective for them to live in the same areas as other Chinese immigrants. For one reason, immigrants may not have the liquid capital necessary to be very picky about the areas they can move to and so will move in with friends or relatives or nearby. Another reason is that they may not yet have the language skills necessary to function within the larger society of America. The same is true for some immigrants from eastern Europe, India, Middle Eastern nations, African nations, and so on. That's not evidence of racism, it's evidence of economic decisions within demographic processes.

Anyhow, what confuses me is the absolute refusal for people who describe themselves as affluent to let go of group identification as the key factor in defining themselves. See one of the latest examples.

What's interesting about this example is the subtle values underlying Hernandez's statements. By making her primary concern whether or not the shooter was Hispanic, she essentially betrays all the normal focus that someone like me would express. Of course, it might have taken some level of guts to stand up and say that her primary concern was with the impact a potential Hispanic mass murderer could have on the already-inflamed debate over illegal aliens in Arizona, for whatever that statement is worth.

The title of this blog is The Debilitating Prison of Group Identity, by which I mean that people confine themselves to the choices made by other people. If it was a Hispanic on that particular shooting rampage, how would Hernandez have responded? Would she have felt some need to preemptively strike against the 'gringos' who would surely be calling for harsher restrictions on 'undocumented workers' or shooters, in this case? By the statements in her article, yes, of course, she would.

And there you have it, she's tied herself so fully to a group of people distinguished not by action, but by heritage or skin color, that when someone's actions (you know, those things that actually count in the real world) are disgusting, she feels compelled to stand up in some way for her group, distance the group from that person or, alternatively, come up with some grievance under the context of which the actions of the person can be deemed acceptable (yay for situational ethics).

But the fact remains, when you identify yourself primarily as a member of a group, you have made that group your preeminent, defining characteristic, something much beyond your control, and without logical merit. Neil Armstrong isn't remembered for being a pasty white guy. He's remembered for walking on the moon, and in absolute awe of the view that no one in history had ever seen before, uttering those famous words. Similarly, W.E.B. Du Bois isn't remembered for being black, at least not as much as he's remembered for all the things he did and wrote. Characteristic of the improvement 'race relations' have undergone since Du Bois' heyday, we only realize his blackness because of his stunning level of activity and inventiveness in race relations. Were he as active in politics today, it's likely his activity would be noticeable due to his scholarship, leaving his race aside as a secondary note, at best.

Which brings up another point. We live in a world where the biggest scandals of race are no longer lynchings and systematic laws forbidding the interaction of blacks with whites. The biggest scandals nowadays, with pertinence to race, are simple words; the statements made. So much so that many white people have taken to using the annoyingly-long, inaccurate, and frivolously-unnecessary phrase "African-American" because someone convinced them that the term black is somehow demagogic racism.

I ask then, how exactly does it benefit Hernandez or any other person self-identifying with a group to maintain such indefeasible alliances? I am confident that my naivete springs from my whiteness which has insulated me from any of the environmental affects which are simply natural to those growing up in families that hold heritage as not merely important for familial history, but for ethnic solidarity. But surely that solidarity is, at some level, a barrier to the improvement that was supposedly the ultimate goal of desegregation and universal human rights.

Sure, it makes sense that Chinese people in America be particularly concerned about the plight of the Chinese immigrant population. Somalis look after Somalis. Georgians after Georgians. Indians after Indians. Mexicans after Mexicans. It is understandable, this desire to help the fellow man whom is close enough to oneself that one could see themselves in that situation, and so I find the concern Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell place in the plight of blacks in America to be just as respectable as my concern for the plight of individuals. Each of us is looking at the world from the viewpoint which is most natural to us, given our background. (Notably, the fantastic doctors are doing a far better job on all fronts. Williams and Sowell are looking out for individuals as well as their concern for particular definable groups of individuals.)

Yet, at a time when the worst common crime against any particular race is the usage of a slur, it seems to me that the only course of action wherein we can see a greater cohesion of these various groups, is for people to relax their group identification and begin to see themselves on a level of individuals and actions and not phenotypic characteristics.

My Welsh heritage may mean a great deal with regard to my family tree, yet it holds no ultimate authority in my choice of job, career, wife, car, musical preference, educational approach, moral grounding, religion, faith, etc. And sadly, too many people allow themselves to be absolutely controlled by the choices of their group. Not to say that people's choices of music should be sterilized from the environment they are in, but in areas where choices really matter, such as educational approach, race too often becomes a hindrance for many people, particularly among inner city blacks, where seeking a good education is deplored as "acting white".

Oddly, there seems to be a refusal in some communities to acknowledge the existence of an equals sign in the grand scheme of things. Because slavery is understood as having been exploitive, as it was in some senses, there seems to be an idea that the return of such exploitation is acceptable. Now, slavery didn't build America, certainly not to the level of prosperity we experience today, and neither did racism!

The grand equals sign in the real world is that no products are available without someone going out there to produce them. If "acting white" means that a black student has a better chance at producing a real product and selling it, making some money to provide for himself; then an enormous question arises in my own mind. How exactly do people who 'act black' get by without providing for themselves?

Should blacks be provided for in perpetuity, because distant ancestors of some of those blacks were abused by distant ancestors of some of America's whites? Can we ever hope for success with a Quest for Cosmic Justice? The way I see it, freedom is synonymous with universal self-ownership and under that system, the only people who can survive without providing for themselves are those who can make sufficient case to someone else to donate provision on a charitable basis. "Acting white" is acting like a responsible human being under the natural constraints of the physical condition and in accordance to the moral compass that God offers to people individually.

Does it really hurt Hernandez to be a member of a group? Nope, in fact, it's likely that much of her success is due to her group identity given her résumé and the fact that we have entire industries built up around and thoroughly dependent upon group identification. But how many other people that her philosophy claims to help are actually harmed because they are convinced that identity isn't a matter of what you do, more so than a matter of what your skin color is, what your last name is? Aren't those the sort of bigoted, separatist ideas that were once considered deplorable when espoused by white people?

I don't expect that we can fix the world or mankind. I certainly don't believe our problems can be solved on this Earth. What I do think, however, is that much of what's being perpetuated is unnecessarily harmful, merely for the sake of tradition, retribution, and convenience. Be an individual and own yourself, no matter your heritage or your group.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Muckraker D Minus

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Sunday, March 06, 2011 9:51:54 PM
It's fortunate that we live at a time when there is such an abundance of commentary and so great an interest by so great a number of people in the major issues, that someone such as myself feels almost entirely without compulsion to attempt regular commentary on the current events or the latest happenings. However, if only to make light of my far smaller audience, I feel sufficiently driven to provide a few of my insights on another nobody; Michael Moore.

Obviously, you readers will already have heard of Michael Moore and have yet to see me interviewed on television or witness a rabble-rousing documentary produced by your author, so how can I refer to Michael Moore as another nobody? Very simply because he is.

Whatever controversies Michael Moore used to be able to stir up, reveling in liberal attention slobbering all over his considerably fat body, he never really was a force of intellect and so far as I can remember, never really taken seriously by anyone who wasn't already a Marxist-bent supporter of government-induced slavery. I really doubt that anyone who ever watched what Moore had to say could possibly come away thinking they were witnessing balanced logic and a decent viewpoint, unless they were simpletons or pre-committed lefties. You see, Moore's arguments have never been logical or empirical; they've been plainly rhetorical, along the lines of Ida Tarbell, except without an ounce of class.

Ida was dangerous to freedom because her lies were so carefully woven into decent journalism. In fact, her lies were often those of dubious omission of facts or context of facts, thereby modifying the appearance of something from what it was to something that it was not, and  yet without stating outright falsehoods. I am reminded of a Sowell quote that stabs at the heart of the muckraker's cries; if all these businesses being derided were run by robber barons, who did they rob with their lower prices?

But what makes Michael Moore a much more ho-hum non-factor to the political/philosophical debate is the fact that he doesn't leave his dishonesty to be uncovered. It's simply available, at low cost. Perhaps the total debunking of his documentaries by exposition of his outright lies within months of their release, sometimes before their release, is simply the result of greater technological capacity in media. After all, if we had nearly as many commentators back in Tarbell's day, it's likely someone would've pointed out that Standard Oil decreased prices to gain their market-share and that the consumer was better off as a result of Rockefeller's innovation, innovation that was solely responsible for gains in market share as well as gains in productivity.

I'm not actually referring to Michael Moore's propaganda films or his books. I'm writing this because of things he says at speaking engagements and interview sessions.

Wealth not theirs

Rich overplayed

Just those two links should be sufficient to sample what I mean. In the first video, Moore swears off private property rights as an absolute, theoretically preferring that they be left to the opinions of man, where he could drum up enough support to take someone else's property and leave his alone (given he has engaged in tax shelter schemes like every wealth holder he accuses of acting identical to his own quiet moves. Read Peter Schweizer's Do As I Say, Not As I Do.

In the Reuters article, Moore stated that the rich have "overplayed their hand" while rallying the public union protesters in Madison, WI. For once, I agree with Moore's words, though I suppose he didn't intend to them to come across that way. When he says that the rich have overplayed their hand, lil ol' just-above-the-poverty-line me assumes that the 'rich' must refer to the union employees who are being compensated better, on the average than their private sector taxpaying counterparts, from whom those inflated salaries are wrenched. Ah, but surely Moore doesn't refer to them. He's referring those evil tax-evading rich guys, that handful of people in the United States who make millions each year and pay nothing!

Except unless you look to anything in the world that actually exists, because the rich actually pay almost all the tax revenue brought in by government and the lowest 40-some-odd% of tax filers receive far more in government benefits than they pay, often paying nothing in the first place. I believe I'm included in this group, simply because I don't make a great deal of money and I don't pay much, either. Maybe Michael the multi-millionaire Moore should put his money where his mouth is (and if you take a look at him, he does this too often in a literal way) and stop hiding his wealth in tax shelters.

Quite frankly, I know of no way around the diagnosis of Moore's statements as anything but an appeal to the jealousy and greed of mankind, to perpetuate a continued destruction of property rights, softening the depravity of the message only by couching it in the pretense of class-warfare, pretending that private property rights really are up for repeal once you attain a certain quantity of property. Michael Moore is advocating a slavery, not of whips and chains, but of the sort that binds men against their will to the preferences of other men, subjugating them under the heel of the intelligentsia. Interestingly enough, just as the white slave-owner ended up declaring himself human and his slaves not in order to justify the institution, as the anti-slavery movement began to take hold after America's founding; the intelligentsia similarly declare themselves intellectually fit not merely fit to govern themselves but also the lives of everyone else, inferring that everyone else is not fit to govern anyone's lives at all, including their own! So, those who may doubt my consistent reference to slavery really ought to give that statement some consideration. Slavery isn't a matter of chain, it's a matter of consistent and illegitimate force, whether by private individual or by corporation or by it's most common wielder, government.

Yet, Michael Moore could never be considered a part of the intelligentsia, because you have to have the characteristic of being intelligent to qualify, or at least a convincing enough illusion of it, and on that alone, Moore is disqualified. A note about true intellectuals, however; don't mistake smarts for wisdom. Many leftists believe themselves fully qualified to run the lives of other people against those people's will, but it's a matter of wisdom that they lack; wisdom to see the logistical, economic, and moral implications of that effete narcissism.

Anyhow, as Micheal Moore regularly demonstrates with his rhetorical idiocy, he's unfit to hold the office of dog catcher, much like myself. Where he and I differ, however, is that I'm aware I shouldn't be endowed with power and I would readily swear off such endowment. My commentary might be enough to get a handful of people thinking about things they've never thought of before and that's all I'm trying to do. Moore on the other hand, believes himself fit to be king, and remains more than happy to have an extra large crown manufactured specially for his oily brow. Is buying into this who wasn't before? I doubt it.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Who Owns You

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Friday, February 25, 2011 10:45:53 AM
One of the most persistent fallacies of our time can be summed up this way: if they government doesn't take care of this problem, it won't be solved at all. In a recent discussion I had with a coworker, his impression of 'Reaganomics' was that as a total deregulation of the marketplace, in effect, absolute license for corporations and businesses to do as they please, totally unhindered. What he was saying was that there is no regulation of transaction, absent controls placed on commerce by the government.

It should already stand out to most people that this simply isn't the case. If businesses could trample anyone they wish, why are there any products which are considered affordable? Notably, most of the products on the market are made for middle income consumers, and are purchasable by them. American business has produced a steady decline of prices for goods, services, and amenities once considered to be the domain of the wealthy elite. Did that happen out of an altruistic charity within the hearts of certain businessmen? No, of course not.

Without the tyranny of force, wealth is only produced through customer satisfaction. Since great amounts of money could be made making everything more affordable, literally everything has become more affordable, all the while making the producers of those now-affordable goods wealthier (and their consumers are better off as well, with the expanded range of options).

But that's the good side of business, say those who deride markets. We don't see the collusion and the harm that comes about when government renounces regulation. Businessmen can just run hog wild and charge anything they want for their products, lay off all their workers who want to unionize, and pay a pittance for those workers they hire!

Except that we have a society once built on the concept of individual liberty or individual self-ownership. Under that system, I can refuse to work for an employer that I think abuses me. And an employer can refuse to hire me if he feels my work isn't worth the pay I demand. Absent the government, regulation is simply a market expression of each person's own valuation opinions. In deciding what we think things are worth for ourselves, each of us plays a role in the communication of these values, providing valuable information to the parties that need it. Without government regulation, consumers, producers, and sellers find themselves regulated much more efficiently and much more freely.

But when the government tries to take over this job, it fails to do an effective job. That's because there isn't the brain power in government to outdo the brain power of individual citizens (much less the interest in to do a better job). Getting government out of the business of regulating free commerce is the surest way to change the oil in the market engine and spark productivity upward, exploding the job market, multiplying wealth all the while.

Think about it. Businesses can't make anyone do anything they don't want to do. People make their own choices and decide for themselves. There is an attempt to shove off the choices made by the individual on the interest of business, but it's really an escape hatch for avoiding responsibility, an inherent ingredient in successful self-ownership. I'll go into that more some other time.

Ultimately, businesses needs governmental powers to behave in the ways that people look to government to keep businesses from behaving! That's where a serious conflict of interest arises when government begins to get its hands in between consumers and producers. If government action can give a bigger market share to one particular company through it's regulatory power, that establishes an enormous incentive for that company to lobby for such special favors from government. Thus, with the rise of unethical regulatory powers in government, there follows a concomitant rise in demands for more interruption of the marketplace, the feedback effect droning on, revving more and more regulation up, fueling the cycle ever onward.

Those who wish to understand the limits of governmental power, where any step beyond becomes a moral problem, should read the classic work by The Law Frederic Bastiat. Here are two online copies of that fantastic treatise. Read it, print it, distribute it.
http://www.fee.org/pdf/books/The_Law.pdf
http://www.constitution.org/law/bastiat.htm

Whereas my coworker saw business owners having legal control over their own property as a problem, I challenge he and others that to interrupt property rights for any person, regardless of his wealth accrued, is a moral pitfall. If someone earned his money by the free market, it is his to do with as he pleases and no others and the burden of proof that he may not hold his property with legitimacy rests on the accuser, not the holder. Property rights are affirmative and certain, requiring negative actions on the behalf of other people. Do not steal, and since you may not morally steal, you have no authority to endow government as a thief on your behalf! That is, so long as you suppose government to be a creation of the people and people to be property of no one but themselves.

You see, it all comes down to the moral statement that we own ourselves. Too often, people mix up their own thoughts to conceal the fact that they are ignoring that very moral statement.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Own Thyself

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Friday, February 18, 2011 2:19:27 PM
The right to life is not a right to whatever is necessary to continue breathing.  The right to life, as a self-evident gift of God in our natural being, as penned in the Declaration of Independence, is the unequivocal right of each individual person to own himself and to own his choices and to own the results of those choices.

Now, why would I take any time at all to make such a statement?  Because it is only with this firm foundation that American liberty ever existed and without such a clear philosophical grounding, we cannot hope to maintain the most precious arrangement ever provided any group of people by their ancestors.

Moderation has become a method of compromise against this principal.  The centrism, so casually avowed as superior in its democratic sensibility, is really nothing more than a disbelief in freedom and is a rejection of servitude at the same time.  I refer to those views as graduated liberty.  These people insist if you have a right to buy a gun, buy a car, work a job, and other basic ideas, then you're free.  Essentially, if we can check certain amenities off a list, then we are free.

That begs the question, who decides what items should be on the list which, if fulfilled, denotes freedom?  George W. Bush might have believed that the right to guns should be on the list, but Barack Obama believes that health care and housing should and not arms.  FDR insisted that people are not free unless they are guaranteed employment.  So, isn't graduated liberty merely another way of saying that freedom isn't a real concept at all, but only an abstract set of opinions by whomever is vested with power?  We may step into heavily esoteric discussions here and that's not the point.

Graduated liberty is nonsense.  Liberty is each person making his own decisions and being held to them by reality.  In effect, liberty is universal self-ownership on an individual basis. Liberty is an absence of immoral force in everyone's lives.

So, what does this have to do with graduated liberty and the current climate in America and her respective states?  It's very simple really.  Since people are all different, each person will set valuations as they pertain to him, without regard to how other people might set values.  This natural, individualized valuation of things generates patterns of interaction between people which establishes Adam Smith's invisible hand effect, wherein people, who are really only interested in helping themselves, benefit other people in the process.

At the moment, governments at all levels are arguably doing all possible to interrupt, corrupt, confuse, and destroy the natural communication of these values among people.  Government subsidizes some industries and penalizes others more harshly.  Government acts like a mobile toll-booth, taxing people almost every time they try to do anything with their capital.  Government establishes agency on top of unconstitutional agency to regulate every minute action in everyone's lives.  And further, these agencies have to be staffed with people to write the regulations, to implement them, and to enforce them.  Those people have to be paid and they also leave the sectors where productive work is done.  Rather they engage in counter-productivity, where the regulators produce nothing except hindrances against other people who would otherwise produce things that people value.  Worse still, the regulations produced by government have to be complied with and businesses find themselves increasingly bogged down under tax codes and regulatory fiat, employing more and more workers, not for productivity, but for the mere sake of compliance.

It's a wonder, with the staggering escalation of regulatory oversight and the tower of pages in in our federal tax code (to say nothing about states and localities) that we have managed to avoid total economic collapse thus far.  It's astounding that markets which long ago lost their freedom, while not being nationalized, have managed to function reasonably well under the suffocating burdens of the federal state.

People adjust their behavior based upon their rate of return and so long as they can get a return, people will do what they must.  What happens when we reach that breaking point?  What happens when too few things on each citizen's personal list of freedom is scratched out by the rise of state power?

Quite frankly, there's a huge difference between creating a job and creating a product.  If you were to add in all the workers that are engaged in counter-productivity as well as all those people ensconced in compliance efforts, rather than those who are actually creating, you may be able to say that one in three people in this nation may as well be unemployed entirely, because only 2/3s of us are producing things people want.  That is, of course, an estimation, but I think it's a rather cautious one.  I'd be willing to bet a hundred bucks (considerable money on my hourly-rate budget) that as much as forty percent of America is engaged in unproductivity, counter-productivity, or compliance duties.

Suppose we could cut that number in half and send half of those people back into the work force to produce things that people actually want, rather than have foisted upon them by bureaucracy and political intrigue.  Wouldn't we all be better off when that segment of the nation is now producing things?  Having more products on the market means the nation is wealthier, because money is just a measuring tool, a method to facilitate trade.  Products are what matters and when more are produced, prices drop, quality and quantity increase, and most importantly, self-reliance, promoting a feedback effect with self-ownership, will return to the people of these states.

Frankly, I suspect that more than half of America understands all this quite well.  Why are the fifteen percent who refuse to accept reality permitted to run roughshod over the rest?  Don't feel alone and let people know when they're supporting softened slavery.  It's not right, even when it backs what is considered to be proper charity because government cannot give anything which was not first confiscated from someone else.  Only people produce things, not government.  Government is purely force.

American citizen, own thyself!
Pansy Lefties, socialize thyself!
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Experimenting with Death

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Monday, February 07, 2011 8:04:08 PM
I have written previously on the mind of the leftist which regards absolute state power as a mere fact of life, an inevitable outgrowth of any society, and therefore the truest way to implement "good", whatever they define that word to be.  Fewer people exemplify this worldview more fully than Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist who has repeatedly lamented how he wishes America could become China if only for a day.

Now, to be fair, Friedman doesn't seem to believe China is superior because the state wantonly oppresses the Chinese people.  He thinks it's a better system because things that 'need' to get done happen much more quickly than similar policy shifts in America, where a bill may spend weeks, months, or generations being debated on the floor of Congress.  The real problem, as Friedman sees it, is democracy is sluggish and if we only embraced China's one-party autocracy for a day, we could solve so many problems!

But, wait a minute, that begs the question: why is our republic slow?  Why do we debate all these laws, some of which pass and others which do not?  Though he will certainly deny this, it is impossible to reconcile Thomas Friedman's obsession with his "China-for-a-day" dream with the steps necessary to make such an experiment worthwhile (in his eyes).  The political system in America contains a fluidity whereby the opinions of the average citizen become the policy.  That being the case, a dictatorship capable of enacting policies on a whim would find its actions entirely undermined within an election cycle because of the resultant political backlash (presupposing the dictator relinquishes the reigns of total power after the end of the day, which dictators never do, especially dictatorships of party).  For that matter, how do we decide which party should be endowed with dictatorship for twenty-four hours? Nevermind...

If the power were to default back to the people, they would undo all the things the dictatorship implemented because they didn't want it in the first place.  That is the entire reason why Friedman wants to try this in America, because these pesky voters have their say and if only, if only I, the infinitely wise Friedman or the eternally pure Democrat party, had absolute power, things would all be better off (not people, mind you).  This of course is the epitome of arrogance and self-idolization which is foundational to the worldview of every intellectual leftist.

The reality is simple: where force is required to implement policy, force is required to maintain it.  Where force was required to pass the Obamacare/control law, since it was passed against a torrent of citizen outrage, even stronger force will be necessary to keep it in place and enforce it.

Ultimately, Friedman's statements subconsciously support the use of long-term totalitarianism, or the enactment of social manipulation with the end goal of arriving at a population which would not reject the changes made.  This references the genocide that is inevitably necessary in order to eliminate those who will not buckle to the will of the state.  Murder was a way of life in the Soviet Union!  Beyond power-plays and insider intrigue, killing was a tool for cultural reform and societal adaptation to the communist way of life.  It was used to remove dissidents and scare everyone else into compliance with the state's dictate.  We could look at the Khmer Rouge where similar policies (though differing in key ways) slaughtered an astoundingly large percentage of Cambodia's population in order to achieve a purification of ideals, both philosophical and physical, which were ultimately never realized (duh).

In Friedman's beloved China, millions of others have been slaughtered, starved, or otherwise condemned to a diseased, poverty-stricken end on the basis that the goals of the state are essentially supreme, as the state is the source of all moral truth.  Within Friedman's admonition for his experiment of China-for-a-day is to call for the permanent overthrow of the Constitution, the condemnation of religious liberty, the revocation of human value and rights, and the implementation of the most despotic form of government in the history of mankind.

At least when a king killed a subject, he didn't pretend it was for the subject's own good.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Rights or Rulers

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Thursday, September 09, 2010 10:03:54 PM
A recent article was sent to me by a relative who was incensed at the situation befalling a resident in New York. My relative was angry about the predicament a man found himself in, merely because, in defending his home, he used a weapon which is considered more frightening than others.  More plainly, the man is being raked over hot coals because third parties who have nothing to do with his situation are emotionally detached from logic.  A gun is a gun.  It doesn't matter what type of gun it is, since the killer needs hands to operate it.  But since I see these stories somewhat regularly, what grabbed my attention was a little different, although I am, of course, frustrated by the arrest of a man for what, according to even to a very slanted anti-self-defense media, was legitimate self-defense.

Near the bottom of the article appeared this sentence, "You may think a person has a right to defend their home."  The arid snobbery of that clearly biased sentence aside, what really stuck in my craw is the misunderstanding of what rights actually are.  After that sentence, the paragraph describes the laws of New York with respect to forceful defense, exposing what the writer considers to be the source of rights; government.

But rights are not matters of law, at all.  As Frederic Bastiat wrote so eloquently in The Law, "Life, liberty, and property (the substance of our natural rights) do not exist because men have made laws.  On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."  The writer of the article puts the cart before the horse.  This really should not bother me so much because of how commonly that approach dominates the reporting of 'facts' as left-leaning media want them to be, not as they are.

Rights exist, whether or not government acknowledges them or opposes them.  Rights are moral certainties which remain despite the decisions of men.  That statement is an assertion of two things, there is absolute moral truth and mankind is imperfect in applying those boundaries, both within our individual lives, but even more so within societies.  So, whether or not the state of New York affirms a man's inherent right and responsibility to protect himself and his family is inconsequential to the fact that he has a right to do so.  Perhaps a man who defends himself within a state that has a legal prohibition on self-defense will find himself imprisoned by the state and perhaps that is what is happening to this man.  But those acts of the government do not unseat the pre-existing rights that the state has decided to make illegal.

Legality cannot establish rights the same as it cannot generate virtue.  Government is responsive, in every act.  The law is force and is only morally implemented to stop illegitimate force.  Self-defense is a personal assertion of the transcendent natural law, if force is properly used to repel illegitimate force.  But what the reporter, likely subconsciously, has done in asserting that law establishes rights is backward, misleading, and dangerous.

It seems to be a simple matter to understand that the state has established the rights of men because our federal Constitution has a Bill of Rights.  But those are an affirmation of some things which exist in man apart from man's will to formulate, given from God at conception.  This is how proper government is formed; the people existed and organized a government to ensure the nearest to just arrangement as humanly possible (which falls far short because of man's innate limitations and depravity), wherein force is reduced to as minute a presence in life as can be expected.  Fail as we humans always will, the results within westernized societies have been enormously superior to all other systems in terms of raising more people out of real poverty and misery, on top of the ethical certainty that people are self-owned.  The practice of true principle is that the people exist first, they then create government, subject to the people and limited to those tasks which people can also morally perform, but can more efficiently perform collectively rather than individually.

The writer of the above mentioned article believes everything is exactly the other way around.  According to that vision, moral supremacy exists first within the government and its dictates about rights are the only determination of substantial, even absolute, certainty, regardless whether those dictates change over time or at the whim of a judge, legislators, or the lowly subjects.  Within that view, rights do not pre-exist wherein men make laws to preserve those rights.  Men exist and no rights exist.  All action is governed by the some people's implementation of strength over others, be it coercive or direct.  Then, with the long-needed, eventual creation of a government that has 'the correct' sense of what is right, do the rights of men suddenly come in to being.

I phrased that last sentence very specifically to illustrate the fallacy of this statement.  If legality is the birth of all rights, then rights are an absolute fiction masking all which guides men; the currents and crops of force.  If governments need to find the 'proper' rights in order for justice to exist within their system, then rights are external and unbound by the decisions of government.  There has already been an admission of something external to any government (even any man since governments are merely establishments of men), which indicates something, a standard of what is proper or correct, as a natural right of man.

This argument has long been used to prove the existence of a transcendent being which could be called God.  C.S. Lewis' classic work Mere Christianity speaks at decent length about the evidence for a God based upon man's innate senses toward the rightness and wrongness of things.  These senses can guide our understanding of what is just, even if we fail in perfection.  But the left, in the main, does not believe in God or doesn't really believe in the God of the Bible.  For them, it is entirely reasonable to regard men as without rights, absent a government, since there is no universal truth or moral certainty, absent a knowable supernatural God.  Even if they believe there is a god, they regard it as distant, unknowable, and that being the case, mankind is only a creature, not unlike any wild beast, evolving over time.  And in the process of evolution, man develops systems to advance humanity's own species, or specific interests within the species.  Thus, they believe, mankind has established government to arrange things best for the advancement of mankind and that it is the center of authority with regards to creating justice, not as a direction of things toward man's innate moral senses, but as a literal creator of defined justice.  The left, it is quite obvious, makes government the god that man created.

Yet, even a few seconds' consideration gives rise to questions which scream out for answers.  If legality is the source of moral truth, then how could the left regard any atrocity whatsoever as a violation of justice?  Would justice vary around the world, just as cultures vary?  Admittedly, the left has not yet expressed any unease about the millions killed by communism in the USSR, China, and various other nations (to do so, they would have to admit the atrocities out loud and they are, as yet, without comment at all), but they waste no time in pointing to the National Socialist German Workers Party as the truest picture of evils (they're close this far, but their logic fails when they try to associate fascism with the right wing, which is diverse but admittedly more close to anarchy than any form of totalitarian statism).

So, the left acknowledges that there is evil in the world, even evil created by a state.  But if the state is the arbiter of all moral direction, how could the Nazi reign of horror have been evil at all?  Many leftists would ponder that, perhaps, when many states exist, with differing ideas as to the best way to arrange people, the states ought to be together, able to override an individual state, since the larger number of intellectuals can more certainly get 'right' what rights to establish.  This, of course, promotes the U.N. to absolute dictator of justice, which is a frightening concept.  It also brings back the paradoxical notion that rights, if originating with the government, must have existed independent of governmental determination, if there are to be any injustices in what any government has done anywhere, ever.

But if the greatest majority of states should determine what is right, then how should alternatives have come about in the first place?  Wasn't most of the world ground under the class systems of feudalism and tribalism, up until recent history?  By the reasoning displayed within the left's government directed morality, the Enlightenment was a rebellion of evil men from the rulers of the day (and perhaps the left doesn't think this too distant from correct, with their anti-Western civilization stance).  It stands to show that the advocates of freedom were the enemy of the majority of governments in that day.  For the left, freedom remains the enemy since statists want only to enact policies which are coercive, requiring illegitimate force to carry out, because people will not do certain things against their own will and those things happen to be the primary focus of the left's greatest plans.

People of the left may not directly state that human rights do not exist, but their statements are clear enough to understand that that is the underlying, subconcious principle, ever at war with their human sensitivity to real moral certainty.  At the time of the Nazi party cementing its grasp of political power, intellectuals within the United States and many other nations found them fit to praise, especially for their more radical ways of thinking.  To leftists like George Bernard Shaw, the prospect of liquidating members of a population, based solely upon their 'usefulness' to the rest of the population, was not only enticing; it was obviously the proper path, since it was determined by the day's most advanced, statist minds to be the swiftest, most effective means of correcting the failings within a society.

Yet, when you separate man from God and isolate morality from any foundation external to man, the end result is an uncertain absolute of moral relativity, a logical paradox, in itself.  We see this in the left's hatred toward Western society.  In their minds, Western society has become imperial in its spread around the world.  I don't quite believe that Western society has spread, so much as moral certitude and the universality of rights has spread, taking with it a great many promotions of human liberty and advancements to the quality of life for the average person.  But the point stands, the left has a reasonably consistent track record of refusing to condemn clearly valueless societies.  They even advocate another paradoxical notion that all societies are equal (which of course is a statement not affirmed by any society except the fantasy world that exists only within the minds of the leftist).  Neither the Soviets nor the Americans (save those 'elite' Americans who wanted us to be Soviet America) would have ever admitted to a moral equality between the two systems.  The enmity between America's generally free-market capitalism and the USSR's rigid, top-down communism was a result of the moral statements being made by both.  The USSR asserted itself as the future's dominant arrangement of mankind, wherein people would be very directed by their supposedly wise betters (another relative notion).  The United States asserted that men are naturally free and when government steps in to direct things, it becomes a master of slaves and an oppressor different from the tyrants of old only in with regard to degree and method (intentions are inconsequential if they are not the result of policies supposedly enacted on behalf of a nation's population).  Most other nations which have high standards of living have asserted these same ideas to one degree or another.

Effectually, rights must be external to man in their source, and indwelt into man at conception, if they exist with any universality.  If they do not exist with any universality, no history of atrocity can condemn the actions of those who committed what we regard now as injustice.  The victims' status of having rights can never be asserted and their persecutors can also not be condemned for their actions, not because they intended a result different from what occurred (most of history, intentions were primarily self-interested), but because we do not have any ability to understand the concepts justice within a system we do not dwell under.  Even though we may analyze a particular society, from the distance of time or space, we can never join it and so can never truly know what moral certainty within that society was or is.

The disturbing subtext to all liberal assertions about rights is that they simply don't exist.  People exist and governments exist and government has a supreme duty and authority to enact whatever policy it deems to be effective toward the betterment of human creatures (or any goal it assigns justice, really), that betterment being, of course, secondary to the protection of their concept that such roles are within the power and duty of intellectual government, in the first place.  What's more, the left has decided to expand the duty of the morality-creator state to the protection of all creatures, often to the detriment of mankind.  Man is just an animal and is no better than any other animal, plant, or rock, as environmental statists assert.  Perhaps man is even worse than all these!  This is a view very similar to the idiocy which states that no government is greater than another.

It is easier to describe the left's logical concepts as a mess.  Most who lean to the left politically, do not engage logic, whatsoever, and rely almost solely upon their anti-logical emotional responses to stimuli in order to maintain a sense of right and wrong.  Just as emotions and issues shift regularly, so follow the statements of emotionally-dependent statists.  Logic seems anathema to them in view of their passion, and evidence of their fallacy is outright rejected as manufactured nonsense.  The only reason I take the time to describe the left (which you probably have noticed, is quite difficult to merely state without confusing the reader), is that they remain a strong force in the world.  Mankind is imperfect, we know, and the persistence of the left, is one sociological manifestation of universal human depravity.

Rights are obligations others owe to you and here's the quick and easy way to determine if something is really and truly a right.  Rights are negative in that they demand that others NOT do something.  You have the right to your life, which is the obligation of other people to not murder you and to not interfere with your decisions and the results of those decisions.  That's very basic and it can be elaborated upon and defined more specifically but those statements are accurate, insofar as rights are limits on other people's ability to coerce without crossing a moral boundary.  Those who have a Vision of the Anointed, as Thomas Sowell has titled his analysis, do not affirm any right, in this real sense of the term.  They advocate that all means are justified by the end result, even if that result never arrives.  But the real truth is the means justify the results.  If the methods are moral, the results cannot be immoral, whether those results are economic 'inequality' (a confused argument which separates economic output from input or actions from consequences) or that self-defense requires force to carry out.

Getting back to the original matter, does the man who defends himself and his family (and even his property) by the use of a gun, regardless of the type of gun, exceed his rights?  No, and it appears the man in question did not exceed his own rights in this case.  He did not even use the gun in self-defense.  His actions provided promise that illegitimate force would be met with legitimate forceful response; a warning that the right of this man's life, liberty, and property would not be violated without the man taking up his own defense which is encompassed within his natural rights, even if the government does not acknowledge them.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

You, Sheep

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:17:39 PM
It intrigues me that so many people, on all sides of the political spectrum, implement the tactic of accusing mere followership of their opponents.  That is, whenever confronted with a particular viewpoint, the attacker will state emphatically that the opposing person is not firm and independent in their ideas, but rather is simply a parrot for the statements of others.  Invariably, many of those who argue their case will still sum up their ideas by deriding the other person or persons in this fashion.

I have seen a great deal of this online.  If you would like a good example, look at any political video on youtube and read the comments.  You are almost certain to find numerous comments containing sentences that begin as follows: "You're just a viewer/listener of *variable*," "Stop watching/listening *variable*", and "Well, you're just a racist."  I admit this tactic is surely more implemented by the left and I will explain why that is a little further on, but even the right engages in this sort of thing.  I, myself, am quite fond of a statement I constructed; Some people believe they are thinking by believing what they are told to think.  That is not very different from the tactic of accusing people of being mere followers and not thinkers.  And I believe that statement to be true.

So, why am I writing this article?  Because the foil is used far too often, too directly, and has contributed to the overly-emotional cynicism that our political discussion has become.  To state that some people believe they are thinking because they believe what they are told to think is primarily a statement of generally what is.  It is not a statement in the absolute since it does not encompass any specifically identified person or set of people.  It merely establishes that some people, probably some from every persuasion, are not engaged in critical thinking but are reflecting verbatim views they recieved from someone else.  But to accuse someone directly of having no logical authority, because they watch or listen to a particular pundit or host, is really beyond the pale, whether it happens to be true or not.

The statement is offensive  and improper in several ways.  First, it is dismissive.  The attacker makes the statement to say, 'Your opinions have absolutely no worth, because they originate in someone whom I dislike and disagree with.'  Second, it is insulting.  The text proclaims, 'You are incapable of having an independent thought process because you merely repeat what *variable* says.'

But the statement is not improper because it is dismissive and insulting.  It may be true and the two subtexts actually may be present in the intended recipient.  The statement is improper when it becomes the sole argument used and because it is a dismissive statement, a means of escape.  Many who use it seem to turn to it first, before they even have a chance to discover whether or not their opponent actually fits the pattern.  Knee-jerk finger-pointing has become a starting-gun practice in order to evade honest debate and to demonize a political opposition.  Of course, being a conservative, I'm very willing to assert that the left does this more often than the right because their arguments lack logical rigor and the test of reality, whereas conservatives are more willing to dwell within the honest debate realm because we are backed by credibility.  That is, obviously, a dismissive and insulting statement toward the left, however, it happens to be the case, these days.

But the left does, indeed, use this tactic with regularity.  As high up the political ladder as the senate majority leader (Reid-D-NV) and even the president have used it.  Throughout the campaign, Barack Obama regularly derided Sean Hannity listeners, asserting that they were being brainwashed, that they could not think for themselves.  Now, I haven't listened to Sean Hannity in at least four years but I do recall that, when I had listened to his show, I still had my own thoughts and disagreed with him from time to time.  It's not uncommon for a radio show host to miss a grand opportunity with a caller, for whatever reason.  Part of my frustration with certain radio talk shows is that the hosts often have great chances to provide some deep intellectual education, and yet miss the on ramp to that effort.  (It's probably format issues and the pressure of being on a national radio show)

I recall one specific instance where Barack Obama, post-election when the president specifically attacked Rush Limbaugh listeners in this dismissive and insulting fashion.  Now, since he cannot test such a statement, there is no chance that the president can say with any honesty that Rush Limbaugh listeners are purely incapable of their own opinions, that they are dancing to his tune because they cannot hear any other.  Yet, Barack has only repeated the refrain that has been pervasive throughout the left; that dittoheads are sheep and nothing more.  What is intriguing is how many callers on Rush's show regularly unseat that notion with statements of their own about how they used to be liberals but they have 'seen the light' or how they already were conservatives and were surprised to find someone saying what they already believed on the radio.  Listeners frequently call in frustrated because they watch some of the media's so called 'mainstream' reporting and become livid at the plastering of lies.  Shouldn't sheep follow any contrived personality?  Why should they be repelled by the MSM and attracted by conservative talk radio?

Though the left simply would never accept this fact, the truth is there is a greater diversity of opinion on the right, than on the left.  The left is confined to theories of enormous governmental control and there may be a plethora of details they can arrange, but they still must have a strong government which is directing many or all things.  History has shown us that most of those arrangements have been tried and have all failed to yield results the are tolerable much less outmatch American free market capitalism.  On the right, you have a greater diversity of opinion, because the right assumes that everyone is different and has a right to be different and live their lives differently.  The left pays a lot of lip service to 'diversity' but when it really comes down to it, their control is trying to equalize everything after the fact, even the subtle differences ingrained into each individual's human spirit.

Here's what's really going on; the left is projecting upon conservatives the left's opinions that the average person is too stupid to run their own life.  Consider, the left believes that we must be intellectually controlled from the top down because the average person is incapable of making the proper decisions within his own life in the context of a society which is affected by choices.  They believe that society can be perfected through control if we simply put the right people in charge and they run a tight ship.  The left, therefore, does not believe that the average person's opinion matters, even if they are making good points because, to the statist mind, the average person is the property of the society and must be made to conform to societal perfection.  Anyone who does not espouse a statist faith in authoritarian expansion is simply ignorant and unfit to be dogcatcher much less any real political official.  Whereas the left is sure their political opposition is just mindless followers of contrarianism and fascism (read my earlier analysis of the left's political meter), they assume that people can be made to conform to ideals very easily, because if they did not believe that, then their utopianism would be impossible.  It turns out, for the left to have any political backing at all, their own followers must be mindless fascists.  Yet, if all people can be made to conform to ideas with relative ease, as they scream Rush Limbaugh has demonstrated, why has the left not rooted out all of these contrarian views that frustrate statist utopian plans?

Let me make a simple statement, whereas the left incorrectly accuses the right of being sheep, most of the leftist base fit that mold comfortably.  Those people who conform to those simple ideals of statism, do so with little intellectual, historical rigor and almost unquestioning support.  Leftist leaders find that acceptable and even as evidence of the supremacy of their ideas.  The right may be frustrated that a minority of people in America are foolish enough to believe we all need a strong nanny-state, but the left embraces these idiots.  Statists are frustrated, conversely, that independent thinking people exist at all.  If we knew what was best for us, we'd establish a statist dictator and let him take control, or so say many on the hard, follower left.  They project the flaws of their base upon all others in attempt to prove their views correct and once again, they are confounded by reality.  Of course, that's not a conscious effort, but it seems fairly clear to me and many other conservatives who have come to similar conclusions.

Whether it's to help someone run away from actual debate or merely to state a fact, this tactic is given far too much use, especially in the age of the internet, and it should find a decline, if we are to have a legitimate realm of debate.  Let ideas flow freely and let disagreement happen, but don't unreasonably use the accusation that anyone who disagrees with you is naturally stupid or racist or whatever.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Voting and Control

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Saturday, August 28, 2010 3:00:00 PM
The government created by our Constitution and limited to those duties established in that magnificent document, is one which is deaf, dumb, and blind to the temptations of bribery.  It has no power to dish out justice based upon anything other than the facts of criminality and limited role to which government is confined.  No opportunity exists for the wealthy to buy anything in government unless the people have already seen fit to do away with our founding document.  Essentially, what corruption exists and exists in perpetuity, is really a manifestation of the people's imperfection and their growing unwillingness to do the right thing, to be independent of the state.

There is a fascinating quandary buried here.  Where the left, and particularly the Democrat Party, are concerned, the people can be confused by the explosion of advertisements, by the injection of money into the political process.  Frederic Bastiat broke this fallacy down handily in his timeless work "The Law".  How is it, exactly, that these foolish people can be relied upon to pick the officers of government who will rule us in the absolute, when they can't even be relied upon to sift the options presented at the ballot box?  In more broad terms, why should we accept votes from people who are so inept, they vote for a party whose platform is that no one can care for themselves, government must step in and do the bulk of the work?  I'm not advocating that the vote be taken away from people who are on the dole. I'm illustrating the entire problem with the Democrat Party's political machine.

This is why they insist that economic justice is only redistributive, that actions don't matter to results, that there is no equals sign except in absolute property ownership terms (leaving aside all input differences).  Statists insist on expanding the franchise to the most incapable members of society, not because those people are wise in their choices.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Democrats love voters who have everything to gain by promoting government growth.  Democrats promote dependency and the reduction of freedom and the only reason they do it through the vote is because they subconsciously know that totalitarianism is wrong, at least is considered wrong by the current crop of subjects.  That's most likely the best conscious statement you'll get from a true hard-line leftist.  Most of them cannot consciously accept absolute autocracy as a legitimate political goal because of what totalitarian regimes have always done in the past hundred years.  So, they accept the vote, even if it entirely conflicts with their views; that some are endowed with the gift of benevolent, wise control and all the rest are the objects of their manipulative benevolence.  Everyone in America is too stupid to run their own lives, but they are perfectly wise to pick out our 'betters' who then make all the rest of our choices for us (that is unless the people choose a non-statist.  The left doesn't know what to make of small-government beliefs). Once the vote is tallied and the leftist is endowed with political office, the sovereign will of the people is entirely expended and the benevolent tyranny commences, as pleasant as necessary to ensure the votes once more.

Getting back on topic, I recall hearing a song a few days ago, where the lyrics were something to the effect of 'I want to be a billionaire really really bad.'  My first thought was, how cute; the millions in record and ticket sales isn't enough, good for that artist.  But then it hit me (and well before the first chorus was finished), the lyricist doesn't want to be a billionaire.  Whoever wrote those lyrics wants to be able to spend money as though it were no object and that's all.  Being a billionaire isn't about being able to buy what you want at any moment.  Most billionaire's have that status because they've lived their adult lives working as hard as they can, slowly building up capital and arranging it so that the money is invested and gains a return.  Billionaires spend much of their waking moments tweaking their wealth, which remains primarily tied up in investments.  Those investments create jobs, products, ventures, loans, etc, but more importantly, those investments pay a return; the cost of capital is profit to the investor.  I doubt very much that money thrown at the lyricist would be treated with the same respect or competence that the average billionaire maintains when controlling his portfolio.  Anyone can spend money like crazy, but it requires care to maintain wealth over time.  The primary reason why many people never become millionaires or billionaires that they do not have the skill set to establish that level of wealth and maintain it.

So, does a billionaire really control anyone else?  Not really.  He offers money to many other people in return for work and those people often accept because they're trying to get rich too and the amount of money offered is worth their effort and time, as they see it.  But when the billionaire and all his employees and all the people to whom he advertised his own political views, go into the voting booth, they close the curtain and vote with a closed ballot.  Votes are not bought by the promotion of specific viewpoints.  We call that persuasion through the dissemination of information.  People can take it or leave it, no matter what the advice or statements are or who it comes from.  If the left doesn't want a corporation, which is merely an organization of individual people working together toward higher profits, to have the right to promote their views, then they really aren't in favor of individuals having the right to promote their views either.   After all, political parties are begun by people meeting together who have similar views.  Are corporate advertisements any different?  Ah so once more, if you play the left's logic out a bit further, they really don't accept the right to vote, at all.  I suppose they'll have to accept our rights in that respect, so long as we don't concede those as well.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Experts Rarely Know

Posted by Non-Average Joe on Sunday, August 15, 2010 5:07:30 PM
It has been shown many times that intelligent people tend to be regarded as enlightened with respect to more subjects than their field of study, when the reality of intelligence is that it is most often confined to a very local realm.  Experts may be able to speak profoundly to the topics they have dedicated their lives to understanding, but that does not translate into a profound interpretive ability in all matters, which would place the analysis in superiority to that of any other observer.  Thomas Sowell has shed light on this affect repeatedly in several of his books, but dissected the phenomenon handily in his recent work Intellectuals and Society.  Pay particular attention to the example he provides of Noam Chomsky.  Another book that deals with this concept of localized, limited expertize is The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

Recently, Stephen Hawking has begun to make statements about ideas which are not his area of expertise.  Now, to be sure, Hawking has the same rights everyone else does to discuss all subjects as he wishes and with whomever will listen.  However, what Hawking's statements carry, to most people, is a presumption of accuracy because he is famous for his ability to think within his respective area of research.  Hawking's focus is on quantum physics and the continuing search for a 'Unified Field Theory' which many physicists are trying to divine.  People who work in this area are working in the abstract and purely mathematical realm.  Some testing and experimental research continues within the scope of quantum physics but it is all the study of data sets; the results measured in a particle collider, the electromagnetic waveform coming from distant gamma ray bursts, and so on.  Physics is not being advanced any longer by the experiments as simple as dropping a hammer and a feather.

Hawking may have a wonderful mind for dealing with the profoundly odd world of quantum mechanics but that does not provide any evidence of expertise on social policy or ecological management.  His statements recently were ludicrous and laughable.  He insists that mankind must vacate the planet entirely before we destroy it because that is the inevitable result of our presence on Earth.  Were it not for his continued work in quantum physics, we might be inclined to wonder whether or not the good doctor is experiencing dementia.  His writing on many matters external to quantum theory, mostly political, provide a troublesome glimpse at his interpretation of evidence, and perhaps illustrates gaps in his data set of the social/ecological situation.

Dr. Hawking noted that mankind was close to extinction with the Cuban missile crisis.  Kennedy's royal mishandling of the situation not withstanding, mankind was not at all under threat of being wiped out.  Given the worst nuclear war possible at that time, most of the world would have been left untouched, including nearly all of Africa and South America.  Many people think that nuclear winter would result from the war and any remaining life would freeze to death as a result of nuclear dust blotting out the sun for decades, perhaps centuries, so let me bring in another science mind who was well respected but should have stayed with his area of expertise; Carl Sagan.  The idea of nuclear winter began with Sagan and a co-author who wrote a paper on the concept.  Yet, when his 'expertise' was called in to comment on the environmental impact of Saddam Hussein's intentional fire-setting to the Kuwaiti oil fields, Sagan could not have been proved more wrong in his underestimating the atmosphere's ability to clean out particulate matter efficiently.  Sagan predicted horrific decades of atmospheric troubles and yet a few months later no atmospheric detection of the extinguished wells could be found, whatsoever.  Sagan was a brilliant conceptualist and a fine author, but when it came to matters of everyday reality, not so much.

Stephen Hawking has shown that his mind can extrapolate what must be done, granted the worst predictions by enviro-statists are indeed the case.  Well, that is one heck of an assumption to make such Earth-abandoning changes upon, especially granted all of the evidence which runs counter to the alarmism.  Enviro-statists like Paul Ehrlich have been predicting the absolute end of the world for mankind as far back as memory goes.  For Ehrlich, the end should've happened well before Y2K was predicted to destroy civilization and yet, here we are having weathered both with no historically significant impact.  In looking at what Hawking has stated, one should be troubled that he seems not to have heard that there is no scientific 'consensus' on global climate change, never to have heard about the continued fraud of climate gate or any of the other countless frauds backing climate alarmism, and never even heard of the BBC's documentary which debunks global warming and nearly condemns alarmism.  I, for one, find myself quite unable to dispel the possibility that Dr. Hawking is surrounded by yes-men who all believe in global warming and expansive government. Undoubtedly, they respect Hawking to a degree that makes everything he say sacred, even if it's just his request of what music to put on while they work or that mankind must become interplanetary before we capitalize our planet to death.  Probably, Hawking has likely never been exposed to an alternative viewpoint, and that wouldn't be such a big deal except that he's making statements of a profoundly radical nature and backing them with the weight of his work on a subject that has absolutely nothing to do with the statements he is making.

It's fairly likely that I, who have no college degree but have spent a great portion of my life thus far studying political movements and the realms in which they exist, can do a better job of explaining Hawking's own ideas about our climate's predicament than he could.  I would also follow up that dissertation of doom with a complete destruction of its every foundation by simple statement of scientific fact (for instance Carbon Dioxide trails significant temperature change, not precedes it. It cannot, therefore, cause temperature change).  I don't consider myself an expert on global warming, but I know enough of the science to understand it's the greatest hoax ever backed by tax dollars.

Another person who has expertise in energy production and yet, seems to be taking the wrong course for different reasons is T. Boone Pickens.  Many people are aware of him because of the commercials he has produced with his own money to promote wind farm development.  What many people do not understand is why a billionaire can't just invest in it himself, and reap tremendous profits.  Why does he need the governments to spend our money on it?  Because you can take every penny Pickens has and not see a hay penny's profit.  Wind energy is so much more expensive than other forms that only government backing makes it a tangible investment option for people who actually need a financial, productive result from their dollars spent, rather than a political result.  In short, without our money being spent against our will, for a political result, there would be no windmill investment.  Here is an example of a man acting against his better judgment because government has bought the stupidity out of the equation with our money.  Not only will consumers pay higher prices for electricity as "energy prices... skyrocket" (President Obama's candid words about his own plan for energy) on the front end, but tax payers will also continue to foot the massive bill for the unprofitable bulk of wind energy on the front end.  In this case, it is the political expertise that is fouling up the wisdom of energy expertise.  So long as it remains politically popular to mindlessly repeat 'alternative energy', the Department of Energy regulators will be appointed by scoundrels and miscreants.

Expertise is a strange thing.  It can provide exercise of the mind that can be helpful outside of one's own area of study, but it can do little more than this and without factual material, all the focus in the world won't provide a good result.  Stephen Hawking's intense study of quantum theory has not given him any instrument of bearing on climate change and demographics.  It is possible that his legacy and fame in physics, as well as praise for doing his work while stricken with ALS, has gone to his head (excuse the pun) and given him a superiority complex.  That is not so uncommon among the academy in the first place (in fact, much of the fascination with control ideologies springs exactly from conceit), but it will be received as cruel for me to have implied that about so revered and physically handicapped a figure.

My advice for anyone who is an expert in one field or another is this; have your political opinions and discuss them if you like, but do not assume that your focus of study gives you a hand up over other people's opinions.  We shouldn't assume that about them either.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive
« Previous12Next »