Stultitia Delenda Est

Then there is ‘class’ science, or the ‘class approach’ to science–the tragic and grotesque inheritance of Lenin. There is no doubt that Lenin was a genius of political organization, of subversion, of manipulation. But perhaps the essential part of his bequest–unwitting, maybe–is the unacknowledged(at times–at other times fully acknowledged) Führerprinzip that permeates the entire structure of the Party and eventually of society. Power in such a structure emanates from the führer, the leader, el lider, duce, chairman, whatever his title may be. It willy-nilly begets lesser führers, not only in the political sphere but in all branches and walks of life. Participating in the power from above, most of them succumb to the illusion that the source of power is also the source of infallible wisdom–scientifically infallible wisdom–and that they participate in this wisdom as well. And so it happens that the führer likes a charlatan dabbler in genetics who dislikes the founder of genetics, ergo the founder could not have been a scientist, ergo the science based on his theories is a nonscience: a bourgeois science. Or the führer is not fond of syncopation, ergo the only good jazz is one without syncopes.

In essence, this is a vulgarized form of the scholastic method of referring to the auctoritates. In the Middle Ages it produced such curious situations as the mandatory belief in the horses’ heart being in its right side, contrary to the evidence of the battlefield, because Aristotle taught so. Its Soviet form, as Starr notes, leads often to devising elaborate arguments intended to prove that the führer’s dislike of an instrument’s timbre is a scientific assessment of that timbre’s decadent nature directly attributable to the disintegration of the outdated bourgeois Weltanschauung. The history of Soviet jazz is, therefore, also the story of incredible, of absurd meanderings of the ideologue’s ‘scientific’ false consciousness.

Josef Škvorecký, “Talkin’ Moscow Blues”, as reprinted in the collection of the same name.

Proof that such “science” occurs, indeed could only occur, in benighted Soviet Republics et al. is left as an exercise to the reader.

I have a back log of stuff I’ve been meaning to post about and probably would have last week if I hadn’t been lying blissfully semi-comatose on a beech.

So here is that backlog:

Go Go Gadget Bulleted List!

• The British Government, after torturing Alan Turing to the point where he took his own life, has now decided not to issue him a pardon. I don’t think I can accurately describe the rage this engenders in me as a programmer, a libertarian, and a person with even a passing sense of justice.
• My friend Jonathan, over at his excellent Trade Diversion blog, has a fantastic post on globalization and local prices. It is title, appropriately, Don’t go to Shanghai for your Big Mac
• I’ve been meaning to post for awhile about the minor kerfuffle over President Obama signing statement calling out a measure that would restrict the government from using certain funds to advocate for gun control. Now I love the Pro-2A camp and I think we do a lot of good work. But the backlash against Obama was, in this case, wrong. Now take as read that I think signing statements are several varieties of bullshit. And I definitely don’t think that the government shouldn’t be advocating for more gun control. But in this case, Obama is accurately pointing out that the text, as written, could potentially impinge on his job as written in the constitution. To whit, Obama’s constitutional authority to suggest to congress whatever measures he finds necessary and expedient. So Obama is, in this exceedingly rare instance, actually protecting the Constitution. And the Pro-2A camp attacked him for it. *Headdesk*
• What SHOULD the libertarian and pro-2A camps be worried about and about which I’ve heard barely a peep? Meretricious, mendacious fuckwittery like this. Alan Gura, one of the best friends Lady Liberty has in this country at the moment, got shat on by a bunch of beauracrats who are paid on the taxpayers dime because, in these trying economic times, we must be careful with the taxpayer’s money. So apparently it’s okay for DC politicos to impinge the rights of the taxpayer on the taxpayer’s dime, but when it comes time to pay the man who put them in their place, well, then we have to be tight with the purse strings.
• Finally, on a lighter note, I present the latest from comedic genius Tim Minchin:
  

Both of the following quotes are from Josef Škvorecký’s autobiographical essay “I Was Born in Náchod….”

First:

After a brief career as right defence in a soccer minileague, I fell ill with pneumonia. This was before the days of antibiotics, and one could easily die. I very much did not want to die and promised, therefore, to say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys daily if I survived. As the days, made hazy by fever, dragged on, I kept raising the numbers until I ended up with a burden of about a hundred Our Fathers and Hail Marys per day. In the year that followed my recovery I tried to live up to the promise. For hours I knelt beside my bed, night after night, and in the morning, I looked like a child suffering from a bad hangover. This intense religiosity exhausted me so much that in another year I had another bout with pneumonia. This time I was wiser. I only vowed that, if I recovered, I would– at the age of eighteen–enter a monastery. When the deadline was approaching I postponed the day until twenty-one. A girl– two, in fact–were unwittingly involved in that decision. With my twenty-first birthday closing in on me, I shifted the date once again: to twenty-five. Eventually, it was the Communists who saved me for secular life. When they took over the country, one of their first acts of class justice was the closing down of all monasteries.

Second:

During the first four years of that Götterdämmerung I attended the local Realgymnasium… It was the Nazis who introduced the term “ideology” into our vocabulary; can anyone wonder why, ever since, I have mistrusted that word and all the varying contents it signified?

I wanted to draw attention to two essays that I think hint at important facets of the debate in libertarianism vs. statism. First, Robert Higgs, writing for The Independent Institute, discusses the problem of burden of proof and the massive status quo bias that crushes and discussion of libertarian politics.

Morally speaking, it would seem that those who opt in favor of coercive arrangements ought to bear the burden of proof. If the state is such a superior arrangement, by comparison with genuine, voluntary self-government, why must the state be propped up by all of its police and armed forces? Why must people be constantly threatened with imprisonment and death in order to bring forth the revenues that support the state’s activities? Walmart does not put a gun to my head to gain my patronage.

He also hits on one fact that I think is crucial to overcoming status quo bias, which is that our modern system of nation states is relatively new and, historically speaking, an aberration. I wished he’d given it more consideration, but he does point out that nation states in their modern form are only a few hundred years old.

My only strong point of contention with Higgs’ essay is that I think he oversteps his case when he lumps science in with politics in his discussion of burdens of proof. The burden of proof does and ought operate differently in the two fields.

Higgs’ essay reminded me of an excellent essay by E. W. Dykes called “Demunicipalize the Garbage Service“. It was originally published in the April, 1968 issue of The Freeman and it’s pretty well known in libertarian circles, but I think it’s worth a read for non-libertarians as well. An excerpt:

War — like many other of to­day’s problems — is the culmina­tion of the breaking of libertarian principles, not once, but thousands of times. We are challenged to jump in at this point and apply our principles to get out of the unholy mess resulting from years and years of errors on errors. The challenge might just as well have been put in terms like this: “You are a second lieutenant. Your platoon is surrounded. Your am­munition is gone. Two of your squad leaders are dead, the third severely wounded. Now, Mr. Lib­ertarian, let’s see you get out of this one with your little semi­nars.”

My answer: “Demunicipalize the garbage service.”

Dykes’ essay isn’t meant to imply the libertarians are inured to war, far from it. Just that asking for a libertarian answer to war on its own is a bit like asking a vegan chef how to avoid burning your steaks. If you really followed the vegan’s advice, the problem never would have come up in the first place.

To me, the modern equivalent of the War question for libertarians is welfare. A lot of people ask me what libertarian policies suggest to people currently dependent on government welfare. And when I admit that, for many of them, a move to a libertarian society would suck, it’s suddenly the libertarian society, not the dependent welfare statism that crowded out private charity and fostered a system of dependence, that is the culprit.

Want to know the libertarian answer to modern welfare? Demunicipalize the garbage service. Asking libertarians to solve problems that are, in part or in whole, the product of statist policies isn’t non-sensical, but it to cast unsatisfactory answers as failures of libertarianism rather than the statism that caused the problem in the first place, is a bit wrong-headed.

After all, in the 20th century, governments killed over 200 million people. Not just in wars, but also in industrialized slaughter. To put this in perspective, about 520,000 people were murdered by private citizens in 2000.

This means that, at year-2000 murder rates, it would take private citizens about 390 years to commit as much carnage as governments did in the hundred years from 1901 to 2000. Put more plainly, the best data available suggests that governments kill about four times as many people in the 20th century as did private violence.

So I guess murder is one area in which government is more efficient than the private sector. Credit where it’s due, I suppose.

I thank that to somehow cast as a libertarian failing our lack of answer to “the war question” misses the point that it’s the Statist system that is actually fighting the wars.

Similarly, the government “War on Poverty” is an abject failure. Poverty rates have been stagnant since its implementation, despite funding for it skyrocketing. The government isn’t solving the poverty problem.

And yet that the libertarians don’t have a ready answer for those already dependent on government handouts is somehow a problem for libertarians, not for the government responsible for the dysfunctional system in the first place.

At any rate, I think both essays are well worth your time, especially if you’re interested in libertarian thought, either pro or con.

And demunicipalize the garbage service.

Robert Kunzig, writing for National Geographic, has an excellent essay about the rise and role of cities in the late 20th century. It’s a great overview of many of the reasons why urbanization is a fantastic trend and one that we should all hope continues as our global population increases. He also tells several interesting anecdotes about global Alpha cities like Seoul and London.

He notes in passing, however, an unfortunate anti-urbanism strain taking hold. He notes that the South Korean government is trying to intentionally break up Seoul, one of the major engines of their prosperity, in order to “spread the wealth around” and, I get the sense, to return to a more “authentic” culture and lifestyle. This is a truly unfortunate trend since, as Kunzig points out, cities are economically and environmentally superior to a more sprawling agrarian or rural lifestyle.

Being of a philosophical bent, though, I’d also argue against the idea that a rural life is a more authentic one. I believe that human nature naturally inclines us as a species towards life in the Polis. Aristotle said that the city was the natural habitat of the human being. The city is to a human being as the bamboo forest is to a panda. This is an attractive notion to me personally, seeing as how I love cities to an almost unseemly extent, but I think it provides a nice complement to the more practical arguments. Forcing people who want to live in cities, who freely gravitate towards a more densely populated urban environment, to move elsewhere isn’t just a bad idea, it runs contrary to human nature. People tend to react poorly to attempted violations or alterations of their nature and that can lead to any number of social ills. This is articulated very well in Thomas Sowell’s excellent book A Conflict of Visions and especially his discussion of the unconstrained vision.

To try and “encourage” people to abandon the cities to which they’ve freely chosen to migrate is a perfect example of the Unconstrained Vision, as it basically asserts that, despite people’s free personal choices to the contrary, a rural way of life is inherently superior. People may want to live in the city, but what they want is less important than what the government asserts they should want.

Of course Sowell’s point is that conscious quests to reform human nature are doomed to failure. Cities are an emergent expression of human nature and the only way to truly reverse urbanization is to act against that nature. One can’t reform it, it shows no signs of changing on its own, so the only way to counteract it is to do so coercively.

All the evidence that we have seen, from cultures all over the world shows that human beings will choose to live in cities when the option is available to them. As of a few years ago, more people live in cities than in rural areas for the first time in human history. This tipping point zipped by without too much fanfare, but I think it’s a remarkable milestone and one that should be celebrated. It means that, for the first time ever, more than half of our brothers and sisters finally live in their natural environment. More than half the human species is finally able to enjoy the fruits of one of mankind’s greatest developments: the city. This is truly a momentous milestone and we should be happy for that fact and looking forward to the time when three fourths, or nine tenths of people have that same opportunity.

That some people, mostly in the meddling class, see this tidal wave of people choosing to live in the polis as a problem is worrying, since their attempts to reverse the trend can only come to ill one way or another. At best they may waste (our) time and resources fighting the useless fight. At worst, they use coercive force to try and change the calculus. China, in fact, is already well on the path to this second option, having implemented an execrable system of internal passports, meaning that millions of people who want desperately to enjoy the benefits of the city cannot do so without risking imprisonment or death.

Ultimately, though, no government can truly stop the course of humanity. This, indeed, is one of the main points of Sowell’s book. The force of human nature, aggregated over the billions-strong population of the planet, is stronger than any attempt to hold it back. Cities are here to stay and urbanization will continue so long as people continue to strive to fulfill their own goals and desires. No government can stop that, but they can definitely make the process more painful than it needs to be.

Communism will go down as one of the great evils of the 20th century. Here’s hoping that the last communist regimes in the world collapse soon enough that its toxic impact on the 21st century can be minimized.

Kim Jong Il’s death will hopefully offer us a small step in that direction. His unique “juche” take on the twist Communist world view lead to the death (through starvation and execution) and imprisonment of millions of people. But North Korea and its people are still laboring under the horrors of a communist state. Kim Jong Il’s death is happy news, but it doesn’t end the terror that reigns in Northern half of the Korean peninsula.

A less happy death also occurred recently. Vaclav Havel, a great defender of liberty, also recently died. In this video he reminds us not only that there are still Communist and tyrannical states in the world, including one in our own backyard, but that there are still dissidents working to foster liberty and justice in those places. These dissidents deserve our admiration and support.

My favorite band of Cuban “dissidents”, Porno Para Ricardo:

Related: the lead singer, Gorki Aguila, spent time in a Cuban prison on charges of “Social Dangerousness”. I submit that this is the single most Punk Rock accomplishment a dissident can have.

Writing in 1925 regarding a proposed ban on interstate commerce of revolvers:

“The real victim of moral legislation is always the honest, law-abiding, well-meaning citizen—what the late William Graham Summer called the Forgotten Man. Prohibition makes it impossible for him to take a harmless drink, cheaply and in a decent manner. In the same way the Harrison Act puts heavy burdens upon the physician who has need of prescribing narcotic drugs for a patient, honestly and for good ends. But the drunkard still gets all the alcohol that he can hold, and the drug addict is still full of morphine and cocaine. By precisely the same route the Nation’s new law would deprive the reputable citizen of the arms he needs for protection, and hand them over to the rogues that he needs protection against.

Ten or fifteen years ago there was an epidemic of suicide by bichloride of mercury tablets. At once the uplifters proposed laws forbidding their sale, and such laws are now in force in many States, including New York. The consequences are classical. A New Yorker, desiring to lay in an antiseptic for household use, is deprived of the cheapest, most convenient and most effective. And the suicide rate in New York, as elsewhere, is still steadily rising.”
– H. L. Mencken, “The Uplifters Try It Again”

Link.

As it was then, it is now, and always will be. Prohibition (of booze, drugs, or arms) hurts only the law abiding.

Those freedoms we have left, anyway:

I already annoyed any of you who follow me on twitter with this last night, but I just had to point out the brilliant strategy employed by the Occupy Seattle Brain Trust.

See, Occupy Seattle, in conjunction with the SEIU, decided to march on the University bridge and shut it down in the middle of rush hour. Now the University Bridge is one of only a handful of ways to get from downtown to North of Lake Union. It’s a popular route for a lot of work-a-day business commuters. Regular folk, working a job to pay the bills and live their lives.

You know, the sort of folks staunchly in the “99%” that these Occupy gits are always nattering on about.

And Occupy Seattle thought that it was a great idea to annoy these people by preventing them from getting home on a Thursday night.

*Slow clap*

Good job, hippies. You just managed to piss off your target audience in one of the most sympathetic cities in the country. Winning strategy, that.

The best part of the whole thing, though, was their rational. Many of them made self-congratulatory comments about how none of the 1%’s yachts would be allowed to pass. See, the U Bridge is a draw bridge (Google informs me that it’s a type called a “double leaf bascule bridge”) which covers the only passable ship channel out of Lake Washington. A lot of rich people have their boats in Lake Washington.

So if any of them decided to go on a pleasure cruise at (departing at 5pm on a Thursday night in foul weather), well, they might be sore annoyed that they had to sit on their multi-million dollar yacht for an hour, waiting for some hippies and union thugs to get bored and go home.

Yeah, that’ll teach those rich fat cats.

So in summation, Occupy Seattle decided to delay, harass, and annoy thousands of work-a-day commuters on the off chance that they might ALSO delay, harass, and annoy a couple of rich people.

Hey, at least they’re being douchebags to every one. Equality!

This is a few months old (roughly a century and a half in Internet Years), but I really can’t let this slip by without posting a link to it.

Shikha Dalmia, on whom I have a sizeable intellectual crush, absolutely destroys insipid NeoCons who try to co-opt Adam Smith:

“Here are the problems: First, Stewart and Frum got the quote wrong—and in an identical way, suggesting that one lifted it from the other without actually bothering to consult the actual text. The exact quote is: “Defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence.” (Look it up yourself on page 465 of Volume I of the Liberty Fund edition.)

Two, they got the interpretation wrong. The operative word in the quote is “defence.” But America does not have a defense budget—it has an offense budget to maintain far-flung bases and military alliances whose original rationale became defunct decades ago. This is not what Smith was endorsing.”

(LINK)

I’m not going to spoil the punchling for you, so you should definitely go read the whole article. It’s a textbook example of how a skilled journalist can demolish a pillar of political bullshit.