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Sigh…

October 1, 2016

This cartoon comes via "A (Sadly Short) List of Admirable Foreign Leaders" at Dan Mitchell’s International Liberty blog. There are some good choices on Dan’s list.

stevebreen-leader-you-respect

Now I like Gary Johnson’s and Bill Weld’s positions for the most part; certainly I like them more than I like their competitors’ positions.

But there are days when I wish Johnson would kick his game up a notch or two. Maybe he could take some advice from Matt Welch? (My emphasis.)

Gary Johnson Has an ‘Aleppo Moment’ (His Unfortunate Words) on MSNBC

Right before I interviewed him at the Libertarian National Convention in May and again before his CNN townhall in June, Gary Johnson made the same odd comment to me (this is a paraphrase): “Matt, I’m so sorry that it’s me up there defending libertarian ideas instead of you people who have been speaking about it so eloquently for so long!” He made a similar comment to longtime Libertarian activists just after accepting their nomination in Orlando. Aside from being an expression of his endearing-for-a-politician humility, the pre-apologies pointed to a central paradox of the Johnson campaign: His strategy has been laser-focused on getting into the presidential debates, and yet as a communicator, he is uneven, goofy around the edges, and prone to the occasional WTF moment.

Oh sure, you can come up with some caveats and whataboutisms here. I don’t know who my favorite foreign leader is either! NPR and Salon and all the rest are unfairly mischaracterizing this as Johnson being “unable to name a foreign leader”! There’s scant evidence that the voting public cares about foreign-policy gotcha moments, particularly in this of all campaign seasons! Also, what about Hillary Clinton’s warmongering and Donald Trump’s incoherent Mideast bluster!

All of that may be interesting, but it doesn’t change the fact that Gary Johnson screwed up bigly here, because this is who Gary Johnson is. A partial list of self-inflicted errors in this exchange: […]

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Promises, promises

September 30, 2016

I like this guy’s clever signs. If only we could find someone to deliver on his campaign promises.

campaigning-panhandler-2

H.T. Paul B

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"Get a government job," they said

September 25, 2016

The pension shortfall in Illinois – at $111 billion (highest in the U.S.) – dwarfs Oregon’s problem.

But this news is surprising because recent reports showed Oregon’s pension funds in better shape than most states’ fundss

Isn’t that curious? How many more ‘surprises’ like Oregon’s will be discovered?

Oregon officials face truth behind state’s soaring public pension costs
‘It’s a little bit like a Ponzi scheme,’ the chair of the Oregon Investment Council says

PORTLAND — Just how bad is Oregon’s public pension funding crisis?

Bad enough that Rukaiyah Adams, the normally polished investment professional who is vice chair of the Oregon Investment Council, broke down in tears last week as she spoke of passing a record $22 billion in unfunded promises to future taxpayers.

“My call to the Legislature and to the governor is for leadership on this, and I mean right now,” Adams said during last Wednesday’s joint meeting of the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System board and the citizen panel that oversees its investments. “This is becoming a moral issue. We can’t just talk about numbers anymore.”

The numbers are bleak. Oregon’s pension system owes billions of dollars more to retirees than it has, and the last major attempt to fix the problem was shot down in courts.

This month, cities, school districts and others will find out how much more they’ll pay to help prop up the system. Higher pension costs could come at the expense of funding for other needs, including social services, infrastructure investments and education programs. […]

“We’re beyond crisis,” Katy Durant, chair of the Oregon Investment Council, said in an interview after last week’s meeting. “We should have been addressing this 20 years ago and it’s just been building. It’s a little bit like a Ponzi scheme. Sooner or later it’s going to catch up with you.”

Pension reform has been a topic at the Reason Foundation for some time now. Here’s a recent post at reason.com about pensions in California. (My emphasis below.)

Pension Mess Can’t Go On; That’s No Reason to Ignore It

President Richard Nixon’s economic adviser, the late Herbert Stein, still is known for his dictum: “If something cannot go on forever, it won’t.” It should be the rallying cry for California’s pension reformers. The numbers don’t lie, they say. Services are being cut to pay for oversized pensions, they note. Something must be done because the debt cannot keep growing forever.

They’re right. And it won’t go on forever. It can’t go on forever. At some point, even the most dogged public-pension defenders will realize the gravy train—six-figure guaranteed lifetime pensions inflated by myriad spiking gimmicks—will end because the math must catch up with the wishful thinking.

New York and Chicago already pay for more retired cops than for officers patrolling the streets. Some cities have gone belly up, with Stockton and Vallejo the most visible California examples of what happens without adult supervision. Even healthy cities are slashing services and raising taxes to meet escalating pension bills, to pay for those who often receive far more in retirement than most residents earn during their working years. […]

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What’s it worth to you?

September 19, 2016

Mark Perry at Carpe Diem has a good post about what I’ll call the Information Economy (for lack of a better term). He starts out writing about the different ways music has been delivered for sale and then moves on to the more general point of how information of all kinds gets delivered now.

I particularly liked the "What’s the internet worth to you?" question.

[t]he limitations of GDP accounting

Thanks to the advances in computer technologies, the Internet and smartphone apps, consumers are getting more and more services like GPS for free (or at a significantly reduced cost compared to the past) today and displacing services that used to get accounted for as market-based production (maps and road atlases). In past decades like the 1950s, maybe economic output measured by GDP was a pretty good measure of both economic performance and Americans’ economic well-being. In 2016, that may no longer be the case.

Finally, the video below captures the point I’m trying to make by asking people:

How much would someone have to pay you to give up the Internet for the rest of your life? Would a million dollars be enough? Twenty million? How about a billion dollars?

“When I ask my students this question, they say you couldn’t pay me enough,” says Professor Michael Cox, director of the O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business. The free market, says Cox, creates a huge gap between what consumers would be willing to pay for Internet access and how much it actually costs.
From the video: Since we’re getting something that we really value that is almost free, and wouldn’t give it up for even $1 million or more, “In some ways, maybe we’re all millionaires and billionaires, if we have something that’s worth that much to us… You might just be richer than you realize…”


Update/Related (HT: Joe Sullivan): From a July 2015 WSJ interview with Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist — “Silicon Valley Doesn’t Believe U.S. Productivity Is Down: Contrarian economists at Google and Stanford say the U.S. doesn’t have a productivity problem, it has a measurement problem”:

“There is a lack of appreciation for what’s happening in Silicon Valley,” says Hal Varian, “because we don’t have a good way to measure it.” One measurement problem is that a lot of what originates here is free or nearly free.

Take, for example, a recent walk Mr. Varian arranged with friends. To find each other in the sprawling park nearby, he and his pals used an app that tracked their location, allowing them to meet up quickly. The same tool can track the movement of workers in a warehouse, office or shopping mall. “Obviously that’s a productivity enhancement,” Mr. Varian says. “But I doubt that gets measured anywhere.”

Consider the efficiency of hailing a taxi with an app on your mobile phone, or finding someone who will meet you at the airport and rent your car while you’re away, a new service in San Francisco. Add in online tools that instantly translate conversations or help locate organ donors—the list goes on and on.

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What song the sirens sang

September 16, 2016

I’d heard about this forum at Cato and was curious about it. So I’m glad Ron Bailey wrote this summary article for Reason’s blog. It’s hard to excerpt so I’ve just included a few snippets from it. RTWT though.

Why Is Socialism So Damned Attractive?
What is the attraction of socialism?

The Cato Institute held a policy forum Wednesday to consider that question, featuring talks from the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt and the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

One problem they quickly encountered was how to define socialism in the first place. Is it pervasive, state-directed central planning? A Scandinavian-style safety net? Something else? Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who pursued the Democratic presidential nomination while describing himself as a socialist, attracted a big following among voters under age 30. But most of those voters actually rejected the idea of the government running businesses or owning the means of production; they tended to be safety-net redistributionists who want to tax the rich to pay for health care and college education. And this was, in fact, the platform Sanders was running on.

Cosmides then turned to a fascinating 2014 study in The Journal of Politics by the Danish political scientists Lene Aarøe and Michael Bang Petersen. Aarøe and Petersen found that certain cues could turn supposedly individualistic Americans into purportedly welfare-state loving Danes, and vice versa. […]

In that experiment, researchers asked 2,000 Danes and Americans to react to three cases involving a person on welfare. In one, they had no background information on the welfare client. In the second, he lost his job due to an injury and was actively looking for new work. In the third, he has never looked for a job at all. The Danes turned out to be slightly more likely than the Americans to assume that the person they knew nothing about was on welfare because of bad luck. But both Americans and Danes were no different in opposing welfare for the lazy guy and strongly favoring it for the unlucky worker. “When we assess people on welfare, we use certain [evolved] psychological mechanisms to spot anyone who might be cheating,” Michael Bang Petersen explained in press release about the study. “We ask ourselves whether they are motivated to give something back to me and society. And these mechanisms are more powerful than cultural differences.”

The next panelist, John Tooby, turned to those counterproductive attitudes. Tooby has long been puzzled that so many of his colleagues are not struck by facts like Hong Kong’s amazing economic success. (Its GDP increased 180-fold between 1961 and 1996 while per capita GDP increased 87-fold and inequality fell.) […]

The chief problem, he suggested, is that many people are beguiled by “romantic socialism”—that is, they imagine what their personal lives would be like if everyone shared and treated one another like family. We evolved in small bands that were an individual’s only protection from starvation, victimization, and inter-group aggression. People feel vulnerable if their band does not exist. Such sentiments are more or less appropriate when people lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers composed mostly of kin, but they fail spectacularly when navigating a world of strangers cooperating in global markets.

The third speaker was Jonathan Haidt, whose research explores the intuitive ethics that undergird the psychological foundations of morality. His goal is to reconcile the universal human behavior identified by evolutionary psychology with the cultural variations highlighted by anthropology. He and his colleagues have identified six moral foundations, but he focused on just three during the session. Those three were care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression.

In contemporary politics, liberals are chiefly concerned about care and harm. They see fairness mostly as equality of outcomes. He illustrated this with photos taken during the Occupy Wall Street episode in Zuccotti Park. (One Occupy sign, for instance, read “Tax the Rich Fair and Square.”) On the other hand, conservatives see fairness has proportionality; if you work hard, you get to keep the rewards. Haidt showed a Tea Party sign that read, “Stop Punishing Success—Stop Rewarding Failure.” […]

Another Occupy Wall Street placard shown in Haidt’s presentation said “Equality Now! Liberty Later.” In response to that sentiment, Haidt quoted Milton Friedman: “A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed.”

Posted in Libertarianism, socialism, Whys & wherefores | Leave a Comment »

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Republicans and walls

September 13, 2016

One of Reason’s Friday Funnies by Chip Bok.

bok-republicans-walls

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How the cosmos knows itself

September 10, 2016

Amanda Gefter writes an interesting column about how we got here from there… whatever ‘there’ means.

It’s fairly lengthy but interesting if you like efforts to unite philosophy and physics. I enjoyed it, at any event.

The Bridge From Nowhere
How is it possible to get something from nothing?

“The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.” So concluded William James in thinking about that most basic of riddles: how did something come from nothing? The question infuriates, James realized, because it demands an explanation while denying the very possibility of explanation. “From nothing to being there is no logical bridge,” he wrote.

In science, explanations are built of cause and effect. But if nothing is truly nothing, it lacks the power to cause. It’s not simply that we can’t find the right explanation—it’s that explanation itself fails in the face of nothing. […]

If you recognized the title of this post, you’ll know it reminded me of something Carl Sagan said.

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Balanced Rebellion

September 8, 2016

Here’s a clever ad.

FYI, it looks like BalancedRebellion.com expects you to have a Facebook account.

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Apple, Ireland, and more nonsense on stilts

August 31, 2016

Here’s Dan Mitchell at International Liberty commenting on the European Commission’s decision to assess Apple billions for alleged unpaid taxes. As the WSJ editorial (linked below) points out, this is a good example of the reasons for Brexit.

But more to the point, the E.C.’s action is a pretty good illustration of the idea that taxation is theft. This attempt is pretty brazen.

European Commission Launches Shakedown of Apple, Asserts Low Taxes Are “State Aid”

[…] But I’ll soon have white hair based on having to deal with the new claim from European bureaucrats that countries are guilty of providing subsidies if they have low taxes for companies.

I’m not joking. This is basically what’s behind the big tax fight between Apple, Ireland, and the European Commission.

Here’s what I said about this issue yesterday. (YouTube video)

There are three things about this interview are worth highlighting.

  • First, the European Commission is motivated by a desire for more tax revenue. Disappointing, but hardly surprising.
  • Second, Ireland has benefited immensely from low-tax policies and that’s something that should be emulated rather than punished.
  • Third, I hope Ireland will respond with a big corporate tax cut, just as they did when their low-tax policies were first attacked many years ago.

I also chatted with the folks from the BBC. (YouTube video)

I’ll add a few comments on this interview as well.

Here’s an interview from the morning, which was conducted by phone since I didn’t want to interrupt my much-needed beauty sleep by getting to the studio at the crack of dawn. (YouTube video)

Once again, here are a few follow-up observations.

  • First, I realize I’m being repetitive, but it’s truly bizarre that the European Commission thinks that low taxes are a subsidy. This is the left-wing ideology that the government has first claim on all income.
  • Second, it’s a wonky point, but Europe’s high-tax nations can use transfer pricing rules if they think that Apple (or other companies) are trying to artificially shift income to low-tax countries like Ireland.
  • Third, the U.S. obviously needs to reform its wretched corporate tax system, but that won’t solve this problem since it’s about an effort to impose more tax on Apple’s foreign-source income.

The Wall Street Journal opined wisely on this issue, starting with the European Commission’s galling decision to use anti-trust laws to justify the bizarre assertion that low taxes are akin to a business subsidy.

Even by the usual Brussels standards of economic malpractice, Tuesday’s €13 billion ($14.5 billion) tax assault on Apple is something to behold. Apple paid all the taxes it owed under existing tax laws around the world, which is why it hasn’t been subject to enforcement proceedings by revenue authorities. […]

This is amazing. […]

Update: 9/2/16

Here’s a report from CNN Money about the Irish response to the E.C.’s demand.

Ireland is turning its back on a massive tax windfall from Apple.

The Irish government confirmed Friday it would appeal a European Union order to collect 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in back taxes from the tech giant.

The European Commission ruled Wednesday that Ireland had helped Apple artificially lower its tax bill for more than 20 years, assistance that it said constituted illegal state aid for the company.

Apple (AAPL, Tech30) has already said it will appeal. CEO Tim Cook has described the Commission’s claim that Apple paid Irish tax of just 0.005% on much of its international profits in 2014 as “total political crap.”

Irish politicians were divided earlier in the week over whether to pursue an appeal. And it’s easy to see why.

As recently as 2010, the country was bailed out by the EU and International Monetary Fund. The extra tax billions would go a long way at a time when Irish officials are worried about the impact of Brexit on their economy.

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Pure geekery

August 20, 2016

I had an e-mail recently from my alma mater and it mentioned Bill Hammack, who makes videos uing the handle EngineerGuy. (Check his site.)

Mr. Hammack made a series of videos about Albert Michelson’s Harmonic Analyzer, which was a mechanical computer for doing Fourier analysis. Here’s the first of four clips describing how the Analyzer worked and how to operate it.

There’s a book about the machine if you’re interested. And it’s also available in PDF at no cost.

Machines like this have always amazed me when I think of the mechanical creativity their designers showed. Nowadays you can do Fourier analysis with MS Excel but not that long ago (100+ years) just performing the calculations was such a tedious, error-prone task that people invented purpose-built machines to do it.

But the icing on the cake was that I came across Hammack’s video adaptation of one of my favorites, Faraday’s lectures on The Chemical History of a Candle.

Here’s the first of five videos (not counting Hammack’s introductory clip).

As with Michelson’s Harmonic Analyzer, Hammack and his collaborators wrote a book about this too (also available for free in PDF).

Or if you prefer the old school, here are Faraday’s lectures in PDF.

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Who knew about microbeads?

August 19, 2016

Not I. But when I checked our current tube of toothpaste, there they were.

This is a preliminary study so bear that in mind.

Microbeads could be turning the fish we eat toxic, study finds
Sashimi, please. Hold the plastic.

Scientists have found worrying evidence that fish are becoming toxic, as their environments are being polluted with billions of microbeads – the tiny plastic particles commonly found in face scrubs, body wash, and other cosmetics.

Several governments, including the US and Australia, are in the process of phasing microbeads out, but based on their findings, researchers are pushing for an immediate ban. […]

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A silver lining to the Trump cloud?

August 19, 2016

Here’s an interesting column by Nick Gillespie at Reason’s blog. I’m not sure that I agree with it, or with Lisa De Pasquale’s column.

Why Libertarians (and Other 3rd Parties) Should Thank Donald Trump
On substance and style, he’s a dumpster fire on steroids, with a hit of crack. But he’s shown how easy it is to destroy a major party.

With just three months to go before the long national nightmare that is Election 2016 transmogrifies into a either a Hillary Clinton or a Donald Trump presidency(!), let’s take a late-summer moment to squeeze some lemonade from lemons. Whatever happens in November, all of us who have political perspectives that are routinely discounted or dismissed by the Republican-Democratic duopoly should thank Donald Trump for creating a blueprint to power for us. […]

The simple fact is, as conservative commentator and Finding Mr. Righteous author Lisa De Pasquale, writes,

There has been much hand-wringing among the right on where Republicans go now that Trump has “destroyed” the party. They complain that the Republican Party has left them, while millions of Trump voters and libertarians believe party leaders and professional pundits left them decades ago. Regardless of whether the #NeverTrump crowd has valid points, it is clear that Trump has done libertarians a favor in busting the Old Guard of Republican kingmakers. The Old Guard isn’t mad that Trump doesn’t represent their principles, but that they no longer hold any power in picking the top of the ticket. The proof is that rather than get behind Gary Johnson, they’d rather trot out a candidate with zero name recognition or campaign infrastructure.

[…]

“A dumpster fire on steroids, with a hit of crack”… Heh!

The problem I have with Ms. De Pasquale’s argument is this: how many reasonably libertarian figures have Trump’s name recognition (or decades of self-aggrandizement)? I can’t think of any, aside from Penn Jillette. And offhand, I don’t think Penn has the personality to be a successful politician.

But maybe what Trump has done proves me wrong. Need someone who’s outspoken and has opinions not generally accepted by establishment figures? That’s Penn, idnit?

Hmmm… I’d probably vote for him. And Teller’s a pretty committed libertarian too… That’s it: Penn/Teller in 2020!

I got $100 says they’d win both Austin and Anchorage.

Update 8/31/16

But perhaps I spoke too quickly. Here’s a recently-published clip of Penn talking about libertarianism and US politics. It takes a few surprising turns.

I’m not fan of the Crony Capitalism Penn gets on about, but I’m even less fond of Crony Government. And that’s what socialist governments frequently end up being. I’m not sure why Senator Sanders’s implementation would be a whole lot different than Hugo Chávez’s.

Posted in US politics | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

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A few interesting essays

August 8, 2016

I found all three of these to be pretty interesting reads. They’re loosely related. Since they’re too long to excerpt in a way that does them justice, I suppose you’ll have to take on faith my recommendation that your read them. (Then again, you can stop reading at any time, right?)

From The Breakthrough, a forecast for world population:

The Politics and Ecology of Zero Population Growth

Having calmed down from the overblown twentieth-century fears of overpopulation, the world has yet to grapple with the end of population growth–and even de-population–that will occur this century. As Paul Robbins observes, global population growth rates peaked in the 1970s, and if current trends continue, some countries could see their citizenries substantially depleted in the coming decades. As native populations in Germany and the United Kingdom dwindle, replaced by immigrants from rapidly growing countries in Africa and Asia, a surge in nationalism and cultural upheaval is already apparent. What comes next depends on how governments and civil society this radical new order of things. […]

At The American Interest, Jonathon Haidt writes about nationalist movements. It reminded me a little of what Matt Taibbi said about Brexit: “The reaction to Brexit is the reason Brexit happened.”

When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism
And how moral psychology can help explain and reduce tensions between the two.

What on earth is going on in the Western democracies? From the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and an assortment of right-wing parties across Europe through the June 23 Brexit vote, many on the Left have the sense that something dangerous and ugly is spreading: right-wing populism, seen as the Zika virus of politics. Something has gotten into “those people” that makes them vote in ways that seem—to their critics—likely to harm their own material interests, at least if their leaders follow through in implementing isolationist policies that slow economic growth. […]

Finally, Jonathon Rauch writes at The Atlantic:

How American Politics Went Insane
It happened gradually—and until the U.S. figures out how to treat the problem, it will only get worse.

It’s 2020, four years from now. The campaign is under way to succeed the president, who is retiring after a single wretched term. Voters are angrier than ever—at politicians, at compromisers, at the establishment. Congress and the White House seem incapable of working together on anything, even when their interests align. With lawmaking at a standstill, the president’s use of executive orders and regulatory discretion has reached a level that Congress views as dictatorial—not that Congress can do anything about it, except file lawsuits that the divided Supreme Court, its three vacancies unfilled, has been unable to resolve.

On Capitol Hill, Speaker Paul Ryan resigned after proving unable to pass a budget, or much else. The House burned through two more speakers and one “acting” speaker, a job invented following four speakerless months. The Senate, meanwhile, is tied in knots by wannabe presidents and aspiring talk-show hosts, who use the chamber as a social-media platform to build their brands by obstructing—well, everything. The Defense Department is among hundreds of agencies that have not been reauthorized, the government has shut down three times, and, yes, it finally happened: The United States briefly defaulted on the national debt, precipitating a market collapse and an economic downturn. No one wanted that outcome, but no one was able to prevent it.

As the presidential primaries unfold, Kanye West is leading a fractured field of Democrats. The Republican front-runner is Phil Robertson, of Duck Dynasty fame. Elected governor of Louisiana only a few months ago, he is promising to defy the Washington establishment by never trimming his beard. Party elders have given up all pretense of being more than spectators, and most of the candidates have given up all pretense of party loyalty. On the debate stages, and everywhere else, anything goes. […]

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Why are people fed up with political correctness?

August 6, 2016

This article by Noah Feldman appears at Bloomberg.com. The EEOC complaint he describes is practically a reductio ad absurdum of political correctness, IMO. Where does this stuff end?

When a Flag Crosses the Line to Harassment

Is it racial harassment in the workplace to display the yellow “Don’t tread on me” flag? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says that it could be, depending on the context. The commission acknowledged that the Gadsden flag, which dates back to the era of the American Revolution, did not have racist origins. But it called for a careful investigation to see whether recent uses of the flag have been sufficiently “racially tinged” that it could count as harassment.

A strong argument can be mounted that this EEOC decision is a threat to the First Amendment — and that’s exactly the argument made by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh on his blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, in reporting on the commission decision. But on closer examination, I think the commission got this one right. When it comes to the meaning of symbols, social context is everything. Even symbols that have no direct historical connection to racism can change meaning over time. And if we’re going to have laws against workplace harassment, we have to prohibit all harassing behavior — including harassment that’s overtly political.

The Gadsden flag […] is said to have been designed or at least promulgated by Christopher Gadsden, a politician and patriot from Charleston, South Carolina. He was a member of the Marine committee of the Continental Congress; the newly formed Marines were reported to have used some version of the image and logo on their drums in 1775. […]

Gadsden made his money as a merchant in South Carolina, and both owned and sold slaves. As it happens, in common with other slaveholding members of the founding generation, he also sometimes spoke against slavery. In a 1766 speech, he referred to slavery as a “crime,” while observing that “slavery begets slavery” and predicting that South Carolina would see more of it.

But there seems to be no dispute that the flag, as used by the Marines and others in the Revolutionary War, was a message to King George, and had nothing to do with slavery or racism per se.

In his complaint to the EEOC, the anonymous writer objected to a co-worker wearing a hat bearing the flag “because the flag was designed by Christopher Gadsden, a ‘slave trader & owner of slaves.’”

On its own, that’s a pretty weak argument. The fact that a slave owner created a symbol doesn’t mean that symbol is racist. The Constitution itself, after all, was designed in large part by slave owners.

Needless to say, I disagree with Feldman’s conclusion (my emphasis above) and I agree with Eugene Volokh’s opinion; Volokh’s post is worth reading.

If we accept Feldman’s conclusion, where’s the stopping point? If the goal is to eradicate any historical reference that over time may be seen as racist in some social context, then there’s no limit to it. Will somebody, somewhere, someday be offended by something innocuous? It’s a sure bet.

Now… who wants decisions like those made by EEOC bureaucrats in Mr. Trump’s administration? Raise your hands.

Gadsden-flag

My suspicion is that maybe the complainer associates the Gadsden flag with the Tea Party and this is really an attack on what the complainer regards as offensive political speech. See this story from 2013. In that case, the EEOC’s decision is even more troubling.

Posted in Fear your government, US politics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

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Go to bed with Karl

August 2, 2016

…and wake up with Uncle Joe. Here’s more news about the devolution of Venezuela. I wonder if Maduro et alia have come up with a catchy name for this, like China’s Cultural Revolution or Russia’s Five Year Plans.

Maybe they’re sticking with CLAP.

Venezuela to reassign private, public workers to agriculture

Caracas (AFP) – Venezuela said private and public companies will be obliged to let their workers be reassigned to grow crops, in a dramatic move in the middle of the country’s crippling economic crisis.

The Labor Ministry announced the measure as part of the economic emergency already in effect; it will require all employers in Venezuela to let the state have their workers “to strengthen production” of food.

President Nicolas Maduro’s government is fighting for its life amid staggering inflation and shortages of everything from food to toilet paper, diapers and shampoo.

Maduro, like his predecessor Hugo Chavez, has increasingly moved the country towards taking over parts of the economy.

Now, Venezuela’s state-led socialist government has said it is ready to take the next big step — giving itself authority to order individuals from one job to another.

It was not immediately clear when the temporary measure will kick in, or for how long workers will be sent to the fields. […]

Regardless of what they may call it, $100 says that the usual privation and misery will be the result.

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I wish it was going to be painless

August 1, 2016

These are from Dan Mitchell’s International Liberty blog.

Uncle Sam, 2016 presidential race, Trump, Hillary, political cartoon

Gary-Johnson-humor-2

Posted in Political humor | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

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Friday’s political gossip

July 24, 2016

I’ll be surprised (very pleasantly) if this happens. So for what it’s worth.

Will Jeb Bush Endorse Gary Johnson for President?

Rumors are spreading that Gary Johnson is joining to receive support from some previous presidential hopefuls. (Getty)

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate might be getting public support from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, both Republicans who have unsuccessfully run for the White House. […]

Via Ricky Campbell and Matt Welch

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Libertarians in politics

July 18, 2016

I ran across a couple of opinion pieces in the last couple of days about Libertarians in national politics. This first one’s by Kevin Williamson. I usually enjoy his pieces even when I don’t agree with them – but I have no big argument with this one. (My emphasis below.)

How’s that ‘libertarian moment’ working out?

Las Vegas — Yeah, I told you so.

As the presidential campaign season kicked off, many of my friends and colleagues insisted that the United States was having a “libertarian moment.” I thought otherwise, and argued (in Politico) that the admirable Senator Rand Paul, the closest thing to an out-and-out libertarian with any currency in mainstream political circles, would have a hard time seeking the Republican nomination not in spite of his libertarianism but because of it. The idea that Americans are closet libertarians who desire a regime of economic liberalism and a hands-off approach to social questions is not supported by the evidence. […]

I am writing from FreedomFest, the annual Las Vegas gathering of libertarians ranging from those we’d recognize as ordinary conservatives to the Libertarian-party types, goldbugs, marijuana obsessives, and the rest of the merry liberty-movement pranksters. The discussions have ranged from libertarianism in the Islamic world to Black Lives Matters to New Hampshire secession, a subject that may be of some interest to my fellow Texans.

The conversations here are familiar: The proponents of free people and free markets have a “branding problem,” and, if we could only figure out the right words to say in the right order, then people would flock to our banner. At the Planet Hollywood hotel and casino, a famous libertarian activist sweeps his hand over the adult video games, the burlesque dancers at the Heart Bar, the people wandering around with foot-high daiquiri glasses and says: “Hopefully, the whole world will soon look like this.”

And we libertarians wonder why we’re losing. […]

The complexity of the real world exceeds what can be adequately addressed by our ideologies, and the variety of real human beings — and real human experience — means that there are real differences in basic, fundamental values. Most people do not want their values to be tolerated — they want their values to prevail. The terrorists in Nice and Orlando are not fighting for toleration. Neither are the neo-socialists now migrating from the Sanders camp to the Clinton camp or the Trumpkins who are sure that their frustrations and disappointments are being artificially and maliciously inflicted on them by a nefarious elite. And that’s why we are not having a libertarian moment, but a nationalist-socialist moment.

I told you so.

Yep. The "let live" part seems to be a lot harder for many than the "live" part.

This second one’s by Kristin Tate, who has a different take on the cause of Libertarians’ problems.

Libertarians’ Big Problem (and How to Fix It)

As purveyor of The Libertarian Chick, I have discovered that it is impossible to please all of my fans. Over the years I have gotten cranky emails from readers who call me “The Tea Party Chick,” “The Republican Chick,” “Democrat Chick,” “hippie chick,” among others (some are too mean to include here — my mommy reads this blog!)

It is no different on my Facebook page. When I post an article about government welfare I am a “heartless neocon”; when I express support for Ted Cruz, I am “bought out by the Republican Party”; when I post about legalizing hemp I am a “left-wing nut job.”

All this capricious griping has become the norm among the libertarian community. The mindset seems to be that if you don’t agree with every aspect of the Party platform, then you are not really a libertarian.

This stubborn purism became especially real to me after I was blocked from the official Libertarian Party Facebook page. (Yes, they blocked the Libertarian Chick! Isn’t that ironic?) After expressing an opposing opinion *GASP* to one of their vocal Admins, he kicked me off the page. Just like that.

The Libertarian Party has a big problem on its hands. The exclusive nature of the group — requiring litmus tests on such topics as immigration, tax policy, government spending and social issues — is largely why we have been unable to affect major change.

We libertarians are principled people. We have strong convictions, which is what led us to break out of the the two-party system in the first place. But clinging to these convictions without allowing any dissent is what often hinders us from actually getting anything done. […]

Posted in Libertarianism, US politics | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

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Dark humor

July 17, 2016

Positively dystopian – from McSweeney’s. RTWT.

CIA MEMO RE: POKÉMON GO.

TO: execstaff@cia.gov
FROM: Office of the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
RE: Great Work On Pokémon Go

CONFIDENTIAL

I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate everyone on the extremely successful rollout of Operation Pokémon GO to Raise Public Morale. I know we had to hustle to speed up this launch by several weeks from its scheduled release on September 10th but it seems to have paid off. More people have downloaded this game in the last 72 hours than have voted in every Democratic primary combined.

It seemed crazy when we floated this idea last year, between Mass Shootings #188 and #189: could “augmented reality” really distract people from regular, awful reality? We took a bold gamble that it would, and it paid off!

Thank you for giving the American public something to engage with mindlessly after two Black men and five police officers were shot in cold blood within three days. It seemed, for a fraught 48 hours, like Americans would have to engage with the news, and as past history evidences, that’s not great for us. Luckily, we can leave that discussion to the talking heads; good, ordinary Americans can find solace in locating Jigglypuffs in public spaces.

In an unprecedented threat, it seemed even Twitter and Snapchat were getting away from us: a huge number of users were seriously grappling with police brutality and racial politics. Were it not for the power of ’90s nostalgia and dynamic animation, this may have been a turning point for these platforms. I am incredibly moved to see Twitter repopulated with hilarious photos of Pokémon in inopportune places, like a frying pan. […]

H.T. Paul B

Posted in Geekery | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

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Directions

July 16, 2016

Desintations

Thanks to Jeff G

Posted in humor | 1 Comment »

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