Musings Of An Indie WriterFriday, January 27, 2012
(Un)intellectual Property
Yet another assault on the free-market has been averted, this time, against the internet by a motley collection of entrenched business interests that have failed to adjust their business models to the realities of the modern age. Or is that a general description of the usual perpetrators of these kinds of things? In any case, one would think with a good decade or so of fair warning, they would have made the transition by now. But no, they’d much rather ask Congress to pass an abominable package of laws that would have stripped users of the information highway of many of their freedoms with an appalling lack of due process, erecting barriers which these businesses can milk for easy revenues. In the business, we call that rent-seeking. So much for the dynamism and competitive spirit of entrepreneurship. Well, at least of these particular entrepreneurs.
As is typical, their arguments were couched in terms which attempt to appeal to free-market sentiments. Intellectual property, they claim, must be protected from acts of ‘theft’ and ‘piracy,’ else the whole edifice of of modern civilization will collapse. Or something like that, as if it hadn’t already, and mostly through the efforts of these very kinds of chumps to confuse the situation and confound our traditions so that they might be taken advantage of. A violation of property? What man of any decency could tolerate such a horror? As it turns out, quite a few. Over seven million people have petitioned Congress to tell these businesses to stuff it. Apparently, there was a difference of opinion as to what constitutes decency in this particular situation.
And as is also typical, I would like to use this happening to ask the reader to consider a few rather radical propositions. Namely, I’d like to take a look at what is meant by intellectual property—and maybe even property in general.
There have been very many good essays on this site and others like it concerning the ‘properties of property.’ Basically, most people instinctively know what these are as a matter of habit, but they haven’t always thought about them deeply. One of the more important of these ‘properties of property’ is that the holder of property has the right to exclude others from using it. If he can’t exclude them, it is taken that he has limited sovereignty over it, and the ‘propertiness’ of the purported property is thereby diminished.
But consider for a moment how this applies to something like a copyright or a patent. Both of these ‘properties,’ come with a built in expiration date, which to most people I would think would be a very strange feature if they really thought about it. Imagine if it applied to, say, one’s car. Imagine waiting outside a man’s house for the strike of midnight on the day of that expiry, and when the moment had arrived, hopping in and drive off. There would be nothing the purported ‘owner’ could say or do against you. He had lost his right to exclude you from it. But if patentable and copyrightable ideas really are property, that is basically how it works.
It seems to me that this is rather incoherent. Either your property is yours until you choose to dispose of it, or it is not. So, if an idea is property, it really ought to be property forever and ever into perpetuity, to be bought and sold and passed on to one’s heirs. Alternatively, it ought not to be property at all and freely used by anyone who likes. But this in-between world makes little sense, and smacks of a contrived legal pretense. The ‘expiration date’ is obviously a recognition that actually treating ideas as property in the normal sense would be impractical. So, allowing patents and copyrights to expire accomplishes a legal jamming of a round peg through a square hole.
It is quite clear what the interest is—the restriction of markets, using the language of property to justify what would otherwise be immediately recognized as an attempt to assert a right to monopoly by legal force. And, typically, that is exactly how intellectual property is used. Worse, once a particular monopoly is established, it becomes a launching point for installing further market chokepoints. The best example of this strategy which I can think of is the way Microsoft attempted to use its overwhelming marketshare in operating systems to attempt to shoulder out competition in web navigators and other software by making them incompatible with its OS. This attempt eventually failed, but it provides a good example of the types of maneuvers that can be piggy-backed onto IP law to restrict markets for the purpose of rent-seeking.
As for the argument that the end of IP law would bring the free-market down around our ears, it is easy to see that this is not the case simply by looking at the digital media industry, where digital technologies have effectively blunted enforcement mechanisms. Yes, major record labels, Hollywood studios, publishers and the like are seeing their profits eroded, and rather heavily at that. But on the other hand, there is certainly no less media available for consumption as a result. Far from it—there appears to be far more of it than ever, and of greater variety than before. Creativity and innovation have not been squashed, they appear to have been multiplied.
What has been squashed are the gatekeepers—the media cartel which before had dominated and effectively homogenized media offerings in an attempt to maximize profits by limiting choice. Among other agendas. Up until recently, they also had the help of a large technological barrier. But with effectively self-produced media approaching the quality of the professional stuff, it becomes difficult for the ‘take it or leave it’ model to work any longer. The erosion of IP is only one aspect of an avalanche of economic effects which have been triggered by the digital age; others are at work as well. But even so, it is still possible, certainly, for the big performers to make the big bucks through concerts, live appearances and such, but in order to do so, they will actually have to work for a living, as the strategy of rent-seeking through legal monopoly and technological barrier is slowly being taken off the table.
It might be argued that the scrapping of IP wouldn’t just hurt the big publishing houses and the like, it’s going to hurt the writers and other creative artists as well, who otherwise wouldn’t be able to protect their ideas. But in reality, very few of these people benefit from the restriction anyway. Typically, for example, it is the publishing house which sees most of the benefit. It uses the copyright to prevent other publishing houses from distributing its titles, of course, but unless you are a Stephen King, a publishing house is not likely to pass on the spoils to you because you have no negotiating power. It is going to go looking for authors who are more desperate to have their works published—of whom there are plenty.
But to take the argument to the next level—let’s forget about all this practical stuff and rhetoric, and get philosophical. What if the ‘in-betweeners’ are just flat right? What if all this market-restriction nonsense is exactly the kind of thing I’m accusing the IPers of doing—attempting to couch an anti-IP argument in the language of the free market? What if, in reality, there are some legitimate differences between types of property which necessitate a slightly different treatment, but on the whole, it really is right and proper to protect the property rights of creative sorts to their ideas? What if not to do so is a very basic and fundamental abridgment of their rights and, as such, certain to be followed by serious, negative repercussions?
I think that what has happened is that this argument —like most political arguments—has been trapped in a sort of ideological vortex. I think that, like it or not, there is no straightforward answer that takes a form that most people would like, if this ‘logical rhetorical answer’ is the form that most people prefer, which it probably is. Life, after all, is not a logic problem, and as the notion of what property is must depend strongly on the answer to the question as to what constitutes human nature, it should be plain that there isn’t going to be a clear-cut answer given one has accepted the notion that human nature can be a variable as opposed to a constant.
As I wander down this path, questioning axioms as I go, I’m reminded of a certain thesis I once heard which I find to be quite brilliant—that there are certain institutions which are given purely by human convention. Sorry, I’ve lost the link, but it was by that Fran Porretto guy. Three were named—money, language, and marriage. And I begin to wonder if perhaps property should not be added to this list.
I say this in the main because it is difficult for me to accept that the notion of property as articulated by the Enlightenment philosophers is the end of the argument when I see the medieval notion of property placed alongside it. Clearly, if the one is valid, and we live in a world where such things are defined purely ‘logically’, then the other must be invalid. Invalid, as in, not even close. I find this very difficult to accept, and further, I find it difficult to accept that I can be thrown into such a logical conundrum over something as simple as a patent. If property is as simple as that, this should be a piece of cake.
But if I take the view that property, like money, marriage, and language, is defined by the norms, traditions, habits of thought, and conventions of the society which institutes it, it provides me with a way to reconcile all of these notions. In fact, it does so in a way that is rather useful. Neither the philosophers of the Enlightenment nor the medieval traditions were wrong—or, at least, not utterly wrong—and I am free to see what good I can in any particular convention, to begin deriving ideas concerning the behaviors of property and people under different sets of norms, and understand the notion of property as something that changes with people and situations.
None of this is to say that property may be defined arbitrarily, or that any which way is perfectly valid. Nothing could be further from the truth. I perfectly accept, for example, that money is similarly defined, yet I will criticize our own norms and conventions about it until I am blue in the face. I recognize what money was ‘meant for,’ how it ‘works,’ and how choosing silly and nonsensical ways to deal with it produces spectacularly reprehensible results. Nevertheless, I fully acknowledge that no matter what I may say, or how ‘illegitimate’ I can argue our money system to be, at the end of the day, it is what it is. If people accept bank deposits as money, then bank deposits are money and there is nothing I can do about it. Except to repeat over and over that it is really, really stupid. But people will just keep doing it. Including myself.
Likewise with language and marriage. There are good, sensible ways of doing things, and really, really retarded ways. Evil, even. I expect that property is the same way, and that it is perfectly valid to have very strong opinions on the subject, and that these opinions may be said to be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect,’ if you see what I mean. I just suspect that they do not take the form which I used earlier in the essay, and which most people tend to employ. And now that I’ve completely philosophized myself out of my original argument and thoroughly confused myself about what I mean, I think I’ll leave the reader to make up his own mind…
Minorities
An aside before we begin: As regular readers of Eternity Road probably all know by now, I rise very early in the morning, typically about 4:00 AM, for reasons beyond the scope of this tirade. The early morning hours have become precious to me for an unusual reason: the way I think when I've only just departed from sleep differs substantially from the way I think when I've been awake for an hour or more. My earliest-morning cogitations are less linear, more amenable to breadth and the cross-connection of nominally unrelated ideas and motifs. As the morning ages and my pattern-recognition ability kicks in, I find patterns and parallels that might not have been visible to me in other conditions.
And I resolve to write about them.
It's well established that a coherent, highly motivated minority with a short, coherent agenda will usually out-maneuver and out-politick a much larger group with a broad, diffuse set of concerns. The power of such a minority waxes as the majority fragments. For example, in cases with political relevance, it acquires the appearance of the "swing vote," capable of deciding a closely contested election. Thus, it is to the advantage of such a minority that the larger society be multiply divided according to as many "issues" as possible.
Though it isn't always possible for a minority to encourage such fragmentation, some minorities have made a specialty of it, and have deployed the capacity with abandon. Much depends on the existence of political fault lines: special interests, actual or potential, by which the greater number of persons can be corralled into contending groups.
Consider the environmentalist movement as a case for study. Nomenclature notwithstanding, environmentalist activists generally don't think much about "the environment," whatever that means; their concentration is on preventing others from doing anything. (If you haven't yet heard them called "BANANAs" -- "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything" -- it strikes me as the perfect label for their real agenda.) Ironically, it's because consideration of objectively measurable things such as air and water pollution, or the well-being of specific creatures, seldom enters into their thoughts that they've become so effective in thwarting human development. It allows them:
- To lobby for the preservation of old things -- forests, buildings, neighborhoods -- simply because they're old;
- To agitate against various projects on bases other than pollutive or habitat concerns (e.g., aesthetic values);
- To invoke "issues" that are objectively nonsensical as arguments (e.g. "We can't allow off-roading in the desert. When you scar the desert, it doesn't heal!");
- To substitute anecdotes, isolated incidents, and scare talk for verifiable data.
Is it not perfectly clear that, were "environmentalists" truly concerned with continental biomass, they would encourage the destruction of climax ecologies such as "old-growth forests" to make room for younger, faster-growing, more vigorous vegetation? Is it not perfectly clear that, were the "environmentalists" of the Massachusetts coast as favorable toward renewable energy as they claim, they would not have agitated to block the seaborne wind farm, proposed to stand thirty miles from their coast? Is it not perfectly clear that, were environmentalists really concerned about the caribou and the polar bears, they would be applauding the developments of recent years -- in particular, the Alaskan oil pipeline -- that have correlated with a substantial increase in those populations? Is it not perfectly clear that, were "the ecology" a real priority to them, they would favor the displacement of activities such as "off-roading" into the deserts, where disturbances to "the ecology" are closely confined by the lack of water?
Don't all rush at once, now.
I selected environmental activists as my test case mainly because "the environment" has been so much in the news in recent years, owing to the Gulf oil spill, the Keystone XL pipeline project, the harnessing of oil shale and tar sands, the development of hydrofracking, and similar developments. When the verifiable facts are presented to a fair-minded man, he invariably sides with development and against environmentalist crisis-mongering. Thus, it's critical to environmental activists that they either prevent the facts from being disseminated, or overbear them with political action to fragment the opposition.
Pick a prominent activist minority. It hardly matters which one. You'll find that the pattern applies. Its activities, if successful, will be guided by a "by any means necessary" credo. Its members will argue whatever will prejudice the "issue" in their favor, whether the argument connects with their overt agenda or not. Its victories, however, will be trumpeted as victories for "the cause," even if "the cause" has taken an objective setback from their machinations.
If you're already aware of this pattern -- and the Gentle Readers of Eternity Road are bright enough that I'd expect you to be -- you're probably asking yourself, "What's his point?"
The point, as it is so often, is the underlying dynamic.
A group intent on achieving a specific aim will always be organized into circles:
- Outer: Persons who favor the overt agenda with votes and / or donations.
- Middle: Persons willing to labor in the group's interests.
- Inner: Top operators, strategists, and keepers of the covert agenda.
Those in the inner circle are the "voice of the organization." They determine what appearance the group will present to public. Often, they direct the specific activities of the middle-circle activists, always with an eye on the covert agenda. That agenda will invariably include increasing the power, perquisites, and prestige of the members of the inner circle. Indeed, self-serving action of that sort will often trump all other kinds.
Those in the middle circle are the organization's foot soldiers. They go and do as the inner circle has directed them. The more naive among them are convinced that the inner circle's choices of strategy and tactics really are in the best interests of the overt agenda. Others aware of the covert agenda, or less starry-eyed about group activism, mainly hope to rise among their fellows, perhaps into the inner circle, by conspicuous service. The distribution will vary according to many factors, prominent among them the ages of the middle-circle activists -- and of the group itself.
Those in the outer circle are seldom even aware of the activities of the others. Their allegiance, such as it is, is to the overt agenda. Were that agenda proved to be a deceit perpetrated to conceal other motives, their allegiance would lapse. Thus, it is critical to the longevity and potency of the group that the deceit not be revealed.
The overarching political dynamic of our time, in which activist special-interest groups are so many and so prominent, is the one inside each of those groups. Their agendas -- both overt and covert -- differ widely; their internal structure and dynamics are uniform.
The constitutionalist appalled by the degeneracy of American government and politics will naturally be massively outraged by the success of special-interest activists at subverting the limitations placed on Washington. The idea that such groups could lure Congress into setting aside the explicit limits on its powers is an offense against the Supreme Law of the Land -- indeed, against the idea of law as such. Yet we have found ourselves to be powerless against those groups; they are far too numerous, and maneuver far too adroitly, for the believer in freedom and Constitutionally limited government to counter.
So far.
Yet the objective facts are plainly in our favor. We can't shake the sense that victory is achievable; we just don't know how. We keep recurring to our fundamental principles -- the value of freedom; the importance of objective law; the dangers from unlimited government; the specific nature of the Constitutional compact and its underlying concepts -- and finding them insufficient to carry the day.
Which brings us to the key insight, which might just turn the tides for us:
If you keep on doing what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten....If what you're doing doesn't work, do something else! -- Michael Emerling
In part, this will require an alteration in our mindsets. Most of us think of ourselves as champions of freedom and allegiants of the Constitution. That we are, and have been, and there's no denying it. But that should not determine our tactics.
The great military breakthrough of World War I, which I studied intensely for twenty years, was a simple innovation by the German General Staff in the use of its forces. Prior to that contest, the usual course of a war involved hurling one's main force at the main force of the enemy, and hoping to prevail by superior strength. The underlying assumption was that one cannot win without breaking the enemy's main force, and that the only way to do that is to meet it head-on. The Germans very nearly won the war by rejecting that assumption; they pioneered infiltration tactics that emphasized the search for vulnerabilities, and the use of small, highly mobile strike forces to exploit them.
A successful assault on a vulnerability brings several consequences:
- Disruption of the enemy's near-term plans;
- A "hole in the line" through which a larger force can penetrate;
- An artificial "flank" -- a border to the enemy's holdings toward which his defenses and operations are not oriented -- that can far more easily be assaulted than his defensive front.
This is a considerable improvement on a frontal assault. Yet it took six millennia of human warfare to reach that conclusion. But more important for today's topic, the insight applies to political combat as well.
I wrote some time ago about the nature of American "quilted fascism." That essay remains accurate, in both its observations and its strategic and tactical implications. Please reread it and reflect on it for a few moments.
If, as I have argued, the problem is that the numerous, mobile, coherent special-interest groups have been outmaneuvering us for decades -- with the able assistance of a completely amoral political class, of course -- then the core of our problem is that the interest groups have been using the Germans' infiltration tactic against us while we've sat still.
The solution to the problem follows logically:
- Rather than merely argue for Constitutional principles and governance, we must form small battle units;
- Each such unit must select one and only one special-interest group as its target;
- The unit must study its target's vulnerabilities, and concentrate its firepower on them.
If my earlier assessment of the internal dynamics of special-interest groups is accurate, the major vulnerability of any such group is the divergence between its overt and covert agendas. By attacking that gap, we can divide the Outer Circle allegiants, whose money and votes are critical to the group, and some of the more idealistic Middle Circle activists, from the clutches of the Inner Circle power-mongers. Whenever the facts are on our side -- and they always are -- the group will lose cohesion and fade away.
I call this the Freedom Commando strategy.
The essay linked immediately above is more than seven years old. It didn't get much attention or commentary at that time. But the time has arrived when it must be taken seriously. The nation is on the brink of disaster. We might not have more than a single year left to us to pull it back.
Think about that. Slightly less than a year remains before the investiture of a new Congress and the inauguration of a new president. I can guarantee you that the majority of those men, no matter to which party they belong, will not be where they are out of a sincere desire to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and the freedom it was written to guard. They will be persons who think themselves brighter and more cunning than you and I. They will be there, with few exceptions, to advance their own interests.
In other words, they will be "the wrong people," having risen to their stations through the operation of the mechanisms Friedrich Hayek described in The Road To Serfdom, specifically the chapter titled "Why The Worst Get On Top." It's our task to actuate Milton Friedman's insight: to make it politically profitable for "the wrong people" to do "the right thing."
And with that, I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
The Evolution of Our Prison Nation
One of the most coveted items of contraband in the various facilities of incarceration across the fruited plain is the cell phone; and for valid reasons. The ability to engage in and coordinate criminal activity is one of the very legitimate reasons for categorizing these communication/recording devices as prohibited items in detention facilities such as jails, prisons, government schools and in at least one recent incident a TSA cubicle at the Nashville, TN airport. At 1:30 into the video you will learn how cell phone use is viewed by the TSA.
We Americans are becoming inured to being monitored, video recorded and photographed by our rulers in virtually any public and many private venues. Such routine practices should not however, lead ordinary citizens to conclude that they have license to engage in such surveillance of leviathan’s agents while they are engaged in “keeping us safe”. One such event resulted in the suspension of a middle school 9th grade student in Tulsa, OK. It seems the cell phone photo of a substitute teacher asleep in class was discovered posted on the web. A youth indoctrination facility school official stated the “...student was suspended because they’re not allowed to use cell phones on campus”. There is no word as yet explaining how the cell phone slipped by the alert guard school employee monitoring the metal detector at the entrance to the facility. It becomes increasingly clear that the real reason for the government schools has become not to educate but to condition the population to servile reactions to tyrannical government acts.
Outside these “facilities” and even though the courts have upheld a mundane’s right to do so, you will likely be charged with either “disorderly conduct” or “interfering with a police officer” for undertaking to record in public these minions of the state as they go about “making the state us safe”.
Conversations
CSO: [Groans feelingly.] Oops, sorry.
FWP: For what?CSO: For making noises.
FWP: What's wrong with that? You're allowed.CSO: That's for old people.
FWP: We're old people. You're still allowed!CSO: I've started talking to myself!
FWP: So? Sometimes that's the only way you can have an intelligent conversation.CSO: But I was half-asleep.
FWP: And who else are you going to talk to when you're asleep?
CSO: Oh.
Oh, The Stress! The Irritations! From These GROUNDLINGS!!
President Obama, alighting from the stairs of Air Force One in Phoenix this afternoon, was greeted by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who handed him an envelope and the two exchanged what appeared to be some heated sentiments. At one point, she pointed her finger at him.Asked afterward what happened, Brewer said, “He was a little disturbed about my book, Scorpions for Breakfast.
“I said to him that I have all the respect in the world for the office of the president. The book is what the book is. I asked him if he read the book. He said he read the excerpt,” she said, according to a pool report. “He didn’t feel that I had treated him cordially. I said I was sorry he felt that way but I didn’t get my sentence finished. Anyway, we’re glad he’s here. I’ll regroup.”
I am reminded of Mark Steyn's observation that Obama acts as if the presidency is "too small for him." You don't "diss" a man like that -- obviously a creature of a higher order than any of us mere mortals -- who's graciously condescended to "clean up your mess for you." Especially, you don't "do a lot of talking;" that would be lese majeste. (Anyone else remember that emission from The Won?)
If Obama isn't the single largest individual disaster to be inflicted upon American government by an unthinking populace, he can occupy that slot while I complete my research.
Mirror image.
Given a society of freely choosing individuals, the market is that which exists as a consequence . . . .In a word, the free market is individual desire speaking in exchange terms … When the desires of people are depraved, a free market will accommodate the depravity. And it will accommodate excellence with equal alacrity. It is "servant alike to good … and evil.”
It is because the free market serves evil as well as good that many people think they can rid society of evil by slaying this faithful, amoral servant. This is comparable to… breaking the mirror so that we won’t have to see the reflection of what we really are.
The market is but a response to — a mirror of — our desires.
Instead of cursing evil, stay out of the market for it; the evil will cease to the extent we cease patronizing it. . . .
To slay this faithful, amoral servant [with government coercions] is to blindfold, deceive, and hoodwink ourselves…denying the market is to erase the best point of reference man can have.
Let Freedom Reign, By Leonard Read, quoted in Amoral markets versus immoral coercion. By Gary Galles, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1/25/12.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
The Big Game
[What with all the foofaurauw in circulation about the upcoming SuperBowl "rematch" between the Patriots and the Giants, and the rule changes made concerning overtime play, I thought I might toss in a bit of whimsy.]
"And here they come, for an unbelievable fifth overtime period in this unprecedented clash of NFL superpowers." The announcer shook his head wonderingly. "Never before have two teams in this contest been so perfectly, evenly matched. Do you think the rules committee will reconsider the overtime rules after this game, Troy?"
The color analyst grinned lopsidedly. "It's possible, Joe. We've seen the equivalent of two SuperBowls already today, and we're no nearer a conclusion than we were after the initial coin flip. No one expected anything like this. No one could have predicted it. But after exchanging field goals on their respective first possessions in the first overtime, the defenses on both sides have taken complete command of the game."
"They look pretty tired, don't they?"
The color analyst smirked. "Wouldn't you be, after playing two complete games against the best team in the league? Excuse me: against the other best team in the league! What I've been wondering is what the coaches had to say to the referee that delayed the start of this period for seventeen minutes."
"Well, whatever it was, the teams are back on the field, the Patriots have lined up for the kickoff, and we're about to resume this incredible contest!"
Five overtimes weren't to be the only unprecedented feature of SuperBowl XLVI.
With twenty seconds remaining in the period, the referee halted the game clock and summoned the two head coaches to the fifty yard line. Coincidentally, that was where the ball was placed. It had been returned there upon the opening kickoff, in a strangely peaceable play. Since then, the two sides had alternated four-knee possessions without a break.
"Gentlemen," the referee rumbled, "don't you think you're being a little obvious?"
The head coach of the Giants nodded. "That was our intention, Ref." He glanced at the Patriots' head coach, who shrugged and added his own nod.
"Exactly how long," the referee said, "am I supposed to let this go on?"
"That," the Patriots' coach said, "is entirely up to you."
"The league will have your ears for trophies. Both of your ears."
The Patriots' coach's face turned dark. Before he could expostulate, the Giants' coach held up a placating hand.
"Ref," he said in his lowest register, "we've got young men out there who've played a hundred twenty minutes of football --"
"A hundred thirty-five."
The Giants' coach shook his head. "A hundred twenty minutes, of the highest caliber ever seen. Each side has had to carry four players off the field on stretchers. These boys are risking their lives, their livelihoods, and their futures in the league -- and for what? To see who'll make the first fatigue-induced fatal mistake? To see who'll be first to die on an NFL field, before live TV cameras?" He shook his head again. "Not gonna happen to any of my boys, Ref."
"Or mine," growled the Patriots' coach.
The referee stood dumbfounded. "So neither of you wants the Lombardi trophy?"
"Not that badly," the Giants' coach said.
They stood there in silence for a long moment. At last the referee said, "Give me a minute to see what I can work out." He turned toward the stands, turned on his mike, said "Officials' time out. Booth review," and walked off the field.
"Amazing. Incredible. Unbelievable." The commentator threw up his hands, nearly hitting the color analyst in the face. "I've run out of adjectives."
"It had to happen eventually, Joe," the color analyst said. "The whole thrust of league arrangements has been to promote parity. Ever more even competition among ever more teams. This is just the logical result."
"So who's the champion, then?" The commentator waved at the field below them, where the teams and their coaches were exchanging handshakes, backslaps, and words of praise.
The color analyst regarded the tableau, thought for a moment about the epic contest they'd witnessed and the way it had ended, and smiled. The head coaches had walked off the field arm in arm, with not a glance from either at the Lombardi trophy conspicuous on its display pedestal on the sideline.
"I'd say, both of them."
Monday, January 23, 2012
Romney slobbers over regulation.
Two years ago Romney told The Hill that Republicans “like modern, up-to-date dynamic regulation that is regularly revised, streamlined, modernized and effective.”
“Modern” = unmoored from the Constitution.
“Up-to-date” = modern.
“Dynamic” = frequently changed per bureaucratic whim.
“Regularly revised” = dynamic.
“Streamlined” = easy to administer.
“Modernized” = up to date.
“Effective” = generates revenue; diminishes liberty.
The mental sloppiness of this aside, Mr. Romney may have a good understanding of what it is that “Republicans”—at least the eviscerated, bloodless, spiritless ones of the present age—like but, if so, they are far removed from people who are capable of living life without efficient and dynamic regulation of every aspect of their lives.
Free people don’t like regulation and have every reason to fear it. They don’t want clear, concise regs that are easy to administer and to understand. They don’t want regulations, period, and they shouldn’t give their support to someone who fawns over the very mechanism of contemporary state control.
The Case Against Mitt Romney. By Steve Baldwin, Steve Deace, 1/19/12
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Freedom: The Near-Term Prospects
Newt Gingrich's massive plurality in the South Carolina presidential primary has conservative-minded voters aroused to a pitch they haven't enjoyed since the earliest TEA Party rallies and Town Hall kerfuffles. One reason is its unclear implications. Another is the obvious approbation expressed by South Carolina voters for a candidate demonstrably unafraid of the Big Bad Main Stream Media. Yet a third is that Gingrich has been singing the Constitutional / classical-liberal tune on-key, in better voice than any other candidate than Ron Paul.
Let's imagine for a moment that Gingrich succeeds in gaining the Republican nomination and goes on to wrest the presidency from Barack Hussein Obama. Leaving aside the convulsions those events would induce in every media organ and left-liberal salon in America, what could we then expect from the Gingrich Administration and its supporters in Congress, particularly concerning freedom?
Freedom is a beautiful word. It's been one of your Curmudgeon's favorites for many years. But there's this about freedom: some folks don't interpret it the way others do.
The classical definition of liberty -- freedom in the political context -- is the absence of politically legitimized coercion or constraint from the decisions and actions of the individual citizen. That's "freedom from," which does not imply any right to any particular thing. It was the sense in which the word was used by the Founding Fathers. It's the foundation of the philosophy of individualism, and of all corresponding notions of properly limited government. John Edward Emmerich Dalberg, better known to us of today as Lord Acton, expressed that conviction most succinctly:
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
Contrast that simple, clear statement of a fundamental principle of social organization with Franklin D. Roosevelt's "four freedoms:"
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.
Which of FDR's "freedoms" can be harmonized with Actonian liberty -- political freedom?
- The first is an immediate implication of political freedom, provided the rights of property owners are respected; the freedom to speak must not include the power to command a soapbox from others, nor to compel an audience to listen.
- The second is also clearly consistent with a wider political liberty, again providing that one's "religion" does not exhort one to invade the rights of others (cf. Islam).
- The third fails badly. There is no way a government can guarantee "freedom from want" to even one individual, let alone an entire nation, without seizing the power to invade and redistribute the rightful property of others.
- The fourth is a fantasy. Fear is an emotion, not an objective fact. No power in this universe can guarantee against fear, for the reasons a man can be made to fear are buried within his psyche and cannot be eradicated by external means. Indeed, of all the things men have come to fear over the course of human existence, one of the most common is government itself.
But the political convictions of the great majority of contemporary Americans tend more toward Roosevelt's airy-fairy formulation than toward the Actonian / Jeffersonian conceptions upon which the United States was founded. The American political class finds that much to its taste and benefit, for it rationalizes activist, expansionist government, ever on the lookout for more power with which to pursue the elusive goals of "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear."
An old saying among libertarians runs: "No matter who you vote for, the government gets elected." The great Mark Steyn comments on this point brilliantly in his recent blockbuster After America:
Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists -- sometimes hardcore Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate" statists, sometimes patrician noblesse oblige statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war western democracies is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: the people can elect "conservatives," as from time to time the Germans and British have done, and the left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppence ha'penny would agree to go and take the chill off the toilet seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects were ready to stroll in and assume their rightful place. Republicans have gotten good at keeping the seat warm.
But that's not the root of the problem. A great many Americans in this year of Our Lord 2012 sincerely believe that among the legitimate functions of government is to provide:
- Food to the hungry;
- Clothing to the naked;
- Shelter to the homeless;
- Cheap credit to struggling businesses;
- Tariff protection to "critical industries;"
- Big honkin' grants to various foundations;
- Use of government's coercive powers to approved special-interest groups;
- Easy access to the "American Dream" to persons who haven't the ability or willpower to earn it for themselves;
...and so on. And if these "functions" are antithetical to the God-given rights of each man to his life, his liberty, and his justly acquired property, what of it?
Call them what you will: "moderates," "pragmatists," "New Deal liberals," "technocrats," et cetera ad nauseam infinitam, the politicians most successful at gaining ever higher office and ever wider powers have made a specialty of conciliating voters who hold those convictions. With good reason: those voters constitute at least a third, and more probably half, of those who go to the polls at every election. The aspirant to high office cannot afford to have them vote against him.
Without their support, Newt Gingrich will not ascend to the presidency, nor will any conservative-minded candidate for a seat in either house of Congress.
The fate of freedom after November 2012, should the election end the Obamunist reign, will depend on two factors:
- Whether those elected to replace the Obamunists sincerely believe in freedom as the highest political end, or at least as an unacceptably disrespected consideration;
- Whether the voters who elected them are solidly behind them.
The prospects, unfortunately, are poor. No candidate who comes out squarely in favor of ending the Entitlement State will rise to power. No candidate who states openly that subsidies and subventions for various industries and corporations are inherently anti-Constitutional will be allowed into Congress. No candidate who castigates the environmental movement as opposed to human progress and security will be elected. The special-interest dynamic is still in play, and as powerful as it's ever been -- and it's tolerated, at least passively, by the voters who matter most.
Expect that a Gingrich Administration would be hemmed in as closely as any other Republican administration and Congressional caucus by those factors. Expect further that the majority of those we elect will consider the status quo ante acceptable, with a few tweaks around the perimeter. Expect finally that the country will acquiesce to that arrangement, no matter how many of us had hoped and yearned for a better outcome.
What will you say or do in that case, Gentle Reader?
Saturday, January 21, 2012
100 Years Ago Today Part 2
In the first post upon this topic, your Curmudgeon examined Belloc's foundation for his concept of the servile state. We proceed thence to Belloc's conception of what constitutes individual slavery:
A man binds himself to work for life and his children after him so far as the law may permit him to bind them in a particular society, but that not for a bare subsistence, but for so large a wage that he will be wealthy in a few years, and his posterity, when the contract is completed, wealthier still. Does the state in enforcing such a contract make the fortunate employee a slave? No. For it is in the essence of slavery that subsistence or little more should be guaranteed to the slave. Slavery exists in order that the free should benefit by its existence, and connotes a condition in which the men subjected to it may demand secure existence, but little more.
Here your Curmudgeon must take exception. Yes, it is indisputable that in a society that embeds the institution of slavery, if the free failed to benefit by it, they would not tolerate it. But a benefit adequate to secure the tolerance of the free need not be the maximum benefit possible under the laws of Nature. There are other values than monetary profit, and the law of diminishing marginal value applies to the relations among them. Were it otherwise, we would never see a captain of industry league with forces overtly determined to limit the profits possible to him; consider environmentalism as a test case.
Nevertheless, Belloc has a point. The free must benefit from the enslavement of others for slavery to persist. More, the benefit must exceed other considerations that would militate against slavery (e.g., conscience qualms, technological advance, or the desire for others' approval). Therefore, a very slender benefit is unlikely to serve; it must be substantial, or otherwise differentiated from conditions that obtain outside the zone where slavery is tolerated, to keep the institution alive.
The phrase ringing in your Curmudgeon's thoughts is "peculiar institution."
The antebellum South was the last bastion of slavery in what we now term the "Western World." That makes it possible for America-bashers to distort the history of slavery, a worldwide institution that had also been tolerated in Britain until 1833, into a unique stain on the American conscience. The facts speak otherwise, though this is not the place for an extensive exploration of them.
Slavery in the Southern, pre-Civil War United States was indeed a peculiar institution. Economically, it would have struck an objective analyst as insane. The emergence of machines that would hugely out-produce any plantation slave ought to have brought the institution of slavery to its end...if economic concerns were the item of greatest importance. To be blunt about it, they were not.
Slavery in the pre-war South was far more important to the South as a component in its regional culture than as a source of economic benefit to slaveholders. The best demonstration of this is the well-recorded willingness of the great majority of Southerners to defend slavery, even though only a small minority of Southerners were slaveholders.
The quality of the arguments presented in defense of slavery is of no moment. There is no argument strong enough to overcome the natural right of every human being to his freedom. The significance of the argument was and is that antebellum Southerners regarded slaveholding as "a Southern thing," a component of the South's distinct regional culture. The "rights" of the few dozen black slaveholders were as much a part of that culture -- and as fiercely defended -- as those of white slaveholders.
Historian Clarence Carson considers the core of the matter to be sectionalism: the view of Southerners that the South was sui generis. Southerners held that the criticisms of non-Southerners, who were therefore outside Southern culture and Southern norms, were inherently invalid and irrelevant, and that the South had every right to maintain its uniqueness. This accords with the historical record far better than any economic thesis. It also meshes well with the persistence of slavery entirely without economic benefits in non-Western lands, of which the Arabian states are the best examples.
Belloc's approach to the servile state is entirely economic. Therefore, we must expect that in some of the analysis he presents, there will be generalizations that fail to apply to "classical" slavery," as your Curmudgeon has delineated above. However, he is on target in his core consideration: For slavery to persist and be tolerated, whether legally, socially, or otherwise, free men must feel that they benefit by it.
More anon.
