The Government Against the Economy In the Year of COVID-19

In the coming days, the US Congress will be voting on a massive spending package to give subsidies to various industries and people as part of the Federal Government’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak. This is a $1 trillion dollar bill that will hand out massive subsidies, include loans for businesses, direct deposits that could give an average U.S. family of four $3,000, and up to $4 trillion in liquidity for the U.S. central bank to support the economy. It includes bipartisan agreement on additional unemployment payments for people who have been laid off. https://news.yahoo.com/u-senate-leadership-aims-finalize-141350505.html

It is part of the government’s effort to legislate away a natural disaster. I think the result will be more hardship for Americans, not less.

In the mid-1990’s, I read a book called “The Government Against the Economy”, by George Reisman, an Economics professor who had been a student of the free market economist Ludwig von Mises and associate of Ayn Rand. In that book:

“Reisman details how the profit motive and private ownership operate in a free society to produce consequences beneficial to all. He contrasts this with socialism, which destroys the possibility of rational economic activity and maintains control through-compulsion. He demonstrates how housing is provided efficiently in a free market, then examines the chaos of rent controls. He explains why shortages cannot exist in a free economy, then explodes the myths surrounding the energy crisis. “ (https://fee.org/articles/book-review-the-government-against-the-economy-by-george-reisman/)

In the 1970’s the Federal Government, specifically the Nixon administration, imposed price and wage controls. https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/remembering-nixons-wage-price-controls. After the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, this had particularly disastrous consequences on the supply of gasoline and petroleum products.

In discussing the 1970’s gasoline shortage, Reisman made the distinction between “scarcity” on the one hand and “shortage” on the other. As he noted in a later, more comprehensive book:

“The concept of a shortage is not the same thing as the concept of a scarcity. An item can be extremely scarce, like diamonds, Rembrandt paintings, and so on, and yet no shortage exist.” (Reisman, George. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics . TJS Books. Kindle Edition. Location 10064.)

Diamonds are very “scarce”, but there is no “shortage” of diamonds. The price of diamonds is determined on a free market. When something is scarce, their price is bid up to a level that will be consistent with that scarcity. So long as price can rise to a level that reflects that scarcity, then there will never be a shortage. People will learn to economize on that good or service. They will learn to do with less, or they will seek substitute goods.

In the production sector, if businesses find that certain inputs they need to operate are increasing in price, they will do the same. They will either learn to do with less, or they will seek substitute goods. For instance, if a factory making leather shoes finds that its cost of leather is going up, then it might switch to imitation leather, or start making canvas shoes.

Additionally, if a business sector is highly profitable because more consumers want its goods and services relative to other business sectors, then that business will have more money to hire more workers and, if the economy is near full employment, then it will be able to pay its workers higher wages, and thereby outbid other businesses that are less profitable.  If, for instance, more people suddenly want more shoes and fewer jackets, then the shoe industry will be making higher profits as consumers are willing to pay more for shoes. This will give the shoe industry greater profits relative to other businesses sectors, and they will be able to offer higher wages and pay more for the inputs that both shoes and jackets use. (Leather, for instance, will go to make leather shoes, and not to make leather jackets.)

But, if the government steps in and interferes with this process by imposing price controls for leather, then shoe companies will not be able to pay more for leather in order to outbid the manufacturers of leather jackets. The government will thwart the shift from making leather jackets to making leather shoes because it has distorted the price system with price controls, and thereby destroyed any incentive that leather makers would have to sell more leather to shoe companies and less to leather jacket manufacturers.

The takeaway from George Reisman’s book, the Government Against the Economy, is that governmental interference in the profit motive leads to shortages, among other problems.

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The plan to increase unemployment insurance benefits and give some Americans (around) $3,000 will lead to shortages in key industries for similar reasons as the price and wage controls of the 1970’s. It will discourage people who have been temporarily displaced from their jobs from seeking alternative sources of employment.

Some of these people could be employed in critical areas of the economy that are going to need to ramp up production. Some of these areas include:

(1) Grocery Stores

Grocery stores need more employees:

https://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/overwhelmed-grocery-stores-looking-to-hire-during-stressful-times/article_25d3c018-6a41-11ea-b4dd-eb1e05a0b641.html

(2) Online order fulfillment at places like Amazon and Walmart centers.

Fulfillment centers at Amazon and Walmart need more employees:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-hiring-100000-workers-7-eleven-will-hire-up-to-20000-here-are-the-sectors-adding-jobs-amid-coronavirus-2020-03-20

(3) Restaurants switching to food delivery or increasing their food delivery services.

Restaurants, many of which have been arbitrarily shut down by the government, need delivery services:

“U.S. consumer interest in delivery and take-out food service has more than doubled due to the coronavirus pandemic”

https://www.ibtimes.com/us-interest-take-out-delivery-food-services-double-during-covid-19-panic-according-2943682

(4) Businesses need extra personnel to clean

All businesses need cleaning people to go through and sanitize their offices and work areas more frequently, if for no other reason than to assure workers and customers that health and safety is a top priority:

“Job openings for cleaners are shooting through the roof as the U.S. mobilizes to contain the coronavirus…Many companies, workplaces and transportation systems are trying to assure customers they are safe by sanitizing and deep cleaning their premises. That’s leading to a steep increase in demand for cleaning services…”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/taking-it-to-the-cleaners-coronavirus-spurs-spike-in-demand-for-jobs-to-sanitize-america-2020-03-12

Paying people unemployment insurance, especially when there is enormous need for employment in other sectors of the economy, like there is right now, will reduce the incentive for people to seek employment in these other sectors of the economy.

Additionally, making cash payments of $2,000 or more to people below a certain income threshold will likely discourage people who could do the type of work that is needed right now from doing overtime or re-entering the job market. If the government is going to pay a person working in the the office cleaning industry $2,000, then they might decide they’d rather stay home for the next month. This will mean offices and businesses don’t get cleaned.

(I don’t know how much cleaning services actually help stop the spread of COVID-19, but consumers and workers appear to want the psychological reassurance that stores, offices, and factories are clean. So, cleaning them will provide those consumers and workers with the confidence to go back to work, and get the economy moving.)

Reisman described how the profit motive works in a free market for labor  in a later book, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics:

“In sum, in a free market there are at least three principles of wage determination at work simultaneously. One is a tendency toward a uniformity of wages for labor of the same degree of ability. A second is a tendency toward unequal wage rates for labor of different degrees of ability—primarily intellectual ability, but also other abilities as well. And a third is a tendency toward the inclusion of discounts and premiums in wages as an offsetting element to the special advantages or disadvantages of the occupations concerned. The combined operation of these three principles helps to explain the full range of the various wage rates we observe in actual life.” (Reisman, George. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics . TJS Books. Kindle Edition. Location 9062)

 “Now, as far as it operates, the principle of the uniformity of wage rates is similar in its consequences to the uniformity-of-profit principle. That is, it serves to keep the various occupations supplied with labor in the proper proportions. Too many people do not rush into carpentering and not enough go into printing, say, because the very effect of such a mistake is to reduce the wages of carpenters and raise those of printers.” ( Reisman, George. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics . TJS Books. Kindle Edition.  Location 9065)

“In addition, the operation of this principle gives to consumers the ultimate power to determine the relative size of the various occupations. If, to continue with the same example, the consumers buy more printed matter and fewer products made of wood, then the effect of the change is to cause the demand for printers to rise and that for carpenters to fall. As a result, the wages of printers rise and more young men are induced to become printers, while the wages of carpenters fall and fewer young men become carpenters.

It should be realized, as this example of the printers shows, that in seeking to earn the highest wages, the individual worker is seeking to do the kind of work the consumers most want him to do.” (Reisman, George. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics . TJS Books. Kindle Edition. Location 9070)

“…the enactment of price and wage controls causes shortages and economic chaos, because it destroys the price system.” (Reisman, George. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics . TJS Books. Kindle Edition.  Location 37186)

Paying people in shuttered industries and professions extra unemployment benefits will discourage them from seeking employment in industries where there is suddenly great demand. If someone can get paid, say, $2,000 a month in unemployment benefits, or go work at an Amazon fulfillment center and earn $2,500 per month, they might just decide to forego the extra $500, and sit at home.

(I am assuming someone at an Amazon fulfillment center makes about $15/ hour, working 40 hours per week. https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Amazon-Fulfillment-Associate-Hourly-Pay-E6036_D_KO7,28.htm and, I’m assuming the average monthly benefit for unemployment insurance is about $500 per week. https://fileunemployment.org/unemployment-benefits/unemployment-benefits-comparison-by-state )

By paying out massive unemployment benefits, it’s like the government is a business that is bidding away people who could go and work at Walmart and in trucking at a time when Walmart and trucking companies are in need of those additional workers. It doesn’t even matter that these people might make more working at Walmart than they would on unemployment, because there is “disutility” associated with working. Most people would prefer to stay at home rather than work, which is why they get paid. If the government pays them something even close to what they can make working, then they’ll just chose not to work.

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The effort to prop up businesses hit by the Coronavirus will have the same effect as giving more unemployment benefits to American workers at this time. It will disincentivize them to switch to the production of more immediately necessary goods and services.

Passenger air traffic has fallen off drastically because no one wants to take a chance of becoming infected on a plane. Commercial airlines and cruise ships could retool their planes and boats to deliver goods and cargo instead of people.  Admittedly, they will take a hit to their profit, since their systems are not set up for cargo delivery, but this could be done with some retooling.  Some airlines are already doing this:

“American Airlines will conduct its first cargo-only flights since 1984 on Friday as it looks to offset a massive revenue shortfall amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.” https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/american-airlines-coronavirus-cargo-freight-flights

Perfume and alcoholic-beverage companies have switched to making hand-sanitizers:

“The British Honey Company, which makes honey, gin, rum and other spirits from its base in the Cotswolds, said it would use spare capacity in its distillery in Worminghall, Buckinghamshire, to produce hand sanitiser.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/21/europes-companies-retool-production-to-fight-coronavirus-fallout

Although in the US, alcohol companies had to get “special dispensation” from the FDA to do so, as the FDA restricts the output of hand-sanitizer with regulations: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/20/fda-says-it-wont-take-action-against-manufacturers-that-start-making-hand-sanitizer.html

Now, thanks to government subsidies, these companies have an economic incentive to sit idle. Rather than retool, passenger airlines might decide it’s better just to do nothing, let their planes sit idle, and take their corporate welfare check from the government. It’s exactly the same principle as paying people extra unemployment benefits. The stockholders at the airlines might decide it’s better to just sit idle, and hope for passenger traffic to return.

Since what is needed right now is the movement of cargo like medical supplies, the government is essentially paying companies to remain idle, which will exacerbate the problem, and thereby keep us in the emergency even longer. (This is all assuming that COVOD-19 is truly the health threat that many government officials are claiming it is- which I don’t have enough information to know, one way or the other.)

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If the current plans in Congress to help will actually hurt our response to the COVID-19 natural disaster, is there anything Congress and State governments can do? They can get out of the way. Some possible solutions include the following:

(1) Reduce commercial drivers license regulations.

There are probably a lot of retired truck drivers out there. The government could repeal commercial driver’s license requirements for anyone who has ever had a commercial driver’s license, even if it isn’t active. For instance, in Washington D.C., if a CDL has been expired for more than 60 days, the driver has to retake the tests:

“If your CDL has been expired for more than 60 calendar days, you must take and pass BOTH the knowledge and the road skills tests.” https://dmv.dc.gov/service/renew-cdl

State and Federal Government should waive this and allow truckers to drive on expired CDL’s.

(2) Allow doctors from other countries residing here who do not have medical licenses to practice medicine – with patients signing informed consent forms.

There could be thousands of foreign people from other countries in the US right now that could start practicing. The New York Times notes that:

“….No one knows exactly how many immigrant doctors are in the United States and not practicing, but some other data points provide a clue. Each year the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, a private nonprofit, clears about 8,000 immigrant doctors (not including the American citizens who go to medical school abroad) to apply for the national residency match system. Normally about 3,000 of them successfully match to a residency slot,…” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/business/economy/long-slog-for-foreign-doctors-to-practice-in-us.html

This is significant because foreign doctors can only practice in the US if they can get into one of these residency slots. This means there are about 5,000 foreign doctors in the US every year that cannot practice medicine.

(3) Relax immigration laws for foreign medical personal and their immediate families (spouses and children). Offer permanent US residency if they serve in hospitals here during the crisis.

I suspect that you would have large numbers of foreign doctors flooding into the US very quickly if this offer was made.

Would a doctor rather live and practice medicine in India, or here in the U.S.? If you allow him to bring his wife and children, and give them all permanent U.S. residency, the airlines would suddenly see planeloads of doctors and nurses headed to the US. I predict this would solve a lot of our healthcare problems, very quickly.

(4) Allow doctors and other medical personnel who allowed their licenses to lapse due to retirement, or who no longer have a license for other, non-disciplinary, reasons, to practice medicine, with patients signing consent forms.

In a serious emergency, getting medical care from a doctor with a lapsed license is better than getting no medical care at all.

(5) Eliminate all tariffs on the import of medical products

This appears to be something the Trump administration is getting right, although they initially helped create the problem:

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/trade/488799-trump-administration-seeks-public-comment-on-removing-tariffs-on-medical

(6) Eliminate all environmental regulations associated with drug manufacturing and the manufacture of medical supplies, so that drugs can be made here in the US, instead of in China.

Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine”, discussed the shortage of essential lifesaving drugs in U.S. hospitals on C-SPAN recently. She noted at 00:33:36 that:

“THAT’S A GREAT QUESTION, ONE OF THE REASONS THAT CHINA’S CHEAPER IS NOT JUST BECAUSE OF SUBSIDIES BUT BECAUSE LABOR COSTS ARE LOWER AND ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ARE CERTAINLY NOT WHAT WE HAVE HERE. SO BY OUTSOURCING IT WE HAVE ACTUALLY INCREASED GLOBAL POLLUTION WHICH COMES FROM PHARMACEUTICAL MANUFACTURING. WHAT I HAVE BEEN IMPRESSED WITH COMING BACK TO THIS IS THE NEW CHEMICAL PROCESSES THAT WE HAVE WHICH DRAMATICALLY REDUCES THE ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT. IF WE CAN LEARN TO MAKE OUR MEDICINES DIFFERENTLY AND ADOPT THOSE PRACTICES, WE CAN MITIGATE THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS THAT COME FROM TRADITIONAL WAYS OF MAKING MEDICINE.” (Emphasis added.)  https://www.c-span.org/video/?470077-5/washington-journal-rosemary-gibson-discusses-us-reliance-china-lifesaving-drugs&start=2016

In other words, environmental laws are forcing drug manufacturers over to China, where they can then threaten to restrict our supply of medical drugs, as one Chinese official recently did. https://www.ibtimes.com/china-threatens-restrict-drug-exports-us-amid-coronavirus-pandemic-2941920

(7) Eliminate minimum wage laws for medical manufacturing here in the US.

This is the other major reason we don’t manufacture more goods here in the US. Labor costs are artificially high thanks to unions and minimum wage laws.

(8) Eliminate overtime restrictions, and requirements that employers pay time and a half for jobs at hospitals, medical facilities, grocery stores, food delivery, and food services industries.  Allow the free market to determine what people will be paid, which will probably be more than before, anyway.

The reality here is that most of these industries are going to pay much higher wages precisely because they need to “ramp up” with as many doctors, nurses, truck drivers, and Walmart workers as they can. So, people in these sectors will likely get paid more, not less.

(9) States like California should roll back laws restricting the “gig economy”, especially for thinks like food and package delivery.

Companies like DoorDash, which is an app-based food delivery service, are potentially going to be put out of business by California’s AB 5:

“It has many unicorns, including Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Uber worried about their business model scrambling to launch a voter initiative to roll back the effects of AB 5.”  https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/11/californias-new-employment-law-is-starting-to-crush-freelancers.html

California, which is currently forcing all residents to remain in their homes under penalty of law (an injustice in itself), should repeal AB 5.

(10) Prepare government funds to pay Hotels and Motels to use their rooms in an emergency as extra bed space for medical patients.

This is a temporary taking of private property by government, so compensation would have to be paid, although I suspect most hotel and motel companies would gladly donate the space. Hospitals would probably be willing to pay them for the use.

The government should cut funding to non-essential things like public parks, recreation areas, and libraries to pay the just compensation to hotel and motel companies. Alternatively, the government can offer to drastically reduce the taxes that hotel and motel companies pay in order to compensate them. In other words, the government can guarantee lower taxes in the future for hotels and motels, if they agree to make bed space available for medical purposes if things should get too bad. (Essentially offer a massive income tax credit for several years to hotel and motel companies.)

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The social and political reality of the age we live in means I am probably “spitting into the wind” by writing this. What people do in a crisis is largely determined by a lifetime of habit and belief. Perhaps if more people read books by Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and George Reisman going forward, the next national crisis, whatever it is, will lead to positive political and social change, instead of more of the statism and collectivism that has made our culture and society sicker than any virus ever could.

Corona Virus Questions

By this point, everyone knows what COVID-19 is, so this topic needs little introduction. The public, media, and political reaction to it is certainly new in my lifetime. People in their sixties or seventies may remember a time when there were health scares of this magnitude, with smallpox or polio, but no one born after about 1965 really remembers them. The last known smallpox case occurred in 1977, and polio was drastically reduced in the late 1950’s, after a vaccine was developed.

The question that I cannot quite answer in my mind is this: Is the public reaction warranted? Even if the reaction is merited, I think we need to think carefully about what solutions to the problem are justified. Sometimes, as the old saying goes: “The cure is worse than the disease.”

Is Corona Virus a great danger? There is sometimes great difficulty in knowing what the right answer is on a complex scientific question, where even the most knowledgeable are operating on limited information. This article, written by a medical doctor makes the same point:

“All of this whiplash points to one perhaps uncomfortable thing: no one really knows how bad COVID-19 is, and how much damage it could eventually lead to.” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/uncertainty-in-a-time-of-coronavirus/

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Some in the media and on the political left have criticized Donald Trump for being too slow in recognizing or reacting to the virus. This can simply be an error of knowledge. No one is omniscient.  This is precisely why you shouldn’t rely on an all-powerful Federal government to make decisions for you. No single human mind can hold that much complex information at one time and make a decision about what is best for your life and situation. It’s why Capitalism and constitutional republicanism are the proper system.

Government employees are poor at dealing with a disaster because the system they operate in is one of rules. There is no “upside” for a government employee who “thinks outside the box” or innovates. If they succeed, they’re unlikely to get a raise. If they fail, and it gets out they broke the rules, they’re likely to get fired. I noticed this before in a different blog entry about the Ebola Virus outbreak that occurred in Dallas:

“This is the essential problem with all government. Government sets rules that are (ultimately) enforced by the barrel of a gun. The CDC bureaucrats only act if there is a rule telling them to act -which is as it should be. So, its no surprise that when this nurse was under the temperature threshold for their no-fly rule, no one at the CDC was going to “stick their neck out” and recommend that she not fly. A bureaucracy doesn’t reward incentive by its employees like a for-profit business -so there would only be “downside” if a CDC employee took initiative.”  (http://deancook.net/2014/10/16/i-need-wider-powers/)

Since I wrote this blog entry, I found a great example of the contrast between the culture of initiative that a free market encourages and incentivizes, and the “culture of conformity” that government creates. “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande discusses how badly State and Federal government failed after Hurricane Katrina. The real, unsung heroes of that disaster were the executives and employees of Walmart. (http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/ )

“The government’s command-and-control system became overwhelmed, with too many decisions to make and too little information available. But authorities clung to the traditional model. They argued with state and local government officials over the power to make decisions, resulting in chaos. Supply trucks were halted and requisitions for buses were held up while local transit buses sat idle.

Walmart executives, however, took the opposite approach from command and control. They realized Walmart’s Hurricane Katrina response could make a huge difference. Recognizing the complexity of the circumstances, CEO Lee Scott announced to managers and employees that the company would respond at the level of the disaster. He empowered local employees to make the best decisions they could.” https://www.shortform.com/blog/walmart-hurricane-katrina/

Walmart dealt with Hurricane Katrina better than the government because private enterprise encourages initiative, while government jobs encourage “covering your ass”.

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What changes should we make in the face of Corona Virus?   Even if we need to adjust our behavior temporarily, I think that any permanent  changes in our society aren’t desirable, regardless of the risks. To understand this, ask yourself a simple question: “What is life?”

Is life just continuing to breath and maintaining our body’s homeostatic equilibrium? I read an article about how grandparents are having to be isolated from their families and grandchildren, since the elderly are most at risk when it comes to Corona virus. (The mortality rates are much higher for people in their seventies and eighties.) (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/18/grandparents-cant-babysit-kids-at-home-coronavirus-fears/5072304002/)

Reading the article, I had to wonder: How long does Grandma want to go without seeing her grandchildren? How long does Grandma want to live in isolation like that? Does grandma think that life is about nothing but keeping her heart beating and her lungs pumping air? (Ask your grandma what she thinks.)

Do we want to permanently shut down movie theaters, ball parks, and churches, just because we might catch a disease? Is life worth living without social contact with other people?

Clearly, shutting down public events and isolating grandma and grandpa has to be temporary, in the face of an emergency. It cannot go on forever. Life is about more than maintaining homeostasis.

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Now, let’s turn to some of the governmental measures that have been proposed, or even implemented in the face of this threat. (Which may very well be a real threat -I don’t know for sure.) Is governmental force the answer to the Corona virus? Is a totalitarian dictatorship more “efficient” at dealing with something like this?

The Chinese were certainly quick to build hospitals and implement quarantine…I mean…after their attempt to cover it up failed. The Chinese doctor, Dr Li Wenliang, who originally discovered the virus and tried to warn people was initially arrested and threatened by the Chinese government. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382

Additionally, it appears that the Chinese government’s lack of transparency and openness about the virus meant the Western world didn’t find out about it until it was too late to do anything to contain it:

“China has a history of mishandling outbreaks, including SARS in 2002 and 2003. But Chinese leaders’ negligence in December and January—for well over a month after the first outbreak in Wuhan—far surpasses those bungled responses.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/china-trolling-world-and-avoiding-blame/608332/

The Chinese government’s failure demonstrates a direct relationship between the initiation of government force and the spread of this disease. A free society and a free press would have had a much better chance of containing the initial outbreak.

Once the virus was outside China, some freer countries seem to have handled it better than others. Italy has now surpassed China in the number of deaths. But, South Korea has done remarkably well:

“A week after the Jan. 27 meeting, South Korea’s CDC approved one company’s diagnostic test. Another company soon followed. By the end of February, South Korea was making headlines around the world for its drive-through screening centers and ability to test thousands of people daily.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-testing-specialrep/special-report-how-korea-trounced-u-s-in-race-to-test-people-for-coronavirus-idUSKBN2153BW

This Reuters article goes on to say that the US response hasn’t been as good. But, it notes that a lot of this had to do with bureaucracy at the FDA:

“How the United States fell so far behind South Korea, according to infectious disease experts, clinicians and state and local officials, is a tale of many contrasts in the two nations’ public health systems: a streamlined bureaucracy versus a congested one, bold versus cautious leadership, and a sense of urgency versus a reliance on protocol.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-testing-specialrep/special-report-how-korea-trounced-u-s-in-race-to-test-people-for-coronavirus-idUSKBN2153BW

Additionally, South Korea is a much smaller country than ours. It’s not much bigger than some of our states. This suggests that what is needed is a political apparatus that is closer to the people, and closer to the problem. Unfortunately, we have ceded too much power to the Federal government, rather than letting individual state governments deal with local problems, which they are closer to, and will have a better feel for.

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What about trying to stop the problem at our borders? Is a temporary restriction on people entering the country from certain areas of the world, especially China, desirable? I’ve wondered if a lot of U.S. Hispanics might not have changed their tune. Are they now wondering why Trump isn’t doing more to keep Asians out of the US? A lot of the immigration debate is driven by tribalism on both sides. As I coincidentally mentioned some time ago, I doubt most Hispanic-Americans would be as against  immigration restrictions if the majority of immigrants were Chinese:

“Would the ‘Hispanic leadership’ in the Democratic Party care so much about immigration if most of the immigrants were German, or Chinese? (I doubt it.) Obama’s policies on immigration were another appeal to a tribalistic pressure group, just like his support of “Black Lives Matter”.” http://deancook.net/2018/12/17/barack-obama-tribalist-in-chief/

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, a lot of immigration restriction was aimed at preventing Chinese entry into the country for precisely this reason. They brought epidemics with them. For instance, San Francisco was the location of a bubonic plague outbreak in 1900-1904, which was focused in that city’s Chinatown. https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article240714036.html

All that said, I am in favor of free immigration, because it is consistent with the free market. But, requiring people to undergo a short quarantine period before entering the country could certainly be a reasonable regulation. Denying entry to people specifically known to carry communicable diseases can also likely be justified. You don’t have a right to knowingly get other people sick with your germs -that is an initiation of physical force, just like if someone recklessly drove a car and killed someone. I do, however, think this is a matter for state government, not federal. http://deancook.net/2014/10/30/i-just-realized-there-is-no-authority-under-the-constitution-for-the-feds-to-impose-a-21-day-quarantine-on-persons-from-africa/

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What about some of the aggressive measures that have been implemented at the State or local level in the United States? Are they justified? For instance, San Francisco is only allowing people to leave their homes to get groceries or pick up essentials. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/greater-san-francisco-area-residents-195831637.html

Are cities like New York, San Francisco, and Dallas doing the right thing with aggressive, involuntary mass-quarantine measures? (Such as restaurant closings, bar closings, “shelter in place orders”, and the like?)

The “shelter in place” order in San Francisco pretty much has to count on voluntary compliance because there isn’t sufficient governmental force in place to enforce it. How will the cops know if you’re going to the grocery store or not? What if you say you’re not carrying ID? Since homeless people are exempt from the order, how will a cop know you’re not homeless? Short of a system of police checkpoints, an internal “passport system”, and heavy penalties for anyone violating this order, it is unenforceable without voluntary compliance.

In fact, compliance with quarantines and social distancing measures has to be almost entirely voluntary. As a free society, we don’t have the systems in place to enforce mass quarantines against people’s will. (And, it’s not desirable.)

I suppose someone could argue something like: “Emergencies can happen. Systems, like the ability to enforce mass quarantine, in San Francisco and New York, are needed. We need systems in place for mass lock downs, holding people without due process, and violations of the freedom of assembly.”

But, what is an “emergency”? It’s a temporary unexpected calamity. If virus outbreaks happened all the time, they wouldn’t be emergencies. We’d develop technologies and social customs to deal with them. (Everyone would learn to wear bio-hazard suits in public, people would insist that others show them a “clean test result” before letting them into their homes, etc.) No police state would be necessary in that case. The free market and freedom of association could handle it.

But, if virus pandemics remain unlikely, “outlier”, events, as they probably will, then putting into place governmental systems and sufficient force to be able to enforce a “shelter in place” order like they are proposing in New York, and have implemented in San Francisco, could be abused by any would-be tyrant or oligarchy looking to seize power and subvert constitutional republican government.

###

If governmental initiation of physical force is never the answer, even in an emergency, then what should be done?

First, it isn’t a good idea to wait until the emergency occurs to figure this stuff out. We need to think carefully about what sorts of temporary governmental measures are acceptable when emotions aren’t running high. The matter requires sober and careful consideration by legislatures and courts, with an eye to due process, basic civil liberties, property rights, and the sanctity of the individual. But, since we are apparently already in the emergency, I would like to propose some “operating principles” for judging different measures being proposed by our Federal and State governments in dealing with COVID-19.

(1) The more each individual can choose their own level of risk, the better.

People can choose whether they want to go to bars, restaurants, and gyms. People can choose if they want to fly on an airplane, or travel on a cruise ship. No one else is being forced to do these things, and mass-restrictions on freedom of assembly should be used extremely sparingly.

I recognize that one person’s decision to take the risk affects other people’s lives. If I go to a restaurant, and get infected, then I could potentially infect other people. But, is mere risk of harming others justification for long-term restrictions on freedom of assembly when there is no evidence that the particular people assembling are sick? Think about this in other contexts. We could save a lot of lives by outlawing cars. People who drive in cars put pedestrians and bikers at risk, so they are, in some sense, putting people who didn’t chose to drive at risk. No one really “needs” a car, do they? Why don’t we get rid of them? Because the inconvenience on our lives is too great.

(This is not to say quarantines are never justified, as further discussed below.)

(2) The more local government can decide on what to do, the better.

County decisions are better than State decisions, and State decisions are better than Federal. Small countries like South Korea can react better than large countries, because their leaders are closer to those they represent. In the United States, each state should be viewed more as its own country, and allowed to deal with the problem, free from Federal interference.

(3) Particular people, who are a known objective threat, should be treated and quarantined, while respecting their due process rights.

The focus should be on encouraging people to be tested and treated through voluntary measures. This seems to be part of what has made South Korea so successful in dealing with the problem:

“The preventative measures being taken in South Korea have so far involved no lockdowns, no roadblocks and no restriction on movement.

Trace, test and treat is the mantra. So far this country of over 50 million people have been doing their bit to help. Schools remain closed, offices are encouraging people to work from home, large gatherings have stopped.” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51836898

Forced quarantine should be a last resort, and only when there is good evidence someone has the virus. Courts should be set up to provide Skype or other teleconferencing hearings for those quarantined to ensure their due process rights. No one should be held, or forced to stay in their home, more than 24 hours without the State getting approval from a court.

(4) Mere economic hardship should not be grounds for a bailout at other people’s expense.

Where does that end? If a restaurant can be bailed out because no one wants to eat there anymore, then what about all the other people who, in normal conditions, see their business fail? A natural disaster is an insurable event. If a business owner is concerned about business shutdown due to an emergency, then contact Allstate or State Farm, not the Feds.

The Trump plan to give everyone $1,000 makes no sense. Goods aren’t produced by the government. If you print an extra $1,000 and somehow magically put it in everyone’s bank account overnight, then they’ll just bid up the price of goods and services, since the quantity of goods and services will remain the same. That’s a prescription for price inflation.

But, with that said, when there is government-enforced quarantine, there is a good argument for that particular individual or business being compensated. If a person is forced not to work for two weeks because we, as a society, have said they might spread a disease, then that particular individual probably should be entitled to some form of support or compensation during that time-period, because it is essentially a governmental taking of private property under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

(5) Fundamental civil liberties, rights to free assembly, freedom of movement, and due process must be observed.

But, this can occur within the specific context of an emergency. The freedom of assembly is not the freedom to knowingly or even negligently infect other people with your disease. People with specific, known communicable disease can be quarantined, with due process.

###

A natural disaster can call for highly unusual government responses, but there is a limit. Even in an emergency, there are things that should not be done, because, in the long-run, free societies have proven to be more prosperous, healthy, and “pro-living” than the alternative, and would-be tyrants will tend to find emergencies, if not manufacture them, to justify the seizure of power.

One Day Objectivism Conference In Dallas, February 29, 2020

I was surprised to see that Texas would have a couple of Ayn Rand Institute sponsored conferences this year.

The first will be this coming Saturday in Dallas. It’s a one-day event, with about half a dozen speakers.

The second event will be later this Summer, in Austin, and appears to be the “main” ARI  conference this year. (It looks like they are trying to have mini-conferences around the nation, rather than just the one big, yearly conference.)

I was unable to attend the 2019 OCON due to conflicts with my work schedule, but I attended the 2017 (my first) and the 2018.

I’ve been reading and thinking about Ayn Rand’s ideas since I was about 15. I didn’t expect to learn anything particularly “earthshaking” or novel at the prior two conferences I attended. I looked at them more as social events, in which I’d have an opportunity to be around a large number of people who are sufficiently sympathetic to Rand’s ideas to pay out a good-sized chunk of money for the admittance fee, plus pay for a hotel and airfare.

I was curious to see what that would be like. In my everyday social interactions, I sometimes get a feeling of being a permanent “outsider”, but I also suspect that may just be my personality. The OCON’s gave me a chance to see how I reacted when everyone around me is, at least ostensibly, holding the same worldview.

But, I was pleasantly surprised to find that listening to some of the lectures at the 2017 and 2018 conferences was a real stimulus to my thinking on several subjects.

There were also additional “intangible benefits” from the previous two conferences that I have trouble fully articulating with words. It was like a “mental afterglow” or just general “good feelings” from attending the conferences, that lasted for a while. (I’m guessing this is something like what religious people feel after coming back from church camp or some other such event.) I wasn’t necessarily impressed with every single person I encountered at the OCON’s, but being in that social environment sort of helped me to see myself a little bit better.

 

Book Review of “Explaining Postmodernism”, by Stephen R.C. Hicks

This is the best non-fiction book I’ve read in a decade. I highly recommend it. The over-all value of the book lies in tracing the origins of what I find to be a common tactic when debating a leftist. You present them with arguments, facts, and logic, and, at the end, they will say something like:

“Well this is all just your white male prejudice,”; “that’s only logic, come down to reality,”; “those are just your definitions, and all definitions are ultimately arbitrary”; or, even, “I don’t feel that you’re right, and why is your logic better than my feelings?”

Hicks has provided an explanation, lying in the history of philosophy, for why so many people seem to consider such responses to a logical argument to be persuasive. That explanation lies, mostly, in the ideas of dead, white, male philosophers who lived two-hundred years ago. Those notions have slowly “trickled down” to the masses, and infect the majority of people’s minds today -especially any college student with a “gender studies” or “black studies” degree.

The author expressly states his theme in his table of contents:

“Thesis: The failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary.” (Table of Contents, Pg. i.)

Did I find this, in fact, to be his theme based on my reading of the book? Overall, I’d say, yes. I’ll start with Hicks’ definition of “postmodernism”:

“Postmodernism rejects the entire Enlightenment project. It holds that the modernist premises of the Enlightenment were untenable from the beginning…” (Pg 14)

“Postmodernism reject the Enlightenment project in the most fundamental way possible -by attacking its essential philosophical themes. Postmodernism rejects the reason and the individualism that the entire Enlightenment would depend upon.” (Pg. 14)

His definition of “postmodern” is basically a “negative definition”. He defines it as an attack on the Enlightenment. What does he think the Enlightenment stood for?

“In philosophy, modernism’s essentials are located in the formative figures of Francis Bacon…Rene Descartes…, for their influence upon epistemology, and more comprehensively in John Locke…for his influence upon all aspects of philosophy.” (Pg. 7)

 “Bacon, Descartes ,and Locke are modern because of their philosophical naturalism, their profound confidence in reason, and especially in the case of Locke, their individualism. Modern thinkers stress that perception and reason are the human means of knowing nature -in contrast to the pre-modern reliance upon tradition, faith, and mysticism. Modern thinkers stress human autonomy and the human capacity for forming one’s character -in contrast to the pre-modern emphasis upon dependence and original sin. Modern thinkers emphasize the individual…“ (Pg. 7)

To sum up, Hicks sees three “types” of philosophical attitudes in the Western World:

The “Pre-modern”, as exemplified by the Christian Medieval, and, probably, the Ancient Greek worlds;

the “modern” attitude, which started around the time of Francis Bacon; and

the “postmodern”, whose origins he goes on to explain later in the book.

What was the “failure of epistemology” he says “made postmodernism possible”?  He doesn’t spend too much time explaining what “epistemology” is. He clearly is familiar with, and sympathetic to, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. I assume he generally agrees with what she said in “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”. I also think he is assuming people reading his book will already have some general understanding of the subject of philosophy and its basic questions. But, early on, he defines what he views as the “Enlightenment epistemology”, which is:

“If one emphasizes that reason is the faculty of understanding nature, then that epistemology systematically applied yields science. Enlightenment thinkers laid the foundations of all the major branches of science. In mathematics, Isaac Newton….developed the calculus….Linnaeus…a comprehensive biological taxonomy…Lavoisier…the foundations of chemistry.” (Pg. 9)

Hicks says there were:

“…philosophical weaknesses…” that had “….emerged clearly by the middle of the eighteenth century, in the skepticism of David Hume’s empiricism and the dead-end reached by traditional rationalism.” (Pg. 24)

But, he says that the real “counter-Enlightenment” started from 1780 to 1815 with a split between Anglo-American culture on the one hand and German culture on the other. (Pg. 24) In Germany:

“Immanuel Kant is the most significant thinker of the Counter-Enlightenment.” (Pg. 27)

Kant’s priority was to defend religion from the Enlightenment:

“I here therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” (See Second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant.)

How did Kant “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith”, according to Hicks?

“The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality -or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material from reality…or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti- reason camps…the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason.” (Pg. 28)

“Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality -real, noumenal reality- is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products….Limited to knowledge of phenomena that it has itself constructed according to its own design, reason cannot know anything outside itself.” (Pg. 29)

In this way, reason was, according to Kant, limited to the “phenomenal realm”, while the “noumenal realm”, the realm of religion, was off limits to reason. (Pg. 29)

Since Kant posited his epistemic system to save religion, how did it come to be used by a bunch of largely, “irreligious”, if not atheistic, post-modern intellectuals? The rest of Chapter Two of Hick’s book lays out the “evolution” of Kant’s way of thinking by subsequent German philosophers, especially Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. He sums these subsequent, pre-twentieth-century philosophers at the end of Chapter 2 in this way:

“The legacy of the irrationalists for the twentieth century included four key themes:

1. An agreement with Kant that reason is impotent to know reality;

2. an agreement with Hegel that reality is deeply conflictual and/or absurd;

3. a conclusion that reason is therefore trumped by claims based on feeling, instinct, or leaps of faith; and

4. that the non-rational and the irrational yield deep truths about reality.” (Pg. 57)

In the Twentieth Century, Hicks sees this tradition as having been continued by most major philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, who “…agreed with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer that by exploring his feelings -especially his dark and anguished feelings of dread and guilt- he could approach Being.” (Pg. 59)

According to Hicks:

“Heidegger offered to his followers the following conclusions, all of which are accepted by the mainstream of postmodernism with slight modifications:

1. Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of realty;

2. Reason is subjective and impotent to reach truths about reality;

3. Reason’s elements -words and concepts- are obstacles that must be un-crusted, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked;

4. Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all;

5. Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason;

6. The entire Western tradition of philosophy -whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Lockean, or Cartesian- based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to overcome.” (Pg. 65-66)

Note that little has been said about the political views of post-modern intellectuals yet. Hicks observes that, in fact, most post-modern intellectuals are on the political left. (Pg. 84) Starting at Chapter 4, he addresses the connection between the epistemology and metaphysics advanced by German philosophers since Kant, and its political implications. The reason for the modern socialist’s rejection of reason lies in the failure of socialism in theory and in practice:

“As modernists, the [early] socialists argued that socialism could be proved by evidence and rational analysis, and that once the evidence was in, socialism’s moral and economic superiority to capitalism would be clear to anyone with an open mind.” (Pg. 86)

Free market economists, such as Ludwig von Mises, Milton Freedman, and Friedrich Hayek, have largely won the debate when it comes to the theoretical case for capitalism over socialism. (Pg. 87) The moral/political debate is more “up for grabs”, but, even here:

“…the leading thesis is that some form of [classical] liberalism in the broadest sense is essential to protecting civil rights and civil society…” (Pg. 87)

By the 21st Century the:

“…empirical evidence has been much harder on socialism. Economically, in practice the capitalist nations are increasingly productive and prosperous…every socialist experiment has ended in dismal economic failure…Morally and politically…every liberal capitalist country has a solid record of being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives. Socialist practice has time and time again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships in history prior to the twentieth century.” (Pg. 87-88)

The success of the capitalist world and the failure of the socialist nations created a “crisis of faith” for those on the left. As Hicks notes:

“This is a moment of truth for anyone who has experienced the agony of a deeply cherished hypothesis run aground on the rocks of reality. What do you do? Do you abandon your theory and go with the facts -or do you try to find a way to maintain your belief in your theory?” (Pg. 89)

Hicks believes the modern left’s abandonment of reality and reason in favor of “post-modern thinking” is their effort to “have their cake and eat it too”:

“Here then, is my second hypothesis about post-modernism: Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.” (Pg. 89)

Hicks notes that just as religious thinkers faced a “crisis of faith” during the Enlightenment, in which it was widely recognized that there was no way to prove the existence of god on “naturalistic” and rational grounds, so to, by the 1950’s and 1960’s, there was no way for socialists to use naturalistic and rational grounds to justify socialism. It had failed in theory and in practice, and, with revelations about the brutality of the Soviet Union, it had very little moral standing left. (Pg. 89-90) If they wanted to hold onto socialism, they had to reject reason and reality:

“Postmodernism is born of the marriage of Left politics and skeptical epistemology….Confronted by harsh evidence and ruthless logic, the far left had a reply: That is only logic and evidence; logic and evidence are subjective, you cannot really prove anything; feelings are deeper than logic; and our feelings say socialism.” (Pg. 90)

The rest of Chapter Four describes the evolution of modern anti-individualist thought, starting with Rousseau and moving on to Hegel and Marx.

Chapter 6 discusses Marxism in historical context. Hicks notes that classical Marxism believes socialism would arise in the more advanced capitalist countries, like England and the United States, first. In actual practice, it arose in semi-feudalistic countries like Russia, Eastern Europe, and China. As such, Twentieth Century Marxists, like Lenin, had to modify their thinking to rationalize the need for a violent and brutal aristocracy to bring about socialism. (Pg. 138 to 141)

By the 1950’s and 1960’s the failure of socialism to arise “spontaneously”, as predicted by Marx, resulted in several different strategies to be tried by socialists. Some subtly changed their ethical standards from “need to equality”, which could include the inequalities experienced by small businesses versus big businesses (pg. 151), or the inequality supposedly present between the races. (Pg. 152)

Other mid-twentieth-century Marxists said wealth was bad anyway, giving rise to the environmentalist movement. (Pg. 153).

A third group of Marxists turned to violence in an effort to move the proletarian revolution along in the First World. (Pg. 165-170) As Hicks notes, several international terrorist groups with ties to Marxist thought, including the Weathermen in the US, and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Middle East, arose in the early 1960’s.

What does Hicks consider to be the motives of the 21st Century postmodern left? He notes that postmodernist thinking contains a whole host of contradictions:

“On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.” (Pg. 184)

“On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.” (Pg. 184)

“Values are subjective -but sexism and racism are really evil.” (Pg. 184)

“Tolerance is good and dominance is bad -but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.” (Pg. 184)

There is a “…contradiction between the relativism and the absolutist politics…” of postmodernism. (Pg. 185)

Hicks sees three possible explanations for this seeming contradiction:

1. Postmodernists are “relativists” primarily and their absolutist leftwing politics are “secondary”. He rules out this possibility because, otherwise, there would be more “conservative” postmodernists, but they are all uniformly left-wing. (Pg. 185-186)

2. The use of postmodernism is a “Machiavellian” strategy to undermine their political enemies. (Pg. 186) When they loose an argument, they will respond with: “Of course you, a white, male, heterosexual, would say that. But we cannot know anything about ‘things in themselves’, so reason is limited.”

3. Postmodernism is ultimately a nihilistic world-view, so the contradiction doesn’t matter to a postmodernist:

“The final option is not to resolve the tension. Contradiction is a psychological form of destruction, but contradictions sometimes do not matter psychologically to those who live them, because for them ultimately nothing matters. Nihilism is close to the surface in the postmodern intellectual movement in a historically unprecedented way.” (Pg. 191-192)

The biggest flaw of the book I see may lie in the author’s treatment and evaluation of Marxism, which I think he gives more credit than it deserves. At several points, he seems to suggest that Marxism is more “pro-reason” than I think it ever was, even in its original “classical” format, as  propounded by Karl Marx himself. Hicks makes an assertion about Marxist socialism that probably isn’t correct at page 86:

“As modernists, the socialists argued that socialism could be proved by evidence and rational analysis, and that once the evidence was in, socialism’s moral and economic superiority to capitalism would be clear…” (Pg. 86, emphasis added.)

He implies that he is including Marxists in the above description of “socialists”, and not just the non-Marxist socialists of the 19th Century, since he goes on to discuss the claims of “Classical Marxist socialism” on the same page. Also, later, he says:

“Beginning in the 1920’s and 1930’s there had been some early suggestions that Marxism was too rationalistic, too logical and deterministic…And early Frankfurt School theorizing had suggested that Marxism was too wedded to reason…” (Pg. 156 to 157, emphasis added.)

Hicks seems to say that Marxism, as originally conceived, is “pro-reason”, when I think it never was. Non-Marxists socialists, the so-called “utopian socialists”, would have been pro-reason, like Hicks said on page 86. The ideas of Marx probably won out over the “utopian socialists” precisely because Marx embraced the Hegelian dialectic, and didn’t depend on classical Aristotelian logic. Marxism is too “arbitrary”, or disconnected from reality, to really be disproved or proved. Any time someone tries to disprove it, a Marxist could just say that person was a “tool of the capitalist exploiters”, and, “of course”, the critic would say that:

“Aware of the fact that communism cannot be defended by reason, the Marxists proceeded to turn the fallacy of ad hominem into a formal philosophic doctrine, claiming that logic varies with men’s economic class, and that objections to communist doctrine may be dismissed as expressions of ‘bourgeois logic.’ “ (Leonard Peikoff, “Nazi Politics,” The Objectivist, Feb. 1971, 12, found at: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/polylogism.html)

Overall, I consider this to be a minor flaw of the book, which deftly traces the “philosophic genealogy” of today’s “postmodern” left. It really helped me to understand the mind of the average leftist, and how she will dismiss reason and say, I’m engaging in a logic:  “…created by dead white men”. Now I see another reason why the average leftist, like some mindless automaton, will point out how I’m a white, male, “bourgeois”, heterosexual -its easier to say this than do any hard thinking about the merits of their political ideology.

(All page number references below are to the 2018, expanded hardcover edition of “Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault”, by Stephen R.C. Hicks, ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7)

Who Is Responsible for Iran Shooting Down Ukraine Flight 752?

Last week, the Iranian regime shot down Ukrainian Flight 752 with two anti-aircraft missiles. (https://www.businessinsider.com/iran-ukraine-plane-crash-flight-752-timeline-unfolded-events-allegations-2020-1)  It was but a footnote in a long history of brutal disregard for human life by a vicious theocratic dictatorship.

The week prior, an Iranian General was killed in Iraq by the United States.  We can debate whether the Trump administration was wise or not wise to eliminate the Iranian General, but he was not a good man, and was known to be responsible for attacks on Americans. (https://www.businessinsider.com.au/trump-claims-us-killed-iranian-general-soleimani-to-stop-war-2020-1 )  He was a force-initiator.

Regardless of whether the Trump administration should have killed the Iranian General, and in the way that they did, I want to address a particularly perverse notion that is floating around out there: Some people on the far left are saying this is the fault of Donald Trump. They use the following sort of “logic” to arrive at this conclusion:

(1) Donald Trump killed an Iranian General in Iraq, where he was waging war against the United States.

(2) Iran had just retaliated for this with a missile strike, and they were nervous of an American counter-attack, so they got jumpy and shot down the commercial airline.

If we were examining any semi-rational western government’s actions in such a situation, we’d ask several tough questions, such as: Why didn’t Iran, which knew it was about to conduct a missile attack, ground commercial airline flights? Why didn’t it have systems in place to distinguish between commercial flights and non-commercial flights?

But, a “liberal” throws all of that out in her mind, because it would require her to actually examine the nature of the Iranian regime, which she prefers not to do. The “liberal” will fail to consider key aspects of reality about Iran:

(1) Iran is a theocratic dictatorship with a record of human rights abuses. It routinely machine guns people in the streets for protesting against the government.( https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/06/middleeast/iran-un-protest-deaths-intl/index.html )There is no evidence to suggest it would have any more concern for the passengers on a commercial flight than it does for unarmed people in the street.
(2) Iran sponsors international terrorism that targets civilians, and it has since the current regime took power in the 1970’s.( https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/02/politics/state-department-report-terrorism/index.html ) This makes Iran essentially an outlaw nation, and they know it. They’re highly paranoid as a result.

(3) A theocratic dictatorship, pretty much by definition, has no concern with the well-being of its people in the here and now. Their goal is to prepare the population for after they die, and will go to heaven. Human rights are irrelevant to this world view. The Iranian regime is what it would look like if Branch Davidians somehow took over the United States. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Branch-Davidian)

All of this adds up to an unstable, paranoid regime that will “shoot first and ask questions later”, because it isn’t really that concerned about the rights or welfare of its own people -or anyone else.

For a Western “liberal” to say it’s Donald Trump’s fault that Iran shot down Ukraine Flight 752, and killed a bunch of it’s own people is a statement of almost willful blindness.

The essence of the Iranian regime is the violation of the rights of other people in the pursuit of a supernatural “paradise” after they die.  In fact, they believe they’ll go to that paradise if they kill the infidels.

I’ll leave you with an analogy. Imagine you encounter a mentally unstable homeless person at the bus stop. You momentarily make eye contact with that mentally ill person, and then they beat you senseless.  Now imagine the police come and say: “Well, you shouldn’t have made eye contact with him.”

Even if your momentary gaze did precipitate the lunatic’s attack, it’s clear to everyone  that the crazy person is just that -and anything could set him off.

The Iranian regime has a specific nature. Even if it didn’t murder anyone this, particular week, given enough time, that’s exactly what it will do.

Good Article on PG&E and the California Wildfires

The Wall Street Journal article “PG&E: Wired to Fail” by Russell Gold,
Rebecca Smith and  Katherine Blunt, was, overall, a good, in-depth, article that lays out the relevant facts for why PG&E allowed its infrastructure to become so old that power lines fell and caused massive wildfires, killing many people.

It doesn’t do as good of a job explaining the significance of the facts that it cites, leaving it up to the reader to “put them together”. I thought I might synthesize the relevant facts from the article here, and draw the conclusions that the authors don’t explicitly draw.

The article notes that, at several points in the past, the state government of California mandated that PG&E switch to “green” sources of energy, mainly solar energy and wind.

“As regulators pushed for more renewable energy, the combination of high winds and sparks from a damaged San Diego Gas & Electric power line ignited what came to be called the Witch Fire in Southern California, killing two people, injuring 45 firefighters and destroying 1,140 homes.”

“For the past 15 years, PG&E has plotted a round trip from one bankruptcy to another. In between, it navigated the aftermath of a catastrophic natural-gas pipeline explosion and a series of increasingly demanding green-energy mandates from state regulators.”

“In April 2011, seven months after the San Bruno explosion, California’s new governor, Jerry Brown, signed legislation raising the percentage of state electricity that must come from renewables to 33% by 2020, up from the previous state goal of 20% by 2010.”

“In September 2018, Gov. Brown, months from leaving office, signed a bill that again raised the state’s renewable-energy target, this time to 60% by 2030.”

This is significant, because it causes the cost of power generation to go up. It’s simple Economics. If solar and wind were cheaper than  other, more traditional, forms of power generation, then power companies would have already switched to them. (That would allow them to generate power at a lower cost, thereby increasing their profits.) The reason PG&E didn’t switch voluntarily, and had to be forced by the government to do so, is because there is a higher cost from producing with solar and wind.

“CALIFORNIA REGULATORS kept up the pressure to meet the state’s aggressive renewable energy goals.

By 2012, PG&E was spending more than $1.2 billion a year to meet the targets, more than double what it spent in 2003, according to PG&E filings, and it was projected to top $2 billion by 2015. Mr. Peevey, the utilities commission head, addressed concern that Californians faced a “rate bomb” as the deals kicked in.”

The second fact that has to be understood about power utilities is that they are heavily regulated by the government in terms of what price they can charge. The supposed rationale for this is that since only a limited number of companies are allowed to operate as utilities, they are governmentaly enforced monopolies that must have their prices regulated. I won’t get “too deep into the weeds” on this point, but there is no reason, in principle, that different companies couldn’t all enter the power generation business. (Power lines can be laid almost without limit underground or even through the air, or people can move, if the power company in one area charges too much, to another city where the power company charges less.)  What you should take away from this paragraph is this point: Power companies cannot just easily raise prices when their costs go up like like less regulated industries. They have to get permission from the government, usually some sort of board, which takes time and money, and there will be political pressure for the regulator to not let prices go up to reflect actual costs.

When you combine increasing costs to a power company from being forced to switch to “green energy sources” with the inability to fully pass that cost on to the consumers, the power company has to make up that difference somewhere. If it reduces profits, it reduces the number of people willing to invest in the power company, which reduces its ability to purchase new equipment, such as power lines. It means the company has to continue generating power with aging equipment. If it keeps profits high enough to keep investment coming in, it will have the same problem. It can’t simultaneously have: (1) higher production costs, (2) pay the same amount of profit to investors, and (3) keep prices the same to customers. Something has to give, and the “short term solution” is to stop spending money on the maintenance of equipment. But, the “long-run” eventually caught up with California:

“It proved to be especially challenging for a plodding utility undergoing management upheaval, heavily regulated and saddled with aging, neglected equipment.

Executives were so focused on the past and the future that the present sneaked up on them. PG&E’s electric lines, after years of deferred maintenance, were threatening drought-parched California. “

“PG&E’s Caribou-Palermo transmission line was built in 1921 through the Plumas National Forest. Part of a larger network that carried electricity from the Sierra Nevada to the Bay Area, it was so old that it had been considered a candidate for the National Register of Historic Places. PG&E had told federal regulators it planned to replace many of the towers and hardware on the line but postponed the work several times…

At about 6:15 a.m. on Nov. 8, 2018, an iron hook holding up a 115,000-volt line broke, dropping the live wire and sparking a blaze.

Thirty minutes later, what would come to be known as the Camp Fire was out of control. Officials ordered the evacuation of the nearby town of Paradise, home to 26,000 people. The town was soon burned to the ground. Within hours, the fire destroyed 13,983 homes and killed more people, 85, than any other California wildfire.”

What is the solution to this problem?  It is two-fold.

First, California needs to withdraw state mandates on a switch to solar and wind, which will bring down the cost of power generation.

Second, California needs actual competition in electricity generation. This doesn’t mean just competition in generation, but distribution. In exchange for eliminating their current legal monopolies on generation and distribution, power companies would be free to charge whatever rate people are willing to pay them.

Of the two, the second is actually the most important. Even if the state mandates on the switch to renewables stayed in place, as long as the utilities can charge customers higher prices to reflect this, then it will not affect the ability of utilities to maintain and replace aging equipment. (I think both of my solutions should occur, since I think the concerns over “climate change” are either illusory, or overblown, but, that is a debate for another time.) The important point to recognize is that there is no free lunch. If the people of California want to reduce so-called “greenhouse gases”, then they need to be prepared to pay for it with higher utility rates. (Otherwise, they’ll continue to “pay for it” with forest fires.)

A Crow Possibly Solving a Problem Like a Human Being

Animal behavior interests me a great deal. I essentially see the human mind as “built on” an underlying “chassis” that reflects our species’ evolutionary development. So, there is a portion of the human brain that can be considered unique, and that makes us human, but there is also a lot of our brain structure that is the same as a chimpanzee’s or other other animal’s brain. This means that by learning something about animal behavior and the animal mind, we can learn something about ourselves.
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This video on BBC involves a crow appearing to “solve” a complex-reasoning problem. After watching it, however, I question whether the conclusion that is being drawn is necessarily the correct one.
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If the crow has done each of these individual things before to get a food reward, then he may just be doing each task randomly with the expectation of getting a food reward that doesn’t pay off?
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The first seven tasks that he has associated with food reward result in nothing this time, but operant conditioning causes him to eventually do the eighth task that results in food reward. In other words, there may not be a mental connection in his mind between doing task 1 and doing task 8, like there would be for a human being.
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A question I would like to ask whoever devised this experiment: Did the crow immediately know the correct order of tasks to perform? Even if he’s doing it in the right order from the start, that could be random, because he does the task that he can immediately perform simply because it’s physically available to him, not because he’s reasoning it out. (In which case, this is just a Rube Goldberg machine with a crow as one of its components.) It would seem more likely to suggest complex reasoning if the crow had never done any of the individual tasks before and he was able to figure it out.

“Joker” Movie Review (With Plot-Spoilers)

The movie is about Arthur Fleck, the man who will become Batman’s arch-nemesis. He is an entertainer, and aspiring standup comedian, who is barely getting by. He works as a clown, and lives with his mother in what appears to be 1970’s, or early 1980’s, New York. (The city was a fairly lawless place, with a lot of crime and violence.) Everyone is “mean” to Arthur Fleck, and that, eventually, “drives” him to kill, and transform into a super-villain.
The movie’s theme is that of our “post-modern” era: “I am justified in using physical force against people who hurt my feelings or offend me.”

The movie isn’t anything particularly new on the cinematic landscape. The character seems like an amalgam of three characters I’ve seen before:

  • A loner who kills at random, living in the “sewer” that is 1970’s New York City. He becomes obsessed with a woman. (The Taxi Driver)
  • A strange fellow with an unhealthy relationship with his mother becomes a lunatic killer. (“Norman Bates” in Psycho)
  • A person who murders anyone who insults him. (Hannibal Lecter)

Arthur kills three times as part of his “transformation” into the Joker. These comprise the major scenes “mapping out” the movie and his development.

First Episode of Violence: Arthur kills some obnoxious “frat boys”. This is somewhat justified since they are beating him up, and were bullying a woman on the train. By the way, the scene was highly unrealistic. White upper-middle-class yuppies weren’t, as a rule, the ones attacking people on subways in 1970’s New York.

Second Episode of Violence: Arthur had previously discovered in a series of scenes that he was adopted and that his mother had allowed her criminally insane boyfriend to beat him so badly Arthur suffered brain damage as a result. (Throughout the movie, he has an uncontrollable laugh due to a neurological condition.) This was also not particularly realistic. In what Twentieth Century American city would a mentally ill woman be able to adopt, let alone keep, a child? Especially after he had suffered that kind of abuse from her boyfriend? This was sort of “blamed” on “the rich”, with references to unspecified “cuts in funding” for unspecified “government programs”. But, under laissez-faire capitalism, there would be courts and police to combat child-abuse like this.

The whole “anti-rich” aspect of the movie basically felt like an artistic “fig leaf” to me, anyway. It was just another way that people hurt the script-writer’s feelings, and justify, in his or her mind, acts of violence. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the main character’s name in this movie is “Arthur”, as in, the *author* of this movie, who identifies with this character.)

Third Episode of Violence: Arthur murders the guy who got him fired from his clown job with a pair of scissors. Tellingly, in this third episode of violence, Arthur lets a dwarf character, another clown, go, saying: “You were always nice to me.”

The “lead up” to this third violent scene was this: Arthur got fired from his clown job after a gun fell out of his pants while he was entertaining children at a hospital. Arthur got the gun from a fellow clown who gave it to him. For some inexplicable reason, this minor character lies to their boss, and says Arthur tried to buy a gun off of him. Why wouldn’t he just keep quiet? If he gave Arthur an illegal gun, he’d have as much to loose as Arthur, so it’d be better to just say nothing, and hope that it never got back to their boss, or the police. Also, if he didn’t like Arthur, why give him a valuable gun free of charge like that? This minor character’s motives made no sense.

With respect to the obnoxious frat boys on the train, Arthur was *possibly* justified in using force.  Even the murder of his mother is “understandable”, if not justified. He had discovered she had allowed him to become the victim of massive childhood abuse. But, by the time he gets around to his fourth, and final, “episode of violence”, involving a character played by Robert De Niro, his motive is clear: He kills people who hurt his feelings.

The “set up” for this scene occurred earlier in the movie. De Niro plays a “Late Show TV Host”, Murray Franklin. Arthur Fleck idolizes Franklin, who, in his deluded mind, is the father he never had. Midway through the movie, Franklin shows a recording of Arthur “bombing” during a standup routine, and makes fun of Arthur. (This was not particularly realistic. I doubt a major TV personality would engage in an unprovoked “attack” on a complete “nobody” like that.) Later, for some inexplicable reason, Franklin has Arthur on his TV show for an interview, where Arthur, now “transformed” into the Joker, comes on stage and confesses to killing the obnoxious frat boys on the subway.

This scene is where the overall “theme” of the Joker movie is revealed. Prior to blowing away De Niro’s character, Arthur says: “…comedy is subjective, the system decides what is right and what is wrong, just like it decides what is funny…” He also says “everyone is awful”. This translates to: My feelings are what matters, even to the exclusion of the lives of others.

As a “stand alone” movie, the “message” of “Joker” is terible, but also not particularly original. (I noted three movies above that it seems to draw heavily from,  with similar characters and motives.) Its theme reflects our era, at least since the end of the Nineteenth Century: Feelings matter more than people’s rights. This “post modern” idea runs all the way from the National Socialism of 1930’s Germany, to the street thuggery of groups like “Antifa”, in cities like Portland, and on American university campuses, today. (These groups think that certain “hate speech” hurts their feelings, and justifies the use of force.)

What somewhat “artistically complicates” the “clear messaging” of “Joker” is that this is a character from a “wider” work(s) of art. It’s the villain from Batman. In that sense, it  may not be “meant” to be a “stand alone movie”. It has the “feel” of a flashback scene from a wider work of fiction, where the motives of the “bad guy” are explained, but not necessarily condoned. For instance, it’s set in Bruce Wayne’s “past”, although he is only a minor character in this movie. But, with that said, I think a work of art has to be taken at “face value”, which means one should not “read into” it what *was not* said. In this, particular, movie, Arthur suffers no consequence for his viciousness, which is motivated entirely by his feelings. (The last scene is the Joker murdering his therapist and escaping.) It says: “Force in the service of my feelings is efficacious and justified”.

If someone knew *nothing* about the Batman franchise, and saw this movie, they’d judge the movie as another, by now fairly tired, artistic depravity study, where the villain “gets away with it”, because the writer thinks his feelings have primacy over reality.

When What Is Common is Inadvertently Reported

The Amber Guyger murder trial was quite prominent in both the local and national news. I would guess that it was so heavily reported because it tied in to the overall media narrative concerning black men being shot by cops as a major problem.

Whether the shooting was justified or not, and whether the jury arrived at the correct decision, I have no idea. I didn’t watch most of the trial because of time constraints. I generally operate on the assumption that I trust the court system to arrive at the correct conclusion, absent some evidence to the contrary in a specific case. So, I won’t comment on the verdict at this point.

After the verdict, I assumed news reporting would slowly fade on this subject, and the media would move on to something else. Then, something “unexpected” happened. One of the witnesses, Joshua brown, was found shot to death, an apparent homicide victim.  (I use quotation marks on the word “unexpected”, because what happened is actually quite common.)

Joshua Brown was a State’s witness, and a neighbor of the decedent. Mr.  Brown overheard parts of the confrontation between the Defendant, Ms. Guyger, and the decedent in the case. His testimony was generally not favorable for the Defense. My understanding is that he testified Ms. Guyger did not issue verbal commands to the decedent prior to using deadly force.

About a week after the trial, Mr. Brown, was, coincidentally, shot to death.  https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2019/10/08/dallas-police-name-three-suspects-joshua-brown-murder-investigation/

I suspected I knew what the race of whoever shot Mr. Brown would be, and it looks like I wasn’t wrong. Two of the three suspects in the shooting were black. The shooting appears to have arisen out of a dispute over drugs.

Normally, I doubt Mr. Brown’s death would have made the news. Why not? Because it happens all the time. It’s the same reason the news reports airplane crashes, but typically doesn’t report car wrecks. Car wrecks happen too often. It also doesn’t fit the narrative the media wants you to believe, which is that the number one concern for black people in America is police shootings, not homicides committed by other black people.

In some years, black people are the primary perpetrators of murder. They’re also the primary victims. The Bureau of Justice Statistics sets forth the percentage of homicides committed by blacks and the percentage of homicides committed by whites between 1980 and 2009. These figures can be found at page 12, Table 7 of “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008”, where it said that of all homicides committed in the US, 45.3% of offenders were white and 52.5% were black. (See http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf, last accessed on 10-9-2019.)

So, Mr. Brown’s apparent homicide at the hands of other black people would normally not be a newsworthy event. It’s too frequent to merit much attention.

Interracial Rape Statistics

I have been trying to find what the statistics say on inter-racial rape for quite some time. It is very difficult, probably because most people know what the results will show.

Today I found an article from a University of Chicago paper from 1982 that summarized some previous studies on the amount of interracial rape, that is, black on white rape, or white on black rape. The article is called:

Gary D. LaFree, “Male Power and Female Victimization: Toward a Theory of Interracial Rape,” American Journal of Sociology 88, no. 2 (Sep., 1982): 311-328.

Each of the rows in the above table is a reference to a study measuring the amount of inter-racial rape, and the results of those studies. The Table is titled: “Table 1 Frequency of Interracial Rape By Year of Offense”, from Pg. 313 of the LaFree Article.

The figures are about like what I suspected. That is, the rates of black men raping white women were much higher than the rates of white men raping black women. One study in particular, was astounding to me. The fourth row down is a sample taken in Berkley, California, where it was found that 60.8% of all rapes were a black offender and white victim, from 1968 to 1970.

The article is also interesting because it accepts the fact that black men are raping white women at much higher rates as a given, and then presents two possible theories for why that would be. That suggests to me that, at least in 1982, the fact that black men raped white women at an unusually high level was a known fact, that nobody questioned.

Parenthetically, the two theories presented in the LaFree article are the “normative” theory, and the “conflict” theory. The “normative theory suggests that the amount of black on white rape had gone up since the time of desegregation because more white women were interacting with black men socially, creating greater opportunities for rape. The “conflict” theory suggested that black men rape white women more frequently as a form of revenge for supposed “white male power”. The article finds that the “conflict” theory is more supported by its findings.

I had to pay ten dollars for the article, which I found here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu. I consider it worth the $10.

From there, I found another article that appears to be freely available online:

“The Racial Pattering of Rape”, South, Scott J., Felson, Richard B., University of North Carolina Press, “Social Forces”, September 1990, 69(1):71-93.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=635F7907F6F07771D7C4D815160167BC?doi=10.1.1.839.5948&rep=rep1&type=pdf

This article posits another theory for the much higher rate of black on white rape than white on black rape. It seems to say that it is due to increased opportunity of black rapists to rape white women in a less racially segregated society than in the past. The article notes that cities with higher rates of racial segregation have less black on white rape. This seems plausible to me, and suggests a definite solution for avoiding becoming the victim of a crime…but I’ll leave that for another time.