Grim's Grumblings

As Detroit's government collapses, private police firms meet the demand for security.

2012-02-11T18:35:00.000-08:00

Almost on cue in response to my earlier post on private police comes this story from Detroit, "911 is a Joke." As the government collapses and the people are unable to rely on the Detroit PD for protection of for 911 to provide assistance in a timely manner, two things have occured. The first is that more and more people are buying firearms and weapons for self defense, and they are using them! Self-defense related justifiable homicides are up nearly 80% over the previous year and are a whopping 2,200% higher than the national average! In addition to resorting to self-defense as means of protection, private police firms have entered Detroit to meet the demand for security, and it seems like business is booming:

The city’s wealthier enclaves have hired private security firms. Intimidating men in armored trucks patrol streets lined with gracious old homes in a scene more likely seen in Mexico City than the United States.

That kind of paid protection can run residents anywhere from $10 to $200 per month, and companies say business is good.

“We’re booming,” said Dale Brown, the owner of Threat Management Group, which along with Recon Security patrols neighborhoods like Palmer Woods in black Hummers.


Threat Management Patrol Car

And after Kevin Early found himself held up at gunpoint right in front of his home, he decided he had enough:

...he was held up at gunpoint outside his home in the upper-middle-class Rosedale Park area. Neighbors called the police, but it was 25 minutes before an officer arrived.

Weeks later, Early packed up his home and left Detroit. He hired Threat Management to supervise the move.

For more on private police see my earlier post. Be sure to click on the embedded links within for more detail and context. Additionally, Professor Bruce L. Benson has authored one of the greatest works ever written on this subject, The Enterprise of Law, that expands its scope to courts and law, as well as law enforcement. I can not recommend it highly enough!

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How the non-action against abusive cops creates a climate of fear and erodes our civil liberties

2012-02-10T14:02:00.000-08:00

So I wrote earlier about a particularly gross display of police brutality in neighboring Henderson, NV that went virtually unpunished, as the offending officer is still employed at his previous rank of Sergeant. Randomly I came across this youtube video that demonstrates how to behave during a traffic stop, while still maintaining and asserting your Constitutional rights. One thing that struck me about the video was that the actor playing the cop did a pretty good job of being intimidating, yet the young man remained un-flustered and proceeded to repeat his rights and behave in an ideal manner. I think what bothered me was that the video does not take into account the level of fear one feels when placed in a real-life situation like the one they are trying to depict.

I wondered why should we feel fear in our encounters with the police. I remember being younger (pre-9/11) and not being particularly fearful of police, especially if I knew I was doing nothing wrong. I can't speak for anyone else, but for me personally, that is no longer the case. What has changed, then? The first thing that comes to mind is the knowledge that police can and do abuse people, and consequently face very little if any punishment for doing so. The empty words of Henderson Mayor, Andy Hafen, demonstrates this concept. Here, we are fortunate enough to have videotape proof of blatant police brutality, yet not only are no criminal charges filed, the offending officer remains on duty to this day.

That is scary. It sends a message - we can abuse you and get away with it. Knowing this to be the climate we live in, if I find myself in a confrontation with an angry officer whom is intent on making an illegal search or detainment or whatever, I am more likely to forfeit my rights than I otherwise would be. I am less confident of the effectiveness of the system in prosecuting police abuse appropriately, and consequently, because both I and the officer know this, there exists greater leeway for him to use excessive force and less incentive for him to be concerned with protecting my rights and treating me fairly.

Additionally, the ever increasing definition of what constitutes "resisting arrest" and thus authorizes the police officer to assault you, only makes matters worse. In this clip we see that merely saying "What are you going to do, shoot me? What are you going to do?" is enough to constitute a threat and the person is subsequently arrested. Living in a world where crimes are so vague, and police are legally allowed to assault you and, if necessary, use deadly force based on the increasingly vague definition of what constitutes a crime has a very precise effect on the citizen, and society in general. It creates a climate of uncertainty and fear. Fear that you will be violently and brutally assaulted for failing to comply with a police officer's command, regardless of whether you are legally required to or not. Fear that they can claim your behavior or speech represented a threat and now they are legally entitled to violently assault you; an assault that if you resist, they are legally permitted to murder you, if necessary.

The most disturbing aspect of all of this is the ultimate result such a climate of fear has on a society. It creates an environment where civil liberties are eroded silently, preemptively. Where there still exists, on paper, the right to remain secure in your person and effects, but no longer does that right function in the tangible world.

This is, of course, by no means limited to Nevada law enforcement. It is a widespread trend across American and most aptly personified by the Federal Government's various police-state agencies such as the TSA and DHS. Still, it always smarts a bit more when you witness the government fail to provide its only legitimate duty - to protect the rights of the people - right in your own backyard. While I expect the road towards the de-monopolization of government-run police is a long one, I would think removing cops who display such abusive and criminal tendencies would be easily achieved. At the very least, the good citizens of Henderson, NV deserve a police force that does not condone and continually employ abusive officers. It would be nice to see the city, and the mayor, make some effort at providing them that service.

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Henderson cop assaults man suffering from diabetic stroke, faces no charges and remains employed as a Sergeant.

2012-02-09T12:57:00.000-08:00

The Las Vegas Review Journal has just published a story of 5 Henderson police officers assaulting a man who was suffering from diabetic shock. The article contains video of the incident which shows the police officers approaching the unarmed man with guns pointed at his face, throw him to the concrete ground, handcuff him, pile on top and throw several kicks to his head. The victim at no point ever made a hostile or threatening gesture. He, of course, was unable to comply with the police officers' initial verbal orders as he was in diabetic shock at the time.

My first response to this story, a story which happens much too often, on a disturbingly regular basis, was that this cop would have been immediately fired and facing criminal charges if we had a free market in policing services. Sadly and predictably, only one of the five police officers, Sgt. Brett Seekatz, faced any disciplinary action. To make matters even worse, the disciplinary that was taken was not released to the public and appears to have been extremely mild; the officer is still employed as a Sergeant, enjoying a hefty taxpayer-funded $110k a year salary.

As appalling as Sgt. Seekatz' behavior was, what is even more outrageous is the system in place that tolerates it. It is not the people that tolerate such behavior. I think we could all agree that the type of person whom approaches an unarmed man, handcuffed face-down on the ground, with three men forcibly holding him down, and decides the most appropriate course of action is to deliver several kicks to his head, is precisely the worst type of person to be employed as a police officer. While we can not change the nature of human behavior and guarantee such incidents will never happen again, we most certainly can change the system that tolerates and institutionalizes it.

The primary reason the Henderson PD can employ police officers whom their customers (citizens of Henderson) would overwhelming consider inadequate, or in this case, downright dangerous, is because of their government-provided monopoly status. Funded by taxation, they are immune from being penalized for failing to provide a valuable product, as the taxpayers are incapable of refusing to pay for the service, no matter how poor of a value they perceive it to be. As a government monopoly that is immune from competition, there is much less incentive to respond to the wishes of the citizens they are tasked to protect than there would be if those citizens were free to decide whether or not to continue paying for said service. On the contrary, if there were a free market in policing, it would be in the best interest of the private police agency to respond to the wishes of their consumers, which would almost certainly result in this officer's immediate termination. Any company that did not appropriately discipline officers found to be behaving in such an abusive manner, would be faced with an exodus of customers whom began looking for firms that were more reputable.

Having this mechanism in place results not merely in more appropriate disciplinary actions, but also acts in a preventive manner, as well. It is in the best interest of the police agency to employ honest, respectful, and professional officers so that they can enjoy the benefits that come with a positive reputation. Additionally, removing the government status from policing allows for the law to be applied equally. Just as private security guards and bouncers are held to the same criminal law as the rest of us, so too would the police officers be in a free-market setting. Removing the protective shield that currently exists (and is so painfully illustrated by this most recent example) in instances of police misconduct and abuse, would also serve as a deterrent to the individual officers from committing such acts in the future.

Traditionally we are told that policing is a good that is so important to society, it is too important to be left in the hands of the free market, and must instead only be provided by the government. In fact, it is often alleged that the very idea of private police is absurd and could never work. The first thing one must understand is that this claim is simply untrue. Private police not only works in theory, it works in practice as well. In 1847 the people of San Francisco found themselves woefully unprotected from the influx of those in search of riches as part of the Gold Rush, and in response established a merchant-based private police force! The San Francisco Special Neighborhood Police was so successful, it still exists today.

One of the oft-lobbied criticisms against competitive, privatized solutions, is that the providers are motivated by greed and self-interest and would fail to adequately provide for the poor. A full refutation of this fallacy is outside of the scope of this article, but I would warn against committing the Nirvana fallacy. It is not my contention that a free market in police would be perfect, merely pointing out the potential flaws is not enough to prove it is inferior than the existing method. The debate is not over how utopia can be achieved, it is over which system is more desirable than the other. The fact that poor neighborhoods have become synonymous with being unsafe should forcibly demonstrate that the current system of policing is woefully inadequate in this regard.

Additionally, the concern over the possibility that a private police force may act in a manner harmful to consumers is only magnified when placed in a monopoly setting devoid of competition! One would think the proponent of government solutions, in response to this perceived weakness of the free market, would recognize the contradiction in calling for a permanent monopoly (still occupied by the same human beings motivated by self-interest) as a solution. In fact, in the history of private police in America we see just this. It is the greed and self-interest of powerful political groups, such as police unions, that is responsible for, and has shaped the current system of police. The notion that our present system of policing services has evolved out of an altruistic motive to provide for the common good should be met with the same degree of skepticism one would treat a used-car salesman who claims his only interest is in providing you with the "right" car.

In a fascinating article published in 1982 by Reason Magazine titled, Cops Inc., we learn that despite a growing and successful movement of small towns outsourcing their police forces to private firms to deal with massive budget deficits, it was the police unions for government employees that demanded an end to the practice. Unfortunately they were successful in creating a prolonged (and expensive) legal battle that eventually eliminate their unwanted competitors. This part bears repeating. When several rural towns in the 1970s began employing private firms to handle their police services, the result was remarkable savings to the town and increased protection. To put in perspective the level of savings, we can look at what happened when the police unions finally forced the private firms out. In 1981, the last year that the town of Oro Valley used a private police force, it cost the town $35,000 for the year. In 1982, the budget increased to $241,000. The private firms received no complaints and in one town, "the burglary rates dropped from 14 a month to 0.7 a month - and stayed at that level."

Yet these efforts at privatization failed, not because they were inadequate, clearly all the data demonstrates they were far superior to the previous government-run police force, but "only because of a legal technicality and the effort by a state agency to gun down a novel concept without serious consideration of how well it worked." [emphasis mine. Self-interest does not disappear when one enters the public sector and it is the strongest argument against government monopolies, not for them!] The move towards a more efficient, effective, and just system of policing was squashed not because it required the imposition of a government monopoly in order to succeed, but instead precisely because government police unions saw their enormously inflated salaries and jobs threatened by a free market that was ready and able to provide the service at a higher quality and a much lower cost.

This issue should not a be a political one. To further highlight the fact that this is not merely a matter of left vs right, or more government vs less, Switzerland (which is not exactly known for its love of free markets!) uses private policing extensively. Swiss Securitas was providing police services for over 30 Swiss villages and townships at the time of the Cops Inc. article's publication, and since then has only grown in both size and scope.

Justice is a human issue and something we all value deeply. We do not have to continue to witness acts of gross injustice go unpunished as the perpetrator remains free to enjoy a lavish salary and pension (at our expense, of course). Desensitizing ourselves to the disturbingly routine incidents of police abuse is no way for a free and just society to function. We have been told that this is the way it must be, that there exists no other alternative. I implore you to study the works referenced within and discover for yourself the validity of that claim. There is an infinitely more just, more efficient, and more humane alternative available to us. We need only to discover, and then, demand it.

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We were not cheated, but we appear to be cheating ourselves.

2012-02-06T19:30:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul performed very poorly in Nevada on Saturday, and consequently an uproar from my fellow Ron Paul supporters has erupted all over the Internet. There are several items that need to be addressed. First of which is that evidence of a poorly run, confusing, and unnecessarily cumbersome caucus system is not the same thing as evidence of voter fraud.

What is even more puzzling, is that nobody seems to be mentioning the fact that Ron Paul outperformed the polling expectations. A LVRJ poll that was released four days prior to the election had Ron Paul at 9% and the highly respected Public Policy Poll had him at 15% the night before the election. The actual election results had Ron Paul come in at winning 19% of the total vote. While this was severely disappointing, it would seem to make the cries of voter fraud difficult to reconcile with his better than expected showing.

Put another way, say Newt Gingrich polled at those numbers leading up to the caucus and then significantly outperformed them. I imagine more people would cry foul at his higher than expected numbers, not that he was robbed of his "true" number of winning the thing outright.

There is tons of evidence of a sloppy and poorly organized Republican Party of Nevada. There is no evidence of voter fraud against Ron Paul.

The people being turned away, the mistakes of people failing to sign in etc. are all symptoms of a horribly inefficient and confusing caucus process. This happened to all people, it did not happen specifically to Ron Paul supporters.

The "special" late-night caucus demonstrated this. Why did we win so overwhelmingly there if we are unfairly being turned away? Did Ron Paul supporters commit voter fraud there to rob Mitt Romney? Of course not, so how can it be that all of Ron Paul's victories are legitimate and his losses illegitimate and indicative of voter fraud?

Is voter fraud possible in such a confusing and messy system? Absolutely. Is there any evidence it took place against Ron Paul? Absolutely not. In fact, I and other Ron Paul supporters were overwhelmingly involved in running things. Because the Nevada Republican Party is so deteriorated, an overwhelming number of site manager and precinct manger positions were left unfilled. As a result, thanks to the fantastic efforts of the Nevada Ron Paul campaign, it was our guys who were running things! Even when I returned the votes from my voting site (which I ran) back to the Republican Party HQ, I found their offices filled with both Ron Paul supporters and official members of the Ron Paul campaign staff. Resorting to cries of voter fraud for our disappointing finish only harms us and the Ron Paul campaign. It shifts our focus away from focusing on why we polled, and then subsequently performed, so poorly in Nevada. That is what we should be focusing on.

We made a concerted effort to win Mormon votes. Exit polling shows us only garnering 5% of Mormon votes. I've worked side by side with members of the Ron Paul campaign and while I was not privy to the higher level discussions and strategy planning, I can tell you those individuals worked too hard to have been aiming for merely 5% of the vote. Did we do something wrong there, either in execution of the strategy, or in choosing that strategy altogether? Could we be doing things differently or better in some respects? Should we be listening to common sense and our volunteers that tell us spam calling our supporters the night before is causing them to not caucus for us? If we are serious about winning, these should be the questions we should be asking. Our focus should be directed towards areas of our campaign strategy that need to be tweaked and/or improved.

I feel like I've entered The Twilight Zone when a group of liberty-minded, Austrian Economics oriented, supporters act like it is unacceptable to suggest there are areas of the Ron Paul campaign that are less than optimal. I thought this blindly following the leader thing was precisely what we revile in government and the drones whom uncritically accept their propaganda? Blindly following a losing strategy is not doing Ron Paul or the campaign any favors.

Ron Paul's strengths on housing and the economy were not emphasized heavily enough here. Half of Mitt Romney voters desperately want someone else to vote for. Numerous times I experienced genuine surprise and interest when I informed these Romney "supporters" of Ron Paul's strengths in this area. The phone banking program needs serious revisions. The strategy of spam-calling supporters the night before is deeply flawed. There are several efficiency issues outside of that specific program that can be improved as well.

I understand where everyone is coming from. We were definitely robbed in 2008 here in Nevada. And quite frankly, if we were in a position to win, I wouldn't doubt they would try and cheat us again. However, priority number one should be getting us in that position to actually win! We failed to do that in Nevada and that has nothing to do with voter fraud. The more time and energy that is spent chasing this ghost is less time spent focusing on what we need to do to give us the best shot of winning.

Nevada was winnable. We failed to do so, and unfortunately it has nothing to do with voter fraud. We all have poured so much of our time and energy into this campaign. We owe it to ourselves to honestly and critically evaluate our strategy so that we can produce the highest quality campaign (including grassroots) effort possible.

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My reaction to the LA Times story on Ron Paul that I was interviewed for.

2012-02-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

If you have not, please read the article first.

The story itself is not all that bad. Compared to the normal treatment of Ron Paul, it’s totally fine and is in no way out of the ordinary.

Yet knowing first hand the material she had, and what she chose to include and lead with, and what she chose to omit, is revealing.

We spent over an hour talking, during which she took pages of notes. She heard a story of a well-spoken, self-educated and compassionate person who believes in the message of freedom and the peace and prosperity it would bring. She heard that despite my never attending college or ever taking a single class of any kind in economics, exposure to Ron Paul’s message motivated me to become a student on my own volition. Devouring thousands of pages of articles and dozens of books on topics from political theory, economics, economic history, monetary history, libertarian philosophy, and the history of law, I became competent enough to place 1st in economic essay contests hosted by esteemed Professors at one of the nation’s premier economic universities, as well as engage in debate with established legal scholars and academic economists.

She heard a story of a young, single man in Las Vegas, who made a living in professional poker and spent his free time doing the above. That is interesting. It is atypical. In a climate where Ron Paul supporters are unfairly and inaccurately characterized as being on the fringe or young people who favor legalized marijuana, my story is a concrete example of something previously unreported. Still unreported. Still yet to be acknowledged.

I spoke of my friends from 40 year old lawyers and hedge fund managers, to college students and peers closer to my own age. All of whom have been profoundly effected by the message of liberty and began spreading that message to their friends and families as well.

I spoke of Ron Paul supporters, in general. The enormous feat of the organizational power that has spontaneously grown from Ron Paul’s grassroots support. How such grassroots support is quite literally more organized, more efficient, and better funded than most non-Presidential political campaigns! I spoke of the compassion, and passion, these individuals have that brings us together as a community.

I spoke of the reason why I believe in liberty. Why I fight for it. Why we fight for it. Fundamentally, my desire for liberty springs from compassion for my fellow man and the urge to see oppression everywhere and anywhere brought to an end. My frustration that those who suffer most under a system of big government, with its relentless inflation and regulation, are those who work hard and follow the script that they were given. The average middle class worker, who doesn’t have the time or effort to learn how rigged the game is against him, and potentially protect himself against it. It is these people, good people, honest, hard-working people, who have spent their whole lives playing by the rules, only to be penalized for it in the end.

I could go on. And I did. For over an hour. But somehow this story, which has never been given a voice in the media’s discussion of “Ron Paul supporters” was omitted from Maria’s final draft. This is not about whether or not my views are correct or if you agree with them. It is about acknowledging whom Ron Paul’s supporters actually are. And in this case, if nothing else, doing so would have been newsworthy. Simply because my type of story has never been reported on in the discussion of Ron Paul and his support base. And in my experience, my type of story is much more emblematic of the average Ron Paul supporter than that which is almost exclusively focused on and represented instead – a small minority that can be portrayed as fringe or extreme.

Maria unfortunately chose to continue this narrative in her piece, as well. Deciding to open with a few paragraphs focusing on the brothel workers’ support for Dr. Paul and a few particularly dramatic quotes from fellow supporter Dr. Carducci such as “"I'd give my left arm for the guy.", and, "It's either him or a further decline into tyranny." My segment was reduced to, “being exposed to Ron Paul has changed my life.” Which is quite true. I hope one day we are able to read a story that takes a deeper look as to who we are and why we are so passionate, as opposed to merely recording the extreme nature of the passion we have for Ron Paul and his message of freedom.

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On monopolies and getting your fair share

2012-01-26T11:58:00.000-08:00

In early September of last year, I declared that the UFC is officially a monopoly. I was referencing the fact that they had just purchased their biggest competitor, and consequently, no serious rival company remained to challenge their dominance as the premier mixed martial arts (MMA) organization on the planet. I then listed the myriad of benefits that the UFC conferred to all parties involved (itself, the fighters, the consumer, the economy as a whole) and noted sarcastically at the end that, "all we need now is for the US anti-trust department to come in and break this consumer-hating monopoly up!" It now appears that may happen as the FTC is currently investigating the UFC for potentially being a monopoly.

The FTC investigation has sparked significant media attention on this matter and rekindled the monopoly debate. The most notable of which was an ESPN segment that featured an extensive (and heavily edited) interview with UFC owner, Lorenzo Fertitta. More recently, Gregg Doyel of CBS Sports weighed in. In response to the heavily critical ESPN piece, UFC President Dana White released the unedited interview footage. The full interview reveals many things I have touched on earlier regarding the increase in fighter pay, opportunity, economic benefits, and so forth that the UFC has created. While I will touch on those things again, my main focus will be on the oft repeated theme of a fair share.

In all the discussions on the UFC being a harmful monopoly, there is little contention that they have done much to improve the lot of their fighters. The perceived problem, instead, is that the entry level fighters do not receive their "fair share". The ESPN segment notes that the lowest paid UFC fighter receives only a base $6k to show and another $6k if he wins. (The UFC also awards three separate bonuses worth $75k each for fight of the night, submission of the night, and KO of the night.) While this is significantly higher than at any other point in history, not to mention the additional health insurance coverage and opportunities that the UFC provides, the focus is not on what has been created, but instead on what percentage of the UFC's total profit the fighter should be entitled to. What percentage is fair?

The question itself should indicate the problem here. Life is not fair. Government's role (at least as outlined by The Constitution of the United States of America) is not to make life fair. It is to protect the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of all. Equally, if you will. Fairly, if you must. All are entitled to an equal and fair treatment under the law. Period. There is no asterisk denoting that the government is also a fairy god mother capable of re-shaping the harsh realities of the world into a more fair and palatable one.

As a libertarian and student of Austrian Economics, it is easy to slip into a delineation of all the economic and material benefits gained from an adherence to protecting individual liberty and a free market economy. The fact that under laissez-faire capitalism, the only way one can achieve wealth is by making those around him richer! Yet, this strikes me as an error. To do so tacitly implies the fundamental critique is valid. It is almost irresistibly compelling to direct the critic's attention towards all the wealth and prosperity the UFC has created. Surely if they are made to see just how much the UFC creates, (the very possibility to be a professional mixed martial artist) they would realize the errors of their ways. While such an argument can and should be made, I must insist on focusing on the fundamentally invalid premise that government force should be used to make life more fair.

Such a notion is much better suited for fairy tales and children's books, not the real world. The system of socialism, in which government is used to redistribute property in a supposedly equal or fair manner, is unworkable. It has been irrefutably proven so in theory, and tragically, empirically as well.

As Hoppe eloquently points out, for a law to be just it must equally and universally apply to everyone. There is nothing just or fair about denying the rights of individuals whom have been fortunate enough to achieve success in a free market system. To neglect this important tenet, is to commit serious intellectual error and embark on a fundamentally totalitarian mindset. While the would be reformer would certainly object to such a characteristic, I urge him to consider the phrase, "fair to whom?" What is it, if not tyranny, to suggest one becomes less human and less worthy of protection of his liberty, simply because he has wealth greater than some arbitrary limit?

If we are to create a truly just society, we must not allow envy to distract us from the most vital element required; the protection of private property rights. The denial of which, in any capacity, is an assault on the very nature of what it means to be human. To use the most fundamentally unfair mechanism ever designed by man - government force - in an attempt to make society more fair, is fatally flawed from its conception. Immoral and unjust means are incapable of producing a more just society. The UFC created a product and an industry that has increased the lot of millions of people across the globe. A career exists where there was none before. Every individual who chooses to undergo the career path of being a UFC fighter, does so because it is better to him than any other alternative. The tens of thousands of current or prospective UFC fighters are a tangible example of the increase in the quality of life and available opportunities that the UFC has created. Let us not punish such a feat! Let us certainly not pretend there is anything moral or just about using the inherently unfair method of government force to do so.

For earlier Grumblings on monopolies see here, here, and here.

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On SOPA and the role of government in society

2012-01-18T18:11:00.000-08:00

To all who oppose SOPA, consider:

"The House and Senate bills are backed by the movie and music industries as a means to crack down on the sale of counterfeit goods by non-U.S. websites"

The narrative in defense of government goes something like this, "without government big business motivated purely by greed would harm consumers."

While I readily concede corporations are motivated by greed and self-interest (as opposed to the angels criticizing the free market whom, of course, are not) the astute observer notices that the introduction of government does not prevent this condition.

In fact, all of modern history is replete with examples like the quote above. Corporations are able to generate significantly more influence over the people via government, than they would without it. This is why you never see big corporations lobbying for a free-market system, which if the generally accepted narrative were correct, one would expect them to do just that.

The profit and power that can be obtained by co-opting government is infinitely greater than trying to figure out a way to come up with something better than the Iphone, for instance!

This article contains the opening quote above, but has nothing else to do with my point: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-18/u-s-lawmakers-abandon-anti-piracy-bills-as-google-protests.html

Glenn Greenwald represents the very best of what journalism ought to be

2011-12-31T12:07:00.000-08:00

In this fantastic piece, Greenwald analyzes the rift between Ron Paul and Progressives. While he explicitly does not endorse Ron Paul, his honesty and clarity are much appreciated talents; especially now when they are becoming increasingly scarce.

Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing here: http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/progressives_and_the_ron_paul_fallacies/singleton/

Is Ron Paul the most pro-minority politician alive today?

2011-12-28T21:52:00.000-08:00

The facts and his voting record sure seem to indicate so...

Or put another way, what is more important to you: An out of context sentence from a 30 year-old newsletter, or the ending of a racist program that disproportionally sends black males to prison for non-violent crimes?

Update: Stefan Molyneux passionately makes the case that Ron Paul is the most anti-racist politician in America today.

Actions are more important than words.

2011-12-25T12:53:00.000-08:00

Reason.com continues to relentlessly produce new articles and blog posts on the Ron Paul newsletter, the latest of which is both factually inaccurate on numerous accounts as well as openly biased. I would posit that no other news organization has birthed more separate reports on this topic, with little to no substantive new material to report on, than has Reason.

The last blog post seems to suggest why; their goal is not merely to highlight the newsletters, it is to tarnish The Mises Institute. I will address this shortly. First, I must address some horrifically stupid statements from a brilliant man and someone I consider one of the best advocates of liberty alive today, Steve Horwitz. Reason's Dalmia quotes him here:

Even in 2008, he refused to return a campaign contribution of $500 from the white supremacist group Stormfront. You can still go to their site and see their love for Ron Paul in this campaign and you can find a picture of Ron with the owner of Stormfront’s website. Even if Ron had never intentionally courted them, isn’t it a huge problem that they think he is a good candidate? Doesn’t that say something really bad about the way Ron Paul is communicating his message?

No and no. Ron Paul has raised tens of millions of dollars from individual donors over the course of his multiple presidential campaigns. Liberty is a system that will benefit all people. This is something I do not think Dalmia or Professor Horwitz would contend. To suggest that because out of the millions of dollars raised, a few hundred came from despicable persons, has any meaning at all, is an enormous lapse in logic, at best, and deliberately malicious, at worse.

If you are using the fact that a handful of people, out of the millions, who support him, is evidence of the "really bad" way in which Ron Paul is communicating his message, it portrays a failure to grasp basic mathematics and statistics, not some novel insight that the messenger is tainted.

Steve breaks my heart when he writes, as Dalmia quoted him, here:

Paul also maintained his connection with the Mises Institute, which has itself had numerous connections with all kinds of unsavory folks: more racists, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, the whole nine yards.

He added that it was ably documented, but did not supply us with even one specific example of this documentation, preferring instead to link to a site that does that for us. There is no question Steve has a much better knowledge of the history of these people and institutions than I do. I did not come to The Mises Institute until late 2008, and yes it was as a result of my exposure to Ron Paul, from earlier of that same year. Yet, it would appear Steve's superior knowledge of the past is serving as a hindrance, to seeing what is.

The implication that the Mises Institute is racist or anti-Semitic etc. is absurd on its face. Mises was Jewish. So there's that...

But more importantly than defending the Institute is pointing out the tragic flaw Steve and Dalmia continue to make. And ironically, it is a flaw that goes against all that libertarianism represents. It is precisely what The Mises Institute, in their superior stewardship of the principles of liberty, first brought to my attention - the evils of collectivist thought.

I have visited Mises.org virtually everyday for the past four years. I have attended their conferences, followed the personal blogs of the most featured writers there, had direct correspondence with some, and even met some scholars and former students in person. I have poured through their archives amassing a personal library that serves as a physical manifestation of their online bookstore, yet not once was I ever exposed to the type of racist thought that they are implicated to be sympathetic towards by Steve's comments above. Not once.

You discredit yourself when you judge the character of others based on their readership. If Reason were to be judged based on the type of people it attracts in their comments section one could quite reasonably conclude the very worst of them. Yet, that would be absurd. Reason can not be held accountable for the vile that spills forth daily in the comments section of their site, anymore can The Mises Institute henceforth be labeled as X, merely because unsavory types have found their teachings beneficial.

I have no doubt that Steve is correct about the past. Yet, if the people and message of that time are no longer a part of The Mises Institute, it is a grave error to forever label the institution and those very good and decent people working there, as co-conspirators and guilty by association. This is made most clear by my own personal experience with The Mises Institute. If someone who follows them intimately every day for four years has not seen a whisper of that which they stand accused of being guilty by association, it is because it does not exist. To instead ignore the reality of what is, preferring to remain forever trapped in the past of what was, is the only way one can sensibly maintain such characterizations. What is denying that which is in front of you in favor of that which once was, if not a form of madness?

Dalmia's slime continues as they write, "cheering him on as he walks off TV interviews and so on." This is a lie. The quote implies Ron Paul regularly walks off "interviews" (plural) when being asked to address this question. That is a blatant lie. It is such a blatant lie that when Ron Paul did walk off, it made headlines, precisely because it was so shocking and had never happened before! Well it turns out it still has never happened. That famous CNN clip of him walking out, turned out to be nothing more than a masterful, deliberately misleading editing job by CNN's video team.

Finally, let us pause and appreciate the hypocrisy of all of this. Ron Paul has done more for libertarianism and thus the potential the benefits such a system will bring to all people, than any of the other parties involved. Not surprisingly his support is the most diverse and widespread of any political candidate. While other candidates have perfected the art of polite speech, while condoning the most anti-human and racist institutions imaginable, (the war on terror, war on drugs, prison system, and the patriot act, just to name a few!) Dr. Ron Paul will actually work to end these programs and the injustice that they represent and inflict on a daily, recurring basis. Truly, there has never been a greater advocate for a moral and just society in my lifetime.

Yet, the response to this from those professing to be advocates of libertarianism is to drag down this champion of liberty and shout to his millions of followers that what we see in front of us is a mirage, and the truth can be found not here and now, but in the past plans of men from a different time. The past is important and has its place. Ron Paul has addressed this issue, apologized for it, disavowed them, and even remarked that he is not perfect and this example represents that.

But to continue to ignore that which exists today, to ignore that which will be done, in favor of that which was merely said, is nothing short of madness. Tragically, it is this delirium that will be far more destructive to the cause of liberty than any unearthed newsletter.

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Some useful links to deal with the coming smear campaign against Ron Paul

2011-12-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul discusses his policy views that do more for minorities than any other candidate running.

Ron Paul directly responds to the charges live on CNN in 2008.

Andrew Sullivan notes how desperate and absurd the search for dirt on Ron Paul is, when compared to the open bigotry that many of his running mates celebrate.

President of NAACP defends Paul from the ridiculous accusations states, "Ron Paul is not a racist.

A fantastic write up in the IB times collecting much of the above information and actually examing Ron Paul's actions over his career and not merely focusing on one sentence taken out of context written 30 years ago by someone else!

In-depth piece with original newsletters and full context

Tom Woods provides us with a much needed elucidation of why this is a non-issue.

22 Reasons Ron Paul is Not a Racist: A great compilation of his voting record and actions on behalf of minorities. Once one reviews the facts and looks at what Ron Paul has actually done, it is reasonable to conclude he may be the most pro-minorities Republican politician alive today.

Stefan Molyneux chimes in!

Please let me know if you have any good resources to add to the above list. After Ron Paul wins Iowa the avalanche of smear attacks is going to be massive!

And to add my own two cents, why is it that the only ones who lobby this racist charge are rich white people? Do they feel that those whom Ron Paul is allegedly racist against are incapable of realizing it? How horribly racist of them!

I mean the guy has been in public office for over 30 years and has run for President of the United States three times! He has appeared countless times on television already. He's known for specifically always speaking his mind and failing to give the rehearsed, scripted answers that is the hallmark of typical politicians. It's not exactly hard to find out where this guy stands.

Perhaps the elitist white people who feel compelled to define a man by the writings of someone else, written decades ago, as having more significance than the actions and character he has exhibited over his lifetime, should shut their mouths and stick to reporting the facts. The people can decide for themselves.

Update:

I have to quote from E.D. Kain here, because it's that good:

This is silly. I care more about actions than whatever Ron Paul’s newsletter once published ages ago. Has Paul espoused any of those views himself? Not that I can tell. Do his preferred policies lead as much killing as the preferred policies of Obama or Romney or any of the other candidates currently swarming about? No, they don’t. Do you think the children we blow to shreds with our aerial drones care if Ron Paul’s associates published a racist newsletter in the 90′s or do you think they care more about being blown to shreds?

Paul obviously should not have allowed things like that to be published under his name and I completely and utterly condemn that newsletter and those behind it. It’s just not as big a deal to me as the aforementioned wars and assassinations under this president.

What’s more important to your idealism – words or bombs? What is more liberal? What is more progressive?

I see it as a matter of life and death. I know you see it as a matter of Your Team vs. The Others. But that’s just not enough for me.

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We made the Sunday edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal!

2011-12-18T10:19:00.001-08:00

A truly fantastic piece on our Ron Paul billboard project and Ron Paul generally. Check it out here!

Someone in the comments section wrote the following:

"Doesn't anyone worry about those like Fellner who "voted for Obama in 2008 and was a Democrat until he switched to the GOP so he could back Paul." Could this fervor be a ruse to dilute the GOP vote or even split the party by running third party? How does one go all the way from Democrat to Libertarian in three years."

I posted the following reply there, but the formatting in the comments section is not great and it bears repeating. My answer:

Education, commitment, and passion to the philosophy of liberty.

Four years ago I was 23. The average 23 year old, hell the average person, does not come to their political views by value-free analysis and education. They tend to just adopt the views of those around them (family, friends etc) without really analyzing why.

When I was exposed to Ron Paul around the age of 23 I began to analyze and think deeply about politics and political theory in general. I no longer simply adopted the views told to me by my teachers, friends, news media, etc.

I researched and studied the philosophy of liberty as well as economics. Once you undergo this process, liberty grabs a hold of you. You realize that you have been lied to. You realize the answers are there if people could just become awakened to grasp them. A fervent passion develops.I have no idea what you are talking about by being a "ruse to split the vote or the gop" and so on. I am voting for liberty.

If my transformation in 4 years is hard to believe, your head would probably explode if I introduced you to PhD educated, wealthy, middle-aged businessmen who 18 months ago were socialist-progressive and after daily emails from yours truly, are all libertarian Ron Paul supporters.

You may think 3-4 years is too short to change your mind; I think 3-4 days is far too long to remain trapped in a false ideology once you have been exposed to sound economics and the philosophy of liberty!

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Ron Paul Billboard is Up!

2011-12-13T10:44:00.000-08:00

I want you guys to know how much I appreciate your donations and the trust placed in me that came with them. I have retrieved data from an independent marketing company who assesses the value of outdoor advertising space. The data provided for this billboard is that it is seen by over 125,000 people a week! That means there will be over 1 million views of this over the duration of our buy. I hope you consider that to be a great value for the money we spent. But wait, there's more!

The whole goal of getting a billboard is to generate publicity and awareness for Ron Paul, right? So how awesome would it be to get a news story about the billboard?! Well, after some more hard work by yours truly, we can expect just that! I will update this page when the stories are published online.

Thanks again to all those who donated!

Feature in Vegas Seven Magazine about this project is now online! Check it out here!

A follow up on the Quail Hollow Farm fiasco - published in the Nevada Journal!

2011-12-07T11:51:00.001-08:00

I wrote about this incident last month right here on Grim's Grumblings in a blog post titled, "A shocking example of government run amok, is it time to re-think the role of government?"

I did a follow-up report that revealed the whole "I have no choice - my hands are tied" excuse given by the health inspector's supervisor was basically total BS. It was just published by the Nevada Journal! Check it out here: http://nevadajournal.com/2011/12/07/total-lack-common-sense-health-district/

Latest poll highlights Ron Paul's significant advantages over the rest of the field.

2011-12-05T22:48:00.000-08:00

The headline reads, "Gingrich emerges as clear front-runner in Iowa", but within the story are some very revealing pieces of data.

First we see:

of six attributes tested in the poll, the only one where Gingrich is not first or in contention for first is on being the most honest and trustworthy. On this score, it’s Paul with 23 percent and Bachmann with 17 percent, followed by Gingrich with 13 and Romney with 12, among likely caucus-goers.

Naturally, it is impossible for the inherently biased mainstream media to appropriately lead into these results with something like "On this score, Paul is in a strong first place with 23 percent", but nonetheless the numbers speak quite loudly for themselves.

And while it is disheartening that the man overwhelmingly considered to be the most honest and trustworthy is not also the top choice for President, a strong 2nd at 18% is an extremely solid showing. I would expect Paul's supporters would be even more energized by such a strong placing. This is sure to serve as even more motivation and I expect their final push towards the finish line in Iowa will result in a campaign presence substantially greater than anything the other campaigns are able to produce.

The following is even more encouraging in my view:

With 33 percent support among likely caucus-goers in the new poll, Gingrich runs well ahead of his two main rivals, Romney and Paul, a libertarian whose passionate following and anti-government rhetoric have made him a durable force in the race. Both are at 18 percent.
But Iowa Republicans are far from decided. More than six in 10 potential caucus-goers say they could change their minds, and even among the likeliest attendees, fewer than half say they have definitely chosen a candidate.
Of the top three, Paul’s supporters are the most solid, followed by Gingrich’s and Romney’s.

This poll clearly shows that Ron Paul's support has been steadily growing (while his rivals have all risen quickly, only to then later flame out) and that support is by far the most solid and unlikely to change their minds. This is extremely encouraging news. As the official Ron Paul campaign ramps up their efforts in Iowa and NH buoyed by the efforts of grassroot projects like The Ron Paul Brochure mass mailing, the prospect of a Ron Paul victory in Iowa is becoming a very real possibility.

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Newt Gingrich epitomizes all that is wrong with America today.

2011-12-04T18:11:00.001-08:00

More accurately, the American people's reaction (or lack thereof) to Newt Gingrich's foreign policy views is the epitome of where this country is today. And that is significantly closer to Nazi Germany than the beacon of freedom and liberty America used to represent so many years ago.

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What the TSA really symbolizes

2011-12-03T16:06:00.001-08:00

Is the total lack of power the people have over "their" government. I came across another TSA horror story just now. This time they force an 85 year old woman in a wheel-chair to be strip searched etc. As disgusting as this is for me to say, there have been so many cases of similar stories like these right now, I won't bother you with the details. The point I want to make is how virtually unanimous the response from the people has been.

I pay very close attention to the pulse of the people. Tracking comments on various article from different types of news sites, is a fantastic way to do this. So for instance you want to read the comments of sites like foxnews.com as much as you do Paul Krugman's blog, MSNBC, etc. What I find truly fascinating is that there has been a steady and growing movement amongst the public as a whole, that is totally outraged and appalled at the existence of the TSA.

More and more, it is not merely "that agent should be fired", instead as the futility of seeing case after case of abuse go on unpunished, the calls now are for "The TSA should be sued" "The TSA should be abolished" "The TSA is scum". Now all of those things are completely true. But being true, doesn't necessarily make people believe those things. So, it is facinating and excirting to see the overwhelming majority of the American people begin to unite in their rightful disgust and call for their termination and subsequent arrest of the TSA and the criminals who work there.

Now to the point of this blog post. Look how free and "representative" this God That Failed you of Democracy is. The intrusive measures to which we are now all standing united in opposition against, not to mention the TSA itself, were all appointed and crafted by bureaucrats. In this supposed system of "voting makes things right", I don't remember being given a vote on this? How about the policy maker that is the head of the TSA, John Pistole. How many votes did he win by? Oh, that's right, he is an appointed official whom you have no power to remove, vote on, or do any of the illusory activities that those who support Democracy believe give you power.

How about the politicians themselves, let's just vote them out and replace them with anti-TSA ones! Well, an overwhelming majority of the populace seems to be against the TSA (as they have been against the Drug War for 25 years now) how is that working out for us? When you go into the voting booth are you presented with the question "Abolish TSA - Yes or No?" I'm sure not! Anyways, I could go on ranting like this for days. The only point I want to make is to emphasize just how weak the system of Democracy leaves those whom are ruled over, despite all the claims to the contrary. That even when unelected bureaucrats literally declare sexual assault is legal for them and only them, and even after the majority of the people wake up to what total bullshit that is, here we stand. The TSA grows stronger by the day, repeated cases of abuse are whisked away by decrees from the unelected commissars as "having followed proper TSA procedure". If Democracy is a system that is a reflection of the will of the people, how does one reconcile the foreign hand grabbing your genitals that seems to say quite the opposite?

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Safety Vs Liberty

2011-12-03T12:00:00.001-08:00

We are witnessing a dramatic decline as America plunges from a once greatly respected and proudly free country, into something far, far worse. The justification most often given for each removal of liberty is the concept of safety. It must be stressed that absolute safety is a nonsensical and self-refuting concept when applied to a world of human action. Additionally, the ultimate end of any just political philosophy must be liberty. There is no life without liberty in the eyes of the libertarian. It is this concept I try to explain in the video below!

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Help buy a billboard for Ron Paul in Las Vegas!

2011-11-30T21:43:00.001-08:00

12/4/11: Success!! We have reached our goal! Thank you all who have donated!!

12/13/11: Updated information on this project can be found here: http://robertfellner.blogspot.com/2011/12/ron-paul-billboard-is-up.html

This billboard:

Is going here:

Get ready to see this billboard on Main Street Las Vegas for 2 months!

I live in downtown Las Vegas and this is the Charleston Blvd and Main Street intersection here in Las Vegas. I drive past it very often and can personally attest that it receives a tremendous amount of traffic. Moreover this particular billboard is illuminated at night and is by far the most visible in the area. You can clearly see it from multiple angles of the intersection.

The billboard reads "The only candidate who predicted the economic crisis is the only one who can fix it." It can be seen more clearly here: http://www.revolutionpac.com/actions/. I am working with The Revolution Pac to tweak it so that it reflects the appropriate information for the Nevada Caucus date of Feb 4th.

I think this is a good idea for a few reasons. Obviously more exposure and advertising for Ron Paul is always a great thing. I particularly think focusing on his successful prediction of the housing crisis, his deep understanding of it, and consequently his ability to fix it, is very important in Las Vegas. As everyone knows, Las Vegas was hit harder than any other city in the country by the housing collapse. Our economy is in terrible shape. Voters here are naturally going to care about these issues significantly more-so than normal and as such it seems a perfect fit to highlight Ron Paul's unique skills and advantages to them in this area.

Ok so now down to brass tax. Ideally I would like to have this billboard up starting Dec. 12th until Feb. 6 (caucus is on Feb 4). The cost to rent the billboard is $1440 per 4 week period. Thus this would cost $2880. However there is also a $600 production cost plus tax ($48.60) which results in a total cost of $3530. I will donate $1030 myself and am seeking the additional $2500 from my fellow Ron Paul supporters to make this happen. Obviously more money would be great and could mean more billboard locations. In the unfortunate event I fail to raise the additional $2500, I will hopefully be able to at least raise $1k so that I can get the billboard for the 4 weeks right before the caucus.

In the event I raise more money than needed to cover the costs, but less than required to buy additional billboards, (so say we raise $2600, surplus would be $100) all those proceeds would be donated to the Revolution Pac. More info on them can be found at www.revolutionpac.com.

I am working with members of The Revolution Pac on this project, but I am not directly related or affiliated with them. Any questions, please don't hesitate to email me at robfellner@gmail.com. Please spread the word and/or donate today! Obviously there is only a small window of time to complete this in, so time is of the essence! Thank you.

WE did it!!

Update (12/4/11) - We have moved the target date up to Monday 12/5/11! We currently need to raise $2100 $1230 more. Please share this and donate as much as you can so we don't lose out on this amazing opportunity! Again, if we don't raise the money soon enough, we will lose out on this amazing location for the Ron Paul billboard.

If you do not want your name displayed, please indicate that in the comments section of the donation form!

Supporters:
Jon-Paul Francini - Ramsey, NJ
MME Holdings Ltd. - Henderson, NV
Black and Blue LLC - Glenville, NY (3X!)
Elaine Smith - Prairie City, OR
Vincent Palmeri - Las Vegas, NV
Linda Vulovic - Belle Mead, NJ
Veloflyte Inc - San Jose, CA
Hak Soo Kim - San Jose, CA
Jim Lodwick - Austin, TX
The VegasPatriot - Las Vegas, NV
Charles Crenshaw - Evansville, IN
Alice Hewey - Hannawa Falls, NY
Karl Mascak - Seville, OH
William Arluck - Bayside, NY
Harris Kirk - Richmond, VA
Valdez Heli-Camps - Valdez, AK
Ryan Treat - Grovetown, GA
Michael Bober - Leominster, MA
Mike Descarfino - Brooklyn, NY
Justin Kerenyi - Atlanta, GA
Jeffrey Wyatt - Las Vegas, NV
Sylvain Anichini - Andover, NJ
Matthew Ciofani - Charleston, SC
Nick McKeldin - Las Vegas, NV
Ashley Pouryamini - Fullerton, CA
And several more donors who wished to remain anonymous! If you would like me to remove your name from the above list now that we have reached our goal, please email me at robfellner@gmail.com!

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Focusing merely on the symptom as opposed to the underlying cause.

2011-11-23T17:54:00.001-08:00

I tend to get sucked into debates on specific examples of government failure that have false assumptions about the larger issues at play. That’s a problem I need to work on. If the framework through which we are viewing an event is fundamentally misguided, it follows whatever we discover will necessarily be deficient. One example of this concept is when discussing any of the various manifestations of the government "keeping us safe". This could be the Drug War, War on Terror, TSA, DHS, FDA, and so forth. It is very easy to get drawn into a debate on the specifics of whatever anecdote that prompted the conversation to begin with, when the problem is of a much more broad and fundamental nature.

One of the really giant flaws of the government provision of safety, is that there is no ability to accurately measure tradeoffs, and thus make efficient or rational decisions. As I’ve tried to stress earlier, there is no such thing as being safe. There are obviously varying degrees of relative safety, but the ultimate goal of being perfectly safe is, by the very nature of human action, impossible to achieve. Allocating resources in an efficient matter may be one of the most critical elements necessary in order to achieve prosperity. However when you provide the government with a task that is literally impossible to achieve and thus will never be reached, the failure to allocate resources efficiently which is endemic to the nature of bureaucracy, is magnified exponentially.

Anyway, this example is about a 88 year old business man being shut down by the feds because he sells a product that can be used in the process of manufacturing an illegal drug. The rationale behind the Drug War is quite simple: Drugs are bad, let’s eliminate them and keep people safe. Well in addition to utterly failing at the goal of eliminating them, all the government provision of “safety” in this area does is make people less safe via criminalization, while also imposing enormous costs on society that are mostly unintended. There is no ability to calculate whether or not this trade off is worth it, as the government funds this (and all of its) operation through coercive means.

And that is of much greater significance than whatever most recent example of government failure it is we are discussing at the moment. There are those who believe these failures are an exception to the rule, and if the system could be tweaked a bit, different people voted in and so forth, these aberrations of an otherwise noble effort to rid the world of drugs would vanish and the system can finally get on working as intended. When in reality, the imposition of costs on innocents, the waste of resources, and the logically unavoidable failure to achieve the objective assigned to the bureaucracy are endemic features of a bureaucratic operation - not outliers.

The Drug War is perhaps the most effective example one can use to demonstrate these concepts. This is something where even when 75% of the population feels it is a failure, as does several top members of the FBI, DEA, and even former “Drug Czars”, still the nature of the bureaucratic agency is such that it only grows larger in conjunction with each successive degree of failure. Forced to face these realities while simultaneously trying to remain blind to the plight of millions of fellow citizens rotting in prisons for a victimless crime, the illusion of political representation or the idea that voting can in anyway effect, impede, or reform what perceive to be undesirable government agencies, is shattered with stunning clarity.

By no means is this limited to the Drug War. Virtually the identical analysis can be applied in all instances of government efforts to keep us safe. Here is an example of the FDA debating mandatory salt reductions in food, where the unintended negative costs extend beyond the obvious loss of property rights to the parties involved. The TSA, Department of Homeland Security, and War on Terror more broadly, is a textbook example of the failure for bureaucracies to conduct cost-benefit analysis and obviously the costs here are astronomical, both in the immediate sense and the long term. The costs from circumventing the rule of law itself are incalculable, but further demonstrate the atrocity created when government is tasked with providing safety to its people. In fact, John Mueller, the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University just co-authored a book on this very topic titled, "Terror,Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs ofHomeland Security". Reason wrote up a brief blog post on this work titled, "Why We Should Fear Bathtubs More than Terrorists" that includes a must watch video-interview with the authors.

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Ron Paul Supervoter Bomb!

2011-11-21T18:02:00.001-08:00

In what I feel is one of the most effective efforts to support Ron Paul out there right now, The Revolution Pac has launced their Supervoter Bomb! This is an effort in which they are directly targeting "supervoters" - Registered Republicans who have voted in both the 2008 and 2010 elections - in the key primary states of NH and Iowa, by mailing them information on Ron Paul, a DVD copy of the Ron Paul "For Liberty" movie, and a handcrafted letter by the great Dr. Thomas E. Woods. The election in these states will be decided by a matter of 10 or 20k votes, possibly much less, this could be what makes the difference.

Recent polls have indicated Ron Paul is in a statistical tie for 1st place, those same polls indicate more than 10% of voters are still undecided, and 60% of voters are open to changing their mind. This is how we win! Donate today!

A shocking example of government run amok, is it time to re-think the role of government?

2011-11-11T17:07:00.001-08:00

There is a story making the rounds of the Nevada news this past week, with the Las Vegas Weekly asking, "Did the Health District go too far to regulate a farm-to-table event?" The author seems to reach the conclusion by the end of the article that, yes, they did. The I-Team on 8newsnow.com did an investigation on this story as well that can be found here. There is a 4 minute video that accompanies the article that I highly recommend watching as well. Quoting from the Las Vegas Weekly piece here is a brief summary of what transpired:

Quail Hollow Farm in Overton had—or tried to have, anyway—a “farm-to-table” dinner last month. This is when a chef takes vegetables and freshly butchered meats and serves them up right there at the farm to fancy food types—“locavores”—who like their food really fresh. Sounds pretty great, right?
Well, someone at the Southern Nevada Health District saw an ad for the event and decided to get on the case.

The health department called farm owners Laura and Monte Bledsoe and said they’d need a special-use permit because it was a “public” event. They complied, or tried to at least.
The night of the event, the guests arrived at the farm, and so did the food inspector. Here were the issues, according to Laura Bledsoe: Some prepared food packages had no labels; some of the meat was not USDA certified; some food was prepared in advance off-site and not up to proper temperature; vegetables were declared unfit; and there were no receipts for food.

...

In the end, the health inspector demanded that bleach be poured on the food, including vegetables, to ensure it was not consumed.

The aforementioned articles do a great job of summarizing the events as they transpired. The I-Team investigation even gets the Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD) supervisor to confess that she does not agree with all the laws, but must enforce them anyway. What none of these articles seem to address, however, is the underlying premise that allows for these types of incidents to occur. That premise is the idea that it is the government's job to keep us safe.

There is quite a bit wrong with such an idea. The very first thing one must point out is that the idea of total safety is an impossible goal. We can do things to increase our relative safety but for something to be perfectly safe, is impossible. The very nature of human action and the fact that the future is uncertain precludes such a state of affairs from being reached. Now I am sure that most people are aware of this concept. The reason I wanted to reiterate it, is that if we task the government to achieve a goal which can never be reached, there are no limits to the actions it can take, as long as it justifies them as being made in the interest of attempting to achieve this unachievable goal - in this case, public safety.

This is a problem. America has a very proud heritage of the principles of individual liberty and freedom. Another concept that goes hand and hand with these principles is the idea of personal responsibility. It is worth pointing out, this is very much the tradeoff one makes when adulthood is reached. In exchange for the freedom acquired of being an adult, the immunity from taking responsibility for your actions as a child fades away. You are now free to do as you please, but with that freedom comes ownership and responsibility for oneself and the choices you make.

These are desirable traits of being an adult, as well as the hallmarks of a free society. Historically in America, the role of government has been to protect the rights of individuals so that a free society could flourish. Over the past few generations that simple yet crucial role has been diminished in importance, however, and replaced with another objective instead - safety. One needs only attempt to step on an airplane, turn on the tap water, or in this case, grow your own food, to see the effects of a government more concerned with "keeping you safe" than it is with protecting your property rights.

But the ambiguous nature of such a task - "to protect and promote the public health and safety", is incompatible with a free society and the protection and enforcement of private property rights. This is what must be realized. You can have a government that watches over you and is tasked with perpetually trying to maintain your safety and well-being, but such a government precludes the possibility of a truly free society. Every expansion towards the elusive goal of safety, by necessity, is a restriction and diminution on the sphere of liberty.

If the government has any legitimate role in this area, and that is very much in question, it should be in an accommodating nature, as opposed to an imposing one. If we resign to the notion that we need the government to remind us to wash our hands or cook our food properly, it should be done voluntarily as opposed to mandated. This specific instance at Quail Hollow Farm illustrates my point quite nicely. Which group of people do you feel more confident in to oversee the production of your food: The Bledsoes (owners of the farm) or the SNHD, which declared that all the food must be bleached and destroyed, not because they found it to be unsafe, but simply because it was not government certified. I venture to guess I can not possibly be alone in preferring the judgement of organic farmers who have created a thriving business for themselves, as opposed to the government agency that looks at a pile of freshly prepared food in a State with tens of thousands of starving and homeless people, and orders it to be destroyed, because it is possible someone could get sick!

Yet not only is it this grossly incompetent and counterproductive bureaucratic agency that is given the role of ensuring food safety over demonstrably more qualified parties, such as farmers themselves, all other options are literally outlawed! All citizens must both fund this agency and follow its edicts. You are not free to opt out.

This brings us to a very important point. Are agencies that operate under the guise of acting in the public interest or promoting public safety, actually designed to do that which they purport to? Or are they more about the illusion of safety? Perhaps their primary function is simply the continued collection of revenue via taxes, permits, and licensing fees, to sustain the bureaucracy tasked with overseeing the health of the public. One rather revealing piece of information that suggests this to be the case, and that this is a systemic feature of the agency, rather than an outlier, comes from the Nevada Statute Law which gives the SNHD its authority. It reads:

NRS 446.870 Prohibited acts: Operation of food establishment without valid permit issued by health authority; sale, offer or display for consideration of food prepared in private home without valid permit issued by health authority; exemptions.

1. Except as otherwise provided in this section, it is unlawful for any person to operate a food establishment unless the person possesses a valid permit issued to him or her by the health authority.

3. Food that is prepared in a private home and given away free of charge or consideration of any kind is exempt from the provisions of this chapter

NRS 446.020 “Food establishment” defined.
      1. Except as otherwise limited by subsection 2, “food establishment” means any place, structure, premises, vehicle or vessel, or any part thereof, in which any food intended for ultimate human consumption is manufactured or prepared by any manner or means whatever, or in which any food is sold, offered or displayed for sale or served.
      2. The term does not include:
      (a) Private homes, unless the food prepared or manufactured in the home is sold, or offered or displayed for sale or for compensation or contractual consideration of any kind;

The above demonstrates two things quite clearly. The first is the egregiously intrusive and overbearing scope of the SNHD. This is critically important to understand. The above example is not merely one of an inspector gone awry. Rather, it is the SNHD simply doing the job it was tasked to due by law. As horrific as the Quail Hollow Farms incident was, surely the law that is both responsible for and encourages such "inspections" is a much greater outrage. In a very real sense, the inspector can be excused from blame as she was simply doing her job. And isn't that the real problem? The nature of this job and the laws that provide a justification for it? What sort of substantive change can be accomplished if the above statutes, and the role of government they represent, are left as is?

The second takeaway from the governing law that gives the SNHD its authority, is the juxtaposition of an intensely detailed and expansive definition of a food establishment and all those whom fall under the SNHD's authority, while simultaneously excusing those whom engage in the very same activities as long as they do not sell their product. How does one reconcile the claim that food establishments are, on the one hand, absolutely necessary to be regulated by the SNHD in order to "keep the public safe", yet those very same establishments are free to be left to their own devices and not inspected by the SNHD, simply if they decide to give their product away for free? How does the determination of the asking price (or lack thereof) impact, in any way, that food's safety and methods of preparation? Either these measures are as vitally important as they claim to be, and must be applied broadly to all, or they are superfluous and specifically target revenue generating food establishments for obvious reasons. Is it possible this law is geared more towards generating revenue to fund the very regulatory agency it created, as opposed to the "promotion of public safety"?

I have said nothing so far in regards to the free market solutions to this problem of food quality and inspection. The reader is sure to ask, "What would happen without the SNHD or USDA inspecting our food to ensure it is safe?" This is a very important question and one that deserves a comprehensive answer. I would direct the reader to two excellent pieces by the Ludwig Von Mises Institute here and here. For the sake of brevity, all I will add is that there is a tremendous incentive for food producers to ensure that their food is safe. It is also worth mentioning that free market alternatives already exist, and the market for such alternatives would only grow with the elimination of existing government regulatory bodies.

All photos by Leila Navidi of the Las Vegas Weekly.

A monetary policy of inflationism is inherently undemocratic

2011-10-25T19:23:00.000-07:00

From "The Emergency Argument In Favor of Inflationism" section of The Theory of Money & Credit, Mises writes:

"The government, in this regard supported by only a minority of the people, believes that there exists an emergency that necessitates a considerable increase in public expenditure and a corresponding austerity in private households. But the majority of the people disagree. They do not believe that conditions are so bad as the government depicts them or they think that the preservation of the values endangered is not worth the sacrifices they would have to make. There is no need to raise the question whether the government's or the majority's opinion is right. Perhaps the government is right. However, we deal not with the substance of the conflict but with the methods chosen by the rulers for its solution. They reject the democratic way of persuading the majority. They arrogate to themselves the power and the moral right to circumvent the will of the people. They are eager to win its cooperation by deceiving the public about the costs involved in the measures suggested. While seemingly complying with the constitutional procedures of representative government, their conduct is in effect not that of elected officeholders but that of guardians of the people. The elected executive no longer deems himself the people's mandatory; he turns into a Führer.

The emergency that brings about inflation is this: the people or the majority of the people are not prepared to defray the costs incurred by their rulers' policies. They support these policies only to the extent that they believe their conduct does not burden themselves. They vote, for instance, only for such taxes as are to be paid by other people, namely, the rich, because they think that these taxes do not impair their own material well-being. The reaction of the government to this attitude of the nation is, at least sometimes, directed by the sincere wish to serve what it believes to be the true interests of the people in the best possible way. But if the government resorts for this purpose to inflation, it is employing methods which are contrary to the principles of representative government, although formally it may have fully complied with the letter of the constitution. It is taking advantage of the masses' ignorance, it is cheating the voters instead of trying to convince them.

It is not just an accident that in our age inflation has become the accepted method of monetary management. Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism."

This was a very revealing passage and was the first time I thought about this, and viewed inflation in this light. I thought this would be beneficial to share for a few reasons. The first of course is just to give an example of Mises' genius and his ability to see things from all angles.

Additionally I thought this concept might be useful to those whom are interested in discussing and spreading the philosophy of liberty and Austrian Economics with others. The idea of inflation as an undemocratic policy could provide an additional angle in which one could approach the layman about the evils of inflation, or when discussing the economics of monetary policy with a progressive whom has received mainstream education. Normally the economic argument results in a most unsatisfying standoff between two different fundamental assumptions about what generates economic prosperity, both of which are somewhat non-falsifiable and thus no real progress can be made with someone whom is absolutely convinced of the Keynesian doctrine. Having said that, more often than not such a person tends to be a rather strong supporter of democracy and the idea of a state that is based on representative government. It would be interesting to see how one would reconcile those pro-democracy views with the call for an inflationary monetary policy, given its inherently anti-democratic nature!

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If you believe in free markets and free people, Ron Paul is your guy!

2011-10-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

I always love being able to get some much deserved positive press out there for the great Ron Paul!

From, "Western voters size up GOP field on three big issues", they saved the best for last:

Less government resonates loudly with Robert Fellner, a professional Las Vegas poker player who's seen his income drop since it became illegal to play online. Playing at casinos is not as lucrative, he said.

"If you believe in free markets and free people," he said, "you'll like Ron Paul."

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The government does a terrible job of keeping you safe.

2011-10-17T20:34:00.000-07:00

As always, this anecdote of government failure in and of itself, is quite appalling. But what I want to emphasize, and what I think is of much greater importance than this one specific example of government failure, is the incentives and institution behind this failure.

So the video below (direct link here) documents how the government agency that determines what is the safe level of radiation exposure to the brain via cell phones, or rather, what the maximum allowable radiation emitted from cell phones can be, is all based on studies that use the head of a 6 foot 2 inch, 220 pound man as their model. So the government agency which has the power to force companies to follow their decree, in order to "promote the public interest", in this case, not being exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation, conducts their research to determine what is the safe level for radiation exposure from cell phones, and does so using a human head that is different than 97% of the population. Not surprisingly, the results of these tests are going to be inaccurate for those people whom do not share the same characteristics of the model used.

As a result of this failure, a group of independent scientists that comprise the organization known as the Environmental Health Trust, conducted some research of their own and their findings were quite shocking. They found that the brain of a child received roughly 150% more radiation than that of the model being used. One may begin to see just how woefully dangerous it becomes when assuming a device is safe, because the government "tested it" and declared it to be.

Some of the interesting things of the Environmental Health Trust's research was that they made an effort to study and model the heads of all different types of people, both in size and gender. One would think this would be a pretty straightforward and obvious approach when determining whether or not a device is harmful for mass consumption by everyone, but hey the government apparently thought using a model that does not accurately reflect 97% of the population was close enough!

<a href='http://money.msn.com/money-video?vid=634d45e2-cc8d-4d59-bffc-d350f3aa97d9&src=CPPlayer:embed::uuids' target='_new' title='Study: Most Cell Users Exposed To Alarming Radiation Levels' >Video: Study: Most Cell Users Exposed To Alarming Radiation Levels</a>

Okay, so moving on from my rant at how colossally the government has failed the people it is tasked with protecting in this regard, let us now consider the mechanisms involved and ponder if there is a superior alternative to government-run regulatory agencies. The government agencies are comprised of mostly anonymous and almost entirely unelected bureaucrats. In a situation like this, where it is clear the quality of research and testing has been woefully inadequate to the point of criminal negligence, what are the consequences of such action? Nothing. The agency continues to receive its funding, the bureaucrats whom comprise said agency continue to receive their taxation-funded salaries and extravagent health packages, and if anything, the agency will receive even more funding, once their failures have been brought to light by free people, as now surely more (government) research must be done to look into this matter!

Now in such an institution, a bureaucracy, which is devoid of the profit and loss test, we might hypothesize that without the check of losses for failure, and the reward of profit for success, such sub-optimal performance is not only expected, but an inherent feature of bureaucratic management itself. And we'd be right.

The amazing thing about this example is that I don't need to ask the reader to engage in imagining what the free market alternative would look like. Even in spite of the existing government regulatory agency that de facto prevents competing free market ones from entering the industry, the free market still provides a superior product! For free! Without even the incentive of profit! Now if agencies like the Environmental Health Trust can spring up and produce such results in the current climate, can you imagine the free market alternatives that would grow in a free market regulatory environment? Where they could charge for their certification and thus be incentivized to produce reports that measure the safety of a product as it pertains to most, if not all, people, as opposed to merely 3%! And that very same incentive, only the inverse, of losses, would be used to bankrupt and eliminate agencies that produce government-quality work, and be a robust check on an agencies attempt to "cut corners" or produce sub-par results.
This example of government failure is an intrinsic feature of bureaucracy. Asking for the head of the agency to be replaced, or better scientists, or the right kind of people, or what not, is not going to make any difference in the long run. It can not. It is the institution itself that is responsible for such failures. Ludwig Von Mises elaborates further in his short book on the matter here: http://mises.org/Books/bureaucracy.pdf.

The market literally produced a superior product, for free, in today's world, under our existing governmental monopoly environment. If that doesn't compel you to recognize that the idea that "only the government can keep us safe" or "only the government can provide X product" is a myth, I don't know what will. And in fact, the government can not and has never produced a superior product in a more efficient manner than the free market alternative. Good lord, look at what free people can produce now! Imagine if the shackles of government were substantially loosened or even removed altogether! Calling for the abolition of the TSA or the FCC or the EPA or any of the other dozen of government agencies tasked with regulating various industries and protecting the consumer, is not a call for less safety. I care about safety too. So how about we start looking towards solutions that will actually provide a reasonable degree of it, and not just empty rhetoric for the continued existence of programs that merely pretend to.

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Letter to the Editor

2011-10-06T18:31:00.000-07:00

The city government here in Las Vegas is notorious for their "special use permits" that tack on thousands of dollars in fees to small business owners or those looking to bring jobs and business to Las Vegas. The local paper just ran a story of how a thrift store that "employed veterans and a place for donation and food items" was just shut down due to the failure to pay an additional $1,000 to pay for a special permit to...wait for it...sell used goods.

Anyways something about this particular story, maybe it was the absurdity of a special permit to be allowed to sell used goods, or maybe it was the tragedy of the government once again abandoning veterans - this time tossing them out of a job, but whatever it was, I felt compelled to write a letter to the editor immediately after reading. Here is that letter:

Hello,

I read the article in today's View about the closure of the Fort Haven Thrift Store, and felt compelled to write. I am tremendously upset at what is being done here. The government is not supposed to be the mafia, whom shuts down honest, charitable, people whom go into business to provide opportunity and jobs for those struggling, simply because the store owner failed to pay up whatever arbitrary sum of money they are demanding from you in order to be allowed to operate. I couldn't help but notice that Mr. Huff had already paid the fee for a business license, but failed to pay an additional $1,000 "special fee" for a permit to sell used goods. Why is there an additional fee required to obtain a special permit to sell used goods?

I assisted in helping a friend of mine open a new martial arts business here in Las Vegas recently and was floored by the amount of fees and licenses required. Naturally in addition to all the standard fees, we also had to pay a "special fee" for a "special" permit to practice martial arts. There was no safety check, no verification of our competency or anything of that degree. Just more demands to pay more money to a government that habitually squanders revenue and produces sub-par products for ever escalating costs. The answer to why these extra fees exist is simple. Because they can. It is why this fee is set at $1,000 and not $10, the government functions to extract wealth from the people it allegedly serves, protects, and "creates jobs" for. Despite hiding beneath generations of rhetoric of how government only exists to help the public and act in the best interest of those it rules over, the actual result is quite clear. Government destroys and consumes the wealth that free people create. This is a perfect microcosm of this much larger issue.

There are so many tragedies in this one relatively small story. Mr. Huff is running a low-end thrift store and employing veterans. The $1,000 additional fee is preposterous on its face, and has no defensible rationale for existing other than the government can and thus will take money from the people it is supposed to be serving, at any opportunity they see fit. For $1,000 the city is shutting down a business that provides jobs and a much needed store that caters to those less fortunate. What is truly in the best interest of the city of Las Vegas here? An extra $1,000 to the city government, or the jobs and services this thrift store provides to those in need?

Yet, this comes as virtually no surprise to anyone. We expect this from government. The government does not act in the city of Las Vegas' interest, the city government acts in the best interest of city government. So why do we consent to such a system?

There was a time when people understood that the government was supposed to serve and protect them, not act as an gang of thieves writ large that will imprison you or shut you down if you fail to pay them their tribute. This is one small example of a much greater problem. People left to their own devices can do amazing things. If we wish for an expedited return to prosperity, perhaps it is time we gave serious thought to removing the roadblock to liberty and prosperity that government is, and allow people the freedom to discover the best ways to serve one another.

Sincerely,

Robert Fellner

Update: Letter Published!

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Where Keynes Went Wrong

2011-10-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

If you are looking for a basic, easy to read, and approachable book that outlines where the economic policies of our day come from, and why both the policies and theories behind them are flawed, you can do no better than starting with Hunter Lewis' fantastic book, Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why World Governments Keep Creating Inflation, Bubbles, and Busts.

This book was specifically written for the introductory student, or just the curious layman, whom is interested in understanding the economic policy decisions made all around us, every day, that ultimately end up directly affecting us all. Hunter Lewis is a graduate of Harvard University, co-founded the global investment fund Cambridge Associates, LLC, and has served on The World Bank.

The book is broken down into several sections where first Keynes himself is quoted, an explanation of Keynes' position on certain matters is given, and then the sensible approach to these economic matters is given quite succinctly by Mr. Lewis. To learn more, check out the link above for a detailed summary as well as several excerpts from the book. Here is one of my favorite passages:

"The greatest obstacle to sound banking is government. The US Federal Reserve was established in 1913, in part, to reduce bank reserves. [Bank reserves are what dictates how much or little the bank can inflate the money supply. A detailed explanation of this process is found in the preceding chapters. - Robert Fellner] Over the years, it has lowered reserve requirements repeatedly, always seeking in this and other ways to create more money and pour it into the economy through the banking system. In the eyes of politicians, more money is almost always better. It will help the economy look better in the short run, and that will help incumbents get reelected. The idea that the government (in the form of the Federal Reserve) guards us from inflation makes no sense. The record tells us otherwise. The Fed is the source, not the cure, for inflation." - Hunter Lewis, Where Keynes Went Wrong, 195-196.

I meet with many people whom generally agree that things are bad, traditional government-administered solutions are not working, and in many cases are making things worse, yet tend to fall into apathy and indifference as they lack any clear understanding of specifically what is wrong, not to mention what we should do about it. If you are one of those people and are interested in getting solid footing to stand on when you criticize the way things are, as well as to be able to propose workable and economically sound solutions, I highly recommend this book. No previous education in economics is necessary.

Furthermore, the book is broken down into self-contained sections such that if you are only interested in certain areas, it is easy to navigate to them and digest the material directly without having to read hundreds of pages of unrelated material first. If you need even more convincing, a glowing review by the Mises Institute is given here!

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Holy cow! Even MSNBC has had enough of this police state!

2011-09-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

Shockingly bold commentary that I couldn't agree more with, from Lawrence O' Donnell. Let's hope this kind of reporting continues in the mainstream media. For too long they have remained silent on government abuse of power. The American people need to be told the truth, not fed a child-like fairy tale picture of "good government". Kudos sir!

The evidence of a media conspiracy against Ron Paul is overwhelming

2011-09-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

I honestly didn't even want to blog about this topic as it has been covered sufficiently in many other areas, most famously was Jon Stewart's segment on the blatant media bias against Ron Paul after he finished in a statistical tie for 1st place in the Iowa Straw Poll, yet was totally ignored afterwards.

However, it just continues to go on and on in the most unabashed and blatant ways imaginable. First there was the Florida Republican Debate last night, where Ron Paul who is consistently ranking #3 in all polls, and whom polls better than all other Republican candidates in an head to head match up against President Obama, was only given 285 seconds of speaking time out of a 2 hour debate. In the refreshingly intelligent and clear-headed analysis of the media bias against Ron Paul by Doug Wead we also find that in the CNN debate in regards to speaking opportunities for the various candidates:

Blitzer then proceeded to give Rick Perry 21 opportunities, Mitt Romney 13, Michele Bachmann 11. Ron Paul was given nine.

Then today on Neil Cavuto's official Facebook page there is a poll asking whom the frontrunner should be, and Ron Paul isn't even listed as a choice. Right now on MSN.com there is an almost identical poll asking "who is likely to win" and again, Ron Paul is not even listed as a possible choice! The poll does include Michele Bachman and John Huntsman, both of whom Ron Paul has been polling significantly higher than for the past several months. The last numbers I believe had Ron Paul at around 13-14% with Jon Huntsman around 2%. Yet MSN.com feels Huntsman is more reasonable to include as a possible answer for who is likely to win, than the guy polls indicate has 7 times the support!?

Or how about this story from Yahoo News titled, "Poll: Romney leads New Hampshire, Huntsman in third, Perry in fourth", you get one guess as whom came in 2nd place in this poll, but was conspicuously admitted from the headline which found it more relevant to cite 3rd and 4th place results. That's just a few examples of the blatant media bias I've come across today. There are literally hundreds of other examples. Doug Wead does a fantastic job of compiling more examples and more importantly addresses why there is such a strong concentrated effort to prevent Ron Paul from gaining in popularity. The article is 1 page long, but it packs a tremendous amount of content in there, some things I wasn't even aware of!

I highly recommend checking it out: The Conspiracy Against Ron Paul

Update: Wow, I just came across the following article that reports: "If you’ve noticed a lack of Ron Paul in the mainstream media’s coverage of the 2012 presidential race, it might not be an accident. After he placed first in a Fox News poll, the outlet has removed the results from their website without explanation."

Milton Friedman on Poverty

2011-09-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

What a truly brilliant thinker and champion of liberty. His ability to express ideas with precision like clarity in both written and public speaking formats are beyond reproach. His public speaking prowess combined with a sound understanding of economics and an ability to think deeply about controversial ideas, is something we could certainly use more of in today's dialogue on these matters. So awesome.

<br><br><br><br>What

Sex at Dawn

2011-09-22T12:59:00.000-07:00

Enjoying beautiful Toronto!

Sex at Dawn is a fantastic new book out that examines human nature, and human sexuality more specifically, in a whole new way. What they find is truly remarkable, and rightly turns the field of research and study in this area totally on its head! Namely, that the classic narrative we are all taught or assume, that human beings are monogamous by nature, is totally false. The book is written in a fantastically easy to engage manner: witty, breezy, intelligent, funny, and above all else, deeply insightful. One great thing about this book in addition to the extremely fascinating information it contains, is the discussion and analysis of the concept known as confirmation bias. Which is basically the process of finding what you want to find or expect to find, as a result of one's own personal views and experiences. Or more accurately in this case, one's own social environment and conditioning. Anyway, I can not recommend it highly enough, hard to imagine any human not finding something about this brilliant work interesting or relevant to your life!

Here is one particularly hilarious passage that I thought might give a good taste of the style the book is written in:

"[Regarding the hit song, "When a Man Loves a Woman"] What does it have to say about a man's love for a woman? What are the signs of true masculine love? Copyright restrictions won't allow us to quote the song's lyric in full, but most readers know the words by heart anyway. To review, when a man loves a woman:
He becomes obsessed and can't think of anything else.
He'll exchange anything, even the world, for her company.
He's blind to any fault she may have, and will abandon even his closest friend if that friends tries to warn him about her.
He'll spend all his money trying to hold her attention.
And last but not least, he'll sleep in the rain if she tells him to.
We'd like to suggest an alternative title for this song: "When a Man Becomes Pathologically Obsessed and Sacrifices All Self-Respect and Dignity by Making a Complete Ass of Himself (and Losing the Woman Anyway Because Really, Who Wants a Boyfriend Who Sleeps Out in the Rain Because Someone Told Him To?)."

Not your average human sexuality/psychology fare, eh? It's great stuff, do yourself a favor and check it out!

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The fall of NYC: Once great beacon of cultural diversity is now the epicenter of the police state in America.

2011-09-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press has produced a stunning, in-depth, investigative report titled,"NYPD eyed US citizens in intel effort." The meat of the report is much more shocking than the headline. To the surprise of virtually no-one, the NYPD has been running a program called the "Moroccan Initiative" since 2003 designed to monitor, record, and spy on innocent US citizens of Moroccan nationality in order to prevent a possible Moroccan terrorist attack from occurring in the future. If you could come up for one good reason as to why this process can't (and won't) be extended to include people of other nationalities, or maybe even a more general term like "dark-skinned" whom need to be monitored, I'd love to hear it.

Although it is worth repeating that even if there were evidence that could somehow demonstrate Moroccan's as a people are more prone to launching terrorist attacks than others, the illegal spying on innocent citizens simply due to their race, sex, color, look, etc. is an abomination of liberty and must be vehemently opposed in all situations. Precisely to avoid arriving at the place we are at today.

Anyways, back to this fantastic report by the AP, that you really must read in its entirety, what struck me the most, and had the most profound impact on making a reality just how far this once great country (and city) has fallen, was the response of one of the citizens when he was informed that he was a subject of this "Moroccan Initiative" monitoring campaign:

"We've been harassed for so long, it doesn't make any sense to complain," said Leo Santini, a cafe owner and U.S. citizen who changed his name from Mohamed Hussein because he thought he would be treated better without such an Arab name. His three American kids, he said, "don't look Arab, so they won't have any problems."

What happened to this nation? Are we now the land that says, "Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free - as long as you don't look differently than us? This melting pot of a country founded on immigrants, now is so hostile to its own people of foreign descent, they look upon their children whom no longer bear any physical trace of their heritage as a shield to protect them from their own government? That they must change their name just to hope they are not held accountable for the sins of total strangers, not only by their fellow Americans, but by the very government sworn to protect them as well?

When you get enraged enough that you are willing to expend the energy to learn what it will take to affect substantive change, I implore you to begin with Professor Bruce L. Benson's masterpiece, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State. Additionally, the links on the right side of the page all contain very useful information as well.

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GG documents the living abortion that is the US justice system

2011-09-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

Gleen Greenwald is out with a piece on a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the government's illegal spying on its own citizens. Piece is here: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/22/jacobs/index.html

This piece is particularly important because not only does it document so much we already know, the government by definition is now lawless, Obama has expanded and continued the crimes done under the Bush administration (while preventing any possible legal ramifications to be brought against said criminals), but also because it highlights just how fundametally flawed this system of government-provided law is. For instance:

All of that stands in very stark contrast to [federal judge] Dennis G. Jacobs. Immediately after graduating law school, he want to work for a large Wall Street law firm -- Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett -- and stayed there until Ronald Reagan appointed him to a life-tenured federal judgeship. How noble. So the entirety of Jacobs' law career before becoming a judge was devoted to snorting up as much money as he could as he represented large corporations and banks. That's the person who just anointed himself the arbiter and smearer of the integrity, psychology and motives of ACLU lawyers and their human-rights-activists clients for daring to challenge a government spying law on Fourth Amendment grounds. (emphasis mine)

Hmm, I wonder why appointing people to life-tenured federal judgeship based on political incentives might not be the best method for designing a just system of law? What's that? We have some examples of the type of lunatics we have serving as judges in the highest courts of the land? Do share:

After accusing the plaintiffs of harboring anti-Americanism for daring to enforce the mandates of the United States Constitution against precisely the activities most feared by the American Founders: unchecked domestic government spying (Jacobs announced his discovery that the plaintiffs' argument rests on a "buried assumption that the United States is the only threat to liberty that anyone anywhere needs to worry about"), he turned his scornful ire to the ACLU for the crime of representing these plaintiffs -- for free -- in a lawsuit to enforce the privacy rights of all American citizens. Unprovoked, Jacobs posed the question of what could possibly motivate the ACLU and its clients to bring this lawsuit -- apparently, an actual belief that the law is unconstitutional and dangerous could not possibly be the real motive -- and this is the answer he supplied:

At the risk of being obvious, the purpose of this lawsuit is litigation for its own sake -- for these lawyers to claim a role in policy-making for which they were not appointed or elected, for which they are not fitted by experience, and for which they are not accountable. As best I can see, the only purpose of this litigation is for counsel and plaintiffs to act out their fantasy of persecution, to validate their pretensions to policy expertise, to make themselves consequential rather than marginal, and to raise funds for self-sustaining litigation.
He then added that this Constitutional challenge to the Government's secret spying powers "bears similarity to a pro se plaintiff’s allegation that the CIA is controlling him through a radio embedded in his molar." Not content with maligning their motives and patriotism, he then all but accused the ACLU and its clients of lying in order to sustain the lawsuit ("these affidavits employ all the lawyer's arts to convey a devious impression . . . affidavits that are craftily worded to skirt actual falsehood").

Glenn then goes on to document how ironic such an attack is, considering the judge doing the attacking is a former corporate Wall St. employee and the ACLU lawyers he attacked have all given up the opportunity for similar lucrative careers to work for free, for those most in need. The whole article is a must read, but I think the closing hits the nail right on the head:

Of course, Jacobs is the living, breathing embodiment of judicial bias: a devoted servant to corporate and government power, a right-wing hack who barely attempts to hide his political loyalties, and -- most of all -- a declared enemy of the very few mechanisms that exist to enable the poor and marginalized to receive competent legal representation and for political power to be subject to some minimal checks (what we call "the Constitution"). It should be anything but surprising that a corporate-serving, political-power-revering, highly politicized figure like this produces judicial opinions that are slightly more restrained versions of a Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly rant. He churns out right-wing agitprop masquerading as legal reasoning.
But the reason he's worth examining is because he's anything but aberrational. He's the Chief Judge of the second- or third-most important court in the country. He works in a judicial system that more and more does the opposite of what it was ostensibly designed to do: it is now devoted to shielding political officials from legal accountability and transparency rather than exposing them to it, enabling rather than halting transgressions of the Constitutional limits imposed on them, and most of all, further empowering the most powerful factions against the least powerful rather than equalizing the playing field. In that regard, the life of Dennis G. Jacobs -- and his slanderous, contemptuous outburst of yesterday -- should be studied as a perfect embodiment of how the American judicial branch has become so corrupted as a tool for the nation's most powerful factions.

Glenn Greenwald might be the single best journalist Americans have. I encourage you to read him everyday.

Troy Davis was just murdered by the U.S. legal system

2011-09-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

For a crime that there was no physical evidence connecting him to. None. The outrage over this and documentation of the complete failure of the U.S. legal system to provide any sense of justice or any attempt at using the death penalty in only the most concrete cases has been well documented elsewhere. Here is the New York Times piece: A Grievous Wrong and Time Magazine. There are many other articles from many different sources from all over the political spectrum that document this atrocity as a quick Google search will certainly reveal.

The legal system doesn't work. This is one brutal and tragic example of that. The fact that such mainstream outlets as the New York Times and Time Magazine are able to recognize that "the safety valves failed" and other fundamental failures of the legal system to prevent the death penalty from being used in cases like this, should speak volumes about how obvious and fundamental the failure in our legal system is. This man was sent to death with no evidence at all. Just 9 eyewitness testimony. 7 of whom have since recanted saying they were wrong. 3 of the juries who voted guilty have since said they were wrong and would vote not guilty. Yet Troy Davis was murdered anyway.

I know for most people envisioning a system of law without government is basically impossible. I urge you and implore you out of compassion and basic human decency to recognize the abomination and violation of human life that the current U.S. legal system is. Surely stopping this must come first. I get the unknown is scary, but if nothing else this must stop. Destroying this life-ruining, inhumane, abomination of "justice" must come first, let the chips fall where they may. How could it be worse than this? And in fact, if one wishes to learn, it won't be worse. It will be infinitely better. As it was for thousands of years before government infringed on the legal system that served mankind splendidly for all of recorded human history, for the express purpose of generating additional revenue. Madness you say? Don't take my word for it, I beseech thee to seek out the real experts.

One such expert is the DeVoe Moore Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at Florida State University Bruce L. Benson. His masterpiece, The Enterprise of Law, will show you what law used to look like, why government provided law will always be less than optimal (to put it mildly) and what alternatives look like and how we can get there. If anyone is seriously interested in educating themselves and fighting for a truly just and humane system, send me an email with your mailing address and I will gladly purchase a copy of this book for you.

LA Times on poker shutdown: those against government shutdown are "dumb".

2011-09-21T09:10:00.001-07:00

Naturally, I lose it in the comments section. I mean I really go off on this guy. In case you are not familiar with the details, I will summarize as briefly as possible. In April 15th without notice or warning the DOJ (Department of Justice) along with the FBI raided and shut down all the online poker operators in the US. There are two large ones whom make up the majority of the market: Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker (FTP). One week after the shutdown Pokerstars begins paying everyone back their money, plus any potential bonuses were converted into cash and paid out! A remarkable consumer first response, that set the standard as how business should be run - from both an ethical standpoint as well as a business-savvy one. FTP however, was unable to pay, but promising they would in due time.

Fast forward to this week. Monday it is announced FTP was a "giant Ponzi scheme" that basically operated exactly how all the banks in the world due under Fractional Reserve Banking. Namely they credit depositors accounts with funds that aren't actually there. They can do this, because generally most people leave the majority of their cash in their account and never withdraw. This is why if on anyone day every customer of a bank shows up for their money, the bank would not and could not pay out and would have to be saved by government or go into bankruptcy.

To make it clear, I am not defending FTP here. They are scum and should be treated like the criminals they are and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I just thought the irony was worth pointing out of the identical nature in which they ran their criminal enterprise and how the banking system operates everyday.

Moving on, so today the LA Times Opinion section came out with a piece essentially gloating over this news and using it to mock people who back in April attacked the government for their hostile, illegal, and anti-liberty actions in shutting down online poker. Here is the closing paragraph to summarize the article's view:

Great. I guess I'm never getting my money back. -- Chris Martin
Don't feel too bad, Chris. It's only money.
It could have been worse. You could have gone on a newspaper's website and made dumb comments about the government taking away your "freedom" -- you know, like your freedom to be cheated.

Well I didn't take too kindly to that and I let them know it. Here is my comment reproduced in full, but I encourage you to leave one of your own on the article as well:

It's hard to know where to begin. It's tempting to start at the disgusting and hypocritical process of writing an anonymously as "the Times' opinion staff" while calling out commenters by name. Next we could look at the content of this article itself. Where apparently it is "dumb" to suggest that a government that prohibits its citizens from engaging in playing online poker is an act of aggression and one that diminishes liberty because one poker site was corrupt? The lack of logic behind this is astounding. Yes freedom does mean the right to take risks. By the logic presented here by the cowardly, anonymous authors of this piece (who nonetheless have the gall to expose others identities - while insulting them nonetheless!) the government banning Americans from playing baseball would not be an act of aggression nor a diminishing of liberty, if it were later discovered a major baseball league was engaging in cheating and corruption...Would the Times then come out and mock those who opposed the nationwide ban on playing baseball as being anti-liberty?

I'd also like to point out the lack of a backbone and journalistic courage you anonymous authors have. Were you able to do anything other than regurgitate the narrative of "us government is great, dissenters are dumb" you might actually highlight how Full Tilt Poker operates exactly like every major bank in our country. They also have a tendency to credit their depositors accounts with money, that having lent out 10x over, isn't actually there! This process is known as Fractional Reserve Banking, yet is perfectly acceptable? No hypocrisy there...shh don't dare mention that ever!

In closing, my name is Robert Fellner. You scared cowardly authors are disgusting people. You are also quite stupid as I've demonstrated above. You end with, "Your freedom to be cheated." Hey the US government is going to ban driving after sundown! Are you going to call me and all the other people who call such an action anti-liberty, shameful, and tyrannical "dumb" when someone points out that people have died in car accidents at dark? Would you write an opinion piece and end it with the snarky, "freedom to die" line?

You're barely human. You are so blind and devoted to regurgitating the "government is great" narrative your analytical process and logic (or lack thereof) would make a Party member from Orwell's 1984 look modest in their brainwashing by comparison.

Keep calling the critical thinkers who value what made this country great and what this country is supposed to represent - freedom - dumb. You are scared, mindless, sheep following orders. I'm Robert Fellner and your time of being regarded as influential in public opinion has almost come.

Follow @GrimHogun

The UFC is officially a monopoly

2011-09-07T12:42:00.000-07:00

After the UFC bought the #2 MMA promotion in the world, Strikeforce, the monopoly talk rightly began. With Strikeforce gone there isn’t even a name I could give you as to whom the new #2 company is. The result?

Fighters are being paid more than ever before.

The UFC has just rolled out a new health care package that will pay for medical costs and treatments required for injuries sustained during training camps. (Previously they only paid for injuries that occurred while fighting).

Dream match ups that were never before possible due to promotions unwillingness to co-promote have already begun. Champion vs Champion matches such as GSP vs Diaz and Alistair Overeem vs Brock Lesnar have already been announced.

More fights will be televised and hosted in more venues around the world, so consumers have a greater supply of the product they love.

Network deal with FOX has been announced. In addition to a total increase in number of available shows, an increase in the number of free or non-PPV UFC cards are now available.

As the UFC brand expands globally, the fighters benefit in many more ways in addition to all time record high salaries and bonuses that they are paid directly from the UFC. Increased awareness results in more sponsorship dollars, greater opportunities to sell books, star in commercials, open your own gym (Xtreme Couture etc.) and so forth. One prominent examples of this is the recent Nike endorsement of Anderson Silva that is worth several million dollars.

The UFC itself becomes richer, profits rise, expands globally and thus boosts economic activity and creates more jobs.

All we are waiting for now is the US anti-trust division to break up this giant consumer-hating monopoly and the story will be complete!

Follow @GrimHogun

The War Between Good and Evil: U.S. vs Wikileaks

2011-09-02T18:26:00.000-07:00

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-onthemedia-20110903,0,435906.column

One routinely murders innocent people and then repeatedly lies about it, the other seeks to expose the truth. Hopefully it's not too hard to guess which one fulfills the role of good and which of evil.

Also, The Tillman Story is a riveting documentary for a variety of reasons. Its first hand account of how routinely and deeply the U.S. military engages in deception about its activities towards the American people, and how totally and completely immune from being held accountable for either the criminal actions they are lying about, or the repeated lies and covers up that follow said crimes, is particularly illuminating.

It is available on Netflix or you can learn more by visiting http://www.tillmanstory.com/.

My essay on the min wage law took first place!

2011-09-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

Announcement of contest results here.

My award-winning (god I love saying that) essay is here!

Quote of the day!

2011-09-01T20:31:00.000-07:00

We must ask, not whether an anarcho-capitalist society would be safe from a power grab by the men with the guns (safety is not an available option), but whether it would be safer than our society is from a comparable seizure of power by the men with the guns. I think the answer is yes. In our society, the men who must engineer such a coup are politicians, military officers, and policemen, men selected precisely for the characteristic of desiring power and being good at using it. They are men who already believe that they have a right to push other men around—that is their job. They are particularly well qualified for the job of seizing power. Under anarcho-capitalism the men in control of protection agencies are selected for their ability to run an efficient business and please their customers. It is always possible that some will turn out to be secret power freaks as well, but it is surely less likely than under our system where the corresponding jobs are labeled 'non-power freaks need not apply'.

- David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom

Regime Uncertainty continues to stifle growth

2011-08-24T10:12:00.000-07:00

Regime Uncertainty is a term first coined by the brilliant economist, Professor Robert Higgs, who introduced it in his paper: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed after the War.

Essentially what the term means is that the uncertainty or nervousness business people have in regards to pending or potential regulations from the government, result in them being less likely to invest in long-term capital heavy business projects. This obviously has a negative effect on economic growth.

Today the Associated Press released a story titled, "Survey: Employers consider ending health coverage."

Towers Watson's Randall Abbott said the survey results should be seen as a snapshot of how companies are thinking now. They can't be viewed as a final decision because there are still many unresolved variables. No one knows what the exchanges will be like or whether consumers will accept them, and companies may change their thinking once they learn more about the overhaul.
The health care overhaul also faces court challenges, and President Obama is up for re-election next year, two more variables that could shape what happens in 2014.

When the government expands its role in the economy, hosts of unintended, negative side effects occur. One of the most destructive in regards to economic growth is regime uncertainty. It is clearly a factor today, and is one major cause for the continued recession that America is deeply entrenched in and has been for the past 3 years.

More examples indicating that regime uncertainty continues to plague any chances of a recovery can be found here, here, here, and here.

Follow @GrimHogun

Ron Paul continues to be ignored by the media

2011-08-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

Learn Liberty!

2011-07-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

This website is absolutely amazing. Totally free to use, clean and easy interface, and information on a massive array of important topics. This is the perfect resource for the aspiring libertarian. You can study as much or as little as you like. There are no time limits or limits of any kind. Most of the lessons are basic and no prior education is required. I can not recommend this highly enough! www.learnliberty.org

Each lesson contains the following elements:
A LearnLiberty short video explaining the concept
Suggested resources for delving deeper into the topic
Questions to enhance your understanding
A discussion area to share your insights and ask questions
Each lesson takes about 10 minutes to complete. In only a short amount of time, you can improve your understanding of liberty and figure out where you can learn more.

It is truly breathtaking to see the internet-led revolution of education. It is especially delightful to see the ultimate form of the free market as manifested by the internet, be the same driving force for increasing the reach and spreading the ideas of liberty worldwide!

Sign up for free in in less than 1 minute and check out the college level education you can get totally free and on your own time today! http://www.learnliberty.org/libertyacademy

UN grudgingly admits wealth creation, not redistribution, driving reduction in global poverty

2011-07-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

Full story here:
http://www.canada.com/business/grudgingly+admits+wealth+creation+redistribution+driving+reduction+global+poverty/5068825/story.html

Another example of the government using the rhetoric of acting in the interest of public safety as a cloak to hide their confiscation of property and wealth away from hard working people

2011-07-07T22:54:00.000-07:00

A pair of fantastic articles by Anthony Gregory

2011-07-07T19:57:00.000-07:00

Anthony Gregory over at The Independent Institute has really put out some phenomenal articles in recent weeks. Here are two of my favorites:

Innocent Until Proven Guilty An excerpt:

An ethical code that countenances incarceration of the innocent, even in a slim minority of cases, is no bulwark whatever against the ghastliest of institutional oppressions. A people who are not profoundly and unwaveringly outraged by the false incarceration of even a single soul are unfit to be a free people. It is often said that it’s better to let ten guilty people free than leave one innocent man behind bars. The ratio should be much higher, for it is metaphysically possible for the guilty to find justice outside of the U.S. legal system, but it is impossible for the innocent to find it within. Thus is the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” of unparalleled importance. There is no word adequate to describe how unacceptable it should be to a civilized people to see an innocent man caged. Every single legal bias should be given to ensure that the prosecution proves beyond a reasonable doubt that a person committed the crime before he be deprived of his liberty or life. If the standard is any lower than that, the prosecution will not only convict innocents in the courtroom, but use the threat of false conviction to obtain plea bargains that unfairly rob the innocent of their freedom.

Why The Left Fears Libertarianism An excerpt for what may be one of the very best articles I've ever read on this topic of the Left's reaction to Libertarianism:

But libertarianism, however weak its influence today, is a much greater long-term threat to the left than is any form of conservatism, and the leftist intellectuals sense this even if they can’t articulate why. Leftism, whether they know it or not, is a distorted permutation of the classical liberal tradition. The statist left did their deal with the devil – the nation-state, centralized authority of the most rapacious kind – supposedly with the goal of expediting the liberation of the common man and leveling the playing field. More than a century since the progressives and socialists twisted liberalism into an anti-liberty, pro-state ideology, they see that they have made a huge mess of the world, that, as they themselves complain, social inequality persists, corporatism flourishes, and wars rage on. As the chief political architects of the 20th century in the West, they have no one to blame but themselves, and so they target us – the true liberals, the ones who never let go of authentic liberal idealism, love of the individual dignity and rights of every man, woman and child, regardless of nationality or class, and hatred of state violence and coercive authoritarianism in all its forms.

The Independent Institute in general does very high quality work. I would highly recommend checking out their website. Their award-winning quarterly journal, The Independent Review is absolutely fantastic as well. I've been a subscriber for the past two years and could not be happier. The really nice thing about their journal (in addition to the remarkable consistency in which they produce high quality work) is that the articles and views contained within are from a very diverse group of minds. There is no one viewpoint imposed upon the reader, and in fact I have oftentimes found myself learning greatly from those whose worldviews different quite radically from my own.

The continued irrational fear of a free market monopoly

2011-07-04T16:55:00.000-07:00

There is a piece over on pcworld.com titled, "AT&T/T-Mobile: Why this New Monopoly is Bad for Consumers" that serves as a good example of the extremely common misunderstanding of monopolies. I think it is important to highlight some distinctions of the different types of monopolies that can exist and what one means by using the word, monopoly. I am going to posit that when the overwhelming majority of the time one refers to a monopoly they think of one giant firm whom has total dominance in their respective industry, and use this power to exploit the consumer. The irony of this is that in reality the only monopoly that has ever existed that behaves in such a manner is the government or government-created monopolies.

Thomas Dilorenzo and Dominick T. Armentano, drawing on the lessons of Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard, have both successfully demonstrated that the traditional education on monopolies (as taught by government-run schools no less!) is almost exactly backwards from reality. I highly recommend the works linked to above if one is not already familiar with this topic. Standard Oil is a great example of a monopoly that allegedly harmed consumers and emerged via the free market. Upon examining the evidence, we find that Standard Oil has reduced the price of kerosene from 30 cents to 6 cents at the height of their "monopolistic powers", and their market share was decreasing at the time Anti-Trust legislation was filed! Not exactly that scary image of an oil company charging outrageous prices for their product, at the expense of the helpless consumer, after all.

When you combine this flawed education of evil free market monopolies that plagued society before the benevolent government reluctantly accepted the power of regulator and antitrust enforcer to save the helpless consumer from annihilation, with the interaction with a real monopoly, it is not surprising to find most people support government breaking up perceived monopolies.

When I referred to a real monopoly, I am referring to interactions with the government in any capacity. Ironically, this is the type of monopoly that is harmful to the consumer, and whom will continue to thrive no matter what the consumer says or does, or how terrible the product they produce is. A few examples would include the DMV, Secretary of the State as it pertains to getting business licenses and so forth, the IRS, and on and on. In all of one's personal interactions with these agencies of a monopoly in the classic sense of existing in spite and directly exploiting the consumer, the people feel that exploitation and know it to be true. If you want to open a business you need to go to the local government office and apply for a license. How much is that license? Well it depends on what state you are in, type of business etc. But there is no choice here. There is only, "pay us this sum that we have declared, or your business will be shut down." The DMV I think speaks for itself as a model of a monopoly that exists in direct defiance to the consumers' preferences. The IRS decides how much of your income they will take this year and if it so pleases them they can modify that amount to a greater or lower degree the next year. You have zero say in this process. That's to say nothing of the atrocious wait times at the various offices, the delay in handling of the paperwork, the "you need to wait in that line to fill out X form so you can come back in Y line to get the permit to be allowed to apply for the Z license" and so on.

So in a very real sense, people have a very good "feel" for what an exploitative monopoly is like. And not surprisingly, they don't like it at all! Couple this with decades of propaganda of how the free-market had many even worse monopolies such as Ma Bell, Standard Oil, etc. it is not surprising that one supports government destroying any business that poses the threat of reaching the dreaded monopoly status.

However, it is a tragic mistake to look towards the most destructive and powerful monopoly in all of human history, the government, as the entity which determines when and whom is deemed a monopoly and thus use their power to destroy the alleged monopoly. (If you want to talk about a monopoly, how about the agency that can use violence legally to order you around!) If we look at the article I mentioned by pcworld.com at the top of this piece, we see the author is calling for the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile to be stopped as such a merger would result in a monopoly and consumers would suffer. The irony to me is that he then cites the fact that the new AT&T and Verizon would then have a whopping 80% of the market share! Now there is no doubt that is enormous. However if your argument is that this will result in AT&T being a monopoly, its probably not the best tactic to add in the market share of their rival company, Verizon, when calculating their total market share. You know because, kind of by definition, the problem with monopolies (in theory) is that there are no alternative choices.

Furthermore the author even notes that there are several additional companies in existence, but all are too small to be of note. Well that's the nice thing about free market competition. It forces companies to behave in a consumer friendly manner. I can't imagine a better boon for these smaller cell phone competitors than for AT&T to unleash their mythical monopoly powers of abusing their customers. Seems like a dream scenario for the other 20% to gain a few extra points of the market share, eh?

There is something else in that article that I want to address now, the author writes:

What's the short term effect? Verizon Wireless, the carrier I use, has ended smartphone all-you-can-eat data plans, in favor of tiered data plans, much to the immense consternation of their clientele. Why make their clients unhappy, you might ask? Because they can.

Again ignoring the fact that the author is calling AT&T a monopoly while simultaneously referring to their competitor Verizon (which currently has more market share than AT&T, the alleged monopoly!) the above paragraph really taps into a popular sentiment of consumers. Namely, extremely successful companies impose their will on consumers. Now this is irritating to see. Private companies, like Verizon and Apple, exist and rise to power only because of how efficiently they meet their consumers needs. Put differently, they achieved such enormous success by improving the lives of virtually every person on the planet. What else can you call it when a person whom finds out they are rolling out a tiered data plan, responds with shocked indignation? I mean really how greedy are these bastards? You mean I can't use my wallet sized portable computer virtually anywhere on the planet to access and download an unlimited amount of information from the Internet? How come there is never any emphasize the other way? Like oh my god, my phone is more powerful than the most powerful consumer computer was a mere 10 years ago and I can take it anywhere and download an unlimited amount of data from an unlimited number of sources on planet earth for 99 bucks a month!!

Let's remember what and why these firms got so powerful in the first place. And it is not because they make their consumers unhappy, as the author suggests. Such a statement is not only absurd on its face, in reality, all of modern civilization has been built on the precise opposite. Firms making their consumers extremely happy, better than their competitors. I hope one takes pause at the suggestion that those companies whom succeed mightily in making our world richer, should be destroyed as their reward. Let's ponder what such a world would look like if taken to its logical conclusion. And if your imagination isn't up to the task, feel free to read up on the enormous success of communist Russia. No free market monopolies there, I promise you that!

Rocking the Henry Hazlitt t-shirt en route to my 9th place finish in Event #35 at the 2011 World Series of Poker!

2011-06-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

Debunking the importance of GDP

2011-06-10T13:14:00.000-07:00

What is GDP and why is it so important? From investopedia.com:

The gross domestic product (GDP) is one the primary indicators used to gauge the health of a country's economy. It represents the total dollar value of all goods and services produced over a specific time period - you can think of it as the size of the economy.

How GDP is measured from www.bea.gov:

First, GDP can be measured as the sum of expenditures, or purchases, by final users. This is known as the expenditures approach (and is illustrated by the formula familiar to students of economics: GDP = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + eXports – iMports)

I hope to demonstrate that the components used in the GDP formula to represent the total dollar value of all goods and services produced in an economy are, in fact, disconnected from the underlying value that they are purporting to reveal.

I've never been a fan of the GDP statistic as an accurate indicator of the health of an economy. Ignoring the quite valid reason that the statistic itself may be manipulated by the reporting agency, there has always been what appears to be a structural flaw in its very nature.

The component which I have always held as being suspect is government spending (G). Previously my criticisms of this G component in the GDP equation was that it did not accurately represent wealth as government spending is arbitrary and oftentimes used for destructive ends such as wars etc. However, this objection can be somewhat countered by the claim that government spending provides public goods (such as national defense etc.) that do in fact increase the wealth of an economy.

Now to counter this claim by attacking the notion that military spending increases the wealth of the economy as a whole, implicitly suggests that G would be an accurate indicator of increased wealth if its underlying actions were wealth-creating. While this is still a very valid criticism of government spending, there remains an additional and perhaps even more fatal critique of the quality of G in the G + I + C = GDP formula. This critique being that G itself, by definition, is not analogous to C (consumer spending) as an indicator of wealth.

To see why, we first have to understand why spending at all can be considered a measure of wealth. Upon reflecting on this matter, we realize it has to do with prices (specifically market prices) and the information that they convey. Whereas one finds his lot improved by the purchase of 5 wheelbarrows at the market price of 10 dollars a wheelbarrow, we can conclude the individual, and thus the economy as a whole, is wealthier to the tune of the utility that 50 dollars in spending has granted him, specifically the subjective value of the additional 5 wheelbarrows. Moreover the spending of 50 dollars represents the creation of these 5 wheelbarrows and of course the additional utility they grant, hence why they were purchased. This is the key. Wealth is not measured simply by the dollar amount of spending. Wealth comes from the goods and services provided in exchange for money. This is why spending matters and is accurate as an indicator of wealth. If any part of this process is diluted, the quality of spending as an accurate indicator of wealth diminishes greatly.

So why does consumer spending work well in this regard, where government spending fails? The answer lies in the prices. In a free market, all participants are subject to the profit and loss test. Namely, if one consistently spends more than he earns, he eventually becomes bankrupt and removed from the market altogether. In order to prevent this "death by free-market" one must learn to generate a profit; which is done by allocating resources efficiently. As all market participants engage with one another in this task, prices emerge for all the various goods and services within the economy that reflect their valuation to the economy as a whole (the price of course being derived both from the subjective valuation of the good as measured against the scarcity of the good, put more simply: supply versus demand).

This is precisely what gives prices such significance in the measuring of value. They have emerged organically as beacons of information about both the relative scarcity of the good contrasted with the market's intensity of demand. Thus, when we look at all of the spending that has occurred within an economy, we are provided with an aggregate of the wealth or utility that is gained precisely because the prices used to comprise "C", are prices that emerged from the free market and under the profit and loss test.

Government spending is a measure of spending that occurs outside of this profit and loss test. Since government and only government is in the unique position of being able to exist via taxation and the printing of money, it is not constrained by the profit and loss test and thus routinely overbids for goods. This results in government spending being less accurate as a measure of true wealth and value of the underlying goods purchased as the prices paid tend to be always higher than the existing market prices. Some examples include paying 200k to design a website and so on. I'm sure everyone has their own favorite anecdote of absurd government spending.

Consequently, all the interwoven factors that result in the prices that emerge within the free market and enabling spending to be an accurate measure of wealth, are completely manipulated if not outright destroyed under government spending. This inherent nature of government spending and its direct contrast with all that makes consumer spending meaningful in the first place is why G is a corrupted and inaccurate measure of wealth, and consequently the GDP = G + I + C formula is invalid when used as such.

Said another way, consumer spending is meaningful because it is very closely, if not exactly, accurate as a reflection of the underlying value of the goods purchased (produced). Conversely, government spending is significantly less accurate as a measure of wealth because its correlation to the underlying value of goods purchased is much weaker due to the lack of a constraint on spending and thus a tendency to overpay (sometimes quite drastically!) for goods and services.

Follow @GrimHogun

Some thoughts on the fallacy of representative government

2011-05-26T11:42:00.000-07:00

So I am reading an article in the NYT about the recent Republican healthcare plan. Ignoring the plan itself and all surrounding issues I want to briefly touch on one aspect of the article that I found quite revealing. Now remember this is about a vote on a Medicare bill. Rightly or wrongly, I am sure everyone would agree that the issue of Medicare and healthcare in general is about taking care of elderly people, more specifically taking care of elderly people when they are ill. Now on to the quote from the article I want to discuss:

Others still, like George Allen, a Republican candidate for Senate in Virginia, appear to be trying to suss out where the political minefields are, and refuse to say if they support the plan or not.

This is such a non-controversial statement that the article rightly pays no more attention to it, other than mentioning why some congressman have yet to declare their stance on this bill. That is to say, it is a given that politicians make their decisions based on political incentives as opposed to the content of the bill itself.

So here is what I find fascinating. No one will find anything I have written so far even remotely interesting or original. Politicians don't vote on bills based on the merits of the bill itself, but instead based on political incentives. This is common knowledge and widely accepted to be true, even by ardent supporters of government.

So my question is, how does a system comprised of thousands of people making decisions based solely on political incentives spit out results that are supposedly in the best interest of the people? In this particular example those people whom government is supposedly taking care of is elderly people in need of medical attention.

Yet the merits of the bill that will totally overhaul and define the mandatory nationwide healthcare plan that will affect virtually every senior citizen has almost nothing to do with whether or not a particular politician votes for it. Do you see the problem here?

Is Rollback the most important book of our time?

2011-05-16T21:25:00.000-07:00

That's obviously impossible to say, but the lessons learned from it are of paramount importance to every living person on this planet.

For now I want to focus on one small subsection of Chapter 5 of the book, "Less Bang for the Buck: Pentagon Spending, the Military, and the U.S. Economy."

Specifically what I found so illuminating about this part of Dr. Thomas Woods' overall fantastic new book, Rollback, is the unseen costs of Pentagon spending, the military, and its effects on the U.S. economy as a whole.

It is common knowledge that there is a tremendous amount of waste associated with military spending. Even the most ardent supporters of big government don't contest this point, but rather say the associated inefficiencies and waste endemic to the nature of military spending are a necessary sacrifice for the greater good of a strong military. While I will not delve into combating that argument now, I do want to highlight how Dr. Woods' new book demonstrates with shocking clarity that the unseen costs of military spending is so much greater than one can even comprehend.

Drawing from the great Frederic Bastiat's essay, "What is Seen and What Is Not Seen" Woods documents the destruction of capital, productivity, and resources that stems from our current military-industrial complex. Some examples include things like: "Over a period of two years, the average U.S. motorist uses about as much fuel as does a single F-16 training jet in less than an hour."

The most disturbing cost of military spending in my view however, is the capital consumption. Dr. Woods outlines how as a result of decades of Pentagon spending pushing up the cost of producer goods such as machine making tools, the productivity of the economy as a whole falters. This should be fairly straightforward to grasp, but mind numbing to truly comprehend its total effect. When the costs for new capital and improved means of production rises, entrepreneurs whom don't have access to the taxpayer derived spigot of funds, will tend to delay or eschew purchasing the new forms of capital as their budgetary needs require.

The result of this, to have an economy using decades-old infrastructure, delaying upgrading machinery to more productive models, is felt everywhere. The economy as a whole is made poorer. Innovation and new products that otherwise would have been created are never seen. The average worker sees his marginal productivity value and thus wages, rise slower than they would have otherwise. It goes on and on.

This phenomenon makes perfect sense when you realize that by driving up the cost of capital and machine-tool prices, production everywhere, not just in military, is going to see its cost rise. The trickle down effect that is a result of this is truly incalculable.

I've long known that government and the military in specific is a giant parasite on productive wealth, I've never before truly grasped the magnitude of the unseen costs as well though. Rollback peels back the curtain to expose this, and many other aspects of government that leaves the reader feeling dazed and left to ponder what riches we might have uncovered if this enormous cost was not forced upon the taxpayer and our society as a whole.

For more information and even to be able to read Chapter 1 for free, please visit: http://www.tomwoods.com/books/rollback/

Chaos Theory!

2011-05-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Bloomberg Businessweek is out with an article titled, "The Arms Race Against the Pirates." This article reads like a real world example of how the free market would deal with the problems of police and security in a world absent of any government whatsoever, as outlined in the short book, Chaos Theory, by Robert Murphy.

The article is really a very interesting read and highlights how in the absence of any government provided protection in 2.8 million square miles of ocean, insurance companies provided the impetus for innovation in the market for security and protection. A quote from the article:

To deal with this 21st century version of an ancient threat, ship owners, often at the behest of their insurers, have resorted to tactics old and new-from razor wire, fie hoses, and safe rooms to long range acoustic devices, laser dazzlers, and, most recently, armed guards.

I mean I thought the idea of a sonic gun that propels sound waves that can incapacitate your enemy was only something that exists in Spiderman comics!

The statist might now remark on how the burden for providing for this protection is unfairly placed onto the innocent ship owners. Let's continue reading:

In the eyes of insurers, however, there is no equal to the threat of lethal force. Says Clive Stoddart, global head for kidnap and ransom for Aon Risk Solutions insurance brokerage: "There really is no substitute for having a weapon: live ammunition carried by people who have the right training." Marsh's Gustafson states the case simply: "Not one ship has been taken that has an armed security team on board." For a tanker transiting high-risk waters, an armed, four-person security detail costs about $30,000. That's expensive, but insurers are willing to discount premiums by as much as $20,000 for ships that use them, says Catlin underwriter Stuart Allen. Catlin's Dobbs relays the report of one security firm: In 1,000 transits through treacherous waters there were 90 encounters with pirates. Seventy-two were resolved simply by showing arms. Of the remaining 18, three were deterred by warning shots fired into the air, and 15 by single shots fired near the pirate vessel.

So again we see Dr. Murphy's hypothesis that it would be insurance companies that would bear most of the cost and provide the most effective forms of policing and security. Their reasons for doing so are simple and based on the one certainty we know of human action, self-interest. That is to say, simply due to their own self interest to not have to pay out massive insurance claims, it is in the insurance companies best interest to provide discounts and incentives for ships that are more secure and thus less likely to be robbed, than their counterparts. Unfortunately the article ends by bringing us back to reality and reminding us the brilliance of the free market is still not appreciated even when it rises up and slaps you in the face with a giant sonic cannon. Referring to the ultra effective armed security detail that had emerged spontaneously with no central planning required, the article closes out with the following quote:

"There aren't enough of these guys to protect the ships," says Frodl. "And by the time you start hiring guys to fill in the void, you're going to get guys who really aren't qualified for the job."

Well, that's one possibility. Or, and bear with me here, quite possibly the increased demand for high level security personnel could result in greater pay for said security personnel. Which then leads to more people becoming interested in this profession to fill this alleged void that those whom have not fully grasped the workings of the market appear to be concerned with.

Damn, it's good to be an anarchist!

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Representing the LvMI!

2011-04-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

Ya that's me rocking a Murray Rothbard "Enemy of the State" t-shirt from mises.org on national TV!

The Absurdity of Intellectual Property and Anti-Trust

2011-03-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

The fiction we are all taught in grade school is that without the government giant evil monopolies would emerge that would exploit the consumer and rule with an iron fist. The reality is there has never been one example of a free-market created monopoly in the history of mankind. Appallingly, alleged examples of "free-market" monopolies, such as Standard Oil, are actually companies that achieved their monopolistic position through government assistance, and then maintained it by government regulations and interventions into the marketplace stifling competition.

Proceeding as such, eventually it was decided the government needed to prevent monopolies from emerging and thus formed the Anti-Trust division. This arm of the government has never been used for anything other than to benefit 2nd or 3rd place companies whom were unable to match the success of the current industry leader through natural free market methods (I.e. improving quality of product and/or lowering price) and instead turned to the Anti-Trust department to dismantle the company that has met the consumer's needs most efficiently instead. One of the most famous examples of this was the non-monopoly of Microsoft which was accused of the non-crime of giving away their product for free by rivals whom were unable to compete.

A new business is taking the business world by storm by the name of Groupon. They have skyrocketed to a rumored 25 billion dollar valuation in under 3 years. Their idea is essentially offering discounts for products and services where demand is typically below average. Meals at restaurants during non-peak hours etc. Their biggest obstacle right now is that their idea is extremely easy to copy. Already there are several competitors that have sprouted up. To combat this they are in process of applying for a patent for their idea. Their idea being offering coupons to use services. In order to prevent a monopoly from occurring, multiple competitors have sprung up. The only way they can make money is to please the consumer. The race to the top of the profit charts is simultaneously a race to please the consumer the most efficiently. In order to prevent this process Groupon turns to the State patent office. Can we please patent the idea of offering coupons in this unique way so that others cannot?

The justification for Intellectual Property and Anti-Trust relies on a fiction that is exactly opposite from reality.

More examples of government failures as measured according to their own stated goals!

2011-02-07T17:02:00.000-08:00

The most recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has two stories that I find rather illuminating. The first one we will address is in their Global Economics section titled, "While the Rich Splurge, The Rest Hold Back." This article documents how despite the recent soaring stock market back to its 2008 levels and government economic statistics telling us that we are in the midst of a great recovery and everything the government has done worked just as planned, reality paints a much bleaker picture.

Before I discuss the contents of the article, I want to preface this by saying the point I am trying to make here is that the government fails at accomplishing its own goals when measured by its own yardstick. I will not emphasize how their policy goals even if successfully achieved would actually cause more harm than good, as a result of their failure to understand sound economics. I will simply show that even on their own merits their policies fail to achieve their own desired outcome.

Mainstream economics and consequently the U.S. government have a flawed understanding of economics and the world. They believe that spending drives the economy. This is backwards. But we will leave that explanation to www.mises.org for now. Believing that the economy thrives and is based off of total consumption and consumer spending, the economic policy in favor is one to flood the markets with as much newly created money as possible, with the hopes that this money will reach the consumer, he will spend it, and presto! fixed economy.

One might recall during the whopping 48 hours before TARP was passed and it was being debated, that people rightly pointed out that the average middle class taxpayer was being forced to bail out the giant banks on Wall Street. Our friends at the government did not attempt to deny this, instead they justified it by saying that without saving the banks the economy as a whole would collapse. Presumably because there would be no one to fuel the debt based consumer economy we have become and thus without giant banks making giant loans to consumers, consumer spending would fall and the economy as a whole would fall right along with it.

In a nutshell, we have to pay to bail the banks out now, so that later we can go back to spending up a storm and boost our economy back up.

So let's see how that plan worked. Remember, this is actually totally backwards. Savings, not spending (especially debt-based spending!) is the lifeblood of an economy. But nonetheless let's see how their actions fared couched in their own framework.

According to the previously mentioned article, "Wealthy shoppers are bolstering the recovery-and masking the reduction of many less affluent Americans to join in. Sales are up at Tiffany and Coach, thanks to demand for $6,000 diamond pendants and $1,200 leather handbags as a stock market surge pads the wallets of the rich."
However, for the average consumer spending has not seen any increase in all. Wal-Mart Stores reports "that many of its customers are still living paycheck to paycheck."

Now this is the part I love about shredding the myth of Big Government. The modern day fascist party, otherwise known as liberals, constantly ballyhoo about the theoretical problems that could potentially occur if we ever dared to have a free market. One of the biggest problems is the disparity between the rich and the poor. (Ironically that problem has been growing alongside the growth of the very same government that is supposed to stop it.) Yet here we have a blatant theft of millions of middle and lower middle class working people's tax money to bail out the banks and devalue the currency to produce a rebound in the stock market in nominal terms, so that the elite rich can increase their purchased of diamond pendants and luxury handbags. Meanwhile if we check back in with the suckers who paid for this bailout, well they are still living paycheck to paycheck, so sadly Wal-Mart can not report the same increase in sales that Coach and Tiffany can.

In your efforts to prevent an economically illiterate myth that the free market punishes the poor, (which unfortunately for them all of recorded human history actually shows the exact opposite, in fact there has been nothing in all of mankind's existence that has benefited the poor more so than the free market. I know facts suck.) you have empowered a government to manifest the worst version of that thing you so desperately claim to want to prevent. The rich fleecing the poor. I don't know how one could fail on any grander of a scale. Hopefully if any supporter of government based on the belief that big government helps the working class, accepts reality and sees the actual effects it has, they will be inclined to pick up a copy of Economics in One Lesson and perhaps think of ways that actually help working class people, and not hurt them instead.

I will address the second article in my next blog post.

Cheating in online poker

2010-10-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

Just got email from Full Tilt Poker notifying me they will be sending me a refund for xxx dollars because they determined some of the opponents I had played against were cheating. They further stated the cheating accounts had 100% of their money seized, accounts closed, lifetime banned, and in the event they not enough money was found in the cheaters account to fully compensate all the victims, FTP would do so out of their pocket.

Wait a minute but there is no government regulation agency using a gun to force them to do this, so therefore this story could not possibly be true! For if it were and private firms were capable of operating in such a manner to best satisfy all of the consumers wants as a result of free market forces, then what again is the justification for government imposed regulations backed by the threat of force and violence? And the justification for government's role in....scary independent thought lies ahead of this train, be warned!

PS. I actually have been winning on FTP recently and had no idea I had been cheated at any point until today when I received a nice check in the mail from FTP themselves! Feels like Christmas or whatever the equivalent of that is for a devout anarchist like myself!

PPS. Hi from Costa Rica!

Where modern pro-interventionist intellectuals make a bizarre wrong turn

2010-07-23T17:11:00.000-07:00

I am reading an interview with the brilliant scholar and current University of Princeton professor, Cornel West. I am familiar with Professor West from appearances he has made on the Bill Maher show and other television programs. I enjoyed his commentary and found him to be a remarkably intelligent person and this interview does nothing to disprove that. In fact what got me so interested and prompted this blog post was some extremely insightful commentary he made regarding modern social conditions that I would like to share with you now:

West: "What's worse is there's less available love in Black America. If I were born today, I'd have a soul sickness. I think that's true for the country as a whole...They (his students) haven't experienced love in any deep sense. They don't know how to love themselves or one another in a way that empowers or nourishes the spirit. They're used to more fleeting interactions, stimulation, titillation rather than deep nourishment."

Interviewer: So as the song goes, where is the love?

West: "Hey, man, it went to the market. It was devoured by corporate strategies and tactics that caught fire in the Reagan administration and continue to burn in the age of Obama....The problem is, we've lived in a kind of ice age these past 30 years or so, and that's hard to rise out of. The age of Reagan began in 1981. The idolizing of the market, the unleashing of the market, the promotion of an unregulated market stared even earlier, with Carter in 1977...So you end up with 30 years of blanketing every nook and cranny of the culture with free-market fundamentalism."

I see this time and time again from brilliant people. Just a total departure from logic, reason, and factual information when they begin to espouse their views on economics and the market. I find it particularly striking in the above interview because I think his comments on the nature of today's youth are extremely poignant and insightful, yet he then literally comes to the conclusion that the cause of this is from corporations. Or profits. Or preaching free-markets etc. I mean I don't even know how to reconcile these two statements. It's like while transitioning to his explanation on why the current state of affairs is so depressing his brain got temporarily disabled and he just blurted out one of the more bizarre and ridiculous conclusions possible. "Because the corporations made us worship greed." It's hard to take that seriously. Yet he is a serious man, with a tremendous amount of intelligence and sadly for the working class and poor people he and those like him are trying to help, he is far from alone.

I don't really want to go into detail about how his facts are wrong and that we never had a free market, and that the supposedly wild and crazy deregulation that took place under Reagan that he cites as the source of these "30 years of free market fundamentalism" saw government GROW IN SIZE under his administration. You would think that government was reduced to unprecedented sizes not seen since the 1800s by the way they make it sound. But no, this wild and untamed free market was a period in which government actually grew in size. But again I really don't want to waste time explaining how far removed from reality the average perception of history and government's role in history is, I just found it extremely paradoxical that one could make such a penetrating insight on human condition and then conclude the reason for such a complex and far reaching social paradigm shift was because corporations made us all greedy.

As I think a bit more deeply about it, it actually makes a degree of sense. It is not quite as abstractly idiotic of a statement that I first thought it was. It is important to remember that when one believes in intervention and State control, their is also a strong belief in the inability of the people. There is a simultaneous belief in the lack of society to organize itself properly, to do what is "in the best public interest", or to even adopt the best values and belief systems and so forth. As such, when one holds these things to be true, I suppose it is not totally absurd to think that the reason for the current flaws in society (that they view as a ball of clay to be molded by the State), is that the State was not given enough power to do its job properly and therefore some evil entity (in this case corporations) imputed these negative characteristics upon the defenseless people whom had but no choice to acquiesce and take the shape of lonely people devoid of experiencing deep emotions.

It's not the most appealing viewpoint when you take the time to break down its foundation and the various implications associated with an interventionist policy. I suppose that is why you never see it done...

I happen to feel Cornel West's conclusion is overly simplistic and wrong. I would expect the true cause to be a much more complex scenario. One in which personal responsibility and ownership would play a more prominent role. The hundreds of millions of interactions that occur within the free market to contribute to shaping the final product we refer to as society today is an extremely complex process and it seems myopic to attempt to point to one event or one entity as the primary cause for any particular trend of characteristic present in society. I strongly doubt Cornel West or any similar intellectual would ever make such a mistake if they were analyzing any other subject matter besides that of politics and sociology, a field in which the greatness of the democratic State has been ingrained so deeply that one is more likely to encounter anti-free market zealots than unbiased, objective, and rational analysis.

Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review

2010-05-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald continues to keep my faith in humanity alive. His most recent article is below:

Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review
by Glenn Greenwald

Few issues highlight Barack Obama's extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush’s most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world -- far away from any battlefield -- and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court. Back in the day, this was called "Bush's legal black hole." In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo. Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention.

Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram -- including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. Amazingly, the Bush DOJ -- in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention -- contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind. In other words, the detainee's Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged. One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team."

Read the rest here: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/21/bagram/index.html

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Great exposition of liberal hypocrisy on race

2010-05-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

One of the beautiful things that I love about libertarianism is its logical consistency. Part of the reason I began to take an interest in an alternative to the liberal or conservative viewpoint to being with was precisely because of the enormous amount of hypocrisies that seemed to be entrenched in both ideologies.

Jacob G. Hornberger whom is the founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation recently wrote a beautiful and concise piece highlighting one of these hypocrisies, specifically the liberal hypocrisy on race.

To examine into this latest instance of liberal hypocrisy on race, let’s delve into a few basics.

Suppose a certain white homeowner in a community publicly announces that he is holding a weekly TGIF cocktail party at his home every Friday night. He publicly invites everyone who lives within a one-mile radius of his home to his parties, but with a big exception. He says: Blacks and Jews are not invited and will not be permitted into his home.

How would libertarians respond? We would say that that man has every right in the world to take that position. We might criticize him, we might condemn him, we might ignore him, we might boycott his parties. But we would defend his right to discriminate against anyone he wants, as a matter of principle. After all, we would argue, it’s his home — his private property. To paraphrase Voltaire, we might not agree with how he uses his property, but we would defend his right to use it any way he wants. That’s what private ownership and a free society are all about.

How would liberals respond to that hypothetical? They would take the same position as libertarians! They would say that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to keep anyone he wants, even on racial grounds, from his home. They would defend the homeowner’s fundamental right to associate with anyone he wants, even if his choices are abhorrent and offensive to everyone else. They would not call on amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to apply it to private homeowners.

What? Could this actually be possible? Could liberals actually be defending the right of a bigot to be a bigot in his own home? Wouldn’t this make a liberal himself a bigot? After all, isn’t that what liberals claim about people who call for the right of discrimination in private businesses — that their support of such a right makes them a closet or overt bigot?

Liberals would respond, “No, we’re not bigots simply because we support the right of homeowners to discriminate against blacks, Jews, Catholics, Hispanics, the poor, and anyone else. We simply believe in the principle of private ownership of one’s home and we’re willing to defend that principle, even when homeowners make racist choices.”

Well, then why don’t liberals extend that reasoning to people who support the right of private business owners to discriminate? Why are they so quick to claim that they’re not bigots when they stand on principle when it comes to the right of homeowners to discriminate but so quick to label libertarians who call for the same principle to be applied to business owners as racists and bigots?

Like I say, two-faced and hypocritical.

Full article is here.

Regarding recent attacks on libertarianism

2010-05-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

There is a piece on salon.com written by someone whose economic and political ignorance is so outstanding it borders on legitimate delusion, that I am not sure it is really worth the time to address. Unfortunately, it has become clear the author of this piece, Gabriel Winant, is not alone in his delusional understanding of the world and thus I will try and spend as little time as possible addressing his truly bizarre recent article.

The title of his piece is, "The lesson of Rand Paul: libertarianism is juvenile." Despite such a title he never even attempts an effort at demonstrating that Rand Paul has anything to do with his conclusion that libertarianism is juvenile. He touches on some recent criticism of Rand Paul stemming from his comments that not all of the civil rights legislation passed was appropriate.

Rand Paul is of course addressing the fact that government does not have the right to determine what private property owners do with their own property. Rand Paul never suggests that the Civil Rights legislation is a bad thing or should be repealed. Quite the contrary. He accurately understands that part of the reason the Civil Rights legislation is a good, is that it undoes government created evil. The entire reason we needed a Civil Rights Act to be passed was precisely to repeal all the GOVERNMENT-CREATED racist laws that were on the books. I always find it comical when historical ignoramuses proclaim of the greatness of the State by citing the Civil Rights Act when in reality that is actually one of the strongest arguments one can make for libertarianism. Start this video at the 3 minute and 8 second mark for some more comments on this area: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhgy0ymD-NI#t=3m08s

Go ahead and watch the clip, it is only 55 seconds long and worth seeing before reading this any further.

Let us now turn our attention to some interesting passages from Gabriel Winant's article that I think do a great job of reflecting just how close to legitimate delusional psychosis he is. It never ceases to amaze me seeing how fantastically polar opposite from reality one's understanding of the world around them is, while simultaneously they believe so strongly that they are right, that they have the gall to suggest it is lunacy to think otherwise. Let's take a look:

"To summarize very briefly a long and complicated process, we got capitalism in the first place through a long process of flirtation between governments on the one hand, and bankers and merchants on the other, culminating in the Industrial Revolution. What libertarians revere as an eternal, holy truth is in fact, in the grand scheme of human history, quite young. And if they'd just stop worshiping for a minute, they'd notice the parents hovering in the background."

It is hard to know where to begin. I suppose we should start with the fact that he simply just decided to rewrite the definition of capitalism to support his argument. I don't know exactly how to attack this. There appears to be two possible derailments on the train to logic here. Either he simply does not know what capitalism is (which is certainly quite possible) and thinks capitalism is the past 150 years of America or some other random abstract time period based on who knows what criterion; or his understanding of history is utterly flawed.

The reality of the situation of course is that the free market and capitalism existed since the first time one group of people focused on collecting berries to trade with the other group of people whom focused on hunting and acquiring meat. Capitalism which to be clear, is the free market, has existed since before recorded history. If you want to understand which allowed the other to be, there would never have been a civilization advanced enough for the monstrosity of government to be conceived had there not been capitalism. Capitalism continues to work in spite of government.

Government regulates, suppresses, and strangles productive enterprise. If one were to study history, the most rich and advanced societies, those places that serves the poor and middle class best are precisely those with as little government as possible. Think the most libertarian nation ever conceived for instance, United States of America. Take some time to read the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States of America and one might start to recognize there has never been a people who despised big government as much as Americans. It of course is no coincidence that for the first 150 years or so this libertarian country which proudly boasted less government than any other nation on the world, made room for capitalism to work and thus produced the most powerful and wealthiest nation in the world. Previously profitable (which is defined as being aptly able to meet the needs of consumers efficiently) businesses go bankrupt year after year as the ever increasing burden of adhering and paying for all forms of various entangling government regulation, not to mention direct taxation, strangle the lifeblood from them. Yet in spite of this, CAPITALISM prevails. Think WalMart, think of the Internet, satellite tv, cell phones so forth.

People tend to blame WalMart for the demise of the mom and pop store. There is a great documentary on this very topic called, "Walmart: The High Cost of Low Prices." That documentary also reaches the conclusion that WalMart is to blame. Yet watch the video. If you do, you will find all the complaints sound a lot like, "I couldn't afford to keep paying the taxes and cost of getting a license was just too much etc etc." The free-market created WalMart precisely to cure the drought soon to be created as a result of government's strangulation on small businesses. In addition the corporate tax structure greatly benefit large corporations like Walmart as opposed to the mom and pop stores. Who is responsible for this? Are we still going to try and blame the free market for the demise of the mom and pop stores because the government created a set of rules (taxation) and gave the advantage to corporations? I mean how far on the crazy train does one have to go to not correctly asses blame where it belongs here. And that of course is squarely at the feet of government intervention.

"Get it? The government didn't just help make the "free market" in the first place -- although it did do that. It's also constantly busy trimming around the edges, maintaining the thing, keeping it healthy. The state can think ahead and balance competing interests in a way that no single company can."

I must bow and extend a tip of the hat to Mr. Gabriel Winant for this. I am truly impressed with his ability to get two different, yet both absolutely breathtakingly absurd and ass-backwards statements about the world in such a small space. And as the sign of all true ignoramuses makes such stupendously facetious claims with absolute certitude without even the slightest suggestions of attempting to validate them. I am now asking myself, why have I decided to even waste my time responding to such rubbish, but I suppose it's too late to stop now.

I am not even going to mock and/or correct his statement that the government created the free market. If any reader of this blog (all 3 of you!) thinks that is accurate, I can't imagine I could reach them anyway. I think every remotely thinking individual understands that property, trade, division of labor, and so forth existed well before government. I mean think about what he is saying. Man crawls out of the stone age. Man begins to hunt and gather. Man encounters other man with different gatherings. Trade emerges. Wait no! Government was hovering about them the whole time (disturbingly I want to say "like a God" but have just realized that Gabriel Winant and people whom think like him, probably really do feel the State is God.) and only until the Government decrees, "Let there be trade" were we fortunate enough to allow the oh-so benevolent State to have created the free market. Crazy pills for everyone I guess?

On to sentence two. I can't believe I somehow got sucked into defending an attack on libertarianism by a guy who genuinely does not know what capitalism or the free market is, and now apparently does not know what the State is. God I'm a sucker.

"The state can think ahead and balance competing interests in a way that no single company can."

I don't know if this is the single most incorrect statement arrogantly presented as fact in his article, but it has got to be up there. The State is not god. It is not an omniscient value-free morally superior entity. The State is a group of people. The only difference between the group of people whom comprise the State and those whom comprise the free-market is their respective motives. The people in the free-market have self-interest as their motive. The seek to make profit. Thankfully the only way profit can be made is by satisfying a great number of wants and desires of the people around you. Hmmm, this might be on to something here.

The group of people who comprise the State are also motivated by self-interest. Their political self-interest is a bit different in that they never need to turn a profit (remember this means serve the consumer efficiently) by producing any goods or services. Instead their self-interests are to get elected or re-elected. At which point thanks to outrageously corrupt and unfair salary and benefits structure they are financially compensated quite nicely with truly exceptional benefits and health care packages all of course paid by institutionalized theft via taxation.

He writes, he actually wrote "the state can balance competing interests." Yes, if by balance competing interests you mean serve those who lobby hardest and are most likely to aid in serving your political career best. Wow. I think I have to stop. It's so bad. Oh ya and then he ends his piece by saying libertarians are selfish and racist, just some not all guys!, and libertarianism as a philosphy is bratty.

I think he does a better job of insulting and embarrassing himself though his own words than I ever could.

Are today's democrats simply totalitarians in disguise?

2010-03-08T17:03:00.000-08:00

Before I knew anything about political theory, political history, economic theory, economic history, monetarism, and finance/banking, I considered myself a democrat for no other reason than because my parents and family were. Also during the only years I was even remotely interested in politics happened to coincide with the 8 years of the Bush presidency. As such I enjoyed watching Real Time w/ Bill Maher because I thought, and still think, hes a pretty smart guy who would call out Bush on all his warmongering and deficit spending while doing so in a funny and entertaining manner.

I'm watching an episode right now, and its unfortunate that one of my favorite television shows has become a source of irritation and something I literally can no longer even sit through as a result of my recent education in the aforementioned subjects. Anyways I want to quote something he said that I believe is a fairly accurate representation of the mindset behind the modern liberal viewpoint.

Bill Maher: "Michael, you are a champion of the people. Yet, before your film premiered the majority of people supported the public option for health care. Now several months later, an overwhelming majority of the people oppose it. So what do you do when the people don't want what's good for them?"

The great irony and tragedy for someone like myself observing this process is that those on the left whom feel this way and are genuinely more intelligent than the "people" they are planning for, are making decisions in fields where despite their intellectual superiority as a whole, they are just as ignorant of as the common people they view as so beneath them.

So to be clear as to what I am saying. I think the modern left are nothing but closeted totalitarians whom believe in democracy and "representatives" as long as those in power act to use their power to subject the minority and people as a whole to their personal vision of what is best. I think there is a tragic error amongst those intellectuals whom believe their overall higher level of intelligence is in some way a legitimate foundation to make decisions on subject matters and in fields in which they are either totally ignorant of or horribly misinformed.

So this leaves me sitting on my couch watching Bill Maher and his guests lament over the present condition of how people are too stupid to understand what is good for them. And I remember identifying with them, because they talked like I did, they were intelligent, and it was fun being in the cool guys club of being a smart person in a country of dolts. Now its just so painfully bizarre to watch the intellectuals bemoan about how the people are too stupid to know what's good for them, and yet their total ignorance on the topics they are discussing leaves them with an apparently obvious solution that in reality is more destructive than the problem they are trying to cure.

Not to mention the slight moral and ethical problem that comes with being a totalitarian and deciding what is in the best interest of other people. The level of hypocrisy associated with such actions while claiming to be supporters of a system of democracy or the fallacy of political representation is also particularly impressive.

Haha, a guest just said to Bill Maher, "ya, but if everyone pulled their money out of the big banks at the same time, all the banks would fail." Bill Maher, "Really?"

Yes Bill, really. If you are going to lecture on how the government needs to regulate the banks more, and the bailouts were necessary, but the banks should just be less greedy and all the other fairly tales people talk about when discussing banking. It may be helpful to try and learn the basics and fundamentals of the system of banking we use. Hint: it is fractional reserve banking. Read for a day or two. Now you see that literally all banks under the current government mandated system of banking are insolvent. All banks are insolvent. All of them. How would one get the mighty too big to fail banks to go belly up? By having the depositors of the banks ask for their money back! What a sinister and evil plot?!

Maybe the problem is not that banks will fail if people ask for their money back, but I dunno maybe the fact that the banks don't have their customers money and print money out of thin air? Maybe, just maybe....Nah I'm just a nut job I'm sure there's nothing sinister about that process. I'm sure like all other modern governmental creations, central banking and fractional reserve banking was designed by a large group of enormously altruistic bankers to help the lower and middle class avoid the dreaded liquidity trap! Yup, that makes so much sense...

Peter Schiff on how government drives up college tuition

2009-10-31T13:40:00.000-07:00

Very good analysis on how the best of intentions and programs that otherwise seem wildly beneficial are in fact both failures, according to the goals set by those whom originally enacted the programs, and the cause of vastly worse problems than the initial deficiencies they were set out to alleviate.

Video Blog here.

Jake Towne for Congress!

2009-10-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

It all clicked when Jake informed me that he was a graduate of the 2009 Mises University Class. Ah...so that's why I agree and am impressed with virtually every article or stance you have on political and economic issues! The man knows his stuff. For those interested in supporting a real liberty-minded candidate with concrete solutions to the abhorrent problems of our current interventionist economic and foreign policies be sure to check out his website, sign up, and get involved in the discussions.

www.towneforcongress.com

The irony of granting the State enough power to prevent "free-market monopolies."

2009-10-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

Tom DiLorenzo wrote a fantastic paper titled, "The Myth of the Natural Monopoly" which shows that the instances generally referred to as examples of how monopolies can occur in the free-market, and thus we need government to protect us from this, were all actually government-created monopolies in one form or another. Murray Rothbard contends that not only has there never been an instance of a free-market monopoly, but also that there never even could be a monopoly that emerges on the market without the assistance or intervention of government in some way.

Anyways, this is relevant to my post today because I always find it hilarious when supporters of the State cite monopolies as their greatest fear of a free-market system. Therefore let's create the most massive monopoly known to man in the form of the State, to protect us from the possibility of a smaller monopoly that could theoretically one day emerge if we left the market unchecked. Well there are other problems besides the redundant theoretic ones with this solution. Not least of which is the State can be used in manners not originally intended (shocking, I know!) See recent events, or the article below for one example of these "unfortunate side effects" to the legalizing of a monopoly known as the State.

"In October of last year, a Goldman Sachs Vice President, Neel Kashkari, was named by former Goldman CEO and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Pauslon to oversee the$700 billion TARP bailout. In January of this year, Tim Geithner hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, to be his top aide and Chief of Staff. In March, President Obama nominated Goldman Sachs executive Gary Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures markets, even though (or "because") Gensler confessed to lax regulation during the Clinton administration over the very derivative instruments that caused the financial crisis. In April, Goldman hired as its top lobbyist Michael Paese, the top aide to Rep. Barney Frank on the House Financial Services Committee which Frank chairs."

"The bailout of AIG -- which resulted in massive federal government monies to Goldman -- was engineered at a meeting between Paulson, Geithner and Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Last year, Goldman paid top Obama economics adviser Larry Summers $135,000 for a one-day visit to Goldman."

The full article is absolutely mind blowing reading:
Another Goldman executive named to key government post as its profits skyrocket.

"Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito."

2009-09-25T15:21:00.000-07:00

Mises would be proud, Congressman Paul. For 26 years his request for a hearing on the Federal Reserve was denied and buried in the corruption-laden bureaucratic abortion of a republic that is the United States Congress. Today with a mind blowing 295 co-sponsors of the bill, he gets his hearing. Few men could persevere so vigilantly for 26 long and lonely years with no end in sight, we owe much to the heroism of Ron Paul.

Feel free to watch only the first five minutes of the hearing below to verify my accusations of deliberate manipulation to deny Ron Paul his hearing, as explained by Chairman Rep. Barney Frank.
House Financial Services Cmte. Hearing on Regulatory Overhaul

Afterthought. There is this illusion of representation or power that the citizen has over his government under democracy. Obviously this is a horribly mistaken concept and has been dis-proven quite thoroughly in a variety of forms, perhaps best in Democracy: The God That Failed by Hans Herman Hoppe PhD. However, even if one is not familiar with such concepts, if an elected official, such as Congressman Ron Paul can be so completely ignored for 26 years, how effective really is this concept of political representation for those of us whom aren't in Congress?

Schools Kill Creativity

2009-09-10T21:37:00.000-07:00

My wonderful friend Jenna shared this video with me and I wanted to post it here because I feel it is of monumental importance.

Capital Theory and some comments regarding the supremacy of the Austrian School of Economics.

2009-09-04T17:01:00.000-07:00

Keynes "Paradox of Thrift" states that if saving increases, there is a decrease in consumption. This is correct. If there is a decrease in consumption, retailers have unsold inventories on their store shelves etc. This is also correct. As a result of these newly created excess inventories in light of a shift away from consumption and toward savings, the retailers will devote less resources to investment not more. Thus the paradox of thrift where saving destroys the economy by reducing consumption, which in turn leads to a reduction in production, and so on and so on until either the government prints enough money to stimulate consumer spending back up, or the economy dies. My paraphrasing of John Maynard Keynes from his "General Theory of Economics." (1936)

Represented in the formulaic aggregate Keynes created: GDP = C + I + G, (where "I" represents investment, C is consumer spending, and G is government spending) one can justifiably come to this conclusion of the paradox of thrift.

Austrians Attack!

So if the Austrians do not view investment as the unit, I, and plug it into a formula as one lump sum, how do they view it? They view it as a structure of production. Specifically a Hayekian Triangle. Where Investment is broken down into stages; early stage production might be research and development or operating an ocean mining rig for oil, end stage production could be the gasoline station that sells the converted oil as gasoline or the CVS that sells the drug created in research and development, and all the various stages of production in between make up the middle areas of the triangle. So what does this mean regarding Keynes "paradox of thrift?" Well most of what he said is correct. But since he fails to view investment in stages, he is unable to realize that because investment in retail goods is constantly falling as a result of reduced consumption, this does not mean total investment is falling. In fact, as a result of this increased savings, the interest rate will fall. This will have the effect of increasing early stages of production in the investment triangle, namely stages of investment that are far away from the final project and take years to complete and are highly sensitive to the changes in the interest rate.

The Austrian or I should say, the correct view of capital and investment as a structure, not as a simple aggregate, allows us to understand why a reduction in consumption and an increase in savings does not result in catastrophic failure for the economy, but rather simply shifts investment from one end of the production process (late stage) to other areas (early and middle stages). In fact, this increase in the earlier stages of production will lead to an increasingly more efficient and sustainable growth in the economy than would have otherwise been possible, had the previous level of consumption to investment been maintained.

I find it quite absurd that was seems so apparently obvious and simple to me and virtually everyone I've discussed this concept with, namely that capital exists in stages of production and is not one giant homogeneous blob, is apparently radical thinking when you compare it to the mainstream and Keynesian school of thought. It seems as if it has become so desperate to apply mathematics to the science of human action, their theory is littered with massive amounts of truly debilitating and fundamental errors such as their misunderstanding of the nature of capital theory, their position to claim with total certainty that it was impossible to have both high inflation and rising unemployment simultaneously (this "impossibility" occurred in the US during the 70's and is now known as stagflation), their backwards understanding of the nature of money, to support and advocate Nixon's severing the last ties of gold to the US dollar, while forecasting a drop in price of gold from 35 dollars an ounce to 6 dollars an ounce as they believed it was the dollar that gave gold its value, not the other way around...Their total inability to forecast the current crisis, and more so not than just failing to predict it, but to be so misinformed to have made comments to the effects that "the era of recessions are over" and the "US economy is stronger than ever" "housing growth is supported by solid fundamentals" and so on as recently as a few months before the recession hit.

And these are the top economists! The head of the FED, the US Treasury secretary, Nobel Prize winning economists, and they all fail and fail and fail and get reappointed to their positions of power anyway. I can assure you in the free market that those whom are so terrible at forecasting are not rewarded with continued employment and gain, but are swiftly removed from the marketplace altogether. Yet, this is the essence of Government in a nutshell. Deny the profit and loss system. Remove yourself from the restrictions of having to engage in voluntary and thus mutually beneficial exchange, and instead substitute it for force and government decree. The result, widespread incompetence to the point that it is no longer even recognized as such by the majority.

F.A. Hayek speaking on the government created monopoly of monetary policy and production said "that is a system in which we can never again hope to get good money." That was over 50 years ago, and the story remains the same. The Austrians got it right, go on being ignored and marginalized, mainstream economics produce failures of truly catastrophic measures and the very same people whom created the errors are now being turned to as our saviors.I don't see how such a system can ever again restore our nation to one of true prosperity and sustainable growth.

For a more thorough and in depth analysis of the importance of capital theory, from one of the great modern day Austrian Economists please check out Robert Murphy's fantastic article.

To view the PowerPoint slides I mentioned, which are extraordinarily illuminating and are a must viewing if one is interested in this material and is unfamiliar with what exactly a "Hayekian Triangle" is, click on the link titled "The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle" here.

A Free Market Perspective on the Online Poker Industry

2009-08-22T15:03:00.000-07:00

I play online poker for a living. I recently lost a large sum of money as one of the sites I played on, Eurolinx, revealed itself to be of a dubious nature, to say the least, and quietly went bankrupt taking with it all the funds of players accounts held on the site. Without going too much into the details I want to look at this from a free-market perspective. First of all let me make one thing perfectly clear, this loss suffered is my fault. I trusted Eurolinx with my money, they proved to be untrustworthy and now I suffer the consequences. No argument there. I just want to examine the current competitve landscape of the industry and perhaps offer a solution to a superior one.

The situation as it stands right now can very easily be considered and compared to Prohibition. The United States of America's Federal Government has decided to stand alone from the rest of the world's major governments in actively trying to ban online gambling. Similarly to Prohibition simply saying you are no longer allowed to partake in this good, does not eliminate the demand for it. Things are made even more complicated given that the current legislature is muddled, unclear, and widely misinterpreted. However, the reaction to a government's decree that a good is no longer allowed is not unclear but rather is exactly what a student of history would have precisely predicted; we head "underground."

This underground or black market is notorious for being unsafe and filled with all sorts of unsavory characters. However the laws of Economics can not be repealed, no matter how desperately government tries to pretend that they can, and as such as long as there is sufficient demand there will be an attempt to satisfy that demand. Unfortunately for the consumers in these underground markets, the suppliers are oftentimes not of the highest quality that they might otherwise be. I feel the average reader probably understands that pitfalls of the black market well enough, so I will not digress further into extrapolating on this topic, but instead let us imagine an industry in which we require the government to simply do nothing and stay away, a free market industry.

I think the first immediate effect of the Federal Government repealing its laws banning online poker and then doing nothing else, would be that a tremendous amount of new US-based poker sites would begin to crop up, and the current sites would experience a greater volume of players. A common objection I hear to my proposal of removing the government completing from any industry is summed up with the question, "Well, what would keep us safe?" I feel this notion is a result of a lack of proper research and analysis and more a result of what I consider to be the spreading of misinformation and propaganda, namely that without the government we would be lost. If one tackles this subject of the history of regulation, it becomes immediately apparent that the private sector is quite adapt at handling this task, and the public sector (government) is notorious for its staggering failures and inadequacies. For those interested in this subject, a great starting off point is this fantastic article.

Now here is where we get to watch the beauty of the free market do its work. Once the freedom is restored to engage in both playing and providing the service to play online poker, we would expect to see an immediate rise in the number of US based poker rooms. The first great thing about this, is the choices of poker rooms based in your own country, whose jurisdiction you are familiar with, increases drastically. And of course when a consumer is presented with a variety of choices, the laws of competition rewards him with a better product at a cheaper price. In this example, the cheaper price may not be immediately evident but certainly the higher quality product would be. For if demand remains high for a poker site that is safe, financially sound, trusted, etc. all the new poker rooms would be scrambling to meet these demands, and those whom were better at meeting them, that is to say, those that are financially sound, that demonstrate reliability and security would prosper, and those that weren't, would fail.

The private sector would even respond to the demand to create an online poker regulatory body. Obviously if financial stability, legitimacy, security and so forth are such big issues for consumers they will express it through their choices and sites certified as reputable by a well known and respected regulatory body would attract many more customers than their competitors. This of course provides profit incentive for competing regulatory bodies to become the most trusted etc, and reap the benefits of selling these coveted marks of certification to the numerous online poker rooms desperately seeking to satisfy the wants of their consumers. Through the eyes of one versed in free market economics we see our friend, profit, reemerge not as a negative concept, but rather as the unifying force which guides the efficient allocation of resources to satisfy the wants and needs of the consumer. Truly, consumer sovereignty is an appropriate term.

Of course, this does not suggest that in a free market there would never be bankruptcies or losses that occur from them and so forth, it simply suggests that far from needing the government we rather need to get rid of the government, in the poker industry. And as the astute reader might have thought to himself by now, you could easily apply this to virtually all forms of industry. Professor Walter Block makes the argument that privatization is superior to government in literally everything.

Regarding Government "Stimulus"

2009-08-20T23:11:00.000-07:00

I put stimulus in quotes because its a horrible misnomer and in fact is a major drain on the economy as opposed to ever offering any real stimulus. The most recent example is indicative of the single greatest and underlying error made in virtually all aspects of government stimulus programs. Which is to ignore Henry Hazlitt's one lesson and not look at the effects on all groups for both the short and long term, but simply focusing on the immediate effects of a policy on one specific group.

President Barack Obama and administration officials declared the program a success Thursday, saying it has revitalized the ailing auto industry and finally brought reluctant car buyers back to dealership lots. Originally a $1 billion program, Cash for Clunkers was boosted to $3 billion in early August after heavy customer demand nearly depleted its funds in just one week.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the program has been "a lifeline to the automobile industry, jump starting a major sector of the economy and putting people back to work." He said the department was "working toward an orderly wind down of this very popular program."

Now please let me know if you disagree with my understanding of this program and its alleged stimulus effects. The car industry is producing more cars than there is demand for. As a result of a lack of demand, the car industry must reduce its production to better align it to satisfy the actual demand for cars. This of course entails shutting down inefficient showrooms, laying off workers, and all the unfortunate negative events that come with a reduction in any industry. Stopping there, and not tracing things further, the government, and apparently the layman, view this as a net negative. People are getting laid off - this is bad! Of course, if we trace it further we realize that to attempt to prop up through artificial means (government deficit spending in this case) the inflated demand for cars to an inaccurately high level we are simply delaying this eventual reallocation of resources. While also either devaluing our currency through inflation, adding to the national debt, or both! If instead we allow this healthy and necessary liquidation of resources to occur, we free them up to be used in a productive and efficient manner to produce goods or services that there is legitimate demand for.

Which to be clear, is to say, allow them to create goods people want, instead of artificially allowing them to overproduce goods that there is not legitimate demand, or at least less demand for, than alternative goods.

In addition we are also increasing our debt while we are at it, both for the Federal Government (which is really the taxpayer as the government's debt will eventually paid for by us through either direct taxation or indirect taxation of inflation), and newly created personal debt for the marginal buyers of these cars whom could not afford to buy them without government assistance.

Viewed in this light, one immediately realizes that while if we look only at one specific group in the immediate term, (being the car industry) we see a stimulus. Yet once we broaden our view to encompass the economy as a whole as well as the long term effects, we see that far from providing legitimate stimulus we are in fact amplifying the original problems and aggressively preventing the necessary and healthy corrections that would otherwise occur in a truly unhampered free market.

WWII did not bring us out of the great depression: like all acts of destruction it made us poorer.

2009-06-21T00:46:00.000-07:00

By now you should understand what caused the stock market crash of 1929. Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) - the Federal Reserve had created an artificial and unsustainable bubble which would eventually have to crash. You have 2 choices: never stop inflating the money supply and run the risk of hyperinflation higher and higher until it becomes inevitable, or you stop inflating the money supply, at which point the artificially created and unsustainable boom period or bubble comes down. The coming down effect is viewed as a crash. This is again because people are unable to clearly trace the effects of policies enacted in the past and only react to what is happening to them at this moment. It is not really a crash, depression, or a recession, but rather a healthy and necessary liquidation of unsound misguided investments. It is a process that is akin to taking medicine. It may not be pleasant tasting or enjoyable but it should be embraced not desperately avoided at all costs.

After the stock market crash of 1929 the market would have rebalanced itself shortly thereafter in the next 1-2 years. Unfortunately the policies of Hoover (massive government intervention) and then followed by FDR (even greater intervention) and his New Deal government spending, wage rate manipulation, creation of federal programs, and the literal destruction of food and crops to keep supply low and profits high for farmers, "farmer-relief programs" while US citizens were on the brink of starvation, had the effect of worsening to a great degree the severity of the Great Depression and extending its lifespan by an estimated 12-15 years longer. In April 1939 a full decade after the stock market collapse and FDR's mighty government interventionist and spending policy the New Deal had 8 years to take effect, FDR's closest adviser and the current US Secretary of Treasury, Henry Morgenthau gave the following quote:

"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong.... somebody else can have my job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started... And an enormous debt to boot!"

So now you should understand the second fallacy that is passed off as economic history and fact, that FDR's New Deal saved us from the Great Depression, and of course this is the reasoning behind doing the exact same thing today with Obama's Administration.

The third fallacy which I have always known is wrong as I understand the broken window fallacy, is that despite all this failing we eventually are pulled out of the Great Depression by World War II some nearly 20 years later in the mid to late 1940s.

This is completely false. I threw a rock through your store window. The window repairman now has employment and 20 dollars more money he can spend on other goods and services as a result of my action. My actions resulted in economic improvement! This is also false. For what one needs to look at is the 20 dollars you lost on the window. You didn’t demand or desire a new window. You needed one. Let us not confuse demand with need. You were quite content with the window you had and the 20 dollars in your pocket you were planning to spend on a new suit! Now I break your window. You pay 20 dollars for the new window, and are made whole. Except now you have one less suit and are that much poorer as a result. Let us look further at what else happens, but is so often neglected as it is not immediately visible to the naked eye. The tailor whom which you were going to purchase your suit from, now has lost your business and the 20 dollars he would have made. So all the benefits the window repairman gained are simply the ones the tailor has lost out on. You, where before my destructive act, would have had both a window and a suit, now simply have a window. The economy as well as the victim of this act of destruction are poorer as a whole. A fairly simple and easy to understand concept, that seems to get twisted around when it comes to massive destruction, namely War.

Oftentimes we rely on government-provided statistics to tell us about the conditions of life and the health of the economy in the past, however in some cases these statistics can be misleading and in most cases they rarely tell the full story. Because if one were to look at the statistics it sure does look like the World War pulls us out of our depression. We now see how misleading these statistics really are. Let's focus first on Unemployment, then moving to GDP. Unemployment falls during war. Why? Well there were 100 men out of work, then there was a draft for 150 men. Now not only is there no unemployment we need workers so badly we are hiring women for the first time ever in factories! Great economy America! Those 100 workers however are not working in the army by choice. It is not their preferred avenue of employment. They also are not getting a meaningful wage for their work. They also are experiencing an increasingly higher possibility of sudden death, maiming, disfigurement, or mental and psychological injury and trauma, than they would have if they got a job selling hot dogs. They are also not providing the American economy with a good or service. Such as making suits or selling hot dogs, they are instead killing foreigners, this does not make our economy richer. Yet if we look at the stats, what a prosperous nation we are during this wartime, with barely any unemployment at all!

Statistic number 2, GDP, the gross domestic product. Our GDP rises during the war as well. Low unemployment, high GDP, wacky Rob is wrong again what a prosperous nation we have become. What is the GDP? Total spending by consumers, businesses, foreigners, and the government. Hint: I left the best for last there. Immediately we should see a serious problem with this statistic. So government spending skyrockets during the war, meaning our debt is skyrocketing as well, since it's the only way the government can increase their spending, and our GDP skyrockets right along with it! Well so what, spending is spending, as a Keynesian whom has returned from his intellectual decapitation in 1972 as an annoying zombie might say, why is government spending so bad? Well quite simply because government spending is much less likely to find the best product for the best price. I direct you to MTV's super sweet 16 tv show, where spoiled rich girls will frequently make less than prudent investments and buy some purse no matter what the price or how effective it is, simply because she has access to an infinite supply of funds. So here we quickly see that 1 billion in government spending can not be equally compared to being as beneficial to the economy as 1 billion in private spending, which further casts the impact of an increasing GDP stat into more and more dubious light.

So now we see that despite the popular belief to the contrary, the entry into the world's second war, did not give us economic prosperity. We can also see that the old adage, "those whom do not know history are doomed to repeat it" could not be more applicable than to our current situation as we are literally going through the motions all over again just as we did 80 years ago...

[This post was inspired by reading Dr. Robert Murphy's phenomenal new book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal"]