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Spring

A reader reminded me that spring has just begun, and that in turn reminded me of a peculiar poem I’ve always liked, by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), whose poetry is wildly erratic. This is Edna St. Vincent Millay at her best:

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

(Link)

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Shakespeare Revisited

Ophelia: Woe is me
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see.

— Hamlet Act III, scene i

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
— Hamlet Act III, scene ii

William Shakespeare was born in 1564, in Stratford — a tiny village with at that time a population of approximately 1,500. In the summer of 1579, when Shakespeare was 15-years-old, a young woman named Katherine Hamlet fell into the river Avon and drowned, an incident the young William Shakespeare would surely have known about.

Is Shakespeare all that?

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Nuclear Over-Reaction

[UPDATE: The sudden interest in this subject and the subsequent glut of traffic that that interest has generated has also, not quite coincidentally, generated a number of requests for my “nuclear credentials” and “my scientific qualifications.” As a bartender, I am of course eminently qualified to discuss these and similar issues, and I refer all curious readers to the following: Interview]

In the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, one article I wrote just over a year ago entitled “Nuclear Waste Does Not Exist” has generated, in the past two days, an astonishing amount traffic. It is no secret that I’m a proponent of nuclear energy — for reasons I outline in a different article called Wind Or Nuclear? — and so I’ve watched with great interest and dismay as misinformation about nuclear energy spreads faster than the Code Red virus infected the world’s computers.

Fortunately, people like Dr. Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT, among others, are working very hard to dispel the mass hysteria building around the Japanese nuclear facilities.

Dr. Oehmen is a PhD scientist whose father has extensive experience in Germany’s nuclear industry. Dr. Oehmen writes:

I am writing this text (Mar 12, [2011]) to give you some peace of mind regarding some of the troubles in Japan, that is the safety of Japan’s nuclear reactors. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.

There was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity.

By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.

I have been reading every news release on the incident since the earthquake. There has not been one single (!) report that was accurate and free of errors (and part of that problem is also a weakness in the Japanese crisis communication). By “not free of errors” I do not refer to tendentious anti-nuclear journalism – that is quite normal these days. By “not free of errors” I mean blatant errors regarding physics and natural law, as well as gross misinterpretation of facts, due to an obvious lack of fundamental and basic understanding of the way nuclear reactors are build and operated. I have read a 3 page report on CNN where every single paragraph contained an error.

I urge you to read Dr. Oehmen’s full article here.

Also edifying is William Tucker’s excellent explanation, which reads, in part:

Even while thousands of people are reported dead or missing, whole neighborhoods lie in ruins, and gas and oil fires rage out of control, press coverage of the Japanese earthquake has quickly settled on the troubles at two nuclear reactors as the center of the catastrophe.

Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), a longtime opponent of nuclear power, has warned of “another Chernobyl” and predicted “the same thing could happen here.” In response, he has called for an immediate suspension of licensing procedures for the Westinghouse AP1000, a “Generation III” reactor that has been laboring through design review at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for seven years.

Before we respond with such panic, though, it would be useful to review exactly what is happening in Japan and what we have to fear from it.

The core of a nuclear reactor operates at about 550 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the temperature of a coal furnace and only slightly hotter than a kitchen oven. If anything unusual occurs, the control rods immediately drop, shutting off the nuclear reaction. You can’t have a “runaway reactor,” nor can a reactor explode like a nuclear bomb. A commercial reactor is to a bomb what Vaseline is to napalm. Although both are made from petroleum jelly, only one of them has potentially explosive material.

Once the reactor has shut down, there remains “decay heat” from traces of other radioactive isotopes. This can take more than a week to cool down, and the rods must be continually bathed in cooling waters to keep them from overheating.

On all Generation II reactors—the ones currently in operation—the cooling water is circulated by electric pumps. The new Generation III reactors such as the AP1000 have a simplified “passive” cooling system where the water circulates by natural convection with no pumping required.

If the pumps are knocked out in a Generation II reactor—as they were at Fukushima Daiichi by the tsunami—the water in the cooling system can overheat and evaporate. The resulting steam increases internal pressure that must be vented. There was a small release of radioactive steam at Three Mile Island in 1979, and there have also been a few releases at Fukushima Daiichi. These produce radiation at about the level of one dental X-ray in the immediate vicinity and quickly dissipate.

If the coolant continues to evaporate, the water level can fall below the level of the fuel rods, exposing them. This will cause a meltdown, meaning the fuel rods melt to the bottom of the steel pressure vessel.

Early speculation was that in a case like this the fuel might continue melting right through the steel and perhaps even through the concrete containment structure—the so-called China syndrome, where the fuel would melt all the way to China. But Three Mile Island proved this doesn’t happen. The melted fuel rods simply aren’t hot enough to melt steel or concrete.

The decay heat must still be absorbed, however, and as a last-ditch effort the emergency core cooling system can be activated to flood the entire containment structure with water. This will do considerable damage to the reactor but will prevent any further steam releases. The Japanese have now reportedly done this using seawater in at least two of the troubled reactors. These reactors will never be restarted.

None of this amounts to “another Chernobyl.” The Chernobyl reactor had two crucial design flaws. First, it used graphite (carbon) instead of water to “moderate” the neutrons, which makes possible the nuclear reaction. The graphite caught fire in April 1986 and burned for four days. Water does not catch fire.

Second, Chernobyl had no containment structure. When the graphite caught fire, it spouted a plume of radioactive smoke that spread across the globe. A containment structure would have both smothered the fire and contained the radioactivity.

If a meltdown does occur in Japan, it will be a disaster for the Tokyo Electric Power Company but not for the general public. Whatever steam releases occur will have a negligible impact.

(Link)

William Tucker, incidentally, is the fellow I quoted at length in my initial article, along with Dr. Pierre Guelfe, chief engineer of France’s main nuclear facility.

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Mayhem In Madison; Death Threats Against Republicans: “Hope you have a good time in hell”

Pandemonium erupts in Madison, Wisconsin, as pro-union protesters converge upon the Capitol to protest the passage of Governor Scott Walker’s so-called union-bargaining bill.

The following is an unedited email, presumably written by a union thug — judging, at least, by the lingo — and published on the website of 620 WTMJ radio, Madison. The letter is relatively short, and if you can stomach it, read every word, typos and all:

Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.

WE want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and the people that support the dictator have to die. We have tried many other ways of dealing with your corruption but you have taken things too far and we will not stand for it any longer. So, this is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, we decided that we wouldn’t leave it there. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the
message to you since you are so “high” on Koch and have decided that you are now going to single handedly make this a dictatorship instead of a demorcratic process. So we have also built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t
tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We Will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Rep. Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. We feel that it’s worth our lives to do this, because we would be saving the lives
of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. YOU WILL DIE!!!!

Reply Reply to all Forward

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Ex High School Basketball Star

You were a pure shooter, a long shot. You were a star.

Another nobody kid raised in a half-broken home in middle America: a drunk father who worked twenty-five years for Clayton County, and a mother who loved you but was always too passive, it seemed, to truly care.

Yet you were inherently happy. Your smile burst across your face like a star shell. Happiness was in your bones, your blood, your ectomorphic body, not tall, but a natural-born athlete from head to toe.

The college coaches all went crazy for you, but your test scores were poor. You never quite made the grade. You served instead as a gunnery sergeant in the war: a gunner, a dead-eye.

But when you shook the high school rafters that late-autumn night, scoring seventy-eight points, shooting twenty-for-twenty in the second half, both sides of the bleachers erupting for your grace, the purity of your touch, your form, the achieve of, the mastery of the thing – you were beautiful.

When you won the 100 yard dash and the 220 against all the big-city boys, edging out by fractions two future Olympians – you were beautiful.

When, at thirty-two, you lied about your age and won a tryout with the Denver Nuggets and made it down to the final cut, still going strong, still a gunner, a sniper from the three-point line, then busted your ankle in a fall – you were beautiful.

And are you beautiful still in your oil-stained clothes, turning wrenches at the garage, your thin black fingers spiderlike among the parts? Do you still have that delicate touch?

Are you beautiful with your scuffed-up knuckles and your immutable smile, your snaggly teeth and skeletal face?

Are you beautiful in those filthy hightop sneakers and that jumpsuit mechanic uniform, your chocolate slab of forelock hanging lank across your cheek?

Are you beautiful in your small hometown, moving into middle-age, still so thin, so graceful-looking, filling in part-time at the cowboy hat store? Is your uncanny coordination fading with disuse? Your infallible sense of direction and time?

I saw you once, not long ago, drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup on the fire escape of your tenement building. It was the middle of August. You wore a white tanktop and pleated gray slacks. You looked very elegant. The day was dying. The trees beyond stood iron-black against the sky. The staircases along the outer buildings were duplicated in isometric shadows across the orange brick walls. I was visiting a woman who lived across the street, and I could see you from her kitchen window. You sat on those metal steps for a long time. The sky flared and then emptied out into a draining reef – a reef of green. Darkness came. The first stars appeared. Still, you sat. You sat and sat, and after a while, the stars began to shoot and fall.

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Individual Rights

Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.

Rights state explicitly the fact that no other person or institution has rightful jurisdiction over the person or property of another.

Justice — also known as equity — is nothing more or less than the legal recognition of each and every individual’s right to her own life and her own property.

The Oxford Dictionary defines the term rights as, in part, “A justifiable claim, on legal or moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain way.”

Freedom is the absence of compulsion.

The primary thing that distinguishes the free person from the unfree person is voluntary action versus action that is compelled.

Compulsory taxation, for instance, means that you are not free to do whatever you wish with your own money, because the government may at any time legally compel you to give to government any amount it specifies.

Voluntary action hinges upon the principle of individual rights:

Are we each free to live as we choose, provided we do not infringe upon the equal rights of others?

Or not?

The most fundamental political question is this: Do we rightfully own ourselves, or do others rightfully have jurisdiction over us?

To ask that question is, I believe, to answer it.

America is the only country in the history of the world founded explicitly and principally upon the concept of individual rights.

At root, there’s really only one way to infringe upon another’s rights, and that is through the instigation of force. Quoting the 19th century political thinker Auberon Herbert:

Nobody has the moral right to seek his own advantage by force. That is the one unalterable, inviolable condition of a true society. Whether we are many, or whether we are few, we must learn only to use the weapons of reason, discussion, and persuasion…. As long as men are willing to make use of force for their own ends, or to make use of fraud, which is only force in disguise, wearing a mask, and evading our consent, just as force with violence openly disregards it – so long we must use force to restrain force. That is the one and only one right employment of force … force in the defense of the plain simple rights of property, public or private, in a world, of all the rights of self-ownership – force used defensively against force used aggressively (Auberon Herbert, The Principles of Voluntaryism, 1897).

As Auberon Herbert notes, force can be direct, as in assault and rape, or indirect, as in fraud or extortion. There’s no other way to breach rights than through the (direct or indirect) instigation of force.

Laws that restrict freedom of production and trade (such as cap-and-trade laws) are an indirect use of force.

Trade tariffs are an indirect use of force.

Military conscription is a direct use of force.

Rights, I repeat, are a formal codification of human freedom. This of course includes the freedom to trade.

Rights are ethical principles, and they are political principles. As such, rights delimit human freedom in large groups.

This latter thing is emphasized because rights would not need to be discovered if you lived alone, or even if you lived in a small and insular society.

Rights derive from three things: human individuation, human society, and the power of choice which gives rise to moral agency.

Rights are discoveries, not inventions.

One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission?

Answering that question is where you’ll begin to glimpse the true nature of rights: if humans only act by permission, who gives permission to those whose permission the rest of us are acting under? And who gives permission to those above, and so on?

Answer: no one — because rights are inalienable in the literal sense: they are not granted, and they cannot be revoked or transferred.

In the final analysis, there’s only the right to your own life: all others – from liberty, to property, to the pursuit of happiness – are an extension of that one.

Those who hold that life is valuable, hold, by implication, that men ought not to be prevented from carrying on life-sustaining activities. In other words, if it is said to be ‘right’ that they should carry them on, then, by permutation, we get the assertion that they ‘have a right’ to carry them on. Clearly the conception of ‘natural rights’ originates in recognition of the truth that if life is justifiable, there must be a justification for the performance of acts essential to its preservation; and, therefore, a justification for those liberties and claims which make such acts possible (Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State, 1884).

The crux of freedom is rights.

The crux of rights is human individuation and moral agency.

A deep connection exists between the right to life and the right to property. The importance of this connection cannot be overstated, yet it is precisely this connection that the leftwing and rightwing are both equally ignorant of.

Quoting Claude Frédéric Bastiat:

Each of us has a natural right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? … Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor, and by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is property (Claude Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1848).

Property is “not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth. The right and interest which a man has in lands and chattels to the exclusion of others. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner as he pleases” (Lectric Law Library).

That is precisely why the crux of freedom and free markets is private property.

It is also why environmentalism, as all other forms of socialism, is inherently anti-freedom.

The reason that laissez faire is the proper social system is not because it “works best,” as many nominal defenders of free markets never tire of telling us. Laissez faire is proper, rather, because it is just. Laissez-faire capitalism is the only economic system that respects and protects the inalienable right to life, liberty, property, and free exchange.

One must never forget: money is property. Money is the symbol of your labor.

The root of real wealth is production.

Compulsory (as opposed to voluntary) taxation is a breach of property rights. It is also, again in the words of Bastiat, “legalized plunder.”

Individual rights have been under siege since the moment they were first brought into the light. And yet they’ve remained remarkably resilient. The reason they’ve remained resilient is that they are in a certain sense self-evident: we each, as John Locke said, “have a property in our own person.”

That is the fundamental principle behind rights, and property is an extension of person, nothing more and nothing less.

If you believe in human freedom, you perforce believe in the freedom to trade – fully. For if humans are not allowed to trade freely, humans are not truly free.

No freedom or justice can exist if rights, including property rights, do not exist.

Indeed, the very word rights has its origins in ancient Roman law and is related to the Roman word jus, as in justice. According to historian J. Stuart Jackson, jus “is wider than that of positive law laid down by authority, and denotes an order morally binding on the members of the community.” In the Roman sense of the word, “right” meant “what is just.”

Rights entitle holders to certain freedoms – specifically, the freedom to act in a certain way. Notice the phrase “freedom to act”; it is a crucial distinction because rights do not assure you of anything except the freedom to try.

What, though, fundamentally, is the stuff of rights? Of what are they made of?

To begin with, rights are not primaries: they are second-order principles that derive from something deeper. And that something is a thing which is very specific within the human condition. It is the faculty of choice.

If human behavior were automatic, as it is with animals, there would be no question of rights because any action we undertook would not be chosen. Human action would be neither moral nor immoral but amoral, and rights would therefore not exist.

The grizzly bear who mauls the innocent child is not evil. The man who mauls the innocent child is.

Thus rights are the link between ethics and politics.

Which is why Herbert Spencer and other freethinkers regarded rights as “ethical-political precepts.”

Quoting Samuel Adams:

Among the natural rights are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can…. Rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

Rights are another of these things that everyone thinks he understands, but which in fact almost nobody does.

To get some idea of how poorly understood the nature of rights is, one need only look at the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and observe the sheer number of times one would have to breach the rights (usually in the form of property expropriation – i.e.: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay”) of some individual somewhere to achieve even a fraction of that Declaration’s stated goals. The UN’s Declaration of Human Rights is a tour-de-force of postmodern, multicultural, neo-Marxist non-thought.

Leftwingers tell us we have the right to healthcare, the right to a job, the right to a smoke-free work environment, and so on.

Rightwingers, on the other hand, say we do not have the right to open our liquor stores on Sunday, we do not have the right to consensual sex with prostitutes, we do not have the right to gamble, et cetera.

Despite what you’ve been told, these views are not opposites; they are a variation on an identical theme, and their common denominator is this: Humans do not possess the inalienable right to life and property, and government bureaucrats are better suited than we ourselves to tell us how we must live. Yet the fact is, there is nothing in nature, neither human nature nor nature apart from humans, that gives government bureaucrats legitimate authority over the person or property of any other human being.

To say that we have the “right to healthcare,” or the “right to a job,” or the “right to a smoke-free work environment” is the same as saying we have the right to the life, labor, and property of another, which we do not and cannot – by virtue of what rights are.

Rights by definition preclude any claim to the person and property of another, even if that person is a doctor.

To say that humans do not have the right to open their liquor stores on Sunday if they choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to have consensual sex with prostitutes if they choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to gamble and use drugs if they choose, is the same as saying your life is not yours by right but belongs in some measure to bureaucrats, and that humans to that extent exist only by those bureaucrats’ permission — this in spite of the fact that no government and no governmental bureaucracy in the history of the world has ever proved itself more capable of running the individual’s life better than the individual herself.

Government compulsion, rightwing or left, is the antithesis of individual rights.

There is no such thing as a “collective right,” not in any variation.

Rights, by definition, can only belong to the individuals who make up any “collective.”

That is why the very term individual rights is pleonastic in the ultimate purport, albeit necessarily so: the very definition of the word presupposes individual, since it is only individuals who can properly possess rights.

Quoting George Reisman, who is echoing his friend and mentor Ludwig von Mises:

Only individuals exist; collectives consist of nothing but individuals. Only the individual thinks; only the individual acts; only the life of the individual has value and is important. All rights are rights of individuals.

As it happens, there’s an absolutely foolproof method that exists for determining if something is a right or not:

Your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

If you follow that simple principle, and if you remember that property is nothing more than an extension of person, and that money is also property, you’ll never confuse the issue of rights.


[This article appeared, in a slightly altered form, in Chapter 30 of my book].

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Unhinged Mob Of Pro-Union Peaceniks Go Beserk In Madison; Shout “Fuck-You” At Republican Senator Glenn Grothman

The mob captured in the following video calls to mind Massachusetts Congressman Michael Capuano’s recent instructions to unions: “Time to get a little bloody.”

Watch:

If you don’t have the time or the stomach to watch, here are some of the highpoints:

“Shame! Shame! Shame!”

“Fuck you! Fuck you!”

All the while clubbing that cheesy tribal drum, backing Grothman up to the side of a building, harassing him across the lawn, cornering him.

Grothman was eventually rescued by Democratic Senator Brett Hulsey.

Barack Obama, whose Organizing For America helped organize this protest, has yet to comment, despite his recent platitudinous appeals to “make all our children proud and improve the national tone.” AFL-CIO union boss Richard Trumka has been likewise silent.

It all just depends upon whose ox is being gored, I guess.



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Barack Obama Is Suddenly Concerned With Individual Rights

Barack Obama — who, in 2008, at the Philadelphia primary, shocked and sickened so many of us when he said (and I quote) “Just because you have an individual right does not mean that state or local government can’t constrain the exercise of that right” — has suddenly, it seems, developed an inexplicable regard for individual rights, stating publicly this morning:

“I don’t think it does anybody any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified or their rights are infringed upon.”

Presumably, he’s forgetting his aforementioned conviction that “state and local governments [may legitimately] constrain the exercise of rights” — an ignorant and extraordinarily dangerous conviction which statists of every stripe have unsuccessfully tried to defend since the dawn of humankind, with spectacularly devastating results, and yet for once I agree with him: it is not ever good when individual rights are infringed upon. The real question, of course, which he could never answer, is this:

Why is it then okay that my rights are infringed upon — when I am forced, in other words, under threat of fine or imprisonment, to subsidize these public employees whom you champion?

Why must I be forced by government to live for others?

Says who? And why?

No good answer has ever been given to that question because no good answer for it exists.

On a related note, Barack Obama disclosed in that same speech this morning his economic illiteracy once again, telling state governors:

“As the Recovery Act funds that saw through many states over the last two years are phasing out and it is undeniable that the Recovery Act helped every single state represented in this room manage your budgets, whether you admit it or not.”

The refutation of this is sometimes referred to as the Broken Window Fallacy, a term that comes to us from a parable coined by the great French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801 – 1850), which parable demonstrates that wealth cannot come from destruction, that money taken by force — i.e. TARP and the so-called stimulus package — necessarily siphons money which would otherwise have been spent voluntarily on other things, thereby wreaking havoc on economies in an unseen way (indeed, Bastiat himself called this principle “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”).

Here’s a two-minute explanation of the Broken Window Fallacy, by an economist and philosopher whom I admire named Dr. Tom Palmer:

And another:

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Labor Unions

The first unions in the United States were formed in the late 18th century, and they’ve always been socialist at their core, explicitly or implicitly.

The principle that most people — union people in particular — do not understand about wages is this:

Wages are determined by worker productivity. Worker productivity is determined by the availability of capital goods(tools) to the worker to help him in his production. The availability of capital goods is determined by the prospect of profiting from such an investment. And the appropriate mix of investment in capital goods results from freedom in the marketplace. Thus anyone concerned with the welfare of workers should be the greatest advocate of free markets (source).

Contrary to what they’ve informed you, labor unions aren’t responsible for the increase in wages and living standards in this country. Advances in technology are.

“Historically, real wages (wages adjusted for the effects of inflation) rose at about 2 percent per year before the advent of unions, and at a similar rate afterward” (Morgan Reynolds, Power and Privilege: Labor Unions in America, 1984).

Quoting Thomas Dilorezo:

If labor unions were responsible for the historical rise in wages, then the solution to world poverty would be self-evident: unionize all the poorest nations on earth. [And yet] private-sector unions reached their peak in terms of membership in the 1950s, when they accounted for about a third of the workforce. Today, they represent barely 10 percent of the private-sector workforce. All during this time of declining union memberships, influence, and power, wages and living standards have risen substantially. All of the ‘declining industries’ in America from the 1970s on tended to be the highly unionized ones, whereas the growing industries, especially in the high-technology fields, are almost exclusively nonunion. At best, unions can improve the standards of living of some of their members, but only at the expense of other, nonunion workers, consumers, and others. When unions use their power to go on strike, or threaten to strike, and succeed in increasing their members’ wages above what they could earn on the free market, they inevitably cause some union members to lose their jobs.

What is the reason for this? The answer is deceptively simple: When wages rise, it makes labor more costly; therefore, to keep turning a profit, employers simply cannot employ as many workers.

In the well-spoken words of economist Jim Cox:

Unions are a matter of pitting one group of workers against other workers; it is not a worker versus manager phenomenon. Successful unions are those which are able to exclude workers, and the unions most able to exclude workers are those composed of skilled workers. Skilled workers are more difficult to replace than unskilled workers and thus are better able to succeed in a strike. As Milton Friedman has stated, “unions don’t cause high wages, high wages cause unions.”

When unions strike they are not merely refusing to work but are preventing any labor from being offered to the employer. Those workers who do cross a union picket line are called “scabs,” thereby illustrating the lack of working class solidarity and clarifying the fact that the issue is one group of workers against other workers. When unions are successful they raise the wages of their membership but do so only at the expense of reducing the number of workers employed by the firm. Those workers unable to find employment in the unionized sector must seek work in the nonunionized sector, thereby depressing the wages for the nonunion workers. Unions do not raise wages, they increase wages for one group of (unionized) workers at the expense of lowering wages for the remaining (nonunionized) workers.

The long and undistinguished history of labor unions is a history of protectionism and violence. And that trend continues to this day — in the following, for instance:

And from the New Hampshire Journal: “Time to get bloody”

A Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts is raising the stakes in the nation’s fight over the future of public employee unions, saying emails aren’t enough to show support and that it is time to “get a little bloody.”

“I’m proud to be here with people who understand that it’s more than just sending an email to get you going. Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary,” Rep. Mike Capuano (D-Ma.) told a crowd in Boston on Tuesday rallying in solidarity for Wisconsin union members. …

This is not Capuano’s first brush with violent rhetoric. Last month Capuano said, “Politicians, I think are too bland today. I don’t know what they believe in. Nothing wrong with throwing a coffee cup at someone if you’re doing it for human rights.”

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Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry, Law Professor Converts, Threatens to Sue

Professor Clark Freshman: Convert
One year ago, I wrote in a previous post that virtually everyone believes in freedom — that is, until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then almost no one believes in it. Freedom simply means you are left alone: you are neither helped nor hindered. And that’s all it means.

Rightwing politicos and leftwing politicos don’t usually agree on specifics, but they do often agree on principle: namely, that government’s proper sphere of authority does extend beyond protection against the initiation of force.

Like most politicians, today’s politicians, both right and left, believe that human beings are not capable of flourishing without the aid of bureaucrats; these bureaucrats therefore believe they must help us live our lives for us. And nowhere is this unquestioned conviction made clearer than in the issue of drugs.

Drugs, like prostitution, provide us with an excellent example of how the rightwing and the left are not fundamentally opposed but merely disagree on superficialities, insofar as both sides agree that not all drugs should be legal.

This notion is so entrenched in the mind’s of Americans that to question its legitimacy at all is considered lunatic-fringe thinking.

True, there are representatives on both sides of the political spectrum who support legalizing marijuana and perhaps a few other drugs. But start talking about legalizing all drugs on principle, or mention doing away with all drinking-age laws on principle, and all liquor laws on principle, or speak of legalizing gambling and prostitution in all states and cities — and then you really begin to sort out the men from the boys.

The principle I’m speaking of is of course the principle that it is not within the proper sphere of government to be involved in these aspects of human lives.

If we each possess the right to our own life and only our own life — and we do — then drug usage is obviously the right of each individual. The fact that it has become unquestionable to the majority that we do not possess the right to use drugs is we choose is a sad testament to the power of entrenchment.

It is a sad testament to how people get so used to thinking about something in one way that changing minds becomes absolutely out of the question. Yet if you truly believe in freedom, which the overwhelming majority of people don’t, you not only should but must believe in the legalization of all drugs. If you do not, then you do not believe in freedom, and you must choose: freedom or statism.

This point can be made on principle alone, and it is a foolproof argument, the first and strongest line of defense. But it will not satisfy those who believe the proper scope of government does extend into telling us how we may and may not live.

This point was very recently hammered home to a UC Hastings law professor named Clark Freshman, who, in his own words, had “been on the fence for years about the legalization of drugs … and now I’m a victim of this crazy war on drugs.”

The full article, which appeared in this week’s San Francisco Weekly, is entitled “Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry and a Law Professor Threatens to Sue.”

So we have another convert. The only question I have is for Mr. Freshman is this: what the hell took you so long?

(Hat tip Timothy Sandefur.)




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Charity Or Love? A Valentine’s Post

The man named Valentinus (which comes from the Latin valens, meaning “powerful, brave, valiant”) was a martyred Christian of ancient Rome, about whom virtually nothing is known.

His name does not appear in the earliest redaction of Christian martyrs (354 AD), and it was Pope Gelasius who first included Valentinus — or Saint Valentine, as Pope Gelasius canonized him — “among those whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God.”

The origins of the Feast of Saint Valentine’s Day are equally murky, and it’s not actually known for certain if the feast of that day is meant to celebrate one saint or several saints with that same name.

The link between Valentine’s Day and romantic-sexual love probably came about in a time now called the High Middle Ages (HMA), when courtly love and all its dog-and-pony-show rituals propagated like bunny rabbits.

The English word love is sourced in the Old High German (OHG) luba and the Gothic lub? and the Latin lub?re — all (like the archaic lief) meaning “pleasing,” “treasured,” “desirous,” “dear.” Even now, the German word liebling, directly related to lief, essentially means that same thing: “dear.”

The word agape, on the other hand, which is the Greek word from which charite ultimately derives, is in Latin caritas, and means “To esteem highly.”

Caritas never really denoted what charity denotes today: namely, giving things away for free.

According to Oxford, caritas meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; love founded upon esteem.”

It was specifically contrasted with amor, a word with a distinctly physical connotation. Oxford goes on to define the original meaning of charite (as opposed to caritas) as “Benignity of disposition expressing itself in Christ-like conduct.”

The word caritas quickly passed out of the monasteries and the churches, where Latin was so frequently used, and into the then more common usage: cheritet or cherite — both deriving from the word cher, meaning “dear,” “dear one,” or “to hold dear.”

Indeed, also to this very day, the word “cherish” means exactly that.

In addition to all this, there was for the same Greek word another Latin word used in those first biblical translations: dilectio.

Like caritas, the word dilectio also meant “To esteem highly.”

Etymologically, this is all significant because later biblical translations, starting in the 16th century, began rendering dilectio as love, and caritas as charity, so that some of the very earliest bibles were already using “love” and “charity” interchangeably, just as the first translators had used caritas and dilectio interchangeably.

Gradually, as the decades and centuries passed and more and more translations were produced, the word love was increasingly substituted for the word charity, until by 1881, the Revised Edition of the King James had completely replaced charity with love. That of course is how it stands today.

Love, in other words, made caritas and dilectio into one.

Remember, though, that these words, as well as the Greek word agape from which they originated, all meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; to esteem highly.”

(It is perhaps worth noting also that decades before the King James translation, there was the William Tyndale New Testament, and Tyndale chose the word love instead of charite.)

From a New Testament perspective, it is, I think, beyond dispute that love is the most important theme that the gospels and the epistles propound. In fact, I believe that if you were to distill the entire New Testament down to its fundamental principle, the one thing that would remain is love. No thinking person, atheist or not, can in my opinion reasonably deny that.

And yet (as I wrote, last Valentine’s Day) if that’s the case, why are we still left feeling slightly unsatisfied about what, precisely, it all means?

Thomas Aquinas, as he so often does, offers some help:

Natural things desire what is in conformity to their nature… Now, in every appetite or desire, love is the principle of the movement that tends toward the end which is loved. In natural appetite the principle of such movement is the connaturality that exists between the one who desires and the end to which he tends. We might call it a natural love.

Natural love is nothing more than the fundamental inclination which is stamped upon every being by the Author of nature.

Thomas Aquinas, like his teacher Aristotle, thought that the highest love was friendship. Both, however, believed that friendship was just a precursor to understanding the love that is, in Aquinas’s words, caritas (charity). One of the first questions Aquinas poses in his tract on charity is whether charity equals friendship. He answers this way:

According to Aristotle (Ethics VIII, 4) not all love has the character of friendship, but only that love which goes with wishing well, namely when we so love another as to will what is good for him. For if we do not will what is good to the things we love but rather, we will their good for ourselves, as we are said to love wine, a horse or the like, then that is not love of friendship but a love of desire. For it would be foolish to say that someone has friendship with wine or a horse.

But benevolence alone does not suffice to constitute friendship; it also requires a certain mutual loving, because a friend is friendly to his friend. But such mutual benevolence is based on something shared in common.

Here are two different translation of what is probably the most famous codification of love:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth (1 Corinthians 13:4, King James).

And:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails (1 Corinthians, New International ).

Yet in both instances this strikes me not so much as a definition but more as a manifestation — a by-product, a side-effect.

A side-effect of what?

Of happiness, and the verdict in your eyes when you look up at me.


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Ronald Reagan’s Birthday

Well, it’s Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, and all the garden-variety conservatives are busy touting that. It seems, therefore, appropriate to republish some of the actual facts about Ronald Reagan, who, like virtually all politicians, talked a good game but didn’t deliver. The following is from a post I did December 16th, 2009:

It’s high time we dispel once and for all the absurd myth that Ronald Reagan was somehow for deregulation.

Statistically speaking, the size of bureaucracy, in terms of sheer civilian manpower, increased dramatically under Reagan, so that by the time he was finished, there were well over 200,000 more government workers than in 1980, when he took office.

In fact, the size of government under Ronald Reagan grew astronomically in virtually every way. To wit:

At the end of the first quarter of 1988, government spending had increased to 28.7 percent of the national income (“national income” refers to the private money generated by the hard-working citizens of this country). To put that into better perspective, this figure is even higher than Jimmy Carter’s outrageous numbers: in his final year as president, Carter maxed out at staggering 27.9 percent. Indeed, both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter cut government spending far more efficiently than Ronald Reagan. Here are some of those numbers, which don’t lie:

Under Reagan, Social Security spending went from 179 billion in 1981 to 269 billion.

Farm programs skyrocketed: 21 billion to 51 billion.

Medicare jumped from 43 billion in 1981 to 80 billion in 1987.

During the Reagan era, federal entitlements alone rose from 197 billion to 477 billion.

Reagan promised the people that he would “abolish” the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He did no such thing. On the contrary, these budgets more than doubled under Reagan. In his own words: “We’re not attempting to cut either spending or taxing levels below that which we presently have.”

In addition to not cutting, however, Reagan also upped the spending a few notches, thus: the Gross Federal Debt went from 900 billion to 2.7 trillion. Ford and Carter simply doubled it; Reagan tripled it.

Spending habits (which are a better gauge of government size than are taxes) increased under Reagan’s leadership in almost every way. But in any case, Reagan hardly cut taxes: by the end of 1987, government revenues, a good indicator of taxes and tax cuts, were nearly identical to those of Carter.

Reagan’s Economic Recovery Act, so-called, was negated a year or two later by his Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA).

He furthermore placed a five-cent-per-gallon tax on gas.

He hiked up taxes on the trucking industry.

He succeeded in increasing the Social Security tax – to the tune of 165 billion. In terms of foreign trade, Reagan was the most mercantilistic since Herbert Hoover: import restriction doubled under Reagan, and quotas were placed on countless products.

Foreign aid went from 10 billion to 22 billion.

Reagan also supported seatbelt laws and federal airbag laws.

Reagan increased regulation of the auto industry by not opposing that monstrous thing known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ).

In the final analysis, Reagan, like all the other bureaucrats, was just another interventionist. So please don’t be fooled.

If the mark of a minimal government is a government which, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “extends only to such acts as are injurious to others” (i.e. which limits itself to protection against the initiation of force), then Reagan was about as far from that as any President ever, right or left.

That is, until now.


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Second Judge Rules Individual Mandate Unconstitutional

Tad the bartender: Did they shoot your horse?

Tom Reagan: If there’s any justice.

— Miller’s Crossing (1989)

Well, thank goodness, there is still some, Tom.

This Monday, January 31st, 2011, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson became the second judge to officially recognize the painfully obvious: namely, that forcing people to buy health insurance is unconstitutional.

Judge Vinson ruled that the reform law’s so-called “individual mandate” went “too far” in requiring that Americans start buying health insurance in 2014 or pay a penalty, stating furthermore:

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications.”

Difficult decision? Seriously? This is a no-brainer.

Today was a small victory for my favorite lady, and yet Judge Vinson — who was so overwhelming correct in his ruling — makes me nervous with his equivocal language, leading to the real question:

How could any sane person actually believe that government possesses legitimate authority to force me or anyone to buy health insurance?


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The Five-A-Day Fruits And Vegetables Myth

My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood …

— William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1606)

The following might be a little difficult for you to swallow, but I make no apologies: here at rayharvey.org we aim to pulverize all the myths, one slab of baloney at a time.

My good friend Dave (“The Cock”) Cochrane, from across the pond, was kind enough to send me this article, which recently appeared in the Daily Mail Online:

With great fanfare, it was reported last week that the current health advice about eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day is outdated, and that scientists now believe that eight portions is more beneficial.

While many people grumbled about how on earth they would manage those extra portions, I ­allowed myself a wry smile.

For more than two years I’ve known that the ‘five-a-day’ mantra we’re all so familiar with is nothing but a fairytale.

Of course, they are tasty, colourful additions to any meal. But in terms of health and nutrition, fruit and veg have little to offer, and telling us to eat eight portions a day is compounding one of the worst health fallacies in recent history.

Surprised? Many people will be, and no doubt some dieticians and nutritionists will reject my arguments. But science backs me up.

The latest findings come from a European study into diet and health looking at 300,000 people in eight countries.

It found that people who ate eight or more portions of fresh food a day had a 22 per cent lower chance of dying from heart disease. Yet just 1,636 participants died during the study from heart disease, which is about half of one per cent.

Out of that very small proportion, fewer people died from the group that ate more fruit and veg.

However, the researchers cautioned that these people may have healthier lifestyles generally. They may be less likely to smoke; they may eat less processed food; they may be more active.

What we should not do is to make the usual bad science leap from association to causation and say ‘eating more fruit and veg lowers the risk of dying from heart disease’.

This survey comes not long after another large study, which examined half a million people over eight years, reported that fruit and veg offer no protection against breast, prostate, bowel, lung or any other kind of tumour. Those eating the most fruit and veg showed no difference in cancer risk compared with those ­eating the least.

So how have we been duped for so long?

You might assume our five-a-day ­fixation is based on firm evidence. But you’d be wrong.

It started as a marketing campaign dreamt up by around 20 fruit and veg ­companies and the U.S. National Cancer Institute at a meeting in California in 1991. And it’s been remarkably successful.

People in 25 countries, across three continents, have been urged to eat more greens, and have done so in their millions, believing it was good for them.

No doubt it was set up with the best intentions — to improve the health of the nation and reduce the incidence of cancer. But there was no evidence that it was doing us any good at all.

Read the full article here.

And remember: It’s an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.