Category Archives: society

A Nitpick About Costly Contraception

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Okay, so everyone knows Rush Limbaugh is stupid for suggesting that someone who goes broke buying birth control is a “slut”. Birth control pills end up being a sunk cost. You don’t go on and off them but stay on them however sexually active you are. But of course it’s not true that there’s no relationship between amount of sex one has and contraceptive costs. Say condoms are about $3 each and it costs $10 a month (at the low end!) for birth control pills. That means if you have sex less than three times a month, it’s cheaper to buy condoms. If it’s $50 a month, then make that 16. $100, 33 and so on. So I suppose if one has a low threshold for “slut” then the mere fact of needing the pill would make someone so.

Naturally, slut isn’t defined by amount of sex but amount of partners. If you have sex twice a day every day with the same person, you’re not a slut and are in need of contraception. It’s also unclear why someone should be shamed (only implored to be careful of STDs) for having multiple partners if that’s really the lifestyle they want. The problem is that many religious conservatives don’t really like premarital sex of any sort and the notion that contraceptives are associated with promiscuity is just a red herring.

The Yeller Menace

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There’s a good chance you’ve seen this ad that Pete Hoekstra ran during the Super Bowl. If not in between watching brain trauma ball, then likely on the intertubes. The ad was immediately recognized as racially insensitive (sure, but political incorrectness doesn’t really bother me) and just plain stupid (there we go, that bothers me!) But is it really exceptional or unprecedented? Or is it just a more clumsy delivery of the rhetoric that politicians spew anyway?

China is a recurring subject in the Republican debates. National debt is given a sinister character by the suggestion that the Chinese own much of it (they own some of it, but by far not most). Here’s Romney from one of the debates:

China is playing by different rules. One, they are stealing intellectual property. Number two, they’re hacking into our computer systems, both government and corporate they are manipulating their currency, and by doing so, holding down the price of Chinese goods, and making sure their products are artificially low-priced. It’s predatory pricing, it’s killing jobs in America I would do something this president should have done a long time ago, which is to label China a currency manipulator. And then I would bring in action at the WTO level, charging them with being a currency manipulator.

Romney’s China rhetoric is relatively more sophisticated and fact-based than many other Republicans’ and yet here we have bad economics. They’re stealing our intellectual property? You mean they refuse to strangle their progress with our monopolies and artificial scarcity? What predators. And here we have the false notion of zero-sum trade, coming from the party that is ostensibly for free trade.

Obama isn’t much better. In his last SOTU, Obama mentioned China 5 times and counted blocking Chinese tires from entering our market as a victory for American workers. Sure, it’s a victory for some workers but on the whole, it’s not a benefit for the American people. Obama knows better and his economic advisers certainly do. But appealing to peoples’ [false] intuitions and paleolithic fear of outsiders is always a politically winning strategy.

The growing consensus, as far as I can tell, among those on the mainstream Left who understand economics is that we shouldn’t stop free trade but rather ensure an ample safety net for the minority who does suffer from the workings of the global market.

China sacrifices her citizens’ subjects’ wealth to make products cheaper for us. This isn’t to the benefit of the Chinese people over the American people. It’s to the benefit of certain Chinese manufacturers over the Chinese people. Countering that with tighter trade restrictions won’t restore the balance in favor of the American people, but rather benefit domestic producers at the expense of everyone else. Tariffs should be seen for what they are – a regressive tax.

Pete Hoekstra may be stupid and he may be blatantly playing off of xenophobia and discredited folk economic beliefs, but he is far from alone.

Matt Yglesias’ Run-of-The Mill Specieism

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Matt Yglesias scoffed at a commenter who pointed out that requiring companies to provide maternity leave constitutes a subsidy for having children, excess children is bad for the planet and therefore we should remove such subsidies:

The beginning of wisdom here is to note that pollution isn’t “bad for the planet.” The planet is a gigantic roughly spherical chunk of rocks that can easily survive whatever level of greenhouse gas emissions or whatever else we care to pump into the atmosphere. The big picture ecological threat is a threat to human beings [...] Radical population reduction would sharply reduce the quantity of anthropogenic ecological impacts, but to what end? The goal needs to be to reconfigure human activity in order to make it sustainable over a longer time horizon.

I won’t get into how I feel about the conservative notion that it’s the government’s job to encourage people to live the standard American lifestyle – suburbs, cars and kids – or, indeed, any lifestyle* beyond to say that I’m not exactly a fan and that he neglects that lower population is a saner alternative to lifestyle adjustments alone for ecological issues. I’ll just address the specieism his post espouses and the oversimplification of what exactly our planet is and does.

If you take a raccoon from the woods, take it into your home and then drown it, you will rightly face animal cruelty charges (among others)**. If you purchase property that is habitat to a hundred raccoons and flood it to provide a reservoir, somehow the mass cruelty flies under the radar. This of course makes no sense. If cruelty to one animal is indefensible, then cruelty to many is more so.

Biodiversity itself may only be of instrumental value. Just like there isn’t much of a difference morally between a mass murder of 1000 individuals and genocide consisting of 1000 individuals, there isn’t that much of a reason to get worked up about minor biodiversity loss itself so long as it is eventually recovered and there remains enough in the present time. However, habitat destruction and the reduction of numbers means that individual sentient organisms are starving to death or otherwise dying in a bad way or living a more impoverished existence. For this reason, any environmentalism that doesn’t make the welfare/rights of all beings, not just humans, central isn’t worth discussing. Matt Yglesias seems to be suggesting we all need to do our part to use less resources to make room for more people. This fails because as we can see it disregards the welfare of wildlife and it also fails because it takes a total view of happiness. Two people living okay existences aren’t really better than one person living a fabulous existence. In a true eco-utopia, everyone will have plenty of unharmed wilderness to explore and achieve oneness.

Another minor point is his assertion that the planet is just “a spherical chunk of rocks.” Clearly, when people say planet, they are not referring to its geology, though the bulk of the mass is, indeed, lifeless silica and minerals. They are referring, of course, to the ecosphere, which supports us and all the other life on the planet. It is perhaps of only instrumental value but very great value indeed. If we fix up Señor Yglesias’ comments accordingly, we still don’t see a powerful argument to reduce humanity to the stone age nor to view children as little packets of evil (however annoying they may be), but you also certainly don’t come to the conclusion that child rearing, something people gladly voluntarily do anyway, needs to be subsidized so as to encourage it anymore than our biology and existing social pressures already do.

* I don’t want zen fascists telling me to live in an apartment, ride the bus and not have kids either.
** Actually, this depends on the jurisdiction. If you at least feed the raccoon first, it will then be your [illegal] pet that you are being cruel to. If you at least agree that someone ought to get in trouble for kidnapping, then drowning a raccoon, then you should agree with my logic, even if the law isn’t quite like I make it sound.

Taxpayers are Assholes

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Watching people argue about how much teachers make makes me think that we are asking the wrong questions, and getting garbage answers. Below the fold is a vid from reason.tv showing one of their journalists heckling attendees of the “Save our Schools” rally in DC. Some of their responses were hilariously inane, like the girl who suggested that there’s no amount that’s too high to spend on schools. However, most of the people they interviewed seemed pretty sharp, including Matt Damon, who had a rather eloquent reply. One of the words he used to describe the idea that we need to eliminate tenure to give teachers incentive to do a good job was paternalistic. Now, he of course is arguing with people who ostensibly despise paternalism.

Indeed, the main argument made by the reasonroids’ side of the debate isn’t that we need to set salaries or incentives for teachers differently. If we really are simply thinking in terms of incentive or the “MBA mentality,” we’d rightly conclude that Damon, however smart he is, is wrong to downplay the importance of salary and job security and raise salaries in order to attract more and better teachers. The argument is, or should be, that it is highly paternalistic to put teachers in a position that their job security, perks and even wages are at the mercy of taxpayers. The problem is taxpayers are stingy assholes.

People on reason.tv’s side of the debate trap themselves into a corner arguing for less cushy jobs for teachers when the free market very well could offer better working conditions for all we know. The fat seems not to be in teachers’ salaries and perks, but in supporting the various parasites that feed off the system*. If giving teachers rock star salaries brings more students to your school, then teachers will have rock star salaries. So let’s free teachers from the tyranny of the taxpayer**.

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What Good is “No Gas Day” Supposed to do?

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It would be so entertaining to see well-meaning people engage in some sort of symbolic act that does nothing material other than “sending a message” were the joke not so tired. Seriously. What the hell good is going to the gas station on Wednesday or Friday instead going to do? (incidentally, I won’t run out of gas until this weekend and even that’s only because I’m going way out to the desert) It is exactly like meatless Mondays. How about meatless every day of the week except for Mondays? How about no gas week instead of no gas day? If there is any value to be had in these symbolic demonstrations (and that’s a pretty big if), it is this – it could be a chance to genuinely try out a habit or lifestyle or to think about something one generally avoids thinking about. Maybe.

What most bothers me about the whole concept isn’t the empty symbolism; I’m used to that and expect such from facebookistan. It is that it is yet another example of this cognitive dissonance I too often see in our movement – conflating the very different concerns of the health of the planet on one hand with very separate egalitarian goals, however laudable, on the other. The protest is about gas prices. If the prices are high, great. Maybe alternatives will finally be viable in the market. Don’t get me wrong; there is reason for environmentalists to protest gas prices – for being too low. It’s time to end the gas subsidies, end our oil diplomacy (and “diplomacy”) and end the socialization of costs where otherwise Americans’ stinginess (a force that knows no parallel) might otherwise prevent unwise use of scarce resources.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=158856697501684

Soil Pill

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My wife tells me I’m 天の邪鬼, meaning I go out of my way to be strange or not conform. Perhaps from a Japanese perspective I am. Maybe she’s right. All I know is I’ve resisted every temptation to blog about the spill. What can be said about it that hasn’t been said? Well, I have come to realize that it’s time to conform and give my two cents, though it may take wading through everyone and their dog’s opinion to find the gem that is mine. The real injustice I’m seeing, the reason I must write, is that, by the very nature of environmental catastrophes and our system, it’s impossible for all those affected to be duly compromised for damages done to them as well as for damages done to non-humans (turtles, manatees) to be duly punished, but I’ll defer the issue about critters for now.

Am I on crazy pills? Everyone I know misses that he's obviously a sea sponge made out to look like a household sponge. It's called artistic license!

Many people say that the best salve for environmental issues is strict enforcement of property rights with activists legally assisting those affected by pollution, etc. It’s worth a try as state environmentalism causes people who otherwise would want to do their part to protect the planet to instead resent the whole movement and feel as if it were forced upon them*. If our system was just, it should be possible for everyone along the gulf coast (and not just in America, but even in other islands sufficiently close to be affected) to do a class-action lawsuit against BP and actually get compensated for the damages. If BP truly believed this was possible, they would have made sure no one cut any corners in meeting safety regulations or, in the absence of safety regulations, would probably have paid to develop their own. Experience tells us that instead of this happening, the rabid pragmatists in our legal system won’t allow for a company that’s an important part of the economy to be utterly destroyed by mere tort. Exxon managed to delay and delay having to pay and managed to get only a slap on the wrist in the end, despite decimating an entire community and doing untold damages to wildlife. Even the ship is alive and well, living on as the the Dong Fang Ocean. This, however isn’t the bigger problem since it’s “simply” a matter of not having a state that claims to act in the interests of the people, but instead acts in the interests of the bureaucrats’ friends. No, the bigger problem is that cases like this amount to such a tiny fraction of the depreciation of natural resources. Wetlands, for example, that make up the invisible bedrock to our economy by performing services we’d pay as much as necessary to get if it wasn’t free, are being nickel and dimed to oblivion by numerous polluters and it’s affects are divided equally by everyone in the vicinity.

You may own a piece of property and essentially do with it as you wish, but on what grounds can you be said to own the air above it or the water below it? These things are passing through and as you use and abuse these things, you automatically damage everyone else’s property. Everyone’s part of the burden is sufficiently small that it’s not worth it for them to seek damages. If that alone were the problem, I think we would have a problem that everyone can live with. Of course the market is going to have negative externalities and if it’s sufficiently minor, there’s no need to bother addressing it. However, not just what I do on my property to the air, but what every single manufacturer contributes to the air adds up to something that harms peoples’ health and destroys the beauty of un”improved” land. Though I said I’ll defer the issue, let’s not forget what we do to creatures who no doubt can suffer, but lack the ability to legally defend themselves. To such situations, I propose an alternative.

Earlier, I blogged about my idea of EcoTax, which turns out to be very similar to Henry George’s idea, though with important differences. I’ll post later with an updated version of my idea, but to summarize, I propose as a practical alternative to numerous mini-torts the government** having an alternate plan for companies (or individuals – a company is just a bunch of individuals) that must pollute as part of their operations. For such companies, they can opt to, instead of being subject to numerous torts, which they will then be forced to actually pay up on, they can simply pay in proportion to how much they pollute, and the funds shared with everyone. This will make it cost to pollute and it will make products that carry a heavier eco-burden to reflect more accurately their ecological costs. The market, which is to say, the creativity of everyone working together, will then work towards solving ecological problems in a bottom-up way, instead of us hoping that the commands from a distant bureaucracy, funded and controlled by elites is the right one, as it would be the one we’ll all be stuck with. Furthermore, it will let people have their freedom to live as they choose rather than a specific brand of green living forced on them.

* There are other problems with state environmentalism too, like the fact that the government bureaucrats and their private supporters don’t have the spotted owl’s best interests at heart.

** The government or whatever legal order(s) there may be. My basic idea is perfectly compatible with a libertarian society. It doesn’t need an army to prop it up!

Livable Hamlets

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Lately, I’m scouring statistics to find places to move to and really just feed my curiosity. Going through city-data’s top 101 lists and was curious which places have the most people walking to work (once I saw the list existed). Naturally, a great many of them are military bases, but I also see that most of them tend to be small towns, not the dense metropolises that make up the wet dreams of the new urbanists.

http://www.city-data.com/top2/h39.html

On International Pressure on Japan’s Child Pornography Laws and Thought Crime

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http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201005250419.html

Here’s a post I expect to be quartered or crucified for writing. So be it.

Japan has always had more lax child pornography laws than much of the Western world. Mere possession is not a crime; only creation is. Also, unlike America, but like some Western countries (including Australia, I believe), virtual child pornography is perfectly legal. Here we have a case where two very important goals, the safety of children and the freedoms of expression, come into direct conflict. The problem, however, is since it’s just viewed as the right of some scoundrels, I fear that Japan will follow the unfortunate model of the West and give no weight to the latter. In the wise words of H.L. Menken:

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

We’ll, if we value liberty, here is a class of scoundrels we must defend – pedophiles. No, there’s no need to defend monsters who prey on children; to call them pedophiles is to trivialize what they are. No, we need to defend people who, due to whatever developmental or other abnormality, are attracted to prepubescence and only want visual materials to go along with their abnormal fantasies. For that matter, also normal males who are attracted to 16-year olds and want visuals to go with their perfectly normal fantasies*.

I don’t know the details yet because the diet hasn’t come to an agreement yet, but I hope that they don’t make virtual child pornography illegal. This is important. We cannot allow “don’t even think about it” laws to exist and crush them where they already do. As Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” I would also say being human means you can have a thought and not act on it. People believe it is okay to make exceptions to fundamental freedoms if it is only creeps who misuse it, but they are making two big, fatal mistakes.

Firstly, there is the belief that the only consequences of a law are from the enacting of the law itself. In fact, a law begets other, similar laws – precedence – and once nations are allowed to make thoughts crimes (like religions do), it is a slippery slope to tyranny. You can’t neatly divide “bad” from “good”. If you think it’s possible to only stop “bad” uses of free speech, etc., then I challenge you to find a weed killer that doesn’t kill pretty weeds. Note the quagmire Europeans have gotten themselves into by thinking its appropriate to regulate speech just because it’s anti-Semitic. Now the Islamofascists have them morally by the balls when they demand censorship against speech they find offensive (e.g., depictions of Mohamed). We must attack this mentality and expose it for what it is.

Secondly, there is the mistaken belief that curtailing freedoms does make us safer in the long run. I won’t trivially reject this, but humor the notion for a second. It may well be in some cases that we are less safe because of freedoms people have. If people can move freely without harassment, ostensibly it will be more difficult to track down and preemptively arrest terrorist. A super-intelligent, benevolent robot controlling the money supply could make us safer financially than if people are free to use their moneys as they please (in extremely hypothetical theory). And yes, it certainly could be that some children are being harmed who wouldn’t be if we could just break into mere users’ computers to track down the peddlers. Think about it for a second. Isn’t this the line of reasoning that oppressive regimes use? People sponsor their own captors because they genuinely believe they are being protected from foreign barbarians. It is naïve to think that the ability to criminalize behavior seen as a some sort of precursor to real crime is going to be used for good ends most of the time. Once we’re allowed to arrest people because “he was shady” or “he was thinking about it” we will have successfully retreated hundreds of years worth of advancement in civil liberties.

For the specific case of child pornography, I still wonder what the real reason is we absolutely have to criminalize possession? I think this is cultural imperialism on our part towards Japan. It’s absolutely not necessary. The law could provide for law enforcement to be able to search suspected customers’ computers for the express purpose of finding the peddlers. As it so turns out, criminalizing kiddie porn doesn’t help gather evidence. It actually makes users (and non-users who have a healthy distrust of both the internet and the authorities) paranoid and practice continual deletion of history, cache, etc. The last thing you want to do is create an incentive to destroy evidence! Let people be relaxed, but if they’re suspected of possessing real child porn**, their punishment should be having to endure a search through their personal property as the real criminal is hunted down.

One last note, a diversion into counter-economics – here is also an opportunity for a peaceful black market. Boycott our corporatist economy by making your own 3d child porn and selling it. Please pedophiles without hurting a single hair on a child. Not into kiddie porn? Me neither. Draw a picture of a hot naked chick (or dude, whatever you’re into) and say she’s 17.

* That it’s normal doesn’t make it morally okay to act on them. In our complex, modern world, people remain emotionally children even after physically adult for a while and it’s always wrong to prey on a child even if the person is only a child in the emotional sense. For that matter, it doesn’t make something wrong just because it’s “unnatural” but I digress.

** Don’t get me wrong about people who enjoy kiddie porn. If you enjoy something that someone had to get hurt to make, you’re still a monster. If you are attracted to children, the right thing to do is of course boycott any real kiddie porn and only download virtual (e.g., computer-generated or cartoons). However, even if you are such a monster, I don’t think you should be put in the same category as someone who actually rapes children or creates this grotesque pornography.

My Voting Guide

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As with all my election guides, this assumes you’ve at least read the summary. I don’t want to summarize it for you but just provide a short summary of my arguments.

Prop 13 – Yes. This is one of those “closing the donut hole” laws. They exempt certain types of earthquake repairs from triggering property value reassessments but not others and this law fixes it so that all earthquake repairs are exempt.

Prop 14 – No. It’s great that you can vote for any party’s primary. It’s great that candidates are not required to list their party, but this prop has a glaring flaw – only two candidates can be selected between and there will be no write-ins. I double-checked to see if this wasn’t just hype by the opposition, but the text clearly states that it eliminates the write-ins. What we need is clean elections and a better system, like approval/disapproval or instant runoff. Why do no propositions to this effect end up on our ballots?

Prop 15 – Yes… This proposition isn’t perfect either. It should have only lifted the ban on public funds provided the funds come from the pool generated from lobbyist fees. Given that omission, I can only offer a timid support of this law on the theory that we’re never going to get true election reform on the ballot and this is the closest we’ll get anytime soon. Corporations and unions run politics and it shouldn’t be so. Ideally, public funds shouldn’t be part of it either.

Prop 16 – No. Whether or not you think local governments should get into the electricity business, voters should have a say. That’s why I oppose this law. I don’t think a 2/3rds vote is reasonable. Also keep in mind that “private” utility providers benefit just as much as state-run from regional monopolies (government granted and “natural”) so I regard the investor owned concerns to be a type of government-sponsored utility that voters have less control over. As the technology improves, we can evolve away from natural energy monopolies and have real competition – it happened with telephone service. Also note that wind, solar is exempted only if it’s 100% of the source. That’s unrealistic and stupid. We need to tax environmental degradation and, beyond that, allow real free-market competition on energy. We don’t need this corporatist neo-mercantilist prop. Pass!

Prop 17 – Yes. There are flaws, however. I read the text of the law (what will be added/deleted) and I definitely support insurance companies being able to take into account things that are going to cost them money so there’s incentive to drop prices. There should be an incentive to continuously have auto insurance as long as you have a car (read on for why I italicized this part of the sentence). For me, I wasn’t able to put me and my wife on the same insurance because it would be more expensive. Yes, that’s right. The lady at AAA couldn’t figure out why their estimate was higher than I pay, but it’s obvious – State Farm is giving me a long-time customer discount.

For this law to be more attractive, it should require a grace period of at least 30 days (in practice, auto insurance companies usually do anyway, but just to make sure) before insurance is to be considered lapsed and allow for lapses if it’s where the person simply didn’t own a car. Choosing to break the law and drive uninsured is irresponsible, but people who chose to not have cars for a while (or have no choice but to do so) shouldn’t be additionally penalized.

What to do About North Korea?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/world/asia/25korea.html
Friends – I’m racking my brain. What to do about N. Korea? Every day, its citizens are subject to a bleak existence in the world’s only fringe cult to also be a state. Any attack on the country and they crack down on their own people harder and retaliate, destroying the increasingly peaceful and prosperous S. Korea (as they revert to tyrrany as all nations do in response to threats). Any sanctions don’t affect the ruling classes but just make the unfortunate rank and file starve. I generally oppose sanctions anyway, though engaging them has only increased the flow of money to their out of control military.

The possibility of revolt seems slim to me. The right psychological soup was engineered out. It’s not sufficient to be poor, unfortunate. You must also feel a tad emboldened and see possibility. It’s when there is great wealth alongside great poverty that revolts can happen. Outside of the military and the party leadership, there simply isn’t wealth in North Korea. What there is isn’t the capitalistic kind where, when you see it, you get the crazy idea that you might be able to do it, too. Where people are powerful and motivated to find a better world, they don’t stay and oppose a police state that can destroy their whole family without blinking an eye, they leave to South Korea. Could the well-meaning (or half-well-meaning, the milder cult they belong to promising celestial reward) rescuers be defusing any hope of uprising?

Part of the problem is their dear leader isn’t the one in charge, or at least, he’s just one axis in the balance of power. Unless we talk directly to their military, we can be guaranteed that no concession is really meant. They know that we prosperous nations have so much to lose. I’m not afraid of Iran, Pakistan or China. These nations would suffer from a war with us and have bright futures ahead of them, even if the path there is rocky. I wouldn’t support a war with any of these nations either. No regime change. Something must be done, however, about North Korea. The countries don’t even have to unite but some basic civil liberties must be held sacrosanct. How to defuse this bomb? How to minimize misery and wrongful death in a peninsula where one leader thinks he is God and the other thinks he’s ordained by God?

Thoughts on “Avatar”

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Today, I had to see what all the buzz was about. Me and my wife saw Avatar in 3D before she had to go to work. The  3D was a nice effect, but after over two hours of that, I had pretty bad motion sickness getting out of the theater. I think I’d enjoy the movie more minus the nausea.

spoiler alert ** do not continue if you don’t want the plot revealed (this is really intended reading for people who watched the movie anyway, not a proper review; I don’t do movie reviews)

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My Proposal – EcoTax

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There is a deep, serious flaw in our tax system – it is too damn complicated. Which is to say, administrative costs dig in to what revenue it brings in and it is spurious (which means it is unfair). Whatever incentives and breaks might be won for the sake of the lower classes, there is an inherent bias in favor of those who can afford good accountants. Also, the process of having a governmental cash-ectomy would at least be less painful if it was quick.

There are a number of tax reforms, mostly proposed by the Right, to make things “fair” (same law applies to everyone) and simple. Some of them are quite ingenious and appealing, but I’ll explain why they all suck and mine is better (even though I’m not an economist… I hope a real economist gets a hold of the idea and fills in the cracks). I for one am not a right-winger (quite the opposite) but rather I think like a programmer. Where I see spaghetti code, I want to untie it and I see more spaghetti in our legal system than in an Italian restaurant (zing!)

FairTax

This taxes products at the end of the value chain – when purchased by the end-user. This replaces all the complicated mess of even paying taxes with a tax on final goods sold. The beautiful part is ordinary people don’t have to fill out paperwork. If you own a business, you simply have to pay the sales tax on what you sell. Genius. One problem with this is that, naturally, as you get richer, the proportion of your money you use to buy things decreases (the likes of MC Hammer and Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk notwithstanding). In this way, it disproportionately taxes the poor. FairTax partially gets around this through (p)rebates to families based on income.

On the Wikipedia article, you’ll see this picture. Yeah, that’s what I mean by untying spaghetti code. All those books are our current tax code, and that man is holding FairTax. Awesome.

Negative Income Tax

I believe this was Milton Friedman’s brainchild or at least he’s commonly associated with it. I think it sort of fell out of fashion among Libertarians in to FairTax, but it is also a good system. You pay the government a fixed percentage of your income, minus a fixed amount, the percentage and amount being the same for _everyone_. If it happens to be a negative amount (which happens if your income divided by the percentage is less than the fixed amount), the government pays you. Your tax is a linear equation. If you took math in middle school you are halfway to being a CPA. Awesome.

The system is, however, likely to be a lightning rod for fraud. Tax evasion now is simply a loss of income for the government (and therefor taxpayers), but if you could convince the government you make nothing, you automatically receive welfare. This also still has the disadvantage of making every citizen go through the trouble of filling their taxes. Okay, next.

EcoTax

Now to my proposal, EcoTax. Turn FairTax on its head. Instead of only taxing things at the end-product level, we only tax raw materials as they are taken out of the Earth. We’re not talking about any tariffs right now, since that’s complicated and really another subject. As far as product created within America is concerned, the tax is at the beginning and it’s up to these primary producers (homotrophes, to use an analogy to ecology) to increase their prices to offset their costs. In this way, the costs of things to a greater degree reflect their true ecological costs. This would naturally mean no subsidies for farmers (rather, they would be taxed for the water and soil they use).

The way EcoTax would work is this: the EPA would be given a new job assess the degrees to which various natural resources are renewable, the degree to which various activities are harmful to human health, etc. They will make no fiscal decision, but rather calculate a schedule of ratios. The income needed by the government to meet its operations and economic predictions will be factored in to create a multiplier. The taxes for the different activities will simply be the ratio in question times the grand multiplier. It’s so simple. The only thing an accountant needs is the latest copy of this (which the government should supply as a free PDF, too). Perhaps the government could supply free software with source code for this purpose to make it even simpler. The important thing is for the ratios to not be politically determined or for other concerns to be taken into account (that’s the job of politicians setting fiscal policy on how to use revenue and what to set the multiplier to).

Note this is related to the idea of Ecotax (or Pigovian taxes in general), but it’s different (you can tell because I capitalize the T). The best way to summarize the difference is this: I propose the only tax being Ecotaxes and the rationale is slightly different. The capital in the free market is derived from two main sources – labor and natural resources. I say you own that which your labor created, but that which is derived from our common natural heritage or which clearly has a negative externality you don’t truly own. Certainly, no one owns the atmosphere, though a section of it will be on your land at any given time and a part of the water table, which you also don’t own, may happen to be under your property. I don’t want to get into the specifics of well rights, etc, but just to point out the obvious fact that, as aging hippie douche would say “you can’t own the ocean, man!”

EcoTax isn’t meant to be the panacea of environmental protection. Rather, we’re removing the artificial economic incentive to destroy that which you do not own. Protecting our species’ viability, wild places, natural habitats and so on cannot rely entirely on the government. Indeed, to the degree people value these things (which they should), they shall donate to private charities that buy up land, such as the Nature Conservancy. The government must not force people to be eco-conscious (it’s not the government’s job to make people do the right thing all the time), but to protect that which is everyone’s property from the few.

The biggest drawback I can see with this is there may be a drop in revenue unless the multiplier is set high enough to put some good companies out of business. There should be a transition period where the old scheme is slowly replaced with the new to give people a chance to switch to other industries. There could temporarily be harsher tariffs against countries that use too much farming subsidies to give our companies enough time to compensate, then the tariffs must be dropped again. This may also make things hard on small farmers, but that could be remedied by in the short term paying for Dutch farmers to teach Americans better efficient farming techniques. A purist Libertarian may scoff at the idea that government intervention is needed to counter the ill effects of government intervention, but it is a fact. “Government intervention” refers to too broad a category for that scoff to be taken at face value.

A [Mostly] Conservative Argument for Gay Marriage

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You’ve all heard the social libertarian/liberal arguments for gay marriage. Tolerance, equal rights, blah blah. They are important and I believe in them, but they are the reasons I support gay marriage being legal. There are many things I believe shall be legal but do not approve of. It is clearly wrong to cheat on one’s spouse, yet few would be so paternalistic (un-libertarian) as to say that such a thing is the government’s business, for example. However, not only do I support gay marriage being legal on basic social libertarian grounds, I approve of gay marriage and these reasons why are what I call my conservative argument for gay marriage. Of course, no one needs my approval to get married, but that’s getting back to the standard liberal arguments you’ve already heard. Continue reading →

Evolution… Politically Correct?

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I was in the book store last weekend (one of my favorite places, of course!) and looking through the biology section to see if there’s something else I should read for the fun of it. As usual, the Biology section contains things that should be filed under “politics” or “fiction” – the likes of Dembsky and Behe – that have to be sifted through to find actual science books (I’m tempted by Gould’s outrageously thick “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory”… maybe after I finish another bio class or so…) One of these mis-filed political tomes was The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism... Now, I’ve seen that cover a million times and never thought much of it, other than what any rational thinking person would think, “yeah, withhold the politically,” but there’s another outrageous claim embedded in the title that occurred to me – the notion that natural selection is politically correct or in any way liberal.

Creationists and their ilk make this claim that Darwinism is a liberal conspiracy almost in the same breath as saying that it justified social Darwinism, a nebulous term except in that it refers exclusively to Right-wing ideologies. I have to ask – which is it? Liberals are all kinds of things but we’re certainly not social Darwinists. The answer is it is not a liberal conspiracy, but there were individuals who committed the naturalistic fallacy (deriving an ought from an is) and advocated modeling society after evolution – a mindless process that produces mostly extinctions and a lot of misery and pain. Take a breath. A bunch of animals throughout the world just met their bloody end to the claw. The theory of natural selection tells us how things got the way they are, but it’s certainly no model on how things ought to be – it’s the reason why Darwin’s rottweiler, Dawkins, says, “I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave.” Indeed. Remember – a fact can never be good or evil, but almost always useful. At worst, a fact is of little use. That is the underlying philosophy behind science. It would only ever break down if we were living in a Lovecraftian universe where the truth drives men mad.

“Fair enough,” you might say, “well-meaning liberals are planting the seeds of social Darwinism because they’re a bunch of Godless atheists and their atheism is the reason they want to teach Darwinism.” Yes, the headwaters of this notion that there is something liberal about Darwinism must be the association with atheism. I don’t know if anyone told these guys, but most liberals (in America, anyway) are not atheists. In being an atheist, I am unusual among liberals (though that’s the least of my divergence with mainstream liberals). Don’t confuse “secular” with “atheist”. Secular is a rather broad term that includes non-religious people as well as religious people who don’t believe society should be centered around religion. Liberals don’t want to hurt people’s feelings; this is the essence of what “politically correct” means. They don’t want to tell people that their own culture’s beliefs are wrong. This leads me to my last point here – the biggest threat to students getting a good education in “sensitive” subjects, beyond the barriers that might otherwise exist for any subject, isn’t creationists, but overly careful, well-meaning, politically-correct liberal teachers.

VOA News – Japan Enters New Era in Crushing Election Rebuke of Ruling Party

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VOA News – Japan Enters New Era in Crushing Election Rebuke of Ruling Party

Unprecedented. Will this be the end to denial of World War II atrocities (which, admittedly, is rampant in the West, where we insist we did nothing because we were the “good guys”), ama kurari, corporatism (a mix of evil mercantilism with just enough capitalism to shut up all the people who should really oppose it), environmental destruction and unequal rights? Japanese people have a love for nature that is beyond what we typically see in the West, yet the admittedly strong environmentalist movement hasn’t had enough affect on the actual political institutions.

I would love to see an opinion poll on this, but I have yet to see any, but when I went around interviewing young Japanese people, they all seemed to be for gay marriage and even ridiculed us Americans for letting religion into politics (which they don’t do, even though the Sokka Gakkai has its own party). Of course, they were stumped when I asked them why they don’t have gay marriage.. well, with an openly post-op transsexual congresswoman who has been reelected, the progressive party (relatively speaking, which unfortunately doesn’t say much… at least one of the parties under their fold are progressive) in power, and a long tradition of not being morally opposed to homosexuality, I think Japan may do what many of my Japanese friends and my wife insist are impossible any time soon and legalize gay marriage.

There is also the issue of Ama Kudari (天下り), where corrupt politicians funnel public funds into some pointless project that makes some company a lot of money, then retire from politics to have a “job” at that company where they do nothing and get the kickback for their “service” to the company. Is not this corporatism at it’s ugliest, a perfect example of the “parasitic” class? Well, this is one practice the Democratic Party promised to put an end to. Here’s hoping this puts an end to Japan’s stagnation. No political party or alliance should hold on power as long as the LDP has, its results being obvious.