Thoughts on freedom, programming and other type stuffs.

Occupy Wall Street: Mocking The Meat It Feeds On

October 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I first learned about “Occupy Wall Street” a few days before it started.

It sprung up as a collection of people angry about the economy, but was steadfastly without a driving purpose from the start.  My initial thought was: with no actual message, this is bound to go sideways.  And really, that’s all it has done: go sideways.  The few protestors that have shown up — a few thousand total across several cities — have, left to their own AdBuster’s-inspired devices…well, they’ve gone sideways.

Consider the evidence:

The overriding theme seems to be this: we are here because we are jealous.

Now I’ll stop to be clear: crony capitalism is an anathema to productive society.  The idea that government should choose winners and losers in any capacity — from GM to Solyandra — is a reprehensible thing.  Government should play no role in subsidizing businesses through bailouts or tax breaks or any other form of favoritism.  And inasmuch, I can agree with a certain amount of the anger inherent in these “Occupy” protests.

But I am a very long way from being convinced that this is the message these protests are about.

Knowledge IS free. It's called a library.

I'm looking forward to plunging head-first into massive amounts of debt and then complaining about it. I am the 99%.

Even the most cursory glance through the tumblr blog suggests that this is largely a movement made up of 20-somethings who want nothing to do with the reality of the decisions they’ve made.  College loans seem to be the chief concern.

And in this is the reason why I contend that jealousy is at the center of this whole thing.  College loans are an entirely voluntary thing.  The choice between taking on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to study what you want at the best possible college vs. not going to college at all is a false choice.  Without really much brainstorming, the actual choices include (but are not limited to):

  • Learning a trade
  • Going to a community college and transferring to an affordable state college
  • Joining the military to let them pay for college
  • Attending an affordable state school outright

The list, I’m sure, goes on.  Suffice it to say, there is literally no one forcing anyone at gunpoint to attend a college which is beyond their means, to study any major they want, no matter how dismal the outlook.

Choosing to live outside your means is exactly that: a choice.

I’m not talking about unforeseen medical bills.  At one point in my life, I chose to go without health insurance and wound up in the hospital, needing surgery, with $37 in my bank account.  And despite all of my own personal poor decisions that led to that moment, I can still come away from that experience understanding just how much some people will always need a safety net.

But let’s be real: this is not about a safety net.

This is about protesting the very idea that educations cost money.  This is largely a 20-something crowd who is tired of paying back loans for a service they have already received.  And that…that doesn’t sit well with me.

Education is overpriced.  But not because education is an industry.  Government decided more people should be able to go to college and guaranteed loans; people took out more loans; colleges responded to increased demand with increased prices.

It’s not hard, people.  Government creates bubbles.  The solution to a government-created problem is not more government.  Not when it comes to crony-capitalism.  Not when it comes to pricing bubbles.

In other words, Occupying Wall Street to force government to provide a solution for a problem that government created is the very definition of a protest gone sideways.

But it’s more than that, because there’s a sizable amount of free will involved here.  Government may have created a bubble, but it didn’t force anyone to buy something they didn’t want.

When you look at other people getting a pricey education and say, “I deserve that too” regardless of how much you’ve saved up…when you look at what other people own and say, “I deserve to have one of those too” regardless of how much you’ve set aside…when you look at where other people live and say, “I should live like that too” regardless of income or savings…you’re driven by jealousy.  You lust after what your neighbor has at the risk of what you do have, and the decisions you make thereafter are your own.

Government has a legitimate role to play in helping the truly downtrodden.

Helping childish people live out their childish fantasies isn’t one of them.

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The Snorting Warthog of Intemperance in the Other Room

July 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

We have a houseguest.

My wife’s friend is visiting for an overly-long five days this week, and I’d be done with the whole matter — upstairs reading my Kindle in peace — but that this particular houseguest is giving me an increasingly rare chance to observe wildly retarded politics in action.

For anonymity’s sake, I will call our houseguest “Thor.”

And for clarity’s sake, it should be said right up front that Thor is a gay man.  They are old college friends, and it’s our turn to put him up for — and I’ll reiterate this — an overly long five days.

Thor is periodically yelling at his computer from the other room, trying in vain to sucker my wife into a two-man political rally in favor of the Democratic Party.  My wife, though I can’t see her, is probably nervously laughing, changing the subject, staring blankly into the television, because (and here’s the crux of this whole post) we don’t see wildly retarded politics in action very often any more.

There was a moment in college when I got angry at a very good friend during a political argument and threw a copy of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government at him.  It hit him in the chest and we stared dumbly at each other before he — in the role of “better man” he’s so often played in our friendship — walked away.

My attraction to politics flipped polarity that night.  My empire of dirt — political columnist, editor of a small start-up magazine, growing power in the College Republicans — began to crumble away.

“Friendships trump politics” was the lesson I took away that night.  “Everything trumps politics” was the bigger lesson.

I’ve been reading The Declaration of Independents by Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie for the past few nights, and I think that’s the conclusion they’re building to.  It’s not that freedom doesn’t matter.  Liberty matters intensely.  It’s that tribal loyalty brings out the very worst in us, causes us to disavow friends, fractures our relationships.  And in the case of Thor, it hangs a pea soup-thick cloud over our judgment.

Thor’s loud pledge of allegiance to the Democratic Party is a sad reminder of the price of politics.  He has convinced himself that his team is better at providing civil liberties, that it can provide a clear path to a balanced budget; he has convinced himself that the other team is the source of all budget woes, that it is actively seeking to trample his civil liberties (though of course this last part is true).  He is literally unable to comprehend life outside of the binary, and it is periodically turning him into a snorting warthog of intemperance in the other room.

Politics is a sorry thing.  It’s the process of using force to uphold your causes that a massive amount of people — given their druthers — would never want for themselves.  It is a thing of coercion, of rage, of force and hate and the belief that you — you — know better than other people what they should or should not be doing.

When that book sank sadly to the floor that night, my political life was over.  My friend — always the better man — forgave me.  He later asked me to be the best man at his wedding, and at the reception dinner, I explicitly avoided telling the story about my John Locke-related childishness, bygones being better off buried.

I guess that’s the point of this post: politics may make for good allegiances, and it may make for a cathartic moment every other November, but it doesn’t make us one iota more free, and it sure as hell doesn’t make for good friendships.

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Tyranny Sincerely Exercised

April 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Resistance is futile.In a single excerpt from a single essay, I’m pretty sure I can recap the several years of deep reflection that took me from conservative Republican to anarcho-capitalist libertarian.

If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners. Observe how the ‘humane’ attitude to crime could operate. If crimes are diseases, why should diseases be treated differently from crimes? And who but the experts can define disease? One school of psychology regards my religion as a neurosis. If this neurosis ever becomes inconvenient to Government, what is to prevent my being subjected to a compulsory ‘cure’? It may be painful; treatments sometimes are. But it will be no use asking, ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ The Straightener will reply: ‘But, my dear fellow, no one’s blaming you. We no longer believe in retributive justice. We’re healing you.’

This would be no more than an extreme application of the political philosophy implicit in most modern communities. It has stolen on us unawares. Two wars necessitated vast curtailments of liberty, and we have grown, though grumblingly, accustomed to our chains. The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance. Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the linguistic analysts.

As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.

C. S. Lewis
Willing Slaves of the Welfare State

(Whole essay, very much worth reading, is here.)

My conversion went like this:

  • I’m fighting for the government to control how people act.
  • The people I support won’t always be in control.
  • If the government has the power to control how people act and I don’t agree with the people in charge, I’m at risk to have myself and my behavior controlled in exactly the same way I’m advocating.
  • The only way to avoid tyranny is to take away the power to control behavior from the state.

In other words, I’m not a libertarian because I hope for libertine squalor or because I hope to hasten the moral decay of society (whatever that means). I’m a libertarian (and border on anarcho-capitalist) because I dread tyranny.

And lest there be any misunderstanding, just because you agree with the outcome doesn’t make your particular brand of government-run behavioral control any less tyrannical:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C. S. Lewis
God in the Dock

Listen, people: you can’t pass laws that make people better or fix society’s ills. All you can do is make everyone less free in the process. Make no mistake: government-run healthcare is a tyranny no less sincerely executed for the good of its victim than the moral do-gooding of the religious right. In the end, we’re left only with less freedom and heavier chains.

I wish I could shout this from the rooftops.

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Evidently, God Hates Consistency, too.

April 1, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I checked — there’s no Facebook group called “I dislike the Westboro Baptist Church but support their right to free speech anyway.”  Lesson learned: free speech is great when you’re speaking out against a group you don’t like, but not okay when another group is speaking out against a group they don’t like.

There’s nothing to like about Fred Phelps and his absurdly hateful family.  I’ll agree with you there, Facebook friends joining groups in opposition to the Westboro Baptist Church: they’re un-Christ-like in as thoroughly and definable way as is possible.

But it’s monumentally short-sighted to want to take away their right to free speech, Congress being unable to make any law to that effect and all.  Iron Law #5: you aren’t free unless you’re free to be wrong.

There’s a reason the framers opted for negative liberties instead of positive ones.  No rules against free speech.  No laws against freedom of religion.  No infringing right to bear arms.  These things allow for the pursuit of whatever makes you happy: speak or shut up, choose a religion or none at all, get a gun or stay away.

Positive rights inherently trample on someone else’s.  A right to health insurance, a right to food or shelter, a right to broadband all come at the expense of someone else’s liberty (namely their right to pursue property); and a right to not be offended comes at the expense of another person’s free speech.

At the end of the day, we are still collectively stronger than words, aren’t we?  Or have we rearranged that phrase?

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Everything old is new again

March 23, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Who likes chocolate milk?But this modern world, modern civilization, does exist only where men have been, for a short two centuries, free from these ancient state tyrannies, called controls.  Free thought, free speech, free action, and freehold property are the source of the modern world.  It cannot exist without them.  Its existence depends upon abolishing these reactionary state controls and destroying the socialist State.

The task before Americans is to end these police-controls of peaceful, productive American citizens, to repeal all the reactionary legislation and rescind the Executive orders that established the national socialist regime, to abolish the Federal corporations, departments, bureaus and agencies that dictate and enforce these State controls, to return three million Federal tax-eaters to useful, tax-paying work, to release American farmers from Bismarck’s socialization and to lift from American industrial workers the burden of Bismarck’s Sozialpolitik, called here “Social Security,” and to require men in public office to recognize again every American’s natural right, as a free person, to own and sow and reap his own land, to manage and to profit or lose by his own business enterprise, to own and to save or spend his own money, to join or not to join a labor union, to sign or not to sign a contract, to choose his own work and to do his own bargaining for wages earned or paid, either individually or as a member of any group of other free men.

No politician, yet, has asked American voters to give him the power to strip any State of the powers it has usurped from its citizens, nor to strip the Federal Government of the powers it has usurped from the States; to restore the rights of the citizens, the rights and powers of the States, and the political structure of this Union of States; nor to add to the original list of restrictions upon political power – the list known as the Bill of Rights – further restrictions that will adequately protect the property, liberty and lives of persons living in the modern world and make the United States again the world-champion of human rights and the leaders of the world-liberating revolution.

The Americans who already are undertaking this task, and will do it, are individuals – the individual who is called “nothing” and patronized as “the little man” in Germany, and as “the common man” here, the individual who makes and re-makes the world.

Just finished reading Rose Wilder Lane’s Give Me Liberty.  Do yourself a favor and make time to read it.

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One of those William Chase Johnson blogs.