This is the archive of all of the original posts on The Progress of Liberty, a blog that Mr. Stolyarov published from June 8, 2008, to October 27, 2010. The blog was hosted by Today.com, which changed its name to the ill-advised BlogDog.com in May 2010, thereby automatically altering the URLs of all blog posts and pages on its network and causing great inconvenience to contributors. BlogDog.com went out of existence in November 2010 without forewarning its contributors or bothering to archive its blogs. Mr. Stolyarov had hoped that The Progress of Liberty could become a method of promoting a more rational and freer world, but Today.com/BlogDog.com repeatedly violated its promises to its contributors, along with neglecting common courtesy. In order to preserve the quality content of The Progress of Liberty, Mr. Stolyarov's posts from that blog have been archived here in a quasi-blog format. Use the index of links below to navigate to each individual post.

The purpose of The Progress of Liberty is to provide you with the tools and principles to contribute to a freer, more prosperous world – where individuals can thrive in peace and work, think, write, and engage in leisure activities as they see fit. The Progress of Liberty is about celebrating and contributing to the advancement of technology, education, culture, and human potential – the emergence of a New Renaissance, during which the problems that had plagued humanity since its beginnings will fall – one by one – to the ingenuity and perseverance of the best among us.

The Internet’s potential as an agent of change has thus far been underappreciated, although recent stirrings of online activism show that this might not be the case for much longer. The 2007-2008 Ron Paul Campaign was enabled in large part by grassroots online activism and donations. With his famous money bombs, Dr. Paul broke fundraising records and enabled his message of liberty to spread to millions, despite being virtually blocked out by the mainstream media.

The Progress of Liberty will give you access to some of the most compelling, interesting, and entertaining content on the Internet. This content will illustrate sound economic principles, the political ideas of liberty and free enterprise, and the philosophy of rational individualism.

This is not a conventional blog – and many of the fixed pages on the blog are just as important as the periodic posts, if not more so. These pages will give you access to educational resources, works of art and music, audio essays, and other illuminating or entertaining features. The ideas featured here are also not conventional – and not simply in that they depart from “mainstream” thought, however defined. They do not fit any stereotypes – be they of libertarian, conservative, liberal, or moderate thinking. Above all, this blog extols the virtue of thinking for oneself and reaching for truth through civil intellectual exchange. The Progress of Liberty does not shy away from controversy and does not fear airing or even featuring opposing viewpoints. Every contributor here is unique in his or her worldview and style of expression, and we welcome any activity that is consistent with our civilized, tolerant atmosphere.

* WikiLeaks Exposes Barbarity of Iraq Occupation - October 27, 2010

* Let Us Hope That ACTA Negotiations Fail - September 12, 2010

* Limitations on Miranda Rights and the Gallop Toward a Police State - August 3, 2010

* The First Flying Car: A Major Victory for Human Progress - July 1, 2010

* Creation of Artificial Cell Deals Fatal Blow to Vitalism - May 25, 2010

* Always Think! - February 21, 2010

* Progress in Life Expectancy for 2008 - August 19, 2009

* The Beneficial Act of Holding Money - August 16, 2009

* The Morality of Honest Profit - But It Must Be Honest! - August 11, 2009

* Abolish the Minimum Wage First - and Only Then Abolish Welfare - August 7, 2009

* Libertarianism in a "Messy Reality" - August 6, 2009

* If Highways Were Privatized, Would There Be Collusion? - July 27, 2009

* Preconditions for Success: Departure from Orthodoxy - July 16, 2009

* Patri Friedman Outlines New Approaches to Libertarian Activism - April 18, 2009

* United States Persecution of Illegal Immigrants Leads to Deportation of Citizens - April 17, 2009

* The Taiping Rebellion: A Religiously Motivated Slaughter of 25 Million - April 16, 2009

* The American Conservative Movement as Scam - April 15, 2009

* The Irrationality of the View That Life is Sometimes Not Worth Living - April 14, 2009

* Could Religions Come to Adopt a Naturalistic Perspective on Resurrection and Judgment? - April 13, 2009

* Famous Atheist Composers -- Who Says One Needs God to Appreciate Beauty? - April 12, 2009

* What is the Best Way to Enjoy Life? The Permanent Enjoyment Hypothesis - April 11, 2009

* There is No Experience Worth Dying For - April 10, 2009

* Can Consciousness Survive Physical Discontinuities? - April 9, 2009

* No Guarantees of Liberty in Life -- Make the Most of What You Have - April 8, 2009

* Life and Liberty: Which is More Important? - April 7, 2009

* Avoid Conceding to Theists That Your Premises are Arbitrary - April 6, 2009

* Mr. Stolyarov's Essay on the Benefits of Globalization in The Freeman - April 3, 2009

* How to Reduce Perverse Incentives from Fines - March 21, 2009

* Beware of Disdain for the Particular! - March 20, 2009

* Most Problems are Technical, Not Ethical - March 19, 2009

* Burton Folsom Discusses the Failure of the National Road - March 18, 2009

* A New Argument for Repealing Capital Punishment: The Cost Argument - March 17, 2009

* How a Government Job Helped Ludwig von Mises - March 16, 2009

* The Proper Rational Attitude Toward Traditions - March 9, 2009

* Why Are Happy Endings Popular? - March 8, 2009

* Major Underestimation of Arctic Sea Ice Sheds Further Doubt on Manmade Global Warming Theory - March 7, 2009

* New Bullet-Stopping d30 Gel May Reduce the Casualties of War - March 6, 2009

* Internet Has Beneficial Effects for Poetry - March 5, 2009

* Productivity Maximization Skills: Parallel Use of Faculties - March 1, 2009

* Microlending Site Enables Charity with Actual Beneficial Results - February 19, 2009

* New Tattoo Developed to Help Diabetics Monitor Blood Sugar - February 18, 2009

* Jonathan Swift's Struldbrugs, Immortality, and Negligible Senescence - February 16, 2009

* Mathematician Bob Palais Challenges the Sanctity of Pi - February 15, 2009

* Dubious "Stimulus" Passes Despite Unanimous House Republican Opposition - February 14, 2009

* The Ocean Quahog: A Clam That Can Live for Over 400 Years - February 13, 2009

* Deutsche Bank Admirably Rejects German Government's Bailout - February 11, 2009

* "Liberation by Internet" Translated into Chinese - February 8, 2009

* The Genius of Archimedes and the Appalling Backwardness of a Medieval Monk - February 7, 2009

* Singularity University: An Institution Devoted to Progress - February 6, 2009

* Teleportation Between Two Atoms Achieved: Milestone for Quantum Computing - February 5, 2009

* Cloning Enables Brief Resurrection of Extinct Pyrenean Ibex - February 4, 2009

* Turritopsis nutricula Proliferation Illustrates the Advantages of Immortality - February 3, 2009

* Sir David Attenborough Harassed by Religious Fanatics - February 2, 2009

* Denying Medical Care to Children is Not Part of Religious Freedom - February 1, 2009

* February 2, 2009, Ayn Rand Book Bomb Aims to Increase Awareness of Atlas Shrugged - January 31, 2009

* Refuting the "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" Argument - January 28, 2009

* Obama Misunderstands the Cause of Economic Crises - January 27, 2009

* The Vagueness of Obama's Inaugural Address: "Ambitions", "Big Plans", "Common Purpose", and "Cynics" - January 26, 2009

* Question for Barack Obama: Who is "We"? - January 25, 2009

* Barack Obama, Free Markets, and Recovery from the Present Economic Crisis - January 24, 2009

* All Are Created Equal but Do Not Remain So: Remarks on Obama's Inaugural Address - January 23, 2009

* Praise for Obama's Tolerance for Nonbelievers - January 22, 2009

* Evil as a Failure of the Intellect - January 21, 2009

* Rudi Boa was Murdered for Beliving in Evolution. His Killer Goes Free This Month. - January 20, 2009

* "Defeating Death" Site Highlights the Evil of Human Mortality - January 19, 2009

* Charles Murray Rightly Criticizes the Expectation That Everyone Go to College - January 18, 2009

* Reintroduction of Cinema into Saudi Arabia Indicates Progress in the Middle East - January 17, 2009

* Major Victory for Freedom: RIAA Drops Lawsuits Against File Sharers - January 16, 2009

* Help Contribute to Human Life Extension: Download Rosetta@home - January 15, 2009

* An Atheist's View of Christmas - December 24, 2008

* Progress for Physics: New Model of Loop Quantum Cosmology Rejects Singularities and Affirms Insights in A Rational Cosmology - December 19, 2008

* Decoupling Activities: A Worthy Goal for the Future - December 18, 2008

* Commercial Space Stations: A Step Forward for Private Space Exploration - December 17, 2008

* Crashless Cars: A Moral Imperative - December 16, 2008

* Editorial by Robert Poole Exposes Egregious Government Infrastructure Mismanagement - December 15, 2008

* Physical Immortality is Possible: Ask Turritopsis nutricula! - December 13, 2008

* Refuting an Extremely Silly Argument Against Gay Marriage - December 11, 2008

* Obama Abandons Effort to Impose "Windfall Profits" Tax on Oil Companies - December 10, 2008

* More Individuals Choose Energy Autonomy - Good News for Liberty - December 9, 2008

* Conserve Resources -- Out of Self-Interest - December 8, 2008

* Is China Economically Sounder Than the United States? - December 7, 2008

* Please Extend Individualism to Include Anti-Terrorist Muslims! - December 6, 2008

* Dr. David Sinclair Makes Progress in the War on Biological Aging - December 5, 2008

* New Model Skyscrapers Available in Antideath - December 4, 2008

* Cancer is Going Down! - November 29, 2008

* Excellent News from Turkey Regarding the Possibility of a More Humane Islam - November 28, 2008

* Ban on Gay Adoptions Overturned in Florida: Good News for Liberty and for Checks and Balances - November 27, 2008

* Gennady Stolyarov II Wins Foundation for Economic Education's Eugene S. Thorpe Award - November 8, 2008

* Abraham Lincoln as a Third-Party Candidate - November 2, 2008

* Response to Mr. Merlin Jetton's Critique of My Essays on Road Privatization - September 30 - November 25, 2008

* Changes That Happen Without Majority Approval - September 29, 2008

* Why Universal Surveillance Will Fail - September 28, 2008

* Mr. Stolyarov's Essay, "Liberation by Internet", Published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute - September 27, 2008

* What Brought About the Soviet Union's Downfall? Bankruptcy or Information? - September 26, 2008

* Argumentative Tacticts Never to Use: Argument by Threat - September 16, 2008

* Free-Market Activism Suggestion: Write a Critical Analysis of a Favorite Work - September 15, 2008

* Grammatically Correct But Meaningless Questions - September 14, 2008

* The Republican National Convention and the Dangers of Crowds - September 13, 2008

* Argumentative Tacticts Never to Use: The Lack-of-Precedent Argument for Impossibility - September 12, 2008

* Getting Over September 11, 2001 - September 11, 2008

* Argumentative Tacticts Never to Use: Argument by Consensus - September 10, 2008

* The Ambiguity of the Russia-Georgia Conflict - August 30, 2008

* The Internet and Massive Long-Term Cultural Change - August 29, 2008

* Keys to Free-Market Activism: An Online Presence - August 28, 2008

* Antideath: Promoting Life Through Model Skyscrapers - August 27, 2008

* Argumentative Tacticts Never to Use: The "Yes or No" Push - August 22, 2008

* How to Break the American Two-Party System - August 21, 2008

* Why I Will Proudly Vote for a Third-Party Presidential Candidate - August 20, 2008

* Musharraf's Resignation Should Inspire a Rethinking of US Foreign Policy - August 19, 2008

* Questioning the Consumption/Production and Consumption/Investment Dichotomies - August 13, 2008

* A Majority is Not Required for an Idea to Succeed - August 8, 2008

* How to Become a Public Intellectual: Publish Your Papers Online! - August 7, 2008

* How to Spread Ideas Effectively: Becoming a Public Intellectual - August 6, 2008

* Gennady Stolyarov II Wins Third Prize at 2008 Mises University Oral Examination - August 5, 2008

* Get a Good Laugh from Edward Current's Videos on Atheism and Religion - July 26, 2008

* YouTube Reinstates Extant Dodo Productions: A Victory for Free Speech - July 25, 2008

* The Index of Prohibited Books: The Historical Catholic Church's Opposition to Freedom and Progress - July 21, 2008

* Hopeful News from Dr. Tibor Machan on Promoting Liberty - July 20, 2008

* Carl Menger Was Wrong: Bad Ideas Should Be Countered - July 19, 2008

* Brazil's Semco Illustrates the Power of Decentralized Firm Structures - July 18, 2008

* Articles and Interviews by Gennady Stolyarov II in Heartland Infotech and Telecom News - July 17, 2008

* How Free-Market Activists Should Approach Money - July 16, 2008

* Seeing Both Positive and Negative Aspects of the Status Quo - July 9, 2008

* Four Questions for All Free-Market Activists to Consider - July 8, 2008

* The Progress of Liberty Wins Today.com June 2008 Blog Award - July 7, 2008

* My Critique of the Firm "WALL-E" on Mises.org - July 6, 2008

* Why Free-Market Activists Should Always Use Secular Arguments - July 5, 2008

* Casual Free-Market Activism on the Fourth of July - July 4, 2008

* Tibor Machan's Distinctions Regarding Public Television: The Content May Be Good, But the Funding Methods are Not - July 3, 2008

* The Totalist Mentality: The Activist's Worst Enemy - July 2, 2008

* Stuart K. Hayashi's "The Invisible Gun": An Excellent Example of Free-Market Activism - July 1, 2008

* Do You Want World Peace? Watch a Video That Explains the Causes of Most Conflicts in the World Today. - June 27, 2008

* The Free-Market Movement Needs Young People! - June 26, 2008

* Lessons for Free-Market Activists from the Ron Paul Campaign - June 25, 2008

* The Possibility of Decentralized Organization for the Free-Market Movement - June 23, 2008

* The Importance of Political Organization for Free-Market Activists - June 22, 2008

* Help Stop the Infighting Among Free-Market Advocates! - June 21, 2008

* Canada's "Human Rights" Show Trials Do Not Recognize Freedom of Speech - June 20, 2008

* Tell YouTube to Stop Banning Users Without Due Process - June 19, 2008

* "Mind Over Matter" Quackery from the Early 19th Century - June 18, 2008

* Sign a Petition to Permit the Construction of a New York Skyscraper - June 17, 2008

* Cultural Activism Idea: Create Free Audio Recordings of Intelligent Literature - June 16, 2008

* Ray Kurzweil's Predictions on Supercomputer Speed Likely Off by 3 Years - June 15, 2008

* Ron Paul Initiates Campaign for Liberty - June 14, 2008

* Pro-Liberty Activism Program for June 13, 2008 - June 13, 2008

* Pro-Liberty Activism Program for June 11, 2008 - June 11, 2008

* Pro-Liberty Activism Agenda for June 10, 2008, and Introduction to YouTube - June 10, 2008

* Tools for Pro-Liberty Activism: Digg.com - June 9, 2008

* The Progress of Liberty: Statement of Purpose - June 8, 2008

***

WikiLeaks Exposes Barbarity of Iraq Occupation

October 27, 2010

Now that WikiLeaks has released nearly 400,000 documents about the Iraq occupation (see the news here), we can safely conclude that even the single possibly beneficial consequence of this war has been brought to naught. The removal of Saddam Hussein – a sadistic, murderous torturer – has brought about more sadistic, murderous torture in his place by the current government of Iraq, with the knowledge but the inaction of the U.S. armed forces. The occupation did not liberate the Iraqi people, but merely handed them over to a new set of masters – less objectionable from a U.S. foreign-policy perspective, perhaps, but no less odious in an objective moral sense.

I regret my initial support for this war, as I was unaware of its true death toll and the appalling behavior that it directly brought about. Thank you, WikiLeaks, for bringing the truth about this dark episode in history to light. Already, this war’s events have motivated me to rethink my position on war in general and reject this institutionalized slaughter as a solution to any situation. But this recent release has shown to a new extent just how ugly even today’s American wars can be.

***

Let Us Hope That ACTA Negotiations Fail

September 12, 2010

One can still hope that tensions between the United States and the European Union will derail the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) – a truly horrible treaty that would greatly curtail internet freedom in much of the “developed” world. As this article by Professor Michael Geist describes, the conflicts over the agreement’s scope and purpose, as well as particular provisions therein, may be creating a rift that might lead the EU to withdraw from negotiations. This is especially possible after the EU Parliament expressed concern about ACTA’s effects on Internet privacy and freedom, as well as the overwhelming secrecy of the negotiation process. Although the treaty might still be concluded without the EU, my hope is that the withdrawal of a major party will thwart the entire proceedings. As I wrote last month, if ACTA passes, the very progress of human civilization might be threatened as the Internet becomes a black market. If ACTA fails, then at least civilization will have a fighting chance.

***

Limitations on Miranda Rights and the Gallop Toward a Police State

August 3, 2010

For those who doubt that the United States is steadily moving toward a police state, this article from Associated Press, entitled “High court trims Miranda warning rights bit by bit” should lead them to reconsider. Apparently, now, one has to explicitly state one’s preference to remain silent in order for the right to remain silent to apply. Moreover, one is only allowed access to a lawyer if one secures a lawyer within 14 days after being released from custody, whereafter – if one failed to secure a lawyer – one could get taken back into custody without the right to see a lawyer. Imagine: just the suspect and the police – with no countervailing power allowed to check on what the police may and may not do in the course of questioning and detainment of the suspect. If this does not scream “police state” to you, what would?

***

The First Flying Car: A Major Victory for Human Progress

July 1, 2010

I was delighted to see this video of the first flight of the first flying car that will be available for mass production. The Terrafugia Transition, which has fortunately been approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, is a welcome development for multiple reasons. The era it inaugurates will feature improved mobility, reduced traffic congestion, increased safety both on the roads and in the air, and, of course, greater human freedom as a result of one more technological opportunity available to a wide market. Technology is the surest way to advance liberty, and the Terrafugia Transition should be celebrated as a step toward a more enlightened, comfortable, and prosperous future.

***

Creation of Artificial Cell Deals Fatal Blow to Vitalism

May 25, 2010

The theory of vitalism, the idea that life is incapable of emerging or being synthesized from non-living components, was completely and obviously invalidated by J. Craig Venter’s recent creation of an entirely artificially designed living organism, the Mycoplasma mycoides. This synthetic bacterium was designed entirely by humans, without emerging from a previous species.

Of course, vitalism was not viable for a long time, and, for intelligent students of the natural sciences, its patent falsehood was evident since Stanley Miller’s famous 1953 experiment, which showed that amino acids – the basic building blocks of proteins – could be generated from simple inorganic compounds in an artificial reducing atmosphere. But now the case against vitalism is so obvious that only the most dogmatic, evidence-averse individuals could still adhere to it. There it is – a cell that was not the offspring of another living organism, but was rather artificially synthesized in its every aspect, much as a building might be constructed by the deliberate arrangement of bricks and beams in accordance with a human-designed blueprint.

I welcome the emergence of artificial life and all of the impressive possibilities that it offers even in the near-term future – from improved and rapidly produced influenza vaccines to microorganisms that can clean up oil spills and synthesize new sources of energy. More important, of course, are the long-term implications of this discovery – which are too vast to be foreseen by any single individual. We humans have an amazing ability to discover and engineer the workings of life, and our own lives should become ever longer and better as a result.

***

Always Think!

February 21, 2010

There is a dangerous mentality among many people that thinking – using one’s mind to fathom the world and solve problems – is optional or is only necessary for some people, such as intellectuals or individuals in high-paying professional occupations. In fact, thinking is essential and indispensable for everyone; that includes you. Our reason – our ability to accurately identify what exists and to determine how it may best be used to promote our lives and flourishing – is the only means we have of reliably surviving and improving our position. Blindly following orders, routines, or conventions may occasionally enable one to survive – if someone else did the thinking behind these external impositions correctly – but it just as often results in catastrophic failure. Every procedure, institution, and norm should be questioned using critical thinking – and every person should engage in such questioning. The result will be an improvement of societal institutions: their alignment with reason and good sense and a vast improvement in efficiency, innovation, and happiness in all areas of human life. Always think! No one is above or beneath using his mind!

***

Progress in Life Expectancy for 2008

August 19, 2009

This article by Mark Stobbe (“CDC Says Life Expectancy in US Up, Deaths Not”) discusses the slight increase in life expectancy in the United States observed by the Centers for Disease Control for the year 2008. This is excellent news, especially considering that the death rate from heart disease decreased by 5%, the death rate from cancer decreased by 2%, and the death rate from HIV/AIDS decreased by 10%. Praise is due to the scientists and doctors who have caused these perils to retreat – as well as perhaps healthier living habits in the population as a whole when it comes to the heart-disease declines.

We can beat back misery, decay, disease, and death – and the slight growth of U. S. life expectancy at birth to nearly 78 years testifies to this. Moreover, the death rate in 2008 was half of what it was in 1948 – truly a monumental development.

***

The Beneficial Act of Holding Money

August 16, 2009

I was recently asked whether the super-rich were economically useless because they merely “held onto” money instead of “using” it and allowing it to “circulate” in the economy. I think that the super-rich cannot be accused of this, however, and the basis of the accusation is itself groundless.

The money held by the super-rich is not “dead money” by any means. It is, in most cases, invested into banks that lend it out to entrepreneurs that use the money to purchase capital goods, make products, or provide services to consumers. But even if the money is not invested but kept under a mattress, this is still desirable — as it means that there is less overall money in the economy, chasing the same number of goods, which means lower prices for everyone.

It is important to keep in mind that the amount of wealth in the economy is not the same as the amount of money. Wealth is real stuff; money as it exists today is just a unit of account. If the money stock increases without a corresponding increase in real stuff, we get inflation — which is coming, by the way, because the Federal Reserve has dramatically increased the money supply over the past year. What matters for the health of an economy is not how much people spend, but rather how much stuff is available — which is a direct function of how much people produce. Capital goods, not consumption spending, are what enable us to be wealthier and more prosperous than hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic. After all, those people could consume just as well as we could, given the chance! But the stuff was simply not available to them, because no one produced it!

***

The Morality of Honest Profit - But It Must Be Honest!

August 11, 2009

In response to my essay, “Profit is Moral,” I was recently asked whether my ethical praise of profit also applies to cases where the consumer has been in some manner deceived, deliberately under-informed, or invited into a transaction where the other party knew that the consumer would fail to fulfill his side of the bargain.

I believe that honesty is one of the foremost human virtues and a requirement for a workable system of commerce to exist. Thus, the morality of profit applies only to those profits which are made in the course of honest value-trades — that is, trades in which all parties knew what they were getting in advance and made at least an implicit benefit-cost comparison of having the thing they planned to obtain versus not having it.

Transactions that are made on the basis of deception, deliberate concealment of information, or the expectation that the other party would in some manner fail to deliver on its end of the bargain are in violation of the principle of honesty and therefore cannot be considered moral; in a free-market society, they would also be of dubious legality, to say the least.

A related situation is where a transaction is made under duress — for instance by a party that was threatened, intoxicated, or otherwise not in possession of a clear ability to give informed consent. It would not be moral for a seller to exploit these circumstances for profit.

***

Abolish the Minimum Wage First - and Only Then Abolish Welfare

August 7, 2009

I mentioned yesterday that I would not advocate abolishing the welfare system prior to the abolition of the minimum wage. My reasoning? The welfare system is not nearly so damaging as minimum-wage legislation. Indeed, welfare is likely to be acting as a band-aid on the harms of minimum -wage legislation, by preventing those who become unemployed due to the minimum wage from starving. Repealing welfare without abolishing the minimum wage first would be disastrous to many people who would be unable to find employment with the present wage floor in force. The minimum wage acts to keep those with skills insufficient to earn income at a certain rate out of the labor market. Welfare at least rectifies the injustice done to such individuals by preventing them from starving while they are legally prohibited from working. Of course, the welfare system has numerous undesirable side effects on individuals’ incentives to develop their skills and find work in the future. However, there are only certain stepwise procedures by which its abolition might be viable.

A doctor, seeking to cure a patient, must follow one of a limited set of options for doing so. Any individual medical procedure might be desirable in a proper context, but, if a multitude of desirable procedures were arranged in the wrong order, disaster might result.  The same applies to fixing problems in the sphere of politics. I happen to believe that the world would be better without both the minimum wage and welfare, but disaster might strike if they are abolished in the incorrect order.

***

Libertarianism in a "Messy Reality"

August 6, 2009

Some criticize libertarianism being “too clean and clear” to accommodate a “messy reality,” I beg to differ. I think most thoughtful libertarians recognize the messiness of reality. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were particularly good about this. If you have not done so already, I recommend that you read Human Action by Mises (available for free here) and The Fatal Conceit by Hayek.

But there is a difference between recognizing a messy reality and allowing that recognition to make a mess in one’s theory. The theory can justifiably be clean and elegant, for that renders it graspable by human beings. It is in the application of the theory that the messiness is important and needs to be considered. Many libertarians have not gotten to this point yet, and all too many prefer spending virtually all of their time thinking about how an ideal libertarian society would work rather than considering how such a society can be attained or approximated when we must start with an imperfect and, indeed, quite messy, world. The messiness really comes in when we consider the sequence of desired transitions. I happen to believe that the minimum wage should be abolished before the welfare system is abolished, or else the consequences would be disastrous. Likewise, getting out of the Social Security and Medicare tangles will need to be an extremely delicate procedure, with care taken to ensure that no innocent dependents of these systems are harmed. But to think about these issues cogently does not require the abandonment of libertarianism; it simply requires taking libertarianism to the next, more sophisticated level.

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If Highways Were Privatized, Would There Be Collusion?

July 27, 2009

I was recently asked by an individual who was favorably inclined toward my position on road privatization about possible obstacles with regard to the privatization of large interstate highways. Would not this market be dominated by a few large firms, which would be able to easily collude with one another to the detriment of the consumer? I believe that this would not be a threat in a genuinely free market.

A historical parallel comes to mind: the railroads of the 19th century — which were competitively built by multiple companies. The railroads spanned up to the width of the American continent, and many railroads were built in parallel, ultimately getting passengers and cargo from the same initial city or town of departure to the same destination. With private competition in the construction of roads, I see no reason why interstate highways could not also be built in parallel by multiple companies, which would then bring about the well-known effects of competition on increasing product quality while lowering the price.

I would also like to note that a lack of capital would not be an issue, as railroads were just as capital-intensive in their time as today’s highways are — not to mention the cost of trains and the crew to operate them. And today, due to the economic growth of the past century, there is much more private capital available for constructing new highways. Moreover, any attempt at collusion by however many private road companies end up existing will be fraught by the well-known problems plaguing any cartel. Cartels that do not have a coercive backing behind them are inherently unstable, as each member has a financial incentive to defect and undercut the rest of the market in price or outdo fellow cartel members by offering a higher standard of quality than was agreed to. Moreover, a free-market cartel would not be able to keep out non-cartel newcomers, who, by charging lower prices or offering better goods, can undercut the entire cartel. Thus, our hypothetical private road companies would need to be worried not only about existing competition, but also about the potential competition that might arise if they were to offer unfavorable terms to the consumer.

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Preconditions for Success: Departure from Orthodoxy

July 16, 2009

How can one succeed in life? How can one become extraordinarily accomplished, prosperous, safe, and happy? Contrary to what most people might think, it is not by following the conventional understandings and definitions of what one ought to do.

The orthodox paths in life have already been tried millions of times. If you want to make something of your life, pursue an unorthodox path. This is not sufficient for success, but it is necessary – so you are doing something right if your approach is unorthodox. I attribute virtually all of my success to date to my numerous departures from orthodoxy.

Not all departures from orthodoxy are created equal, however; some will destroy the individual pursuing them. Any departure from conventional ways must be done for a reason, with a thoroughly considered understanding of why it is superior to what most other people do.

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Patri Friedman Outlines New Approaches to Libertarian Activism

April 18, 2009

An excellent new essay by Patri Friedman, “Beyond Folk Activism,” discusses some fundamental shortcomings of traditional pro-freedom activism and suggests less intuitive but more powerful ways to overcome these shortcomings. As creatures who evolved in small tribes where everyone had the ability to directly speak to and persuade everyone else, we humans still have the intuition that by talking about an issue sufficiently with the people around us, we can effect substantial change. In the highly complex, technological civilization of modernity – with billions of people to persuade rather than tens – this approach does not work. The best kinds of activism are the ones that do not require the participation or even the agreement of the vast majority of people, and Friedman’s Seasteading project attempts to do just that. Generally, a more sophisticated and effective activist needs to focus on creating new kinds of goods – including technologies and capital goods – that advance the cause of liberty in themselves, without requiring the assent of the general society to be brought into existence.

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United States Persecution of Illegal Immigrants Leads to Deportation of Citizens

April 17, 2009

If all the conventional economic and moral arguments against the crackdown on illegal immigration were not enough, then consider this: the recent wave of persecutions and deportations of alleged “illegals” has led to American citizens being indefinitely detained and deported – in direct contravention of U. S. law. This article by Suzanne Gamboa discusses the case of Pedro Guzman, a mentally ill American-born citizen who was deported to Mexico upon suspicion of illegal status. Hundreds of other U. S. citizens have also been deported in this manner.

It is absolutely intolerable for even one American citizen to be denied the rights and privileges of citizenship due to overzealous and sloppy efforts to crack down on illegal immigration. And yet, if anyone is given the colossal power needed to keep track of and punish over 10 million people who have broken a rather silly law, then we can be sure that some mistakes will be made and some innocent people will suffer. The far more reasonable remedy to any of the negative effects of illegal immigration is to render the legal immigration process much easier, swifter, and more accepting – giving many of the currently illegal immigrants an incentive to take legitimate routes to residency in this country.

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The Taiping Rebellion: A Religiously Motivated Slaughter of 25 Million 

April 16, 2009

Alarmingly many theists argue that it was atheism that led to the genocides of Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot during the 20^th century – notwithstanding that atheism is not a positive doctrine and it was rather the dogma of communism that motivated these genocides. However, theists who argue this way often challenge non-believers to give instances where slaughters on such a grand scale were motivated by religious considerations. In fact, there happens to be such an instance, the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) in China, where about 25 million people – mostly civilians – were killed in the course of an uprising orchestrated by the Christian convert and religious fanatic Hong Xiuquan. Hong’s regime was not only Christian, it was communistic – abolishing private property and mandating communal living and strict separation of the sexes.

By contrast, estimates of the death toll inflicted by Pol Pot only go as high as 2.3 million. This is still horrific, of course, and inexcusable. However, it is for this reason that I advise theists not to play the death-toll card anymore. Rather, it is important to recognize the dangers of all sorts of fanaticism and dogma, irrespective of their underlying metaphysics. Any set of ideas which does not incorporate a considerable degree of tolerance for opposing views is highly dangerous and likely to lead to horrendous destruction of lives and property.

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The American Conservative Movement as Scam

April 15, 2009

I have no disrespect for many rank-and-file American conservatives – including serious academicians, middle-class professionals, and many college students who genuinely believe the ideas of today’s conservative “movement.” While I disagree with some of these ideas, I can admire those who adhere to them with sincere conviction and a genuine desire to do good in the world.

I have no comparable respect for most of the elites of today’s American conservative movement – who, in their personal lives, clearly do not practice what they preach. I do not simply refer to such religious figures as Ted Haggard or to such political figures as Larry Craig, who were exposed as practicing lifestyles they condemned. I point to much more routine indiscretions committed by the children of such elite conservatives as George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. I point to the routine personal vulgarity – which borders on and sometimes extends into the obscene – of such prominent conservative figures as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, and that artist widely considered to be a paragon of Christian virtue – Thomas Kinkade. This is, of course, not to mention the despicable spousal abandonment practiced by such men as John McCain and Newt Gingrich.

I have, over time, begun to see the American conservative movement as at least partially a scam perpetrated by ethically unscrupulous elites – who do not believe their own teachings – upon morally upright, conscientious, but credulous conservative petit-bourgeois and intellectuals. What the elites want is money and power; they do not actually wish to realize the principles they expound, but they need to expound the principles in order to receive the donations.

It is time for men of integrity among American conservatives to cease being the dupes of the Republican Party, megachurches, big talk show programs, and activist organizations whose real goal is to maintain a perpetual stream of funds from fairly ordinary and credulous people. Think for yourselves – and keep your money, too.

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The Irrationality of the View That Life is Sometimes Not Worth Living

April 14, 2009

In behavioral finance, there is a well-known tendency of many people to consider themselves worse off after a financial net gain that happens under certain circumstances. For instance, if person A wins $10 million but then loses $8 million, he might consider himself worse off than he would have seen himself as being if he had simply won $1 million. Even though in absolute terms A is twice as wealthy in the first case as he would have been in the second, A will see his current position mostly in relation to the $10 million he once had and will thus consider himself to be in dire straits. This is, of course, an entirely irrational mindset; $2 million is clearly better than $1 million, all other things equal.

I think many people are afflicted by a similar mentality with regard to life itself. It is likely that even a majority of people think that life is not worth living under certain conditions. These conditions are virtually always worse than the conditions of those people’s lives at present – and so a descent into such conditions would entail a diminution of the quality of life. However, people who think that life is sometimes not worth living do not venture to make the proper comparison of lower quality of life to no quality of life. Rather, they compare some hypothetical or actual lower quality of life to a former higher quality of life – even though both are better than an absence of life altogether. In despair over their losses of liberty, privilege, health, loved ones, or any other values, they are willing to abandon everything else of value that they have by choosing to succumb to death. This is as irrational as a person who lost $8 million out of $10 million burning the other $2 million out of the belief that wealth is just not worth having unless there is a certain amount of it.

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Could Religions Come to Adopt a Naturalistic Perspective on Resurrection and Judgment?

April 13, 2009

Religions and religious doctrines evolve all the time – and this is a fact that warrants hope. I have long speculated that some future strains of Christianity might come to view the promise of resurrection as one of renewed life in this world – not in some ethereal Platonic world of souls that many Christians today seem to consider Heaven to be.

Robert Ettinger, the founder of the cryonics movement, wrote an excellent short story, “The Penultimate Trump,” in 1948. In this story, the suspended animation of humans enables them to be restored to life and youthfulness hundreds of years later. At that time, they are judged on the basis of their past actions and, if they committed sufficient misdeeds, are flown to the penal colony on Mars, which has been renamed Hell. (I recommend everyone to read the full short story, so I will say no more on its contents.) Perhaps the promise of resurrection and judgment will be fulfilled through naturalistic means in this world – and cryonically preserved humans will indeed be judged by their more morally advanced future counterparts upon their revival.

An even more distant future possibility might be the revival of non-preserved humans from even a remoter past, if it ever becomes possible to reconstitute entire bodies and minds from the data included in whatever DNA samples from these persons might have remained. In this case, the “judgment” might consist of deciding whom to revive. We would want Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin around, but not Hitler or Tamerlane.

I myself am an atheist, but I welcome any adjustments in the theological views of religious people that would render such persons more comfortable with and supporting of technological progress that will ultimately benefit us all.

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Famous Atheist Composers -- Who Says One Needs God to Appreciate Beauty?

April 12, 2009

One of the most ludicrous allegations made by some theists is that one needs to believe in God in order to appreciate beauty in the world and in art. Such a claim needs only one counterexample of an atheist artist, musician, or admirer of the arts to refute. Several such counterexamples are extremely well-known.

The French composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) repeatedly referred to himself as an atheist in his letters. The virtuoso Italian violinist Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840) was well-known as an atheist during his day. Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was documented to have said of all religious creeds and writings, "Not a word of it is true." French composer Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) was an atheist, as was Richard Wagner (1813-1883) during the time when he wrote his most monumental music.

An excellent article by Madalyn Murray O’Hair documents atheistic and freethinking tendencies among some of the most famous composers of human history. If these men could compose works of universally recognized beauty, then surely a belief in God is not required for esthetic appreciation!

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What is the Best Way to Enjoy Life? The Permanent Enjoyment Hypothesis

April 11, 2009

With regard to enjoying life, I am, of course, not opposed to it – and I, like all human beings, seek out enjoyment in a variety of circumstances. I do, however, try to follow a permanent enjoyment hypothesis, much akin to Milton Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis. That is, I try to sustainably spread my enjoyment throughout my life (and perhaps to increase its sustainable quantity per unit time whenever possible). However, I think it is also important to take care that present enjoyment does not undermine one’s future capacity for enjoyment – and this often requires one to endure a certain level of inconvenience and struggle in order to not suffer much more in the future. Those who maximize enjoyment now at the expense of future enjoyment – or even in a manner that causes great future suffering – are not acting prudently or with foresight as far as enjoying life is concerned.

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There is No Experience Worth Dying For

April 10, 2009

I was once asked whether some experiences were so worthwhile as to justify a willingness to sacrifice one’s life in order to have such experiences. The question was phrased as follows: “Is it possible that a finite life with experience A is preferred to an [indefinite] life without experience A?” I do not think so and, moreover, I think the dilemma is a bit artificial. A life of indefinite duration will always give one the possibility of pursuing experience A at some point in the future. If one missed having A now, one can always catch up on it thousands or millions of years in the future. No A is worth so much to me that I would be willing to cut off my future ability to exist or to experience anything for it.

I think that my argument is the one that better incorporates the idea that anything is better than nothing. If, without life, one has nothing, then anything that one has or experiences while alive is better than that nothing. Ceteris paribus, a longer life is better; that is, being able to live one’s life up to the present plus X years is always better than being able to live one’s life up to the present plus (X – Y) years, where Y > 0, no matter what happens during those extra Y years.

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Can Consciousness Survive Physical Discontinuities?

April 9, 2009

A curious dilemma accompanies proposals to keep people alive forever by “uploading” their memories and consciousness onto a computer or outfitting them with new bodies sometime after their deaths – bodies which are identical to the originals in physical structure and the makeup of memories.

Even if, hypothetically, after your death, it were possible to replicate the exact same physical structure and memories of the exact same life history as you have at present, I doubt that this individual would have the same state of awareness that you presently have of your existence and surroundings. Permit me to posit a hypothetical scenario. If a physically identical copy of you were created right now, with the same memories as yourself, you would not perceive the world from the vantage point of this person – although he, too, would consider himself to be you. Now separate this person in time from yourself at present, and you will see that it is unlikely that this person’s awareness would be a continuation of your own. He will be as apart from you, consciousness-wise, as any other person who is not you. Looking back from his vantage point, he will believe himself to have been you and to have experienced your life. However, looking forward, you cannot expect to be aware of what he experiences once his body has been constituted. I strongly suspect that only some underlying continuity of the physical processes within the same body can bring about a continuity of consciousness.

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No Guarantees of Liberty in Life -- Make the Most of What You Have

April 8, 2009

Some people have argued to me that life without freedom is not worth living, in part because one’s consciousness can thrive under liberty in a qualitatively different (and better) way than it can under unfreedom. I agree that the individual’s consciousness thrives better under liberty than under non-liberty, but there is also no natural law guaranteeing that one’s consciousness must thrive or that one must have anything desirable at all – including liberty or life itself. I will take everything desirable that I can get, and I do not expect that the cosmos must give me some particular kind of life or standard of living. Rather, I will use any existing state I am in (including a state of unfreedom) to get to a better state – with more liberty, prosperity, and happiness. To give up on any efforts at improvement simply because one finds the initial state of affairs undesirable is to me akin to the attitude of a person who starves himself to death because he cannot access the gourmet foods to which he has been accustomed. Gourmet foods are great, but I will eat gruel if it is my only option for the time being.

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Life and Liberty: Which is More Important?

April 7, 2009

I often hear the claim that life without liberty is not worth living. Whenever I hear this, I need to ask, of course, what is the purpose of liberty. The purpose of liberty is for the individual to have the ability to take all those actions which contribute to preserving and improving his life. Liberty exists to make life (or at least better life) possible – not the other way around.

Note that a dead person has neither life nor liberty; he has nothing. So there are three options as far as slavery is concerned:

1) Both life and liberty;

2) Life but no liberty;

3) No life and no liberty.

While option 1) is clearly preferable to all the others, option 2) is preferable to option 3), because something is preferable to nothing. Besides, a man who has temporarily lost his liberty can live to fight another day and bring back that liberty when the opportunity is right. A man who has lost his life has also lost his liberty forever; he will never have it back.

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Avoid Conceding to Theists That Your Premises are Arbitrary

April 6, 2009

One approach that many theists will use to convince you that their religion is at least just as plausible as a rational, naturalistic worldview is stating that every worldview requires one to accept certain arbitrary starting premises or value judgments. In the case of the theists, then, the arbitrary starting premises are that their god or gods created the universe and that it/they is/are the source(s) and arbiter(s) of morality. These theists will then claim that an atheist also starts with some arbitrary premises, such as the sole status of the senses and reason as instruments that can convey knowledge as well as the status of the individual’s life as the highest moral value. It is important to avoid conceding that these premises are just as arbitrary as the theists’ assumption that their god(s) of choice exist(s).

When an atheist, materialist, and rationalist discusses his starting premises or axioms, he must be clear that these axioms are either true because it is impossible to meaningfully deny them without lapsing into contradiction or because they are observed to be true through ubiquitous experience — quite unlike the posited deities of any religion. While it is true that every person’s worldview has starting premises, these premises need not be arbitrary, and any system whose starting premises are not arbitrary is superior to any system whose starting premises are.

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Mr. Stolyarov's Essay on the Benefits of Globalization in The Freeman

April 3, 2009

The April 2009 edition of The Freeman, the magazine issued by the Foundation of Economic Education, includes my essay, “Globalization: Extending the Market and Human Well Being.” In this essay, which won FEE’s first annual Eugene S. Thorpe award, I argue that globalization permits the greatest possible extent of the market – i.e., the entire world. Globalization enables the production of specialized goods that would not have been produced otherwise and facilitates greater product variety. This essay is particularly relevant considering that we may be facing an increased push for economic protectionism in the United States today. A PDF version of the April 2009 issue of The Freeman is available for free.

One of my favorite aspects of The Freeman is the magazine’s highly generous policy of permitting reprinting of its articles under a Creative Commons license. So if anyone wishes to republish my essay in any venue, it is perfectly fine to do so with proper attribution.

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How to Reduce Perverse Incentives from Fines

March 21, 2009

Punishing violations of the law with fines can be problematic; it can generate perverse incentives for law enforcers, particularly if the fines are used to fund the operations and salaries of law enforcement officials. Then there exists an incentive to invent new kinds of violations just to collect the fines or to punish existing kinds of violations with a disproportionate amount of severity. Many police departments are particularly arbitrary and draconian with regard to punishing minor traffic violations toward the end of the month, because they need to fill a quota of fines collected in order to remain adequately funded.

My proposed solution to this is as follows. Keep the fines as penalties for genuine violations of individual rights and the safety of others. However, the present law enforcement officials should not be able to benefit from the fines. Rather, the fine money should be put into a savings account and accumulate interest until existing law enforcement officials are replaced. Then the successors get to use the fine money their predecessors collected. In this way, the people charging the fines do not get to personally benefit from them and can enforce the law in a more detached, objective, and even-handed fashion.

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Beware of Disdain for the Particular!

March 20, 2009

I wrote yesterday that most problems in life are technical. This has particular bearing on those “high-minded” individuals who disdain the technical fields of endeavor as somehow “beneath” them, while preferring to concentrate on the “nobler” things in life – i.e., asking questions of the greatest possible generality whose answers have been disputed for millennia because of those questions' imprecise formulations – formulations that are open to a myriad of semantic ambiguities.

When a man who claims to advocate any set of principles disdains the technical fields in life, he ends up undermining his own principles. By failing to properly organize his endeavors and ensure their practical, real-world success, he sets himself up to replicate the failed systems and schemes of his opposition – virtually by default. I have encountered all too many a “libertarian” or “free-market” organization that operates internally like a central planning board which micromanages the organization’s members while leaving no room for individual entrepreneurship or initiative. By failing to think about how to technically implement their principles, the well-intentioned leadership of such organizations simply reverted to the default accepted modes of organization, which are all rigidly hierarchical, extremely lag-prone, and highly inefficient in some manner or another.

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Most Problems are Technical, Not Ethical

March 19, 2009

Most problems in life are not great clashes of values or principles – either internal or external. Rather, they are technical issues – issues about how in particular to arrange the material world so as to minimize human suffering and maximize possible gain. When the best technical solutions to existing problems are not recognized, this is due more to many people’s stupidity than to their malice.

It is much more intuitive to see the world as composed of grand conflicts of visions – clashes of good versus evil – but the reality is much more tangled and particular. Only by looking at the particular, detailed, and minute – considerations of logistics, technology, communication, and incentives – is it possible to resolve most conflicts so that they do not even get to the “clash of visions” stage – as clashes of visions are simplistic mental shorthand for a large variety of particular technical miscalibrations.

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Burton Folsom Discusses the Failure of the National Road

March 18, 2009

In an excellent short essay, Dr. Burton Folsom – a renowned historian and economic thinker with whom I am personally acquainted – explains the reasons for the failure of the National Road, one of the first major federal public works projects in United States history, which was virtually defunct by the 1850s. The road’s construction and maintenance were plagued with inefficiency, as decisions about how to build it were made out of political, not technical, considerations. Even the Jefferson administration – which enacted the construction of the road – was not immune from the influence of pressure groups, each trying to get the road to go into its own district. Ultimately, the National Road ended up not contributing substantively to westward expansion and settlement, as private roads and railroads were preferred for personal and business travel.

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A New Argument for Repealing Capital Punishment: The Cost Argument

March 17, 2009

It turns out that the conventional wisdom, stating that executing a murderer costs less than incarcerating him, is simply false. According to this article from Associated Press, it actually costs over ten times more to executive an individual than to keep him imprisoned for life. Many of the costs occur in the form of lawyers’ fees, the highly convoluted and inefficient appeals system, and upkeep for prisoners who may spend decades on death row. Many states are considering repealing the death penalty now in order to introduce more fiscal sanity into their budgets.

This is one powerful argument for repealing the death penalty; the government cannot do it right and cannot do it efficiently. Why should taxpayers be assessed multiple millions of dollars per executed person? Is that not a case of punishing the innocent – the general public whose members have not committed any crime to deserve such a fine?

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How a Government Job Helped Ludwig von Mises

March 16, 2009

It is not commonly mentioned, but rather interesting, that Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), the great Austrian economist and champion of free markets, spent much of his life employed in a government position. From 1907 to 1908 and again from 1918 to 1938, Mises had a position with the Kammer für Handel, Gewerbe und Industrie, the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, where he acted as an advisor to the Austrian government on economic matters. (You can read more about this in the biography of Mises on the Ludwig von Mises Institute page.) Mises always gave honest, well-informed, principled advice and several times prevented Austria’s slide into complete socialism. He even convinced the socialist Otto Bauer not to institute a complete command economy!

Mises was benefited by his position in that it enabled him to earn a living despite the frequent attacks he and his ideas encountered in Austria. As a man of Jewish descent, of laissez-faire ideals, and of a highly principled, uncompromising disposition, Mises was often not given the treatment he deserved in academia. He was only able to get an unpaid Privatdozent position at the University of Vienna, despite his extensive record of world-class economic writings. But he could conduct his free private seminars without care for how financially profitable they were or how well-received they were by the academic establishment. By having a position outside of the academic system – and the Viennese society which often misunderstood him – Mises could have a degree of free rein that enabled him to create some of his greatest works.

This can be a lesson to many free-market advocates. Working for the government may be a good career choice – provided that one remains true to one’s principles and does one’s job in a way that constitutes a marginal improvement compared to what would have occurred had someone else (say, a new Eliot Spitzer) held that job. It can also buy one the time and flexibility to develop ideas and products that advance free markets outside one’s day job.

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The Proper Rational Attitude Toward Traditions

March 9, 2009

The proper attitude toward practices that can be deemed “traditional” is neither to accept them just because they are traditional nor to reject them just because they are traditional. Each approach demonstrates a fundamental dependence on tradition that is simply unwarranted for a rational individual. A rational individual evaluates each practice on its own merits and rejects a practice if he sees a good reason to do so. On the other hand, he does not attack a practice if he does not see anything explicitly or indirectly harmful about it. In this way, it is possible to give all things traditional the benefit of the doubt in the absence of evidence. There are so many known dangers in the world that to fight anything else is an improper allocation of resources. Let traditions stand where they do no damage, but fight them with all of your abilities when they diminish human well-being!

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Why Are Happy Endings Popular?

March 8, 2009

I am quite fond of happy endings – in books, movies, plays, short fiction, and virtually any other creative medium. It seems that the majority of consumers of these media share my taste. Why prefer happy endings even if in real life there is no poetic justice much of the time, the good people do not necessarily prevail, and absolutely nasty twists of circumstance can destroy an otherwise promising situation – or even a good life?

Happy endings to particular episodes are indeed possible – although they do not always happen. One of the functions of good art is to show people what can be and ought to be, to paraphrase Ayn Rand. Many people’s lives are frequently dominated by some kind of tragic flaw or misfortune, and they seek – even if they are unable to recognize this explicitly – some kind of alternative, some kind of vision of a world where this obstacle can be overcome. Happy endings inspire individuals to fight sources of suffering in their own lives, whereas tragic endings can often only lead to resignation to a miserable condition. (On the other hand, of course, some tragic endings can be useful in serving a didactic purpose – instructing the audience as to what not to do in order to avoid undesirable consequences. But only a certain proportion of stories needs to have this role.) Even if one’s own life is not dominated by happy endings, one can draw on fiction as a way of seeing and working toward some realistic possibilities for greater success, safety, and prosperity.

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Major Underestimation of Arctic Sea Ice Sheds Further Doubt on Manmade Global Warming Theory

March 7, 2009

An article by Alex Morales reports that an error in satellite sensors has led climate scientists to greatly underestimate the amount of Arctic sea ice by an area the size of California. This is yet another of a series of recent discoveries regarding faulty data which adds to the mountain of evidence disputing the ill-conceived and politicized theory of anthropogenic global warming. Although manmade-global-warming alarmists are still not giving up in trying to rescue their pet theory, empirical reality continues to elude their preconceived mental framework. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green!” Or, more appropriately for the situation, the glaciers of the Arctic spring ever white!

In any good natural science, when the data contradict the theory, the theory must be rejected. It is time for the dubious theory of anthropogenic global warming to be consigned to the dustbin of failed ideas.

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New Bullet-Stopping d30 Gel May Reduce the Casualties of War

March 6, 2009

A highly laudable new invention will likely soon be adopted by the British military. It is d30, a gel that hardens immediately when it experiences a high-energy impact, such as the one created by a moving bullet. Thomas Harding’s article, “Military to use new gel that stops bullets,” describes this innovative new way of protecting the lives of soldiers in combat. Moreover, this gel is expected to be applied to many sporting goods as well to reduce the likelihood of injury due to an accident in such diverse pursuits as horseback riding, ballet, skiing, and hockey. The d30 gel is yet another triumph of human chemistry knowledge and engineering. It promises to make our lives safer and even to soften some of the devastating impact of wars. Perhaps civilians during wartime could also be outfitted with clothes containing this gel in order to minimize “collateral damage.” Humanitarian organizations could distribute such clothes to areas that are at risk of being subject to armed conflict.

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Internet Has Beneficial Effects for Poetry

March 5, 2009

Who says that the Internet has brought about the decline of the practice of poetry? Quite the contrary, the Internet has led to an impressive resurgence of poetry consumption and production, and the popularity of both well-established and new poets is on the rise. The Telegraph article “Internet ‘is causing poetry boom’” gives the details on this amazing development. Because the Internet and a series of related technologies permit voice recordings of poetry to be made and easily distributed for free, this has brought about a revival of interest in and unprecedented accessibility of spoken poetry, which captures many of the qualities of good poetry that might elude silent reading.

As one who has published numerous poems on the Internet, I can safely say that this new medium’s existence was a necessary condition for my own creation of poetry. I would likely not have expended nearly as much time or energy on creating poems if I could not find a reliable audience for them, as I presently do online. When one can seek out appreciative readers and listeners from anywhere in the world, one has much greater chances of success than when one is limited to one’s immediate geographic proximity.

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Productivity Maximization Skills: Parallel Use of Faculties

March 1, 2009

Here, I will briefly discuss an approach that virtually anyone can use to maximize productivity – i.e., the amount of work accomplished per unit time. This is not quite the practice known as multi-tasking, as that involves more of a frequent shift from one activity to another – often with time and energy lost in the transition. What I am offering is much less stressful and more effective.

We all have some faculties that can be exercised simultaneously and others that cannot be. For instance, I am able to read and listen to music at the same time, but not read and talk at the same time. I can draw and listen to music, or draw and talk, or draw and listen to a book read to me at the same time – but I cannot draw and read at the same time. I can run and listen to music at the same, and I can run and read at the same time (if I am on an elliptical trainer). I can even run, read, and listen to music at the same time – but it is extremely difficult for me to run and speak at the same time. I suspect that different people may have different combinations of faculties that can and cannot be exercised simultaneously.

The parallel use of faculties involves employing at the same time those abilities that can be comfortably exercised simultaneously. For instance, I am able to get a lot of reading done on an elliptical trainer – while listening to music. Much of my exercise, then, is accompanied simultaneously by work and by leisure.

Time is limited, and all of us have only 24 hours in a day. But by using one’s faculties in parallel, one will find oneself able to accomplish increasingly more – aided by a bit of self-knowledge and creative juxtaposition of activities. To do this, one may need to think somewhat unconventionally about the manner in which a particular task gets done. For instance, reading a particular book might be replaced by reading an audiobook or listening to a voice reader program read the text. Running outside might be replaced with running on a machine. Just thinking about these possibilities might enable you to recognize opportunities for improvement in close proximity that a more passive observer might have missed.

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Microlending Site Enables Charity with Actual Beneficial Results

February 19, 2009

Kiva.org, a microlending site, gives individuals the ability to lend directly to entrepreneurs in poor countries who need small amounts of money to purchase equipment for their businesses. The site cooperates with a variety of field partners in other countries and gives lenders the option to pick the entrepreneurs to whom they entrust their money. Each field partner has its own rating, ranging from one to five stars and indicative of the riskiness of the loan. Thus, individuals can select the projects they give to based on their own risk tolerance. The Internet permits for a versatile, dynamic system of feedback regarding which loans actually got repaid and therefore contributed to actual profitable enterprises.

If you are ever in a charitable mood, go to Kiva.org and other sites like it instead of giving your money to huge multinational aid agencies – where you have no verification regarding exactly how and where your money will be spent and whether it will have any real impact. Charity can work, but only if there is a direct, visible link and strong accountability between lenders and borrowers.

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New Tattoo Developed to Help Diabetics Monitor Blood Sugar

February 18, 2009

Mike at Coated.com describes an eminently useful new invention developed at Draper Laboratories – a tattoo that enables diabetic patients to monitor their level of blood sugar without undergoing often troublesome blood tests. The tattoo changes color based on the amount of glucose in the bloodstream, so a moment’s glance will tell patients whether they are in the healthy range. Aside from removing the inconvenience and pain of using needles, this tattoo will enable a quicker response should abnormal glucose levels be detected.

The trend of technological progress is to make virtually everything less painful, less invasive, more customized and customizable, and empowering to the individual. This new tattoo will enable more diabetic patients to lead healthier, fuller lives.

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Jonathan Swift's Struldbrugs, Immortality, and Negligible Senescence

February 16, 2009

In Part 3, Chapter X of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift describes a subpopulation of immortal humans – the Struldbrugs – which live forever but upon reaching the age of eighty lose the soundness of their mental faculties, their memory, and many human virtues. The Struldbrugs, moreover, continue to senesce and become increasingly decrepit as they become older. Swift makes the argument that this kind of immortality is to be pitied, not desired.
 
Fortunately, this kind of immortality can only exist in Swift’s fictional world. Living forever while becoming increasingly senesced and losing ever more of one’s faculties is practically a contradiction in terms – considering that it is the accumulation of damage due to senescence that eventually kills people. Any sustainable immortality for real-world humans would have to come through the reversal of senescence by either periodically removing the damage and revitalizing the body or by delaying the process long enough for further, more efficacious treatments to be developed.

So immortal humans will also be forever young – or, more precisely, any biological age they want to be. I suspect that most people will choose to look like today’s 25-year-olds – fully physically and mentally mature but without any signs of bodily decay setting in. This kind of indefinite longevity is precisely what Aubrey de Grey refers to as engineered negligible senescence and outlines in his approach, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS). Swift himself recognizes, through the words of Gulliver, that such a kind of immortality would be highly desirable. Non-senescing immortals would, according to Swift, “have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehensions of death!” Gulliver proceeds to describe how he would accumulate wealth, knowledge, and virtue beyond the limits of mortal humans’ abilities if he could have indefinite life. With a healthy body and a functioning mind, everything in Swift’s description and more could be quite attainable.

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Mathematician Bob Palais Challenges the Sanctity of Pi

February 15, 2009

A refreshing and well-argued short essay by mathematician Bob Palais, entitled, "Pi is wrong!", challenges the nearly revered place of the number π = 3.141592653… in mathematics. Palais argues that due recognition should be given not to π but to 2π = 6.283185307. This would greatly increase the notational elegance of many mathematical formulas, including Euler’s famous formula, e^iπ = -1. If a symbol for 2π existed, the formula incorporating it would have a 1 on the right side. 2π is also the number of radians equivalent to a 360-degree turn – and it would be much easier to learn properties of the unit circle in such a notational convention is adopted. Mr. Palais even proposes a symbol for 2π, a π with a third leg in the middle.

Mr. Palais’s argument illustrates the follies of getting locked into a single notational convention – as happens with both languages and mathematical/scientific disciplines. Any given notational convention may have some advantages but is sub-optimal in other respects. It is best to maintain flexibility and openness with regard to notations (and this includes spellings, too!) in the hopes that the best uses of any particular system or element of notation would be found by individuals working on problems to which such notation is relevant. As always, homogeneity enforced by culture – or worse, by force – stifles innovation, creativity, and elegance.

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Dubious "Stimulus" Passes Despite Unanimous House Republican Opposition

February 14, 2009

On Friday, February 13, 2009, the House of Representatives passed the $787 billion economic “stimulus” package, consisting of $281 billion in tax cuts and $506 billion in additional government spending. I welcome the tax cuts and oppose most of the new spending, and on balance the stimulus is likely to be detrimental – but there is one aspect of this vote that is quite encouraging.

As this article by Andrew Taylor reports, every single House Republican voted against the “stimulus.” This might mean that Republicans have finally begun to revert to once again being a voice for limited (or at least more limited) government.

The Republican Party went on a horrifying spree of spending, inflation, regimentation, human-rights violations, corruption, and incompetence during the past eight years. Republicans deserved to lose massively in both 2006 and 2008. Now they are once again in the opposition. Because they do not control the federal government anymore, and Obama is from the “other” party, Republicans – even the highly unprincipled ones – have an incentive to oppose Obama’s favored policies simply because he is Obama. This might lead them – perhaps inadvertently – to support free markets and oppose further expansions of federal-government power. Perhaps they will pull enough Democrats to their side to block some further federal regulatory and spending increases. Seven Democrats in the House did vote against the “stimulus,” and more might come to oppose Obama on future measures.

I hope, for the sake of the future of all Americans, that Republicans do a better job in the opposition than they did in power.

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The Ocean Quahog: A Clam That Can Live for Over 400 Years

February 13, 2009

The ocean quahog – or Arctica islandica – is another fascinating organism of extreme longevity, one that exhibits negligible senescence and lives about 5 times longer than the typical human.

In 2007, a clam was found by researchers from North Wales’s Bangor University; the clam’s age was found to be between 405 and 410 years. The clam was named Ming – the name of the Chinese dynasty in power when it was born. It is uncertain how much longer this creature would have lived, as it unfortunately died as its age was being determined. I hope that in the future, less invasive techniques of calculating the ages of ocean quahogs might be found so that it would be possible to observe if and when such creatures die of senescence.

Surely, we humans can do at least as well as a clam in terms of how long we live! Figuring out how to do this is the great challenge of scientists in the 21^st century.

Sources:
* “Artctica islandica.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
* “List of Some Animals and Plants with Negligible Senescence.” Human Ageing Genomic Resources.

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Deutsche Bank Admirably Rejects German Government's Bailout

February 11, 2009

A genuinely heroic show of independence, integrity, and respect for the free market were shown by Deutsche Bank and its chairman Josef Ackermann, who refused the German government’s offer to bail out the bank after it had posted a loss for the first time since the Second World War. This article from AFP reports the details on this development. It is highly encouraging that at least some people in the business community understand that the free-market system is a system of profits and losses, and that occasional losses – or even regular, major losses – are no justification for seeking government aid. Ackermann rightly pointed out that the losses signaled to him some weaknesses regarding Deutsche Bank’s former business plan – weaknesses that can be revised to improve the bank’s performance. The companies that are bailed out, on the other hand, will have no incentive to correct their flaws, so they will be digging themselves deeper into the already enormous hole they are in.

I suspect that Deutsche Bank will survive the current crisis, while many of its bailed-out competitors will no longer exist in a few years.

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"Liberation by Internet" Translated into Chinese

February 8, 2009

I was delighted to find out recently that my essay, “Liberation by Internet,” has been translated into Chinese. You can see the translation here and here. I appreciate the work of the translator, whom I will not mention by name, because I do not wish for the Chinese government’s attention to be drawn to him or her.
 
Chinese-speaking audiences will benefit from this essay in particular, as it explains how the Internet is a means for colossal, unprecedented individual emancipation from government oversight and control. The Chinese government has made futile attempts to censor Internet content by blocking certain search terms on search engines and monitoring some of its subjects’ Internet use. This, as my essay explains and the existence of its translation shows, is not enough to stop the spread of information to individuals who are interested in pursuing truth and liberty.

“Liberation by Internet” has been quite influential in recent months. It has been referenced in a commentary on the blog This is No Place, and I recently received an extensive e-mail from a long-operating computer entrepreneur who had read it and whose experiences corroborated my thesis.

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The Genius of Archimedes and the Appalling Backwardness of a Medieval Monk

February 7, 2009

What do you do if you are a fourteenth-century monk who needs paper to write a prayer book? Why, you take the writings of one of the greatest mathematical thinkers who ever lived, try to erase them, and write your petty incantations in their stead! This is what a French monk some 700 years ago did to a book by the ancient Greek genius Archimedes. An article by Julie Rehmeyer in Science News discusses this travesty, which led some of Archimedes’ greatest insights to be lost to humanity for seven centuries, until x-ray fluorescence imaging techniques could reveal the text underneath.

The fascinating part of this discovery is that Archimedes was beginning to arrive at the principles of calculus – two millennia before Newton or Leibniz.

The tremendously saddening part of it all is that Newton and Leibniz might have had a much easier time discovering the calculus – or it might already have been discovered before them – were it not for a backward monk who would use anything and everything for his prayer book. In this case, religious zealotry possibly set back the progress of human civilization by centuries. This is, of course, not to mention all those great mathematical works of antiquity that have been irretrievably lost because the monks who erased them were not so sloppy.

When will superstition and fanaticism cease setting back the progress of mankind? When will the savage disrespect for knowledge of some cease robbing the rest of us of opportunities?

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Singularity University: An Institution Devoted to Progress

February 6, 2009

Google and NASA have contributed funding and support to Singularity University, whose chancellor is to be none other than Dr. Ray Kurzweil, the renowned inventor and futurist who predicts a dramatic acceleration in the rate of technological progress – which will yield unprecedented solutions to many of the greatest problems currently confronting humanity.

According to its mission statement, “Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.“

This institution is likely to contribute significantly to technological and scientific progress, as it will serve as a means of integrating knowledge from a variety of cutting-edge fields and thereby reversing much of the rigid compartmentalization that has occurred in many academic and technical disciplines during the twentieth century.

I look forward to seeing what ideas and innovations come out of Singularity University in the coming years.

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Teleportation Between Two Atoms Achieved: Milestone for Quantum Computing

February 5, 2009

The LiveScience article, “Teleportation Milestone Achieved,” discusses a recent success in actually teleporting information between two atoms – more particularly, two ytterbium ions – over the distance of a meter. This is an unprecedented development and will be highly useful for the development of quantum computing, which will be much faster than today’s computers in searching databases and doing encryption calculations.

Although I have previously voiced skepticism about the philosophical and metaphysical interpretations of quantum mechanics, I have never had any problem with the mathematics or practical applications of quantum physics. If a particular procedure can bring about fruitful results – and if quantum theory leads to the procedure – then, by all means, the theory should be used as at least the best available model. However, it is wise to heed the advice of Richard Feynman – who knew more about quantum mechanics than those who try to construct metaphysical propositions from it – and who said, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." Technical breakthroughs – not philosophical ones – are what quantum physics is good for.

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Cloning Enables Brief Resurrection of Extinct Pyrenean Ibex

February 4, 2009

In a fantastic though still incomplete scientific breakthrough, Spanish scientists briefly resurrected the Pyrenean ibex, which went extinct in 2000. The Telegraph article, “Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning,” describes how a living Pyrenean ibex, genetically identical to its extinct ancestors, had been created via cloning and survived for seven minutes. While it is quite sad that this specimen did not live longer, the very possibility of bringing forth such creatures opens a world of opportunity both for resurrecting endangered species and conserving existing ones.

Those who value the preservation of certain animal species should not resist human technological progress. Quite the contrary, improved technology – particularly biotechnology – is the key to achieving an unprecedented level of security for many species which animal lovers wish to see preserved.

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Turritopsis nutricula Proliferation Illustrates the Advantages of Immortality

February 3, 2009

The Turritopsis nutricula, the immortal jellyfish I discussed earlier, is proliferating throughout the world’s oceans. The Telegraph article, “’Immortal’ jellyfish swarming across the world,” describes a “worldwide silent invasion” of these creatures, whose recent increase in numbers has truly been phenomenal.

I think that the ability to expand so readily due to eternal longevity is a strength, not a weakness. Contrary to the fears of those who wish to avert “overpopulation,” I envision a rapidly expanding human habitat. As humans live increasingly longer (and as there are more of them), many of them will find ways to live on the oceans, underwater, in outer space, or even on other planets. The technological, economic, and cultural gains from such expansion and diversification of the human species will be tremendous. For one, the species will be immune from extinction if humans settle even a few other planets or satellites.

We have a lot to learn from our remote hydrozoan relatives. Meanwhile, I wish them – and my readers – long lives.

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Sir David Attenborough Harassed by Religious Fanatics

February 2, 2009

Some people do not know when to stop inserting God and Jesus into every aspect of their lives and conversations. I have to shake my head at those people and hope that they will grow out of such futile and ridiculous nonsense. But a much stronger form of my censure and condemnation is directed at people who spew hate at others who fail to insert God and Jesus into every aspect of their lives, conversations, and work.

My full sympathies and support go to Sir David Attenborough – host of numerous quality nature documentaries – who has been receiving hate mail simply for failing to mention God in his films! This kind of intolerance is barbaric and inexcusable. Moreover, it verges on harassment, as Mr. Attenborough is sometimes told to “burn in Hell” simply for not mentioning God.

As a proud atheist and enemy of all forms of bigotry, fanaticism, and intolerance, I hope that Sir David will persist with his excellent films and that his detractors are seen as the vicious haters that they are.

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Denying Medical Care to Children is Not Part of Religious Freedom

February 1, 2009

An excellent essay on The1585.com describes yet one more easily preventable death of a child – Kara Neumann – due to the decision of cultishly religious parents to deny her medical treatment that was virtually guaranteed to save her life. About one child dies in the United States every month due to such inexcusable negligence.

This case illustrates a vital principle: freedom of religion does not extend to acts that endanger the lives of others – no matter how old those others might be. Parents have an obligation to ensure the continued life and well-being of their children, and if they through their own decisions prevent that life and well-being from being actualized and perpetuated, then they are guilty of child abuse. Denying a child medical treatment for religious reasons is no different from denying such treatment on a whim or because a pink unicorn in a dream told the parents to do so.

Children have rights, too, and one of these rights is not to die because of their parents’ stupidity, irrationality, and “faith.”

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February 2, 2009, Ayn Rand Book Bomb Aims to Increase Awareness of Atlas Shrugged

January 31, 2009

I was recently informed by a fellow friend of liberty and admirer of the ideas of Ayn Rand that a large number of adherents to Ayn Rand’s philosophy – Objectivism – are planning to purchase the Plume edition of Atlas Shrugged on February 2, 2009 – the 104^th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birthday. The book is currently ranked 92^nd on Amazon.com, and the aim of the book bomb participants is to raise the book’s rank to first. Then, the hope is that a large number of people who have previously not been introduced to Ayn Rand’s work will begin to pay attention to it and will refer to it for solid counterarguments against the disastrous political and economic course pursued by the U. S. government during the past several years and decades.
A considerable debate has been taking place among Objectivists regarding the merits of the book bomb as a way to increase exposure to Ayn Rand’s work. You can see many of the discussions on the Objectivism Online forum.

I will personally not be participating in the book bomb, as I already own two different editions of Atlas Shrugged, and I am running out of space to hold my extensive library of books!

However, if you do not yet own a copy of this book, I certainly encourage you to participate and purchase this edition. I own it already, and I find it conveniently portable. You might as well purchase it on February 2 – which is only two days away – and thereby help the book bomb effort as a side effect of your own purchase. Atlas Shrugged is an excellent read, and I believe it to be a necessary prerequisite for being philosophically and economically well-rounded – even if you end up disagreeing with some or all of the ideas in it.

Many Objectivists have argued that the book bomb is not the best way to spend money to advance rational ideas and have also claimed that the book bomb’s intention will fail even if it raises Atlas Shrugged to the first sales rank. This argument states in mild form that if enough people find out that the book bomb was a deliberate effort, then it will simply be seen as a propaganda push by devoted Objectivists and not a genuine spontaneous flowering of interest. Worse yet, Objectivists might be compared by their detractors to advocates of the wildly irrational cult of Scientology – which has used book bombs in the past.

I will not go so far as dissuading book-bomb advocates – because I think that they ought to try their idea and see what happens. It is sometimes possible to predict the outcome of future events through rational deliberation, but it is also useful to have direct empirical evidence in order to see how much weight each causal factor has in determining the outcome of an event. The kind of backlash that book-bomb skeptics foresee may happen, but the question is, to what degree? If 50,000 people are turned away from Objectivism by mistakenly likening it to Scientology but 500,000 are simply convinced to read Atlas Shrugged because they find out about it for the first time, then there would be a net gain of 450,000 people who are now at least aware of Ayn Rand’s ideas. That would be progress. Let the experiment take place and see what happens. I am also strongly inclined to think that the manner in which the book bomb is conducted may have an effect on its outcome. If each Objectivist participant purchases 50 copies of the book, then many will suspect foul play. On the other hand, if each person purchases one or two books, then it is entirely possible that other reasons besides the book bomb are involved – say, giving a copy of the book to a friend, a relative, or a library. This is the de facto equivalent of that friend, relative, or library purchasing the book, and there is nothing dishonest about this. Each book so purchased will genuinely introduce a new person or multiple people to Ayn Rand’s ideas.

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Refuting the "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic Argument"

January 28, 2009

Some Christians seek to convince non-believers in the divinity of Jesus Christ that either Christ was mad, a liar, or an actual god. This argument then relies the non-believer’s sense of tact – expecting the non-believer to avoid insulting the person of Jesus by calling him mad or a liar in front of someone who worships him – in order to extract an admission that Jesus is divine. This argument was strongly popularized by C. S. Lewis in his still influential collection of non sequiturs, Mere Christianity.

But the “Lord, Liar or Lunatic” argument fails for many reasons.

There is a fourth possibility that the argument discounts. Jesus could have been neither mad nor a liar, but sincerely mistaken about many important issues. Even the wisest and most intelligent of humans make serious intellectual mistakes, and often these mistakes entail such people’s misunderstanding of themselves and their role in the world. Consider that Alexander the Great – who was also not insane – also honestly believed himself to be a god – until, that is, he died of a fever at age 32.

Moreover, a fifth possibility is that Jesus was simply extremely politically savvy about the titles which influential men of his time tended to arrogate to themselves. It was Octavian Augustus who began the tradition of Roman emperors proclaiming themselves to be gods (see the “Deeds of the Divine Augustus,” which were written down during Jesus’s lifetime). By proclaiming himself a god, Jesus could have been trying to establish an alternate nexus of allegiance to that of the Roman emperors. This would understandably have been seen as a serious challenge to Roman authority – as Jesus would quite deliberately have been setting himself as a counterpower to Augustus’s successor Tiberius.

So the “Lord, Liar or Lunatic” argument holds no water. Jesus could have been honestly mistaken about his divinity, or he could have been politically clever in proclaiming himself a god in order to challenge Roman imperial power.

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Obama Misunderstands the Cause of Economic Crises

January 27, 2009

A substantial policy criticism of Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address entails his inability to identify the genuine causes of this and other economic crises. Obama said,

“Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched. But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”

I am glad that Obama at least recognizes that markets have greatly positive qualities. This is a mark in his favor. However, the reason that the market “spun out of control” during the housing bubble this decade and the high-technology bubble of the previous decade – as well as every other unsustainable, artificial economic boom of the twentieth century – is not a lack of a “watchful eye,” but rather an excess of regulations, restraints, and incentive distortions on the part of the federal government.

Obama should really familiarize himself with the works of Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who developed the Austrian Business Cycle Theory in the 1930s. Mises and Hayek explain that it is government central banks that cause the boom-bust cycle by artificially lowering interest rates below what they would be on the free market. This is what happened prior to every unsustainable boom in history.

Of course, it did not help that the Community Reinvestment Act in the late 1990s mandated banks to make the variable-rate subprime loans that were the proximate cause of the housing market crisis. It was the federal government that tried to keep housing prices artificially high and growing – a terrible blow to lower-income and middle-class (and even upper-middle-class!) Americans who wanted to buy houses but found them increasingly unaffordable. It was the federal government that created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the 1930s and kept subsidizing them and encouraging their irresponsible behavior. Moreover, during the time of the housing bubble, there were more financial regulations than at any time in human history! This is not the absence of a “watchful eye.” Rather, the federal government is the factor that introduces chaos and massive upturns and downswings into the markets.

Moreover, it is precisely federal government intervention that favors only the prosperous – particularly by rendering goods such as education, health care, and housing prohibitively expensive through a myriad of regulations, licensing rules, subsidies that raise prices, restrictions on entry into a variety of fields, and protection of special interests. Free markets enable every individual to work for his own support and to spend his money as he pleases. Free markets are wonderful precisely because they can benefit everyone – including the poor – to a much greater extent than central planning can.

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The Vagueness of Obama's Inaugural Address: "Ambitions", "Big Plans", "Common Purpose", and "Cynics"

January 26, 2009

My major criticism of Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address is its incredible, sometimes inscrutable, degree of vagueness. For instance, Obama said,

“Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage.”

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply.”

As I pointed out earlier when I asked who the “we” Obama refers to are, specification is also needed with regard to many of the other terms Obama mentions. For example, what is the nature of “our” (the Obama administration’s?) “ambitions” and “big plans”? Is the ambition simply to achieve economic revitalization of the United States, or more specifically to do so through the federal government? Moreover, who is to be making the big plans – individuals or the federal government?

What is the “common purpose” that Obama is trying to extol? Since when does a vast, spontaneous order like an entire society and economy have a single purpose? Obama is here confusing the two Hayekian types of order – taxis, or the deliberately arranged order, and cosmos, or the emergent order. Societies and economies are emergent orders, while individual lives are to a great extent deliberately arranged orders. Individuals can have big plans for themselves and their own lives – but there are no “common purposes” beyond the purposes that all individuals individually agree to. Obama, it seems, would disagree with this, as he praises people who allegedly “saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions.” With these words, Obama seems strongly to suggest that “society” can exist as a reified entity apart from the individuals comprising it. This is gravely mistaken and dangerous rhetoric.

Moreover, who are the “cynics” whom Obama criticizes? Surely, a presidential speech would not be devoted to criticizing those petty cynics who say that individuals cannot attain success in their lives or overcome hardships. Those kinds of cynics are too infrequent for Obama (or most of the rest of us) to pay any attention to. Does Obama mean to call “cynics” the advocates of free markets, limited government, constitutional restraints, and a laissez-faire approach to the economy? If so, then what is so cynical about these positions – and even if they are cynical, what warrant does Obama have to suggest that such cynicism is unjustified?

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Question for Barack Obama: Who is "We"?

January 25, 2009

Now I come to the parts of Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address which I found somewhat dubious, be it in their content or in their vagueness. Obama said the following:

“The state of our economy calls for action: bold and swift. And we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its costs. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.”

Whether this statement is to be praised or heavily criticized depends on the identity of the “we” to whom Obama continually refers. Are the “we” private individuals who, each in their own capacity, pursue these improvements? Or are the “we” federal government officials who arrogate to themselves the power to speak for us all? If the “we” are the former, then there is nothing to fear; then Obama’s speech becomes a simple encouragement for people to be creative, to innovate, and to develop new technologies and infrastructures to adapt to changing conditions. But if the “we” are the latter – the federal government officials – then Obama’s policies would stifle progress, growth, and innovation in the name of fostering them. Only people can create, build and innovate. The federal government can only regiment, prohibit, and coerce. The best the federal government can do in order to encourage the kinds of positive changes Obama desires is to stay out of the innovators’ way.

This ambiguity regarding the identity of the “we” can also be found in Obama’s much publicized campaign slogan, “Yes, we can.” If the “we” means private individuals, then the slogan is just meant to motivate us all to do our best. I think this is the connotation the Obama team intended most people to have in mind when seeing the slogan. But if “we” refers to the federal government or Obama’s team, then the slogan begins to assume disturbing, even sinister, dimensions. If federal officials say, “Yes, we can,” the question that naturally follows is “Can do what?” If it is taxing, regimenting, restricting, and mandating, then I would prefer it if the federal government could not engage in such activities. In my more cynical moments, I wonder if Obama or at least some of his campaign staff and cabinet really mean the slogan to say, “Yes, we [the federal government] can,” while leading the rest out us to interpret it as “Yes, we [the people] can.”

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Barack Obama, Free Markets, and Recovery from the Present Economic Crisis

January 24, 2009

In Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, I found another highly praiseworthy and correct sentiment: “Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed.”

The present economic crisis has not destroyed any physical capital or killed any workers; nor has it limited anyone’s physical or intellectual skills. In order for individuals to work at their full potential and produce as much as they did before, two components are necessary: (1) restructuring of ownership and (2) renewed motivation to work and succeed. Obama may be able to provide the second to many people; the first can only be accomplished by the invisible hand of the free market. During a recession, firms must be allowed to go bankrupt, change owners, and be sold out. If prior owners of assets mismanaged and misallocated them, then it is time for the assets to change hands and be managed by other more competent and prudent individuals. Government bailouts and protectionism only hinder this structural readjustment by keeping afloat firms that need to implode because of past imprudent decisions. The physical assets and workers of those firms will still remain available for others to use.

Hopefully, Obama will genuinely attempt to cease “protecting narrow interests.” The way to do this is to end the massive government subsidies, bailouts, and trade barriers that favor a select few politically connected companies at the expense of everyone else. I have no problem with Obama using his rhetoric to motivate and inspire people. However, I hope that he does not turn his silver tongue against the only long-term, stable solution to this economic crisis – the free market: the uninhibited energies of hundreds of millions of motivated, creative, productive Americans.

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All Are Created Equal but Do Not Remain So: Remarks on Obama's Inaugural Address

January 23, 2009

In his Inaugural Address, Barack Obama mentioned “the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” With this I must partially quibble. The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” not that all remain equal after birth. As a strong anti-egalitarian I must point out that differences in individual effort and merit will necessarily result in individual inequalities after birth. These inequalities are both inevitable and desirable. Some individuals exert themselves to a greater extent than others; this leads them to accomplish more and find themselves in better material positions.

There are some undesirable kinds of inequalities – namely, inequalities which result from coercive privileges which chronically elevate persons of inferior merit above those of superior merit. These inequalities are fostered, among other things, by government grants of monopoly privilege, subsidies, barriers to entry into professions, compulsory unionization, minimum wage laws, and “welfare” (i.e., poverty subsidization) programs. It is true that government ought to eliminate these inequalities, which it can easily do by abolishing those government activities which are the source of the inequalities.

I do agree that all humans ought to be free and ought to have “a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” We must remember, however, that the right to pursue happiness is not the same as the right to have happiness – which few people ever attain to a great extent, and which no one ever attains completely. The best way to ensure that every person has the maximum opportunities to pursue happiness is to remove coercive obstacles in that person’s way – including the compulsions of private criminals and the massive interventions and prohibitions of many governments.

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Praise for Obama's Tolerance for Nonbelievers

January 22, 2009

I have mixed impressions of Barack Obama’s inaugural address, and I will be discussing parts of it in detail subsequently.

What I found highly admirable about Obama’s speech is the following passage affirming that “our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.”

I was amazed to hear the President of the United States finally admit so much explicitly – that those of us who are non-religious and do not believe in any kind of deity are just as much Americans as those who do. We have the same constitutional rights and the same opportunities under the law. We, too, are human beings of no less virtue and merit than many of those who believe in some kind of deity.

Some of Obama’s rhetoric and proposals worry me. But I do not think his administration will be problematic as far as religious tolerance is concerned. He will attempt to preserve the peace among individuals of various convictions, and he will not seek to impose quasi-theocratic institutions.

Obama’s words here constitute tremendous progress – especially considering that just 21 years ago, on August 27, 1987, George H. W. Bush uttered the following detestable words: "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." One can only hope that such bigotry will never again be acceptable in high office in the United States.

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Evil as a Failure of the Intellect

January 21, 2009

All evil is caused by a failure to think. This is not to say that no intelligent or knowledgeable people are evil. But even intelligent evil people have failed to think about something.

If all people took their genuine, long-term interest into account when making each decision, then no person would harm himself or another innocent. Failure to recognize one’s genuine, long-term interest comes from failure to think about it.

Virtually no person considers himself to be evil. Even Adolf Hitler believed that what he did was reasonable, justified, and for the “greater good,” or at least for his own good. What differentiates good people from evil people is that good people’s thinking about reality is more complete, and their efforts are more rigorous when it comes to thinking and genuinely attempting to understand the world, their own lives, and other people as they actually are. One is rightly judged as being good or evil by a preponderance of constructive or destructive actions, not by one’s motivations or self-image. Motivations matter only insofar as they provide reliable indicators to what a person will do in the future. If somebody is kind to me with the sole intention of getting me to give him an unearned inheritance, and I am aware of this, then I can expect this person’s behavior to become considerably less kind in the future.

Thinking and continually recalibrating one’s ideas to reality are not just useful or prudent activities. They are the foundation of moral virtue. Beware of not thinking, for it may lead to evil.

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Rudi Boa was Murdered for Believing in Evolution. His Killer Goes Free This Month.

January 20, 2009

In December 2007, Alexander York was sentenced to serve jail time for murdering Rudi Boa in Australia, as this article by Richard Shears describes. York, a creationist, killed Boa in a drunken state as a result of a prior argument about evolution, in which Boa and his girlfriend Gillian Brown defended evolutionary theory. This month, after serving only a little less than three years in prison, York will go free. He had been sentenced to five years in jail in late 2007, but will be released shortly. The murder occurred in February of 2006, and York had been detained in jail since.

Killing an innocent person is unacceptable, period. Killing an innocent person for ideological reasons is vile and detestable. Yet York’s punishment amounts to a mere slap on the face compared to the magnitude of his crime. This incident simply shows that creationists’ cries that they are being oppressed are not at all reflective of reality. The reality is that individuals who believe in evolution and dare express these beliefs openly are frequently intimidated and sometimes even have physical violence exercised against them. The murder of Rudi Boa is the latest atrocity in the creationist campaign of intimidation against evolution proponents. Other milder and more “respectable” creationists prefer to use bogus copyright infringement claims as grounds for censoring their intellectual opponents. They also like to exclude atheistic and pro-evolution students from school activities and pass laws which either prohibit the teaching of evolution (as had been the case in Kansas during the 1990s) or mandate the teaching of creationism alongside evolution. The creationists’ push to promote their ludicrous ideas by force is intolerable, period. If I were the judge at York’s trial, York would get the death penalty for his unambiguous murder of an innocent, good human being. As matters stand now, the court system of Australia seems to be discounting a creationist’s atrocities on account of his creationism. This favoritism toward a blatant murderer cannot be allowed to stand.

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"Defeating Death" Site Highlights the Evil of Human Mortality

January 19, 2009

For an excellent illustration of just how horrific the status quo is with regard to human mortality, I encourage everyone to visit the site Defeating Death. This site is highly concise, powerful, and striking. About 150,000 people die every day. This website’s dynamic counter keeps track of how many people died since the user came to the website and categorizes the deaths. It is amazing how many more people are killed by so-called “natural causes” than are killed by war, violence, and accidents. Since I began writing this post (about two minutes ago), over 500 people have died of all causes. Of these, only about 30 were killed by wars, other violence, and accidents. The vast majority die of some kind of “natural” body disorders. Of course, there is nothing natural about these perils – perils like cancer, cardiovascular disease, and illnesses of the brain.

This is the great evil of our time. This is what we must defeat – or else all is lost for us.

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Charles Murray Rightly Criticizes the Expectation That Everyone Go to College

January 18, 2009

In an excellent New York Times editorial, “Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?”, Charles Murray makes a series of points that I consider right on target. It is dangerous and highly undesirable to expect every person to get a college education. This cheapens the value of a college education by pushing the quality of what is taught down to the lowest common denominator: the students who do not enjoy learning but simply see college as a necessary bureaucratic procedure to go through. Some people will always prefer partying for four years to going to classes. The solution, of course, is to not admit such people to colleges, but this policy would go counter to the current establishment and egalitarian ideology’s push for everyone to get a college education. I would much rather prefer the chronic partygoers to be expected to get a job right out of high school; this will enable them to make a worthwhile use of an otherwise wasted four years. But for this to happen, employers need to stop seeing a college diploma as a certificate of competency. It is time to return to the days before government subsidization of higher education, when the title of “student” conferred great respect on the bearer, precisely because a student was known to be someone erudite, motivated, and highly familiar with matters intellectual and abstract.

I made the best of my college education (200 credits, three majors, and a 3.993 grade point average). I studied, worked hard, and genuinely pursued the learning opportunities offered to me. This is what other college students should be expected to do. And if some people do not wish to do this, this is absolutely fine. But then it should be made clear that college is not for them.

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Reintroduction of Cinema into Saudi Arabia Indicates Progress in the Middle East

January 17, 2009

After thirty years of being banned by the Saudi Arabian theocracy, cinema is making a low-key, limited, but historically momentous comeback, as this article by Souhail Karam details. This is excellent news, particularly since the film was created by one of the Saudi elite, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and is being shown over the objections of the religious authorities. Try as they might, the theocrats will be unable to stop the tide of peaceful globalization which will civilize the Middle East in due time.

This matter also sheds light on how terrorism and resentment against the West will eventually be defeated in the Middle East. They will not fall due to costly and bloody wars and occupations. Nor will they be rendered ineffectual by draconian “security” measures in Western countries or the futile attempt at appeasing hard-line Islamists in their ridiculous and frightening demands. Rather, commerce and technology will defeat the forces of militant Islam (but not those of peaceful and humane Islam). The great things the past two hundred years of innovation have produced in the West are too attractive to be resisted by the majority of human beings. Give them an opening, and they will pour through. Prevent them from having an opening, and they will make one for themselves anyway.

Islamic fundamentalists, you have already lost the war of ideas. It will be a matter of time before your oppressive, backward theocracies collapse. Do the rest of us a favor and relinquish control right now. Also, please stop killing people and even blowing yourselves up. I would much rather that you become civilized, productive contributors to progress. (I may, of course, be hoping for too much rationality from these people.) It is futile to resist globalization, technology, and cultural progress.

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Major Victory for Freedom: RIAA Drops Lawsuits Against File Sharers

January 16, 2009

On December 20, 2008, a colossal victory for the rights of ordinary people was won as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that it will no longer file lawsuits against individuals who have been caught sharing files. An article by Ryan Nakashima, “Music industry drops effort to sue song swappers,” describes this development. The RIAA lawsuits were abominable under virtually every criterion, as file sharers were often charged millions of dollars for downloading a few tens of songs – clearly a disproportionate penalty even if it were legitimate to penalize them for their individual contribution to the reduction of the record companies’ revenues. Charging double the purchase price of the song might have been understandable if still unjust – but millions of dollars?

The technological reality of the situation, however, made the recent RIAA decision inevitable in the long run. When the ability to costlessly replicate files – without detriment to those who already have such files – exists, then attempting to stop the exercise of such an ability is futile and counterproductive. What is necessary, rather, is to develop new marketing models that take the new technology into account. The RIAA still resists this and promises to cooperate with Internet service providers to cut off access to file sharers. This, too, will be a losing battle, as it is in the interest of the Internet service providers to retain their customers, a sizable fraction of whom are in violation of the RIAA’s draconian standards (by which sometimes making a copy of a file for one’s own use constitutes a criminal offense). Internet service providers who go after their customers too aggressively will rapidly find themselves out of business.

I have an idea for the RIAA. Why not devote those billions of dollars, which it has been spending on attempting to punish file sharers, toward developing new non-coercive ways of making money that cannot be circumvented by Internet technologies? Hopefully, somebody there will eventually come to this realization.

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Help Contribute to Human Life Extension: Download Rosetta@home

January 15, 2009

If you believe that human lifespans ought to be greatly extended and today’s perilous diseases cured, then you may be thrilled to learn that there is something you can do – no matter what your experience or occupation – to help further this goal. No, I am not referring to donating money. Rather, you can engage in an endeavor that is much more direct in its relevance to research that helps promote life extension and disease cures. Rosetta@home is a distributed computing project which harnesses the power of hundreds of thousands of computers throughout the world in order to predict the manner in which various proteins fold. Being able to predict how proteins fold will be helpful to fighting many major diseases and also designing new proteins that can aid in this task. You can download the Rosetta@home program onto your computer, and it will make these predictions using your computing power when the computer is turned on but you are not working on it. I now have an older computer fully devoted to running Rosetta@home, but it should also be easy to configure your main computer to run it during its “down time.”

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An Atheist's View of Christmas

December 24, 2008

I do not believe in any god or gods, and, moreover, although I do believe that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure, I do not believe that it can be ascertained exactly when he was born. Nonetheless, I do not have any problem with the holiday of Christmas, its date, or even celebrating it myself. If you wish me a merry Christmas, I will wish you one right back. Yes, I know that my behavior is exactly contrary to what many Christian fundamentalists have tried to convince you about us atheists. But my approach to Christmas is, in my experience, the most common among atheists.

First, there is no problem with arranging a celebration on any occasion – with gathering with friends and families, experiencing good food, and sharing presents. Second, Christmas has already become so extensively secularized and commercialized that even many Christians celebrate it without engaging in religious ceremony. It seems that Santa Claus, rather than Jesus Christ, is the mythical figure around which Christmas is centered in English-speaking countries today.

Third, numerous pre-Christian cultures had celebrations on or near the beginning of winter. Celebrations of the winter solstice emerged naturally in numerous cultures because, if people had enough food with which to celebrate, this meant that they also had enough to last the winter – when gathering new food was problematic for pre-Industrial peoples. The early Christian church understood the significance of Winter solstice celebrations to those whom it converted. Instead of trying to root out the celebrations – an impossible task that would arouse considerable hostility – the early church officials simply co-opted them by convincing people that the birth of Jesus occurred around the time of the winter solstice. But the solstice celebrations came first.

Contemporary Christmas needs not have a religious component at all, and for most people it does not. And for those who wish to celebrate it with a religious component, this is their free choice. So long as no coercion is involved on the religious front, I have no objection to people, including myself, celebrating Christmas in public.

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Progress for Physics: New Model of Loop Quantum Cosmology Rejects Singularities and Affirms Insights in A Rational Cosmology

December 19, 2008

In an excellent step forward for mainstream theoretical physics, the model of Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC) presents a picture of a universe where singularities do not exist. LQC still holds that a Big Bang happened, but the Big Bang was not the beginning of existence itself, unlike conventional contemporary mainstream cosmology asserted. Rather, according to LQC, the Big Bang occurred after a prior “universe” collapsed and all the entities in it came to occupy an extremely small volume – but not an infinitely small one.

The New Scientist article, “Did our cosmos exist before the Big Bang?” by Anil Ananthaswamy, describes LQC in a manner accessible to the layman reader.

LQC, originated by Ashtekar, Singh, Pawlowski, and Bojowald, is a wonderful improvement in clarity and logical consistency over conventional cosmology. It also affirms many of the insights present in my treatise, A Rational Cosmology.

LQC does not treat “the universe” as all of existence; rather, it refers to the “present universe” as all of existence after the Big Bang, and to some “past universe” as all of existence prior to the Big Bang. Thus, LQC holds that there was not necessarily an act that created existence itself. This is a different definition of “universe” from the one I used in A Rational Cosmology (where I defined the “universe” as “everything that exists”). However, it is a definition that is logically consistent with what I have been saying all along: that existence itself could not have been created – although some subset of existence may have had a beginning.

According to Mr. Ananthaswamy’s article, here is a picture of existence that LQC would imply:

”If [LQC’s predictions are] verified, the big bang will give way to a big bounce and we will finally know the quantum structure of space-time. Instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end.”

While I am still somewhat skeptical that every entity in existence can act in this highly coordinated manner with respect to every other entity, this theory is at least logically conceivable, and if a plausible spontaneous-order mechanism for such coordination can be presented, I am willing to accept it. LQC eliminates two fatal flaws from mainstream contemporary cosmology:

(1) The idea that all of existence could have been created, instead of existence always existing. This is fundamentally a religious notion and not a scientific one; it implies creation ex nihilo and has no place in a rational worldview.

(2) The idea that the universe or “our present universe” at one time existed as a single point of infinite density – namely, a singularity. According to the article, “Bojowald's major realisation was that unlike general relativity, the physics of LQC did not break down at the big bang. Cosmologists dread the singularity because at this point gravity becomes infinite, along with the temperature and density of the universe. As its equations cannot cope with such infinities, general relativity fails to describe what happens at the big bang. Bojowald's work showed how to avoid the hated singularity, albeit mathematically… Singh and Pawlowski developed computer simulations of the universe according to LQC, and that's when they saw the universe bounce. When they ran time backwards, instead of becoming infinitely dense at the big bang, the universe stopped collapsing and reversed direction. The big bang singularity had truly disappeared.”

I have been arguing these two points for over three years now, and have often been ridiculed by conventionally minded people for defying the scientific “consensus.” Well, it seems that there is no longer such a consensus and that the thrust of new scientific theory is in fact highly consistent with much, even if not all, of my philosophical writings on cosmology. Here are some excerpts from my treatise, precisely on these subjects. Keep in mind that the impossibility of creation ex nihilo and singularities were my primary objections to conventional Big Bang theory.

From Essay VII:

“Assuming that a singularity was a single entity, which exploded to result in the Big Bang, what caused the explosion? Explosion, like generic creation, is an action, and an action is a relationship of multiple entities that results in the alteration of said entities' qualities.”

“…If the singularity were the only entity that existed, and had no component parts that could interact amongst each other, it could not have exploded, nor could it act in any way whatsoever!”

“…if the entity is some single, monolithic, component-less, indivisible thing, such as the Big Bang theory's definition of a singularity, and it happens to have certain qualities at a given time (such as non-explosivity, for example), and no other entity exists to change these qualities, there is no way that these qualities can be changed! A thing is what it is, and cannot, especially if it lacks volition, spontaneously decide to become something else and assume a different totality of qualities.”

”If such a component-less entity as a singularity were left entirely unto itself, nothing could have influenced a change in its quality of non-explosivity, and it could not have exploded. Without any mechanism to induce an alteration in its qualities, it would have remained just what it was, a singularity.”

From Essay XIV:

“if the quality ‘matter’ exists in an entity, it must have a real manifestation; this manifestation is volume. If the quality ‘matter’ and the quality ‘volume’ did not coexist and were not inextricably connected, we would encounter absurdities.”

From Essay XV:

“A singularity conceived of as a sole point containing mass, but mass without volume, i.e., a point-entity, is a contradiction in terms.”

In the words of Ayn Rand, “an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.” (“Introduction,” The Virtue of Selfishness) In the true spirit of the individualism that Rand advocates, I held to my own reasoning and my own understanding of cosmology, in spite of what the prevailing consensus among the laymen and scientists of my time was. I did not take any understanding on faith, irrespective of how prestigious or “indisputable” the theory endorsing it was. In this issue at least, future scientists will likely agree that I was right after all.

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Decoupling Activities: A Worthy Goal for the Future

December 18, 2008

To add to the worthwhile aims of achieving indefinite human life, complete economic and social freedom, and the cessation of all aggression among humans, I would like to propose yet another quite ambitious goal for humans today and in the future to strive toward. I call it the decoupling of human activities from one another. Currently, in many realms of life, in order to achieve aim X – some desirable goal – a person must frequently undertake activity Y, which is not necessary to get to X because of the nature of X itself, but rather is necessary because of the contingent circumstances surrounding the attainment of X.

For instance, if one wishes to make money, one does need to work to get it; working is a constitutive part of making money, and this will never change. However, if one wishes to make money or to work, it is not an indispensably necessary part of work that one needs to put one’s life at risk by driving on congested streets to get to one’s workplace. Innovations such as telecommuting, working online, or cars that drive themselves can decouple the inconveniences of driving from the desirable activity of work.

Likewise, I believe that every organization that owns a set of spatially disjoint yet mutually nearby facilities should eventually build indoor walkways connecting buildings that are currently separate. This will be of great convenience to such organizations’ customers and employees, as it would decouple getting from one building to another (often a desirable undertaking) from necessarily having to walk outside (which is sometimes desirable and sometimes not, depending on the weather). Eventually, when the capital to do so exists, I would like to see humans build for themselves such a network of indoor passageways that going outside will be altogether optional. Of course, I recognize that being outdoors can be of great value to many people – and this would still be fully available. But it will be decoupled from every other possibly worthwhile goal, so that people could choose to do one, both, or neither.

I would like to live in a future world where every person can evaluate every individual undertaking with respect solely to its own merits and demerits, so that circumstances do not force us to choose between sub-optimal “bundles” or “packages” of actions. The decoupling of activities in a tremendous diversity of realms would make all of us far wealthier, happier, and more productive.

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Commercial Space Stations: A Step Forward for Private Space Exploration

December 17, 2008

A brief article in the New Scientist, “Commercial space station finds first customers,” describes a project by SpaceX to build a mini space station, DragonLab, where the first missions will be conducted as early as 2010. This is indeed a wonderful period of transition from government-run space exploration to private space exploration. The Space Shuttle will be retired by NASA in 2012, after a 40% record of catastrophic failures. A wide variety of competitive privately provided space services, from rockets to space stations, is already emerging in its place. And for all its faults, the incoming Obama administration seems to be friendly to private space flight as well, as the appointment of George T. Whitesides, “a senior adviser to Virgin Galactic,” to Obama’s NASA transition team suggests.

I may be overly optimistic here, but it does seem that the federal government is at least somewhat stepping aside and permitting private enterprise to take over operations that have been a growing burden to NASA. It will be wonderful to observe what innovation un-hobbled by bureaucracy can accomplish.

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Crashless Cars: A Moral Imperative

December 16, 2008

A fascinating recent article by Steven Ashley in the Scientific American is entitled, “Crashless Cars: Making Driving Safer.” It describes some of the remarkable safety systems that are currently being experimented with in automobiles and the kinds of improvements that – within the next 5 to 10 years – could greatly reduce the frequency of collisions by enabling cars themselves to take charge of situations where drivers cannot react with sufficient speed or simply have not been paying attention.

What is even more impressive is that the technology to create functional robotic cars already exists. The conclusion of the article states that “In 2007 a tricked-out Chevrolet Tahoe nicknamed ‘Boss’ and several similar driverless vehicles successfully navigated through a realistic city streetscape in Victorville, Calif., one complete with other cars and even traffic jams. The autonomous cars and trucks were competing in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Urban Challenge, a race designed to demonstrate that robot road vehicles can become practical. Soon afterward General Motors CEO G. Richard Wagoner, Jr., predicted his company will market autonomous vehicles within 10 years. That prognostication may be a bit optimistic, but his statement surely points the way to real robotic cars in the not too distant future.”

Mr. Ashley reports that driver error is the primary cause of the vast majority of accidents today. The fact remains that human beings are easily distracted, often tired and incapable of alertness, and frequently engaged in a futile and dangerous effort to multi-task while driving. Taking the control of fast, potentially deadly vehicles out of human hands and into the power of reliable, always rational, always responsive automated systems is therefore a moral imperative – as it would save about 39,000 lives per year.

Unfortunately, as Mr. Ashley’s article documents, many American drivers are still wedded to the notion that full human “control” or “mastery” over the vehicle is somehow indispensably desirable and even liberating. To such drivers, I say: “Your car is a means of transportation, not a means of self-expression. Its primary aim should be to get you from one place to another in one piece, not to give you some silly psychological thrill. Express yourself in ways that will hurt neither you nor others, please!” The long-standing cultural assumption that driving one’s own car is somehow a manifestation of autonomy or independence needs to be challenged. I, for one, look forward to the day when robotic cars will be doing all the driving for me. I want to live, and I, as a human being, am keenly aware of the limitations to my responsiveness as well as to the emotional composure that is necessary to drive safely and competently. Therefore, I urge all drivers to embrace automated vehicle safety systems as soon as they become affordable. For most of my readers, this recommendation extends to their next car purchase.

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Editorial by Robert Poole Exposes Egregious Government Infrastructure Mismanagement

December 15, 2008

Following our extensive discussion regarding the merits and possible effects of road privatization, Mr. Merlin Jetton referred me to the following excellent article by Robert Poole, entitled, “Stimulus Shouldn’t Be an Excuse for Pork.” This article highlights the wastefulness and misdirected priorities of governments when it comes to infrastructure projects and gives plenty of empirical evidence for precisely why governments should not be involved in infrastructure management. Mr. Poole reports that the mayors of cities throughout the United States have requested a “stimulus” package of over $73 billion. Mr. Poole then proceeds to list numerous superfluous and misguided expenditures to which this money would be devoted – at the expense of vital infrastructure maintenance.

According to Mr. Poole, here is how government management of roads and bridges has failed us – miserably:

Poor Maintenance on Roads and Bridges: “We have a backlog of deferred maintenance on both highways and bridges. According to Reason Foundation’s Annual Highway Report, 24% of U.S. bridges were reported structurally deficient or functionally obsolete in 2006. At the current rate of repair it will take 62 years for those bridges to be brought up to date.”  

Overemphasis on “Public Transit” Projects: “Consider how the Los Angeles area is spending its transportation money. A 2006 study by University of North Carolina at Charlotte Prof. David Hartgen found that in Los Angeles less than 5% of the area’s workers use public transit to commute, yet over 50% (nearly $67 billion) of the area’s long-range plan (to the year 2030) money will be spent on transit projects. Planners admit the cash going towards those transit projects won’t significantly increase transit’s share of commuters, which means over half the spending won’t do anything to reduce the region’s infamous traffic jams, which drain the economy and hurt businesses.”

Politicians’ Tendency to Favor Glamor Over Substance: “Too often [politicians] choose ribbon-cutting ceremonies at sports complexes over repairing bridges.”

What is particularly frustrating about government (mis)management of roads and bridges is that many experts on the subject agree that glaring problems – such as urban traffic congestion – can be resolved with much less money than the mayors are asking for. According to Poole, “Hartgen’s study showed we could eliminate severe congestion in all of the nation’s urban areas for $21 billion a year — less than we are spending on transportation today, and $52 billion less than the mayors just asked for. And by investing in the right projects we’d save 7.7 billion hours each year.” Surely, if roads were privatized, we would get at least this benefit of elimination of severe traffic congestion. This alone would be a massive improvement over the current system and would alone be worth the privatization effort. Traffic congestion wastes our precious lives. Moreover, it puts those lives at risk. It is imperative to end it, not just from considerations of economic efficiency, but from considerations of the moral value, dignity, and safety of every individual.

Moreover, I am glad to see Mr. Poole recommending a possibility that I, in my discussion with Mr. Jetton, argued is likely to happen under private roads. Mr. Poole writes that “[t]oday, over 80% of all goods (by value) in this country are shipped by truck. Time is money. A national network of truck-only toll lanes would enable truckers to carry more goods, faster.”

Finally, for those who would argue that there is not enough private capital to fund the kinds of improvements Mr. Poole discusses, the numbers speak to the contrary: “Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters says there is over $400 billion in private capital available for high-priority U.S. infrastructure projects. That sum, if properly spent on the most-needed transportation projects, would transform our roads, transit systems and airports into a 21st century transportation network that would unleash the economy.”

Mr. Poole’s article reinforces much of what I said in my discussion with Mr. Jetton – namely:

(1) that government mismanagement of the roads today is severe and devastating in many respects;

(2) that private enterprise would do a far superior job, even with existing technical knowledge;

(3) that most problems that are ubiquitously associated with roads today would disappear after privatization.

I am also wondering whether this article has had an impact on Mr. Jetton’s thinking on the subject as well. If so, I would be interested to learn what that impact might have been.

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Physical Immortality is Possible: Ask Turritopsis nutricula!

December 13, 2008

Indefinite life for humans and other organisms is not a mere fantasy disjoint from the real world. Rather, indefinite life already exists among certain animals in nature. Tortoises, for instance, do not senesce, and neither do many kinds of fish. Many tortoises have been known to live for hundreds of years, and they can possibly live longer if humans take good care of them.

However, Turritopsis nutricula, a tiny jellyfish, has an edge on even the tortoise. Indeed, scientists recognize this organism as virtually immortal. How does it achieve a feat that has eluded humans for millennia (although humans have not genuinely given the goal of immortality their fullest effort yet)? After the Turritopsis nutricula attains sexual maturity, it reverts once again to a sexually immature condition through cell transdifferentiation. It is the hydrozoan equivalent of adults turning into children, then growing up again, turning into children again, and so on indefinitely.

The Turritopsis nutricula is tiny – about 4 to 5 millimeters in diameter, which renders them extremely small to the human eye but still visible. As they grow into adults, these organisms develop additional tentacles – going from 8 to 80-90.

These minuscule jellyfish have mastered the secret of eternal life! Surely, we humans can do just as well. Now that we know that living forever is possible, we should all wholly support efforts to achieve this tremendous blessing for human beings.

Read more about Turritopsis nutricula:

“Turritopsis nutricula” from Wikipedia
“Meet the World’s Only Immortal Animal” by Mihai Andrei
“Cheating Death: The Immortal Life Cycle of Turritopsis” from Swarthmore College

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Refuting an Extremely Silly Argument Against Gay Marriage

December 11, 2008

I can respect some arguments certain social conservatives make against legalizing gay marriage – even if I disagree with those arguments. There is one argument, in particular, which is not worthy of any kind of respect in my view. The argument runs along these lines: “Restricting gay marriage is not a violation of homosexuals’ freedom to marry, because homosexuals are still perfectly free to marry a person of the opposite gender, just like everyone else.”

Let us say that a cult of Invisible Pink Unicorn worshippers took over the legal system and forced everyone to worship the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Of course, allegations would arise that the cult violates religious freedom. But then the cult members could respond, “Of course, we are not restricting anyone’s religious freedom! After all, anyone is still free to worship the Invisible Pink Unicorn in exactly the same way that we worship It.” This is precisely the same argument as the claim that homosexuals are perfectly free to marry persons of the opposite gender. Freedom to only engage in one kind of action or one among a list of officially “authorized” actions is not freedom at all. It is at best a grant of privilege, at worst outright compulsion.

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Obama Abandons Effort to Impose "Windfall Profits" Tax on Oil Companies

December 10, 2008

As much as I disagree with many of Barack Obama’s ideas, I must applaud his sanity and good judgment in one particular instance. As this article from Reuters reports, Obama no longer plans to impose a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies. He, just like all of us, has seen gasoline prices and oil prices decline by more than a factor of two, and so has concluded that a tax would be unnecessary and that even its initial rationale no longer holds. I am glad that Obama is at least willing to look at empirical evidence and consider whether his former policy suggestions might have been rendered absurd or counterproductive based on that evidence.

Lower gasoline prices have been a tremendous boon to consumers during the past several months. I, for one, am extremely pleased that the inflationary boom of 2003-2008 has been stopped. It, and not the present “recession,” was the genuine economic problem, as perpetually rising prices for virtually everything made it difficult for individuals to retain their former standards of living. For the time being, prices are mercifully low and declining – especially on essentials such as housing and fuel. A windfall profits tax on oil companies would have raised the cost of gasoline to consumers once again. Basic economics teaches us that the real incidence of a tax does not depend on its nominal incidence. No matter whether the tax would have been imposed on consumers directly or on oil companies, the consumers’ share of the tax would have been the same. The last thing consumers today need is a revival of the high costs of everything that characterized the last several years. I am glad that, at least in this respect, the federal government will not make our lives any more difficult.

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More Individuals Choose Energy Autonomy - Good News for Liberty

December 9, 2008

An encouraging trend has been documented in the December 3, 2008, New Scientist article by Gaia Vince, entitled, “How to Unplug from the Grid”. This article describes how increasing numbers of people are able to economically supply power to their own homes, without going through public utility companies and government-granted monopolies.

Of course, many environmentalists like this development because it offers incentives for energy conservation – for people to use only the energy that they absolutely need in order to keep the arrangement economical. This is not my primary reason for being pleased with this trend, however.

I believe that any time individuals can afford to no longer to rely on local governments and government-favored businesses for the provision of any of their resources – those individuals thereby become freer. They become less beholden to politicians, who have less of a club to wield against them. For instance, no politician can cut off the power of an individual who has his own generator and/or solar panels. That individual can even comfortably live outside any city limits and thereby enjoy far lower taxes and no requirement to fund wasteful and often intellectually damaging public schools.

Besides, the enormous problem with 20^th-century and early 21^st-century economies and infrastructure has been a dangerously high level of interdependence, or the “we are all in the same boat” effect, where, if some aspect of the markets or the infrastructure fails, individuals all throughout the system can suffer dramatically for none of their own fault. This, too, may be due to government distortions of various economic sectors, yet reforming the government is a slow and difficult process. It should be done, but in the meantime, an excellent course of action is for as many people as possible to become as independent as possible of the fragile “same boat” (which looks to be capsizing anyway). Hopefully, we will all be able to achieve this degree of independence in the coming decades.

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Conserve Resources -- Out of Self-Interest

December 8, 2008

I am the last person who would call himself an environmentalist. I am staunchly pro-technology, pro-industry, and pro-human-progress. I do not consider man to be a blight on the Earth. Rather, I believe that everything that is good is good because it benefits man. Even when it comes to treating animals with dignity and respect, I believe that only man can save certain species of animals from the vicious waves of extinctions that have characterized virtually all of our planet’s history.

However, I also practice more resource conservation – with energy, containers, supplies, and money – than even many of my liberal environmentalist contemporaries. Why? The answer is simple. I believe in enlightened, long-term self-interest. If I use only the energy and other resources that I absolutely need, this means that I have more money to spend on other things. I can afford to have a highly positive savings rate, and in this credit-dependent, debt-ridden society, I can afford to pay for all of my everyday purchases with money that I actually have. I can afford to live a truly sustainable life – no risk of impoverishment, no risk of overstretching my resources, and plenty of money just sitting there, to be used in the event of any unforeseen contingencies or big essential purchases.

The environmentalists are not that far off in their more commonsense recommendations for reducing waste, reusing more of one’s property, and finding more efficient ways to accomplish the same goals. However, to do so for the sake of something vague, abstract, and not easily definable, such as “the environment,” is not a particularly strong motive considering that a much closer and more relevant one is staring you in the face. If resource conservation is desirable, this is because it brings about your own improved well-being. In earlier eras, this practice was considered a part of the virtue of frugality. The nature of this virtue has not changed one bit in our time.

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Is China Economically Sounder Than the United States?

December 7, 2008

When freedom and common sense depart one part of the world, they typically settle in another – although the change does not occur instantaneously. Nonetheless, the disastrous government interventionism that has occurred during the unjustified 2008 economic bailout has certainly done untold damage to the future economic climate of the United States. To see just how outrageously wasteful spending on the bailout has been, take a look at this chart from VoltageCreative.com.

Economic leadership in the world is rapidly shifting away from the United States and toward countries where economic policy is more solidly grounded in the production and provision of real goods and services – rather than the collective delusion that prices for existing real and paper assets will continue to rise in perpetuity. China is now in a position to seriously lecture United States policymakers on economic issues – which is precisely what Chinese officials are now doing. “China lectures US on economy,” an article by Geoff Dyer, documents what may be the beginning of a systematic shift in global economic dynamics. Because of reckless federal-government-induced credit expansion, financial bailouts, and increasing socialization of businesses, the United States is fast becoming an economic basket-case. China, on the other hand, is moving in precisely the opposite direction. Since Deng Xiaoping assumed power in 1976, China has gradually transitioned away from Maoist communism toward a system of state capitalism, where the state is playing an increasingly weaker role over time. China is still not as economically free as the United States, but China is moving in the direction of more economic freedom, while U. S. politicians are foolishly throwing away the freedoms that have turned America into a global economic powerhouse.

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Please Extend Individualism to Include Anti-Terrorist Muslims!

December 6, 2008

It is always unfortunate when advocates of liberty reject or alienate any possible friends and allies by making sweeping generalizations about entire groups of people. I fear that Muslims have been unjustly smeared as a group for the actions of a few self-proclaimed Muslims who actually do not follow many of the teachings of Islam.

I took exception to a statement made earlier by Mr. Kyrel Zantonavitch that “There's virtually no Muslim anywhere in the world that can honestly say he opposes normal-type Muslim propagation (jihad) and normal-type Muslim law (sharia). There's virtually no Muslim anywhere in the world that can honestly be called a Western liberal. For those who don't believe this - name one." In my response, I named numerous Muslims and Muslim organizations who strongly condemned terrorist attacks and expressed support for liberty and nonviolence.

Now, here is another courageous Muslim individual who has condemned terrorism – unequivocally, completely, and without reservation. I hereby congratulate YouTube user americanmuslimgirl, who succinctly does exactly what critics of all Muslims have dared any Muslim to do. Now the critics must be intellectually honest and concede this point. At least some Muslims have in fact condemned precisely what they needed to condemn.

Please watch this video; please observe the clearest possible evidence that not all Muslims are bigoted, intolerant, or supportive of violence, oppression, and terrorism.

Individualism is truly a wonderful concept. It implies treating each person primarily as an individual human being, not as a member of any circumstantial or ideological group. Collective guilt and guilt by association do not exist for an individualist.

Now let all the individualists of the world do Muslim individuals the courtesy which is owed to every human being. Treat them and judge them as individuals. If they blow up things and people, condemn them. If they condemn those who blow up things and people, respect them and cease unjustly attacking them.

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Dr. David Sinclair Makes Progress in the War on Biological Aging

December 5, 2008

A recent article in The New Scientist, “Has universal ageing mechanism been found?” by Linda Geddes, reports some hopeful news for those of us who desire indefinite life in this world. The work of Dr. David Sinclair at the Harvard Medical School has discovered that malfunctions in a protein called Sir2 in yeast cells are responsible for those cells’ senescence. The protein performs a dual function; it repairs DNA and suppresses the inappropriate expression of certain genes. As yeast cells senesce, Sir2 protein molecules become overworked and are unable to fulfill the function of gene suppressors – and hence certain genes begin to be expressed in the wrong parts of the organism, leading to nasty side effects for the yeast cells’ health.

Dr. Sinclair has further studied the protein SIRT1, which performs similar functions in mammals to those of Sir2 in yeast cells. He has discovered numerous similarities between these two proteins, which suggests that a possible way to rejuvenate senescing mammals (and, in particular, human beings!) might be to somehow facilitate the creation of many more SIRT1 proteins than are naturally available to mammal organisms. In that way, each individual protein molecule would be less likely to become overworked. The article quotes Sinclair as saying that this discovery "opens up the possibility of restoring youth in the elderly by re-establishing a useful pattern of gene expression.” As I am not anywhere close to being elderly yet, this bolsters my hope that by the time I am in my sixties, this technology will already be mainstream and affordable.

The next step in Dr. Sinclair’s research is to find out how to actually increase SIRT1 production in mammals. I hope that he succeeds in discovering a way and that he succeeds as quickly as possible. Colossal numbers of people die of senescence every day; the faster a way to delay this killer is discovered, the more of these immeasurably precious lives can be saved.

***

New Model Skyscrapers Available in Antideath

December 4, 2008

A massive update has been made to Antideath, my model city of the future. Fifteen new model skyscrapers have been added, along with two-dimensional digital images of each. Remember that you can download a three-dimensional model of each skyscraper for viewing and use in Google Sketchup. I would highly encourage you to see the buildings in Antideath from all sides and at various levels of magnification, as this is one of the principal advantages of three-dimensional art.

Moreover, a structural improvement to the Antideath page has been made, so that links to all the individual buildings are provided close to the top of the page, enabling you to efficiently navigate to any building that you wish to see.

These are the new additions to Antideath:

Adam Smith Tower
Antoine Lavoisier Tower
Bastiat Building
Carl Menger Tower
Charles Darwin Tower
Friedrich Hayek Building
Geometric Progression Building
Globalization Building
Gold Standard Tower
Isaac Newton Compound
Jean Baptiste Say Tower
Pyramid of the Living
Richard Cobden Building
Tower of Endurance
Trapezoid Tower
Turgot Tower

Also remember that you are welcome to create your own three-dimensional skyscraper models and add them to Antideath. Just e-mail me at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com with your creation and any information pertaining to it, and I will add it to the collection, with full credit given to you for its authorship.

***

Cancer is Going Down!

November 29, 2008

It is always delightful to have good news to write about. One of the most virulent killers of our time is giving way to the advances of technology and healthier living. Cancer death rates have been declining for several decades now, but cancer incidence rates – rates of new cancer cases emerging – have gone down for the first time in history during the current decade. This article from Reuters has some encouraging figures pertaining to the declines in the frequency of new cases for most cancers.

Improved medical technologies and increasing abandonment of unhealthy lifestyle choices such as smoking, as well as the increased frequency of early diagnosis of cancers, are responsible for the drop in cancer rates. We can only hope that this trend will continue, until cancer incidence is reduced to zero, and cancer will go the way of the bubonic plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, and other killers of our dark past.

***

Excellent News from Turkey Regarding the Possibility of a More Humane Islam

November 28, 2008

I have always been of the opinion that the war of ideas in our time is not a war on Islam as such, but rather a war on intolerance and fanaticism in general – and these can come under the guise of any ideology. Earlier, I elaborated on this subject in “The War on Fanaticism, Savagery, and Murder – Not on Islam.” Thus, I welcome any effort within Islam to foster greater tolerance and appreciation of modernity and individual freedom. This is precisely what is happening in Turkey today. This article from BBC News details a courageous and eminently wise effort by theologians at Ankara University to literally rewrite the Hadith – the sayings of Mohammed – and get rid of much of the historical baggage that has accumulated there. It turns out that it was not Islam or the teachings of Mohammed as such that are responsible for many of the socially restrictive customs of today’s Middle East. Rather, these customs existed on their own, and their adherents tried to twist Islam to justify them.

The empirical evidence exists that societies with predominantly Islamic populations can be just as peaceful and civilized as societies with predominantly Christian populations. Dubai is a marvelous case in point. Turkey is getting there. We can only hope that the entire Middle East will follow, and that we can welcome its inhabitants – Muslims and non-Muslims alike – into the amazing modern world.

***

Ban on Gay Adoptions Overturned in Florida: Good News for Liberty and for Checks and Balances

November 27, 2008

On November 25, Judge Cindy Lederman of the Miami-Dade Circuit Court in Florida overturned that state’s ban on gay adoptions, which had been on the books since 1977. This is tremendously hopeful news for individual liberty and for the system of checks and balances. You can find out more about the specifics of this case here.  

The State of Florida defended the ban by citing (possibly dubious) statistical evidence that in gay couples, substance abuse and mental instability are more prevalent. However, in the particular family in question, that of Frank Gill, it was clear that children who had been abused by their biological parents were in fact thriving. I congratulate Judge Lederman for treating individuals as individuals and not as statistics and for ruling on the facts of the case, rather than on any probabilities with which the facts did not correspond. Even if certain problems were more prevalent in gay couples, this does not give anyone license to treat any gay couple without such problems any worse than heterosexual couples without such problems are treated.

Aside from being a victory for individualism, the recent ruling was also a victory for checks and balances. Here, a courageous judge checked abuses of liberty imposed by Florida’s legislative branch. Often, too many opponents of so-called “judicial activism” want judges to be mere passive enforcers of the law, bowing down to the will of legislature even when the legislature acts in an oppressive and immoral fashion in the judge’s own opinion. But this is a recipe for legislative tyranny – a tyranny that is one step removed from the tyranny of the majority. Where there is an opportunity to bring about genuine individual liberty and to stave off oppressions, every individual – whatever his political position – has a moral right and perhaps an obligation to use his power to de-legitimize coercion and persecution.

***

Gennady Stolyarov II Wins Foundation for Economic Education's Eugene S. Thorpe Award

November 8, 2008

I am pleased to announce another major triumph – my attainment of the Eugene S. Thorpe prize of $2000, issued by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) as a result of its earlier essay contest on the benefits of globalization and the harms of government interference with it.

I am honored to have been selected as the winner, especially as my essay was chosen as the first among 129 quality papers, each of which was subjected to a blind review process.

You can read more about the Thorpe award at the page issued by FEE on this occasion.

My essay, "Globalization: Extending the Market and Human Well-Being", will be published in the Spring 2009 in FEE’s magazine, The Freeman, which has for over five decades been one of the primary publications for advancing liberty and free-market thought. I hope that my work will be able to inspire creative thoughts and lead to further contributions to the progress of liberty through the promotion of free-market-based globalization. 

***

Abraham Lincoln as a Third-Party Candidate

November 2, 2008

Some may dispute my earlier characterization of Abraham Lincoln as a third-party candidate in the 1860 election by claiming that the Republican Party was already a major party by that time, and had as early as 1858 achieved majority support in most Northern states.

Perhaps to better understand my claim about Lincoln and the Republican Party, it is instructive to look back four years to the election of 1856, where the Republicans still had not controlled majorities in every northern state. This election was also outside the confines of the conventional two-party system.

In 1856, the Democratic Party was the major party and was still largely unified. James Buchanan ran on the Democratic ticket and won. But he ran against two “third parties,” the Republicans and the Know Nothings. The Republicans had been formed two years earlier, and this was the first presidential election involving their party. Their candidate, John C. Fremont, won 33.1 percent of the popular vote and carried 11 states. The nativist, anti-immigration Know Nothing Party was formed at about the same time as the Republican Party (circa 1854) and largely died out after the defeat of its candidate, Millard Fillmore, in the 1856 election. The Know Nothing Party got about 21.6 percent of the popular vote and is universally recognized as a third party – even though its candidate was a former President of the United States.

If the Know Nothings constituted a third party, then the Republican Party in 1856 was most certainly a third party as well. It was just as new, and its candidate was not even a former President (unlike Fillmore), and, moreover, he was the first candidate to openly proclaim anti-slavery views. For a politician to run for the presidency under an anti-slavery platform was surely radical at the time. Admittedly, abolitionist sentiment was growing, and Fremont was able to persuade many people of the correctness of this sentiment – an accomplishment on which Lincoln later capitalized.

The Republicans’ effectiveness in gaining large majorities in the North does not disqualify them from being a third party. Rather, it is testimony to how successful some third parties can be at convincing people to support them within a short period of time. The Republican Party rose at an astounding pace from insignificance to political dominance during the Civil War era.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about third parties as pertains to the 1860 election. (This page also contains a comprehensive list detailing the performance of third-party candidates in American elections since 1832.)

”By 1860 the two-party system had fallen apart. The election featured four candidates, including the breakaway Southern Democratic Party, which nominated Vice President John C. Breckenridge as its candidate, and the Constitutional Union Party, which nominated John Bell. Republican Abraham Lincoln did not appear on the ballot in any of the 11 states that seceded after the election to form the Confederacy. Breckenridge, the southern pro-slavery candidate, carried most of the slave states, but had little support in the North outside of Pennsylvania. Bell and the Constitutional Union party, neutral on the slavery issue, drew most of their support from the southern former Whigs that had voted for Fillmore four years before. Stephen Douglas, the northern Democratic candidate, had the broadest support geographically but lost most of the Democratic votes in the South to Breckenridge.”

“Lincoln won the election with 39.8% of the overall popular vote but 180 electoral votes due to his votes being concentrated in the northern free states. Douglas finished second in the popular vote with 29.5%, but, with his votes scattered all over the country, carried only Missouri and New Jersey and won 12 electoral votes. Breckenridge, the quasi-'third party' candidate of southern Democrats, got 18.2% but won 72 electoral votes due to most of his votes being concentrated in the South. Bell, a true 'third party' candidate, finished last in the popular vote with 12.6% but carried Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee to win 39 electoral votes, due to the Democratic vote in those states being split between Douglas and Breckenridge.”

“After this election, the two-party system coalesced around the Democratic and Republican parties.”

In a way, every candidate in the 1860 election was a “third-party” candidate, simply because both of the previously dominant two parties (the Whigs and the Democrats) had splintered, and the two-party system simply broke down. Every one of the candidates was severely handicapped by some disadvantage in the election, but Lincoln was in the best position to overcome his handicaps because of the activism of the Republican party during and since the election of 1856 and the effectiveness of this activism in convincing millions of people in the Northern states to adopt anti-slavery views.

So while the facts of the 1860 election are generally well-established, I can understand that there may exist differences of interpretation regarding who was or was not a third-party candidate then. However, there does exist considerable support for my position.

An article on PBS’s Online NewsHour states the following: “American voters have not elected a third party president since Abraham Lincoln when the then-minority Republican Party beat the Whigs and the Democrats in 1860 on the anti-slavery platform.“

Moreover, Thom Holmes of the Constitution Party of Oklahoma has a similar account: “Many people aren’t aware that the Republican party began as a new party in 1856 and only 4 years later, Abraham Lincoln was elected president in a 4 way race. Back in 1860 the two major parties of the day were the Whigs and the Democrats. Lincoln received less than 40% of the popular vote and his name did not even appear on the ballot in 9 states, including Texas.” (I think Holmes attributes the first major election in which the Republicans participated as the time of the Republican Party’s true beginning – a difference of interpretation rather than an inaccuracy.)

The reason I bring up these two sources is that they come from representatives of organizations with extremely divergent views – PBS and the Constitution Party – and yet seem to agree on this evaluation of the Lincoln’s status as a third-party candidate.

***

Response to Mr. Merlin Jetton's Critique of My Essays on Road Privatization

September 30 - November 25, 2008

Index of Discussion

Part 1	Part 7	Part 13	Part 19	Part 25	Part 31
Part 2	Part 8	Part 14	Part 20	Part 26	Part 32
Part 3	Part 9	Part 15	Part 21	Part 27
Part 4	Part 10	Part 16	Part 22	Part 28
Part 5	Part 11	Part 17	Part 23	Part 29
Part 6	Part 12	Part 18	Part 24	Part 30

Part 1 - September 30, 2008

In response to my article, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization,” Mr. Merlin Jetton has made some comments, to which I will respond over the course of the next few days. This exchange of arguments is, I think, valuable for spreading awareness regarding the possibilities of road privatization and deliberating over how it might be possible.

Mr. Jetton wrote, “A good part of [Chicago roads] being so poor is the huge volume of traffic they bear. The nicest roads tend to be where there is little traffic (or they are new).”

While this is true, it still does not justify the same stretches of roads being repaved every single summer, as is frequently the case in the Chicago suburbs. The Chicago area is notorious for its corrupt governments, and I strongly suspect that the roads built there are specifically designed to fail once a year (or sometimes, once every few years) and thereby require repairs from the leading government officials’ favored construction firms. Of course, I have no specific evidence for this aside from the general and well-known fact of Chicago corruption and the extreme plausibility of my theory when compared to alternatives and when considering that other less corrupt but equally large metropolitan areas in the country do not experience this kind of dismal road quality. If such specific evidence ever arose, the guilty government officials would surely be subject to public scandal and removal from office – which happens every so often in the Chicago area.

Mr. Jetton wrote, “Streets are repaired often, but not a given stretch every year, nor are they  completely torn up and replaced every year. To say each street's life is one year because it needs a little repair now and then is akin to saying a person dies when he/she only has heart surgery.”

In Chicago suburbs like Northbrook and Glenview, it is indeed the case that the same segments of streets are re-paved every year – whether the repairs be major or minor. What typically happens in these cases is the following. Government-favored construction firms block off an entire lane or more with the ubiquitous orange construction cones and then do nothing on it for a few months. When they start to do something on it, they only work on a small fraction of the blocked-off stretch, while the rest of the road segment is kept off-limits for no reason. It may well be that the repairs required in any given year are minor, but the traffic congestion is increased irrespective of the magnitude of repairs required, because immense segments of road are blocked off without being immediately worked on. No private entrepreneur would engage in such folly.

Part 2 - October 1, 2008

When responding to my article, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization,” Mr. Merlin Jetton rightly pointed out that not all Roman roads that were built lasted for 2000 years and that some of them were specifically designed to be temporary. Moreover, Roman roads were not always built under “free-market” conditions, and their construction often employed slave and conscript labor. I grant all of this, but my point with regard to Roman roads did not rule out some of their shortcomings. Rather, I simply wished to emphasize that the technology for building permanent roads has existed for a long time, and one would expect today’s technology to be far superior to any methods the Romans had. And yet, despite the massive technological superiority and continuing advances of our time, road quality in places like Chicago continues to be dismal. I wonder why, and I see no answer besides government intervention and favoritism.

Part 3 - October 2, 2008

In his response to my article, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization,” Mr. Merlin Jetton argues that it is entirely conceivable that private road owners would opt to build roads of lower quality that require more frequent repairs, provided that the present value of the current cost plus the future maintenance outlays for the road of lower quality (call the road R_L, its present cost C_L, and its future maintenance costs M_L) is less than the current cost of building a higher-quality road that does not require much (or any) maintenance (call the road R_H and its present cost C_H, and its future maintenance costs M_L). Mr. Jetton claims, quite plausibly, that, if C_L + PV(M_L) < C_H + PV(M_H), then the private owner would still opt to build the lower-quality road R_L.

While this is certainly a part of the considerations a private road owner would have to face (along with any fiscally prudent government planner, of whom there are some, I grant), costs are not the only consideration for a private owner. Maximizing future revenues and minimizing foregone revenues is a still further consideration. With regard to roads, it is a fact that road maintenance greatly decreases the traffic flow that the road can accommodate. For a government official, this is not a concern, because the official does not profit in direct proportion to the amount of traffic the road can profitably sustain. But a private entrepreneur who profits based on the number of people who use his road within a given time period will have a strong incentive to minimize the kind of road maintenance that leads to traffic congestion.

A private entrepreneur does not only minimize costs; he maximizes the difference between revenues and costs – and a prudent entrepreneur would probably make some kind of present-value estimates for future differences of this sort.

I argue the following: The road R_H will typically attract somewhat higher revenues during the course of its everyday operation than the road R_L – because drivers enjoy high-quality roads that are not bumpy and not congested and would be willing to pay more to use them.

Moreover, maintenance of the higher-quality road R_H will not require as much time as maintenance of R_L, and will not obstruct traffic nearly as much. Therefore, R_H will earn normal revenues for a greater time period than R_L, and the revenues R_H earns during maintenance will be higher than the revenues R_L earns during maintenance.

To design a model on the basis of this, we can let T_H be the amount of time road R_H will operate normally and T_L be the amount of time road R_L will operate normally. We note that T_H > T_L.

We let t_H be the amount of time road R_H will require for maintenance and t_L be the amount of time road R_L will require for maintenance. We note that t_H < t_L.

During normal operation, road R_H earns revenue V_H and road R_L earns revenue V_L. We note that V_H > V_L.

During maintenance, road R_H earns revenue V_H,M and road R_L earns revenue V_L,M. We note that V_H,M >> V_L,M.

So the lifetime revenues of road R_H will be T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H, while the lifetime revenues of road R_L will be T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L. We note that T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H is always greater (and often significantly greater) than T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L.

To take the time value of money into account, the private road owner will need to discount the future revenue streams based on the time in which specific revenues occur. This is doable, but it is not necessary to illustrate it here. Suffice it to say that, if the private road owner has the same rate of time preference irrespective of which road he builds, then PV(T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H) is related to PV(T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L) in the same way that T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H is related to T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L. Namely, PV(T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H) >> PV(T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L).

(Note: PV(T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H) is a rough expression for the present value of future revenues from road R_H. I understand the need to split up the cash flows based on the time in which they occur in order to make a genuine computation.)

In order for the road owner to choose to build the lower-quality road, then, it must be the case that his present value of expected net income from the lower-quality road is greater than from the higher-quality road. That is, it must be the case that

PV(T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L) – (C_L + PV(M_L)) > PV(T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H) – (C_H + PV(M_H))

We can transform this inequality as follows:
PV(T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L) + (C_H + PV(M_H)) > PV(T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H) + (C_L + PV(M_L))

(C_L + PV(M_L)) < (C_H + PV(M_H)) + PV(T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L) - PV(T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H)

Note that because PV(T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H) - PV(T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L) is greatly positive, it follows that PV(T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L) - PV(T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H) is greatly negative. So, if the rational private entrepreneur chooses to build the lower-quality road, it must be that the present value of expected costs from building the lower-quality road are less than the sum of the expected costs from building the higher-quality road and this greatly negative amount, which represents the foregone revenues from building the lower-quality road rather than the higher-quality road.

So now we can compare two people in the same capacity of deciding which road to build – except one is a government official who (if he is incorruptible and rational) only considers costs, and the other is a private entrepreneur who considers the difference between revenues and costs.

The government official will choose to build the lower-quality road R_L if

C_L + PV(M_L) < C_H + PV(M_H).

The private entrepreneur will choose to build the lower-quality road R_L if

(C_L + PV(M_L)) < (C_H + PV(M_H)) + PV(T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L) - PV(T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H), where PV(T_L*V_L + V_L,M *t_L) - PV(T_H*V_H + V_H,M *t_H) is a greatly negative quantity.

Thus, all other things equal, the private entrepreneur will be likely to choose to build a higher-quality road in a greater range of circumstances than the government official, which means that a greater proportion of roads will be of a high-quality, low-maintenance nature under a free market for roads than under a government-controlled market. 

Part 4 - October 3, 2008

In his response to my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization,” Mr. Merlin Jetton wrote, “Simply privatizing an existing road isn't going to improve matters instantly in the ways you say. Maybe over a span of years, but not immediately.”

Certainly, some of the beneficent effects of road privatization will not occur overnight, but rather will unfold over a long period of time. But there are still other effects that will be more immediate.

If any of the newly privatized roads require maintenance, the maintenance will be done in a less intrusive manner and with less deadweight loss due to blockage of lanes by unnecessary construction cones. The smart private road entrepreneur would only block off the area of the road that was immediately being worked on, leaving the rest open to traffic. As the repair crews finished patching up Segment A and moved on to Segment B, Segment A would be liberated to traffic, and Segment B, which was hitherto open to traffic, will be blocked off only for the duration of the construction.

Private road owners will actually have an incentive to get road maintenance done quickly, because they are not guaranteed a perpetual influx of taxpayer funds irrespective of what they do. Rather, they have to pay their workers by the hour out of their companies’ limited resources, and the more time the workers spend repairing the road, the more they will need to be paid. Of course, it is in a private road owner’s interests to have a quality job done on the repairs, but he will also be assiduous in minimizing costs within the constraints of quality.

Also consider the instant benefits that would accrue from at least partial private regulation of the roads. What if every road owner could decide the maximum blood alcohol level permissible on his roads? What if he could set speed limits to actually correspond to the prevailing tendencies among safe drivers, rather than setting them arbitrarily low (say, at 55 miles per hour in Chicago) so as to enable the police to have “probable cause” to pull over whomever they felt like? These would be instantaneous improvements, in addition to those that would most certainly come later.

Part 5 - October 4, 2008

Here, I continue my answers to Mr. Merlin Jetton’s response to my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton wrote: “I'd be very wary of a transaction in which a government gets an immediate and huge influx of cash. What will it do with it? The Chicago Skyway was recently "privatized" with a 99-year lease (source). Why do you think it was done? An easy way out of looming government deficits. Like it says in the linked article: "They raise enormous amounts of money, making up for tax increases politicians won't impose. Texas, for instance, plans to raise $7.2 billion from a lease, which is just the first part of an ambitious plan to sink $180 billion into road and rail projects that otherwise would be politically unthinkable."

Mr. Jetton is correct to imply that the Chicago Skyway “privatization” was sub-optimal and was not performed on the basis of free-market considerations. But there is a gulf of difference between the public-private partnership (PPP) that was established for the Chicago Skyway and the kind of privatization that I propose.

First, a 99-year lease is not a transfer to private ownership. It simply amounts to privatizing the profits from the road and socializing the costs of the ultimate damage that will be done to the road. A company that simply borrows the road from the government is likely to care little for the road’s life after it has relinquished control of it. Rather, this company’s incentives will be to use the road as intensively as possible, irrespective of the wear and tear this imposes over the long term. By the time the 99-year lease is up, I expect that the road will be in dismal condition, and the taxpayers will thereafter be given the repair bill.

Moreover, a 99-year lease on the road gives the company that controls the road insufficient flexibility. It must, under the conditions of the lease, keep the road close to its present state in terms of where it goes, what it is made of, how many lanes it has, and what traffic regulations prevail there. An owner of the road would have full discretion to change any of these factors at any time, perhaps subject to some extremely small set of restrictions – such as the inability to disallow police access to the road.

Consider that if the road network in Chicago stays as it is right now over the next 99 years, this will be a historically unprecedented stagnation – yet this is precisely the premise behind the 99-year leases. Privatization of the sort I suggest is necessary to allow the road infrastructure to evolve technologically and logistically to accommodate the progress that will certainly be made over the course of this century.

Leasing a road is just privatizing the revenue stream from that road; it is not a transfer of ownership and is thus not comparable to my proposal.

Moreover, leasing the road generates a continuous income stream for the government, which makes permanently greater government spending more likely. In my proposed system of privatization, the government gets a one-time payment for each road, and that is it. Therefore, the government will not be able to sustainably increase spending from my mode of road privatization, although it might be able to pay off some of its debts and unfunded liabilities.

Part 6 - October 5, 2008

In his response to my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization,” Mr. Merlin Jetton asks, “What evidence do you have [that road construction] would be faster [under private ownership as compared to government ownership]? The private builder of a totally new road would face the obstacle of getting  the right-of-way. That is a very slow process.”

I refer Mr. Jetton to my reasoning in the article itself, which Mr. Jetton cited prior to his question. I wrote: “Of course, new roads will be built under a private system, and at far faster rates than under government control. The moment any private entrepreneur thinks an additional thoroughfare is necessary and profitable, he will begin building one; he will require no extensive political lobbying, no seeking of special-interest favors, no lengthy and tedious committee discussions that paralyze efficiency.”

As additional evidence, I present the ubiquitous failure of centrally planned provisions of other goods, wherever they have been tried. Take, for instance, socialized industries in the former Communist bloc, and compare their output to the output of private industries in the West. Which industries produce output faster – the privately controlled ones or the government-run ones? Which industries innovate more frequently? If a government-controlled industry can be shown to be superior to a comparable private industry in even one instance, I would be quite surprised. Indeed, the overwhelming evidence of history suggests that the burden of proof should always be put on the advocate of government control of anything. Such an advocate would need to show that the government will not fail miserably in performing a given task and will for some reason do a considerably superior job – beyond reasonable doubt – compared to private providers on the free market. Absent this demonstration, the free-market position should be adopted by default.

I do not believe Mr. Jetton to be an advocate of government interventionism, by the way. I simply argue that even asking the question, “What evidence do you have [that road construction] would be faster [under private ownership as compared to government ownership]?” is conceding too much to those who do advocate such government interventionism. Rather, the proper question that should be asked is, “Can there be any conceivable ways in which government-owned roads would be unambiguously better than private roads?” In this particular case, the question that should be asked is, “What evidence do you have that road construction is faster under government ownership now than in would be under private ownership?” If the advocate of interventionism cannot find such evidence, then the presumption should always be in favor of private ownership.

I will address the question of right-of-way next.

Part 7 - October 6, 2008

Here, I address Mr. Jetton’s argument that “The private builder of a totally new road would face the obstacle of getting  the right-of-way. That is a very slow process.”

I argue the contrary. This is because we do not need to think of right-of-way as the right of a straight way. Rather, a private road owner will seek to find any way he can (while keeping in mind costs of construction, of course), by which he might build a road from point A to point B. The straightest path is often the most desirable, but it is quite frequent that the straight paths from A to B are already occupied by valuable property. It is not reasonable to expect the owners of that property to cede it without what they consider to be just compensation in order to facilitate the building of the road. But if they refuse to cede this property, the road builder could simply build around them, curving the road. We encounter curves on roads ubiquitously today, so this would not make newly built private roads any less convenient to drive on than government roads are in the status quo.

It is important to recognize that it is not necessary that everyone between points A and B be willing to sell land to the road builder. Rather, it is only necessary that some people be so willing. If Person X is unwilling to sell his land, then Person X’s neighbor, Y, might still be willing. If Y is unwilling to sell, then his neighbor, Z, might still be willing. The road would still be built; just the curvatures in specific places might differ.

I am, moreover, confident that only a tiny minority of people would try to hold out to receive a price far above what they could reasonably expect on the market for their property. The road builder will likely initially offer a premium over the typical market value of any property it buys out. This premium will be in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and will be too good for most people to forgo, as they can use that money to purchase much better property. (Imagine what you would do if your net worth suddenly increased by $100,000.) Thus, I expect that in most cases, it will be easy to build even a reasonably straight new road from A to B because only a few people would refuse to sell their property, and they can be built around.

Compare this mutually beneficial arrangement to the kind of coercion that results when the government uses its power of eminent domain to confiscate property from people and give them what it considers to be the “fair market value” of that property – which is typically far below what the property would sell for in any actual market. For an additional elaboration of the inherent immorality of government confiscation, I refer readers to my discussion of it in “Why Freedom is Free and Rights are Right: The Case Against Conscription, Compulsion, and Confiscation.”

Part 8 - October 7, 2008

I continue my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “I think there are some other differences I didn't think of earlier between the Roman roads that Mr. Stolyarov praises and the Chicago North Shore roads he criticizes.  Have the former been subject to the temperature extremes that the latter are subject to? Have the former been subject to the tons of salt that the latter are subject to? Roads deteriorate due to these things, too.”

As evidence to back up his claim that poor weather conditions might be responsible for poor quality of roads more so than government intervention, Mr. Jetton cites a survey of truckers regarding road conditions. He writes:

“Per this site and based on survey responses of more than 400 truckers, the best and worst roads are:
WORST ROADS
1. Louisiana
2. Pennsylvania
3. California
4. Illinois
5. Michigan
BEST ROADS
1. Texas
2. Florida
3. Tennessee
4. Georgia
5. Virginia

Another trucker site says, "It’s no secret that Louisiana’s swampy terrain makes road building in some areas difficult."

Several variables have a role in road quality. Still, note that the best states are in the south, where the roads aren't subject to the freezing temperatures, snow, and salt that occur in northern states. Texas has a lot of road mileage between cities, which don't get a lot of traffic and would probably affect a trucker's rating.”

The issue I have with Mr. Jetton’s claim is that many of the data he cites actually contradict it. A plausible explanation can be given for poor weather in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Michigan contributing to poor road quality there – but California? California is known for its temperate, spring-like climate during the majority of the year. Surely, roads there would not need to be salted extensively, nor would there be the kind of swampiness that might contribute to poor road quality in Louisiana.

Moreover, Florida is known for a similarly swampy climate to that of Louisiana, yet Florida has the second-best roads according to the survey Mr. Jetton cites, while Louisiana has the worst. If weather cannot account for these differences, then something else must. I argue that the differences in institutional conditions in each of these states play a significant factor, though I grant that they are not the only factor. As in all matters in life, a variety of influences affect any given outcome. I do claim, however, that, all other things held constant, privatizing roads anywhere would result in significant upfront and long-term improvements in road longevity and quality.

Additional doubts are cast on the contention that weather is a primary determinant of road quality by some further data in the survey Mr. Jetton cites. For instance, the survey rates the following five roads as the worst in the country:

“WORST ROAD

1. I-10 Louisiana
2. I-80 Pennsylvania
3. I-40 Arkansas
4. I-5 California
5. I-40 Oklahoma”

Once again, the California road’s poor quality cannot be explained due to poor weather, nor can the poor quality of I-40 in Oklahoma. Oklahoma has a dry, temperate climate without significant extremes of temperature during the winter nor significant humidity during the summer.

Where poor weather does play a factor in road quality, private builders will take cognizance of this fact and will vary the composition of the road surface depending on what materials are more likely to withstand the weather conditions that are likely to occur in a given area. They are also more likely than government officials to experiement with new, innovative solutions to road deterioration due to weather. Government officials are likely to stick to already known, “tried and true” formulas that are imperfect but do not have the risk associated with novelty. Indeed, regulations on the composition of “public” roads might restrict what materials can be used or experimented with in road construction, while private entrepreneurs will have much more flexibility and a strong incentive to innovate their way out of any persistent quality problems.

Part 9 - October 8, 2008

I resume my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “to maybe somewhat de-mythologize private roads, give some thought to the varying quality of driveways. Are they all in great shape and made to last decades?”

I grant that some private driveways are in poor shape, but the incentives facing private driveway owners are different from those facing private road owners.

Private driveway owners mainly have driveways for their own use and the use of their close friends and relatives. In their personal lives, some of these people might indeed settle for poor-quality driveways if that means that they do not have to work as hard in maintaining them. They personally bear the full cost of non-maintenance, and they are apparently willing to do so in order to achieve what they believe to be greater leisure.

A private road owner, however, is in the business of making money. His road exists not just for his own use, but also for the use of his customers. He therefore has an incentive to build and maintain a road that appeals to his customers, so that his customers would be willing to pay him for its use. Thus, the private road owner cannot just take his own preferences for labor and leisure into account. Rather, he will need to consider what kind of road his customers will be satisfied with, and he will likely build such a road, even if his personal standards of quality are much lower.

Part 10 - October 9, 2008

I resume my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “Mr. Stolyarov comments about sections of roads being blocked while not being worked on. No doubt that is true and many of us have witnessed it, but I suspect he exaggerates. For example, he says ‘... do nothing on it for a few months.’ Not days or weeks but months?”

It may be an exaggeration to say that the government-hired workers do nothing on the entire blocked-off part of the road for months, but it is quite true – from numerous instances of my everyday experience – that they do nothing on a particular blocked-off segment for months. This was my primary intended meaning in Part 1 of my response. What happens frequently is that a stretch of several miles in length is blocked off, and the construction work begins at one end and takes several months to reach the other. The construction cones are not removed from the segments on which work has been completed until the entire blocked-off area has been fully repaired. Moreover, the areas remotest from the segments on which work began first stay blocked off for months before the workers actually reach them.

Most sensible private road owners will only block off those areas on which work is being immediately done and will move the construction cones as the construction crew moves to new stretches of road.

Mr. Jetton further writes: “Many years ago I worked on road construction, both concrete and asphalt. The work is monitored by state inspectors who struck me as quite competent, at least the head engineers. I witnessed a state engineer order a stretch of brand new road be removed and redone because of poor work.”

I grant that there are competent people working in the construction of government roads, just as there would be some incompetent people working in the construction of private roads. What is crucial, however, is whom the system of control tends to reward and whom it tends to punish. For instance, I have been informed by several former federal government employees, about how bureaucracies like the EPA treat economists that work for them. The economists are mostly competent and give reasonable recommendations. But they are sidelined and ignored at best and often bullied for not using their work to affirm the preconceived notions of agency leaders, who frequently have politically motivated agendas rather than agendas devoted toward objectively sound policy. I suspect that a similar dynamic is at work with regard to government roads. Some (and perhaps many) competent government inspectors and technicians try to do as good of a job as they can from a technical standpoint, but the politically motivated higher-ranking officials in charge of them often second-guess and overrule their decisions or else improperly set the entire range of government priorities with regard to road construction and design.

Part 11 - October 10, 2008

I resume my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “Still granting that government may be part of it, other causes for poor road quality are volume of traffic, weather conditions and salt.”

I grant that all of these are possible causes for poor road quality and certainly each of these factors, ceteris paribus, will affect the quality of the road. The key issue in my mind is whether some of these factors may also contribute to the severity of others – namely, whether government control of roads leads to greater vulnerability of roads to weather, salt, and high volumes of traffic.

I already somewhat addressed the weather issue previously, so here I will focus on high volumes of traffic. High volumes of traffic indicate high levels of demand for roads. If there is a lot of demand for a good – such as roads – on the free market, then the high price users are willing to pay for the good on account of this demand will tend to attract more entry into the field, leading to an increase in supply. Private road entrepreneurs would be interested in earning sizable revenue by redirecting some of the increasing traffic onto their own roads, thereby engaging in additional road construction and reducing congestion. Governments have little such incentive.

Mr. John Armaos gives some relevant information with regard to how governments have handled the expansion in demand for roads. Mr. Armaos writes: “Michael Dickey provided statistics on lane mileage which he got from the Bureau of Transportation statistics; please read his blog for more info. He wrote: ‘We see barely 20% more highway travel lanes than in 1975, while the number of vehicle miles traveled has doubled, and the number of cars on the road continues to skyrocket.’”

“Wouldn't you consider a doubling of traffic while experiencing a 20% increase in lane mileage as something that is alarming? I do. I think that stinks. Demand is outstripping supply, and if motorists paid private entities for highway usage we would see a more optimal equilibrium between supply and demand.”

Government infrastructure, when it is initially built, may be in line with the most advanced technological, economic, and logistical understandings prevailing at the time it is built. But, as time passes and economic conditions change, the government infrastructure, encumbered by the weight of bureaucracy and vested special interests, does not change nearly as fast to accommodate a different world. Private entrepreneurs, acting on a smaller scale and having faster response times and more direct control over their resources, can accommodate changes in demand and technological knowledge much more readily. Some of the better government officials try to do so as well (hence there has been some, though insufficient, growth in lane mileage), but the incentives work against them.

So it may be true that many urban roads are deteriorating faster due to high volumes of traffic. But, in the absence of government control over these roads, they would also not experience these high volumes of traffic and so would deteriorate more slowly.

Part 12 - October 11, 2008

I continue my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

In response to the revenue-cost comparison model I outlined in Part 3 of my response, Mr. Jetton acknowledges its relevance in part and writes: “Maybe. There is one questionable, implicit assumption in all his algebra. It is neutral to the size of the different up-front costs. (Yes, higher revenues and lower maintenance costs for the higher quality road partly offset that.) However, there remains the ‘budget issue’, namely the size of the initial outlay. Whether it is government or a private firm building the road, this is an important real world consideration. Let's assume the government or private firm has enough capital for the lower quality road, but not for the higher quality road. That does not necessarily preclude the higher quality road, assuming the government or private firm can borrow the difference. A comparison model could easily accommodate that. The money to repay the loan and interest thereon could be additional costs for the higher quality road.  This identifies the questionable, implicit assumption in Mr. Stolyarov's algebra. It assumes no borrowing costs for the higher quality road and is indifferent to the different initial outlays to pay for construction. Borrowing costs might more than offset the additional expected revenues from the higher quality road. “

“Taking all this into account, it still might be the case that the higher quality road is the better alternative. However, the choice is somewhat more complicated.”

It is true that in some cases borrowing money would be necessary to pay the upfront expense of building a higher-quality road. Of course, this is equally true for private entrepreneurs and for governments, and we know all too well what kind of record governments have with regard to borrowing money systematically. If anything, governments at all levels are already borrowing beyond the limits set by sanity and would not be able to afford to borrow as much money as might perhaps be necessary to construct roads of higher quality. On the other hand, private entrepreneurs have systematic incentives to be more prudent regarding when, what, and how they borrow and spend – so we can expect more of them (at least more of the ones that survive in the long term) to have net savings rather than net debts. Therefore, if and when a private entrepreneur does need to borrow money to pay for higher upfront costs of constructing a higher-quality road, he will be much more likely to afford to do so safely and repay the loan out of his higher future revenues. When government borrows money, on the other hand, it will likely just plunge itself deeper into the fiscal abyss.

Part 13 - October 12, 2008

I offer the thirteenth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

While Mr. Jetton does not oppose road privatization per se, he does write, “I have other higher priorities for changing government.”

Mr. Steve Wolfer seconds Mr. Jetton’s opinion: “I don't see much purpose in discussing the privatization of roads when what we need to do is correct the monetary system, rein in an out of control congress, fix the broken party system, get government spending massively reduced, free the educational systems.... and a few other items that I'd give a higher priority.”

I grant the validity of perceiving some objectives for change to be more important than others and prioritizing among them. I do not consider either Mr. Jetton’s or Mr. Wolfer’s ordering of priorities to be undesirable or wrong in any way. As a matter of fact, if they achieved their priorities first, I think that we would all be better off and living in a freer society.

But even if one agrees with them that road privatization is not the first proposal that should be implemented, there is still substantial merit in discussing it and its advantages. Many opponents of free markets often dismiss the case for them by dismissing its proponents as “those lunatics who want to privatize the roads.” Unless coherent arguments can be made for why privatizing the roads is indeed desirable, opponents of free markets will continue to unjustifiably use the road privatization position as a straw man in attacking the entire free-market program. While we might not be willing to privatize roads first, we need to win the theoretical debate regarding the desirability of road privatization if we are to convince many people of the merits of the free-market position as a whole.

Moreover, it is important to distinguish between setting goals and accomplishing them in a stepwise fashion. It is desirable to understand at least somewhat the direction in which we desire to move and the outcomes which we hope to accomplish, before we deliberate on how and in what order we must get there. Both are undeniably important, but either one without the other will not accomplish tangible results. In my essay, I tried not only to outline the desirability of road privatization but also how the privatization might be accomplished in the status quo. If and when the opportunity to accomplish it in practice arises, proponents of road privatization need to be ready to defend it and implement it competently.

Finally, to address the question of priorities, I am in favor of the “taking all you can get” approach with regard to liberalization of the economy. The objectives Mr. Jetton and Mr. Wolfer have are undeniably desirable, but they also have substantial and vigilant opposition. Road privatization is a fringe issue and might, at least in some places, be snuck in without attracting much notice from the statist establishment.

In my essay,“Working on the Fringes: How to Create Effective Political, Cultural, and Intellectual Change,” I argue that it may be wise to try to win on issues that are not perceived in highly polarized terms or engaged in by substantial portions of the public. For instance, I write that “Most people's hostility to utility deregulation, repeal of environmental laws, and private space flight is not nearly so great as their opposition to Social Security privatization, open immigration, and the abolition of welfare would be. The former are fringe issues; they do not occupy the mainstream's attention at present -- which means that whoever does focus attention on them will automatically have the upper hand.“ I believe road privatization to be a fringe issue whose proponents can win if they make a sufficiently persuasive case.

Part 14 - October 13, 2008

I offer the fourteenth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes, “I believe Mr. Stolyarov misconstrues the lease terms for the Chicago Skyway and similar cases. What the Chicago government received was a cash infusion of $1.8 billion in exchange for a net revenue stream -- toll revenues minus maintenance costs -- spread out over 99 years. (See here.) Indeed, it would make little sense for the lease to give the Chicago government ‘rent’ over 99 years when that's what it already had. Also, the city of Chicago's purpose in doing the deal was to give it cash to cover short-run deficits.”

I concede this point, which implies that I now look on the Skyway partial privatization more favorably than I did in the past. I applaud the Chicago government’s willingness to address its deficits by means other than borrowing more, taxing more, or reducing the purchasing power of money (which, I suppose, a city government does not have the de facto power to do). My only remaining problem with the Skyway partial privatization is that it occurred in the form of a 99-year lease rather than an outright sale.

Mr. Jetton writes, “In Mr. Stolyarov's proposed system of privatization, I assume he means a sale rather than a lease. If so, it does nothing to counter my comment in post 34. The transaction, whether sale or lease, is a cash infusion into the hands of government (immediate or in a short span of time) which it can spend on other things.”

Again, Mr. Jetton is right. The government can indeed spend the cash infusion gotten from privatizing the road on other things. However, this may be a good or a bad outcome, depending on what the government spends this revenue on. I think Mr. Jetton and I both agree that government deficits are undesirable, as is a government debt that continues to accumulate interest and thereby continually cost taxpayers money. The more debt the government can pay off without increasing taxes, the better off taxpayers will be in the short and the long run.

Perhaps the way to prevent the government from using the extra revenue gained to expand its spending on further welfare programs or on more effective coercion of taxpayers is to stipulate in the road privatization proposal that the money gained from selling the road must be used first to pay the existing government debt and then (if any money is left over) as a substitute for tax revenue, with taxes reduced correspondingly.

Part 15 - October 18, 2008

I offer the fifteenth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes regarding my critique of 99-year leases as a substitute for privatization: “I strongly doubt the company will let the road deteriorate over the entire 99 years. That would likely result in revenue deterioration, too. If deterioration will be allowed, it will be the final few years, when the cost of maintenance exceeds the present value of the remaining revenue stream. It may not happen even then, if the company plans to renew the lease.”

I agree here. The longer the lease, the longer the time period over which deterioration will be kept to a minimum. But during the last few years of the lease, the road may be vulnerable to deterioration, depending on the circumstances involved.

This raises an interesting tradeoff with regard to leases, which gives me another reason to favor transfers of ownership over roads.

Making the lease longer will lead to longer periods of less deterioration but also less flexibility in terms of completely revamping the road or making major improvements to it, as the private firm leasing the road does not have the authority to make such decisions; it can only operate the road largely as it is and perform maintenance to support it in its existing condition.

Making the lease shorter will lead to greater flexibility in changing the road arrangement in between leases to accommodate for changes in economic and technological possibilities. But it will also lead to greater road deterioration, because the time to lease expiration will be shorter and thus incentives for the private firm to maintain the road will not be as high.

Transfers of ownership give both a complete set of incentives to maintain road quality as well as complete flexibility to revamp the road as its owner sees fit (provided, of course, that he is not hampered by unfortunate urban planning regulations and other government-caused obstacles).

Part 16 - October 19, 2008

I offer the sixteenth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “I grant that building under a private system might be faster than under government control, but in my view that is all [Mr. Stolyarov’s] arguments can support. They don't support [the claim that it] will be far faster.  He gives no specific empirical evidence to support his position. (Admittedly there is a paucity of empirical data about it.)”

Granted, there is a paucity of empirical data, although my essay does cite some examples of successful private roads throughout the world. But even if more empirical data are necessary, why not give an opportunity for such empirical data to develop? That is, why not privatize some roads or permit much more extensive private road construction and see what happens? Given how effectively markets have worked at providing virtually every other good, my expectation is that market provision of roads will also be more successful in all respects than government provision.

Whether the benefits of privatization will be small or great, they will be benefits, rather than harms. So why not try genuine road privatization and see just how great the benefits end up being in retrospect?

Mr. Jetton writes: “First, how often will it be a lucrative proposal for all sides, and they will see it that way, when there are 1000's of people involved? For building roads in urban areas, one might consider the empirical evidence of the building or expansion of airports.”

There is a difference between getting land for roads and land for airports. Airports, if they are built or expanded, must be built within some specific land area, and the airport developer has little choice about where an existing airport might be expanded or how to arrange a new airport so as to accommodate unusual shapes of the plots of land on which it would stand. However, with roads, there is much more flexibility. The road entrepreneur simply needs to buy some of the land in the vicinity – enough to get a continuous path from point A to point B. If some people in the area refuse to sell, their neighbors might agree. Hold-outs are much less likely when there is competition among sellers.

In order for all sides to see the proposal as lucrative, the road builder will have to offer lucrative prices for the land it buys. This would be an improvement over the miserable payouts – far below the true “market value” of their land and house – that homeowners get under eminent-domain laws today.

Mr. Jetton continues: “I submit that many roads, especially local ones, were not built by governments in the first place. It was a community effort of the local people, led by the more influential among them and funded by the wealthier among them (who may have been the same people). Later the road was converted from community property to government property, maybe handed over or maybe expropriated. I'd guess what Mr. Stolyarov has in mind for a private system is private entrepreneurs who specialize in road-building for a profit. I submit that there is an alternative -- not as a public policy choice but as a fact of reality -- to only private-built roads ala Mr. Stolyarov or government-built roads. That is community-built roads. This is also the case for other sorts of ‘public utilities.’”

The community-built roads Mr. Jetton describes are indeed a valid kind of private road and would exist in a world devoid of government control of the roadways. It may be a good idea in some circumstances for people living or working in a particular area to form “road cooperatives” and agree to jointly finance a road that will result to improved access to and among their homes and businesses. It may often be the case that such roads will be free of tolls and fees, just as many privately built and managed parking lots do not charge their users in order to encourage visitation to adjacent businesses.

Part 17 - October 30, 2008

I offer the seventeenth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “Mr. Stolyarov points out that California has among the worst roads, despite its favorable climate, and Florida has good roads despite swampy areas (swampy areas are cited as contributing to poor road quality in Louisiana).  This might explain that. Florida has 657 miles of toll roads, the highest of any state. California has 96 miles. Louisiana has 1.5 miles. Do you think that just maybe this has any connection to road quality? He cites I-40 in Oklahoma as a poor road, despite a favorable climate. Well, OK has lots of toll roads, but I-40 is not one of them. (link  I-40 runs E-W in the center.)”

It is fair enough to say that the number of toll roads in a state has a connection to road quality in that state and that generally services that are paid for voluntarily or quasi-voluntarily on a per-use basis are more efficiently provided than services that are paid for through a compulsory tax system that charges everyone, irrespective of what roads they use, how much time they spend on them, or what the quality of those roads is. If it is possible to transition all government roads to government-owned toll roads while at the same time eliminating all tax funding of roads and relying solely on tolls, this situation would be an improvement over the status quo. Individual customers will have a greater incentive to be more efficient with their road usage, as the costs of each use will be more clearly visible. Governments will have a greater incentive to maintain road quality and accessibility to traffic, because their toll revenues will depend on these factors.

But while government toll roads are an improvement over tax-funded roads, I see two possible problems arising from them.

First, even with toll roads, government retains a coercive monopoly over road provision. Under a coercive monopoly (the only genuinely harmful and lasting kind of monopoly), prices are permanently higher, and output and quality are permanently lower. Private toll roads, subject to market forces, will thus be an improvement over government toll roads. I am not an opponent of taking the intermediate step, but I do wish to note that it is in fact an intermediate step in a desirable direction. I believe that even further steps should be taken in that direction, however.

Second, there is little to deter governments from instituting tolls and keeping existing tax funding of roads in place. This is a practical difficulty that might be overcome by packaging road-reform legislation together. One part of the reform bill might turn all roads into toll roads, while the other part might repeal all taxes used to pay for roads and thus result in greater real incomes for road users. I suspect that once such a bill is implemented, the vast majority of people will end up paying less in aggregate for roads than they currently do.

Part 18 - October 31, 2008

I offer the eighteenth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “Does Mr. Stolyarov believe that no road contractors, who are in the private sector, do research? I also suggest he look into civil engineering departments at universities.”

Of course, I recognize that a considerable amount of quality research into constructing better roads is currently being done both by contractors and by universities. I do not dispute the possibility or the success of such research under the current system, and the links Mr. Jetton provided to examples thereof (here and here) discuss some highly promising work.

However, what I do doubt is that the ultimately political decision-making process regarding how to actually build or maintain any government-owned roads will take advantage of much of this research, or at least take advantage of it to the extent that a free-market entrepreneur would. As I am most familiar with the field of economics, I am best qualified to discuss it. In economics, for decades and even centuries, academicians have been writing papers on the greater effectiveness of free markets in providing virtually any conceivable consumer goods. But have politicians listened to these academicians? A small minority has, on a few occasions. But by and large, sound research tends to be ignored in favor of considerations of political expediency.

Likewise, federal government departments today, such as the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) have many quality economists working for them who give sound recommendations. However, these recommendations tend to be routinely brushed aside and the economists given a difficult time because they refuse to rubber-stamp the agency heads’ preconceived agendas. I have heard testimony to this effect from several former employees of said federal government organizations. I cannot imagine that many road experts hired by federal or local governments are in a better position. They might be aware of the latest research and the best methods of building and maintaining roads. But the politicians in charge have strong incentives to just ignore them and do whatever they fancy.

Part 19 - November 1, 2008

I offer the nineteenth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “Road-building is a very long term venture. Typically, the longer a business venture, the more risky it is. Road-building requires a huge commitment of capital up-front for construction. The financial success of a private road will presumably depend on some sort of user fees such as tolls over a very long period of time, e.g. 20 years or more. Having built a model in Excel to analyze a road project, I can tell you that profit or loss is extremely sensitive to toll volume.”

Indeed, Mr. Jetton is correct in everything he writes here. It is true that roads require large amounts of upfront investment and that their success is largely dependent on toll volume. But I think that this claim supports my argument. In order for a road to be profitable, the road owner needs to ensure that traffic can flow as smoothly as possible for as long as possible, so as to maximize the toll revenues he can get. This means that initial road quality and maintenance arrangements will be such as to minimize the possible inconveniences to road users arising from the breakdown of road infrastructure or the need to repair it.

Mr. Jetton writes: “I'm confident that Mr. Stolyarov has learned from free market economists that entrepreneurs sometimes fail. (Of course, the main loser is the entrepreneur and those who invest with him.) The free market's incentive is profit, but the free market – ‘where the rubber meets the road’ (-: -- is a profit and loss system.  Where in this entire thread has Mr. Stolyarov acknowledged this in regard to private roads? He has said plenty about government failure, but nil about private failure.”

The free market is indeed a system that includes losses as well as profits, and entire businesses (even large and well-established ones) often go bankrupt and even cease to exist. If I did not mention this, I certainly did presuppose it in my discussions. But it is true that this aspect of the free market ought to be addressed more explicitly here. The loss part of the profit-and-loss system is essential for the successful functioning of competition because it gives an extremely strong incentive for entrepreneurs who want to stay in business to supply high-quality, affordable products. If they do not do so, then the competition will, and they will incur losses and eventually find themselves needing to undertake a different occupation.

With private roads, it is true that some road companies would fail to be as profitable as their owners would like, some would incur losses, and some would go out of business entirely. But this is not necessarily to the detriment of the consumer. If a road company goes out of business, what happens to its assets? They do not magically disappear. Rather, they get acquired at fire-sale prices by other entrepreneurs who hope to devote them to uses that consumers value more highly and therefore are willing to pay more for. Thus, even if a road company goes out of business, the road will still be there and will be owned by someone else, who is likely to manage it better.

Moreover, competition under the profit-and-loss system is a discovery procedure, as the works of Friedrich Hayek discuss extensively. In the course of competition, market entrepreneurs find out what works and what does not, and successful business models tend to be emulated, thereby reducing the risk of blunders (or at least of the same blunders recurring). As new information is discovered and new business models arise that better fulfill consumer desires, competition under the profit-and-loss system is remarkably flexible in incorporating these changes into the decisions of market entrepreneurs.

The failure of private entities is not necessarily a failure of the market as such. Rather, it is often a necessary ingredient to the success of the market system. On the contrary, government failure to provide genuinely useful services (such as roads, education, health care or a myriad of other goods) is a genuine failure because government monopolizes or quasi-monopolizes the field and then fails to deliver on the goods, leaving consumers with a shortage of inferior-quality products (and virtually no superior-quality ones).

Part 20 - November 3, 2008

I offer the twentieth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes:

“In part 9 on his blog Mr. Stolyarov responds, saying that private road owners would have an incentive to own higher quality roads because they have customers and want to make a profit. I agree to a degree. The primary target of my rhetorical question was budgets. Some people are going to spend a lot less money on their driveways than others simply because they can't afford more. Similarly, some private road owners will likely spend less money on a road simply because they can't afford more. More importantly, a private road owner might choose to spend less on road X because it also wants to spend on road Y. The customer or revenue aspect Mr. Stolyarov addresses is an important one. So in order to improve my question let's consider apartments rather than driveways. Are they all in great shape and made for high durability? I say no, landlords (and renters) have budget constraints. The law of diminishing returns is also relevant to building higher quality roads. This law says a producer will increase marginal costs (MC) only if marginal revenues (MR) are larger. (It works with negative numbers, too, i.e. if MC < MR < 0.) There is a caveat to add in regard to road building (less so to road maintenance). MC is near-term and MR is long-term, which makes the producer's business more risky.”

With regard to apartments, I agree with Mr. Jetton that not all are of great quality and that some fairly glaring budget constraints are evident in many apartment buildings.

And yet, I must ask Mr. Jetton and my other readers to compare the quality today of most privately built and owned apartments and most governmentally built and owned housing projects. Which kind of building typically exhibits less wear, better infrastructure, a longer expected functional lifespan, less crime, less vandalism, and more devotion to its upkeep on the part of its inhabitants? Like private apartments, private roads will not be perfect in all ways and will not meet the criteria of all drivers simultaneously. However, they will be an improvement of the same order that private apartments are improvements over government housing projects.

Moreover, many of the poorer-quality private apartments can be directly attributed to burdensome government restrictions, such as rent control, building codes, zoning laws, and union shop laws in certain metropolitan areas (including, as I last heard, downtown Chicago) that make it illegal to even carry furniture into a building without hiring a union member. These laws make it much costlier to renovate and keep buildings at a level of quality that is most suited to their owners’ and residents’ needs.

Granted, budgets are an important issue in any economic venture, but they are just as important for governments as they are for private individuals, and governments virtually always are far over the threshold for the kind of financial management that chronically courts disaster. Private entities not only deal with budget constraints more responsibly than governments; they can also accomplish much more given the same budget constraints.

The law of diminishing returns indeed helps private entities make decisions regarding how much to improve their assets – and these decisions generally result in the best possible outcome for all parties involved. Government officials, however, face different benefit-cost comparisons. The benefit of the free-market private entity is necessarily aligned with the benefit of its customers; if its customers do not like the service, they will not pay, and the private entity will not get money. The cost for the free-market private entity is necessarily aligned with its own expenditures. It must pay for any expenses out of pocket or convince venture capitalists or donors to help with them. For government officials, unless they personally and deeply care about consumers, it is possible for the benefit to be detached from any consumer experiences. Rather, some such officials may be seeking publicity, promotion, reelection, political power, or the advocacy of the ideology of government control. That, and not road quality or the economic returns from the road, may be what concerns them. Likewise, many government officials’ costs are not incurred out of their own pockets, but rather out of the pockets of taxpayers. Government officials do think in terms of diminishing returns to them, but this makes them likely, in some cases, to make decisions that conflict with what the law of diminishing returns would result in if benefits to road users were to be maximized.

Part 21 - November 5, 2008

I offer the twenty-first part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes that “the sort of blockage used in re-routes and widenings are barrels or even concrete barricades, not cones. My purpose is not to nit-pick, but trying to focus on the sort of work being done. In these cases it seems to me the segments must stay blocked off until all work is done. At least it would be impractical and costly to put a series of temporary re-entries to the traffic flow. Wouldn't a private road owner also face such practical difficulties?”

While the private road owner would indeed face such difficulties, he also has more of an incentive to address them creatively. Here are a few possibilities for how he might do this. They do not apply to every conceivable case, and other creative solutions may be required in certain scenarios. However, discussing them alone can illustrate how a private system of road ownership might address practical difficulties in a manner that is much more convenient to road users.

1. The private road owner could use mobile barriers instead of stationary ones. Each small segment of a concrete barrier and each barrel could be made to have retractable wheels that could enable the barriers to be relocated much more conveniently. Perhaps the barriers’ wheels could even be remote-controlled and therefore not require the presence of actual workers during the time the barriers are being relocated. Electronic systems facilitating this would not be particularly expensive after they have had time to develop on the free market for a few years; virtually all devices of this sort – when they are marketed for mass usage – tend to plummet in price within months or years after they are released.

2. The private road owner could conduct all road work at night or during low-traffic times of day. This would at least get rid of blockages caused by the presence of construction vehicles or workers themselves. Currently, many construction workers are prevented from working during unusual hours because of labor-union restrictions. Lifting these restrictions will go a long way toward ensuring that road users can drive conveniently.

3. The private road owner could conduct all road work within a smaller time interval by hiring more workers and equipment for a shorter amount of time. Assuming a constant cost per labor hour and a constant cost per hour of renting a machine, the road owner would incur the same costs if he hired a proportionally larger amount of labor and machine power for a proportionally smaller amount of time. However, hiring more labor and more machines has the benefit of getting the job done faster (maybe even within the same day!) and therefore gives the road owner the ability to only block off the road for extremely small amounts of time and remove the obstacles to traffic shortly thereafter. While the costs the private entrepreneur would incur from doing this are the same, he would get more revenue as a result, because traffic flow will be obstructed for a smaller amount of time.

Mr. Jetton writes: “I'd expect that tolls would be much higher under a private system, at least for new roads, because the road owner would not have access to tax revenue (fuel taxes especially).”

While tolls for private roads may be higher in some cases than tolls for government roads under the current system, I disagree with the statement that they would be much higher under a private system. Moreover, I do not even believe that private road tolls would be higher than current government tolls in most cases.

Competition is the reason why tolls would be lower under a private system. With multiple competitors providing roads within the same area, each road owner will need to keep his prices sufficiently low so that his customer base does not abandon him in favor of the competition. All coercive monopolies keep prices at a much higher level than they would be under free competition. Monopolies are interested in collecting the “monopoly rent” that accrues from their special privilege and can charge a price that is just low enough to prevent customers from refusing to use the good altogether. When demand for the good is highly inelastic (as it would seem to be with transportation for many people), monopolies can charge prices many times the free-market price. Thus, in a truly competitive environment, for new roads and existing roads alike, I would expect tolls to decline substantially relative to the status quo.

Part 22 - November 13, 2008

Mr. Jetton writes: “Toll roads or not, at a very local level and short distances, there is a natural constraint on increasing supply with more routes. The shorter the distance between point A and point B, the fewer the number of reasonable routes there are.”

This is true. However, as Mr. Jetton himself acknowledged, it might be possible to overcome this issue via community or local business provision of the roads. Community residents might be willing to voluntarily pool together their resources to build and maintain the road that leads to their homes and businesses -- if only because they desire to personally be able to access these structures. Likewise, shopping malls or looser associations of businesses might be willing to provide complimentary roads in the same manner that they provide complimentary parking lots today -- so as to attract business to their location. I think that in a fully private system, longer roads between cities or within large cities might operate on a toll or membership-fee basis, while local roads would largely be free to use and the costs of building and maintaining them paid for by the increased business they bring to their owners.

Part 23 - November 14, 2008

I offer the twenty-third part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “I agree that there is generally more flexibility for roads, but think comparisons should be made with care. Compare new roads with new airports and road widening with airport expansion. There is little flexibility on widening roads. I admit it wasn't a superb analogy, but the target of my suggestion was Mr. Stolyarov's contention that with private roads there would be unanimous approval among 1000 people, since it would be lucrative for all.”

It is fair enough to say that it is more difficult to widen existing roads than to build new ones. I think the market-based solution to this issue would be entrepreneurs’ more careful planning of the initial width of their roads. The problem with government-owned roads is that, while they might have been even at the top of the line in terms of quality when they were first built in the 1950s or 1970s -- depending on the location -- they were built to accommodate the existing flow of traffic and existing economic patterns, rather than anticipating how traffic flow was likely to grow dramatically in the future. Many politicians are fairly short-sighted, not even because of personal shortcomings, but because their actions are driven by the voters’ perceptions of pressing problems. If n cars have a difficult time getting from point X to point Y, then the politician, pressured by his constituents, will build a road from X to Y with a capacity of n cars. Neither he nor his constituents want to spend money to anticipate a situation 15 years later when there will be 3n cars traveling the same route. The politician will be out of office by then, and many of his constituents will have moved elsewhere. A private road owner, however, is likely to hold on to the same road over that time period and so is likely to make the road wide enough to begin with so that all of his customers can travel on it safely and conveniently.

So, while it is more difficult to get nearby owners’ consent for a road widening, this situation will not occur with nearly the same frequency under a free market, because roads will tend to be built to be wide enough to begin with. And if they happen not to be, then the road owner will still be able to comfortably widen most of the road, and if some of the nearby landowners hold out, it may be possible to buy them out over time, or wait until the land changes ownership, or negotiate a contract with them whereby they permit the road widening in exchange for receiving a fraction of revenues from the road.

Part 24 - November 16, 2008

I offer the twenty-fourth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “I grant there is a big difference private apartments and government housing projects, but don't see a lot of mileage :-) using that as an analogy with roads. Regarding private apartments he doesn't say whether he refers to owner-occupied or renter-occupied apartments. Residents of government housing projects are usually lower income renters. In either case lower income renters tend to be less careful about upkeep. I believe the analogy to roads is weakened because there is no counterpart among drivers. The vehicles that contribute the most to road deterioration are the 18-wheelers.”

To make the analogy more precise, let us compare private non-rent-controlled apartments occupied by low-income renters to government housing projects occupied by low-income renters. From general observation (and I am confident that any empirical data would confirm this), private apartment complexes for low-income renters tend to be much cleaner, much more cost-efficient, and much less crime-ridden than government housing projects intended for the same groups of people. When my family first moved to the United States, we lived in a privately owned apartment complex that, while not impeccable, especially when compared to a neighborhood of privately owned houses or condominiums, was nonetheless clean, peaceful, civilized, and safe. Many immigrants who came to the United States with virtually no money lived there while they saved enough money to purchase a house. Compare this to a government housing project in one of the ghettoized areas of Chicago, where one cannot appear outside without risking being shot or mugged.

Part 25 - November 17, 2008

I offer the twenty-fifth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

With regard to my suggestion that private road owners might create mobile barriers for construction sites – barriers that can be remotely controlled or programmed to achieve relocation along with the construction site – Mr. Jetton writes: “Very funny. Did you mean axles, wheels, and tires? Concrete barriers weigh tons and are put in place with a crane (large ones) or forklift (small ones).”

First, the barrels and cones often used in road construction are not made of concrete and so could be modified to incorporate the improvements I discussed.

Furthermore, while I concede that it might be difficult to incorporate these improvements into concrete barriers, who said that construction barriers need to be composed of ridiculously heavy and cumbersome materials, such as concrete? It is extremely rare for drivers to fail to notice even nominal barriers between usable parts of the road and parts that are being worked on. There is no need to erect a large, costly, and unwieldy barrier to keep drivers out of the construction site – a few cones will do most of the time. The typical construction cone is still a formidable menace to cars and can easily damage vital components if it strikes the underside of the vehicle.

On the other hand, concrete barriers are a tremendous safety risk for drivers; cars that hit them are unlikely to get away with minor damage; someone will more often get severely hurt. Moreover, consider what happens if there is a road emergency on a highway where all lanes but one have been blocked off and the single usable lane is surrounded by concrete barriers. Let us say that a car breaks down or experiences an accident and there are other cars both ahead and behind it. How will assistance be able to arrive, if there is no way to access the lane due to the presence of concrete barriers that cannot be easily lifted? If the barriers were mobile, they would simply move out of the way of, say, the ambulance that arrives to help. While the road may be in the process of being repaired, surely an ambulance should be able to use the stretch that is being worked on in the case of an emergency.

The elimination of concrete barriers and their replacement with lighter and more versatile obstructions will be another advantage of road privatization.

Part 26 - November 18, 2008

I offer the twenty-sixth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Regarding my response to his claim that tolls for private roads would be much higher than tolls for government-owned roads, Mr. Jetton writes: “I could have been clearer, but I meant tolls under all private roads versus tolls under the current government system, in which the toll is most often $0.00. (I grant that privatizing a gov't toll road might result in lower tolls, but that is about all.) “

Certainly, if Mr. Jetton wishes to aggregate tolls under all private roads in a fully private system and tolls under all government roads today, the former will be higher. But I can comfortably concede this point, because this is not the relevant cost comparison for road users.

Rather, the relevant cost comparison is aggregate tolls under all private roads in a fully private system versus aggregate tolls under all government roads today plus the sum total of taxes paid to support those roads. I argue that the latter number is much higher than the former would be. The taxes are an insidious cost of the roads, precisely because they are not readily visible by road users. They are sunk costs, in effect, because everyone is forced to pay them by the government. Drivers choose their road usage on the margin, without regard to sunk costs, so it seems to many that government-owned roads are preferable because the marginal cost of using them is lower. However, the total cost of using them is much higher to each individual taxpayer. Unlike a private firm, which has a reason to charge reasonable tolls – or else it will lose its customers to a competitor – a government has no similar incentive to levy reasonable taxes or even to charge reasonable tolls on its roads, because the government has a monopoly (or at least a near-monopoly) over roads and so can do anything it pleases short of aggravating people sufficiently that they refrain from traveling altogether.

So my argument stands that the total cost of private roads to most users will be much less than the total cost of government roads to most users today.

Part 27 - November 19, 2008

I offer the twenty-seventh part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Regarding my argument that private roads will be built sufficiently wide to accommodate expected future traffic as well as present traffic, Mr. Jetton writes: “Again, capitalists have budgets, not unlimited funds. He again ignores the law of diminishing returns. Why will a road builder buy more right-of-way than needed? That would not be efficiency, but inefficiency. It would increase immediate costs and any returns thereon will be decades in the future.”

From elementary (and perhaps somewhat simplified) economic reasoning, it is clear that road entrepreneurs will undertake projects whose net present value is positive – i.e., projects whose present costs are exceeded by the present value of their future benefits. Revenues that occur farther in the future would indeed have to be discounted by a larger factor, but they would also be taken into consideration by the prudent, far-sighted entrepreneur. To consider only present returns is a myopic outlook that only a politician can have. Private owners will be in the road business for the long term, and they will necessarily have to consider long-term changes if they want to remain profitable.

Because of the rather astonishing rate at which road traffic has increased in the past several decades – and because there is no reason to assume that this rate of increase will not continue – it is evident that at least some excess capacity will be built into private roads to accommodate the virtually inevitable rapid growth of future demand. This is not wasteful, just as building four-lane highways (in each direction) everywhere during the 1950s would have saved enormous amounts of money in the long run – money that is currently being sunk into widening two-lane highways.

We need to also compare the costs of building a wide-enough road to begin with and the costs of widening it later. Typically, the marginal cost of modifying a road is higher than the marginal cost of adding what would otherwise have been the modification in the first place. The marginal cost of modification does need to be discounted by the appropriate present value factor, but I suspect that even the present value of the cost of future road widenings is much higher than the present cost of building the road to be wider to begin with.

As for the budget issue, (1) road owners will be able to get more value for the same budget, as compared to governments and (2) if road owners can persuade capitalist investors that a wider road will generate more in future revenues than in present costs (with appropriate adjustments made for present values), then in well-functioning markets it should be possible for these road owners to borrow the capital necessary to construct the wider road. Perhaps we do not have ideally functioning capital markets yet. However, this is the fault of excessive federal-government regulation of financial markets, federal-government distortion of investor expectations, and federal-government magnification of investor uncertainty.

Part 28 - November 21, 2008

I offer the twenty-eighth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Regarding my argument that government roads were built to consider present traffic patterns rather than future ones, Mr. Jetton writes: “Regarding the first interstate highways built in the 1950's this is false. Such highways were built for defense and military purposes -- evacuation routes and military transport.”

While this may be true, it does not go against the essence of my point, which is that governments build roads for reasons other than maximally facilitating the convenience of (civilian) road users over time. Provided that it did not take several months to travel from one coast of the country to another, as seems to have been the case in Eisenhower’s younger days, the military commanders of the 1950s probably saw no inconvenience in, for instance, moving at an average of 35 miles per hour on a crowded two-lane highway; this was still a considerable marginal improvement over what they regularly dealt with in their youth. But for the convenience of civilians and for the perpetuation of modern commerce, this kind of average speed (which occurs routinely on obsolete highways near urban areas today) is absolutely devastating. Think of the deadweight loss resulting from millions of people sitting in traffic jams for an hour or more every day!

Moreover, the information Mr. Jetton provided does not refute my argument that the government failed to anticipate the increase in civilian traffic over time, even though it had a quantity of resources at its disposal that competent private entrepreneurs would have been quite able to devote to wider, more durable, less expensive roads.

What is particularly fascinating about the sources cited by Mr. Jetton on this subject is that they corroborate my claims of the vast inefficiencies involved in government road construction and maintenance. Wikipedia states regarding the Interstate Highway system that “[t]he initial cost estimate for the system was $25 billion over 12 years; it ended up costing $114 billion (adjusted for inflation, $425 billion in 2006 dollars) and taking 35 years to complete.” About.com states that “The plan for the Interstate Highway system was to complete all 42,000 miles within 16 years (by 1972.) Actually, it took 27 years to complete the system. The last link, Interstate 105 in Los Angeles, was not completed until 1993.” This means that the federal government’s project took anywhere from 1.6875 to 2.916666667 times longer than the federal government itself estimated, and cost about 4.56 times more than the federal government itself estimated.

In the private sector, mistakes like that bring about instant loss of customers, investors, credibility, and anything else having to do with maintaining a viable business. Imagine what would happen to a private business if it even underestimated costs or time to completion of a project by a mere 20 percent, not 292% or 456%! The stock price of the business would plummet, and customers would flee in droves. Yet the federal and local governments keep on operating the roads and offloading the costs on taxpayers.

Part 29 - November 22, 2008

I offer the twenty-ninth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “In post 109 I said Mr. Stolyarov's analogy between private and public apartments versus private and public roads was weak. He modifies one side of his analogy -- shrinking it to low-income private and low-income public apartments. That does not strengthen the analogy. The correspondence between source (apartments) and target (roads) remains weak. The vehicles that contribute the most to road deterioration -- 18-wheelers -- aren't analogous to low-income renters of public housing. They use the same roads (where permitted) as other vehicles. Also, they are the high rent payors, since they pay more in fuel taxes, motor vehicle taxes, and tolls to use the roads.”

Every analogy breaks down to some extent, because no two aspects of reality compared are exactly identical. But I would like to remind Mr. Jetton and our readers that it was Mr. Jetton who began to develop this analogy by rather roughly comparing the divergent qualities of private apartments to the divergent qualities of private roads. I continued by refining the analogy, comparing private services to government services in each realm.

However, to make the analogy still more accurate, I would venture to argue that fully private roads would experience less deterioration due to 18-wheelers than government roads do today. Granted, 18-wheelers and low-income renters are perhaps not perfectly comparable, but I still think it is fair to claim that road deterioration due to 18-wheelers will be less under a private system than it is a under a government system, to a degree similar to that in which private apartments for low-income renters are better kept than government housing projects for low-income individuals.

Private road owners could address the 18-wheeler problem in many more creative ways than government officials can even imagine. For instance, private owners have full discretion over whom they allow on the road and what kinds of rules of the road they set up. A road owner could build a special lane just for the 18-wheelers, and this lane could be particularly reinforced to compensate for the added expected wear on it. Or special separate roads could emerge just for smaller vehicles and just for 18-wheelers – which would be safer for the drivers of smaller cars in any case, while perhaps facilitating faster commerce. Drivers of 18-wheelers tend to be more careful and more experienced (after all, their jobs and cargos are on the line). Thus, they can be permitted to go faster than, say, 70 miles per hour, when only 18-wheelers are on the road. The greatest danger that faster 18-wheelers pose is to smaller cars whose drivers are typically less experienced and incapable of going along with the faster traffic flow that a prevalence of fast 18-wheelers would generate.

This is just a possibility, but it is one way in which private markets might reduce road deterioration due to 18-wheelers.

Part 30 - November 23, 2008

I offer the thirtieth part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

In response to my raising the possibility that mobile construction barriers might exist under private road ownership, Mr. Jetton writes: “I am curious to learn what efficiency is gained by putting retractable rollers on cones or barrels that are easily hand-carried by one person.”

First, remotely controlled (or better yet, robotic) mobile barriers pose less of a safety risk to workers moving the barriers. Except in the unlikely event of an equipment malfunction, the cones/barrels could move themselves or be moved remotely to whatever new stretch needs to be blocked off. Second, this procedure is also likely to be faster than similar tasks involving direct application of human labor. (While machines can be designed to be perfect efficiency maximizers, by whatever criterion of efficiency one chooses, human beings are not; they may get tired or distracted; they need motivation; and they often have difficulty with quick transitions from one task to another. These are not problems or at least not avoidable problems per se, but they do indicate that anything which can be automated should be – to free the humans to do the more creative parts of the job.)

Mr. Jetton writes: “Why presume [concrete barriers] are ‘ridiculously heavy’? I'm not an expert on the matter, but I won't presume concrete barriers were chosen simply based on the irrational premises of politicians or bureaucrats. Mr. Stolyarov proceeds to address possible dangers of heavy concrete barriers to drivers of cars, completely ignoring 18-wheelers and the safety of construction workers. Will private road builders be that negligent of the safety of their own employees?”

First, I seriously doubt that an 18-wheeler would be stopped by the kind of concrete barrier typically found on a government highway undergoing construction. A car might be completely crushed upon colliding with such a barrier, but an 18-wheeler will probably ram through it and break the barrier. (This is, of course, my conjecture; I am not an engineer. If there is data to the contrary, I am willing to concede this point.)

Second, I raised the possibility in Part 29 of my response that private roads might have separate lanes for 18-wheelers (which would probably be permanently blocked off by concrete, except at exits, to begin with) or that separate private roads for 18-wheelers and other large vehicles might emerge, with different rules and specifications. This means that different safety precautions might be taken when repairing lanes/roads meant for small vehicle traffic as compared to repairing lanes/roads meant for 18-wheelers.

Third, I suspect there will be varying degrees of risk involved in private construction jobs, with risk premiums paid to workers who undertake particularly dangerous assignments. Instead of one-size-fits-all “hit a worker, go to prison, pay a $10,000 fine” regulations, private companies will pay their workers more for risking their lives. This is better for the workers and their families (who, aside from the satisfaction of retribution, would probably not benefit much from an offending driver being heavily fined or put in prison). It would also provide an indication to private companies about how much safety in construction is optimal. If they want to expose their workers to undue risk, they will need to pay them a lot more – more, perhaps, than they can comfortably afford. If the marginal cost of safety improvements is less than the marginal risk premium for the unsafety resulting from a lack of such improvements, then road companies will undertake the safety improvements. (Of course, in the marginal cost of safety improvements, one must include the foregone revenue from road users if the safety improvements impede right of way or convenience.)

Part 31 - November 24, 2008

I offer the thirty-first part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “In part 26 [Mr. Stolyarov] writes: ‘So my argument stands that the total cost of private roads to most users will be much less than the total cost of government roads to most users today.’ Perhaps so.  However, his argument in Part 21 was this: ‘While tolls for private roads may be higher in some cases than tolls for government roads under the current system, I disagree with the statement that they would be much higher under a private system.’ This is about tolls only, whereas his claim above is about all costs, including those paid via taxes and licenses. This is not standing by the argument, but radically changing it.”

I think that my position is consistent, and this is why.

In Part 21, I said that tolls for some individual private roads might be higher in some cases than tolls for some individual government roads today, but no individual private road (of comparable or slightly better quality than government roads today) will have tolls that are much higher than tolls on government-controlled toll roads today.

However, since many more private roads than government roads would be funded by tolls, it is still quite possible and likely that the aggregate private tolls would exceed the aggregate government tolls, which was Mr. Jetton’s point, and which I said it was possible to comfortably concede in Part 26. But I never said that aggregate private tolls would necessarily be lower than aggregate government tolls. I said that individual private tolls would not be much higher than individual government tolls today – which is a far different and much milder claim.

I then said that if Mr. Jetton wants to aggregate, then evaluating aggregate private tolls versus aggregate government tolls is not the relevant comparison. Rather, the relevant comparison is aggregate user costs under private roads versus aggregate user costs under government roads.

I summarize my position, which I believe to be consistent, as follows.

1. Individual private roads will not be much more expensive than individual government toll roads today (and will sometimes be less expensive).

2. There will be more private toll roads than government toll roads today, so aggregate tolls will likely be higher under a private system.

3. Aggregate road user costs, however, will be much lower under a private system than they are today. User costs will also be lower for the vast majority of individual road users.

Part 32 - November 25, 2008

I offer the thirty-second part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Regarding my argument that private road entrepreneurs would be more likely to make roads initially sufficiently wide so that future inconvenient widenings would not be required as often, Mr. Jetton writes: “Why will a private road builder buy unneeded right-of-way for road X which will begin to generate revenues decades in the future, when the same money could be used on road Y that will generate revenues immediately?”

To this, I respond that the costs of building an entirely new road elsewhere might be much higher than the costs of building the initial road with more lanes, especially considering that significantly larger amounts of land would need to be obtained for the new road. Certainly, it is possible that the road entrepreneur could choose to build two smaller roads instead of one larger one, but I suspect that there are economies of scale that come into play when a wider road is being constructed at the same time (for instance, all the asphalt can be poured at the same time, and if there are barriers on the sides of the road, the road builder still needs the same amount of material for the barriers, irrespective of how wide the road is).

Regarding the federal government’s gross underestimates of the cost and time it would take to construct the Interstate Highway System, Mr. Jetton writes: “I'm not at all surprised the government failed to anticipate the increase in civilian traffic.  I expect hardly anybody in the 1950's anticipated (1) the migration from cities to suburbs, in which the new roads played a strong role, and (2) wives entering the workforce, a significant factor in the number of vehicles. I strongly doubt private road builders/owners would have anticipated it either.”

Mr. Jetton continues by writing that cost mis-estimates are much more common in the private sector than I alleged and that the consequences thereof for private firms are much lower than I alleged.

While it is true that private road owners could grossly underestimate future consumer demand, I ask what would happen if they did. Typically, another private road company would simply build another road in parallel to existing insufficient ones, and this new road would bear some of the additional traffic. Because of a vibrant competitive market, other road entrepreneurs would be jumping at the opportunity to seize some of the profit opportunities that resulted from their predecessors’ oversights. It is true that larger and better-funded firms would be able to absorb the costs of some cost mis-estimates, but nowhere to the extent that a tax-funded government can.

On the other hand, the government has a virtually complete monopoly over roads and thus has no real competition to speak of. Moreover, it is not funded solely through revenue from its service operations and thus will continue to exist whether or not it makes catastrophic mistakes. If the government mis-estimates future traffic, then virtually nobody will be able to provide another road to absorb the unexpected increase. Hence, we have the sorry situation today of 1950s-1970s-era roads bearing 2000s-era traffic and only occasionally being widened. 

Moreover, Mr. Jetton himself wrote: “I suspect more accurate estimates were made, but the official government one was a lowball estimate to make congressional approval easier.” In other words, the federal-government officials interested in constructing the roads intentionally deceived congressmen in order to get them to pass a plan they otherwise would have rejected. This practice would not pass muster in the private sector. Companies that selectively revealed only the estimates that were most favorable to them, instead of addressing all available data, would be quickly shunned by intelligent and prudent investors.

If there are systematic cost under-estimates in a private sector, then this is a warning sign that something is being meddled with in that sector. Perhaps there are tax or regulatory advantages to producing low-cost estimates now and absorbing the increasing costs later. Perhaps we have a case of fly-by managers who want the prestige of initiating apparently low-cost projects, dropping their job with their companies, and leaving their successors to deal with the actual higher costs. (The severe dissociation of ownership from management in many of today’s companies is due to federal-government intervention – namely, to the many regulatory barriers to entry for small firms, which encourages large, highly inefficient forms of organization to prevail – including the modern publicly traded corporation, where many of the owners are speculators, many of the managers simply try to pad their salaries and benefits with their companies’ assets, and many of the employees are unionized and try their hardest to get more pay for doing less work, while keeping out competent non-union labor.) Perhaps we have the macroeconomic instability caused by the Federal Reserve’s artificial infusions of credit, which lead entrepreneurs to systematically believe that there is more capital available than is in fact the case, and that this capital is available at a lower price (interest rate) than would be warranted by the real economic state of affairs. I do not claim to know precisely why the software companies systematically underestimate development efforts, but I suspect that if we looked closer, we would find some government measure responsible for it.

Finally, I would like to address Mr. Jetton’s words that “[i]t seems [Mr. Stolyarov] gave up on the idea of retractable rollers. Instead he throws out some new ideas about remote-controlled or robotic barriers.”

I would like to clarify that this is in fact the same idea. The barriers would have retractable rollers which could be deployed remotely and moved to the location of one’s choice – or else could move themselves. This is not too improbable given even today’s technology. I own a cleaning robot which is extremely effective at accomplishing its intended tasks and which can move in much wider variety of ways than the kinds of devices I am envisioning here.

At this point in the discussion, I think that I have made my arguments sufficiently explicit that I can safely let Mr. Jetton have the last word and let our readers decide who has the upper hand in this discussion. It was interesting to address some original and in-depth critiques of the road-privatization position – as typically the counterarguments to road privatization are nowhere near this level of sophistication or persuasiveness. (Most people tend to dismiss the notion without argument simply because it is unfamiliar to them or outside their zone of comfort.) Hopefully, others who wish to examine this issue will be benefitted by the arguments made here.

***

Changes That Happen Without Majority Approval

September 29, 2008

Numerous revolutionary, life-changing developments occur in the world without ever meeting with the approval of most people or even many people. This is not just a fact; it is a desirable fact, too. Imagine having a majority vote on every advance in technology, culture, or ideas in the past. How many of today’s routinely accepted and celebrated advances would have been voted down out of fear, short-sightedness, or the desire for power over others? How many great inventions and discoveries would have been voted down simply for failing to be appreciated by the unimaginative masses?

A great intellectual or technological breakthrough can change the world without ever initially winning mass support. Once the breakthrough exists, people who would not have understood or supported it at first come to appreciate it due to an empirical demonstration of its advantages. They then become either willing or indirect users of the breakthrough, until the advance is so well established as a new paradigm that it is impossible to return to a past when it did not exist. In such a way, it is possible to “sneak” progress upon an unsuspecting general public.

The art of the successful activist consists of sneaking progress upon the public and the world – without raising too much of an outcry or generating too much resistance. Opposition to future improvements to human life will not perish in a grand struggle; rather, if all goes well, it will simply fade away as people everywhere gradually adapt to new beneficent advances.

***

Why Universal Surveillance Will Fail

September 28, 2008

In response to my essay, “Liberation by Internet,” Mr. Ross Nelson wrote the following letter to me, which I reprint here with his permission. Thereafter, I will offer a response to this remarks.

   “To the contrary, Hayek was right.  The Internet is an extraordinary tool, even for computer-illiterate people like me.  But the same technology that allows this access to information and people also allows a comprehensive surveillance over us Orwell could scarcely have dreamt of.  Technology already has, or foreseeably will, allow governments to monitor constantly, where we are, and what we read and do.  Our new cars will keep complete records of how far we went and how fast, how many stops we made, whether there was hard de- or acceleration, and will eventually wrest control of themselves  from us either at their own decision or that of an external authority.

   “What we buy and sell, our health records, our behavior in public and increasingly in private, and our financial data will be more and more transparent.  As our government has already established, tapping devices at just a few locations allows complete, or near-complete, monitoring of emails and other telecommunications nationwide.  Technology has made omnisurveillance easier, not harder.  Should Cuba wish to cut off the Internet it need only jam satellite or any other transmissions while filling up its own ether with propaganda.  That was the point way back when teaching the populace to read, wasn't it?  To pave yet another road to filling its minds with propaganda?

   “In the near future there will be nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide, for everyone except possibly a handful of computer sacerdotes one step ahead of Big Brother.  Your blessed technology will allow us to be watched even through concrete walls.  Eventually, we're told, even our thoughts will be decipherable through external scans of electrical and blood flow in our brains, coupled with scans of our muscle tenseness, perspiration, and the like.  Your body will be naked to observers first at airports, then anywhere in public there's a supposed risk, which is pretty much everywhere.   Like rats in the basement walls, there might be a few people living marginally and continually on the run with contraband technology hiding from Omnisurveillant Society, but to think that the Internet will make us free is nonsense.  You've made an altar to a false god, technology, who will not save you.

   “Your life and mine are far more accessible to government now than any other person's lives in history.  You see the vast panorama of the Internet and its advantages--and there are many--and fancy yourself free.  But in fact you and I are more circumscribed in reality and theory than we are liberated by an excess of technology.  I'd rather not live in an age of following a horse-drawn plow all day and bloodletting as a cure for what ails me.  But I'm unconvinced that all the bells and whistles before which you bow, and whose sparkling lights mesmerize you, will make me freer.

                                                                                                        Regards,

 Ross Nelson”        

While I certainly agree that the government has tried and will try to use technology to achieve greater surveillance of the population, I also believe that these attempts will inevitably fail. Why am I so optimistic? Because I observe that virtually every national-government program and policy fails to achieve its stated objectives. Maybe the federal government might be able to effectively arrange surveillance if it were able to effectively perform other tasks, such as providing education, providing health care, fighting wars abroad, or “stabilizing” the economy. But every well-informed free-market advocate knows just how miserably the federal government fails at each of these tasks, no matter how many officials it devotes to them or how benign their intentions.

If the federal government is so incompetent and bound to fail in every other area, why ascribe near-omnipotence to its capacities in the realm of surveillance?

Universal surveillance would be even more difficult to achieve than universal education or universal health care – neither of which will ever come to pass through government. After all, virtually everyone agrees that health care and education are good for them and would gladly accept decent health care and education if these were offered. But virtually everyone believes that being watched by the government is not good for them and leads to inevitable abuses of powers. The federal government has failed at providing genuine goods to people – and it has failed without facing major public resistance. Consider, then, how spectacularly the federal government will fail at achieving universal surveillance given that it will face significant resistance from virtually everybody.

The resistance that universal surveillance will face is not of the sort that can be put down with guns or even tracked. Consider that today even basic copyright restrictions on digital media are unenforceable, despite billions of dollars, draconian threats, and thousands of hours of effort put into suppressing violations by government officials and “private” guilds such as the RIAA and MPAA. The federal government does not even have the power to stop file sharing, much less impose universal surveillance. And the people who evade federal-government controls will always be nimble, decentralized, and a step ahead of cumbersome bureaucracies in their technical knowledge and ability to bypass monitoring and surveillance.

As I wrote in “Liberation by Internet,” “The people who design applications for private use on computers are either professionals who earn a living doing so or enthusiasts who, following a sincere passion, have exposed themselves extensively to such technology for years. The millions of such people throughout the world, each working on his own project in his own way, can surely design systems that are more effective than any government controls intended to stifle individual communication and exchange.”

I grant, of course, that a government policy can inflict tremendous damage while failing to achieve its intended effects. But universal surveillance, if it is ever established, will be more akin to alcohol Prohibition than to an effective ban. Virtually everyone will operate outside the rules, a few will get caught, corruption with regard to surveillance will prevail, and a black market will emerge, characterized by some dubious and unsafe behaviors – but generally an improvement over the “legal” regime of prohibition. But the free flow of information will not stop – nor will the universal and insuppressible desire of individuals for privacy and freedom from Big Brother. Just as Prohibition had to be abandoned in light of its futility, universal surveillance will likewise eventually be discarded as impracticable and unenforceable, even if it is ever attempted.

***

Mr. Stolyarov's Essay, "Liberation by Internet", Published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute

September 27, 2008

I am pleased to announce that my essay, “Liberation by Internet,” has been published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute as a part of its prestigious Weekend Read series, normally reserved for the works of such intellectual giants as Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt, Albert Jay Nock, and Friedrich Hayek. You can read the essay yourself or listen to a free mp3 file of me reading it to you. You can access both by following the hyperlink above.

This essay is about how technology destroys tyranny and how the emergence of the Internet invalidates Hayek’s dire forecast about technology being used as a tool of state oppression. I show how the Internet helped bring down the Soviet Union and is helping many individuals today escape and mitigate government oppression. In freer countries like the United States, the Internet is just beginning to manifest its beneficent social and political consequences through such phenomena as the Ron Paul Revolution.

***

What Brought About the Soviet Union's Downfall? Bankruptcy or Information?

September 26, 2008

Some argue that the primary reason for the Soviet Union’s demise was that the Reagan administration’s policies brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy. But this view overstates the role of American policy and understates the role that the spread of information from and about the West played in the USSR’s demise.

Indeed, the Soviet Union had been bankrupt in the conventional sense since its very founding. As a matter of fact, Lenin’s initial policy of “War Communism” from 1917 to 1922 completely demolished the capital stock of the Soviet Union and reduced the people to a hand-and-mouth existence. Thereafter, whatever increases in prosperity the Soviet Union experienced were intermittent (say, during the “New Economic Policy” of the 1920s or Khrushchev’s relaxation of repression during the 1950s and 1960s) and in large part made possible by investments from the West – which were subsequently nationalized by the Soviet government.

It is possible for a country to exist on the verge of starvation for generations without the people realizing what the root of the problem is and correcting that problem. Without having an idea of what freedom was or what life in a free society was like, most of the Soviet people did not even believe that an alternative to their way of life was possible – and state propaganda convinced them that life in the West was even worse.

So it was indeed information that brought down the USSR – by giving the people an improved understanding to the alternative to Soviet life.

***

Argumentative Tactics Never to Use: Argument by Threat

September 16, 2008

One of the absolute nastiest rhetorical techniques is threatening to harm a person who disagrees with oneself – whether that harm be direct bodily injury or deprivation of physical resources and opportunities. Threatening to hurt someone who has a different opinion in any way is an infringement of the principle that every man has an inalienable liberty of conscience.

Mere intellectual disagreement should never put a person out of your good graces. Consider the possibilities with regard to an opinion that disagrees with yours. Here, I will paraphrase John Stuart Mill’s famous essay, “On Liberty.”

1.) It could be that your original position was wrong and the contrary position was right, in which case having the contrary position voiced was of benefit to you.

2.) It could be that your original position was right, but you are now better able to defend it by honestly and seriously confronting challenges to it.

3.) It could be that both your position and the position of someone who disagrees with you is wrong, and, by engaging in a civil, rational argument, you are each able to refine and improve your views.

Threatening another person not only shuts off the possibilities for rational intellectual exchange; it also fosters resentment in the threatened person and a disposition to dislike the threatener’s ideas more intensely – waiting for the right moment to strike against them when the threat itself subsides. The best way to kill any idea is to try to use the threat of harm to enforce its propagation.

***

Free-Market Activism Suggestion: Write a Critical Analysis of a Favorite Work 

September 15, 2008

What is considered “great literature” or “high philosophy” in any given time period is based on the preponderance of derivative literature written on the works in question. If enough people have analyzed a particular author in writing, then everybody else begins to think that this author’s works must be extraordinary and remarkably valuable in some sense, because so many intelligent people have devoted so much effort to thinking and writing about them.

Note that this can be done with any work of one’s choosing. For about three millennia, this has been done with various components of the Old and New Testaments, even though neither would pass muster as great literature or coherent philosophy if they had been written today. But enough intelligent people have analyzed these works for enough time as to build up a formidable corpus of derivative literature and philosophical interpretation and application of their content. Much that is of value about Biblical texts is not actually in the texts themselves, but in the analysis of the texts by subsequent writers!

So find an essay or book that you like and write a literary or philosophical analysis thereof. The work in question could address issues such as free markets, individualism, reason, and even the prospect of future improvements to human life through technology. The author and the work do not have to be well-known. You will help make them well-known by writing and publishing an essay about their work. Often, even one essay helps introduce a work into the realm of serious academic discussion, and the derivative literature builds up from there.

***

Grammatically Correct But Meaningless Questions 

September 14, 2008

One of the remarkable characteristics of languages in general is that they allow us to express a much broader set of ideas than the set of ideas that actually pertains to the real world. It is possible to formulate questions and statements that are entirely grammatically correct and employ the proper meanings of every word within them – and yet have no relevance to the real world and are indeed devoid of any genuine meaning.

Some questions of this sort include “What is the height of the color green?” and “What is the smell of five?” Most people will recognize these questions as absurd. But there are other equally absurd but highly esteemed questions that are asked ubiquitously: “Why does the universe exist?” and “Why do you live?” are common examples.

The use of the word “why” in this manner already presupposes not only the existence of some things, but also the existence of purposive beings who are capable of using means to achieve ends. The very ability to ask “why” depends on one’s existence and on the existence of things in general. To use that derivative ability to question the fundamental facts on which it is based is not logically correct, just as it is not correct to use the theorems of any logical system to disprove the axioms on which that system is built.

Note that the use of the word “why” in absurd questions of this sort pertains to final causation, the attempt to get at the purpose which things pursue. But only a certain class of existents can be said to have final causation applicable to it – namely, living, volitional beings such as humans. It is perfectly acceptable to ask “Why do you live?” in the sense of “What factors brought about and/or maintain your life?” That sense of “why” pertains to efficient causation and is applicable to all entities. But final causation already presupposes a living entity who pursues the maintenance of his or her own life.

My very ability to ask “why” questions depends on the continuation of my life. I dare not direct my questioning ability against the very state that makes it possible.

***

The Republican National Convention and the Dangers of Crowds

September 13, 2008

Jillian Melchior, who attended the Republican National Convention, has written an excellent article in the Hillsdale Collegian about its disturbing proceedings. There was no independent thinking, no constructive criticism, no measured, proportionate admiration at the Republican National Convention. Rather, there was worshipful fervor, which turned into mass fury when a few people expressed their displeasure with John McCain and Sarah Palin.

The more experience I get observing the political scene, the more striking two realizations become for me.

1) Among Republicans and “conservatives,” there are about as many political and personal vices as Democrats and “liberals.” Often, their vices are of a slightly different nature – but they are present nonetheless. Among them is a blind, unthinking patritotism, a narrow-minded conviction of the superiority of one’s own subculture – without true knowledge of any others, a thinly veiled dislike of immigrants, foreigners, and any kind of ethnic heterogeneity, as well as the unenlightened fundamentalist conviction that morality cannot exist without religion. Visceral shouting, conformity, groupthink, and ease of manipulation are just as characteristic of these people as they are of many militant Democrats. Of course, not all Republicans and Democrats are like this. But during election season, many come perilously close to such a characterization.

2) Organizing politics on a mass basis is dangerous and debilitating to freedom. If you consider each typical person to have an intelligence level of 1, then in any group of people, the sum of the intelligence levels of all the members can never exceed 2/n, where n is the number of people in the group. Two people can have a serious intellectual exchange without generally lapsing into the cruder vices. The more people exist in a group, the less responsibility each individual has for keeping nay given discussion civil and rational. Individuals are wonderful. Crowds are dangerous. Crowds do not think. Crowds erupt in violent passions and violent action. Crowds need to be avoided, and their formation needs to be highly discouraged by rational individuals.

***

Argumentative Tactics Never to Use: The Lack-of-Precedent Argument for Impossibility

September 12, 2008

Many people dismiss possibilities for constructive improvements in people’s future lives by arguing that these improvements have never taken place in the past and have never been implemented yet. This is taken to imply that they will never happen in the future as well.

But this is a non sequitur. Just because a particular technology has not been invented yet, for instance, does not mean that it will never be. As late as 1903, many venerable “experts” with the United States Navy were claiming that powered flight would never be invented – because it never had been! Likewise, the argument that a lack of precedent implies impossibility could have been used at some time to discount the possibility of steam engines, railroads, automobiles, computers, and the Internet – simply because nothing of the sort had existed in the past, from the point of view of our hypothetical critics!

The past is not a predictor of the future, since human beings have free will and creativity and are able to experiment with new possibilities and new ways of doing things – some of which end up superior to the older ways. This is not to say that one cannot demonstrate the impossibility of some particular scheme. But to do so, one cannot simply say that it has never been done. One needs to argue why the specific nature of the scheme in question precludes it from being realizable.

***

Getting Over September 11, 2001

September 11, 2008

I do not mean to minimize the tragedy experienced by over 3000 innocent victims who perished during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as the continued impact that horrendous calamity has made on the lives of the victims’ families. They deserve our sympathy, and this day will justifiably remain a day of mourning for many of them.

But the same holds for all the great massacres, genocides, and slaughterfests of history. Just as tragic as the events of September 11, 2001 were the Nazi Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, the killing fields of the World Wars, the genocides of Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein, and other events going at least as far back as Saul’s indiscriminate slaughter of the Amalekites over 3000 years ago. These tragedies need to be remembered, and their lessons need to be learned so that they might not be repeated. September 11^th is now one more of these historic tragedies – important indeed, but no more so than any of the other on that long, bloody list.

The occurrence of this tragedy does not mean that the way we lead our lives on an everyday basis needs to change. If we let September 11^th irrevocably alter the way Americans lead their lives – putting them in perpetual fear of the next attack, rendering them willing to trample over their sacred and inalienable liberties for the sake of an imagined “security” – then the terrorists will have won without blowing up another bomb. They will have gotten us to subjugate ourselves to external controls and renounce America’s heritage of freedom, individualism, and the presumption of innocence.

While remembering September 11^th, we have an imperative to enable American cultural attitudes to recover from this event. The obsession with security needs to stop, and liberty needs once again to become our primary aim, for without liberty, no security is possible.

***

Argumentative Tactics Never to Use: Argument by Consensus

September 10, 2008

Defending a position simply because many people in general or many people in a particular specialty or position of authority adhere to it is not a rational technique of argumentation. A position whose sole support is that a lot of people – or “respectable” people, or “authoritative” people – embrace it is not a strong position at all.

The following views have at one time or another been embraced by a majority of people or a majority of “experts” in some particular field: the geocentric model of the universe, the necessity of burning witches, the efficacy of bleeding in curing ailments, the creation of all life forms during a literal six-day period some 6000 years ago, the ability of socialism to achieve universal prosperity and happiness, the imminent depletion of the world’s oil resources (predicted as early as the 1880s), the absolute impossibility of man-powered flight, global cooling from anthropogenic causes, global warming from anthropogenic causes, imminent global calamities due to “overpopulation”, and the demonic properties of cats.

Some of the views commonly held today may well be classed with many of the above by future thinkers reflecting on our time. If a view is defensible, there must be a good reason for it. Widespread agreement does not qualify.

***

The Ambiguity of the Russia-Georgia Conflict

August 30, 2008

I do not have a dog in the fight between Russia and Georgia. I despise the neo-socialist, authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin and his likely political puppet, Dmitry Medvedev. I certainly do not condone said regime’s persistent violations of the liberties of its own citizens and its rather obvious attempts to restore the “Greater Russia” that existed during the Romanov dynasty and much of the USSR. I emigrated to the United States in part to be free of the machinations of the Russian government and its even more oppressive sibling regime in Belarus.

However, I am not going to enlist my support in favor of the Georgian side in the current South Ossetia War, either. My foremost intellectual position on this matter is more of an entreaty to the United States government that goes something like this. “Please, please, please do not get involved in this horrid mess!” I do not want a regional conflict to escalate into World War III, and I hope to convince you why my position is the sanest and most reasonable possible.

To understand why the United States should stay out of the Russia-Georgia mess, we need to consider what enabled Russia to invade Georgia in the first place – and quite blatantly at that. The cause, I believe, is the extremely overstretched status of the world hegemon, the United States. With extensive military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as substantial military presences in tens of other countries throughout the world, the United States simply cannot afford to engage in another major military operation anywhere in the world. The U. S. has neither the manpower, nor the money, nor the popular backing to intervene militarily any more than it has already been doing. While Russia’s ruling elites are power-hungry and evil, they are not stupid. They recognized that the United States was ill-suited for stopping a major, determined Russian expansionist effort. And they were right. The Russian invasion of Georgia was a statement to the West: “We know you cannot do anything serious to stop us.” And it is a dangerous illusion to think that the West can, indeed, do anything serious and effective.

I wrote previously that not only is the United States powerless to do anything effective in the conflict between Russia and Georgia, but that it is dangerous to think otherwise. Getting dragged into a military conflict with a major world power like Russia is not like invading Iraq or Afghanistan. Rather, it is analogous to – and indeed would ignite – another world war, which is the worst possible outcome in the world today. We have enjoyed sixty-three years of fairly calm times – with no major wars in the way of a steady push toward technological progress and improving living standards. After the end of the Cold War, the global geopolitical situation has been even more stable and peaceful, enabling steady globalization and cultural exchange – building increasing understanding among people from various cultures and worldviews. People who would otherwise have slaughtered one another have seriously begun to trade, with tremendous benefits for all. A major war can jeopardize all this and plunge us back into the savage 1940s.

I do not care how good – compared to what existed before or what might exist in Georgia – Mikhail Saakashvili’s regime is. It certainly has its virtues, but it is not worth World War III. Nothing is. No regime, no hegemony, and no principle is worth the deaths of millions of people, military or civilian. I say let Russia trample Georgia, although it seems unlikely to do even that. The Russian military seems content with the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well as the occupation of the Georgian cities of Gori and Poti. This, from a larger geopolitical standpoint, is inconsequential, even for American world dominance. So the United States is unable to protect a minor Caucasian ally. So what? The alternative would be to send thousands of young men – who would most likely be drafted – to fight and die against thousands of other young men who are not responsible for the transgressions of the Putin/Medvedev regime.

The necessity of preserving a wider world peace have never been greater than they are today. Regional flare-ups like the South Ossetia War do happen and will continue to happen. But the international system of commerce, communication, cultural exchange, and technological progress must not be interrupted for any reason. The result of interrupting it would be a repetition of the disastrous, murder-ridden early 20^th century.

Thus, regional conflicts must be kept regional, and any remoter powers must avoid interfering in them, no matter what the stakes to their “image,” “reputation,” or “sovereignty.” The United States could comfortably abandon all of its extensive international alliance network and still be fundamentally unaffected in terms of life as usual within its territory. As a matter of fact, it would be better for the long-term health of the countries currently under supposed American protection if their regimes were given a firm signal to carry their own weight considerably more.

To finish my fervent plea to the United States government for non-intervention in Georgia on a more sentimental note, many of the Russian soldiers fighting in Georgia right now are my age, and have been drafted into the military. The only difference between them and me in this respect is that I happened to be able to emigrate to the United States at the age of nine on account of my father’s work visa, whereas they were not so fortunate. These young men are not evil; they are simply following the orders of evil men. They have no choice about whether to be in Georgia or even in the Russian army. Why should they have to die? Why should American young men – many of whom I have also gotten to know over the years – be sent to kill them or be killed by them? No geopolitical machinations are worth the lives of innocent young men. No principle is worth a single human life. The last thing we need in the world today is a senseless major war filled with senseless killing.

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The Internet and Massive Long-Term Cultural Change

August 29, 2008

Recently, on his excellent blog, Waxing Poetically [since disabled due to the irresponsibility of Today.com/Blogdog.com] Mike LaPenna wrote regarding the “Power of the Internet This Campaign Season”. I enjoyed Mr. LaPenna’s post in particular because he compared two snapshots in time – eight years apart – in the year 2000 and today. Many of us living our everyday lives notice only tiny incremental changes as they happen day by day, and we shift our living patterns accordingly. But over larger spans of time, such as eight years, the sum of the incremental changes results in a massive difference in terms of the opportunities available to us. While, certainly, the 2000s have not been without both major and minor crises, the general direction of our times is onward and upward, especially if we consider a longer-term picture.

There is no better time for the Internet than today. It has become so influential that even the notoriously sluggish and technologically backward politicians of major parties are beginning to recognize the need to adjust to the realities it has created. Ron Paul’s run for the Presidency in 2007-2008 and the continuation of his impact via his Campaign for Liberty are two more great examples of how the Internet shapes today’s political landscape and brings about increasing receptiveness to free-market ideas.

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Keys to Free-Market Activism: An Online Presence

August 28, 2008

The Internet is perhaps the greatest means of individual liberation that has ever existed. It has dramatically lowered barriers to entry into the field of serious discussion and promotion of ideas. Indeed, if you do not have a blog, website, or at least some kind of online presence, you are seriously underutilizing your intellectual potential. You might feel alone or marginalized because few people in your immediate vicinity are sympathetic to your ideas or are even willing to discuss anything in an intellectual manner. This feeling immediately disappears once the entire world becomes your potential audience, and many people with similar interests find your ideas, comment on them, and benefit from them. If anything, I find that I am often behind in my electronic correspondence because so many people write to me and comment on my work!

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Antideath: Promoting Life Through Model Skyscrapers

August 27, 2008

I have rendered publicly available a new and unusual effort that any willing individuals are welcome to join. It is called Antideath: City of the Future and consists of numerous models of skyscrapers and other buildings that I designed in Google Sketchup. All of the models can be downloaded for free for your own use in creating model cities or derivative works. I hope that these skyscrapers will provide readers of The Progress of Liberty with esthetic enjoyment while at the same time getting them to contemplate the importance of prolonging human life through any means possible – and devising new means to prolong life. I want the fight against death to be at the forefront of as many minds as possible, and putting an anti-death message into a fun project such as this one might help accomplish this purpose. I encourage you to create your own model buildings and submit them for inclusion to Antideath, using the instructions on the Antideath page linked above.

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Argumentative Tactics Never to Use: The “Yes or No” Push

August 22, 2008

If you ever want to persuade anyone of anything, there are argumentative techniques that will absolutely destroy your attempt at influencing anyone’s opinion. One of these is a commonly used approach I call the “Yes or No” Push. It consists of grossly simplifying a complex issue and making a question out of it that the person posing the question presents as having either a “Yes” or a “No” answer. Then, when the other person to whom the question is posed is reluctant to answer one way or the other, the questioner becomes angry and insists, in an ever rising tone of voice, that the questioned party must give a simple “Yes” or “No” answer.

Whenever you are faced with this kind of intellectual bullying, an amusing response might be the following question: “Does your mother know you are taking drugs? Yes or no?” This quickly illustrates that some questions can be so formulated that either a “Yes” or a “No” answer would misrepresent the truth. And if the truth – rather than getting the other person to bow down to a predetermined ideological agenda – is sought in a discussion, then the “Yes or No” Push must be abandoned by all participating individuals.

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How to Break the American Two-Party System

August 21, 2008

The two-party system in the United States is a political disaster. On all issues of substance, the Republican and Democratic parties are copies of one another. Both will grow the federal government and massively restrict your freedoms whenever they are given the chance. Each will eagely embrace “bipartisan cooperation” with the other when it comes to fleecing the taxpayers and regimenting the life out of all of us.

We need to break the two-party system. How? By voting our conscience, irrespective of who we think will win. Forget about using your vote to influence the outcome of an election. It will not happen, even if you vote for one of the two major parties. Instead, vote for the candidate whose views are closest to yours. If you are one of five people doing this, so be it. At least you will not be feeding the beast by giving your vote to one of the establishment candidates who will hurt you.

When another deleterious law is introduced, and some demagogues try to justify it by saying that “the people voted for it in the last election,” you can at least have the satisfaction of saying that, as a matter of fact, you voted against the advocates of this law. If enough people rebel against the two-party system, it will crumble. In the meantime, voting remains a good way of stating one’s true preferences – if one has the courage of using it that way.

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Why I Will Proudly Vote for a Third-Party Presidential Candidate

August 20, 2008

What is the purpose of voting for a third-party candidate? Many people consider such an act to be either “throwing one’s vote away” or giving the election to the “greater of two evils” – Republican or Democratic. I disagree. I will be voting for a third-party candidate this fall (Bob Barr of the Libertarian Party), and I believe it to be the best course of action I can take.

The main purpose of voting is not to get one’s candidate of choice to win. A single vote virtually never affects the outcome of an election – and certainly not one in which tens of millions of people vote. Rather, a vote is simply an expression of preference through an official channel. The extent to which one’s candidate of choice reflects one’s personal principles is the extent to which whoever does get elected will see what those principles are. After all, if I vote for Barack Obama and he gets elected (which he will be), Obama will think that I am in favor of what he is proposing – when in fact I highly dislike his “agenda for change” and consider him only marginally better than John McCain. But if enough people vote for the Libertarian Party or the Constitution Party, Obama will see that there are constituents who are not satisfied with the course of action either of the two parties has taken. In an attempt to get the support of at least some of these people, Obama will have to throw a bone to the advocates of liberty.  But this will only happen if the Libertarian and Constitution Party votes add up to a substantial number. I am willing to contribute my vote. Are you willing to contribute yours?

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Musharraf's Resignation Should Inspire a Rethinking of US Foreign Policy

August 19, 2008

The forthcoming resignation of Pervez Musharraf, president/military dictator of Pakistan, should give pause to purveyors of American foreign policy. Here we have the downfall of yet another unsavory character – joining the ranks of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Shah Mohammed in Iran, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and the precursors of Afghanistan’s Taliban. All of these entities had at some time been massively supported by American funds, weapons, advisors, and even troops. It seems that recent American foreign policy has not seen a departure from endorsing dictatorial regimes that oppress their own people. Policymakers, analysts, and ordinary people should rethink whether using taxpayer money to sustain regimes that violate individual rights is such a good idea after all. Perhaps without American aid, those regimes would have crumbled earlier.

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Questioning the Consumption/Production and Consumption/Investment Dichotomies

August 13, 2008

I would like to call into question the rigid distinctions in most economic theories between consumption and investment and between consumption and production as at least somewhat artificial in at least some cases. Two examples will suffice to illustrate the problem with such rigid dichotomies.

1)   A Quaker store owner in the Northern United States during the 1760s decides to completely stop servicing any slaveowners or anybody partaking in the slave trade – about a decade before slavery is abolished in his state. Austrian School economists Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard would grant that said store owner would be acting in the capacity of a consumer by choosing to forego income in the marketplace in order to fulfill his ethical preferences. However, the store owner might also correctly be perceiving his activity as an investment. He might want to use his integrity as a part of his “brand name” to attract fellow anti-slavery advocates as customers. Moreover, he predicts correctly that slavery will be abolished in about a decade, and then he will be able to capitalize on the fact that his store resisted the institution back when it was in vogue. He expects significantly greater future revenues from his refusal to deal with slaveholding customers. Can his choice be strictly delineated as a consumption decision or an investment decision?

2)   An artist who produces paintings for either personal consumption or sale to others might also enjoy every moment of creating the painting. To him, painting is a form of leisure, and he would have done it even if he earned no money or other compensation for it. It would seem that his act of painting is simultaneously an act of production (for his own or someone else’s future enjoyment of the finished work) and an act of consumption – because he views the act painting as valuable in and of itself. Can his activity be strictly delineated as either production or consumption?

What implications do these scenarios have for the consumption/investment and consumption/production distinctions altogether? I think that more economic theories need to take into account cases of the possible convergence of what have hitherto been considered as discrete categories.

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A Majority is Not Required for an Idea to Succeed

August 8, 2008

Many people falsely presume that support of the majority of some given population is always required in order for an idea to take hold and be implemented. In fact, this is seldom, if ever, the case. While many people are not receptive to true ideas or good policies, a large fraction of those people are also insufficiently able or willing to counteract them. What is needed for a good idea to be implemented is an active, vocal minority. As free-market activists, we need to look to persuade exceptionally hard-working and intelligent individuals of the benefits that dramatic reductions in coercion can bring about. Those people will end up being the primary influences of the political system and cultural atmosphere of the future, and many others – including politicians – will often follow their lead by default. To persuade the most intelligent and industrious people, nothing short of high-minded, civil communication and sophisticated rational arguments – propagated by the maximum amount and quality of technology possible – will do.

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How to Become a Public Intellectual: Publish Your Papers Online!

August 7, 2008

Most of the people reading this post have likely written some kind of academic paper for some subject in the past. It is a shame that so much quality writing in Western academic institutions only gets seen by two people – the student authoring it and the instructor grading it. A good paper – be it a paper that receives an A grade or one that makes original, creative intellectual contributions – is good enough to be read not just by one other person, but by the general public. Do not think that the world has little to gain from your work. You will often be surprised regarding who finds your paper and how your insights might be developed and applied by other people. I certainly have been surprised in this respect many times as a consequence of publishing my writings. There is no major opportunity cost to publishing your papers, either. On the Internet, publishing is free, almost instantaneous, and highly customizable.

Please let me know if this message has inspired you to publish any of your works. I will be happy to read them and perhaps even spread them to a wider audience if you e-mail me at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com

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How to Spread Ideas Effectively: Becoming a Public Intellectual

August 6, 2008

At an August 2, 2008, speech at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, economist Jörg Guido Hülsmann described one of the factors that facilitated Mises’s long-term success in spreading his economic and political ideas. Instead of following the typical academic track and looking above all for tenured positions, respect among his colleagues, and places in prestigious organizations and publications, Mises decided to become a public intellectual, trying to communicate his ideas to intelligent laymen rather that merely talking to other academicians. The result? Many of the economists and political thinkers whom Mises confronted in his time are hardly known today, even though they were quite fashionable during the mid-20th century. Mises, on the other hand, still appeals to thousands of scholars around the world, and even more laymen.

Those seeking to spread ideas most effectively to the most people should seek to become public intellectuals rather than academic intellectuals. Even those who wish to work in academia to earn a living should also develop ways to communicate ideas to people outside of academia. Milton Friedman is another great example of an economist who, while he succeeded in the academic arena, took an entirely different approach when he communicated to the general public. He produced some of the most inspiring pro-liberty works of the 20th century, including Capitalism and Freedom and the Free to Choose book and video documentary series.

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Gennady Stolyarov II Wins Third Prize at 2008 Mises University Oral Examination

August 5, 2008

I have just returned from a rigorous week at Mises University, hosted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. I attended over 35 lectures and discussion groups by such notable thinkers as Robert Murphy, Walter Block, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, George Reisman, and many others. I also passed a series of extremely challenging written and oral examinations on Austrian economic theory and its implications. I made my way into the final oral exam session, where six contestants were questioned in sequence by over a dozen professors sitting around a conference table. They chose to award me the George and Joelle Eddy Prize for third place – a nice $500 bonus to my trip. In addition, Mises University awards scholarships covering tuition and room/board for qualified attendees. The experience was intense, rigorous, and highly immersive. I spent virtually all my time brushing up on the finer points of Austrian theory. I think that all the effort was certainly worth it, and I would recommend attending Mises University to those who have an interest in delving more deeply into Austrian economics and free-market thought.

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Get a Good Laugh from Edward Current's Videos on Atheism and Religion

July 26, 2008

Edward Current is a YouTube satirist and comedian, who often parodies the arguments and attitudes of those militant and intolerant religious types who would seek to wage a “War on Atheism.” Watching his videos will certainly give you many good laughs – as well as the satisfaction of knowing that satire in the tradition of Molière and Voltaire has not perished in our time.

Oddly enough, some people – including certain atheists – fail to recognize at first that Mr. Current’s videos are all satire. I repeatedly see comments to this effect next to his videos. Why might that be? One possibility is that Mr. Current is capable of satirizing arguments made by certain intolerant Christians by stating those arguments almost verbatim. Too many people seriously hold fanatical views of this sort, and Mr. Current is doing the world a great service by exposing how ludicrous they are.

Note that I do not mean this post to condemn respectful, civil, sophisticated Christians or members of any other religion. I do not think that Mr. Current does, either, as indicated by his video on the God Delusion Index. But the religious militants need to be socially combated through both serious and humorous speech until their ideas become widely perceived to be as unacceptable as traditional Chinese foot-binding and traditional Indian widow-burning are today.

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YouTube Reinstates Extant Dodo Productions: A Victory for Free Speech

July 25, 2008

Extant Dodo Productions, a team of two MD/PhD students making in-depth video commentaries refuting popular fallacies, dogmas, and quackeries, had for some time been suspended by the YouTube administration for allegedly violating YouTube’s “terms of policy,” even though not even any breach of civility had taken place on the part of Extant Dodo. What actually happened was a concerted flagging effort by haters of rational ideas that triggered YouTube’s automated banning threshold.

But now sensible people have once again taken control and reinstated Extant Dodo’s account several days ago. You can visit it here. I encourage you to watch and rate highly any or all of their 28 excellent videos. This is encouraging news for others whose accounts had been suspended for no offense except that their ideas were disliked by some.

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The Index of Prohibited Books: The Historical Catholic Church's Opposition to Freedom and Progress

July 21, 2008

The Catholic Church, especially in the past 40 years, has become increasingly tolerant, civilized, and respectable – even to the point of issuing a pardon for Galileo’s “transgressions” in 1992 – about 359 years too late, but better than never at all.

Yet, while Catholics should be proud of many, though not all, of the directions their Church has taken recently, they should be ashamed of its activities during the majority of its history. Until the 1960s, the Church has functioned as an active foe of rational thought and attempted to suppress the free exploration of ideas. Some of the most talented writers of all time have been put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Prohibited Books, which was only discontinued in 1966.

Among the writers proscribed on the Index are John Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Jonathan Swift, John Stuart Mill, Victor Hugo, and Giordano Bruno (whom the Church also burned at the stake, by the way). You can see a vast list of prohibited writers by following the link above.

Interestingly enough, Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler are not on the list, even though both were alive while the list was still being published.

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Hopeful News from Dr. Tibor Machan on Promoting Liberty

July 20, 2008

Dr. Tibor Machan has been writing and speaking about free-market ideas for many decades. Recently, he has been having increasing success getting people to be more receptive to his views. In “A Chance for Freedom?”, Dr. Machan describes the inroads he has made at conferences in Lugano, Switzerland, organized by the Business & Economics Society International.

Here are a few insights to take away from Dr. Machan’s experiences.

1) Always, always be civil, even and especially if you are surrounded by people who disagree with you. If you are uncivil, you will simply not be tolerated and lose your chance to promote your ideas. If, however, you are civil and your conduct demonstrates respect for others in your company, you will be given an opportunity to express your views most of the time.

2) Persistence is the key to getting ideas to take root within a particular forum. Many people will viscerally reject free-market ideas simply because these ideas are so unfamiliar to them at first. But the more they hear about and are immersed in these ideas, the more receptive they will be.

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Carl Menger Was Wrong: Bad Ideas Should Be Countered

July 19, 2008

The Austrian economist Carl Menger made significant theoretical innovations that were vital for the further development of free-market thought. But while brilliant theoretically, Menger was quite mistaken regarding the proper approach toward confronting wrong ideas in the real world. He refused to engage in any kind of activism to oppose the emergent socialist ideas and policies of his time, under the assumption that these ideas were evidently false, and people would see the falsehoods and problems entailed in them if these wrong ideas were allowed to play themselves out.

In a certain respect, Menger was right. Most people today do believe that socialism as such cannot work. But what consequences did they have to see prior to adopting this belief? Millions of people slaughtered by their governments, horrendous destitution of millions more, two world wars – one caused by hyper-nationalism and the other by national socialism – and the delay of technological progress by perhaps a few decades compared to how it would have occurred were it not for the cataclysms of the 20^th century. And still, most people adhere to some toned-down version of socialism, even while they might reject that name.

The truth does not automatically win out, and many people will not reject falsehoods even when they lead to the deaths of millions. To achieve the victory of free-market ideas, one must actively promote them. There is no other option.

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Brazil's Semco Illustrates the Power of Decentralized Firm Structures

July 18, 2008

Today’s video to watch, rate, and promote is “The Caring Capitalist,” which describes the dynamics of an innovative firm from Brazil – Semco. This firm virtually lacks management, top-down hierarchy, and internal central planning. Instead, employees often pick the work they do, the hours they work, and even their salaries. The company’s founder, Ricardo Semler, has built in a set of incentives whereby workers encourage one another to work productively and to not shirk. He is also applying his decentralized business model to a school and a hotel which are in part run by the children and the residents of the locale where the hotel is being built, respectively.

Semler’s work is an excellent example of entrepreneurial innovation – the kind of innovation we would see more of in a free market. Semler does not see himself in ideological terms, but he implicitly understands what free-market theorists have been saying for several centuries.

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Articles and Interviews by Gennady Stolyarov II Published in Heartland Infotech and Telecom News

July 17, 2008

I am pleased to announce that the August 2008 issue of the Heartland Institute’s Infotech and Telecom News (hereafter, Heartland ITTN) features three of my free-market-oriented news articles as well as two articles by Mr. Aleks Karnick, which include extensive excerpts from his online interview with me. Heartland ITTN is one of the best available sources for a free-market perspective on information technology developments, and I strongly recommend it to readers.

Read these articles here:

“Bandwidth Experiment Raises Concerns” by Gennady Stolyarov II

“DC Summit Takes Up Community Wireless” by Gennady Stolyarov II

“FCC Takes Second Shot at D-Block Auction” by Aleks Karnick

“San Jose Airport Offers Free Wi-Fi Service” by Gennady Stolyarov II

“Verizon Gets Qualified Approval to Offer Cable TV in New York City” by Aleks Karnick

A note to free-market activists: Applying free-market ideas to current events – even those that seem highly technical to most readers – is essential for the ideas to stay relevant in public discussion. The fact is, most real-world changes are highly concrete and technical, and speaking in generalities alone, without reference to those actual changes, does not suffice in convincing most people that one’s ideas are anything beyond skillfully crafted theoretical constructs. If you have a way to apply free-market principles to some current issue, no matter how complicated or technical it might seem at first, please write about it.

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How Free-Market Activists Should Approach Money

July 16, 2008

In order to contribute to the acceleration of technological, economic, and cultural progress and to enable it to counteract the force of national-government intervention, free-market activists need to adopt a new approach toward money. Money is undoubtedly important and valuable, but it must be viewed as a means rather than an end in itself. Money can help one acquire more productive capital as well as give one much-needed leisure time. But that leisure time should not be spent idly – or else statism will win. Rather, when earning money, one ought to produce goods and services that other people want, whereas when one has leisure time, one ought to produce goods and services that one personally wishes to see come about. Having more money and leisure time enables you to be your own boss, customer, and master. Use these opportunities to change the economic and cultural landscape by ensuring that the free-market side has a preponderance of productive capital as well as a steady output of writings, artworks, and representation in the new Internet media.

Remember that in today’s world of fiat currency, money is ultimately just pieces of paper that operate simply because people expect them to trade for real goods. But it is the real stuff that matters. Whoever has the real stuff determines what happens in the real world, in proportion to how much real stuff he owns. You can buy real stuff from other people, or you can make it yourself. Take your pick.

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Seeing Both Positive and Negative Aspects of the Status Quo

July 9, 2008

To effectively change the status quo, it is essential to perceive it realistically. Yes, the federal government has grown and threatens to grow more. Yes, many freedoms have been lost in the West. Yes, this is extremely undesirable and should be rectified by all means consistent with morality and prudence.

However, the status quo is not all bad, and its trends are not all negative. Many of these trends have, in fact, greatly aided the spread of free-market ideas and promise to make them even more prominent in the future. Consider the effect the Internet has had on your ability to access and express ideas that otherwise extremely few people would have been exposed to. We can use the good aspects of the status quo to our advantage.

The colossal growth of technology – especially information technology – during the prior two decades has opened up opportunities to the ordinary person which the kings of past centuries could not have imagined. Although the ordinary person in the West is less legally free than he was in the past, his effective range of activity has increased. He can do more with what he has to improve his quality of life than ever before. This is not to mention that absolute standards of living have increased and continue to increase – never mind the occasional mild “recession” which means nothing for the long-term future. All of these trends are the outcomes of free enterprise working magnificently, even though it is heavily restrained and restricted by the federal government.

To add to the continuing technological improvements characterizing the status quo, we must not forget numerous beneficial social trends – such as increased toleration for people who behave unconventionally and are outside the “mainstream.” Atheists are no longer either legally persecuted or socially ostracized, for instance. A wider range of ideas is considered acceptable to express in public. Recall that anyone who espoused economic views other than the Keynesian theory would be laughed at and prevented from publishing in the 1950s and 1960s – if he were not accused of being “unpatriotic” for not wholeheartedly embracing every action, policy, and ideology of the federal government. A scholar who recently released a brilliant book critical of FDR and the New Deal told me that he would not have been able to publish such a book at all as late as the late 1980s. Free-market activists can use increased societal tolerance for their ideas to advance them effectively without fear of marginalization and persecution.

Another beneficial aspect of the status quo that many free-market activists overlook is that virtually nobody adores or trusts the federal government anymore. Certainly, many people embrace the federal government's policies on principle, and think that that those policies could be done the right way if they were in charge. But virtually nobody – of any political orientation – believes that the federal government as it currently exists is at all desirable. Of course, most people do not perceive a viable alternative and will grudgingly accept the political status quo, seeing no way out. It is the job of free-market activists to suggest a way out through the elimination of restrictions and the increased liberation of individuals from federal-government control.

Even a semi-free man today is able to accomplish virtually anything he wants to accomplish in a wide variety of creative endeavors. As a writer, an artist, a musician, a speaker, a broadcaster – or as any other creator who primarily uses computers and the Internet to create his works – he is practically unregulated and is limited only be the amount of time he has to spare from his job, his family, and his entertainment. If he turns his independent work into a kind of entertainment, he may be able to make time for such endeavors. After all, the process of bringing forth a unique creation representing one’s personality, values, and skills is much more ultimately satisfying than simply watching a film or playing a computer game – although I do not mean to denigrate those entertainments, either. The more you work in any venue available to you and create products incorporating  pro-freedom and individualist messages, the more progress liberty will make in our world.

It is useful to conceive of the dynamic of our time – and of the foreseeable future – as a race between two colossally powerful forces. On the one hand, there is central-government intervention and the ills it brings. National governments keep growing and imposing itself on ever more areas of our lives. On the other hand, however, is the force of technological and economic growth. This progress, too, continues to accelerate and open up fresh opportunities for us even as central governments swallow older ones. Technological progress builds on itself, as prior machines, programs, and methods of production are used as capital goods for the creation of even better technologies. More technology in the hands of more individuals renders central governments increasingly less influential. Technological progress is an essential force to promote for free-market activists wishing to empower and liberate individuals.

The next thirty years will decide the future of liberty – perhaps for all time to come. The competing forces I described previously, the forces of command-and-control and technological progress, will come into conflict. Technological progress has the potential to liberate people from the greatest constraints in their lives. Biotechnology, nano-manufacturing, medical progress, information technology, and decentralized cultural creation will greatly lengthen life – possibly rendering it of indefinite duration – and render people tremendously more educated, intelligent, and capable than they are today. Hopefully, a much more enlightened populace will be much better informed about free-market principles and will demand freedom from the politicians. But central-government officials and powerful special interests, desirous of power, might catch on to these trends before they cross the threshold of no return. It is essential for free-market activists to prevent government crackdowns on technological innovation. Freedom can survive virtually any attacks – but technology must keep growing, or else we might see a disastrous reversal of the upward course Western civilization has thus far followed.

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Four Questions for All Free-Market Activists to Consider

July 8, 2008

To engage in effective activism, it is important to be aware of both the general values one wishes to uphold as well as the specific objectives that would lead to upholding these values. Free-market activists need to ask themselves four questions:

1) What state of affairs exists currently?

2) What state of affairs is desirable?

3) What steps would take us from the currently existing to the desirable state of affairs?

4) How do we implement the transition?

Question 2 has generally been covered extensively by the free-market movement, both in highly sophisticated theoretical treatises and in the goals articulated by laymen-enthusiasts of free markets. But this alone is not enough. We need to know how to get from the status quo to the fully free market. My “Plan for Cutting Big Government” offers some possibilities. Moreover, we need to be able to understand what the status quo is like and its similarities and differences compared to a free market. We shall delve into that more in the coming days.

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The Progress of Liberty Wins Today.com June 2008 Blog Award

July 7, 2008

I was thrilled to learn that The Progress of Liberty (henceforth, TPL) has been awarded one of Today.com’s June 2008 blog awards. TPL won first place among new blogs for making the most progress since its inception - which carries with it a prize of $150. Since I only initiated TPL on June 8, 2008, I was surprised at how quickly it was noticed and how fast its visitation has grown for a new blog. Today.com has certainly been appreciative on my efforts, and I likewise wish to express my gratitude for the award and for the generally lucrative terms Today.com bloggers get. Moreover, I would like to thank my readers for coming back here for more ideas, activism possibilities, audio essays, music, and articles.

I hope that The Progress of Liberty will continue to thrive and attract ever-increasing visitation. I will do everything in my power to make this happen and to turn TPL into a major force for spreading ideas that will greatly ameliorate our world and improve the chances for individual freedom and technological progress to triumph over regimentation, coercion, and the premodern/postmodern reaction.

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My Critique of the Film "WALL-E" on Mises.org

July 6, 2008

I am thrilled to report that my article, “WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity”, has been featured on the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s website. This, to my knowledge, is the only essay to date that addresses the egregious economic fallacies and anti-modern propaganda in the recent much acclaimed Disney/Pixar film, WALL-E. I have already received numerous positive comments on this article from readers whom I hold in high esteem. Unusually enough, this review has also sparked a great degree of controversy among many people otherwise friendly to free markets. It seems that the emotional impact of the love story between WALL-E and EVE in the film overshadowed its propaganda and economic fallacies in the minds of some viewers. I agree that the love story was rather charming, but that does not excuse attempts to indoctrinate children and espouse a view of the world so flawed, it is difficult to conceive of anyone considering it relevant to reality. But many people do think that WALL-E is an accurate depiction of the future of humankind and technology. We free-market activists have a lot of work to do.

I encourage you to read, digg, and recommend this article to others.

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Why Free-Market Activists Should Always Use Secular Arguments

July 5, 2008

Whether you are a religious or a secular free-market activist, know this. The moment an idea or policy has no justifications for it besides religious justifications, it will fail in practice and will be impossible to defend in argumentation. Since we do – justifiably – have a separation of religion and government in the United States, arguing that a policy should be implemented for everyone on a religious basis – even if the policy is an objectively good one – would be worse than supporting the injustice that policy was meant to correct. If we lose the religious freedoms made possible by the separation of church and state, we will shortly be plunged into the horrors of premodernity.

To defend an idea consistently, you need to be able to potentially convince anyone of its truth, irrespective of his or her religion or lack thereof. That is, you need secular arguments that make no reference to religion at all. It is fine, if you are religious, to persuade others of your religion using that religion’s concepts and beliefs, but you should always emphasize that these religious arguments are not the only possible ones and that secular justifications relevant for everybody exist with regard to the policies you seek to promote.

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Casual Free-Market Activists on the Fourth of July

July 4, 2008

Today is the Fourth of July, and so it is fitting to think about how you can promote free-market ideas with regard to this holiday. All too many people celebrate the Fourth of July without recognizing its true significance. The fireworks, festive food, and American flags are nice – but the essence of the holiday is the remembrance of the efforts of some of history’s most successful free-market activists – the American Founders. These men  developed a free-market culture and a natural-rights understanding of politics due to a century of salutary neglect by the British. When their understanding of their liberties began to become endangered by renewed intervention by the King and Parliament, the leading American colonists rebelled and initiated an unprecedented political experiment.

Remember that the American Revolution was started over outrage at fairly small taxes – such as a three-cent tax on tea – as well as the presence of British troops on American soil and their invasion of Americans’ liberty and privacy. It was a revolt both against government economic interference and government military interference into civilian life. Today, remind people casually that this was what the Revolution was about and what we are celebrating on the Fourth of July.

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Tibor Machan's Distinctions Regarding Public Television: The Content May Be Good, But the Funding Methods are Not

July 3, 2008

Today, we have an excellent article for reading and promoting: “My Uninvited Speech at KOCE-TV’s 35^th Anniversary Bash” by Dr. Tibor R. Machan.

This article is particularly good at making a distinction between the purposes to which public funds are put and the means by which they are obtained. It is possible for public programs – including public radio and public television – to offer genuinely valuable services. However, this still does not justify the coercive means by which funding for these programs is obtained. If the services they offer are indeed valuable and important, then it should be possible to convince people to support these services of their own free will.

By acknowledging whatever is valuable about these services, the free-market activist might gain the ear of their supporters and portray himself not as trying to shut them down, but simply trying to make an already somewhat good thing even better by removing any possibility for it to be objected to on the grounds of being coercively funded.

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The Totalist Mentality: The Activist's Worst Enemy

July 2, 2008

The habit that can most readily undermine a free-market activist is – to coin a new term – the totalist mentality. The totalist thinks of everything in all-or-nothing terms. Either he must accomplish the entirety of his agenda and have all of his expectations fulfilled, or the results he gets are not worthwhile at all.

Reality does not work that way. Rather, all changes happen incrementally, and most differences in the world are differences of degree and not of kind. (This is not to say that differences of kind do not exist; they do, just not to the extent the totalist believes.) The key to successful activism is to work for movement in the correct direction, and try to make that movement of sufficiently substantial magnitude to more than compensate for any countervailing forces. Lamenting the state of affairs or the state of other people’s minds because they are not already at your ideal goal state is futile and will defeat your efforts.

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Stuart K. Hayashi's "The Invisible Gun": An Excellent Example of Free-Market Activism

July 1, 2008

Today’s video to watch and promote is Stuart K. Hayashi’s “The Invisible Gun.”

If you want to know what good free-market activism by young people would look like, this is it. Mr. Hayashi has a clear, engaging, passionate style of presentation, and he explains in ten minutes a vital point that many people miss – that saying “there ought to be a law about this” amounts to saying that a certain way of things ought to be enforced through the threat of violence and ultimately the threat of death against violators.

Give this video five stars and share it with others. Its brief, eloquent presentation is likely to get many people thinking.

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Do You Want World Peace? Watch a Video That Explains the Causes of Most Conflicts in the World Today.

June 27, 2008

Today’s work for you to watch and promote is “Do You Want World Peace?” This video is authored by SUSPENDEDKUFFAR, an enemy of all haters and violent fanatics. The video makes a compelling point: virtually all the armed conflicts in the world today have either Islamic Fundamentalist fanatics or Marxist fanatics involved on at least one side.

Perhaps it is time to recognize this truth and understand the genuine hindrances that exist to the lives, liberty, and prosperity of many people worldwide. The violent Islamic fundamentalists make much worse the lives of even those peaceful Muslims who do not believe in blowing themselves up or killing those who do not share their faith.

This video made the honors list on YouTube, but then a single hater gave it a rating of one star and thus made it go off the list. Please give this video a rating of five stars and help it return to the honors list. It certainly deserves to be there.

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The Free-Market Movement Needs Young People!

June 26, 2008

Do you know what the free-market movement needs? It needs a lot of people with time on their hands, strong technology skills, and a justified discontentment with the status quo. In other words, it needs young people. Young people are artificially kept from accomplishing their full potential by compulsory education laws and a school system that promotes on the basis of seniority and not of merit. Precious few young people finish school and college early and begin earning good money while they are still young. The government school system and extensive artificial economic barriers virtually cripple any prospects for easy entry into the job market and make it extremely difficult to be both young and rich.

But young people have a great opportunity to advance their ambitions and demonstrate their displeasure with the status quo by engaging in free-market activism. If you are young and reading this, consider making a name for yourself outside the orthodox system. If you are an older free-market advocate, consider persuading some young people you know to join in promoting these much needed ideas.

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Lessons for Free-Market Activists from the Ron Paul Campaign

June 25, 2008

A decentralized system of organization has already shown to be highly effective in promoting free-market principles during the Ron Paul Campaign of 2007-2008. Using grassroots communication, independent websites, and major centers of online traffic, such as Digg and YouTube, Ron Paul supporters were able to spread the message of free markets and limited government to millions and to gather millions of dollars in donations without the involvement of the official campaign. I hope that Dr. Paul’s Campaign for Liberty will continue to use similar decentralized organizational methods to even greater effect.

The lesson of the Ron Paul campaign is that freedom-minded people do not need to remain the thralls of the mass-media elites who seek to control what people consider to be “news” or ”the mainstream discussion.” If they are sufficiently well-informed and motivated, they can go out on their own and collaborate with others who desire a freer world. The vital question now is, “How can that tremendous enthusiasm once again be galvanized, this time to enact pro-freedom agendas and tendencies at every level in our society?”

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The Possibility of Decentralized Organization for the Free-Market Movement

June 23, 2008

Yesterday, we discussed the importance of organization for an effective free-market movement. Yet how is it possible to have an organization without a leader, an official platform, a hierarchy of posts, and a source of funds? It is quite possible indeed. You are using one such method of organization right now – the Internet. No single person or group owns or controls the Internet. The Internet as such is not goal-directed, but it does facilitate the accomplishment of many billions of goals – big and small – that its users have. By enabling easier exchange of information and sharing of plans, the Internet makes each of these goals easier to accomplish than they would have been if pursued in isolation from this organizational form.

An effective free-market movement will be organized in much the same way – with no leaders, no official platform, but rather a vibrant decentralized network where ideas and plans are shared and cooperative ventures routinely entered into.

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The Importance of Political Organization for Free-Market Activists 

June 22, 2008

A weakness of the present free-market movement – one which, fortunately, has been somewhat diminished in recent years – is its lack of organization and its often grudging but nonetheless existent embrace of other powerful organizations and agendas that undermine the cause of free markets – such as the platform and policies of the Republican Party during this decade. I think that many free-market advocates confuse organization with central planning; naturally, since they oppose central planning as an end, they also reject it as a means to fight central planning – and rightly so. But without organizations of their own, free-market advocates often passively drift under the influence of non-free-market organizations such as the Republican Party.

Organization, contrary to popular belief, can be decentralized and leave virtually all aspects of activism to the discretion of individuals. The primary benefits of having some kind of organization are as follows.

1. The ability to quickly share information and enable many people to discover what is the actual state of affairs.

2. The ability to exchange plans and share ideas with many people simultaneously, reducing the transaction costs of intellectual exchange.

3. The ability to take quick, coordinated action – as in mass voting for a particular piece of online content.

The Republican Party has a good system of organization – and even a propaganda network – which is why it has maintained a substantial following despite terrible policies and foolish leadership. If they wish to supplant the Republicans, free-market advocates need to develop an organizational network of their own – a decentralized, individualistic, but nonetheless coordinated one. I welcome your ideas for how this might be done and your participation in it.

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Help Stop the Infighting Among Free-Market Advocates!

June 21, 2008

Why, despite the intellectual fervor of free-market advocates, has the cause of liberty and free markets continually lost ground in the face of the statist onslaught? The answer can often be traced to the flaws of the mindsets of many present-day free-market advocates. If you eliminate these flaws from your thinking, you will become much more effective at promoting freedom, and you will likely inspire others to do so as well.

One such flaw is the insistence on intellectual purity in others. While statists of all stripes routinely overlook their intellectual differences to achieve a particular specific end on which they agree – an increase of restrictions here or a raising of taxes there – too many people who call themselves champions of freedom are more inclined to nit-pick with regard to the thoughts of those intellectually closest to them, simply because inevitable differences in the end goals they ultimately desire or the philosophical grounding of their views exist. This infighting undermines the free-market cause much more than any explicit actions by advocates of regimentation. Stop it!

Whenever you get the urge to criticize another free-market advocate for not being quite like you, cease and desist. Take a moment to think whether you might not be doing more harm than good by such an action. Instead, focus on what positive values you can gain from that person and how you can perhaps work together to achieve a freer world.

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Canada's "Human Rights" Show Trials Do Not Recognize Freedom of Speech

June 20, 2008

Did you know that freedom of speech is not widely recognized in the Western world? Indeed, there is nothing akin to the U. S. Constitution’s First Amendment in the constitutions of many Western countries, and some countries – like Great Britain – do not even have written constitutions. This, of course, puts basic human liberties in those countries in an extremely precarious position.

Even Canada is drifting away from an implicit recognition of the right to free speech. Mark Steyn and Macleans – a magazine that published his essay, “The Future Belongs to Islam” – are currently on trial there for “hate speech,” even though Steyn's article contained nothing genuinely hateful or offensive. You can read the article for yourself, as I reprinted the aforementioned essay in my online magazine, The Rational Argumentator, to show my willingness to defend Mr. Steyn’s freedom of speech against the true haters and censors who would deny inalienable human liberties.

Jonah Goldberg has written an excellent article, “Canada’s Thought Police,” on the debacle of Mark Steyn’s trial before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. These people are quite serious and unapologetic about blatantly suppressing fundamental liberties. Mr. Goldberg cites Dean Steacy, an investigator for the Human Rights Commission of Canada: “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.” This is frightening and intolerable. Please digg Mr. Goldberg’s article to help inform more readers of the travesty to which Mr. Steyn, Macleans, and other intelligent, decent argumentators are being subjected.

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Tell YouTube to Stop Banning Users Without Due Process

June 19, 2008

Although YouTube is a wonderful means of disseminating information via intelligent and articulate videos, some of YouTube’s members are not too intelligent or articulate. Unfortunately, because of the way YouTube’s policies are currently designed, a member’s account can get banned automatically if a certain number of people “flag” his videos – i.e., mark them as offensive for some reason, which they do not have to explain.

I recently had a good friend, PureLiberalChallenge, banned from YouTube because certain fanatics found his intelligent and civilly argued videos on politics and religion to be offensive. If he can be banned, so can anyone else. In response, I posted a video urging the YouTube administration to implement basic due process for members accused of violating its terms of use.

I urge you to watch this video, give it five stars, and digg it using the button below. Add your voice to those of other rational individuals who despise arbitrary obstacles to free expression of ideas.

“Message to YouTube: Stop Banning Users Without Due Process” by G. Stolyarov II

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"Mind Over Matter" Quackery from the Early 19th Century

June 18, 2008

The following is a list of advice written by J. P. F. Deleuze in 1813 for the practitioners of the “mind over matter” fad of the time – “magnetism,” the belief that an application of magnetic plates to the body and a strong enough imagination on the part of the “magnetizer” could cure virtually all illnesses. Magnetism was also practiced by the Austrian pseudo-physician Anton Mesmer and was the precursor to the equally dubious practice of hypnosis.

“Forget for a while all your knowledge of physics and metaphysics.”

“Remove from your mind all objections that may occur.”

“Imagine that it is in your power to take the malady in hand, and throw it on one side.”

“Never reason for six weeks after you have commenced the study.”

“Have an active desire to do good; a firm belief in the power of magnetism, and an entire confidence in employing it. In short, repel all doubts; desire success, and act with simplicity and attention.”

Does this not sound remarkably like the New Age “holistic medicine” and “mind over matter” mysticism of our time — which suggests that you can cure diseases or lose weight just be thinking about it and wanting it hard enough? Do not so many contemporary “motivational speakers” also urge us to “think positive” and suppress any objections we might have for their quack remedies to quite real and pressing problems? If we fail to solve our problems using their methods, it was, of course, because we did not try or believe hard enough.

This kind of deception is neither new nor sophisticated. Quacks giving ineffectual advice and charging extravagant sums for it have been around as long as humankind – and they have never contributed one iota to genuine progress.

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Sign a Petition to Permit the Construction of a New York Skyscraper

June 17, 2008

The Manhattan Community Board 5 has voted to block the construction of the 75-story MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) Tower, which was to be built by the developer Hines according to the plans of architect Jean Nouvel.

The Community Board has chosen to deny air rights to Hines by a crushing vote of 21 to 1 . Too many people unfortunately think that this building is “too tall” – as if such a thing were possible. Fortunately, the Community Board’s decision is only advisory, and the ultimate say will be had by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. There is still time to act and ensure that the just outcome takes place.

To respond to this travesty of a decision, a petition has been started to urge the building of the skyscraper to be permitted. You can read and sign the petition here. It already has nearly 500 signatures – and more signatures are always better.

Here is what I wrote in the comments next to my signature:

“The building of this skyscraper will be a tremendous human achievement, and we ask nothing except that it be permitted to happen. No reasonable person should stand in the way of such a noble aspiration. To say that this skyscraper is ‘too tall’ is also to suggest that certain things are ‘too good’ for human beings to enjoy. This is neither a humane nor a civilized sentiment.”

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Cultural Activism Idea: Create Free Audio Recordings of Intelligent Literature

June 16, 2008

Here is an excellent idea for contributing to positive cultural change if you have the leisure time to read.

Many of the best works ever written are no longer copyrighted and can thus be distributed by anyone who wishes to. Find a work in the public domain that you have not yet read. Instead of just reading it, you can – in almost as little time – both read it and create a nice free audio version of it to make available to anyone who wishes to download it.

You probably already own a microphone that can be attached to a computer. If you do not own one, they are quite inexpensive to buy. Everything else you will need can be obtained for free.

Audacity is a free, open-source sound recorder and editor that you can download here. You can record yourself reading the book or essay in question and then export the recording to an mp3 file which you can upload to your own website or to mine. If you have an audio book or essay that you wish to share with the public, you can contact me at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com and send me the file. I will be happy to host it for you on The Rational Argumentator.

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Ray Kurzweil's Predictions on Supercomputer Speed Likely Off by 3 Years

June 15, 2008

In his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil predicted that, by 2009, the world’s top supercomputers would be able to perform “20 million billion” (2*10¹⁶) calculations per second.

It is now mid-2008, and IBM has just released a new supercomputer, Roadrunner, which can perform “one thousand trillion” (1*10¹⁵) calculations per second. This is about 1,000 faster than the best supercomputers of 10 years ago, but Kurzweil’s prediction has still fallen short by a factor of 20.

Is there a chance of Kurzweil being right? After all, it is not 2009 yet. If we assume – for the sake of simplicity, that computer processing speed grows by a constant multiple every year, then it grows by a multiple of X, where X¹⁰ = 1000.  Thus, X = 1000^1/10 = 1.995262315 or about 2. Thus, in 2009, if prior trends continue, we can expect the fastest supercomputer to perform 2*10¹⁵ calculations per second, which is still 10 times fewer calculations than Kurzweil predicted.

By the same calculations, we should get supercomputers matching the hardware capacity of the human brain in T years, where 2^T = 20 and T = 4.3219281 – i.e., sometime in late 2012. So it is likely Kurzweil was off by about 3 years on this prediction. Historically speaking, this is not too bad.

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Ron Paul Initiates Campaign for Liberty

June 14, 2008

On June 12, Texas Representative Dr. Ron Paul – whose 2008 run for President has been astonishing in terms of the exposure it gave to pro-liberty ideas – announced the end of his Presidential campaign and the beginning of a much broader endeavor, the Campaign for Liberty, aimed at bringing about genuine political and cultural change on a wide variety of fronts so that the growth of the federal government can be reversed and sound economic education can spread. This is right in line with the pro-liberty activism which is The Progress of Liberty’s purpose.

The Campaign for Liberty’s current goal is 100,000 members by September 2, 2008. Membership is free and fast to obtain on the page linked above. Once you become a member, you can also donate any funds you see fit – but this is not required for membership. Join the Campaign for Liberty and add your name to the burgeoning movement for limited government and free markets.

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Pro-Liberty Activism Program for June 13, 2008

June 13, 2008

Today, you can use The Progress of Liberty to promote one article and one video on Digg.com.

“Arthur C. Clarke Was Wrong, So Progress Must Have Stopped” by Warren Meyer discusses how ludicrous and blatantly wrong Paul Krugman is to say that no substantial material progress has been made from 1958 to 2008. Quite the contrary, the past 50 years have witnessed the most massive improvements in the standards of living of the majority of people than any other era in history.

“The History of Failed Ideas” by slavophile1 is a brief video exploring the numerous fallacious philosophical notions that have since been shown incorrect by the facts of reality – from statements made by Thomas Hobbes to those Leo Strauss.

Remember to give this video a rating of five stars on its YouTube page.

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Pro-Liberty Activism Program for June 11, 2008

June 11, 2008

The Progress of Liberty now has a new permanent page where you can easily promote articles on Digg.com. All the “digg it “ buttons are arranged on the same page. All you have to do is click on each of them and vote for the corresponding article. This will make it easy for you to quickly vote for the articles and videos you enjoyed. As I add new content to promote, it will also be included on that permanent page.

“From the 60’s to the 90’s and Beyond” by Warren Chase Anspaugh describes some beneficial trends of the American consumer culture over the prior five decades – including a greater move toward individualism and a greater cultural acceptability of heterogeneity among individuals.

“Jim Crow Energy Policies” by Roy Innis describes the severe attack against our fundamental natural rights and standards of living by militant environmentalists and politicians who seek to curtail our access to energy – the master resource.

Here is today’s video to watch, rate, and vote for on Digg.com. (And yes, I will occasionally engage in self-promotion, because I believe that there is nothing wrong with it, especially when I have ideas to offer that might interest you.)

”The Illusion of Success Due to Luck” by G. Stolyarov II explains that no lasting good comes to man through luck and that the illusion that any success is possible through luck is responsible for the lingering disappointment, disillusionment, and unhappiness in an age that abounds with material and intellectual opportunities. Only by taking responsibility for his own life and actions can a person - any person - thrive.

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Pro-Liberty Activism Agenda for June, 10, 2008, and Introduction to YouTube

June 10, 2008

Now that you have a Digg.com account, we will be looking at a few pro-liberty articles every day, in the hopes of promoting them and raising them in prominence.

Today, we have an excellent article by Dr. Tibor Machan. Dr. Machan explains the vitally important connection between technology and happiness and lists just a few opportunities that Internet technology has in store for you.

This article is called “Pursuing Your Happiness”.

Read this article and then go this page: http://digg.com/arts_culture/Pursuing_Your_Happiness

Press the yellow “Digg It” button to vote for Dr. Machan’s fine essay.

YouTube

YouTube is a highly popular online site for sharing short videos. Go to http://www.youtube.com and create a free account. You do not have to upload any actual videos to have an account, but an account will enable you to add other people’s videos to your gallery of favorites, to rate other people’s videos, and to comment on them.

Once you have established an account, watch this short video by slavophile1, entitled, “Natural Law”.

In two and a half minutes, this video presents some of the crucial historical insights regarding natural law, from Aristotle to Murray Rothbard.

Give this video a rating of five stars and add it to your gallery of favorites. The go to http://digg.com/political_opinion/Natural_Law_3 and digg this video! That way, you can quickly promote it on multiple fronts.

Every day, we will be doing some digging and rating of videos.

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Tools for Pro-Liberty Activists: Digg.com

June 9, 2008

To engage in easy, effective pro-liberty activism, you will need to open a few online accounts. They are free and quick to initiate, and they will often give you considerable sway over what content gets spread to other users.

Go to http://digg.com/ and create an account. This will enable you to add your vote in favor of articles, videos, and images that you like and find to express views favorable to liberty and free markets.

After you have registered at Digg, try it out with the following article.

“America’s Radical Departure From Its Foundations” by Johnny Waltz explores the manner in which today’s politicians have abandoned the principles of classical liberalism espoused by America’s founders.

You can read the article here.

Then you can go to this page and press the yellow “Digg It” button.

The more “diggs” this article receives, the higher up on Digg.com’s listing of links it will be and the more likely additional readers will be able to access it.

Contribute to the progress of liberty by helping spread ideas like the ones in Mr. Waltz’s article!

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The Progress of Liberty: Statement of Purpose

June 8, 2008

Greetings and welcome to The Progress of Liberty.

The purpose of this blog is to provide you with the tools and principles to contribute to a freer, more prosperous world – where individuals can thrive in peace and work, think, write, and engage in leisure activities as they see fit.

The Internet’s potential as an agent of change has thus far been underappreciated, although recent stirrings of online activism show that this might not be the case for much longer. The 2007-2008 Ron Paul Campaign was enabled in large part by grassroots online activism and donations. With his famous money bombs, Dr. Paul broke fundraising records and enabled his message of liberty to spread to millions, despite being virtually blocked out by the mainstream media.

The Progress of Liberty will give you access to some of the most compelling, interesting, and entertaining content on the Internet. This content will illustrate sound economic principles, the political ideas of liberty and laissez-faire capitalism, and the philosophy of rational individualism. It will also give you ideas about what you can do to easily promote this content so that it rises in popularity and has a chance to reach many more readers and viewers.