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Corporations, Capitalism, Laissez-Nous Faire

As I’ve quoted before:

“Whether one likes it or not, it is a fact that the main issues of present day politics are purely economic and cannot be understood without a grasp of economic theory.”

Wrote Ludwig von Mises.

I think his words are true.

And as I’ve also said before:

Like the human body, knowledge forms an indivisible unity. It’s interconnected and deeply interwoven. Knowledge is hierarchical and contextual: one part flows inevitably into another.

At the foundation of it all is philosophy.

Philosophy forms the underpinnings of all knowledge.

People don’t believe me when I say this, and yet it’s the truth: I don’t particularly care for politics and economics.

The reason — the only reason — I’ve spent so much of my life and my time writing about these subjects is that they’re inescapable, and because they affect our lives so immediately and extraordinarily:

One is either knowledgable about them, or one isn’t.

One is either informed or one isn’t.

One either buys into the easy platitudes of the day — right, left, or middle, it makes no real difference — or one considers the issues for oneself and forms non-dogmatic conclusions.

Package-deals — i.e. what right, left, and middle offer — do not work for philosophy. Philosophy is too vast and complex.

It requires independent thought, and a great deal of it.

It takes a great deal of thought and conscious effort.

It requires independent integration, which is what true apprehension consists of.

One either jumps in and swims, or one is swept along with the tides and the trends — until, in the latter case, one grows old and one day finds that he holds convictions — convictions he’s even willing to die for, the foundations of which, however, he’s never seriously thought about or questioned, but mostly grew up with or among.

This not only can happen: it happens, I think, more often than not. People grow old and die holding like grim death onto beliefs, either secular or non, it doesn’t matter, which they’ve never bothered to seriously investigate. It is a tragedy.

Two of the most regurgitated buzz-word platitudes I hear today, rivaling even “inequality and privilege” (and not unconnected with them), are “corporations” and “capitalism.”

In my experience, “capitalism” as it’s used by the left is seldom defined — and even more seldom, correctly defined — so that it’s turned into a kind of non-word, which is to say, an anti-concept. For this reason, I myself have stopped using it to denote free-exchange. It’s been corrupted.

Karl Marx is often credited with coining the term “capitalism,” but in actuality Marx was far from the first to use it. Neither, as you’ll also often hear, was William Thackeray’s 1854 novel The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family the first place it appeared.

The French socialist Louis Blanc’s employment of the term in Organisation du travail precedes Thackeray’s and is, in any case, more significant in the history of both the use of the term and of social and political thought generally. As economic historian Geoffrey M. Hodgson observes, the word capitalisme did not appear “in at least the first five editions” of that book (1839 to 1848), but emerges in 1850’s ninth edition, in which Blanc argues that the fact of capital’s usefulness should not be “confused with what I call capitalism, that is to say the appropriation of capital by some, to the exclusion of others.” Hodgson notes a still earlier appearance of the term, possibly the first, in the English translation of an article Blanc penned during his exile in London.

Writes Blanc, “The suppression of capitalism cannot, then, have anything to do with the suppression of capital.”

(Link)

But, whatever.

Corporations, like business partnerships and LLC’s, are not state-created.

Here is a thorough though technical article debunking misconceptions and myths about the totally misunderstood and vilified “corporation.”

Here is another good article, written with exceptional clarity and logic, at the Library of Economics and Liberty, which, by the way, is an incredible non-partisan resource for true economic literature.

Here is the short version: corporations are VOLUNTARY (contractual) agreements between humans, and if you want to “do away” with this business organization called the corporation, then be prepared for no more driving, flying, bicycling, shipping, phoning, computing, television, newspapers, magazines, books, mp3 music, modern medicine, beauty products, banks, private postal service, plumbing, refrigeration, electricity, all other energy, and virtually everything else.

The truth is that any business, no matter how small, can become incorporated. In a free society, anyone who wants to grow their own food or plants or weed on their own land or in their own home or ON their home is allowed to do so. They can become an incorporated business, or not.

People should be entirely free to do this whether they do it by means of hydroponics, vertical gardening, or anything else.

For the exact same reasons, if a person wants to sell to me food or plants she’s grown and the transaction is purely voluntary, we in a truly free society are entirely free to do so.

Also — and this is for the exact same reasons as well — if a person starts up a business on her own property or through voluntary transaction rents a property (we’ll call it a “store” or a “restaurant”) which acts as a sort of middle-person between me and the grower of food, that person is entirely free to do so.

The same is true of a person who, for instance, harvests and distills brandy on her property, and the person who opens a business called a “bar” or “liquor store,” which acts as a middle-person and which people are free to patronize, or not.

All of these businesses can freely become corporations.

I repeat: in a truly free society, all of these (and everything like it) are permissible, legal, and good — just as we are free to voluntarily buy or sell things through the mail or the internet.

Upon the other hand, it is NOT just or right to force anyone into any lifestyle, as no government has the right to infringe upon private transactions and businesses, so long as they are all voluntary and non-coerced, and that includes (incorporated) businesses that become fantastically successful and wealthy.

There’s Nothing Wrong with Socialism — as Long as It’s Voluntary

How government regulations trash the environment

Environmental Protection: The Surprising Solution

Does all this sound stupidly obvious?

Good. It is. And we agree.

You cannot force me to shop at Walmart. I cannot force you to shop at Whole Foods or the local co-op. You cannot force me into yeoman-or-cottage economics. I cannot force you into being a business-owner. You cannot force me to avoid organic food or meat or soda-pop or booze. I cannot shut down (or have shut down) your business because it sells alcohol or meat or non-organic food.

We can win people’s business, or not. We can also coexist. We can especially do this if the economy is vibrant, which under conditions of freedom, it is.

I know: this is all horribly basic. And yet, and yet:

“Isn’t our only hope that industrialized society will collapse?”

From a piece I wrote some time ago:

Laissez faire is first and foremost a beautiful notion: leave the world alone. It manages itself.

In many ways this idea is the very seat of human civilization.

The term is pronounced lay-say-FAIR and derives its present-day meaning from Vincent de Gournay’s half-forgotten codification:

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

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

People who believe in total, unadulterated laissez faire, as I do, believe that society contains within it the capacity for ordering and managing its own path of development.

This includes ecosystems of every stripe and variety, which are clearly best managed by a system of full private property rights, and not centralized planning committees or an elite bureau who determine everything for the rest of us.

It follows thus that people should enjoy the liberty to manage their own lives, associate as they please, exchange with anyone and everyone, which includes — and please listen closely — owning and accumulating property and otherwise being unencumbered even when one grows wealthy.

For all the lip-service they pay anarchism, the egalitarians, the communitarians, the agrarians, and all the other similarly-minded groups, they simply do not tolerate hierarchy, neither in wealth-and-property accumulation, nor in employment structure — blanking out, of course, the incontrovertible fact that human beings possess varying degrees of motivation and ambition: the two greatest factors in “inequality and privilege.”

It is for this reason that implementing egalitarianism in any form requires the diametric opposite of laissez faire: it requires force.

Laissez faire asks only this: that you leave others alone.

Laissez faire is deeply connected with the concept of individual rights.

Laissez faire states that your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

There are, in the present day, two main alternatives to laissez faire, neither of which is more convincing than the other:

There is the so-called Left, which, to speak generally, believes that if we let the economic sphere be free, the world will collapse. The Left then hypothesizes all manner of disaster that will befall humankind without government control.

And then there is the so-called Right, which is every bit as misbegotten, convinced as it is that state control must happen in, for instance, your bedroom, or the world will collapse into debauchery and crime and war.

Laissez faire rejects both views — for semi-obvious reasons:

“The harmony of interests,” as Claude Frédéric Bastiat called it, which make up the social order. And the fact that human freedom is a birthright.

Laissez faire is the view that the artists and creators, the merchants and business-people, the philanthropists and farmers, the entrepreneurs and property-owners — all, in short, should be left alone.

It is the view that everyone, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, possesses the inalienable right to her own life and property — and only her own life and property — and this is the only way for all humans to live freely.

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Quiddity

This certainly beats most of the other stuff I’ve had sent to me lately. Thank you TRD! And thank you Merrriam-Webster for using my sentence.

“Quiddity” — Word of the Day, September 6th, 2018.

That article, incidentally, which discusses the difference between mezcal and tequila, was part of a monthly series I once wrote for the Coloradoan newspaper.

If you don’t want to deal with their fireworks display of pop-up advertisements, you may read it here on my website.

I always thought that along with the heartbreaking beauty of distilled spirits, it was one of my better efforts, which I know isn’t saying much.

Nevertheless.



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Democratic-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “Communism Is Good,” & Why California Cities Are Becoming Unaffordable

That tweet was recent.

I know of a few hundred million people who’d probably be willing to debate the statement — except they’re in prison or were already murdered.

(Happy Birthday, Karl Marx!)

Democratic-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who called for tax cuts when she was running her own business) famously wants “healthcare, housing, and education for all,” and plans to fund it by “raising taxes.”

Forget, for a moment, the fact that NO amount of taxation — not even 100 percent — could ever actually provide all this, as many on her side correctly noted. I have a more fundamental question for her:

Do you know how a single pencil is made, Ms. Cortez? Do you know why pencils in America are so abundant and inexpensive, and why (therefore) even the poorest have easy access to them — whereas in certain socialized countries, pencils are scarce and expensive?

It’s an absurdly old and common tactic among government-lovers of all stripes to implement state regulations which create deeper problems, and to then blame the “free market” for these deeper problems which the government controls created in the first place, so that now deeper controls can be demanded.

It’s so common, in fact, that it’s cliche. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s government intervention and violation of property that created the problems to begin with.

Like virtually all socialists, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t understand even rudimentary economics — but I have good news for her: “free” healthcare, housing, and education for all already exists in the United States — in fact, all throughout the United States — and I wonder if she knows where.

Answer:

Indian Country — i.e. the Native American Indian Reservations — where healthcare and education are 100 percent free, housing is fully provided by money that pours freely in, and food as well is provided. Here also property is not private (a core feature of socialism, in any of its variations) but instead is shared and held in trust by a benevolent bureaucracy which oversees everything, and which grants more money to these places than to any other single place in the United States.

Here the leading cause of death among young men is suicide.

These Utopias also have the highest rate of poverty among ANY racial group in the country — more than twice the national average — and are often environmentally dirty and unsanitary, all of which is quite strange, when you think about it, considering their Utopian nature and the sheer amounts of money they receive.

They also have the highest unemployment rates in the country, and perhaps there is a clue there:

In 2016, the last year for which the census data is available, the average household income on reservations was approximately 70 percent below the national average of $57,617. Just over 20 percent of those households earned less than $5,000 a year. More the 25 percent of the reservation populations live below the official poverty level, compared with 13 percent of the United States as a whole.

I respectfully request all self-proclaimed Democratic-Socialists, or anyone even remotely leaning that way, spend some time in Indian Country.

I also strongly recommend reading about the socialist roots of the Reservation System, which is by any standard imaginable an unmitigated catastrophe.

Anent healthcare, I’d like to point out something else, as well.

Healthcare in America has long been over fifty percent socialized (here’s how it all began). The following charts, which are super easy to understand, show in no uncertain terms how medical costs have risen astronomically in direct proportion to third-party payment — and that includes insurer pre-paid healthcare (which is NOT actual insurance, incidentally, and which is also a big part of the problem).

Here are five charts which show the very clear progression and correlation of rising healthcare costs and socialized medicine in America:

The same sort of principle is at work in, for instance, many places in California, and it’s why socialization has made housing unaffordable to all but the very wealthy.

How Big-Government Housing Policies Made San Francisco Unaffordable for All but the Rich:

Despite the insistence that they’re all about helping the disadvantaged, progressive policy has the actual effect of creating a place where only the rich can afford to live….

“Despite the fact that many of the homes and apartments are small and located close together, San Francisco now has the highest rent in the world,” wrote Rachel Alexander in Townhall. “The average monthly rent is $3,500. A median-priced home sells for $1.5 million, but only a paltry 12 percent of residents can afford this.”

Why Is Housing so Expensive?

Read the the full answer here (it’s pretty short).

Read also why California’s once-beautiful cities are becoming unlivable (also short).

Conversely — and this is important — over the past two or so decades, U.S. medical prices have risen at approximately 5 percent every year, whereas prices for Lasik an other cosmetic surgery, which are not covered by a third-party payment system, have fallen.

You may see the unequivocal data from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery here and here. This is some of what you’ll find:

1. For the top ten most popular cosmetic procedures displayed above for last year, none of them has increased in price since 1998 more than the 47.2% increase in overall consumer prices, meaning that the real, inflation-adjusted price of all ten of those procedures has fallen over the last 18 years.

2. For the three most popular procedures in 2016 (botox, laser hair removal, and chemical peel?–?all nonsurgical cosmetic procedures), the nominal price for each has actually fallen since 1998 by large double-digit percentage declines of -11.3%, -21.7% and -34.8% respectively.

That is, the prices for those procedures have fallen in price since 1998 measured in current dollars, even before making any adjustments for inflation. Note also that the demand for those three procedures has increased dramatically, especially botox procedures (29-time increase since 1998) and laser hair removal (9.5-time increase).

3. The two most popular surgical cosmetic procedures last year were liposuction and breast augmentation, which have increased in current dollar prices by 30.6% and 26.2% respectively since 1998. Both of those average price increases were less than the 47.2% increase in consumer prices over the last 18 years, meaning that the real, inflation-adjusted prices for liposuction and breast augmentation procedures have fallen since 1998.

4. The average price increase between 1998 and 2016 for the 20 cosmetic procedures displayed above was 32%, which is less than the 47.2% increase in consumer prices in general. Of the 20 procedures above, 14 increased in price by less than overall inflation (and therefore decreased in real terms) and only six increased in price by more than inflation.

And most importantly, none of the 20 cosmetic procedures in the table above have increased in price by anywhere close to the 100.5% increase in the price of medical care services or the 176.7% increase in hospital services since 1998.

(Link)

Here is another chart that shows the rising costs of healthcare since 1970 as America has increasingly moved to third-party payment.

I know that socialism, whether democratic or otherwise, is trendy. I know it’s hip. I know it’s all the rage.

But I know also that it won’t work. I know that it cannot work: it is impossible mathematically. It’s doomed to fail because of the calculation problem, among other things. But even more:

Nobody — no matter how supposedly charismatic the politician, no matter how big the bureau (Obama and Clinton ICEd as many people as dumbfuck Donald, and not even the extremely liberal ACLU really denies it) — nobody has the right to the life or property of another.

Life, freedom, the sanctity of the individual, independent thought — these are timeless.

They are beyond trendy and hip and faddish — because they are right and they are true.

And once you concede that principle — which virtually everybody, right, left, or middle has — you can never again properly defend the sanctity of your person and property — i.e. laissez-faire and individual rights.

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Cultural Amnesia and Losing Earth



On August 1st, The New York Times published a thirty-one-thousand-word propaganda piece called “Losing Earth,” which in thirty-one-thousand words — almost the length of my latest book — did not manage to mention nuclear energy except once in passing. They also somehow managed to ignore the sheer amount of fossil fuels and rare-earth minerals — in short, industry — required to create and maintain “renewables.” They did, however, unwittingly “deal a horrible blow to the fringe activists” (unquote) who don’t understand production or even the most basic economics, and this blow has left activists everywhere scurrying to their soapboxes.

“The idea that energy companies ‘knew everything there was to know about climate change,’ as Bill McKibben likes to say, and that the rest of us didn’t know about it until James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988, ‘is one of the worst examples we have of the cultural amnesia of this country and especially around this issue,’ Nathaniel Rich [the author of the New York Times article] told NewsHour.”

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, who (like me) long ago left the movement because of an utter and absolute disenchantment with its innumerable, unignorable lies — i.e. Noble Cause Corruption — as well as its patently propagandistic and unscientific methodology, recently wrote a must-read article titled Twelve Invisible Eco-Catastrophes and Threats of Doom That are Actually Fake. Among them:

Coral reefs around the world are dying and Ocean “Acidification” will kill all the coral reefs and shellfish in the world, and, of course, here is a “sea of plastic” the size of Texas in the North Pacific Gyre north of Hawaii.

For this last one, he posted this proven fake photo — laughably fake — which, however, eco-warriors and social justice warriors the wide world over are still posting to weariness, without, of course, daring to think for themselves:





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Plastic Straws are a “Gateway Plastic” as Alcohol and Marijuana are a Gateway Drug



Yes, you read that headline correctly.

It is real.

It has come to this:

2018 will forever be remembered as the year that hating plastic straws went mainstream. Once the lonely cause of environmental cranks, now everyone wants to eliminate these suckers from daily life.

In July, Seattle imposed America’s first ban on plastic straws. Vancouver, British Columbia, passed a similar ban a few months earlier. There are active attempts to prohibit straws in New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco. A-list celebrities from Calvin Harris to Tom Brady have lectured us on giving up straws. Both National Geographic and The Atlantic have run long profiles on the history and environmental effects of the straw. Vice is now treating their consumption as a dirty, hedonistic excess.

(Source)

This will go down in world history as an example of perfect propaganda — in large part because you’ll very soon start hearing how effective these bans have been, despite the fact that they’re not the real problem, and despite the fact that it’s the weight of plastic that should most concern environmentalists, not the raw number of plastic things used, or whether those objects are recyclable.

[M]ost plastic, whatever form it enters the ocean as, will eventually be broken up into much smaller pieces known as micro-plastics. It is these micro-plastics that … pile up on the ocean floor, and leech into the stomachs and flesh of sea creatures.

Reducing the amount of micro-plastics in the ocean thus requires cutting down on the aggregate weight of plastics entering the ocean each year. It cannot be stressed enough that straws, by weight, are a tiny portion of this plastic: At most, straws account for about 2,000 tons of the 9 million tons of plastic that are estimated to enter the ocean each year, according to the Associated Press .02 percent of all plastic waste. The pollution problem posed by straws looks even smaller when considering that the United States is responsible for about ONE PERCENT [my emphasis] of plastic waste entering the oceans, with straws being a smaller percentage still.

As countless experts have stressed, truly addressing the problem of marine plastic pollution will require going after the source of this pollution, namely all the uncollected litter from poorer coastal countries that lack developed waste management systems.

Straw banners have proven stubbornly resistant to this logic. Instead, they have chosen to rely on either debunked statistics (such as the claim that Americans use 500 million straws a day, which was the product of a 9-year-old’s research) or totally unproven notions (like the theory that straws are a “gateway plastic“) in order to justify petty prohibitions on innocuous straws.

(Ibid)

Yes, 2018, the year the left took an even sharper and more dangerous turn:

Coming out OFFICIALLY against freedom of speech.

The year they sought to jail people who use plastic straws.

The year bar-straws were labeled a “gateway plastic”(!)

(Please note that, all who think me hyperbolic whenever I say the left and the right are merely two sides of the same penny, which they are.)

The year Starbucks Bans Plastic Straws — and Winds Up Using MORE Plastic because of It

The year they doubled-down on the debunked idea that Scandinavia is a model for “democratic socialism”

The year they blinded themselves one time too many in seeking to resurrect the horrific and immoral ideology responsible for more death and destruction than any other ideology in world history:

The Questions Stephen Colbert Should Have Asked Democratic Socialist “Rock Star” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

It’s been a very bad, sad year.

And it’s only halfway through.





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Single-Use Plastic And Why Nine Out of Ten Statistics are Wrong

[UPDATED] I was just sent this: SHOCKER:RECYCLING PLASTIC IS MAKING OCEAN LITTER WORSE

This one is surging — or, I should say, re-surging, since it’s not at all new — and you will watch it go stratospheric.

You will also watch the Texas-sized exaggerations and outright prevarications spread across the globe with pretty much the exact same speed as legal bans on single-use plastic.

Here Dr. Tom Hartsfield, physicist and associate Editor at RealClearScience, mathematically debunks the often-repeated claim about Texas-sized islands of garbage in the Pacific:

First, we can do a quick feasibility calculation. The mass of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the plastic from which most water bottles are made, required to create a two-Texas-sized island just one foot thick is 9 trillion pounds. That’s 15 times more than the world’s annual production of plastic. Even if a year’s worth of the world’s spent plastic bottles could be airlifted out over the ocean and directly dropped in one spot, this island could not be made.

So, here are the facts. Much of the ocean contains little to no plastic at all. In the smaller ocean gyres, there is roughly one bottle cap of plastic per 50 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water. In the worst spot on earth, there is about two plastic caps’ worth of plastic per swimming pool of ocean. The majority of the plastic is ground into tiny grains or small thin films, interspersed with occasional fishing debris such as monofilament line or netting. Nothing remotely like a large island exists. Clearly, the scale and magnitude of this problem is vastly exaggerated by environmental groups and media reports [source].)

You may or may not know, as well, that the debate-driving statistic that Americans use “500 million plastic straws a day” was the product of a nine-year-old’s guesstimations, and the truth behind this “wild lie” is morbidly fascinating.

Reason Magazine has listed several major media outlets explicitly perpetuating this particular lie:

CNN

The Washington Post

Reuters

People

Time

Al Jazeera

National Geographic

The Guardian

The Independent (UK)

Seattle Weekly

San Francisco Chronicle

The Sacramento Bee

The Los Angeles Times

Saveur

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

And activist groups also promoting the claim:

The Lonely Whale Foundation

The Plastic Pollution Coalition

The Sierra Club

The National Park Service has also touted it.

So has California Assemblyman Ian Calderon.

It’s also in the text of a Hawaii bill that would ban the distribution of plastic straws in the state.

If you’ve ever wondered how a propaganda campaign begins and then surges across the world, you’re watching it in real-time with single-use plastic.

Keep watching.

It is instructive.

Watch how people, whether in real life or on social media or both, who didn’t really think about the issue one way or another before, are suddenly perfervid — though they know little of the actual data but a lot of the major media talking-points.

As David M. Perry, whose son has Down syndrome and relies on straws, recently wrote for Pacific Standard Magazine:

The oddly singular focus on straws may date back to a a viral 2015 video of a sea turtle with a bloody plastic straw embedded in its nose. The video is horrific. But again, scholars have not identified straws as a particularly grave threat to marine wildlife.

(Michaela Hollywood, who has muscular dystrophy, also wrote an article for The Huffington Post titled “Straws Save Lives Like Mine — Don’t Ban Them!”)

None of which is to diminish the problem of pollution but only to present the actual facts and, most importantly, possible solutions.

Quoting microbial oceanographer Dr. Angelicque White, professor at Oregon State University, after a 2011 expedition to the mythical “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” which lies between California and Japan:

You might see a piece of Styrofoam or a bit of fishing line float by at random intervals after hours or 20 minutes…. There are not floating towers of milk jugs, toilet seats and rubber duckies swirling in the middle of the ocean. The majority of plastic in the sea consists of confetti-like specks that are spread out widely and nearly impossible to see with the naked eye.

The nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup has taken perhaps the closest look at the problem and how to solve it.

Recently, they produced the most comprehensive assessment of the problem ever, which they detail in the 5 March 2018 issue of Scientific Reports — and here is where it gets very real and very interesting — and I ask you to ask yourself why this isn’t commonly reported:

The Ocean Cleanup study estimates that “up to 20 percent of ocean garbage mass resulted from the 2011 Tohoku tsunami,” which indeed pushed an enormous amount of trash out to sea.

Also, the primary items were not plastic straws, plastic cups, or plastic bags — not even close.

“In The Ocean Cleanup’s Pacific patch sample, 46 percent was fish nets. When combined with ropes and lines, it amounted to 52 percent of the trash. The rest included hard plastics ranging from large plastic crates and bottle caps to small fragments referred to as microplastics, which comprise 8 percent of the mass. Obviously, this is not simply a consumer waste issue…. Some of the waste, such as food packaging, included written material that indicated a significant portion came from Asia. Of these, 30 percent were written in Japanese and 30.8 percent were in Chinese.”

(Source)

I modestly suggest we ban fishnets and rope and bottlecaps, before we ban plastic straws and plastic bags.

Incidentally, I once briefly worked in recycling, and recycling, if you don’t know, is a thoroughly industrial process.

Other studies indeed confirm that Asia is a very substantial source of ocean pollution:

China and 11 other Asian nations are responsible for 77 percent to 83 percent of plastic waste entering the oceans because of their poor disposal practices. A 2017 Environmental Sciences & Technology study reported that up to 95 percent of plastic waste enters oceans from one of 10 rivers — eight in Asia and two in Africa….

Of course, other nations should do their best to reduce their contributions, no matter how small. The Science article placed the United States as 20th, but its contribution to ocean plastics was just about 1 percent, even though the United States is among the top plastic producers and consumers. Credit goes to modern waste management practices — landfilling, incineration or recycling — and litter control. (Ibid)

The Ocean Cleanup, which is a good organization founded in 2013, says it’s “developed and can deploy cleanup technologies which could remove more than 50 percent of the waste from the Pacific patch within five years.”

Technological problems require technological solutions.

Another nonprofit called Keep America Beautiful (the weeping Native American man from the old television ads was theirs) has in America been among the foremost fighters of litter since 1953. And they’ve done well: their reports show that U.S. litter has declined by over sixty percent since 1969.

Why do you not often hear that?

I don’t know. Perhaps because it’s not sensationalistic enough or scary enough to make the uncritical masses think we’re on the very brink of destruction.

Malia Blom Hill, a Hawaiian and policy director at the Grassroot Institute, recently wrote a decent article titled “State Legislatures Clutch at Plastic Straws” — which reads, in part:

In the last few weeks, the internet has enjoyed a hearty laugh at a California bill that would ban the use of plastic straws and throw violators in jail. Sneaking under the radar, however, is a similar proposal from Hawaii. The Hawaii version is slightly less draconian, in that it requires fugitive straw users to pay only up to a $500 fine and do community service.

It’s also closer to actual passage, having moved through the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Environment with three “aye” votes and none opposed.

The testimony in favor of the straw bill was focused primarily on the environmental impact of straws. People unfamiliar with Hawaii might be led to believe that the streets and beaches of our islands are littered with plastic straws. I assure you that is not the case….

Advocates for the disabled have commented that a plastic straw ban would be especially difficult for those with special needs. But why let a little practicality interfere with the warm glow that comes from legislating environmental morality?

The real problem here is not the straw bill. Every year, the Hawaii legislature has at least one proposal that is driven more by emotion and political trends than hard facts and research. The problem can be found in lawmakers who can’t pass a poster in the corner Starbucks without thinking, “There ought to be a law….”

(Source)

In a counterpoint to this article, one of the commenters, who, though I don’t actually know, did not strike me as particularly partisan either way, put it well:

Every article I read on this subject seems to leave out the actual problem to ocean pollution. It’s no[t] manufacturing less plastic and its not consumers using less plastic. It’s people (and businesses) who litter. Indeed, the vast majority of this littering comes from a few so-called ‘underdeveloped’ countries…. I grow weary of the constant barrage of blaming plastic manufacturers for this dilemma. Plastic applications continue to provide useful and economically beneficial products to citizens of all countries and employs millions worldwide. I do not wish to diminish the impact of any possible impact upon the environment, but keep in mind that there is a growing plastic recycling industry and it seems that there is a new innovation every day that will improve the sustainability of new polymers. Next time you contemplate plastic pollution in our oceans, remember how it got there.

(Source)

Reader, every single time you see a cause — whether right-wing or left — surging or re-surging, I implore you to ask yourself the following question first, last, and always:

What will the proposed solutions do?

Like smoking bans and CO2 bans and virtually all other legal prohibitions, banning single-use plastic and fining or jailing (!) people who use it will not address the problem — not remotely — and supporters and legislatures admit that openly. Until these groups and bureaus actually get serious about addressing problems — instead of all this feel-good talky-talky, which is ultimately meaningless but for all the gigantic and ever-growing bureaucracy it spawns — they cannot be taken seriously, nor should they be.

“Let’s say you recycle 100 percent in all of North America and Europe,” Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineer at Michigan State, tells National Geographic. “You still would not make a dent on the plastics released into the oceans.”

Why do it, then?

Read more here:

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[UPDATED] “Online Mobs Drive Ornithologist Into Research Secrecy After Learning He Killed A Bird”

[UPDATE]: The subject of animal rights is complex, and I won’t get into the intricacies of it here — except to point out that those who are calling Christopher Filardi a “murderer” (for euthanizing a bird) believe perforce — by extension — that the domestication of animals is slavery, and that zoos are a form of imprisonment or interment camp, and that pet-ownership, as well, is a form of slavery. Also, when PETA in particular refers to Christopher Filardi as a murderer, what then are they engaged in when by their own admission they euthanize thousands upon thousands of healthy animals a year? Answer: by their own brand of reasoning, they’re engaged in mass murder.

The ornithologist Christopher Filardi has recently been hounded into hiding for publicly practicing his science — which is to say, he carried on what has been the standard practice in the natural sciences for centuries now: he euthanized a kingfisher to collect it as a sample for his museum.

The overwhelming majority of his detractors belong to the Party of Science — id est: members of groups like Earth Liberation Front, which among many, many other things committed a clear-cut act of terror (for which they were convicted) by firebombing the Center for Urban Horticulture at the University of Washington, where Dr. Filardi was once a graduate student.

The New York Times wrote a good article about all this, and here is a small excerpt:

The Ornithologist the Internet Called a Murderer

While the expedition was still underway, the museum released the first photographs of the bird, which seemed to be mugging for the camera. The mustached kingfisher became a viral celebrity, under headlines like ‘ridiculously gorgeous.’

It wasn’t until the public realized that Dr. Filardi had ‘collected’ the bird—killing it for the museum’s research collection—that the adulation turned to venom…. While Dr. Filardi was still on the mountain, almost entirely off the grid, the rage spread. Tens of thousands of people signed petitions that condemned his actions, and thousands more signed a petition calling for him to be fired, or even jailed…. [!]

He descended from the mountaintop into an inferno of hate. ‘If they wanted to make me feel horrible and more than a little frightened for my family or welfare,’ he told me, his voice strained, ‘it worked.’

“More than a little frightened.”

Yes.

Yes, indeed, it is more than a little frightening to be harassed in this way — i.e. online through social media — not primarily because you fear for your safety, but because what you suddenly sense before you is an extreme and hostile Borg-like presence that has forever lost some vital part of its rationality.

[Filardi] wrote an essay for Audubon explaining the many steps he’d taken to ensure that the taking of a single kingfisher would not cause harm, including a survey of the population, which he estimated at 4,000—a ‘robust number for a large island bird.’ He highlighted the role the bird played in conservation efforts: After his findings were presented to tribal, local, and national officials, they resolved to protect the area from being mined or logged. His essay received over 900 comments, the most up-voted of which called him a murderer.

[I]t has led him—and many other ornithologists with whom I spoke, almost all of whom asked me not to use their names—to be extremely cautious about attracting any kind of attention. Many research expeditions are no longer being publicized; in some cases, there is a total blackout on media.

Reasoning with a mob, online or off, is of course futile; and there comes a point — such as when members of the maddened mob sign you up via your email address for ghastly websites — that you know beyond the shadow of any doubt that these people will stop at very little, if anything.

The most paradoxical part is that “science” has never been more en-vogue, and yet it’s “science” used as just another dogmatic ideological shibboleth (such as “The Party of Science”) politically driven to the hilt and repeated and reproduced endlessly, until in no time at all it becomes devoid of actual meaning, if it ever had any to begin with, and that is by no means certain. So that now real science, which is a method of observation and gathering evidence carefully and painstakingly, in any and every endeavor (including economics), must be conducted in secret. (Read Sumantra Maitra’s article: “Campus Repression Is So Bad That Academics Are Now Holding Conferences In Secret.”)

This kind of reaction should remind us of previous superstitious taboos against practices like dissecting cadavers, activities that were scientifically valuable but emotionally repugnant to an ignorant mob and obscurantist authorities. In this case, the main push came from precisely the kind of left-leaning activists—particularly PETA and the animal rights crowd—who so often like to pose as advocates of science.

The comparison to a pre-scientific era only seems more appropriate the deeper you probe this case. We already see historical scholarship having to be conducted in secret, just as in the days of the monasteries, in order to avoid attack by a hostile outside world. Now the same thing is happening to science.

There is a lesson here about the psychology of online mobs, and a warning that in an era when science lives by social media it can die by social media.

(Link)



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Intolerance, Individualism, and the Paradox of Dogma

Did you hear about the 18-year-old Utah girl, Keziah Daum (non-Asian), who did nothing wrong last month?

And yet she was harassed like hell, inadvertently sparking an outrageous and indefensible left-wing backlash merely by wearing in celebration and total homage a beautiful prom dress of qipao (Chinese) provenance.

Her putative crime? “Cultural appropriation.”

Let me tell you something:

This is a kind of lunacy.

Let me tell you something else:

The rightwing lunatics who bomb abortion clinics have nothing — and I mean nothing — on the left-wing lunatics who bomb ski resorts and blow up bridges, who are no different fundamentally from the zealots who set meat-trucks on fire and destroy “by whatever means necessary.”

Having tasted firsthand a little of the venom from both sides, right and left, I can tell you without any shred of hesitation or doubt that, in terms of sheer vitriol and sheer numbers, the left is by far the most shrill, hostile, intolerant, blindly dogmatic, and closed-off-to-rational-discussion of any group I’ve encountered firsthand — in fact, the numbers don’t even compare — and I, who am atheist and no right-winger, would sooner talk to a room full of fundamentalist Christians about why abortion should be legal, rather than talking to even moderate enviro groups about, for instance, the many, many environmentally hazardous materials that go into making a single silicon cell for a solar panel, who will sometimes try to shout you out of the room for the very subject-matter of your talk, before even hearing a single word you’ve said.

Henry Wismayer, a self-described “lefty,” just wrote an article titled Liberals: Please Chill Out — and though the article is fairly well-written and he does make a few good points, what his article reveals most tellingly of all, in my opinion, is how even someone aware enough to write such an article, who glimpses that something is wrong in this depth of blind zealotry and dogmatism, is himself so indoctrinated in the fundamental tenets of that same dogma that he cannot conceive his fundamental premises might be wrong (which many of them are): he merely thinks that how “lefties” react is what’s in need of modification.

To even consider, for instance, the notion that climate change is not catastrophic or that human ingenuity can solve it doesn’t even enter into the equation, or his brain.

That is frightening.

It’s as thorough an indoctrination as any religion, and it’s why I’ve long held that dogma (and not God or gods or a belief in the supernatural) is the distinguishing characteristic of religion.

As The Onion (which I’m not really a fan of) once well expressed it:

“College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea: Students, Faculty Invited to Freely Express Single Viewpoint.”

This excellent writer (and individualistic thinker, and no Republican) put it even better:

The cultural and political left is cocooning itself in a bubble of ideological uniformity. This is intended to totally suppress dissent on key issues by making it impossible for anyone to even express a divergent opinion. The result is to entrench leftist dogma, in the hope that a whole generation will graduate from college unable to engage in thoughtcrime.

That’s the dilemma for anyone trying to overturn any aspect of this dogma. How can you debate an issue and change anyone’s mind, when the discussion has been rigged so that your viewpoint is dismissed as illegitimate before anyone has even heard it? So the new orthodoxy seems impenetrable and its hold on the young unbreakable.

If I were to come up with one idea for how the left could cripple itself over the long term, it would be: teach your young adherents that ideological debate is an abnormal trauma and that it is a terrible imposition to ever expect them to engage in it. It is a great way of raising a generation of mental cripples. And that is exactly what they have set out to do.

“Intersectionality” is one of the more recent examples of this new dogma to cross my ken.

Intersectionality is a neologism coined by Columbia law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, and it is the latest variation on so-called identity politics: believing, as it does, that you and I are not fundamentally individual human beings, but rather that our identity is determined by how many (minority) groups we belong to. This, says intersectionality, is what unites (and divides) us.

Ultimately intersectionality, like all forms of anti-individualism — which is to say, collectivism — is the impossible attempt to define something by means of non-essentials.

The thing that defines humans — our common denominator, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, gender, color, or class — is our human faculty of reason.

Our defining characteristic is our rational-conceptual faculty.

Thus, the attempt to make anything else the essential or defining characteristic, whether sex, sexual preference, skin color, gender, or anything else, is to define by means of non-fundamental characteristics: i.e. it is to incorrectly define.

The consequences of this are enormous.

Because accurate definitions are our means of understanding reality and are the guardians of reason and cognitive clarity — “the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration” — defining humans by means of non-essential characteristics serves to divide humans endlessly. It balkanizes and confuses — “first, confuse the vocabulary” — and it pits humans against one another, negating the natural kinship that exists among us, far more than it unifies.

Proper definitions — i.e. defining by means of essential characteristics — is not to say that our secondary characteristics do not matter at all. It’s only to say that these characteristics don’t fundamentally define us, and the attempt to make them fundamental is to make them the tail that wags the dog.

Dogma is the problem.

That’s why the most rebellious thing any human can do is reason and think for herself.

The paradox of dogma is this:

If you successfully shut down all public debate and discourse, is this a way of making sure that you win? Or is it an admission that you’ve already lost?

I’ll leave each individual reader to answer that for him or herself, and I’ll close with this quotation:

“The imposition of dogma succeeds in getting everyone to mouth the right slogans, even as fewer and fewer of them understand the ideology behind it,” wrote Robert Tracinski.




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Scurvy Dog

Scurvy: “By the end, death is mercy.”

Yesterday in the late morning — after reading from a little book which had a small section on scurvy and how, from 1500 to 1800, scurvy killed as many as two million sailors, who on the high seas had limited access to fruit and Vitamin C — I was walking through the grocery store. I was on my way to the ibuprofen aisle (migraines), and there I passed by a seemingly unlimited supply of fruits and juices from around the world, all at very low cost.

I actually stopped in my tracks for a moment and considered this modern miracle, and the ramifications of it.

I thought of how the threat of scurvy, like polio, is one of thousands upon thousands of threats we now no longer think about, and I thought of Jeff Tucker’s article from some time ago about this same thing:

How at any time of the day or night, I can get on my computer or phone and search for the closest local store, get navigation, compare prices, discover nutritional properties, drive or motorcycle or bicycle there, and so on.

I thought of how I could even photograph it or shoot a video of it and share it immediately — and I thought of how none of this was possible even twenty years ago.

How we are in the middle of a quiet revolution which, for all its stealth, is happening far more rapidly than the revolution that made it possible: the Industrial Revolution.

Its quietness, I believe, is why there’s such a lack of consciousness about it. And most of what you hear about it are complaints: too much food, too much consumption, too much excess, too much obesity, evils of grocery stores and dire warnings that we’re ingesting disease-causing things.

Still, the fact remains: to the extent that humans are free, economic freedom is delivering miracles by the day, and hardly anyone seems to care or notice — or, worse, denounces it as dangerous, degenerate, decadent, when in reality it’s the realization of a beautiful dream that all our ancestors throughout history would not have believed possible.

Very recently, after receiving more anonymous, semi-hostile communications, this time from across the pond, concerning an article I wrote on food production — though, to be fair, I’ve also recently gotten some respectful communication from across the pond as well — the poorly reasoned content of the SPAM comments and email made me think of Mr. Tucker’s words anew:

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 put it so well, “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. There is nothing that the state does that either needs to be done or cannot be done better within the matrix of voluntary action and exchange.”

Voluntary. Yes, let people choose. Even if that means they choose pizza with extra cheese and Taco Bell and Happy Meals, complete with Coke-a-Cola and a plastic straw — not my choice and perhaps not yours, but theirs.

It is, for the record — and this is largely to my latest correspondent(s) — the state and specifically FDR and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was part of the socialistic New Deal, the state and not the natural order of laissez faire, I say, which created government-sponsored farming and the horrible conditions that this thing fosters.

You want better farms, with cleaner, more diverse agriculture? Then get governments out of the farming business, which results in regulations that even supporters call “mind-numbingly complex.”

“Honestly, nobody sitting down today to create a new system would ever dream up such a complicated, convoluted and dual bureaucracy system that we’ve created now,” said Ferd Hoefner, the NSAC’s policy director.

(Link)


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The Beauty Of Laissez Faire — And How It Explodes Climate-Change Scaremongering



It was just recently announced that a team of Harvard scientists, in collaboration with a private company called Carbon Engineering, have developed an inexpensive, large-scale method for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

In an excellent article titled Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air Into Gasoline, Robinson Meyer, of the left-leaning Atlantic magazine, correctly notes that this innovation could well “transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change.”

First, it should probably be noted again that climate by definition changes, and that the very term climate change is for this reason a misnomer and also, I believe, a deliberate obfuscation.

Second, Robinson Meyer’s point is entirely true — and, though he doesn’t quite realize it, it’s a perfect illustration of the power and the beauty of laissez faire.

As many have been saying for decades: the innovation and prosperity that freedom fosters — not government-coerced behavior-modification or autocratic laws and more and ever-more mushrooming bureaucratic red-tape, such as what the left and the right have been proposing for decades — will solve climate problems, in the same way it’s solved problems all throughout history.

This stems from the human propensity to invent, innovate and advance in efficiency and technology when we’re left to our own devices.

Humans always have done so, and humans always will do so.

Whether it’s kerosene instead of whale oil, electric energy instead of kerosene, atomic energy instead of electricity, whether it’s deuterium instead of nuclear, whether it’s hemp instead of cotton, edible spoons and straws instead of aluminum or plastic … when you allow humans to be free, which includes secure protection of person and property and the freedom to prosper and grow wealthy, humans will endlessly innovate, create, invent, produce, exchange, and innovate and create more.

It’s part of what it means to be a conceptual species: our survival is born out of our ability to reason and problem-solve — in short, to think.

If the industrial-scale de-carbonization stabilizes temperatures — and it now seems inevitable that it’ll be a big part of the solution — the Malthusian notions that dominate the modern Left will once again lose out to capitalistic innovation. This was inevitable when Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon were betting on resource scarcity, Al Gore was producing chilling Oscar-winning science-fiction films [whose ten-year predictions have proven way off], and contemporary Chicken Littles were telling us the human race was doomed.

“This opens up the real possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior,” Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told The Atlantic.

That’s fantastic news, because, despite decades of sensational predictions and “education” on the topic, our behavior hasn’t changed.

(Link)

As left-winger Steven Pinker put it in his most recent book Enlightenment Now:

[The] idea that environmental protection is a problem to be solved, is commonly dismissed as the “faith that technology will save us.” In fact, it is a skepticism that the status quo will doom us — that knowledge and behavior will remain frozen in their current state for perpetuity. Indeed, a naive faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that never happened.

Truer words were never spoken, and I sometimes wonder when we’ll ever get an apology for all the wild fear-mongering and scaremongering and failed predictions — things that had us petrified and sleepless on and off all throughout elementary school, as the end-of-the-world and The Rapture had us petrified in church.

Steven Pinker also notes:

The “population bomb” defused itself…. The other environmental scare from the 1960s was that the world would run out of resources. But resources just refuse to run out. The 1980s came and went without the famines that were supposed to starve tens of millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide. Then the year 1992 passed and, contrary to projections from the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth, the world did not exhaust its aluminum, copper, chromium, gold, nickel, tin, tungsten, or zinc. In 2013 the Atlantic ran a cover story about the fracking revolution entitled “We Will Never Run Out of Oil.” Humanity does not suck resources from the earth like a straw in a milkshake until a gurgle tells it that the container is empty. Instead, as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get at the less accessible deposits, or find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes.

The climate-change debate has hinged completely on the false notion that only vast government intrusions into energy consumption can solve it; that regulating everyone’s habits — not just wealthy people and wealthy nations, either, but also emerging countries whose poverty-stricken people benefit most from inexpensive energy, the life-blood of any and every society — this alone, it’s wrongly propounded, can prevent us from certain catastrophe.

What this notion translates to, as David Harsanyi well explains it, is this:

You could be poorer, less free, and do almost nothing to change the trajectory of warming.

We can’t have complete certitude about the future, of course, but you’re not a techno-utopian to trust that humans typically find ways to adapt. You’re not Pollyannaish to point out that, by nearly every quantifiable measure, the state of humanity has improved over the years we were busy panicking about global warming — people are safer, live longer, and are freer. They’ve cut poverty, illiteracy, infant mortality, and so on….

For many environmentalists, all this will be welcome news. I doubt it will be for the politically motivated climate warriors, whose aim has always been social engineering in the cause of curbing “capitalistic excesses.” Even if decarbonization is successful, they will demand we continue to mandate inefficient renewable energies. They will demand tax dollars be used to prop up the clean-energy industry. They will continue to demand we ban fracking. They will continue to propose creating fabricated markets that artificially spike the cost of fossil fuels to pay for supposed negative externalities…. After all, we’ve been told for a long time that the Earth was on the precipice of disaster. Every year was our very last chance to save it.

Climate change is the peg upon which the modern-day environmental movement has hung virtually everything. It is the holy grail. Without it, many (though not all) will for this reason be lost without it. Get ready for the next thing. And be very careful embracing global cooling — cold being FAR more deadly than warmth: Carbon Fuels Conquered Famine But …

To those who embrace this new technology, I salute you.

Because the most rebellious thing you can do is think for yourself.


Related: Remember when the massive California wildfires of 2017 were blamed on global warming? Never mind.


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The Unknown Rebel, Tiananmen Square, & the Twenty-Ninth Year Anniversary of a Socialist Massacre

Tank Man — or the “Unknown Rebel,” as he’s sometimes called: so small and yet so large.

That photo is of course from Tiananmen Square, twenty-nine years ago today, June 4th, when the entire world watched an anonymous Chinese man stand alone in front of advancing tanks, not backing down in the face of socialist totalitarianism.

Whether you associate more closely with the so-called leftwing or the so-called right, I urge you in all sincerity to please take a brief moment and ask yourself:

What would lead a person to such an incredible act — standing in front of a column of tanks knowing virtually for certain that you were going to die?

I write about Tiananmen Square every year on its anniversary because I think it’s vital that the world never fully forgets.

I ask you to think of the Unknown Rebel next time you see another enviro group lauding praise on the socialist Che Guerva, a proven child murderer (read some of it, please — please — I implore you to: “Murdered by Che: Che Guevara, Mass Murderer and Terrorist” and please take a moment and scroll through the documented victims here) — Che, a man who explicitly called for Russian nukes to wipe out New York City, which even the Huffington Post doesn’t ignore.

Here, incidentally, is some Che Guevara paraphernalia from an Occupy protest, all those years ago in 2011-2012: young women and men who are perfectly okay idolizing a mass murderer and socialist totalitarian, but who, at the same time, don’t at all like the people and the country who provide them with the wealth, health, cleanliness, and the pure freedom to protest these things which keep them alive. Let’s put it this way: women and men who wouldn’t be allowed to protest this way under the very man whom they praise — Che — but would have to do it like Tank Man (see above), in which case, also like Tank Man (it is believed, though no one really knows), they’d be rapidly executed.

Yes, America sucks — it’s so hip and cool to think so — except when it doesn’t:

Think of Tank Man next time you see a “Feel the Bern” bumper sticker — and they’re still everywhere — and think of Bernie himself in one of his three (American) mansions saying (and I quote from his own website): “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger” and then in the very same paragraph asking, ostensibly in all seriousness, in reference to Venezuela-versus-the-United-States (where his mansions are all located): “Who’s the banana republic now?” as the Chavez regime tore through Venezuela leaving a vast swath of poverty.

Think of Tank Man next time you see Bill Ayers, and his book called Prairie Fires, which he dedicated to Chairman Mao Zedong, and think of all the other Obama progressives in positions of power praising the man himself: Chairman Mao Zedong, who is the one most responsible for creating the regime that (likely) killed Tank Man — and much, much more:

The regime that is undeniably 100 percent culpable for hundreds of millions of murders, forced famines, and wrongful imprisonments.

Because when people in some of the highest positions of power in this country overtly and explicitly praise someone like that and the majority of citizens see absolutely nothing wrong with it or, seeing something (they don’t quite know what), choose instead to look away, you can be sure there is a kind of mass lunacy and ignorance at work.

And then please, after that — please — tell me how none of this is true socialism, and that those of us who believe in the absolute sanctity and inviolability of individual person and property, tell me how we are the foolish radicals because we know that the moment you concede that principle — the principle of individual rights — you’re fucked, as history has proven, time and again and again and again and again and again and again….

And then tell me that behind every major victory for personal liberty — legalizing gay marriage, for instance, or pot legalization, justice for Native American children, or allowing insurance companies the freedom to trade across state lines, abolishing trade tariffs, et cetera — tell me what bedrock principles you find there undergirding such acts of true justice.

I’ll give you a hint: you won’t find collectivist principles.

This week, think of this and Tank Man for just a moment, before you go back to business-as-usual.

Surely, Tank Man is one of the defining photos of the 20th Century, but let us also never forget, as socialists already have — or, rather, never paid attention to to begin with because it’s not real socialism — Chengdu:

June 4th indeed marks the twenty-ninth year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China — when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

At that time, other protests, in other Chinese cities, sprung up as well. Do you know about Chengdu?

Twenty-nine years ago, on April 15, 1989, Chinese students were mourning the death of a reformist leader. But what began as mourning evolved into mass protests demanding democracy. Demonstrators remained in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, day after day, until their protests were brutally suppressed by the Chinese army — on June 4. Hundreds died; to this day, no one knows how many.

The media captured some of the story of the massacre in Beijing. But Louisa Lim, NPR’s longtime China correspondent, says the country’s government has done all it can in the intervening 25 years to erase the memory of the uprising. Lim’s forthcoming book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, relates how 1989 changed China and how China rewrote what happened in 1989 in its official version of events. Her story includes an investigation into a forgotten crackdown in the southwestern city of Chengdu — which, to this day, has never been reported.

It was in Chengdu, which is now a bustling mega-city with a population of 14 million, that Lim met Tang Deying (source).

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force — which, really, is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

“Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government” (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.

It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout China, including Shanghai. These others remained relatively peaceful, however — except the now virtually forgotten Chengu:

Protests in Chengdu mirrored those in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, with students mourning the sudden death from a heart attack of reformist party leader Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989. This soon morphed into mass protests, followed by a hunger strike beginning in mid-May.

Students occupied Chengdu’s Tianfu Square, camping at the base of its 100-foot-tall Chairman Mao statue and proudly proclaiming it to be a “Little Tiananmen.” The initial move by police to clear protesters from Tianfu Square on the morning of June 4 went ahead relatively peacefully.

But on hearing the news that troops had opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, the citizens of Chengdu took to the streets once more. This time they knew the risk; they carried banners denouncing the “June 4th massacre” and mourning wreaths with the message: “We Are Not Afraid To Die.”

Soon the police moved in with tear gas. Pitched battles broke out in Tianfu Square. Protesters threw paving stones at the police; the police retaliated by beating protesters with batons.

At a nearby medical clinic, the bloodied victims of police brutality lay in rows on the floor. Kim Nygaard, an American resident of Chengdu, recalled that they begged her: “Tell the world! Tell the world!”

A row of patients sat on a bench, their cracked skulls swathed in bandages, their shirts stained scarlet near the collar, visceral evidence of the police strategy of targeting protesters’ heads.

But the violence went both ways: Dennis Rea, an American then teaching at a local university, watched, horrified, as the crowd viciously attacked a man they believed to be a policeman. The crowd pulled at his arms and legs, then dropped him on the ground and began stomping on his body and face, crushing it.

Eight people were killed that day, including two students, according to the local government’s official account. It said the fighting left 1,800 people injured — of them, it said, 1,100 were policemen — though it described most of the injuries as light.

But U.S. diplomats at the time told The New York Times they believed as many as 100 seriously wounded people had been carried from the square that day.

Protests continued into the next evening, and as June 5 turned into June 6, a crowd broke into one of the city’s smartest hotels, the Jinjiang. It was there, under the gaze of foreign guests, that one of the most brutal — and largely forgotten — episodes of the Chengdu crackdown played out after a crowd attacked the hotel (source).

It isn’t known exactly how many people died altogether in these Chinese protests, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600 for Tiananmen Square alone, a number which they later denied.

During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.

It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

From the previously quoted article entitled “After 25 Years Of Amnesia, Remembering A Forgotten Tiananmen“:

“What happened in Chengdu 25 years ago matters enough that the local government continues to devote financial and human resources to muzzling Tang. Her treatment shows how scared the Chinese authorities are of their own recent history.

“A quarter-century ago, the government used guns and batons to suppress its own people. Now it is deploying more sophisticated tools of control — censorship of the media and the falsification of its own history — to build patriotism and create a national identity.

“Though China’s citizens have become undeniably richer and freer in the post-Tiananmen era, Tang Deying’s experience shows the limits to that freedom. Simply by keeping alive a memory that others have suppressed or simply forgotten, Tang has become seen as a threat to social stability.

“What happened in Chengdu matters because it shows the success of the Chinese government in not just controlling its people, but also in controlling their memories. In the China of today, that most personal space of all — memory — has become a political tool.”

Because the only true rebel — like Tank Man — is the person who follows not the crowd or the group, but reason and the independent mind.







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Anarchism, Egalitarianism, Gresham’s Law, & the Fundamental Flaw of Socialism



The fundamental flaw in every variation of socialism — and this includes the watered-down versions we enjoy today (i.e. progressivism or welfare statism) — is the idea that human survival is or should be guaranteed.

Therefore, says the theory, it follows that the legitimate function of government is to ensure everyone’s survival.

This is achieved through massive applications of expropriation and other force.

The reason this is a fatal flaw is that survival by definition is not assured or guaranteed — not for any living thing — because life by definition is effort.

Life is work.

Survival — even human survival, which unique among the animals is physical and epistemological — requires effort.

Ultimately, this effort is an effort that can only be made and maintained by each individual, because human survival is rooted in the power of thought. This is where it begins and ends.

We can and properly should help others if we choose, but our charity and help must always be voluntary.

No one person can think for another person.

If you come down on the side of socialism — any form of it, no matter its mutation — you necessarily come down on the side of force.

Force is why from a purely moral standpoint socialism is fatally flawed.

From a practical standpoint — which is to say, an economic standpoint — it’s fatally flawed on any number of different levels.

It cannot work.

If you come down on this side of the issue, you’ve come down on the wrong side — the side of force and non-consent — and no amount of equivocation, rationalization, circumlocution, or permutation will change that.

Egalitarianism

Egalitarianism is the defining characteristic of all forms of socialism and virtually all leftist political theory.

Full egalitarianism is the belief in total equality — not equality before the law (which is the only legitimate meaning of that term in a political context) but metaphysically equal: in personal attributes, including most importantly ambition, desire, motivation, drive.

But humans don’t possess the same attributes — not even close — nor are they born into the same circumstances, and that is why the implementation of egalitarianism by definition requires force.

Humans when left alone naturally stratify, as several experiments have demonstrated.

Egalitarianism is essentially the view that all humans must be made equal. For this precise reason, egalitarianism requires massive and continual applications of expropriation and the bureaus who enforce it.

Morally speaking, egalitarianism is an injustice.

Practically speaking — because human are limitlessly varied — it’s impossible to implement full egalitarianism, though Pol Pot’s murderous and cataclysmic Khmer Rouge, which was downplayed by leftists like Noam Chomsky until it couldn’t be downplayed any longer, is one of the nearest successes in modern times.

This is egalitarianism:

A woman who has worked hard to become a great runner — and who has succeeded — goes to the doctor to have her injured ankle mended, but instead of mending it, the doctor breaks the ankles of twenty other women and tells them all that this will make the patient feel better. When everyone has broken ankles, the doctor advocates for laws making it mandatory that everyone has broken ankles at all times, so that everyone is slightly crippled, and in this way the “unfairness” of nature is to that extent equalized.

Anarchy: anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-capitalism

Despite the fact that both ideologies nominally (and only nominally) reject all forms of government, there is a significant ideological difference between left-wing anarchism and right-wing anarchism — most commonly, anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-capitalism — and that difference reduces down to egalitarianism, which in turn hinges upon the principle of private property.

Anarcho-syndicalism, which is leftist and Marxist (or Neo-Marxist) in the extreme, is the anarchist theory that believes industrial unions, or some similar collective, will control the property and thus the economy.

Anarcho-capitalism is the anarchist theory that private property is just and therefore all things should be privatized — so that even national defense, police, and courts to adjudicate honest disagreements are, says the theory, privatized.

Both forms of anarchism — indeed, anarchism in general — will amount to mob rule or a de-facto government: e.g. the private firms that hold the weapons for national defense.

The real paradox of anarchism-versus-laissez-faire is from my perspective that true laissez faire is actually much closer to true anarchism than the brand of anarchism most stated anarchists espouse: a kind of non-conformists variety of conformity, albeit one that takes the longer way around to get there. Where?

Authoritarianism.

Which, I think, is why ninety-nine percent of self-described anarchists I know vote unswervingly and unhesitatingly for whichever left-wing pundit, no matter how gigantic (and corrupt) the government programs said pundit explicitly calls for.

As I recently wrote, everything is complicated until it’s reduced — and reducing is often the most complicated part. But once it’s reduced, it becomes simple:

There are only two fundamental forms of government: freedom and non-freedom.

Freedom is the absence of coercion. It simply means that you are left alone.

Most governments are a mix — but one must always remember the iron-clad law:

Bad principles drive out good.

This is a variation on Gresham’s law.

The fight is always a fight for principles.

Thus, when people — even good people — accept doctrines the premises of which they do not know and do not seek to fully understand, they’ve instantly come a long way in conceding the principle.

And that is the process whereby bad governments, whether rightwing or left, come gradually to control the land.

And neither cronyism nor colonialism nor corporatism is laissez-faire but just the opposite.



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Angry Dirty Water: The Uncompahgre River

Along the western edge of Ouray, Colorado, and sourced some 12,000 feet above at a lake called Lake Como, there flows a greenish-yellowish-reddish river named the Uncompahgre River.

The word is pronounced un-COME-pah-GRAY.

It’s a Ute Indian word that means “dirty water” or “angry water” or “red lake,” because mountain minerals color the water, as they always have.

Long before the mines existed, the Utes observed this.

This is Red Mountain, near the river’s source:

Red Mountain is very beautiful, and it’s naturally this color.

It is not this color because of mining or pollution.

Ouray, however, which is where I grew up, is a mining town.

In the early nineties, when the environmental movement began to really take hold, we natives (and by “natives” I mean Ouray locals) rather suddenly began hearing that the reason the Uncompahgre River is colored this way is that the mines had polluted the river water.

In fact, this rapidly became a common environmentalist talking-point, repeated and passed along without any critical questioning.

And yet it’s totally, provably, patently false, and I, who was all for environmentalism at this time, I knew for a fact that this talking-point was a total fabrication.

It was pure propaganda made up out of whole cloth, and I, along with many others, watched this fabrication materialize and grow into a monster that, to this day, certain true-believers will fight you to the death over.

Other outright lies cropped up: lies about the mines being “mined out” (they’ve barely been tapped, in fact); lies about pollution and environmental degradation; lies about what the miners did to the environment. Some contained kernels of truth but were wildly exaggerated.

The question for me became: why?

The answer: Noble Cause Corruption.

At the time, being a kid, I didn’t of course know about this. But watching outright lies materialize before your eyes will certainly make you start looking far more critically at subsequent claims — or, at least, it should.

It turns out that the lies and exaggerations are part-and-parcel to the cause. They’re commonplace, as a matter of fact, and the leaders of the environmental movement make no real secret of this.

Most environmentalists I know are genuinely good people.

Most of my hippy-dippy friends are excellent sweet people, with excellent sweet intentions, and that’s why we’re friends.

But I can say also, without any hesitation or doubt, that most don’t have any idea about the philosophical-political-economic underpinnings of the movement they espouse, which is pure Neo-Marxism.

The truth is that I know no serious person who doesn’t care about the state of the planet.

The only real question is, how best to deal with environmental and societal issues?

And I can absolutely promise you this much:

It’s not through an elite bureau of centralized planners.

It’s not through subsidizing “renewables” and making them mandatory — and then claiming that renewables are “sustainable” because they’re more efficient, and look: they are everywhere now.

It’s not through majority rule, and it’s not through the majority having power to vote away the rights of any individual — which is to say, through vox-populi-democracy.

It’s not through subordinating individuals and their property to a collective — of any kind — and when you hear that proposed, every single time, no matter what, you can be 100 percent sure that it is a false and dangerous doctrine.

It’s not through wealth destruction and “bringing down all industrial society,” as environmental leader Maurice Strong put it, and it’s not through retrogressing back to that point in human history, not so long ago, when over ninety percent of populations were necessarily devoted to farming — when sickness and disease were rampant and unchecked and lifespans were dismally short, water and food dirty, and medicine was still in the dark ages, and even short-distance travel sheer drudgery and danger.

The solution is through human progress and innovation, which comes through fully and legally recognizing each individual’s unalienable right to person and property, allowing people to flourish and prosper and create new wealth, and also in holding people fully accountable for breaching either, whether through pollution, expropriation, eminent domain, extortion, murder, fraud, rape, or any other form of violence, direct or indirect: because human progress comes about through conditions of freedom.


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Oxford Professor: “Control Them for the Good of Everyone”

Danny Dorling

The BBC, which is owned by the British government, recently hosted a talk from Oxford Professor Danny Dorling — a quintessentially elitist talk, but even worse than that: one which shows how completely out-of-touch with reality (economic reality, in particular) so many of these intellectuals are. Please note also that further on in the lecture (you can watch the video here) what Professor Danny Dorling classifies as “rich” includes even poor people in the United States. Why?

Because poor people in the USA, as Eric Worrall explains it, “are rich by global standards — and so pretty much everyone in the USA is part of the target group the professor believes needs to be ‘controlled.'”

Here’s one of the most astonishing parts of the professor’s talk — which is nothing more (or less) than the latest repackaging of Marxism:

I’m Danny Dorling, I’m professor of Geography at University of Oxford, and in my very humble opinion one of the worst things about high economic inequality is it damages the environment.

High economic inequality is extremely damaging to the environment, because the greedy do not know how to control themselves.

Thomas Piketty, who is a brilliant economist from Paris, has done incredible detailed work recently, looking at the consumption and pollution patterns of the richest one percent, and he has shown that the richest one percent disproportionately contribute to greenhouse gasses and to carbon pollution which are damaging our planet.

This is because they buy so many things they do not need, because money is not an issue for them.

It’s because they have so many homes that they travel between, is because when they travel they don’t travel in a sustainable way. At the extreme they’re flying in private jets; there isn’t a better way to heat up the planet and damage our environment than to fly in a private jet and they need to learn the importance of this.

Because climate change is the biggest threat that we’re facing, and we’re partly facing it because we’re allowing the greedy people to carry on being greedy, and we’re not controlling them for the good of everyone.

[Boldface mine]

Please reread that last paragraph — especially if you think I exaggerate the dangerousness and the full-blown Neo-Marxist egalitarian roots that are an inherent part of the environmentalist philosophy.

Note also that Thomas Picketty’s postmodern and explicitly Marxist book has been thoroughly — and I’m mean thoroughly — rebutted and debunked.

I want to point out also here that even if the world were to implement all of the proposed measures (proposed by Professor Dorling and all the others) to reduce carbon emissions — which measures, incidentally, almost never include carbon-free nuclear energy — it would not only NOT have any significant effect on global temperatures (“Don’t Tell Anyone, But We Just had Two Consecutive Years of Record-Breaking Global Cooling): it would devastate world economies to such an extent that even wealthy countries wouldn’t have the wealth by means of which we deal with societal issues.

If low-impact is the ideal, I have a question for Professor Dorling and anyone else who thinks similarly: would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea?

The correct answer, of course, is North Korea, which has a much lower impact upon the environment — by far, in fact — and which exists in grinding poverty, misery, repression, authoritarian control, death.

If low-impact is the ideal, none of the world’s great cities would ever have been built or allowed: from New York City to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Tokyo, Chicago, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Los Angles, and everything in between — gone.

As environmental guru Maurice Strong said, at Earth Summit:

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

Reader, at the very, very minimum, please understand this: without industrialization, the division-of-labor and the transmission of knowledge are instantly obliterated, and that means, among innumerable other things, all the benefits of the division-of-labor and the transmission of knowledge — from phones, computers, tablets, modern medicine, planes, trains, automobiles, running water, reliable clean water, heat and air-conditioning, supermarkets, highways, radios and movies and televisions, buildings, bridges, electricity, as all other forms of energy, and a billion other things besides — are all gone. Because industrialization which singlehandedly created the division-of-labor which facilitates the transmission of knowledge is alone responsible for this.

So please let me quote environmental guru Maurice Strong again:

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

In other news, Seattle’s Brazen Tax Grab Ignores Unintended Economic Consequences and California Set to Become First State to Require Solar Panels on All New Houses

Please remember: if it has to be subsidized, it’s not sustainable.

The solution is to get all subsidies out of all energy — as with everything else — and simply leave people alone. Let supply be determined by consumer demand.

“California is set to become the first state to require solar panels on all newly built single-family houses,” the Los Angeles Times reports. Not only will consumers have no choice in the matter, but neither will voters. “The state’s Energy Commission is scheduled to vote Wednesday on the rules, which are expected to pass and take effect in 2020,” the Times explains. “The regulations, which would also apply to new multifamily buildings of three stories or fewer, don’t need the approval of the Legislature.”

The Commission estimates the average cost of a new single-family home will increase by $9,500 but that utility bills will decline by roughly twice as much over the period of a 30-year mortgage. Why not let consumers decide whether the projected future savings justify the immediate up-front costs? Because here people can do whatever they want, as long as it’s mandatory.

California Already Has a Housing and Poverty Problem

Median home values in California have been climbing since 1940, now approach $500,000, and are more than twice the median value nationwide, according to economist Issi Romen of BuildZoom. When factoring in the cost of living, California has the nation’s highest effective poverty rate. Skyrocketing housing costs are chiefly responsible, contends Chris Hoene, executive director of the left-leaning California Budget Policy Center.

“Every year, the state falls roughly 100,000 units short of what it needs to keep up with housing demand,” Patrick Sisson writes in Curbed.com. Sisson cites a 2016 McKinsey Global Institute study, which found that California real estate prices are rising three times faster than household incomes and that more than half the state’s households cannot afford the cost of housing.

Kelly Knutsen of the trade group California Solar & Storage Association assured the Times that the new mandate would produce “a significant increase in the solar market in California.” He said it would also send “a national message that … we are a leader in the clean energy economy.” Permit me to translate: what’s good for the solar industry is good for the country.

(Source)



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“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails and any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe”



Her name was Kelly Carlyle. She was twenty-years-old, and she was the girl Kristy Reed had seen over a year before in the classroom, who had shown him the book.

Some twenty days after this meeting in the diner, he visited her at her home, when she was sick with a high fever, and the lights of the city hung in a rippled haze beyond her window. She lived in a bare spacious flat far west of town, in a subdivision along the fringes of the desert. She lay upon her back on a wide black futon on the floor. Her slender white fingers looked flowerlike across the dark-blue sheets. He brought her a bottle of icy-cold water.

“I would say that I’m surprised to see you,” she said, “except for some reason I’m not surprised to see you. I think I half expected it.”

“They told me you were sick,” he said.

She lolled her head on the pillow and looked at him from under heavy eyelids. He did not speak but regarded her frankly.

“I think I was hoping you’d come,” she said.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No.”

They were both silent, and in the silence a big generator throbbed stupidly outside.

She apologized for the noise and told him she was unable to sleep because of this noise, because city road-crews were tearing up the entire street right out front and rebuilding it. She said that even though they stopped working at 5:00pm, they left their klieg lights on all night long, for some reason, and the generator too, and she said that it was very loud and bright and that the lights and the noise kept her awake, even though she had heavy black drapes. She said she’d even called the city and complained about it, and they told her there was nothing that could be done, that that’s just the way it was.

“You can’t fight the city hall,” she said.

“What is that?” he said.

“Just an expression.”

He looked contemplative. She was in this moment struck by his sprawling and haphazard education, which in the past two weeks she’d come to know: she found endearing the gaps in his knowledge but also the depths, which stemmed from his upbringing, his autodidacticism, his singleminded decision to take upon himself the task of his own education.

“I think it means you can’t fight bureaucracy,” she explained, “because there’s no one human there.”

“Have you tried?”

“No.”

He looked thoughtful again, deeply thoughtful, his eyes narrowed as thin as saber slashes.

“I suggest earplugs,” he said. “For the noise,” he added, “not the city hall.”

He smiled, and she weakly laughed and said:

“Don’t make me laugh: it hurts my head. I’ve tried earplugs. They don’t really help. I’m resigned to the noise. Besides, I can hear my heartbeat when I wear earplugs, and I don’t like that. It reminds me too much of my own mortality, and that definitely keeps me awake.”

But that night, the lights and the big generator indeed went simultaneously silent and black.

***

 

That next morning, the foreman found the generator disconnected — no small job since the generator was fenced-off and secured. He asked the nightwatchman about it. The nightwatchman said he’d witnessed nothing, and so that next night the foreman stationed himself, with a large thermos of coffee, in a hidden alcove very near the high fence that enclosed the generator.

Near midnight he saw a hooded figure sweep through the darkness, leaping lightly over the fence and shutting off the generator by removing the wires and the boot from the spark plugs and thereby instantly abolishing the lights and the noise. This figure then hopped back over the fence and ghosted away into the darkness.

It happened so rapidly that the foreman scarcely had time to react.

The next night, he was better prepared: He had men with him.

Thus when the figure came, they were all three waiting in the dark, and when the figure got inside the fence, the men sprung.

But it was almost as if the figure expected them: he vaulted like a puma over the other side of the fence, and he bound off into the darkness.

The men gave chase.

“Halt!” the foreman yelled. “STOP! This is government property. You are trespassing.”

The figure did not stop but kept running: a hooded blur in the darkness.

The men followed after him at top speed.

The figure did not know that a high cement wall awaited him.

But the men knew.

When the figure came to the wall, he hesitated for just a fraction of a second, but he didn’t stop running. There was a slight hitch in his step, and that was all.

He leapt with all his might and ran two steps up the concrete facade which stood glowing brightly under an apricot klieg and then one more shorter step before leaping again — a wild effort in which he reached for the top of the wall.

He caught it.

Just barely, but he held on with his left hand and hung there for a split second. Then he swung his other arm around and grabbed hold of the top of the wall with his fingertips and started to pull himself up — until one of the men below, who was agile and strong, ran the wall as well and leapt and grabbed hold of the hem of the hooded jacket, striving to pull the figure down, momentarily stopping the figure from climbing over. No sooner had he grabbed hold of the jacket-hem, however, than the figure slipped out of it, leaving the man empty-handed and back on the ground, but exposing the figure’s face as he did so.

It was Kristy Reed.

All three men saw him in the light.

Kristy slipped up and over the wall and dropped down and then vanished into the night.

***

 

Four days later, on a Friday afternoon, when Kristy learned that a nameless boy had been caught and jailed for trespassing on government property and shutting off the generator, he went down to the police station and turned himself in. A little later that same day, the foreman and his two men definitively identified Kristy as the person they’d chased and who had evaded them.

He was arraigned three days after that, on Monday, and brought before the judge. The courtroom was spacious and mostly empty. Along the righthand side of the room, a screenless window stood open to receive the desert breeze.

When the judge asked him why he’d done it, he said because he cared for the young woman, who was his friend, and who was ill and unable to sleep for the lights and the loud noise. He said a second time that he cared about her.

“Did you know you were trespassing?” the judge asked.

“Yes.”

The judge looked at the papers before him.

“It is my understanding also that you’re a runaway who’s been arrested at least once for truancy, and that you’re not yet eighteen-years-old — not until next month.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“How do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

The judge looked at him. Kristy spoke:

“There is deep legal precedent, judge, going back to at least 1786, for escaping and running away with impunity, even from police or other government personnel, when matters of personal safety, injury, and security are at issue.” Kristy paused. “Judge, in a land of freedom, life is worth living because in such a land, under such circumstances, life is full of promise, and it teems with potential. I was born in no such place. I was brought up in no such place. I was brought up in a place where we are not allowed to own the fruits of our labor, which is property, which is an extension of person. In running, I sought to come into such a place. Frederick Douglass said ‘Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails and any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.’ That is what I come from, judge.”

The judge cast Kristy a long, steady stare.

“You may say that at your trial,” the judge said. “Your bail is set at twenty-thousand.” He hammered the gavel.

The bailiff then came to lead Kristy Reed away, back to the jail cell. He reached over gently for Kristy’s arm, but Kristy slipped lightly out of his reach, and in a liquid-like manner, he went for the open window. He jumped out.

The police chased him, but they did not catch him.

They pursued him down the alleys and the backstreets and the neighborhood lanes, and they pursued him down the labyrinthian ways — and they lost him. They put out an all-points-bulletin, but he was not found.




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