PayPal & Pornhub

For about ten years now, every time the owner of some platform or another decides, for whatever reason, to change its terms, you’ll almost immediately hear a wild outcry for “justice,” followed by a backlash against “robbing people of their livelihood,” and then there often begins the predictable protests against “late-stage capitalism” and “unregulated markets” and “disempowerment.” Et cetera.

(Please note and remember: nowhere have markets ever been completely unregulated, and they most certainly are not today.)

This phenomena happened with Google.

This happened with YouTube.

This happened with Bing.

This happened with Facebook.

This happened with Patreon.

This happened with Tumblr.

This happened with Reddit and confounded people with college educations.

This happened with Instagram and confused Erika Lust, the porn director mentioned below.

This happened with many, many other companies, some of which (and there is a clue here) went out of business for the decisions they made, and it will continue to happen.

Yesterday, it happened (again) with PayPal, so that as of yesterday PayPal now no longer “partners with” PornHub.

Very big deal, I know. And yet to judge from the outcry, you’d think it was armageddon.

PayPal’s decision may or may not have had something to do with the recent and horrifying story which hit headlines October 30th.

This story concerns a 15-year-old girl who’d been missing for a year and who was then spotted in 58 videos which had been uploaded to Pornhub — as well as Snapchat and Periscope — videos which show the girl, who’d been abducted, being repeatedly raped by her abductor. These videos proved sickeningly popular, and I have a very good idea about why precisely this is, but that’s a subject for a later post.

It is, I’m afraid, time again for me to state the obvious — the obvious and the fundamental — and I admit I find it exceptionally disheartening that such elementary things are so poorly understood:

These are privately owned companies. They can change their terms if they want, and they can change them whenever they want, as you can leave and delete them from your life whenever you want. Users did not use these platforms before they existed, and users do not now suddenly have claim to ownership or a say in how these privately owned companies choose to run their business. Users use these platforms by choice. If these platforms change their terms of service, they are allowed to. Users can write letters and can post as much as they’d like on their own platforms and on any other platforms that allow it, but there is nothing wrong with private companies doing this, and there’s (currently) nothing illegal about it, nor should there ever be. PayPal can choose to do business with Pornhub, or not.

This is not at all a complicated subject. The fact that so many putatively educated people don’t understand something so elementary is a sad testament to the world’s understanding of basic economic principle. You know what it’s like? It’s like a fucking joke to me.

Thanks entirely to social media, a whole new subculture and a whole new generation has recently discovered a term which, for the most part, they did not know anything about even ten years ago. This partially explains why so many among this generation and among this subculture use the old and venerable term as if it were somehow novel and even new.

But in actuality, this term — and, more precisely, the principle behind the term — is something which many have fought tirelessly for for decades and even centuries: fought for in full, I should say, by which I mean, in every aspect of human life.

That term is “decriminalization.”

Decriminalization is similar to deregulation and to legalization, but it is not synonymous.

You’ll be excused, by the way, if you don’t quite recognize the full word — decriminalization — since the term is these days most often used in truncated form, presumably to fit character-count and the trendy terminology of social-media speak: decrim.

Today, the overwhelming majority of people whom you’ll hear discussing decrim are referring to one and only one industry, and that industry is not, unfortunately, the healthcare industry with all its licensing-law monopolies and mandatory health-insurance laws and so forth.

Nor is it unfortunately in reference to zoning laws.

It is not in context of nationalizing and socializing and subsidizing any of the many arms of agriculture, nor any of its offshoot industries, and it’s not about decriminalizing property rights on Native American Indian Reservations.

It also, I regret, has nothing to do with government bailouts of banks or automobile companies, nor does it concern the thousands and thousands of bureaucratic pages added to the Federal Register each year, nor the preposterous gambling laws in America, which are often backed with equal fervor by left-wingers and right-wingers alike.

It’s not about decriminalizing those who don’t comply with mandatory solar-panel laws, or any other mandatory “renewable energy” laws, and it has nothing to do with emissions and the sheer stupidity of officially labeling CO2 (one of the building blocks of life) a “pollutant.”

Neither does it have anything to do with decriminalizing the building of new nuclear reactors, nor to hydraulic fracturing decrim, nor to decriminalizing waste-disposal — specifically by abolishing any and all mandatory recycling laws, which mandatory laws have generated astronomically more pollution and waste.

It’s not about decriminalizing our absurd drinking-age laws, which so many countries in the world do not have — to no detriment whatsoever — and it’s not any decrim related to drugs or alcohol or tobacco or firearms or firecrackers or compulsory education or military conscription or progressive taxation or mandatory licensing laws for any number of other industries, or anything like this. Nor is it about decriminalizing all marriage, so that this institution is separated from the state entirely. Neither is it about any and all forms of coercive welfare, including but certainly not limited to all publicly funded, non-voluntary healthcare subsidization. (You may, of course, voluntarily subsidize any form of welfare-pool or “safety net” you’d like, as was once the case, should anybody choose to organize one, instead of relying upon government compulsion to do it.)

Nor, I very much regret, is it about decrim of all interstate trade and all international trade by abolishing all trade tariffs and all prohibitions against such trade.

Today, rather, decrim is used almost exclusively in the context of the sex industry.

I, along with many others who advocate full unadulterated laissez-faire, have fought long for the total decriminalization of all voluntary trade and consensual transactions, which of course includes drugs, sex, rock-and-roll, gambling, et al, and I have done so for a very long time, and I’m on written record as having done so, and over this subject I’ve lost many people whom I thought were friends. My convictions remain.

When, however, any industry, no matter what that industry is, explicitly pedals pedophilia and rape and other atrocity exhibitions, it falls squarely within the proper jurisdiction of the law. This of course goes without saying, though perhaps not for some.

I am not, for the record, talking about the depiction of non-consensual strangulation and other acts of extreme violence (including snuff), unspeakably disgusting as I find it, which depictions of violence are everywhere in porn — so much so, incidentally, that a number of so-called sex-positives (a bullshit term if ever there was one, and I say that primarily because people who coin terms like this are precisely the people who can’t conceive that there are humans who are completely positive about sex, to the point of loving it — yes — who are open and experimental and not phobic in the least, and yet who nonetheless abhor violence and phoniness and, in addition to that, and more importantly, actually like to spend time thinking about and reading about and talking about a great many other things besides sex), such as Dan Savage now saying:

“There’s this normalization of strangulation and other violence during sex — strangulation without asking: one recent survey showed 13% of sexually active girls aged 14 to 17 had been choked nonconsensually.”

Yes, you read that age-range right: 14 years old to 17 years old, and the boys are statedly getting this from the “edgy” porn they watch.

Quoting porn director Erika Lust, who laments nominally — and only nominally — that “face slapping, choking, gagging, and spitting has become the alpha and omega of any porn scene and not just within a BDSM context. These are presented as standard ways to have sex when, in fact, they are niches…. Young people will go to the internet for answers. Many people’s first exposure to sex is hardcore porn. [It teaches children] that violence and degradation is standard.” (Niche? Hardcore? Violent? Degrading? But I regard “face slapping, choking, gagging, and spitting” as nonsense boring vanilla shit, strictly for squares. And don’t even get me started on the subject of actual “love” and emotional connection between two human beings who have brains and who delight in each other’s company even apart from sex. But if you lament it, Ms. Lust, one wonders why you yourself simply don’t stop contributing to it as “the standard,” and work instead to keep it, as you say, “niche.” Upon second thought, though, so what? Why not make it the standard? What’s the problem with that? What’s the problem with 14-year-old boys and girls watching mere depictions of extraordinarily violent nonconsensual sex acts, including staged snuff and necrophilia? Where’s the problem? I see none. What’s the problem with making depicted nonconsensual strangulation and any and all other forms of violence and brutality and “degradation,” as you say, standard and non-niche, since everyone knows that fantasy enactments, no matter how bloody and brutal and degrading and disgusting and pathological they may appear [to the prudish and religious, of course], are not real life, and that’s one of the main reasons for porn, isn’t it? And, anyway, sex-positivity forbids drawing any such patriarchal distinctions as “standard and non-standard” — because when you get right down to it, there isn’t a standard, and for a porn director to presume any sort of demarcation-of-standard, especially a white Scandinavian female porn director, is, if I may speak frankly, privileged, non-inclusive, hegemonistic, sexist, and quite possibly even racist.)

Other sex-positives, if you’ll permit me further use of this bullshit terminology, sex-positives who still work in porn, discuss sex-trafficking and the number of scenes that take place without the performer’s consent, and this, if you ever feel like making yourself sick and if you feel like implanting ghastly images inside your brain that you will never expunge, is a topic you may read about for weeks which stretch into months and months. But I don’t recommend it.

Yes, the porn industry would normalize this, just as Erika Lust correctly notes. They would normalize this and much more. Normalizing is a type of desensitization. Escalation of tastes is largely for this reason, particularly among men, commonplace, and this is not — not by any reasonable person of whom I know — denied.

Recently, in fact, the discussion — if it can even be called that — has fixated (to the point of absurdity) upon whether or not sex can be an “addiction,” or is it just “potentially compulsive.”

This is an absolute non-issue. It’s also stupidly basic.

All addictions involve compulsion — all of them — and virtually all pleasurable things are “potentially compulsive,” including something as fundamental as eating food.

Furthermore, some of the most difficult compulsions to treat and overcome are not technically “addictions,” anorexia and gambling being two of the most notorious. (I once had a customer — Dr. Berry, an M.D. in psychiatry, recently retired at the time that I knew him, who’d graduated top of his class from Stanford School of Medicine — tell me that in his decades of professional experience the toughest compulsion to treat “by far” [his words] was not heroin or meth or tobacco or any other drug or substance, but gambling.)

So please let me repeat this: PayPal, like any and every privately owned company, may partner with whomever they voluntarily, consensually fucking choose, and they can withdraw that consent, just as Pornhub can stop accepting credit cards or whatever, and just as they can all change their terms of service, and they can buy-out Venmo if Venmo chooses to sell (which Venmo consensually did), and you or I can start up a new payment-processing company or invent an app that people can download onto their phones and soon not be able to live without, or we can start-up a new porn platform — or all of the above — or whatever other 101 shit.

Note also that to the extent that laissez faire does exist, when a platform enacts a policy which causes users to leave, new businesses and companies are free to start up and fill this newly created void which, in enacting whatever policy, opened up a demand — and that’s exactly what we’ve always seen and will continue to see, until government and its advocates implement protectionism. (The rivers of tears had not finished drying over Patreon’s change-of-terms before a hundred new and better platforms sprung up, almost overnight, to take its place. Meanwhile, we watch Patreon’s popularity gradually but inexorably fade. It’s called Creative Destruction.)

It is worth noting here, as well, if only in passing and in closing, that the overwhelming majority of advocates for sex-industry decrim are leftist-progressive-socialists, who, as strident and hysterical as they are for decrim, would, however, CRIMINALIZE any number of other industries (including, for example, PayPal’s right not to do business with whomever they choose [see also most of the list above]); and this is especially true, I’ve noticed, of the psychologists and pseudo-neuropsychs arguing on behalf of the sex industry (but no other industry) for decrim, all of whom, without a single exception in my personal experience, are economically illiterate — one even going so far as to say that “there are no good billionaires.” (He wrote this on a phone or computer or tablet invented and brought into existence by a billionaire, in the comfort of a first-world society made possible by billionaire wealth, upon a platform created and popularized by a billionaire. But I’m quibbling, I know.)

This encapsulates why this group will never ultimately fully succeed in the cause — a cause I support though not in mere isolation without reference to its underpinnings — never fully, I say, because they don’t understand the principle behind the cause, which is this.

October 21, 2019December 1, 2019

Reverse Racism

In actuality, there is no such thing as “reverse racism,” as you’ve probably heard, though it’s likely not for the reason you’ve been told: i.e. “white people simply can’t be victims of racism.”

That’s a real quote, and it’s spoken in complete seriousness.

The only reason there’s no such thing as “reverse racism” is that racism, like justice, is an absolute: It takes no qualifier. To give it a qualifier is to erase its actual meaning — which then results in more and deeper racism. There’s racism or there isn’t. The term “reverse racism” is the equivalent of “reverse hatred.” There’s either hatred or there isn’t.

Racism does not only “work against people who are already oppressed” — as that writer goes on to say — and oppression is not the defining characteristic of racism.

Racism, the most barbaric form of tribalism, is the belief that each human intellect and each individual’s moral worth and character are determined by genetic lineage and biochemistry.

Tribalism, collectivism — whatever you wish to term it — is the subordination of the individual to the tribe or group. On a smaller scale, it is the subjugation of the individual to the cult, clique, community, gang, et cetera, with which one associates.

Tribalism in any of its variations and manifestations is the antithesis of individuality.

No matter its specific form and no matter the levels of equivocation or rationalization involved, all doctrines of racism hold to the conviction that, in some significant measure, humans are to be evaluated not on the basis of their actions which stem from their reasoning brains — an act of choice — but by the unchosen biochemistry of one’s ancestry and pedigree.

Racism is in this way another form of determinism: humans are determined not by their brains which shape their actions but by their blood, over which humans have no ultimate choice or control.

As such, racism purports that the thoughts and ideas which make up each individual mind are not chosen but merely inherited, and all values and character-traits are thus determined by biochemical-physical factors beyond any individual’s control.

Racism seeks to nullify that human attribute which is our defining characteristic: the faculty of reason and choice — which is to say, the rational faculty.

In the latest (quasi) arguments and iterations, you’ll often hear that there is no such thing as reverse racism because “only privileged white people can be racist.”

This is disastrously, dangerously wrongheaded.

It seeks to correct injustice with more injustice.

This will not work. It cannot work. It is a mathematical certainty that it cannot work. It will, in the end, breed — as indeed it has bred — more and ever more racism and racial conflict.

That is the only possible outcome of such a philosophy.

It’s also why today, leaders of the free world can say explicitly racist things — “My grandmother was a typical white person” (Barack Obama, 2008) — and most won’t even recognize it as racism.

Something else you should know — something closely related with the subject of reverse racism as it’s now come to be understood:

Except for the very poorest people in the world, everyone is “privileged.” That’s what this non-word — “privilege” — has come to mean.

It is an attempt to negate human health, wealth, and well-being.

If, therefore, you’ve bought into academia and its jargon, this is what you’ve bought into: nobody, not even the poor, deserves the fruits of her ideas nor the wealth, however small or large, earned through her effort and work. It is all a “privilege” — and do you know why?

Answer: because there are people in the world who do not have the “privileges” you have.

You will never, of course, hear any mention whatsoever about government privilege — in much the same way that you will never hear categorical condemnation of the government regimes, so often marxist, that keep the poorest of the world in their continual state of grinding poverty.

Nor will you ever hear discussion of where real wealth derives, which is the essence of the entire subject of so-called privilege.

The absolute fact of the matter is this: any individual — no matter that individual’s race or skin color — can be racist.

Every human, no matter the genetic lineage, can act in a racist manner.

I’ve known Native American racists. I’ve known Mexican racists. I’ve known Asian racists. I’ve known black racists. I’ve known Jewish racists. I’ve known Middle-Eastern racists. I’ve known Scandinavian racists. I’ve know white-trash racists. I’ve known mixed-breed racists.

Et alia.

Racism is a very specific thing, and even in spite of all the torturous equivocations and the postmodern vocabulary twisting — that specific thing is basic and simple to understand:

Racism is the belief that human virtue is determined not by choice but by race. Racism is the view that human character is determined by genetic bloodline.

But neither character nor virtue are so determined: virtue and character, rather, are chosen.

Racism is as commonplace as it is cliche. It is as banal as it is dangerously stupid — and stupidly boorish — and, as you know, there is no sin except stupidity.

To claim that only “institutionalized white people” can be racist is foolish and embarrassing. It is to commit an error of staggering yet elementary proportions. It is also to perpetuate more racism. Indeed, it is a kind of racism.

Which is precisely why and the way in which racism is being perpetrated today, and will continue to be perpetrated — largely by academic-and-political elites — until the entire deadly doctrine of determinism is extirpated once and for all.

In the realm of human virtue — which is to say, human action — only that which is chosen is relevant. In this realm — the moral realm — race is meaningless because race is unchosen.

The human faculty of volition — of mind and morality — exists in all human-beings, regardless of skin color or race or, for that matter, sex or gender. And no matter how furiously people wish this weren’t so — and no matter how many wish it weren’t so — this human faculty is not nor ever will be replaced by biochemical predestination.

To try to do so will only sow greater strife and disrupt the natural goodwill and the sisterhood and brotherhood which exists among human-beings, no matter their race or biochemical pedigree.

Because the individual human mind with the choice to think is the root of all things good and and beautiful and true.

July 3, 2019July 4, 2019

The 4th of July & the True Meaning of Human Freedom and Independence

800px-Amagi — Ama-gi: Sumerian symbol which many believe to be the first written expression of liberty: circa 3000 BC.

Independence is autonomy. It is the freedom to govern yourself and to rely upon your own independent judgment.

Independence is the freedom to express your own individuality.

But what, finally, is freedom?

Freedom, in its most fundamental form, has only one meaning: it is the omission of force.

Freedom is the absence of compulsion.

It simply means that you are left alone.

It means that every individual, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, possesses the absolute right to her own life — and only her own life.

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

Freedom is one of those things that virtually everyone believes in — that is, until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. And then almost no one believes in it.

The difficult thing for many people to accept about freedom is that it doesn’t actually guarantee much of anything.

It doesn’t guarantee success or happiness, or shelter, or a certain income, or food, or healthcare, or a “level playing field” or a level training field, or anything else that must ultimately derive from the production or labor of others.

Freedom means only that you are free to pursue these things and that if you achieve them, they are yours unalienably, which in turns means: they cannot be taken, transferred, revoked, or made alien.

“The legitimate functions of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Here, he’s speaking of — and against — the initiation of force.

Around the same time Thomas Jefferson was writing those words, another erudite fellow, a German named Wilhelm von Humboldt, independently came to the exact same conclusion:

“Any state interference into private affairs, where there is no reference to violence done to individual rights, should be absolutely condemned” (The Limits of State Action, 1791).

That — the absence of violence, the omission of force — is finally what Independence Day is all about.

Happy 4th of July.

May 31, 2019June 4, 2019

Modern-Day Socialism and the 30-year Anniversary of Tiananmen Square

This recent tweet captures the half-assed distinction Marx tried to make between so-called bourgeois property and personal property:

On the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre — when the totalitarian socialist government of China quashed, with extreme force, a political uprising by the people of China who rebelled at last against the obliteration of their freedom — I sincerely hope that the dire error of the illustration above is both obvious and horrifying.

If, however, it’s not obvious or horrifying, this is perhaps a testament to the steady erosion and the subsequent non-understanding of the concept of rights — which, in turn, is the result of the ideology and the ideas which have for decades reigned supreme in academia and across western culture.

The fatal error in the illustration above is this:

A complete non-understanding of — or, worse, deliberately ignoring — the supreme importance of the amount of money (i.e. capital) that it takes to start and run a large business, including but not limited to all the equipment required; and even more important than that: the role of ideas and the knowledge and learning that goes into starting and maintaining a business.

James Jerome Hill, Thomas Edison, John Rockefeller, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, Ray Crock, and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of others could be appropriately cited here — and they should be: because they represent the principle precisely: they and all others like them, who have brought the entire world incalculable amounts in incalculable ways, are the total argument to the illustration above. Moreover, any employee of any business is free to raise her or his own capital and invest her or his own time and learning into a business of her or his own, and the division of labor and the specialization which creates the machines that the business-owner buys with the capital she’s raised is perfectly legitimate, and it is good.

But I suggest we make it more personal:

Let us say your mother, who was born into poverty, the second oldest in a family of ten, and who then worked very hard all her life, beginning as a young teenager, in restaurants and kitchens around southwestern Colorado — let us say that one day this mother of yours, after 53 years of working and learning her trade, of perfecting her pie-crusts and cinnamon rolls and donuts and biscuits and all the other recipes she learned and developed and invented, finally went for it: She mortgaged the home she did not yet fully own, and she raised other money, and she at last, at age 54, opened her own restaurant.

She thereafter worked tirelessly to make this restaurant succeed — and it did: People voluntarily and happily came into her establishment and paid their money to eat her pies and cinnamon rolls and donuts and biscuits and soups and everything else she’d learn to make and create, and which she daily worked so hard in producing anew. In turn, your mother, because her business was earning money, could afford to hire people — people who voluntarily agreed to work for her in exchange for a wage, and whom she taught the things she’d learned over the course of her life. And more than that: these employees liked your mother — they liked working for her, because she was fair, and they learned from her as she learned from them, and the money was good for everyone. The contractual relationship was mutually beneficial: because she hired them and they voluntarily agreed upon the wage she offered, and because the restaurant, which (let us never forget) was her idea and upon which she took all the financial risk and started up, and, armed with knowledge she’d accumulated and developed over four decades of her life, she worked tirelessly to build — knowledge and skill people willingly paid for — she succeeded.

Now imagine someone suddenly comes along and tells your mother that the employees who voluntarily agreed to work for her, and who do so by contractual arrangement, and who invested no capital in starting up this restaurant or buying any of the expensive equipment, and who can leave at any time — they by right have equal ownership in your mother’s business, merely by virtue of the fact that she hired them.

That is the horrifying error in the illustration above.

The exact same principle applies to any business, no matter the specific industry.

If you think that I’m in any way being hyperbolic, you’re perhaps forgetting your history lessons.

It’s called expropriation. It is a horrible injustice — and it’s flatly, unequivocally wrong.

It’s what everyone from Lenin, to Mao, to Castro, to Pol Pot, to Che, to Occupy Wall-Street, to many others, believe:

Egalitarianism by force.

Note the phrase “by force.” Under a system of freedom, anyone is allowed to create a business which is non-hierarchical and entirely employee-owned. Under the opposite system, however, the opposite thing is not true.

It is a very great irony indeed that socialism — which through the media-mob and especially the social-media-mob — has, in the last two decades especially, developed a reputation as being hip and trendy and young and even new and cool: a glittering new idea, this 21st century socialism. The irony is that it’s just the opposite, and the grim joke is on all the true-believers: because the ideas which underpin all socialist theory are embarrassingly outdated, antiquated, and old as hell. They’re also proven failures, mathematically doomed.

Not only are these ideas out-of-date, in fact: they’re out-of-touch — out-of-touch with even the most rudimentary economic laws — and it is a frightening thing when the leaders of the free world, behind whom the people have lined up in lockstep, do not have any inkling of these rudimentary laws (such as knowing that America absorbs and subsidizes much of the world’s socialized pharmaceuticals).

You have the natural-born right to grow wealthy, so long as you do not infringe upon the rights of others: your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

If you need any more convincing, please watch the following debate — it’s genuinely fascinating — in which the young, hip socialist (founder of Jacobin Magazine) is soundly defeated by a so-so defender of private-property and free-exchange. I urge you to take particular note of the young socialist’s absolute refusal to answer the question: if people voluntarily want to work for someone who starts up a business, and if these same people voluntarily agree to that business-owner’s offered wage, should they be free to do so? Should such business transactions be legal and allowed?

And the reason the hip socialist does not answer this question is that he doesn’t believe this business structure and this sort of voluntary transaction should be allowed — because he, like so many others, has bought into the dismally old and failed ideology of egalitarianism-by-force.

October 17, 2018October 17, 2018

Frogs, Toads, & Bats

Lyric poet Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner: nom-de-guerre Gertrud Kolmar, RIP

Frogs and toads and bats have had a special place in my heart for as long as I can remember. I love these beasties for their diversity, their versatility, their resilience, and for what they represent.

Beginning about two years ago — for reasons which go far beyond that lovely ghoul-haunted month meaning “8th month,” from the old ten-month Roman calendar, October — my interest in these creatures grew significantly. So that now, even after all the surreal strangeness and surprise and pain and mistakes of the past two years, these little living beasts of beauty remain as pure and pristine and beautiful to me as they ever were. What better time than mid-October to share this absolutely remarkable and pitch-perfect poem, written by an almost-forgotten writer named Gertrud Käthe Chodziesne (1894 — 1943), whose pseudonym was Gertrud Kolmar, a German poet of great power. I love animal poetry — and I’m not speaking hyperbolically when I say that this is truly one of my all-time favorite animal poems. It’s intimidatingly well-observed and evocative and gorgeous, with a delightful nod to Shakespeare in the very last line.

The Toad

The bluish twilight sinks with dripping dews,
Dragging behind its broad, rose-golden fringes.
Lone poplars stand out black on soft pale hues.
A tender birch dissolves to mist-gray tinges,
And apples roll like skulls toward the furrows.
The leaves, like crackling embers, fade to brown,
While ghostly lamps peer from a distant town.
White meadow fog brews beasts within their burrows.

I am the toad.
I love the stars of night.
The coals of sunset, evening’s ruddy load,
Smolder in purple ponds, barely alight.
Beneath the rainbarrel’s sodden wood
I crouch, low, fat, and wise.
My painful moon-eyes wait and brood
To view the sun’s demise.

I am the toad.
Whispering night is my abode.
A slender flute stirs
And sings in swaying reeds and sedge.
A velvet violinist whirrs
And fiddles at the field’s edge.
I listen, silent, from my soggy seat.
Then, pushing with my finger feet,
Beneath the rotten planks I creep.
Out of the morass, inch by inch I wind,
Like a thought that, buried deep,
Emerges from a muddled mind.
Through the weeds I hop and over gravel,
A dark and humble sense.
Over dew-soaked leaves I travel
Toward the black-green ivy by the fence.

I breathe and swim
upon a peaceful deep.
And from the garden’s rim,
With modest voice I peep
Among the feathered night, and rest
Defenseless. So be cruel —
Come kill me! Though to you I’m but a pest:
I am the toad. I wear a precious jewel.

October 14, 2018October 15, 2018

“Get Out You White Little Fucker!” Portland AntiFa Fights “Fascism” With Fascism, Mindlessness, Violence, And The Independent Mind Of The Herd

This should do a lot for Portland’s tourism industry, which the state of Oregon has sought to cultivate because tourism is good and healthy for economies, which, however, the Party of Science ultimately knows next to nothing about.

(“We are the 99 percent.”)

Yes, I’m afraid the evidence is overwhelming: the religion of the Left continues its inexorable descent deeper down into its 21st-century Progressive inquisition.

Here’s a pretty good article about it from the Wall Street Journal: Anarchy Breaks Out In Portland, With Mayor’s Blessing.

Local media in Portland must be working hand-in-hand with the police to make sure (quasi)-anarchists and Antifa members [an Occupy offshoot] are allowed to block streets in protest of whatever they’re protesting that day.

The following are two camera-angles of the same incident — both of which clearly disclose an unhinged and mindless mob, who think that “public property” is theirs and theirs alone:

The backlash has been swift and entirely accurate:

That’s just a small sample.

Reader, I want you to know this — and I’m not exaggerating:

If you side with the left these days, you’re siding with something not only horribly wrong but dangerous, something every bit as mad as the right — and probably even more so.

Unquestionably in my own personal experience, the left is far more closed-off, more cocooned and deaf to rational argument and discourse than anything I’ve personally encountered on the right these past several years — and I’ve encountered plenty on the right, as well.

What you’re seeing in those videos above and in so many other places on the left is “the independent mind of the herd,” as the philosopher and critic Harold Rosenberg so aptly put it, writ large: a mind chronically susceptible to the principle behind the cultic (in every area) and the party-line.

Thus, you wind up with this sort of terrifying spectacle:

The following is from just a few days ago (October 10, 2018), when Eric (“Fast-and-Furious”) Holder, former Attorney General of the United States, who knowingly sold weapons to Mexican drug cartels, which killed Americans. Watch him lose his cool and then back-pedal, unconvincingly:

Here’s Bernie and Hillary on the same basic issue:

(Justice, remember, is an absolute. It takes no qualifier, and any attempt to qualify it creates injustice.)

So, then, if I understand her correctly: the party that wants to destroy what I stand for — i.e. the party that believes in the ideology responsible for the murdering and wrongful imprisonment of more innocent people than any other ideology in world history — cannot be treated civilly.

Fair enough.

I, for one, won’t forget she said that — especially the next time the left calls for more civility in our discussions.

Closely related to this — and in true (and very eerie) Orwellian fashion — Barack Obama’s propaganda machine, which includes Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton, as well as Bernie Sanders, for whom, incidentally, Senator Barack Obama campaigned (this, for all those who still somehow deny the inherent socialism that defines the Progressive Left), they’re still trying to convince the world that it was a “scandal free” administration, though in actuality it was among the most scandal-ridden, propagandistic administrations in history — every bit as much as Donald Trump’s clownish dog-and-pony show.

Even the liberal New York Times, of all publications, which doesn’t even pretend to be objective journalism any more, agrees that Obama’s attempt to quash journalistic free speech was a horrifying precedent that may never be undone: “If Trump Targets Journalists, Thank Obama”.

Yes.

It’s no real secret that the left has long quit believing in freedom of speech, which is one of the many reasons the smartest leftists distanced themselves from the party years ago — the party, I would like to add, which once, many decades back, believed beautifully in freedom of speech and no censorship, and which now no longer has any inkling what that means, or what their party actually stands for, and the brutality that the realization of that party’s doctrine would bring upon all of us.

October 2, 2018

A Manifesto For Misfits: Full Audiobook

CONTENTS

1.) To Hell with Swords and Garter

2.) How Good Do You Want to Be?

3.) It’s Not How Clever or Smart You ARE: It’s How Clever and Smart You WANT to Be

4.) Wickedly Cool

5.) Ten Authentic Signs of Intelligence that Cannot be Faked

6.) How to Penetrate People’s Brains as though You’re Telepathic

7.) How to Charm the Pants Off Anyone Without a Single Word

8.) How to Have People Dying to Hear What You’ll Say Next

9.) How to Answer the Age-Old Question: What Do You Do?

10.) How to Become a Freakishly Brilliant Small-Talker

11.) How to Come Across as Diabolically Clever

12.) Lynchpin

13.) Are You Fascinating?

14.) How to be Unforgettable

15.) How to be the Smartest Person in the Bar

16.) 101 Things to Do Instead of College

17.) The Art of Independent Thinking

18.) What is Friendship?

19.) Laissez-Nous Faire

20.) How to Drop Out of School, Fire Your Boss & Change the Word

Did you feel that tug?

Like a half-forgotten idea you can’t quite put out of your head — the escalating sensation in the center of your chest telling you it’s time to shift your life?

Nothing outrageous — no come-to-God moment, this — but rather a soft yet persistent pull in another direction: an urge, sourced somewhere deep within, impelling you to do that thing for which you were born:

Create.

Admit it. You often feel it swelling up and pulsing inside you.

And once you acknowledge it, it begins to intensify, struggling to take shape so that it might burst open at last, like a tarantula-firework, illuminating a dark world desperately in need.

Yet, at the same time, an oppositional force tugs at you too: the uncertainty and fear of breaking away from the pack, of leaving your staid but secure position, of running out of money, not making your bills, evicted, hungry, homeless.

And so you ignore the pull to create, and you do nothing about it.

You bury yourself back in the safety of your soul-sucking job.

Oh, you tinker with your passions, here and there. You become something of a hobbyist.

But, in the end, you evade and ignore your dreams, and you meanwhile drown yourself in booze or food or drugs or sex or whathaveyou. And you tell yourself that staying in your current lifestyle is the right thing to do.

Still, that irrepressible part of you can’t be completely suppressed. It’s like a little creative beastie pulsing with life and pushing and kicking to break open inside you, yearning to grow.

Have you ever watched the slow, silent death of a thing?

Have you witnessed the life-force leaking out of a living organism, bit-by-bit, and gradually draining that organism of all its beautiful vitality, until one day, one hour, one minute, one second, the organism is suddenly no longer alive?

It is wrenching to see.

It is also ominously familiar.

And yet, and yet …

And yet what you always hear about pursuing your dreams and if you do everything will work out — this is, to a certain extent, a lot of nonsense.

You can run out of money.

You can get evicted.

You can go hungry.

Your life, in short, can nose-dive.

I’ve been there.

It is not pleasant: showering at the beach, brushing your teeth in the bathrooms of all-night convenient stores or laundromats, unable to write because you can’t concentrate, because you’re so worried about what’s going to happen to you.

And so knowing this is possible, what do you do?

You tell yourself you’re being prudent after all. You’re being sensible, practical.

You tell yourself that you need to first do this and then that and then you need to go back to college and then you need to do this other thing, and then, perhaps — perhaps — you’ll pursue your passion to become a creator, at last.

The truth is that you’re stalling because you can’t muster the courage to take the plunge.

You have the power within you right now to change everything for the better — and if you don’t try, do you know what will happen?

You’ll die without ever knowing what you could have done.

Am I telling you, then, to quit your life of safety and security?

Yes, I am.

I’m telling you that if the life you’re living is stultifying you and preventing you from bringing forth that which is most vital within you, you should indeed quit your safe secure life.

I’m telling you to stop treating your passions as hobbies.

I’m telling you to stop glutting yourself on the things that drown out your dreams.

I’m telling you to start thinking of your passions and your dreams as your profession: your life-force, your reason for living.

Start today.

Start now.

You just have to do it.

Slash your expenses.

Plan it.

Map it out.

Focus your brain.

Find a freelance or part-time gig.

Construct a fall-back plan for when everything goes straight to hell, which it might.

Frightening?

Inexpressibly.

Difficult?

You bet your fucking ass.

Every great achievement is difficult, and every path leading to it frightening.

We each live primarily inside of our own mind. Our lives are largely an attempt to give form to our psychological existence. We do that through what we create.

It’s do or die:

Life is do or die.

So go and do.

And to hell with swords and garter — and anything else that strangles the creative beastie so desperately yearning to hatch open and take shape inside of you.

How Good Do You Want to Be?

Does it keep you awake at night?

Do you burn in a white-hot fever?

Make it hotter, baby.

Stoke it.

Let it burn.

***

Because it’s as you always suspected:

You are not the product of your genetic code, and nobody is genetically doomed to mediocrity.

In actuality, it’s the opposite of what you’ve always been told. Your life is yours to shape and mold.

Genes are not blueprints dictating precisely what you become.

Your genes are only one of countless components, in a complex interplay of components, that go into the making of an almost infinitely complicated organism, the sum total of which is determined fundamentally by your desire:

Your will to become the person you most want to become is the main factor in determining your future.

The drive to persist even in the face of overwhelming odds comes chiefly from within.

So I ask again:

How good do you want to be?

That desire is far more important than your pedigree.

***

Brandon Mroz is the first ice skater in human history to complete, in sanctioned competition, a jump called a quadruple Lutz. He did this on November 12, 2011, at the ripe age of twenty-one.

Perfecting this jump requires untold hours and days and weeks and years of practice, and much of that time Brandon spent falling down on the cold, ungiving ice.

He began skating when he was three-and-a-half years old, and he performed his first successful quadruple Lutz — non-sanctioned — in 2010. A cursory calculation tells us that in his lifetime of practicing, he fell approximately thirty thousand times before landing a successful quadruple Lutz.

Yet those thirty-thousand spills were not in vain: through them, he became excellent. He raised the standard and in so doing he changed a certain sector of the world.

This story — the story of falling on your ass thousands of times and getting back up, over and over again to master a skill, of spending your time in this way — it is in many ways the perfect metaphor because it goes to the very essence of where human excellence originates, in any endeavor:

Falling down thousands upon thousands of times and getting back up and practicing it again and again — day in day out, week in week out, year in year out — that is how people learn to master a given skill.

That is how women and men of every stripe and variety achieve great things.

It is how humans grow wings.

***

It also raises a profound and inevitable question:

Why would anyone put him or herself through so much falling for a reward that looms so far into the future and the success of which is hardly assured?

Why, indeed?

Concerning exceptional achievement, it is, perhaps, the deepest inquiry that exists. And the more you think about it, the more you see that the inquiry is nearly bottomless, going so far down into the human psyche, beyond psychology, that it may well be that no one from the outside can penetrate it fully.

Why do people who become great pay the price they must pay in order to get there?

***

One thing we can clearly see:

People who achieve excellence learn to love the task they’ve chosen. They therefore focus almost exclusively upon the task.

It’s a type of monomania, a singleminded and often obsessive focus.

In essence, people who become great say to themselves: how can I solve this specific problem?

They do not say: how will solving this problem benefit others or me?

Or:

What is the higher cause in solving this problem?

They instead focus laser-like upon the task itself.

When that task is taken care of, they move to the next task and focus upon it with the same intensity, and then move on, and so on.

***

The creator must be driven and must have focus. That focus first comes from within, but the most crucial point to recognize — and it is absolutely vital — is that neither the passion nor the focus start out fully formed.

Passion and focus, in other words, do not spring full-blown from the head of Zeus. They do not accompany us into the world like the parts of our body. They develop as our interest in the thing develops.

Which is why great performers, whether musicians or athletes, scientists or painters, writers or architects or anything else, start out as all of us do: learning things slowly and tediously, often when we’re young, perhaps taking lessons that are more-or-less forced upon us.

The difference between the good and the great, the hobbyist and the expert, the mediocre and the excellent, is that at some point, people who become great choose to pursue the given activity and make it the focal point of their life.

The significance of this cannot be overstated.

As one jazz virtuoso explained it to me, describing the precise moment in childhood that her piano lessons ceased to be a chore:

“One day, when I was twelve or thirteen, after having taken [piano] lessons for years, I was struck in an almost epiphany-like fashion with the range of possibilities that lay before me. It seemed endless and at my fingertips, the potential for artistic expression inexhaustible. It was at that moment that I made my decision and ceased thinking of piano as a hobby.”

Passion develops.

It does not emerge fully formed.

First we must endure the effort of early practice, and then we must decide if the activity is what we wish to pursue.

In this sense — a general sense — creativity represents the highest levels of human excellence.

This is true no matter the domain in which you work, no matter the subject.

***

Every single person born healthy has the power within to become extraordinary. And in the bud and blossom of life, everyone sees for herself or himself a big and bright and beautiful future.

To be exceptional, you must first forsake many things that are unexceptional — forsake the foolish and live: it is a corollary.

It’s also, for most, the biggest obstacle.

***

Purpose and self-development are the aim of life.

Vice smothers self-development and purpose, and it can make the pull of mediocrity almost irresistibly strong.

Most won’t overcome it, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Mediocrity is not fated. It is accumulated.

The life you’ve always imagined for yourself is within your reach — it’s yours to control — but reaching it requires a great deal of effort. That’s why the overwhelming majority of people retreat into the relative safety of the group. Which group? Whichever one most represents the values any given person has accumulated over the years.

The way out of mediocrity isn’t college.

The way out of mediocrity is to focus first upon the task — on developing knowledge.

The way out of mediocrity is the decision to do, and the willingness to fail. Because mistakes and failure are part of the process.

The first move, then, is in explicitly recognizing what things you genuinely like to do.

Happiness must ensue.

It’s Not How Clever or How Smart You ARE: It’s How Clever and Smart You WANT to be

The most successful people in life aren’t particularly gifted or talented.

They become successful, rather, by wanting to be successful.

Genetic giftedness is largely a figment.

There are really no such things as prodigies.

Talent is a process.

Have you ever noticed that the smartest kids in school are almost never the ones who go on to be the most successful in life?

School in its best state teaches datum, not ambition or desire or will — all of which things can be encouraged and fostered, but not really taught.

Ambition, desire, will, persistence — these, as you may or may not guess, are the greatest predictors of success.

***

No human being and no living thing begins her life by undercutting it.

No human being, no matter how pampered or abused, no matter how spoiled or mistreated, starts out by giving up or giving in.

No one starts life irrevocably defeated.

Abandoning the dreams of one’s youth comes only after a protracted process of perversion.

The time it takes before this mindset dominates differs for each person.

For most it is a gradual accretion of pressures and set-backs and frustrations and small failures, or by the systematic inculcation of mantras that this life doesn’t really matter, that our dreams can’t be fully realized anyway, and that human existence is accidental or meaningless or both — only to find, one day, that their passion, once a glowing force within, is now gone … but where and how?

Others, having no depth of thought or will, stop at the first sign of adversity.

Only the truly passionate persist. Only the truly passionate retain for a lifetime the vision they had of themselves when they were young. Only a handful maintain for a lifetime the beautiful vision of their youth and go on to give it form.

The means by which we give that vision form is our work.

No matter what any given person may become — no matter how good, bad, ugly, or great — in the springtime of life, each person at one time believes that her existence is important, and that big wonderful things await.
Each and every single human being has the potential to retain that vision, and each and every single human being should retain that vision, because it is the true and correct vision.
College, I submit, can do irreversible damage to it.

***

Unactualized potential is a tragedy.

Nonconformity for nonconformity sake is meaningless.

Nonconformity for the sake of reason and independent thought, however, is a virtue.

Independent thought is a prerequisite of genius, and it takes courage to think for yourself.
Courage is also a virtue.

Blind conformity is the opposite of independent thought.

Ambition, too, is a virtue.

Virtue is human excellence. It is The Good.

The Good is that which fosters human life and promotes it.

The Bad, corollarily, is that which frustrates human life and smothers it. It is pain. It is that which stultifies human thought and human flourishing and prevents gain.

Thinking is the human method of survival. It is for this reason that humans are properly defined as the rational animal, and it is also for this reason that morality — true morality — is rooted not in God or gods or devils, but in the human quiddity: our rational faculty.

As a thing is defined by its identity, so humans are defined by their acts — which is to say, their actions.
Our actions are in turn shaped by our thoughts.

Your brain is the most powerful weapon in your arsenal. Nothing increases its strength like thinking. Cultivate, therefore, deliberate thought.

It is the greatest asset you’ve got.

***

Your life is largely a process of turning your interests into talents, which is done through a process of practice.
Talent is learned. It is cultivated.

Talent is not fated.

Your talents are rooted in the things you most enjoy doing.

It is in this sense that your passions are primarily willed.

Find your passions and grow them, and the more you do this, the more completely you’ll be fulfilled.

***

If you want to go to college, go.

If your true desire in life requires something specialized or technical — like medicine or engineering or law — go.

By all means, this.

The point here is not to condemn college categorically, for condemnation sake.

The point here — the only point here — is that if you’re going to college because that’s what you’ve been told you should do, or because you’ve been told that you must go to college in order to have a more complete or successful life, do not go.

Do not go to college merely for lack of anything better.

If you don’t yet know what you want to do, do not go.

Don’t go back to college for that Bachelor’s degree in sociology.

Don’t go back to college to try and motivate yourself to write, or in an attempt to fill your time, or your head.
Cultivate your brain instead.

Read. Think. Blink. Drink.

Relax.

Be self-taught.

Learn to play the piano or piccolo or sax.

Read and think a lot.

There is no hurry — I assure you, there is no hurry.

I assure you, you need not worry. In fact, it is a good thing to not yet know what you want, because life is a gigantic canvas and there’s so much with which to fill it, so much to do — have you not heard? So much, indeed, that choosing one thing at twenty or thirty or even forty is absurd.

College is far from the be-all-and-the-end-all. College is a lot of conformity and groupthink.

It can truly stunt your brain, every bit as much as lack of nourishment or food.

College is very often nothing more than pointless debt accrued.

***

Your desire to become the person you most want to become is ultimately the only thing you need.

In its elaboration, this will require a great deal — focus, discipline, practice — but the desire is the fundamental thing.

As long as there’s a fundamental desire and it burns like a fire, there’s no limit to anyone’s achievement. You needn’t be a savant. The desire to excel is the most important ingredient in becoming what you want.

***

“Life is an unceasing sequence of single actions, but the single action is by no means isolated,” wrote Ludwig von Mises.

Your life is largely a process of transforming your interests into talents, which, in turn, comes about through a process of practice.

It is in this sense, I say again, that your passions are primarily willed, and not inborn or innate.
Even genius is willed. You make yourself great.

***

Life is work.

Jobs are healthy. Work is good. Work is good for the soul. Be happy in your work.

Nothing more fundamental than labor is required for the production of abundance and the good things that you want for your life.

Labor takes many forms.

Blue-collar jobs build character, as they build invaluable work habits that you’ll never lose.

In her book No Shame in My Game, Katherine Newman points out what for many of us has been blindingly obvious for years: namely, that so-called low-skilled, blue-collar jobs, whether fast-food, waitressing, bartending, barista, custodial, clerking, so on, they require talents completely commensurate with, or even surpassing, white-collar work:

“Memory skills, inventory management, the ability to work with a diverse crowd of employees, and versatility in covering for co-workers when the demand increases,” she writes.

Among many, many other skills, I add.

Servers, bartenders, baristas, expos, clerks, et cetera, must multitask and remember every bit as much as, for example, an ER doc.

That’s one of the many reasons these jobs are good, and not something anybody should knock.

***

What do you value? Parties and thumbs-ups and reblogs and other time-killers, day and night? Or the active work of your body and brain?

Find work that you enjoy and embrace it. Become good at it. Become better. Pour your energy into your work like rain. Enjoy the motions of your body in concert with your brain.

He who’s faithful in a little is faithful in a lot.

Everything you do, therefore, do it with all that you’ve got.

Wickedly Cool

Personality is personal style. It is nothing more and it is nothing less. The art of charisma is really the art of personality.

Which is why there are as many different ways to be charismatic as there are different styles of personality.
Personality is the sum total of one’s many individual characteristics as they come together and create the person presented to the world.

Just as a thing is defined by its identity, so humans are defined by their acts, which are in turn defined by their thoughts.

Since we’re each the shapers of our own thoughts — and only our own thoughts — we each have the power to change and to mold our own personality.

For this reason, charisma begins (and ends) in the brain.

Charisma is magnetism.

Magnetism, as the very word implies, is the power to attract.

People can be magnetic and charismatic in a multitude of different ways:

You don’t, for instance, need to be extroverted to be charismatic.

You don’t need to be gregarious or boisterous. Many of the most charismatic people you’ve ever seen are silent and strange.

Nor is physical beauty alone charismatic — or, at any rate, not in the full sense of the word:

Physical beauty attracts, esthetically, sexually, whathaveyou, but its power of attraction is limited, precisely because humans are conceptual: this means we think and ruminate and interact.

Magnetic qualities are ultimately qualities that demonstrate one’s skills at living life as humans are designed to live it — which is to say, conceptually.

This is why contemplation is the highest occupation of the human species — because your personality and your behavior are a complex interplay of contemplation and action mixed. But it all begins in the brain.

Which, in general terms, is the reason that the most magnetic quality anyone can possess is the genuine happiness and the relaxed disposition that comes from a life that’s been thought about and thus lived well, and then the genuine confidence which is the natural elaboration of that.

Perfection, however — and this is important — is not the determining factor in matters magnetic and charismatic:
Flaws, faults, foibles, and fuck-ups do not an uncharismatic person make.

How one deals with one’s own flaws, faults, foibles, and fuck-ups is what’s at primary issue.

Happiness is charismatic.

Understanding is charismatic.

Actual self-confidence is charismatic insofar as it discloses efficacy and worth.

Have you ever observed that you’re at your best when you’re doing something you really grasp?

Have you ever observed that you’re at your most relaxed and comfortable when you’re doing something you enjoy — i.e. something that you’re genuinely confident in?

That state of mind is charismatic.

Have you, on the other hand, noticed that when you’re put into a situation about which you know little or nothing and want no real part of, you feel diffident, timid, unhappy?

This is the opposite of charismatic.

The primary method of human survival is our rational capacity, because of which human survival isn’t just physical but psychological.

That’s why happiness is the goal.

The goal of life, then, is emotional. But the means of achieving it are not.

The means of achieving it are cognitive:

We must use our brains.

We must think.

Charisma stems from this uniquely human faculty.

Charisma comes from thinking.

So cultivate your power of thought.

Cultivate contemplation.

Contemplation, I repeat, is the highest occupation of the human species.

In the very decision to do this — and even more in the sincere follow-through — your charisma will EXPLODE.

Purchase the full book here, for fucksake!

September 27, 2018September 29, 2018

Agriculture: How Subsidies and Socialization Destroy Good Farming

Farm subsidies have never made any sense — and despite almost a century of entrenchment, this remains as true today as it ever was — and I will show you specifically how: how and why, I should say, the subsidization of agriculture devastates the vital, beautiful industry of farming and agriculture.

My notions, first of all, are not just theory. The world has plenty of examples — including the United States, in times and in sectors when and where it’s been left free — but here are two of the best:

In New Zealand, farms were liberated from state interference following an agricultural crisis back in the 1980s. Farmers were left without subsidies after the market reforms, ultimately resulting in Kiwi agriculture booming into one of the most diverse and efficient markets in the world.

Not only were prices decreased, but previously ignored sectors popped up as well — including the now-booming New Zealand wine industry.

In Australia, it’s much the same story.

Like New Zealand, Aussie farmers are among the world’s least subsidized. Also like New Zealand, the Australian agricultural economy is diverse and efficient, resulting in the gross value of production in that sector reaching record levels this year at AU$62.8 billion.

Seeing how unsubsidized farmers flourish down south, one is forced to question why we stick with protectionism in Europe and the US.

Implementing protectionist principles in the agricultural sector raises prices for consumers, promotes overproduction, damages developing economies, and lowers efficiency and innovation.

On the other hand, free farming results in diversification, growth, and efficiency. Consumers pay less for better products, and healthier foods are more readily available. Diversification also leads to new markets and sectors, resulting in a higher availability of jobs.

Let’s stop pretending that agricultural protectionism helps anybody — especially the poor and working class. Europe and the US need to follow in our Southern Hemisphere cousins’ footsteps: Free the farms, and feed the poor.

(Link)

Did you know?

The federal government of the U.S. spends more than twenty-billion dollars annually on subsidies for farm businesses.

Roughly forty percent of the nation’s 2.1 million farms receive subsidies, the overwhelming majority of that money, however, going to the large government-crony producers of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice.

Federal aid for crop farmers is deep, complex, and comprehensive — dating back to at least 1862, when the Morrill Act of established the land-grant colleges to teach agriculture and other subjects.

The Hatch Act of 1887 funded agricultural research, and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 funded agricultural education.

The Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 created cooperative banks to provide loans to farmers, which in-and-of-itself is no big deal, but that developed into today’s Farm Credit System — a thoroughly government-sponsored financial system with more than $280 billion in assets.

Also, “the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 created the Federal Farm Board, which tried to raise crop prices by buying up and stockpiling production. That did not work, and after spending $500 million this early agricultural boondoggle was abolished in 1933.”

And yet it was during the Great Depression of 1930s and FDR’s disastrous policies that the socialization of agriculture really began in earnest and included wage-and-price controls, commodity price supports, supply regulations, import barriers, and much more. And this, not coincidentally, is when farming conditions started to become horrific.

Among numerous other things, all this taxpayer money shields farmers against price-and-market fluctuations and seasonal yields, as it also funds their insurance coverage, marketing, export sales, research (however whimsical), and other activities.

Agriculture is no more (or less) risky than any number of other industries, and, like all other industries, it does NOT require a complicated maze of government subsidies and regulations.

United States farm subsidies are promoted as “saving family farms and protecting the food supply,” but in actuality, in terms of sheer dollars spent, they’re America’s largest crony-corporate welfare program in existence, surpassing even healthcare.

These subsidies also burden American families with higher taxes and higher food prices.

Yes, I know: farm subsidies are intended to alleviate farmer poverty, but I know also that the majority of subsidies go to commercial farms with individual net worths of nearly $2 million.

Most damaging of all is not how undeniably costly farm subsidies are to taxpayers, but in how these subsidies harm the economy and the environment and diversity of food:

Subsidies and socialization discourage farmers from innovating, cutting costs, diversifying their land use, and taking other actions needed to prosper in a vibrant, competitive economy.

Laissez-faire market forces, on the other hand, as with all other goods and services, create a food-and-agricultural sector that is free to diversify and flourish when left alone, as it has and does in New Zealand, for instance. This, in turn, results in readily available, inexpensive food for all.

The problems, as usual, only come when the state gets involved — the state, that “coldest of all cold monsters, which bites with stolen teeth.”

Agricultural protectionism comes in many shapes, sizes, and forms. Farm subsidies are the most common, and they almost invariably result in overproduction and waste, but there are plenty of others:

Tariff and nontariff barriers to foreign entry are also common and aim to prevent farmers from foreign countries from providing cheaper products and undercutting local producers (ironically almost exactly what subsidized farmers do after overproducing).

Blocking foreign competition, however, usually results in higher prices for agricultural goods due to a lack of competition. As a result, consumers in protected economies usually wind up paying more for foodstuffs than if the market were free.

There’s even evidence that subsidies contribute to obesity. In the United States, the majority of farm subsidies go to crops like corn, wheat, and soy — primarily used as food for livestock and as sweeteners — whereas subsidies for fruit fall far shorter.

As a result, unhealthy foods have their prices artificially lowered while the healthy stuff stays expensive. Thus, poorer members of society are not only made to pay more, but they often have to [to some extent] forgo a healthy diet to do so.

(Link)

My point? The usual:

It’s government that creates the problems to begin with and then the “free-market” (that doesn’t actually exist) is the one blamed so that deeper government controls can then be demanded, and then the problems worsen, and the cycle begins anew, et cetera ad infinitum.

And so it goes.

My point is this:

Laissez-faire et laissez-passer, le monde va de lui même.

“Let it be and let goods pass: the world goes by itself.”

Human society contains within itself the capacity for ordering and managing its own path of development, without that monstrous apparatus which democrats and republicans alike love so much:

“Government is solely an instrument or mechanism of appropriation, prohibition, compulsion, and extinction; in the nature of things it can be nothing else, and can operate to no other end….” (Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943).

Because one of the greatest ironies of agricultural-socialization-versus-laissez-faire is that some of the loudest voices calling for more and ever more and ever bigger government are also some of the loudest lamenters of the horrible farming and agriculture conditions which have been created by the very big government they’re calling for MORE of.

It is inarguable — it is indubitable — that FDR’s policies of unadulterated socialism wrecked farming for decades that have stretched into the present day.

As Jeffrey Tucker once put it: we should all be more conscious of the cause-and-effect relationships operating in the world of human action, which give rise to the unbelievably elegant order of that thing called the free economy: an order, as he said, “fueled by human choices, entrepreneurship, relentless learning, experimenting, imitating, copying, private property, and the freedom to trade; for these are the institutions bestowing miracles on us ever day. We also need to be aware of its opposite, the gargantuan apparatus of compulsion and coercion called the state that operates on principles that are anachronistic to the core. Its principle is violence, and its contributions to the social order are prisons, economic upheaval, and war. It is lumbering, stupid, and angry as hell, and it is the main drag on the world today. The contrast with laissez-faire is overwhelming.”

Nine Farm Subsidy Myths Pushed by Special Interest

Ideas and Consequences: Of Meat and Myth

Market Demand is Reforming Bad Farming

How Laissez-Faire Creates Cleaner, Better Farms

The Absurd World of Agricultural Subsidies

September 24, 2018September 24, 2018

“How Well-Intentioned White Families Can Perpetuate Racism”

That title is in quotation marks because it’s the title of an actual piece, which recently appeared in the Atlantic Magazine.

This piece is an interview with a sociologist named Margaret Hagerman, who sought to “recruit white affluent families as subjects for the research she was doing on race” — and this is for a book she’s written called White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America.

I want to quickly inject here that an actual privilege is a benefit bestowed by one in a position of authority — as in, thank you for the privilege, father, of not having to do my chores today. It is not success that comes through hard work or even inherited wealth, no matter at what place or position you start the race of life, and there are millions of affluent minorities (all races, all colors, all sexes) in America: women and men who through hard work and persistence have lifted themselves out of all manner of hardship and poverty to make better lives for themselves and their families — and in fact this is what America is largely about: coming up from the gutters, rags-to-riches, overcoming hardship, fleeing from authoritarian regimes, where freedom and the right to keep what you earn does not exist, and into place where you do have total freedom to make something of yourself, in a country which allows everyone, no matter their race, color, class, sex, gender, or creed, the freedom to do just that. And this interminable dividing and subdividing by race and other non-essential characteristics only, in the end, perpetuates racism and greater division among human beings — and also, not coincidentally, greater poverty in the end. Many, many minorities agree, and that’s why I think that the people who understand and appreciate freedom the most are those who come to America — usually with nothing — from other countries, where no such freedoms existed.

Also, just for the record, in terms of percentages, white Americans are some of the greatest recipients of food stamps and other welfare programs, and it is no coincidence either that some of the greatest inequalities and wealth disparities are found in places with the biggest government programs.

And yet isn’t it remarkable how certain people who claim they’ve done “exhaustive research” can only come up with the same-old-same-old rebranding of egalitarianism that’s become so fashionable today: “white privilege”?

How, then, according to Margaret Hagerman, do “well-intentioned white families” putatively perpetuate racism?

The answer may (or may not) surprise you: by wanting their children to do well in life.

Here’s what Margaret Hagerman says constitutes white privilege:

One of the things I talk about in the book is what I call this ‘conundrum of privilege,’ which is that these parents have a lot of resources economically as well as status as white people. [So do plenty of affluent minorities.] They can then use those resources to set up their own child’s life in ways that give them the best education, the best health care, all the best things. And we have this collectively agreed-upon idea in our society that being a ‘good parent’ means exactly that—providing the best opportunities you can for your own child.

But then some of these parents are also people who believe strongly in the importance of diversity and multiculturalism and who want to resist racial inequality. And these two things are sort of at odds with one another. These affluent white parents are in a position where they can set up their kids’ lives so that they’re better than other kids’ lives. So the dark side is that, ultimately, people are thinking about their own kids, and that can come at the expense of other people’s kids.

This notion that the good of your own children must perforce come at the expense of other people’s is, to put it mildly, preposterously and flatly false.

I believe the sole purpose of such ridiculous notions is the attempt to make people feel guilty about their station in life, their upbringing, their education — the ultimate goal of which is, as previously mentioned: egalitarianism.

It is an attempt to take down — via bromides like “leveling the playing field” and “creating a fairer and more equal starting line” — the freedom of all to pursue their own lives, no matter what their race or sex or sexual orientation or gender or skin color, no matter in what circumstances they grew up: all humans free to make better lives for themselves.

Egalitarianism, even if it were a good thing — and it is NOT, primarily because humans possess wildly varying degrees of ambition, motivation, desire, drive, persistence, and so on — remains, as it always has and always will, an impossibility, though, as pointed out before, you may look to Pol Pot’s Cambodia as one of the nearest successes.

People are not all born into identical circumstances, and it is not the role of government or anyone to attempt the impossible task of equalizing everyone, which would require continual and massive applications of force and expropriation, and which even then could never be fully achieved.

Quoting Margaret Hagerman again:

Some of the parents in my book, they rejected the idea that their child needed to be in all the AP classes. They valued other elements of their children’s personalities, such as their concerns about ethics or fairness or social justice. There were a handful of parents in my study who resisted having a separate track for AP students, for example, which can sometimes be a segregating force within schools.

There were also affluent parents who were very much opposed to having police officers in schools, and they were using their position of influence in the community to try to get the police officers out of there. Maybe others would be aware of their own presence at PTA meetings, making sure they’re not dominating them and making sure they’re not putting their own agenda ahead of their peers’ agendas. I’m not sure that I saw tons of behavior like that, but I certainly saw moments where some of the families were concerned more about the collective than their own kid.

Please give special heed to those last few words.

Please remember also that collectives don’t actually exist: only the individuals who compose them actually exist.

Let me here note as well (not quite parenthetically) that “justice” is an absolute: it needs no qualifier; it can take no qualifier. And more: any word used to qualify “justice” — social, latino, Asian, white, or anything else — is by definition an injustice.

Justice is the legal recognition of every individual’s inalienable right to her own life and property (money is property), and only her own life and property.

Egalitarianism, in any of its multifarious guises, necessarily requires massive violation and expropriation of property.

I’ll close by quoting at length Robert Tracinski’s review of Margaret Hagerman’s book:

So to be a good “progressive,” you should place “social justice” indoctrination over actual education, and maybe send your kid to a school with increased crime and violence. I could understand, if you grew up poor, if you got knocked around a lot, if you felt like an outsider, it might be natural to resent the upper-middle-class kids, to think they’re too privileged and need to be knocked down a peg. It’s not exactly a healthy way to go through life, but I could understand it. What I can’t understand is thinking that way as a parent about your own kids. But there, at the end of the quote, we find the real agenda: you must subordinate your own interests to “the collective.” Who, aside from unreconstructed Marxists, still uses the phrase “the collective”? Maybe Star Trek fans, because Hagerman seems to be offering advice on how to assimilate into the Borg.

This goes to the real heart of the issue, and it also indicates that this isn’t really about race. After all, which of these arguments has anything specifically to do with kids being white or black, versus being rich or poor? The difference between phrasing this as an issue of race versus an issue of economics is not logical or substantive. It’s merely a matter of intellectual fashion. It’s harder to get people to listen to you if you publish an old-fashioned lefty screed about “class,” but racial politics is all the rage right now and will get you a book deal and coverage in The Atlantic.

That’s why that phrase “the collective” is such a giveaway. This is just the old-fashioned Marxist class-warfare agenda repackaged in the language of racial politics….

Take, for example, the arguments that came up recently in the Sarah Jeong case about how non-white people cannot be racist—even when they are definitely, flagrantly racist—because racism is really about the “dominant power structure.” The “dominant power structure” ends up meaning pretty much the entire system [of freedom], including the fact that you are able to make money, own property, and buy things—such as buying a house in a good neighborhood in a town with a good school system, or sending your kids to private school.

These are the actual examples used in that interview about people perpetuating racism merely by providing as well as they can for their kids….

Collectivism was the next logical step, taken by the next generation of German intellectuals. You can see that if you have to eliminate any personal value, that would necessarily mean purging one of the most precious of personal values: your attachment to your own children.

In the collectivist theory, this purging of personal values is supposed to produce a corresponding increase in concern for “the collective.” New Soviet Man was going to care for state property as assiduously as economic man had cared for his own property. Caring less about your own kids is supposed to lead, Hagerman imagines, to caring more about other people’s kids.

To say that this runs counter to human nature is an understatement. It’s not just that people will psychologically resist caring more for other people’s children than their own, a resistance that might be overcome with indoctrination and willpower. The problem is that the whole idea is a logical impossibility. It asks us to care the least about those things that have the most intimate connection to us and are therefore most capable of earning our affection.

We can only feel love, compassion, or respect for others to the extent that we see our own humanity in them—to the extent that we imagine what it would be like if we were in their place. A man who cares nothing for his own life will actually find it harder to empathize with others. Self-loathing is not a basis for love of humanity.

Similarly, to reach the point where you do not wish the best for your own children, how much would you have to hollow out your personal values and capacity for affection? Hagerman asks us to “think in bigger ways about…what it means to actually have a society that cares about kids.” But how is “society” going to care about kids if you’re asking everyone not to care about their own? How can they be motivated by love after they have crushed their capacity for love at its most intimate source?

Reader, do you know what this is?

It’s anti-individualism and political correctness run amok.

September 23, 2018September 29, 2018

Universal Healthcare Truths and Myths

Actual photo of a Venezuelan supermarket

Often you will read or hear that except in America, healthcare in all developed countries around the world is recognized as the “basic human right” that it actually is, and this is why “America is the only civilized country in the world that doesn’t offer universal healthcare to its people.”

You will often hear that this is a black-eye on the face of the United States.

You will often also, as a corollary, read and hear such things as Why Healthy People Should Subsidize the Sick, and in such discussions, you’ll read or hear that single-payer is frequently opposed because it “forces” people to be humane. The word “forces” will often be in scare quotes.

No caring or compassionate person — which is to say, most people — wants to be thought of as “inhumane,” and that’s how you know that this sort of talk is a tactic: a type of propaganda.

The purpose of this ridiculing tone and the scare quotes around “force” is an attempt to bully you into believing that force is perfectly acceptable when it’s for the sake of something “humane,” or something that’s deemed a “greater good.”

Don’t be bullied. Don’t be duped.

I will show you that even if they don’t intend to, the people who advocate any kind of force, even for ostensibly humane ends, are in actuality perpetuating much greater suffering for all people involved.

The only way to truly solve the healthcare crisis that plagues the world is through a policy of no force whatsoever.

First, last, and always, nobody has the right to the life and labor of any other human being — and this includes the life and labor of any and all doctors.

It is true that despite the mighty push and the stupefying corruption involved in that push, America does not yet have universal healthcare — and it is a very, very good thing for the sake of the entire world that America does not.

One of the (many) things you’re not told about universal healthcare is this:

In every country that has it — even those listed as the best: France, Japan, Canada, so on — healthcare is perpetually out of money. They all operate in the red. This is a fact.

They operate at a loss — just as Medicare and Medicaid do in America, and for the same reasons. They are in debt, and that debt grows deeper and deeper and deeper, endlessly.

But that’s okay, people will reply, because healthcare should not be for profit.

Says who?

Things cost money to produce and to make and to manufacture and to do.

Whether it’s aspirin and antibiotics, or beds or oxygen tanks and tubes, or MRI machines and computers, or an almost endless number of other things besides — it costs money to produce.

(Money is only a symbol of production, a medium. Money is a facilitator, and as such it drastically simplifies life for a conceptual species.)

This is to say nothing of the fact that the doctors, nurses, medical techs, paramedics, custodians, administrators, bio-pharmaceutical researchers, and so on, this is their work. It is their livelihood. And so if healthcare isn’t for profit, then all this staff is expected to provide it for free? Or for whatever wages the government deems? (Yes, actually: cost controls are a BIG part of all universal healthcare systems.)

These hard-working people, then, because it’s bourgeois and vulgar to regard healthcare as something at which you make money, they must therefore get other work so that they might put better food on their tables and support their families in a higher-quality way, and have money to travel and for leisure and everything else, like the rest of us?

In other words, the argument goes, in one of the most demanding and specialized industries there is — healthcare — people should by definition not be able to support themselves by their work as a open-market would determine, because for-profit medicine is “bourgeois and inhumane,” and so the people who spend years and years gaining the knowledge and the expertise required to practice it, they must not be allowed to support themselves by means of it, and so they must work two jobs (at least).

I hope you can see how ridiculous this is.

It’s precisely why in all countries with universal healthcare — i.e. all developed countries except America — doctor shortages, especially the most accomplished specialists, are a very serious problem.

(Where, I ask again, is the “right” to brain surgery if no one exists with the expertise required to perform it?)

In all countries with universal healthcare, staff and medical personnel shortages are a constant issue.

This is one of the reasons that when somebody like Canadian politician Belinda Stronich — who is a good friend of Hilary and Bill Clinton and who, like them, totally supports universal healthcare — when she’s stricken with cancer, she does not opt to be treated in Canada but instead comes to the United States.

And then there’s Hugo Chavez.

It’s also part of the reason that free market principles are being quietly introduced into many systems of universal care — to save them from collapsing — though they don’t want you to know this.

It’s also why MRI machines are abundant and no problem in, for example, veterinarian clinics in places with universal healthcare for humans, whereas in hospitals and other places of care for humans, you must often wait and wait and wait for access to (often life-saving) MRI tests: because universal care creates so many OTHER shortages beyond doctors, nurses, and other staff.

These endless shortages are the result of still more Marxist economic naïveté.

In the real world, thus, so-called universal healthcare, because it by definition operates at a perpetual loss, requires constant measures to prevent it from collapsing economically:

As mentioned, one of those measures is cost controls.

In all places with universal healthcare, strict cost-controls are implemented and constantly added — by a gigantic bureau of planners — which is why in such systems the average amount of time doctors spend with patients is limited: in Japan, which is often regarded as one of the best universal healthcare examples in the world, the average doctor-patient time is less than five minutes!

This bureaucracy also by definition mushrooms into endless permutations and red-tape, and among the many ramifications of this — please listen — America, which because of the profit-motive leads the world overall in medical technologies, innovations, and medicines, subsidizes the entire world because of the policy of universal healthcare.

Yes, you read that right.

In other words, you’ll often hear, for example, how inexpensive the same drugs are in places with universal healthcare compared with America. And this is true: they often are drastically cheaper.

But you won’t ever hear why: i.e. that it is precisely because America must pick up the remaining tab for the rest of the world that our costs are more expensive.

This is just one of the many ramifications of the cost controls that must be implemented in countries with universal healthcare.

Nor will you hear how the bureaucratic monstrosity known as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) makes it mind-bogglingly complex for new medications to be created and approved — sometimes taking decades — and this as well drives up the cost of medicine and medical care: it drives it up astronomically.

It’s also another textbook example of how socialism loathes laissez-faire even while it relies upon it ENTIRELY in order to exist.

And it’s also, of course, another textbook example of how government controls and regulations create problems to begin with, and then the “free-market” (that doesn’t actually exist) is the one blamed for these problems so that deeper controls can then be demanded. All the while, it’s only actual laissez-faire principles that can truly fix the problem.

Another thing you’ll see in all countries with universal healthcare is healthcare rationing.

Rationing is part and parcel of universal healthcare because it’s necessary.

They don’t like to call it rationing, of course, and so they use any number of different terms (i.e. “limited funds,” “over-use of medical care”), but no serious person I know of, even those in favor, denies that under conditions of universal care, bureaus ultimately determine who gets what care — including, of course, who lives and dies, as Obama’s medical advisor famously made no secret of.

As the Alfie Evans case recently demonstrated to the world so starkly and horrifyingly.

I ask you in all sincerity to, at least for a moment, think of it this way:

You may not in theory like “for-profit healthcare,” but under such a system, can you deny that your health is at the very least NOT determined by government or governmental bureaus? You may have other arguments and objections, but you cannot, I don’t think, seriously deny that.

Please remember also: American medicine is already over half socialized, which has created staggering inflations and any number of other insoluble issues.

I ask you to please consider the following:

Imagine if food and shelter — both which are even more urgent human needs than medicine — imagine if they were deemed too important to be left to “open-market and unbridled laissez-faire,” and therefore government must provide universal food coverage, food care for all, and shelter for all. This is not purely hypothetical, by the way. It’s exactly the philosophy behind virtually all strains of socialist theory, and it’s how they’ve played out in a number of different countries — ranging from North Korea and Cuba, to the USSR and Pol Pot’s Cambodia and of course Communist China.

Under such systems, governmental agents assume control of food production and food distribution and housing, and do you know what happens then?

Many, many, many things — none of which are good:

Everything from lack of food diversity to government telling you what you may and may not grow to eat, or cultivate or milk or raise, to starving people waiting hours in breadlines for stale bread and then, after waiting all day in the bitter cold, being told that the bread rationing for the day is done, and so you must leave empty-handed and still starving.

Houses old, cold, and crumbling.

Which is PRECISELY why Nikita Kruschev and Boris Yeltsin simply did not believe their eyes when for the first time they saw an American supermarket: the sheer abundance and diversity that laissez-faire creates, with no shortages even imagined — this was beyond anything their socialized systems (and brains) could conceive. (To his great credit, Boris Yeltsin completely changed his way of thinking.)

The exact same is true of medicine.

I promise you what I’m telling you is accurate.

Perhaps most insidious of all: once such systems are enacted, no matter how dismal and inefficient they actually are, in a very short time, people cannot imagine life without government providing said things. In fact, this is the very situation we’re in with universal healthcare — and it’s the most challenging thing to overcome in demonstrating to people why universal healthcare does not work: the notion has already become so entrenched that people simply cannot conceive government not providing at least some measure of it.

Entrenchment is in this way a form of indoctrination.

I urge you to begin thinking of healthcare in a slightly different way. Think of it, even if it’s just for a moment, like this:

Think of it as dentistry already is in America.

Think of it as veterinary medicine already is, and Lasik and other cosmetic procedures.

Think of it like your eye-glass-clinic or optometry shop.

Now observe the sheer number and variety and quality of vet clinics and dentists and optometrists you have to choose from right now in America — precisely because those industries have been left comparatively free (though it IS significant to note that no industry has been left untouched by the horrid hand of government, and to the precise extent that it’s been meddled with, it is inflated and warped, and would be even less expensive and with better care and more options had it all been left alone).

Observe, for instance, how many dental practitioners or orthodontists or optometrists you have to choose from — their payment plans, the ACTUAL insurance you may (or may not: it’s up to each individual) purchase.

Observe the generosity and charity of most all providers and clinics.

(Though I’m not a fan of Ron Paul or his equally religious son Rand Paul, they are both MD’s — and by all accounts they are good MD’s — and they make the following point articulately, no matter the smears from both rightwingers and left: under conditions of freedom, in cases of emergency, medical practitioners don’t heartlessly let people die, as the government-lovers never tire of telling you. And before government got so involved in healthcare, many, many, many private charities — both religious and non-religious — as well as actual insurance, existed for emergency care. And it works far better than political care.)

Observe how today in America people are not bleeding from the mouths in the streets for lack of dental care, with nowhere to go. It is not a crisis. Dentists and dental offices are everywhere.

Nor are animals in America dying everywhere in the streets for want of veterinary care. Vet clinics (24 hour included) are everywhere. Private organizations and charities are everywhere for pets.

Observe how many clinics there are of ALL kinds, walk-in and otherwise: observe how they’ve sprung up under conditions of freedom and the corollary freedom to make money providing these services.

You must not allow yourself to be intimidated, bullied, or brainwashed into believing that you’re “inhumane” if you don’t believe in the vague and totally untenable notion of universal care.

Allowing full freedom, I absolutely assure you, will bring about far, far, far more care and vastly more compassion than being forced into providing medical care for everyone, and this is not just speculation.

It will also instantly abolish all the impossible-to-negotiate red-tape and bureaucracy — including (very significantly) the crony insurance system, as well as everyone’s concern with what her or his neighbors are eating and drinking and smoking since we’re all paying for each other.

If you truly want to solve the healthcare crisis — and I mean truly — you must change your thinking about what creates the problems in the first place, and also what the proper solution is.

What creates and maintains the best care?

Government bureaus?

Or conditions of freedom?

To help answer that, I urge you again to think for a moment about dental care, orthodontics, veterinary clinics, Lasik and optometry.

If you can get past all the dogma and the propaganda behind the dogma that you’ve been hammered with your entire life, you’ll see that the evidence is overwhelming.

At the very minimum, I urge you not to fall for the ridiculing tactics that you’re “inhumane” if you don’t believe in being forced to provide healthcare for everyone else. Such policies, even if they sound good and humane in theory, have dire practical consequences in how they play out: from shortages, to cost controls, to death panels and other rationing measures, to never-ending inflation.

I’ll close by saying that people often tell me that my notions of laissez-faire may have worked at one time, and yet now the world is “far too complex,” as one person recently put it, “for such a system of hands-off.” But the paradox of this and the actual truth of the matter is that just the opposite is the case:

The MORE complex a society becomes, the LESS equipped and able centralized-planning committees are to manage that complexity.

One of the best illustrations of this — best because it’s demonstrated in such a way that virtually anyone, no matter their political leaning or their level of economic understanding, can see the inherent logic of it — is in how pencils are made.

Another example is in how a sandwich is made:

Andy George tried to experience the production of a sandwich from scratch. He made a sandwich by using as little trade and processed products as possible. He had to grow vegetables, produce cheese, make bread, all himself. Of course, he ‘cheated’ a little by using kitchen tools and other ‘capital goods’ which would have been unavailable in a total autarkic economy. But even with this, he spent $1,500 and six months of his life to obtain one sandwich.

Today, it costs a few dollars and mere minutes to buy a sandwich in a supermarket. Free trade is precisely what allows us to obtain an ever more optimal division of labor when it is enabled on a large scale. This division of labor allows us to save time while reducing poverty.

That, mind you, is one sandwich, and he didn’t, of course, manufacture any of the machines or equipment he needed to make all the ingredients — nor does it even touch upon all the transportation required.

Concerning complexity and the impossibility of centralized-planning bureaus able to manage this complexity, there’s also the very closely related and insurmountable calculation problem.

Even if you hate economics, a sentiment with which I completely sympathize, I nonetheless believe it is vital that all people — left, right, or middle — grasp this very basic issue, which is not really hard to grasp: economic calculation.

It is bedrock. It is a crux. And it is in many ways all that really needs to be said.

I repeat:

The more complex any given society, the more impossible it is for any planning committees or bureaus, no matter how brilliant its members, no matter how vast their numbers, to manage for any length of time.

Whereas upon the other hand laissez-faire, through its legal recognition of person and full property rights (including the right to trade products and services and to earn money), organizes all this complexity voluntarily, seamlessly, elegantly, peacefully, and in a way beneficial to all.

And this is why so-called universal healthcare creates a healthcare system that is in actuality not universal at all — not any more than it is compassionate or humane.

September 22, 2018September 23, 2018

The Path of the Just is as a Shining Light which Shines More and More Unto the Perfect Day

This is a repost from some time ago — the most articulate and thoughtful and heartfelt review of this book that I ever received, from a wonderful person I’ve never met and with whom I barely communicated, and that was a long time ago:

I finished reading Ray Harvey’s More and More unto the Perfect Day more than a year ago – for the third time. I had intended to write a review of the book immediately following each reading, but couldn’t gather my thoughts into a neat pile. Instead, I was left with crooked, overlapped, often torn conclusions of how the book had affected me. I have taken notes. I have made an outline in order to follow the storyline. I still find myself unable to write a standard type review, so instead, I’ll submit to my visceral reactions…as a human being; not as a writer, critic, or editor.

First, it pissed me off because it attempted to challenge the beliefs that I have held dear for the entirety of my 38 years. For this, I commend it. A religious man’s faith is tested. The pages where this occurred in real-time are now filled with dry gorges — valleys that were formed by the weight of my tears. Old tears.

Second, the crooked, yet parallel, line it draws with my own life had me looking over my shoulder with the turn of every page. From things as provocative and significant as sourceless anger and spontaneous illness to spooky similarities like Cherokee heritage, acne scars, stretch marks, the names and appearances of family members…I experienced what I would call a one-dimensional, reflective haunting.

Here’s where I stop counting and fall into what flirts with a search for words. This book reached deep within in me. I am a deer that is not yet dead, but being prematurely field-dressed due to her poacher’s anxiety, guilt…something. A hand grabs at my trachea, cuts off the air, and pulls downward, to a place outside my own body. This book has found places within me that have been injured. Some of them have been healed. Others are now bleeding.

I’m not a philosopher, and don’t wish to be. I’m not an intellectual, though I sometimes envy those who are. That’s why it’s so difficult to qualify how and why this book affected me so profoundly. I’m still not sure I understand all the material. Maybe I never will; maybe it’s not intended to be fully understood.

I have found myself wishing I had never read it. Yet, I have read it numerous times. I have attempted to rid my mind of the images it imparts. Yet, I revisit them and curl up into the places they have hollowed out for me. Its lyrical prose is like a song. Its imagery is dark, shapely, and at times, far too real.

Thank you, Mr. Harvey. I don’t know if you intended to do this to me, but it has been done. I doubt I will ever read another book like yours, but if one comes along, the will power to keep my hands off of it will have to be strong. Thank you for demonstrating how good literary fiction distracts the conscious mind while implanting belief systems into the subconscious and unconscious minds. You have reminded me why I love the written word and why I am addicted to its effects – even if those effects are those which I’d rather not endure.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is NOT impressed by predictability, pedestrian prose, shallow characters, and ignorance as an ultimate form of contentedness. If you fit the profile, hold on. There’s no telling how deep this one will take you.

(Source)

Many dislike this book, and I’ve been surprised at the amount of hate-mail I’ve gotten over it. It is flawed — I know that — not well-paced and perhaps overly philosophical. Yet it took me almost a decade of my life to write and have published, with two near misses — one from Counterpoint Press (Santa Rosa) and the other from Unbridled Books (Saint Louis), both of whose editors were kind enough to write me personal letters expressing admiration but both of whom felt it ultimately “unmarketable.”

I just reread this book for the first time in almost three years, and I believe more strongly than ever that for all its undeniable flaws, it succeeds on the level I most wanted it to, and that its thematic point is important and intelligible. (“If it ceases to be intelligible, it ceases to be art,” said Walter Pater.)

This book took unspeakable amounts of discipline to finish. It very easily could have not gotten finished, and it almost didn’t. It is a long, dense novel, and I labored like never before over every word of every sentence in this book (122,000 words), and rereading it over the past week-and-a-half brought back a heartbreaking multitude of memories — so many specific rooms and places and coffeeshops and cups of coffee and seasons and thoughts about storyline and so many old bookstores and libraries (I lived in these places for much of this book, primarily for Ethiopia and its unbelievable history, much of which goes far deeper than the internet currently provides, and a great deal of which information I wound up cutting, but it remains dear to me), and then the final push to finish the last hundred pages: a Herculean task, if I may say, driving out alone into West Texas and New Mexico, living in motels and doing very little more than writing and going for long runs in the high deserts and eating only occasionally.

Sometimes when writers read their early work, they wince in embarrassment. I half expected that might be the case in rereading this, my first published novel. It was not.

In many ways, it was just the opposite: I almost cannot believe that I wrote it — and I don’t mean that in any way self-aggrandizingly, but only to say that it’s such a strange, philosophical novel that I don’t quite know how it all came together. Dostoevsky is clearly the driving force behind much of it — all four of his masterpieces, but especially Demons and Crime & Punishment.

Thank you again for the inexpressibly beautiful review, Jacinda: a friend and fellow writer whom I’ve never met.

Here’s a less understanding review I once posted.

September 16, 2018September 18, 2018

Higher Education: Institutions of Staggering Debt and Indoctrination

Why is college so expensive?

For the exact same reason that healthcare has become so expensive.

Which is the same reason rents in San Francisco and Boulder have become so expensive.

Economist Daniel Lin, professor of economics at American University, explains this basic and well-known principle, in three short minutes:

Even worse than the monetary cost of college, however, is the intellectual and psychological toll:

Every year millions of teenagers — approximately 20 million in America alone this fall — will attend college. For those who finish, only the slimmest minority will emerge unscathed: i.e with their independent mind and their capacity for independent thought undamaged and intact.

For most, in my observation, this damage will not be reversed — though it CAN be, always — but will persist and deepen through life. College is not only a maze of debt: it is without question the largest secular church in the world, indoctrinating impressionable minds with its frozen Neo-Marxist dogma as thoroughly as any non-secular church I’ve ever personally seen.

Camille Paglia — an independent thinker (if ever there was one), a college professor and a brilliant writer and leftist whom I’ve always admired — and Jordan Peterson, whom I’m not a big fan of, talk about this “feel-good indoctrination,” as she puts it, the “cafeteria curriculum,” the “laziness of Neo-Marxism,” and “the primacy of the individual.” Their conversation is over-intentional, but it’s also interesting and rather refreshing:

The upshot: stay out of school, kids.

September 14, 2018September 14, 2018

Speaking of Corporations and Capitalism and Privilege

I recently wrote about some of this, and then just last night I read the following.

Native American Senator Elizabeth Warren, in kicking off what many think will be her 2020 Presidential run, proposes what she calls — apparently without irony — the Accountable Capitalism Act.

As actual legislation, it will go nowhere and it’s not intended to: it is more of a symbolic proposal to show people where she stands and the direction she wants to take the democrats:

Under the legislation, corporations with more than $1bn in annual revenue would be required to obtain a corporate charter from the federal government—and the document would mandate that companies not just consider the financial interests of shareholders. Instead, businesses would have to consider all major corporate stakeholders—which could include workers, customers, and the cities and towns where those corporations operate. Anyone who owns shares in the company could sue if they believed corporate directors were not meeting their obligations.

Employees at large corporations would be able to elect at least 40% of the board of directors. An estimated 3,500 public US companies and hundreds of other private companies would be covered by the mandates.

(Source)

I’m writing about this now because it occurred to me that it’s a near-perfect example of how precisely backwards the Progressives understand the science of economics — and I’m not being snide here when I say that but literal and sincere — in this case specifically: how government intervention and meddling will create actual privilege:

You see, back in the days of feudalism, when property wasn’t recognized as a right but the crown held all property in “tenancy,” that same crown — i.e. the Monarch — granted “prerogatives and privileges in exchange for services rendered back to the king.”

This is in principle exactly — and I mean exactly — what Native American Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposal would re-establish: by abolishing the right of free-and-clear property ownership, it would make ownership a state-granted privilege.

“In America, and to some extent in Britain and Europe, as the legal remnants of feudalism were being cleaned up, the basis for the law of corporations was changed from one of privileges to one of rights. A corporate charter wasn’t [any longer] a special favor the sovereign granted in exchange for special services. It was a recognition of free-and-clear ownership of the corporation by its shareholders.”

(Source)

Quoting again from her proposal:

The proposal would create a new Office of United States Corporations within the Department of Commerce, which would be responsible for granting the charters—and which could revoke a charter if a state attorney general requests it, and the office finds the firm has a history of egregious and repeated illegal conduct and has failed take action to correct it.

This is another textbook example of the antiquated, regressive nature of modern-day Progressivism, which is so shockingly and dangerously closed-off and naive to economic history and fact.

The left has a long history of antipathizing free-and-clear ownership — most people know this, even leftwingers:

[The left has] always hated the concept of free-and-clear ownership, and they have been struggling all along to go back to a neo-feudal system in which all economic activity takes place only with the permission of the sovereign. They merely give it a gloss of democracy by claiming that the sovereign, this time, will be ‘the people’ [which is only composed of individuals, not all of whom agree].

You can get a sense of this neo-feudal approach in the way that corporations, in [Elizabeth Warren’s] proposal, would be attached to the land like medieval serfs, unable to move or change without the permission of the cities and towns where they operate. While in theory this is a way of making corporations answer to ‘the people’ in the same way that feudal barons answered to the king, notice that in practice this proposal gives power to bureaucrats and ambitious, self-promoting politicians.

(Source)

Yes.

Yes, indeed.

In closely related news, your tax dollars at work for self-described Democratic-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, friend of the working man, reminding us again how easy it is to spend other people’s money:

September 12, 2018September 15, 2018

Global Climate Action Summit

Tomorrow — Thursday September 13th, 2018 — Al Gore, Van Jones, Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Michael Bloomberg, Nancy Pelosi, and many more will fly in on fossil-fuel-powered jumbo-jets and ride in fossil-fuel-powered motor cavalcades to gather together in fossil-fuel-temperature-regulated rooms (rooms composed largely of fossil fuels and their by-products) to lecture us again on our use of fossil fuels, and our “carbon footprint.”

They call this the Global Climate Action Summit.

It will be broadcast through cameras and televisions and live-streamed through computers, all of which are composed of plastics and rare-earth minerals that are the product of fossil fuels and mining.

I’m writing this now to tell you that during this so-called Summit, a number of real scientists and other independent thinkers will be across the bridge live-streaming rebuttals to the prevarications and hypocrisy and misinformation coming out of the “Global Climate Action Summit.”

You can watch Thursday’s live-stream at this link.

You can watch Friday’s live-stream at this link.

But if you happen to be in the audience at the “Action Summit,” please ask Al Gore if he still stands by his statement in 2007 of “20-foot sea-level rises in the near future.”

(That same year the International Panel on Climate Change, a thoroughly leftist organization composed of scientists and policy makers around the world, estimated sea levels would rise a mere 0.18 to 0.6 meters (0.59 to 2.0 feet) over the next 100 years.)

Ask him if he still believes it is “appropriate,” as he put it, “to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are.” Unquote.

Ask him why he backed-out of his scheduled debate with former Greenpeacer Bjorn Lomborg.

Ask Al Gore about his own home-energy use, especially compared with George W. Bush’s.

Ask Van Jones if he still believes 9/11 was an “inside job.”

Ask them all if they had comfortable trips in on their jumbo jet rides and in their motor cavalcades, in their air-conditioned vehicles, and ask them also how their trips around the world have been lately, their luxury hotel-room stays, to lecture the world on its use of fossil-fuels, so on, while over a billion people in dire poverty in the world still do not have access to basic power.

Ask them: Have their trips been pleasant and comfortable?

(Harrison Ford, if I’m not mistaken, is a pilot who own his own planes and jets which, also if I’m not mistaken, are powered by fossil fuels. Ask him: did he fly himself in on a private jet?)

Ask them all which is more likely (by far) to contaminate ground water: hydraulic fracturing (i.e. fracking) or mining the material required for solar panels?

Ask them about the neodymium and other rare-earth minerals that wind-power requires, and ask them are they all okay and at peace with the unequivocal environmental destruction that this causes.

Ask them if they’re all still opposed to nuclear energy, which is clean, safe, abundant, and emits zero carbon emissions, and, as a follow-up to this, ask them if they believe in dismantling France’s use of nuclear energy, which works so well, as does the U.S. Navy’s nuclear energy program, neither of which have ever had a significant mishap.

Ask them about all the polar bear prevarications.

Ask them, lastly, about my friend Dr. Bill Gray (RIP), Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and at one time, and for a very long time, the world’s foremost expert on hurricanes and the left’s despicable behavior and harassment of him, which lasted all the way to the end of his life and even after he was dead — all because he dared to think for himself and do his own research, well into his 80’s, and because his data on hurricanes holds up to this very day, and yet it does NOT conform to their catastrophic propaganda — and who, in a debate I’m glad to have helped organize, exposed the alarmist Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, as ipse-dixit debater extraordinaire.

Report back.

September 11, 2018

More (Proven) Climate Fraud at the New York Times

I recently wrote about the New York Times 31,000 word propaganda piece on climate — in which they failed to mention, among many other things, the over 1 billion people on planet earth who do not have access to power, as the New York Times indeed has (and couldn’t operate without) — and I don’t pretend that the following is any big surprise to anyone who actually thinks about the issue. Still, the following is incontrovertible. It’s also damning.

Watch it all: