Pagan Vigil "Because LIBERTY demands more than just black or white"

Mon - June 30, 2008

The KYFHO Gambit, or How libertarians Have Already Won (without realizing it)

*Originally this entry was going to be posted February 12, but life interfered. So here it is, suitably updated.

For quite some time, I have been telling people that an ever expansive and oppressive government is NECESSARY. Just like that, in bold and capital letters. We're talking about history here. More specifically, we're talking American history here.

We're also talking about the death throes of large scale central government. And we the people have ringside seats.

Over the last three or four decades, more people have realized that no matter what the promises, government can not deliver lasting social change. Every single time government interferes, things get worse. Public schools, housing, medical care, retirement, taxes, Prohibition, the War On Drugs, civil rights…

What's that you say? Government did deliver on civil rights?

No, it didn't.

Government reacted to what people were demanding and then took credit for the change. No act of Congress made those protest marches possible. No Presidential executive order opened the lunch counter at Woolworth. And no judge overturned the Jim Crow laws. It was only when people stood up for themselves and others saw that human rights were being denied that government changed the law.

The changes in law came after the fact, not before.

Before the fact, we had Malcom X and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Afterwards, we had Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

In 2000 and 2004, I would tell people that George W. Bush was NECESSARY. In bold capital letters, just like that. Just as Bill Clinton before him was NECESSARY. And so on, and so forth, and back to at least George Washington himself.

Each Congressman, each Senator, and each President elected in American history KNEW that the job of government was to wield power over the citizens. Oh, they all had good reasons for the things that they did. Sometimes they even did the right things at the right times, even if it wasn't for the right reasons. But they knew that more government ALWAYS came at the cost of someone's freedom.

Until recently, people have been lulled to sleep because it would always be the other guy who had to pay. But now we've passed the tipping point. The effective people have realized that government is a no-win proposition. It always demands more than it can deliver.

By effective people, I don't mean a democratic majority. I don't mean the elected or appointed "leaders." I don't mean the representatives of some institution. I mean the all the individuals whose daily decisions influence all those around them, even if they aren't "in charge."

Who is it who decides which orange juice sells well this month? Who is it who decides which movie gets the box office magic after the second or third week? Who is it who decides which charity deserves their help? Who is it who decides which street is more popular?

There are a million and one decisions built into each person's day. Most people go through life on autopilot and do what they've always done. But every once in a while, someone sees a better way and takes it. The effectives spread the word about the better way.

It's the result of individual choice. Hundreds, thousands, millions of choices. Those choices can't be controlled. They can be influenced, but never controlled. You see, no one knows beforehand who the effectives will be in any given situation. And the effectives for fashion probably aren't the same ones for car mechanics. Or breakfast cereal. Or summer reading lists.

It's Adam Smith's invisible hand.

And it is applying to politics in a big way this year.

Not because of some carefully stated philosophy. Not because of a telegenic candidate. Not because of carefully harvested sound bites. Not because of government at all.

But because people have seen what happens when government keeps expanding, and the effectives have decided not to do it anymore.

They don't want government.

Keep Your Freakin' Hands Off.

So yes, the political game is great fun this year. We've already seen one of the biggest and nastiest political machines ever derailed, possibly permanently. But who is running and even who's elected is less fun than who wins.

We do.

The rest is just gravy.

Posted Mon - June 30, 2008 at 05:02 AM in

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Tue - January 22, 2008

Obama sucker-punched by Clintons

I don't usually quote a whole entry from another site. But Tammy Bruce is dead on with this analysis.

As long as he decides to deal with Bill Clinton directly he allows pictures and stories like this to dominate the campaign, which is exactly what the Clintons want. When people see a pic like this, and then they see the Clinton name on the ballot, they think they might as well be voting for Bill, handing Hillary another victory. Just like the race argument, which he fell into, which isolates Obama as a single-issue race candidate, Barack Obama has dived right into this new Clinton trap. And if he is going to address Bill directly, he needs to be extremely aggressive. You wouldn't approach a rapid bull with gentility, now would you?

This is the same stuff that the Clintons (and ESPECIALLY Bill) have been pulling for years. I don't particularly like (or trust) Bill Clinton, but there are two areas where he has no equal in modern politics. One is networking, and the other is mudslinging. Obama will have to end this fast and with a knock-out punch if he wants the nomination.

My question remains, why does Hillary Clinton have to run from her husband's coat pocket. Do we really need a president who could only be elected because enough Americans bought the premise that this would be a continuation of Bill Clinton's presidency?

This reminds me of the old joke from 1992 about "Billary." And that was told by Democrats.

Posted Tue - January 22, 2008 at 09:57 PM in

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Once again demonstrating her total lack of practical economics

You know, I've been trying not to pick on Hillary. These days it's too easy a shot. But sometimes, she makes it necessary. I don't know if you saw this one from a few days ago.

"I have a plan - a moratorium on foreclosures for 90 days [and] freezing interest rates for five years, which I think we should do immediately," Clinton announced at what was the last Democratic debate before the Nevada Caucus on Jan. 19. A 90-day moratorium on foreclosures would throw a lifeline to some deserving homeowners, though I suspect it would only delay the inevitable for most. That's not my beef.

Where Clinton goes awry is her proposal to freeze mortgage rates for five years, which is essentially a much broader version of a deal President Bush recently hammered out with lenders to assist some subprime borrowers. If Clinton's only goal were to bail out homeowners facing steep rate resets on adjustable mortgages, her plan would work just fine.

For everyone else though, such a freeze would be disastrous. Interest rates on new mortgages would skyrocket - perhaps past 8 percent, as the mutual funds, pension funds and other investors who typically provide capital to the mortgage market shift their money into other investments where the government isn't impairing returns. With higher mortgage rates eroding buying power, the downward pressure on home prices would only increase. Lower home prices would lead to even more defaults, as more folks who'd lost the equity in their homes choose to walk away from their mortgages.

Government controlling the economy. Golly, where have we heard that one before? Do you really suppose Hillary Clinton knows what's best for a free market?

Of course, she did do well with those cattle futures...

She doesn't stop with defaulted mortgages. The Senator proudly proclaims just how much further she would go. Emphasis added.

Mrs. Clinton, whose campaign initiated the interview, can speak in both fine detail and sweeping historical terms about the economy — almost as would a policy adviser, which she essentially was for a long time. When talking about the middle class, she divides the decades since World War II into two periods, using the same cutoff point that many economists do.

In the first period, from 1946 to 1973, the pay of most workers rose steadily. The income of the median family — the one earning less than half of all other families and more than half of all others — more than doubled during those years, to almost $50,000, in inflation-adjusted terms, according to Census Bureau data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal group in Washington.

Since 1973, the income of the median family has grown only about 25 percent.

During the earlier period, Mrs. Clinton said, the share of workers in labor unions grew, allowing workers to win raises and benefits that they can rarely win on their own. Marginal tax rates on the affluent were “confiscatory” by today’s standards, she said. (In the early 1970s, the top rate, which applied to income above $1 million in today’s terms, was 70 percent; the top rate now is 35 percent.)

Jobs once paid enough that only one parent in many families needed to work, saving them from expenses like day care. And not only did the federal government invest in public goods like the highway system, but companies also invested more in communities than they do today. In Rochester, for example, Kodak helped build hospitals and schools.

“You had a corporate ethos, that, because of the more self-contained American economy, was really focused on community,” Mrs. Clinton said. “There was a sense of multiple obligations. It wasn’t just to one’s shareholders. It was also to one’s employees, to one’s community.”

Mrs. Clinton mentioned technological change, which has eliminated the need for many blue-collar jobs, as well as global trade, which studies suggest may be holding down the wages of some Americans.

But when discussing the causes of the middle-class wage slowdown, she tends to focus not on market-based changes, like technology and trade, but on institutions, like unions and the government.

For someone who is supposedly so qualified, she's missed the obvious. Government's "control" (read mismanagement) of the American economy exploded in the 1970s.

That might have just a tiny bit to do with the shifting economic forces.

Posted at 12:20 PM in

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"Behave yourself and don't hit your sister"

"Libertarianism is what your mom taught you: behave yourself and don't hit your sister. "
— Dr. Kenneth Bisson

One of the simplest (and best) definitions I have ever seen. We libertarians can be pretentious, it's good to know that some of us can be refreshingly direct.

Posted at 04:41 AM in

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Mon - January 21, 2008

This isn't MLK's dream

Today is Martin Luther King Day. Aside from the implications that this holiday has had in Arizona, I have special reasons to mark this day.

I believe that the assassinations of Dr. King and Malcolm X marked a radical shift in the American civil rights movement, a Jonbar hinge if you will.

Before the assassinations, the movement was about equal opportunity.

AFTERWARDS, civil rights was about preferential treatment for a particular group.

While this can seem attractive, over time it weakens. The perception is that "they" can't succeed without government help, even among the beneficiaries themselves.

I can think of no better way to destroy a movement and demoralize people.

Think about it. If the only way you can win is if the game is stacked in your favor, will you really even try to do anything except making sure that the rules favor you as much as possible?

Isn't that saying that you aren't fully human? That you can't be responsible no matter what advantages you are given?

I mourn this day. Not for Dr. King, who was human and very definitely not the saint he is portrayed as today. Not for Malcolm X, who for most of his time as an activist was every bit as racist as those he fought against.

No, I mourn the Dream. The Dream of What Could Have Been. The Dream before the movement was hijacked by small minded opportunists who could only profit by victimhood and guilt.

“Those are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other.”
— Sojourner Truth

I won't fight for civil rights as preferential treatment.

I will fight for human rights. That is the only fight that matters.

Posted Mon - January 21, 2008 at 03:01 PM in

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Alternately destroying the environment

I've nothing to say here. But I will point. Emphasis added.

Using biofuels made from corn, sugar cane and soy could have a greater environmental impact than burning fossil fuels, according to experts. Although the fuels themselves emit fewer greenhouse gases, they all have higher costs in terms of biodiversity loss and destruction of farmland.

The problems of climate change and the rising cost of oil have led to a race to develop environmentally-friendly biofuels, such as palm oil or ethanol derived from corn and sugar cane. The EU has proposed that 10% of all fuel used in transport should come from biofuels by 2020 and the emerging global market is expected to be worth billions of dollars a year.

But the new fuels have attracted controversy. "Regardless of how effective sugar cane is for producing ethanol, its benefits quickly diminish if carbon-rich tropical forests are being razed to make the sugar cane fields, thereby causing vast greenhouse-gas emission increases," Jörn Scharlemann and William Laurance, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, write in Science today.

"Such comparisons become even more lopsided if the full environmental benefits of tropical forests - for example, for biodiversity conservation, hydrological functioning, and soil protection - are included."

Efforts to work out which crops are most environmentally friendly have, until now, focused only on the amount of greenhouse gases a fuel emits when it is burned. Scharlemann and Laurance highlighted a more comprehensive method, developed by Rainer Zah of the Empa Research Institute in Switzerland, that can take total environmental impacts - such as loss of forests and farmland and effects on biodiversity - into account.

In a study of 26 biofuels the Swiss method showed that 21 fuels reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 30% compared with gasoline when burned. But almost half of the biofuels, a total of 12, had greater total environmental impacts than fossil fuels. These included economically-significant fuels such as US corn ethanol, Brazilian sugar cane ethanol and soy diesel, and Malaysian palm-oil diesel. Biofuels that fared best were those produced from waste products such as recycled cooking oil, as well as ethanol from grass or wood.

Climate change isn't really the problem. Government interference in the free market, that is the problem. Especially when it hides the real costs.

Posted at 02:37 PM in

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The new third rail of American politics

Victor Davis Hanson wrote another great piece on The Messy Politics of Illegal Immigration.

Some time ago, supporters of open borders lost the debate. The majority of Americans want them closed -- now! They ignore the tired slurs like "anti-immigrant," "racist," "protectionist" and "nativist." And noisy May Day parades with Mexican flags and heated rhetoric from the National Council of La Raza ("The Race") only turn more people off.

It doesn't do any good, either, for a Mexico City functionary to cry about how mean we are to want a secure border with Mexico. Most Americans also tuned that out long ago.

They know instead that Mexico cares mostly about sending north those it won't or can't feed and house -- so it can skim off from them billions in remittances once they arrive in the United States.
Mexico City, of course, could reform the country's laws and economy whenever it wants. But it changes only enough to draw in tourists or Americans looking to buy vacation homes, not to better the lives of millions of its mestizo poor in the heartland.

The spin masters may think illegal immigration is an issue that pits conservative Republicans against liberal Democrats. But it doesn't always.

Nowadays, worry about illegal immigration is just as likely to mean that African-Americans are terrified of racist alien gangs in Los Angeles. Asian-Americans are frustrated that their relatives with college degrees wait years to emigrate legally, while thousands without high-school diplomas to the south simply break the law to enter the United States.

And many Mexican-Americans are probably tired of being expected to defend the indefensible of foreign nationals breaking immigration laws simply because they may share an ethnic heritage with illegal aliens.

Great article, you should read the whole thing.

My biggest frustration is that the banner of civil rights is used to excuse behavior from illegals that Americans wouldn't tolerate from anyone else. If an illegal commits a violent crime, I want them deported now. I want to be able to debate La Raza without being called a racist.

If someone immigrates here, I don't think it is too much to ask that they respect the rule of law.

Posted at 02:31 PM in

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No skip video ads

More proof that Micro$oft is indeed customer focused.

But their customers are not their user base.

Microsoft files for no-skip video ad patent. Emphasis added.

Microsoft is attempting to secure a patent for technology that would prevent users from skipping ads in downloaded videos, according to a new filing with the US Patent Office. The technique would insert a digital rights management (DRM) token inside the file that would prevent users from playing the intended video until relevant ads are viewed. It would also allow a content producer to insert ads into a downloaded video at its own discretion.

When it comes to digital rights, Micro$oft sells fear to the content providers. That lets Apple eat their lunch just by focusing on the end user.

Customer choice means the free market always wins.

Posted at 02:21 PM in

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State senator goes after video games

I'm clearing out my scrubbots and even I can't believe all that I find. Like this headline.

Wisconsin Senator Wants to Tax Consoles and Games to Pay for Juvenile Delinquent Rehab Programs

He knows that he doesn't dare BAN those objectionable games, so he tries a backdoor entry.

What if Wisconsin raised taxes on liquor to pay for legislative salaries?

Of course, we know that there is no link between adult beverages and politico stupidity. At least none that has been proven yet.

But why take the chance?

Another example of government authority used against those least likely to resist.

Posted at 02:03 PM in

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Wiretaps pulled because of unpaid bills

What happens when you combine unrestrained government power. arrogance, corruption, and the free market?

Someone doesn't get paid.

And the FBI loses it's wiretaps.

Liberty lives to fight another day.

Posted at 01:53 PM in

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Tue - January 15, 2008

Huckabee is desperate

You have to laugh.

There is no way that people would stand for this. It would drag on for years, possibly decades. It would polarize this nation as few things would.

Time for the handy dandy parity test.

Do you think Mike Huckabee would agree to live under the tenants of my faith?

Why should the law of the land be amended to force me to live under his?

No wonder the guy is not playing in Peoria.

Posted Tue - January 15, 2008 at 10:51 PM in

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Paul's liberty isn't - Updated

A couple of weeks ago, I was commenting on global warming misinformation on a popular Pagan site. Take a real close look at some of the comments. Now this isn't the first, the fiftieth, or the five hundredth time I've been told that I am not a "real Pagan" (read True Believer™) because I don't think humans are dooming the Earth through global warming.

Any time someone trots out their choice as The Only Acceptable Choice, I get nervous. Too many bad memories of some of my more enthusiastic evangelical Christian relatives. What's worse is when they "tolerate" you, but ONLY if you keep quiet and don't dissent from the Unquestioned Dogma.

I've seen this behavior my whole life, and I have been fighting it for most of my adulthood.

And that brings us to Ron Paul.

Paul himself is populist, not libertarian. When his positions coincide with liberty, it's more accident than commitment. Even then, he wants "his crowd" to be first in line. I've particular issues with his assumption that Christians are responsible for liberty and the rest of us only "get to sit at the big table" because of the tolerance of those selfsame and oh-so-humble Christians. We're supposed to do what we are told, be on our best behavior, and never, EVER put our bare feet in the mashed potatoes.

This is codswallop. The United States is not a Christian nation. "Christian" principles were only part of the founding. And don't get me started about the origin of those "Christian" ideas.

The point is, I have a place at the table no matter what Ron Paul deigns to grant me. It's not his table. He can't kick me out. If he doesn't like it, tough. I don't need his permission. Too much of what Paul says and writes reminds me of Orwell's Animal Farm. "All animals are equal, some are more equal than others."

That's why it bothers me when Paul's followers take it on themselves to declare who is and who is not a real libertarian. It's a pattern that's all too familiar. I may not be the target this time, that doesn't mean I can ignore it.

As Sunni pointed out, we don't need a hero sanctified by this or that group. What the libertarian movement REALLY needs is a bunch of pissed off individualists who demand to be left alone and who are willing to fight for that.

After all, that is how it all started.

The only reason I indulge my passion for politics is because I really want to be left alone. I don't want someone telling me who are the right people to associate with, what the right foods are to eat, and if I can put my dirty feet in my mashed potatoes.

Now we might have a problem if I put my feet in YOUR mashed potatoes, but as long as it is mine. it's my choice.

KYFHO, now and forever.

UPDATE: A reader sent me some email criticism.

By calling Ron Paul a populist, am I doing the same thing that I accuse the True Believers™ of doing?

You see, individuals have rights.

Groups have membership.

If you look at Ron Paul's writings, he almost always defines rights as something that his particular group doesn't have.

He's not talking about individual liberty, he's pushing group preferences. His entire campaign has been about attacking the "bad" groups while praising the "good" groups. That's populism, pure and simple.

It's also why I am not surprised about the racist writings, no matter who the author is.

Posted at 05:25 AM in

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Apple flakes discourage blogging

I didn't plan on going away, but...

I know that sounds flaky.

Since I posted here last, I have been busy. I had a trip to Vegas for an impromptu wedding (not mine), a trip to Tucson to settle some legal issues, and a trip to Colorado to scout out land. Add the holidays and a forty-something birthday (that I refuse to acknowledge publicly and wish other people wouldn't either which means NO MORE PARTIES), not to mention the job-that-pays-the-bills and the usual family obligations, and I have been stretched.

Last week the storms moving through knocked out high speed internet and mobile phone service for most of Northern Arizona for a couple of days, and things were shaky until Friday.

I've also had a corrupted calendar file to fix on my laptop, and some hard disk issues. Every time I would use iBlog, my trusty iBook would freeze. That can discourage anyone from blogging. The iMac is still waiting on a cooling fan to be shipped.

Despite what Apple says some of the time, even Macintosh hard drives can get fragmented. This can make your computer act flaky, unfriendly, and very unMac-like.

There will be light blogging the next couple of days to make sure I have things fixed, then I will ramp up to speed.

Posted at 05:15 AM in

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"Pull over so we can fingerprint you."

Climate computer models flawed

FBI database threatens your freedom

Not a bright idea

Let us pray, but only to an acceptable god

Forgot to post this freedom banner the other day - UPDATED

Just a Girl in short shorts tells us again that "Democrats knew"

Iranian students turn up the pressure

It will be harder to find a mortgage

Chavez doesn't trust the Venezuela voters