Single-Payer Nation

As a fiscal conservative and libertarian (for lack of a better term), I vehemently support a voucher system for public schooling and vehemently oppose universal health care.  Yesterday a friend of mine asked me to defend this apparent contradiction (they’re both single-payer systems) with the question: “You support a single-payer system for public schools but oppose it for health care.  Why?”

First of all, this is not a contradiction.  A contradiction would exist only if my position was that nothing should be a single-payer system.  Then I would be contradicting myself by supporting one single-payer system and opposing another (it would also be hypocritical).  No, my argument ultimately comes down to this: I think it’s good for taxpayers to subsidize some things and bad for them to subsidize others.

The rather broad category of what a government must provide through taxation includes an army, policeman, firemen, roads, a legal system, and so forth.  All of these things are necessary to protect each citizen’s individual rights and uphold commerce and free trade.

I would argue that primary education falls into this category (my friend and I agreed to include it under “infrastructure” spending).  A child cannot function in any capacity without learning the basics of arithmetic and English.  The child must also learn the fundamentals about our civil society (by learning about how our government functions and how he can vote, for example).  Furthermore, I think that a free society cannot sustain itself without some minimal investment in the education of its free people.

Where to draw the line of what constitutes “infrastructure education” is up for debate.  I would never demand taxpayers dollars to pay for people to go to college, for example.  A college education is not necessary to provide for yourself; knowing how to speak and add is.

Rising Economic Anger

I listened to Michael Moore talk about how “anger is building” among the have-nots, how people who are struggling are getting fed up with these rich corporate Wall Street players.  I started to wonder if there’s some vague hint of a coming revolution in his mind, a turnover in economic policy that will result in the wealthy producers paying for anyone who “needs” it.  After all, Moore said that he would vote for any legislation that raised taxes to ninety percent for the wealthy.

I’m certain there’s anger in this country directed at Wall Street.  I just hope it’s legitimate anger at the crooks and thieves and scam-artists.  Better yet, I hope it’s anger against the government for taking taxpayer money and giving it to these banks and giant firms.  Those are justifiable things to be angry about.  I’m all for it.  If people want to “revolt” against a government that spends their money like that, I’m all for it.

If, however, this anger rises from simple class warfare, if you’re mad that some people make more money than you, if you think you deserve the money of a rich guy more than the rich guy does, then it’s not legitimate.  In fact, I tend to think of such people as whining snivelers at best – thieves at worst.

What is it about some people in this country who think they’re entitled to the property of others?  It can’t be as simple as jealousy.  Every time I hear someone complaining about how much more CEOs make than their employees, I ask, “So?”  When pundits on TV talk about how much this gap has gone up in recent years, I ask, “So?”  When a liberal says the rich are getting richer, I ask, “So?”

I think the root of this self-entitled attitude often lies in fallacy: the idea that there’s only set amount of wealth in the world.  If you believe that, it’s easy to see how you think it’s justified to believe in theft.  After all, those wealthy people are keeping you from earning money by hoarding most of it.

The fact is that this fallacy is demonstrably and manifestly false – wealth is created all the time.  The only way a wealthy person can prevent you from achieving your economic goals is by force; i.e., criminal behavior or the intervention of the government.  If anyone is doing this, they’re crooks and should be prosecuted as such.

If they’re not doing this, if they’re free people who’ve earned their money honorably, why is it anyone’s business how much money they make or what they do with it?

True Racism in America

Last week, a black male guest on The O’Reilly Factor told Juan Williams to “get back to the porch,” because Williams dared to claim that the controversy against Rush Limbaugh was overblown.  I also remember another incident last year in which a black reporter on CNN called Juan Williams a “happy Negro.”  These are ways of calling a black man Uncle Tom, saying that he’s a sell-out to this own race.

To put this in perspective, I find analogies useful.  I’m incarcerated, and white supremacists in here talk about “selling out your race.”  Most tellingly, they have a simple term for certain Caucasians they don’t like: They call them “nigger-lovers.”  That’s exactly equivalent to what these two men said to Juan Williams.  Yet no one makes a fuss.  These two men weren’t villified in any way.  It’s perfectly okay to say vile, racist things as long as you’re black.  As a consequence, the only racists of any importance left in America are the black liberals. 

Sure, you have the white supremacists and Neo-Nazis who say these things, but they’re completely marginalized.  They’re instantly (and rightfully) scorned.  They aren’t respected journalists and professors and writers who get guest spots on national television.  As I’ve just said, the only place I hear them is on the prison yard.

This goes deeper than just disgusting comments.  Not only did these black men say things that are perfectly analogous to what I hear everyday from white supremacists, but they share the exact same philosophy: racial solidarity.  You can’t accuse people of selling out your race without first thinking that your race has some sort of inherent value.  The belief that your “race” should grant you any sort of value or self-esteem is childish and absurd.  It’s the modern remnant of tribal thinking, a vestigial and quite ugly mentality.

Racial superiority may be the root of racism, but racial superiority can’t exist without racial solidarity, without the illogical belief that the value of a clan of individuals with the same ethnicity outweighs the value of any individual.  White, black, Hispanic, Japanese; whatever – every individual of every ethnicity needs to take a second look at the way they view their “sacred heritage.”  If we want to address the issue of racism, we need to start there.

O’Reilly and Dawkins, Part Two

After Richard Dawkins’s appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, I watched the next episode to see what emails he would read regarding to the interview.  The very first one pointed out the fundamental problem with people like O’Reilly’s position.  The email read that Dawkins was correct since evolution, being a scientific theory, deals in evidence, whereas religion deals in faith.  O’Reilly’s response was that because evolution has gaps, it also deals in faith.

Why is it that O’Reilly and his ilk can never, ever provide any positive evidence for their viewpoint?  Isn’t it telling that the entirety of their position is to attack evolution in some childish attempt to win by default?  They make no attempt to elevate their argument more than an opinion; instead they try to lower science to the level of an opinion.

Yes, O’Reilly, the theory of evolution has gaps and unanswered questions.  Guess what?  So does atomic theory, and the theory of relativity, and quantum theory, and the theory of gravitation, and even the germ theory of disease.  Are all of these a matter of faith, as well?  Einstein could never reconcile quantum theory with relativity – does this mean trusting e=mc² is faith?

Science isn’t like a neat episode of CSI – there are always unanswered questions.  This is true for every single field of study.  But it is logical fallacy to claim that this reduces science to purely a matter of faith.  It sure is strange that we can’t combine gravity with the other three fundamental forces in physics, or figure out why it’s so weak compared to the other three, or even discover the first bit of evidence of the graviton.  My my; such huge, gaping holes in the theory of gravitation.  According to O’Reilly’s reasoning, anyone who believes in the theory of gravitation is using faith – and perhaps we should teach the “alternatives” to gravity in science class.

Kurt Cobain was found dead in 1994 with a shotgun in his hands and a suicide note nearby.  But strange, unanswered questions remain.  An unidentified person was using his credit card as he was lying dead.  His fingerprints were on that gun but not on the shells.  The signature on the suicide note was in different handwriting than the body of the note.  Conspiracy theories proclaiming that he was murdered abound.

Yet despite all the unanswered questions, he almost certainly voluntarily shot himself.  Because there’s a mountain of positive evidence saying that he did it.  If conspiracy theorists want to fortify their case, they need their own positive evidence.  Ditto for the opponents of evolution.

O’Reilly and Dawkins

Watching Richard Dawkins go on The O’Reilly Factor is always entertaining.  O’Reilly kept saying that “alternatives” to evolution should be taught in public classrooms because evolution can’t answer every question.  Of course, O’Reilly even said that teaching only evolution is “fascism.”

Personally, I think Richard Dawkins dropped the ball during this interview.  Sure, he correctly pointed out the illogic of automatically leaping to a Christian creation story by default, but I think he should have brought up the pure idiocy of O’Reilly’s claim, the stunning and manifest contradiction: “Teaching only science in science class is fascism.”

Honestly, let’s look at this.  O’Reilly and all like-minded Americans are saying that we should teach an alternative to science in a science class!  This would be like teaching alchemy in chemistry class, or better yet, like teaching geography in history class.  Does O’Reilly seriously think that telling kids that “billions of people believe that a god designed everything” is science?  Call it whatever you want, remind your kids of it every day at the breakfast table, but please don’t insult the very foundation of human reason by calling your feelings science.

That’s what this comes downs to: people’s feelings.  O’Reilly didn’t even mention that bad science of intelligent design theory.  He reminded  ”>Dawkinds that there are “many more believers than nonbelievers,” as if this is supposed to add any weight to his argument.  Like so many of his peers, O’Reilly seems to think that the question of evolution’s veracity should be decided by polling, by the subjective opinions of a majority of Americans.

What’s also amazing to me is that O’Reilly continues to say that his religious beliefs “explain everything” whereas the theory of evolution has unanswered questions (such as how it all began).  This is the problem.  Unless you can provide some evidence, your religious belief matters about as much to objective reality as your political opinion does.  Evolution is either true or it is not.  People’s opinions, feelings, faith, or beliefs are not going to change this, and they certainly aren’t going to discover the truth of it.

Food for thought for the faithful out there: The theory of evolution (indeed all science) has unanswered questions because scientists are not so audacious and arrogant to claim that they know things unless there’s a great deal of evidence to back these things up.  This is more than humility – this is rationality.

Redistributionist Protestors, Part Two

Sean Hannity’s redistributionist guests from the G20 protest said some things that were pretty out there.  I doubt that every socialist leftist in this country would ask a question like, “Why should anyone need to make more than five hundred thousand dollars a year?” with a straight face.  (However, let me note that the philosophy behind such questions and such thinking is fairly simple and always the same at its base.)

Something else this young woman said was to recount a tale of her family.  She said that she was fortunate to be enrolled in college, but that the rest of her family had worked brutally hard for all their lives and make only “ten thousand a year,” and now are going bankrupt because they can’t afford medical care.

I have no reason to cast any doubt on her story, just as I have no reason to doubt that similar situations exist among Americans.  My question is, so what?

Some would surely call me cruel for that attitude, but by asking, “so what?” I don’t mean that no one should care about such a situation.  What I’s trying to say is that this young woman’s family bears the responsibility for how their lives unfold.  We all do.  Plenty of people live hard lives and eventually go on to be successful.  Plenty of kids stay home and study hard while their friends are partying and hanging out on the street.  Plenty of adults work two jobs and go to night school.

Is there something preventing members of this young woman’s family from getting educated and finding a better job, or starting their own business, or investing in the stock market?  Is there an obstacle that she failed to mention?  A greedy elected official who taxes them too harshly, perhaps?  A crooked employee at their bank who skims their savings?  A prejudiced employer who ignores their applications?

I doubt that such an obstacle exists, but if it does, it should be abolished right away.  Such obstacles are morally wrong and certainly not a part of a free capitalistic society.

What is a part of a free society, however, is that everyone must earn what they consume.  Furthermore, the only worth that your product or service has is whatever others are willing to pay for it.  If your particular job doesn’t pay you enough, then perhaps you should provide a more valuable product or service.  If you instead demand that you should be given more than others are willing to pay for your product or service, you’re demanding that which you didn’t earn.  That is called begging when a private citizen does it, and thievery when men with guns do it.

All of this is assuming, of course, that there are no criminal obstacles in your path.

The Non-Shocking Shock Doctrine

I’m beginning to see striking similarities between the opponents of free-market capitalism and the opponents of evolution: They both make nonsensical claims and build straw men to try to make the object of their dislike appear silly or even dangerous.  For the anti-evolutionists, the quintessential (and flawed) argument goes something like this: “I can accept small adaptive changes, but those small changes can’t add up to a new species.”

And then there are the opponents of free-market capitalism like Naomi Klein, who enunciates in her book The Shock Doctrine the fundamental tenet of her collectivist philosophy: “I can accept that free markets work, but not for poor people.”

Ms. Klein’s main thesis – that an exploitative form of corporatism that she calls capitalism has been forcefully, and often bloodily, shoehorned into the lives of poor, unsuspecting ethnic people over the last several decades – has some merit.  But Ms. Klein seems to suffer from a congenital and quite common need to conflate free-market capitalism with corporatism.

I would direct Ms. Klein (and her intellectual peers) to Ayn Rand’s definition of capitalism: Separation of Economy and State.  The corporations that these collectivists have so many problems with have no power on their own.  None.  If they exist in a rational nation with objective laws, then they’re only as powerful as the product or the service they provide.  It is only through government intervention and/or criminal behavior that a corporation is able to exploit anyone.  In a true free-market capitalist society, only the criminals would get away with this – and then only when they could evade the legitimate law.  Needless to say, criminals have always been part of every society, and they always will be.  Free-market capitalism doesn’t breed a greater number of them.

In her book, Ms. Klein came up with the usual moaning about wealth disparity and crony capitalism.  She described what capitalism has done to the Chinese people while omitting the fact that in the last decade, since the post-crisis “free-market takeover” she so reviles, roughly 150 million Chinese have been lifted out poverty.  Her caterwauling is definitely nothing new.

Several times in the book, however, Ms. Klein made amazing statements such as, “At least under communism, everyone had a job” when speaking about the history of countries like Poland and Russia.  Yes, the unemployment rates in communist countries are always zero.  It worked wonderfully in Russia and Poland, didn’t it?

Anyone can create a job out of nothing.  If Washington wanted to, they could reduce the unemployment rate in America to zero overnight by handing everyone a government job.  The question is, Who’s paying for it?  Is it sustainable?  What happens when the money runs out?

But that’s the problem.  That’s what Ms. Klein and those like her can’t seem to understand.  In her book, she stated what she believes is the “core free-market promise – that increased wealth will be shared.”

Since when was that the core free-market promise?  I’m pretty sure Milton Freidman never claimed that the implementation of his ideas would lead to wealth being shared.  The point, Ms. Klein, is that no one should be forced to share.  The point is that you have to earn increased wealth.  The core free-market promise is that you’ll get the opportunity to earn as much wealth as you want.  The opportunity; no more, no less.

Redistributionist Protestors

I saw a couple of college girls on Hannity who’d taken part in the G20 protests.  Both were earnest young Americans who believed in the utter righteousness of their cause.  After all, they simply want to give poor people money.  They want to eradicate poverty.  A nobler goal one would be hard-pressed to find.

Of course, a noble goal does not imply a noble method of achieving that goal.  It would be noble to rid the world of a particular genetic disorder, but accomplishing this by murdering everyone with that disorder so they couldn’t breed and pass on the disorder would not be noble.

Hannity’s guests wanted the abolition of capitalism and the redistribution of wealth.  They spent the entire segment griping about how it isn’t fair that some have a lot and others have a little.  They claimed, for example, that 225 human beings control 50% of the world’s total wealth.  If this is true, my response to them would have been a simple, “So?”

Most telling, one of the young women asked, “Why does anyone need to make over 500 thousand dollars a year?’

Why indeed?  Hannity gave the appropriate response: “What business is it of yours?”

Redistribution may serve a noble goal, but it’s thievery all the same.  Taking money from people who earned it (that is, they did so without fraud, intimidation, or government favors) is theft no matter what you plan to do with the money.  If you steal to pay for the operation of a helpless baby who will otherwise die, you’re still stealing.

So what, people might ask.  Stealing may be bad, but allowing people to languish in poverty and die of malnutrition and easily preventable diseases is worse yet.  I think they’re missing the point.

As I said above, the method of achieving a noble goal is not necessarily noble.  But also, the point must be made that the method of achieving a noble goal is not necessarily the most effective one, either.  Murdering everyone with a particular genetic disorder would be morally disgusting, but praying for the genetic disorder to disappear from humanity would be simply ineffective.  Obviously, a solution that is both morally decent and effective would be to make advances in the science of genetics capable of correcting the disorder (without any harm to its sufferers).

Likewise, taking money from productive people and giving it to those who didn’t earn it has both moral objections and, I would argue, a serious problem with effectiveness.  Foreign aid and charity has helped people, absolutely, but it has done next to nothing to transform nations and insure long-lasting economic security for their people.  It is also important to note that the more you take from the successful, the less successful people you have, and this is clearly self-defeating to the redistributionist cause.

The point is this: Empowering poor people across the world to earn their own money is both nobel and effective method of alleviating poverty.  This method has been working for generations, and it continues to work right this minute (evidenced, for example, by not only the booming economies of India and China, but by the rising incomes of their lower classes).  This method is called, of course, free-market capitalism.

Child Zombies

This morning I saw footage of an elementary school teacher in New Jersey leading kids in a song praising President Obama.  Maybe it was the hypnotic monotone, maybe it was the mantra-like “mmm” chant; or maybe it was just the fact that children were mindlessly glorifying a man for no reason they can possibly fathom, but I started thinking of Jim Jones and Kool-Aid.

We’ve come to a point in this country where it’s inappropriate for kids to say the Pledge of Allegiance, to pay homage to worthy ideals like liberty, justice and unity.  A point where Americans shriek endlessly about the Pledge because of the words “Under God,” as if voicing a tradition is going to ruin a child’s objectivity.  And yet, here we have teachers paid by taxpayers dollars inculcating their students to praise a president of their liking.

I bet if someone were to ask them, they’d give some nonsensical answer about how they were teaching their kids to be “patriotic” and to support the office of the president.  I suppose that sounds reasonable, but I highly doubt those same teachers would have led their students to praise Ronald Reagan or George Bush for their accomplishments.  And honestly, do these kids even know what they’re saying?  do they understand at all the difference in policies between a Barack Obama and a George Bush, or are they simply repeating what their authority figures are forcing them to repeat?

And what exactly has Barack Obama accomplished, anyway?  What key, life-changing legislation has he pushed through?  What decisive foreign policy decision?  So far he hasn’t even accomplished the things he promised all through the campaign, like pulling out of Iraq and closing Guantanamo.

To me, the most disturbing part of this song was the line “equal work means equal pay.”  Considering the socialist policies of Barack Obama, the devotion to class warfare, and the clear hostility toward Big Business (except those who support him, of course), the sight of brainwashed children chanting a proletarian catchphrase seems rather chilling.

Obama, Health Insurance Czar, Part Two

It’s amazing how our president justifies the fact that he will require everyone to buy health insurance.  Forget freedom, forget individual rights, forget that tired old dusty Constitution-thing; Obama has an agenda, and nothing is going to get in the way of its realization.  Not only will everyone be required to buy health insurance, but check this out: You get fined if you don’t.  And here I was thinking this was America.

I heard the president roll out the responsibility speech.  That is, everyone should be required to buy health insurance because otherwise the rest of us will have to pay for it when something inevitably happens to an uninsured American.  Yes, that’s right, our proletarian president whose entire formula rests on class warfare, whose every move is paid for by taking money others have earned, is going to lecture us about paying our on way in the world.

Let me get this straight: Some Americans who already pay high taxes have to foot the medical bills for those who can’t afford it, because roughly thirty million more Americans are going to be required get insurance – and the reason they’re being required to do is because “it’s their responsibility so the rest of us don’t have to pay for them.”

Do my ears deceive me?  It sounds to me like this is what the president is saying: “No one should be forced to pay the medical bills of others, so I’m going to use the taxpayer dollars to pay the medical bills of others.”

Contradictions are a natural part of life when your entire philosophical worldview is irrational.  Obama – and all of his left wing collectivist ilk – thinks the rights of “society” outweigh the rights of the individual.  They never get the fact that “society” is nothing more than a collection of individuals.  The contradiction is manifest: You violate the rights of some individuals in the interest of other individuals.  That’s what it all comes down to.