RedStateEclectic

Essential Bastiat, part 2

From “The Law”:

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.

What are the consequences of such a perversion? It would require volumes to describe them all. Thus we must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking.

In the first place, it erases from everyone's conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them.

The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are "just" because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them.

The Guy With The Baggage

 

What if war is a racket for special interests? What if the American people learn the truth?

Remember, this guy with the baggage was saying all of this during the last throws of a booming bubble economy and at a time when hollow patriotism trumped most efforts at logic.

Battle of Brooklyn

Battle for Brooklyn follows a group of people who come together to fight the Atlantic Yards Project, a massive real estate development that threatens to destroy their homes and neighborhood. Situated at the juncture of two low rise-Brooklyn brownstone neighborhoods, it would place 16 skyscrapers and a sports arena on a 22 acre parcel of land. 

Daniel Goldstein's apartment sits at what would be center court of the new arena. A reluctant activist, Daniel is dragged into the fight because he simply can't believe that the government should use the power of Eminent Domain to take his property and hand it off to a private developer.

Watch the video.

The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. – John Hay (1872)

“Every Time You Pass a Law…”

 

“…You take a bite out of freedom.”  Gary Johnson on MSNBC, talking about his chances, and his views.

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

And then there is this, from an opinion piece called “The Pragmatic Libertarian”:

The issue, however, is whether he can sell this message.

His hope is that his economic conservatism and social liberalism will have cross-political appeal. But the flip side is that they will also generate cross-political hostility. Liberals, whose beloved entitlement programs Johnson would probably cut, won’t take things lying down. Indeed, they already have started digging up dirt and attacking his opposition to child labor laws. Meanwhile, anti-immigration conservatives, too, have declared him unfit for office because he supports a guest worker program and opposes deportation.

Paul doesn’t have to contend with conservative hostility because he makes no pretense of being a social liberal and routinely flirts with questionable causes popular with his Texas base. But Johnson is no populist. His strategy is to make pragmatic arguments for liberty. Thus he defends his embrace of immigration and opposition to the war on drugs, not on first principles but on fiscal grounds. He doesn’t give lectures on the importance of open borders to individual liberty. Or offer discourses on “your life, your choice” to defend drug use. Rather, he appeals to voters’ common sense. As governor, he tackled the illegal immigration issue by demonstrating that illegals pay more in state taxes than they consume in services. Likewise, he emphasizes how the drug war sucks up massive law enforcement dollars without reducing use.

This is a savvy approach because it allows him to be more pro-liberty on more issues and reach more people, especially independents for whom putting America’s fiscal house in order is a top priority. According to David Kirby of the Cato Institute, liberty-minded independents already comprise about 15 percent of voters, a big enough bloc to swing a general election. Johnson’s message could increase that number.

LLE

They Pry Them From Our Cold Dead Fingers

Sounds familiar, right? But in the hands of Sharon Harris, the phrase takes a surprising turn. This article was one of the first to get me thinking “outside the box” (literally) when it came to my kids’ education. I remembered it after reading Triple Hash’s fine article.

Mind you, it wasn’t the end-all to changing my mind but it sure got me thinking. Of greater influence were various articles written by John Taylor Gatto. A visit to the local school and conversations with those within the home-schooling vanguard clinched the deal.

You may be telling yourself, “My local school isn’t that bad.” And you’re probably right. However, you may wish to rephrase the statement just a bit. Like so: “My local school isn’t that bad… yet.”

Certainly, the home school way is not the only way, nor is it the best way. It’s just one way which may be the best for some, and it was a hard-fought legal battle to make it so.

A good test of a nation’s freedom can be found in the amount of voluntary choice that exists for those who live there. With regards to education, attendance is mandatory, as is the payment of large chunks of money toward its end. Not very free, and certainly no one opts out without political, legal, and social repercussions, and while the ability to home-school suggests that educational choices are freer here than in other countries, we could do much better.

Maybe vouchers would be a good way. Personally, I would leave the entire ordeal to those people who should be first and foremost responsible for their kids: the parents. If that makes many people shudder, so be it. Such a reaction, in my opinion, belies this country’s belief in liberty.

At the heart of government education can be found the socialist ideal. Make it voluntary, and it instantly becomes something quite different. How many would make education voluntary and paid for solely by the parents and any philanthropy that came their way? To disagree makes you a socialist to some degree, since you are then advocating forced education and the forced theft of money to pay for it. Keep in mind that all positive rights are grounded in socialist theory.

Surely, extreme examples of parental misconduct are headed my way as justification for forced schooling. Be warned, for every heinous example you wish to offer up, I have hundreds of thousands of horrific examples with which to counter. Socialism demands its payment at the end of its run and the cost, in the universally understood denomination of lifeless bodies, is far greater than most minds wish to consider up front.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. – Thomas Jefferson 

 

I'm Bookmarking This Now

Paul Krugman 2011:

True, the Fed expects inflation this year to run a bit above target, but Mr. Bernanke declared (and I agree) that we’re looking at a temporary bulge from higher raw material prices; measures of underlying inflation remain well below target, and the forecast sees inflation falling sharply next year and remaining low at least through 2013.

Just for comparison -

Paul Krugman 2002:

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

 

 

The Future Engineers of Our Society

Tonight, my middle daughter attended her second SAME competition presentation. SAME stands for Society of American Military Engineers. It is an organization that centers on engineering and of course leans to military recruitment as one employer of choice after college.

Students from Middle Schools and High Schools work with mentors from the private sector on engineering projects. Many were "social" projects like green/garden space construction, animal shelters built with bioengineering in mind. Projects like that.

Each year they give out recognition for various categories like technology, team work, presentation, sustainability, etc., etc. They also give out a top award for the Middle School and High School age groups which means that if you win this prize then you've been tops in all categories.

Tonight the Middle School top prize went to a school that's project included MACs. Not Macintosh computers. Multi Access Cards. These students have a problem in their school that since their neighborhood is not very safe, they feel the need to carry a card on them at all times to prove that they are in the right place at the right time. They're looking at this technology as away to keep others out. But little do they understand they are accepting a technology to make sure others know if they are in.

One more observation. The High School category was won by a school that is considered a technology/engineering magnet school. The purpose of the magnet school is to attract certain kids who excel in that area of knowledge to attend that school since the programs (teachers and infrastructure) are catered to that subject. Also, since the teachers and infrastructure are there the other lesser advantaged (and even much lesser advantaged) student population would likewise be lifted with the rising tide. Well, let's just say that the teams that school put together matched nothing like the population of students that live in that neighborhood. One has to wonder if magnet schools do anything for those kids living in that neighborhood other than being a way to hide behind other student's good test scores thus making it look like that area of the city is doing better than it really is.

This was my view of public education tonight. Not a very good one, I must say. It was bad enough that many of these future engineers are saving polar bears. Or they are coming from "education centers" that are more concerned with looking good then actually educating their population. Or they think it is okay to increase a few people's safety while reducing a greater number of people's freedom. Perhaps all of this and our future is yet another outcome of the "statist" education we force on our kids.

###

 

Armed Man Fights Off Ninja

Yes, this really happened.

A Fayette County man attacked by a "ninja" with a sword quickly ended the encounter by pulling a gun....

Guzzo said he pulled his gun and the man broke the rear window of Guzzo's car as he ran off. Guzzo said he chased the man, who did not move with the grace typically associated with a ninja.

"He was like a gazelle that just got attacked by a lion," Guzzo said. "He got up and fell, and got up and fell. Then he jumped off a cliff."

Choo-Choo, Sexy and Unsexy

Most of the great progress in this country occured when the government was asleep. The railroads, the steel industry, the auto industry, the computer industry  -  all were built by individuals when the government was at best uninvolved and at worst fighting their progress at every step. [...]

The US rail system, unlike nearly every other system in the world, was built (mostly) by private individuals with private capital. It is operated privately, and runs without taxpayer subsidies. And, it is by far the greatest rail system in the world. It has by far the cheapest rates in the world (1/2 of China’s, 1/8 of Germany’s). But here is the real key: it is almost all freight.

As a percentage, far more freight moves in the US by rail (vs. truck) than almost any other country in the world. Europe and Japan are not even close. Specifically, about 40% of US freight moves by rail, vs. just 10% or so in Europe and less than 5% in Japan. As a result, far more of European and Japanese freight jams up the highways in trucks than in the United States. For example, the percentage of freight that hits the roads in Japan is nearly double that of the US.

You see, passenger rail is sexy and pretty and visible. You can build grand stations and entertain visiting dignitaries on your high-speed trains. This is why statist governments have invested so much in passenger rail — not to be more efficient, but to awe their citizens and foreign observers.

But there is little efficiency improvement in moving passengers by rail vs. other modes. Most of the energy consumed goes into hauling not the passengers themselves, but the weight of increasingly plush rail cars. Trains have to be really, really full all the time to make an energy savings for high-speed rail vs. cars or even planes, and they seldom are full. I had a lovely trip on the high speed rail last summer between London and Paris and back through the Chunnel — especially nice because my son and I had the rail car entirely to ourselves both ways.

The real rail efficiency comes from moving freight. As compared to passenger rail, more of the total energy budget is used moving the actual freight rather than the cars themselves. Freight is far more efficient to move by rail than by road, but only the US moves a substantial amount of its freight by rail. One reason for this is that freight and high-speed passenger traffic have a variety of problems sharing the same rails, so systems that are optimized for one tend to struggle serving the other.

Freight is boring and un-sexy. Its not a government function in the US. So intellectuals tend to ignore it, even though it is the far more important, from and energy and environmental standpoint, portion of transport to put on the rails. In fact, the US would actually probably have even a higher rail modal percentage if the US government had not enforced a regulatory regime (until the Staggers Act) that favored trucks over rail. If the government really had been asleep the last century, we would be further along.

Make sure to read the entire well informed and intelligent article by "the coyote" (Warren Meyer).

The Sound of Promises Being Broken

The PEW Center on the Sates has some disturbing news. Well, the news has been around for a while but it’s getting MORE disturbing:

The gap between the promises states have made for public employees’ retirement benefits and the money set aside to pay for them grew to at least $1.26 trillion in fiscal year 2009—a 26 percent increase in one year—according to a Pew report.

Good old Nebraska. They’re 88% funded compared to South Carolina, which is only 69% funded . And it seems that these numbers are growing worse. Ugh.