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March « 2009 « Dangerous Dan
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Dangerous Dan Thoughts and musings on the world

3/20/2009

The Environmental Threat to Liberty

Filed under: General — Dangerous Dan @ 12:52 pm

Periodically, proposals are raised for some kind of international taxes that are supposed to be justified by threats to the environment and by mythical global warming concerns.  Several years ago, for example, ideas were floated for imposing special taxes on international flights, the revenue of which would go to saving nature.  The very latest idea is levying a tax on oil, which will raise $740 billion that will go to… yes… saving nature.  In tune with the current fetishizing of FDR, it’s being called a Green New Deal.

So, the problems:  This is to be done somehow through the UN.  The article was skimpy on details for just how this tax is to be imposed, collected, and under whose authority, but I take it it’s through the UN.  The United Nations is not a taxing authority and it has neither the legal authority to do so nor the political justification.  A sovereign people would be fools to allow a tax to be put on them by some extralegal entity over which they have no control.  My political representation in the UN is tangential at best and the bulk of the members and the bulk of bureaucracy do not have my nation’s interests at heart.  Any kind of international tax like this sets a precedent by which the UN can slowly exert greater powers while not being answerable to any population.  It would be the creation of a sovereign without even the benefit of a social contract.  What’s galling – and frightening – is that there exist people who see no problems with such plans and actually think them good.  Throw into this mix the UN’s proficiency at corruption, e.g. Oil for Food, and there’s no telling where or in whose pockets much of this money would wind up being depositied.

As if these international technocrats weren’t bad enough, we have our own in the U.S.  NASA’s James Hansen recently complained that the democratic process just isn’t working for him.

The democratic process doesn’t quite seem to be working.  … The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.  The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I’m not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we’re running out of time.

Absolutely amazing.  The implication here, even if Hansen is coy about drawing it out, is that sticking to democracy is likely to doom the world.  Presumably, the solution is ditching democracy, at least temporarily, in order to fix the environment (like China and its environmental successes, I suppose).  This illustrates the threat of crises that so many don’t want to waste in order to further their own agendas.  The White House wants to exploit the economic crisis to institute sweeping liberal policies and many of the green lobbies are determined to exploit a non-existent crisis in order to increase their own power and those of fellow technocrats.  The rest of us will be forced to be free and to go along with what our more intelligent superiors dictate.  And our liberties will be sacrificed in the process.

Threats to Liberty

Filed under: General — Dangerous Dan @ 12:15 pm

Our liberties are always under constant threat from someone or some group or another.  I’ve been somewhat surprised at the number of threats that have been jumping recently and I’m near quaking at the possibilities that any of them could succeed.  I’ll go down the list in the subsequent posts.

Going Galt

Filed under: General — Dangerous Dan @ 1:06 am

I’ve finally started reading Atlas Shrugged.  It’s been on my reading list for one or two years now, but, with all the Ayn Rand talk recently, I decided to get to it.  I’m only 200 pages in, which leaves me 800 more to go.  I find the prose to be a little overbaked at times, and the book is probably longer than it needs to be.  The characters are also odd and anything to do with sexuality is downright… strange – as if it’s begging for Freudian analysis.  But all of that doesn’t bother me much.  Though I’m not to it yet, I know the general idea of what the society’s producers wind up doing and who John Galt is supposed to be.  This has given rise to the going Galt call among many in our current economic and political climate, advising people to scale back and contribute as little as possible to a looting society.

Wandering around the blogosphere, I’ve seen interesting comments about Rand and going Galt.  Many criticize her writing and characters or call her books the equivalent of pulp sci-fi.  They mean this last one derogatorily, but I don’t see the problem with it.  Science fiction isn’t meant to be real or even necessarily realistic; it’s an often allegorical story exploring social issues.  I certainly don’t think there’s going to be a free-wheeling Captain Kirk out exploring the galaxy someday who has to broker a peace between two alien races whose only difference is which half of their bodies is white and which is black.  But that wasn’t the frickin’ point now, was it?  The point was the racial issue the story was addressing.  Similarly, it’s seems silly to dismiss all of Rand’s points just because the characters are too ubermenschish or unrealistic or some such or that what the producers do wouldn’t really happen.  Well, that’s not the frickin’ point now, is it?  She’s using a story to illustrate an overall point, philosophy, and argument.  That requires intellectual honesty in taking her position at its strongest and examining that.

As for the going Galt, many criticize it that it will make no difference and trolls love to dare people to actually go Galt and see what it does for them or the effect it will have on society.  That dare is usually accompanied with some kind of insult, epithet, or abbreviations standing in for laughter.  But I don’t think the criticism being offered here is fair either.  Below is what I wrote about the topic for the comment section of this Denver Post article.  If you look at the comments (the later comments), you can see the back and forth between me and several other people.  I eventually stopped replying because I had other things to do and it seemed to get to the point where nothing new was going to be added by either side, which makes the debate tiresomely repetitive.  Though I do hate leaving a debate like that because it gives the appearance of surrender, something I don’t do lightly (or much at all).

Anyway, the comment:

I keep seeing a rather curious misunderstanding of the going Galt phenomenon. While the book posits it as captains and titans of industry punishing the looter society by removing from it their own productivity, the real life version is more subtle. It’s not that people will purposely remove themselves or drastically scale back in order to punish “looters.” They will merely scale back in smaller ways due to simple incentives. If there is no incentive to excel or produce more, then why should anyone do so? If there is actually a disincentive to produce more and if success even seems to be punished, then why excel?

Let’s say a dentist makes $300,000 a year, but realizes that after federal, state, local, and social security taxes, he’ll get to keep only 40-50% of the last $50K he makes. He’s likely to reason it’s better to scale back his business. He’ll have more time to himself, work less, but not lose much financially if he cuts back to, say, $250-275K. Sure, he may miss out on $20-$25K, but he’ll figure that’s better than putting in $50K worth of work and still lose as much. So he’ll scale back. But by doing so, he’ll hire fewer employees, cut back on hours for current employees (or even lay off a few), contribute less in taxes, and provide less of a service to his community. He’s not consciously going Galt and he may not even care about politics at all. He’s merely pursuing his own financial interests, which are affected by society’s incentive structure.

Now imagine many, many more people like this dentist doing the same thing with all sorts of producers and employers merely following financial self-interest and scaling back. This is the going Galt problem that exists and the effects will cascade throughout the economy and government. People need to have an incentive to work harder and produce more and that incentive is that doing so will earn them more money. Take that away and their behavior will change.

In the Communist countries, it was “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” only because the government forced them to work certain jobs. Here, it will simply be, “We work less because we can’t get paid more.”

3/18/2009

Kim Jong Il – A God Among Men

Filed under: General — Dangerous Dan @ 8:53 pm

For whatever reason, I wandered onto the site for the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, aka North Korea.  I started reading the biography for Kim Jong Il and it’s… interesting.  Some excerpts:

From his early years Comrade Kim Jong Il possessed the power of keen observation, the power of clear analysis and extraordinary perspicacity with regard to things and phenomena.  he had a faculty for creative thinking, regarding every problem with an innovative eye.

Courageous and ambitious, Comrade Kim John Il did everything in a big way; he had a strong and daring character which enabled him to carry any difficult task to completion with his own efforts, once he started it.

Possessed of warm human love and broadmindedness, he was always generous, unceremonius and warm-hearted among people.

His unusual natural disposition was nurtured, so developing the traits and quality of a future revolutionary and leader, thanks to the exceptional education he received from his parents.

It then talks about his education, which was wide and “profound.”  Most of it deals with how he studied everything possible and how he advanced the party and the revolution.  I did like this part:

During his practice at the Pyongyang Textile machinery Factory he aroused the workers of the factory to launch a movement for  model machines in maintenance and operation, personally handling lathe No. 26.  This movement became the inception of the “model machine movement of loyalty for emulating lathe No. 26”, which is now conducted as a mass movement.

“Dude, what movement are you part of?”   “The model machine movement of loyalty for emulating lathe No. 26.  It’s totally sweet.”

He’s a great author too:

In his treatise On Reexamining the Question of the Unification of the Three Kingdoms, Comrade Kim John Il comprehensively analysed and criticised the “Theory of the Unification of the Three Kingdoms by Silla”, and the “Theory of Sila’s Orthodoxy”, and put forward his view on the need of newly systematizing from a Juche-orientated stand the Korean history which had been distorted by flunkey historians.  As it turned out, this was a great scientific discovery.

I didn’t bother reading beyond that.  I can only take so much comedy and so many lies at once.

3/17/2009

The Problems of Government Control

Filed under: Politics,Society — Tags: — Dangerous Dan @ 10:37 pm

The latest populist outrage du jour is the $165 million in bonuses AIG paid out to its executives.  Since AIG is a recipient of tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer bailout money meant to shore it up, Obama and other politicians are in full bluster mode about the payouts.  They shouldn’t be.  AIG was contractually obligated to pay that money to its employees.  Just because the company gets funds from the federal government doesn’t mean that it is suddenly at liberty to violate the terms of its contracts with its workers, whether it’s an extra $20 to a guy in the mail room or several million to a vice president.

It’s also not as if this suddenly snuck up on anybody.  The White House is claiming they didn’t know about the bonuses until earlier this month, but this is likely a CYA move.  It’s difficult to believe that the administration didn’t have some idea of the extent of the bonuses before official word got to it.  Even if the benefit of the doubt is given, the alternative explanations are either incompetence or shoddy work for, respectively, not thinking to investigate bonuses or going about getting the information slowly.

The problem for AIG if it had cut the bonuses, aside from getting sued by those who were stiffed, is that the business requires skilled, qualified people in its ranks.  It cannot get or retain these individuals if it is unable to match the compensation packages of competing firms.  This is part of a larger worry of mine whenever Obama and other mostly Dems talk about limiting the executive compensation of the companies that have received federal relief.  That sounds quite nice but such a policy puts the businesses at a serious competitive disadvantage for personnel.  If you’re a skilled corporate manager, salesman, broker, etc., and you have the opportunity to make, say, ten times as much money at one firm than at another, the choice is obvious – you go to where you can make big money.  The firm that is legally unable to match salary and bonuses will increasingly get less qualified workers, i.e. the leftovers after all the other firms have picked over the available labor pool.  Considering these companies are already troubled (that’s why they got federal money to begin with), this will only exacerbate the troubles.  Rather than use taxpayer money appropriately (something I consider was already not done in bailing them out at all), the politicians will waste that money by creating a non-competitive company that cannot succeed against rivals and will either go down with that taxpayer money or it will keep demanding more to keep it afloat.

This last option is a worrisome one.  There’s a decent chance the government will continue pumping money into failing companies only because it has already sunk so much into them.  No politician wants to admit AIG or some other entity is going to go down in flames with billions in taxpayer money never to repaid.  The pols would rather keep propping it up as long as possible, a bit like the gambler who keeps gambling because he’s already “invested” so much cash and holds out a futile hope of getting it back and keeping his wife from divorcing him.

So what would become of such companies?  That they become wholly dependent and functioning arms of the federal government?  This would certainly seem to be the case.  One of the lines the American people were given during the initial round of bailouts is that the government was buying stock without voting power and the banks, firms, and companies would not be controlled.  Not surprisingly, that didn’t last long.  The fool populists now feel at liberty to exert ever greater control on these businesses, always on the justification that the companies received federal funds and the politicians, never good stewards of taxpayer money in their own spending, must ensure the U.S. investment is being used appropriately.  So far, only executive compensation packages are targeted, but there’s no reason to stop there – not given the above justification.  What if a bailed out bank wants to foreclose on a number of houses owned by the poor, or refuses to lend to the “disadvantaged,” or does business with the politically unpopular (let’s say, a whaling group or a questionable foreign regime)?  There seems little to stop the pols from declaring that the bank needs to act correctly – that is, to act according to what the legislators have determined is politically advantageous or socially right – because, as a recipient of taxpayer money, it owes the taxpayers its subservience.

And what of that?  Doesn’t a company owe obedience to the wishes of its investors and stockholders?  Of course, but what is the nature of this investment?  Ordinarily, I voluntarily invest my own money in a company and take on the risk should the company fail.  I can also voice my displeasure with the company’s actions and try to direct it to act differently according to what I think is the best course of action.  None of this is the case with the government bailouts, however.  My money is being invested in companies regardless of my wishes.  Politicians are investing it for me, and against my will.  The pols also risk no monetary capital of their own should the investment go poorly.  All they risk is nebulous political capital, which can still be salvaged in case of failure.  I also have no say, as an investor, in the direction of the companies.  Instead, those same politicians act as my intermediary.  But the interests of those politicians are, again, less profit and more political (remember what it is they have at risk).  If it is political gains those pols wish to make, then they will pander to the poorer majority.  Since many of the poorer majority do not pay income taxes, they haven’t any money at risk in these government investments.  The result is that my money is invested, but that investment is controlled by politicians for the benefit of those who have invested nothing.

Let’s bail out all sorts of business entities.  Other than loss of taxpayer money, effective nationalization of companies, destruction of normal competition, and a bizarre distortion of investor-company relationships, what could go wrong?

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