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Why Thugs Are Dumb and the Dumb Are Poor

Any time I hear the words "social justice" I get uneasy.

I keep going back to my study of Constitutional Law to determine where in that document social justice got any air-play.

And then I hear things that refer to the social justice movement being "progressive," and I get uneasy.

What is progressive about working against individuals who are simply content to live their own lives unfettered by an intrusive government, who pay their bills, raise their kids and work in order to take care of themselves and their friends and neighbors?

Working against? How so?

When you take something that is not yours it is theft.

I think the law reads something like "the conversion of property for personal use" is theft, but much like changes in land-use laws, breaking the social contract for personal political benefit is a conversion for personal use, or theft.

The social justice, or progressive movement, is based upon theft. It couldn't succeed without theft. The priorities of social justice--or the progressive movement--is the maximization of theft; a sort of Laffer Curve for poltical thuggery.

The problem of thuggery, or social justice or the progressive movement, is that there is no limiting self-interest in being a thug. If you see anyone with more than you, in order to enact the agenda of social justice, that more must be converted to others with less. Or, in the words of President Obama, "...I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody."

Holding on to what is yours, holding on to your property and your profits is evil. Letting government take that which is yours, taking away your property and your property rights, holding on to the money you earn is good.

Or, thuggery is good. And, there is no limiting self-interest in being a thug. Political thuggery requires political mass. Thuggery in one area of concern is a demonstration of a concern for social justice. Therefore, thuggery in an area of concern that doesn't have a negative effect on ones personal thuggery is demonstrably justifiable, again, as social justice.

Problems with a new plant coming into your community? Argue against it in terms of social justice or within the terms of the progressive movement. Problems with a new "box store" coming into your community? Then, let's talk about social justice and the progressive movement. You're a freakin' hippie and your neighbor's kids have high-speed internet and you can't afford high-speed and that makes your kids look like dopes because you can't hold on to a job or make the necessary decisions to pay your bills and take care of your kids?

It's time for social justice and the progressive movement.

When one group of people have stuff, and another group of people don't, in terms of social justice and the progressive movement, the reason for one group having and another without is this thing called profit.

Profit is evil, since, if we didn't need to worry about profit everything would be free.

Of course, this is on its face false. But the thugs of social justice and the progressive movement aren't real quick on the uptake when it comes to making sense of how things are made, bought or sold. Just as in the current debate over health care reform, the question is never profits, but costs. But not the way the President talks about costs. What the President is actually describing--if you take the time to listen to the man--is the problem with prices. That is, when it comes to saving ones' own life, one is willing to pay a high price. And it is the willingness of old and sick people to pay a high price to continue living or to re-gain ones' health that drives the prices of health care treatments up!

You've heard talk about the law of supply and demand.

Unfortunately, there are too many people on both side--the Left and the Right--who really have no idea, get alone a general comprehension, of that the determinants of supply and demand are, and yet feel compelled to talk about policy prescriptions to "fix" things; either our economy or our society. Or our schools. Or health care.

Really, when it comes to informed debate about any of the "ills" of our society, the debate rarely begins with "is this something we can fix?" And a really, really important correlated question is, "is this something we can afford to fix?"

The thugs of social justice and the progressive movement never take up question one. So asking them to examine the costs of their socially justified and progressively motivated policies is something smart and important people have no need. It is left to us poor red-necks, abiding with our guns and Bibles.

Take this, the latest social justice, progressive movement issue: the internet.

According to a group calling themselves "SaveTheInternet.com", "...sees equal access to all legal Internet content and applications as critical to a healthy democracy."

Well of course! How can you believe otherwise? Our rise or fall as a healthy democracy is hanging in the balance!

The issue? Profit.

I pay about a hundred bucks a month for internet access. I've a high-speed account and a dial-up account. Sure, I hate the dial-up account, but guess what? There are times when it's the dial-up that works...and the high-speed doesn't. There are even times when neither of those work. It happens. We live in the real world. Sometimes stuff doesn't work.

But my recent upgrade to 1.5 Mb/s was taken with the assurance of my high-speed provider that I could downgrade to a lower download speed without cost. What was I thinking? If I need to further economize my business operations, I can lower my annual costs by a couple hundred a year rather easily. When you have more time than money, you live with lower download rates.

Not good enough for the thugs on the Left.

"Houston, we have identified a victim group."

Some people can't afford the hundred bucks a month I spend for internet access. This is wrong. How can our kids--or minorities--play WOW without a high-speed internet connection? Jeez.

Time for a short digression: I have two web browsers loaded on this machine. One has all the bells and whistles so I can download pics and graphics and cool vids. The other? Graphics is turned off. All I dl is text. It's amazing what kind of download speeds you can get when you're not hanging around waiting for pics to load.

In moments I can choose whether or not to launch the fully featured browser...or, not.

It's called choice.

When I think about this form of self-depravation, I yearn for greater social justice and progressivism in my own life. How can I deny myself the benefits of high-speed internet access?

I assert that there is a great substitute to high-speed internet connection: the library.

But that means that our public school system is going to have to teach the fundamentals of research and critical thinking; and that would take away fantasy football time away from these educational thundercrats while their students are surfing for answers in the classroom.

End of digression.

What motivates these heroes of social justice and the movement progressive?

Evil corporations. It seems the people who invest and hire folks to provide you with your internet access are making money. And you know that ain't right. If it weren't for profit, everything would be free. Thugs, looking out for you and me.

And here's the killer line from the ONA press release on the horrors of dial-up, "Most of those people are lower income, in rural areas, communities of color are also disproportionately offline. So, we have a challenge, not only to make sure that the Internet is open and free, but also to get more people connected."

See? Not having high-speed internet access is not only holding down poor folks, but it's racially motivated!

Here's an article from the aforementioned "savetheinternet.com". In the four links provided by this article is some good argumentation. Here's one of the links, titled "FCC Should Heed Danger Signs on Road to Net Neutrality"

Read the article. Read the comments. Remember the goal of social justice and the movement of progressives is to take from those who make, and give to those who want.

What happens when corporations can't make money anymore? If they are providing a service that the Left deems good, then they'll get money from the government. If not, well, take their cash and give it to those who are suffering from the attendant ill. Don't worry about the costs of such action.

I am a comfortable tool of the corrupt corporations, the evil folks who work for a living and expect to gain in affluence as a result of their individual effort. I think that the folks who have great ideas and great work ethic should be rewarded greatly.

Sure. I know that Al Gore invented the internet, so he should have some say on its roll-out.

But the core of the internet has been provided by some key communications companies; Verizon and AT & T are just two of these companies. In the northwest, we rely upon the copper and fiber of Qwest.

Remember this demand curve?

Demand f(D) = ∑ Qn x Cn or, (Quantity (Q)1 x Cost ( C) 1 + Q2 x C2 + Q3 x C3…+ Qn x Cn).

This was the demand curve for the health care industry. But, it's also the demand curve for the communications industry. As new communications products come on-line, these new products and services will increase the over-all (aggregate) demand for communications services. And guess what?

As new products and services are made available, the aggregate demand for communications services will increase, too.

So, I'm sure that in the not-far-distant future, there will be demands on the Left for social justice and a progressive movement to assure that the government provides us with access to the internet.

Oops. Sorry.

That day is already here.

Read the Bill

It's in .pdf format.

And this isn't the final version. Let the guys in charge of your future, guys like Reid, Schumer, Rockefeller will do that work behind closed doors.

Ah! transparency.

The bill.

Becker, Burgers and Beanie Babies

Gary Becker is a learned man.

What does it take to be considered a learned man?

There are several attributes. I’m going to suggest a few, but if you think I’m missing some attributes, please feel free to add your attributes in the Comments section.

Making a clearly defined argument.

I know a lot of people who argue about this or that, but the question always seems to get confused somewhere between proposition and dissertation.

One of the strengths of Becker is his closely defined argument. Any student of philosophy will be able to tell you that there are roughly three schools of argument; cosmological, ontological and epistemological.

What I have learned over my short course of years on this earthly coil is that the relative value of certain beliefs are quickly supplanted by a recognition that some things are simply knowable, and that those things that rely too much upon definitional priors simply attempt to escape the examination that too often fails to occur.

How can this be?

Belief versus knowledge.

It’s been a battle I’ve had to deal with for most of my professional life.

I’ve been working on an equation that attempts to predict the value of inputs into a discussion that is defined by introducing changes in practise with changes in bias. Bias is the weight we tend to give certain ideas without regard to any other variable that may affect outcome. There are a lot of simple representations of this idea; one is the idea that coming to a stop sign, one stops. Intellectual inquiry becomes meaningless at a certain point. At what point must one count the number of sides of a stop sign? At what point must one confirm that the colour of the sign is, indeed, red? At what point must we confirm that the word “stop” is indeed, the word “stop” and not “spot”?

We become biased in our beliefs, and more importantly, we substitute beliefs for knowledge. Due to bias. Re-thinking stop signs may seem a small thing, but for many of us, simply recognizing patterns becomes a replacement for examination. Pavlov taught us about conditioning dogs. At a certain point, modern education techniques put the gloss on Pavlov.

It may seem specious to many that most of what I consider bad argument is a statement that most, or much, of what we believe to be true is simply the result of repetition. Just as Pavlov taught his dogs to salivate at the ringing of a bell, modern education techniques attempt to teach our kids with the same system of reward.

Unfortunately for the education community, people aren’t dogs.

Not that there isn’t attempt afoot to treat us as if we were as suggestible.

There is a huge body of literature that opines that we are not as trainable, nor as suggestible, as dogs. For a simple argument, I offer Solzhenitsyn.

That being said, what is it that Becker offers? For $14.00 you can read for yourself. It’s going to be money well spent, since you, like I, cannot find a copy of the Journal of Political Economy in our local library. (The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 76, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 1968), pp. 169-217).

Ideas versus Rationality.

What Professor Becker attempts to share is an idea.

The idea is, that people make choices. The choices that people make aren’t entirely irrational choices. It is, in fact, a rational choice that allows a person to make a choice that might be construed as an irrational choice. The question is, what is it that would be the most effective deterrent to crime? And what Professor Becker landed upon was the two-fold choice of detection versus punishment.

If you’re not going to get caught, there is no downside to your behaviour. If you’re are going to get caught, and the punishment is rather benign, there’s yet no reason to avoid the behaviour under question.

This, of course, is representative of the Chicago School.

If you hit the link, it wasn’t what you were thinking, was it?

Anyway, Chicago styled politicians have learned lessons that were otherwise elided from civics classes offered across this country during the 1950’s and 1960’s. During the post-war years, emphasis was placed upon individual behaviours. Freedom, liberty, freedom of speech, equality before the law, equality in how the government must treat you and I…these where the lessons that hammered into our young heads until we achieved repletion. Then, the arguments shifted; individualism was replaced by the next best thing, we’d become full of liberty.

We wanted to conform. We were the generation of non-conformists that required conformity from ourselves and our peers. We wanted to be perfect, and therefore, without examining our priors, became victim of our priors. We didn’t need to ask questions about stop signs being octagonal. We defined the stop signs. They were ours.

And while we were congratulating ourselves for our moral superiority, we became victims of our own wealth. Which is: the burger.

In Europe, the leading intellectual impulses were being enunciated by guys like Sartre and Camus.

Existentialism, nihilism and absurdism were the soup de’jour of the intellectual elite. Arguments that had been exposed for decades, if not centuries, were re-introduced. Cosmology and epistemology were re-introduced into the collegium. Decades, if not centuries, of outmoded ideas were brought back to life.

The fact that some ideas were neither able to be confirmed or denied created a certain angst. The intellectual problem that was introduced by existentialism, nihilism and absurdism was simple; none of the arguments offered by the protagonists had the clarity of intellectual rigour.

Instead, we had burgers.

The burger as apogee of intellectual insight may seem ridiculous. Granted. But what, before the onset of the apostolic devoteés of Maslow, was the apogee of human existence? A powerful car, a clean windshield and a shoeshine.

During the 1950’s and ‘60’s, the way we defined our experiences became the way we expressed our experiences.

We weren’t concerned about the epistemological conditions of necessary and sufficient conditions for proof of knowledge. The accoutrements of thinking were all we needed. We had beliefs. We expressed our beliefs. That we took the time to enunciate our beliefs was proof positive that our beliefs were provable.

And then we got cheap burgers.

Scotties on Sandy were what, ten cents?

McDonalds on Bertha-Beaverton were 15 cents?

And really good fries.

AC had to push.

Burgers. We held the world in our hands, we were growing as an economy to levels that were never experienced before in world history. We were the proof that Popper was looking for. Malthus was wrong. And not only a little wrong. But completely wrong.

Costs for the basic provisions of market wants were decreasing. Markets were proving more efficient than models predicted. The idea that a restaurant could provide your family with a meal more cheaply—less expensively—than that which your mother could provide was revolutionary.

Yes, McDonald’s did that.

Let’s re-examine bias and the inputs of our arguments.

Some things are simply knowable. And true.

Some things rely too much on prior conditions.

Beliefs rely more upon prior conditions—what was I thinking at the time I came to certain conclusions—than upon posterior conditions; that is, what happened.

Or, the dreaded “hindsight is twenty-twenty”.

Becker talks about priors, because it is priors that lead to action. If you’re going to break the law, and you clearly know that you’re about to break the law, what are the conditions surrounding your decision to break the law that convince you that breaking the law will either be undetectable or that the punishment for breaking the law will be so minimal as to not serve its deterrence purpose?

Even Becker believes that thieves think.

That they are rational actors.

Beanie Babies

Which is why I mention Beanie Babies.

I could have mentioned hula hoops and yo-yos. Or long hair. Or tie-died shirts.

Mebbe even swine flu.

Or Christian Science.

There have been waves of populist belief that have swept America since its earliest days. What has been interesting is the way that the populist movements have either been sustained, or ultimately, declined.

There have risen and fallen cosmological arguments. There have risen and fallen ontological arguments. We’ve seen these arguments take place in the last two hundred years with such protagonists as Kant, Kierkegaard and Hegel. In our lifetimes we’ve reviewed this progress with such intensive works as I’m Okay, You’re Okay.

This author blushes. Imagine having to point out such a ludicrous comparison.

So, let’s talk about Beanie Babies.

The recent housing bubble is all about the Beanie Babies.

There was a fad some 15 years ago about Beanie Babies.

They were cheap. They were in demand. And they were an investment.

Poop.

Imagine finding out that something that was cheap 10 to 15 years ago could possibly be cheap today.

Unthinkable.

Until you replace Beanie Babies with sub-prime mortgages. And then you hopefully will begin to see that what stupid people think is less important than what you think: real estate has real value; therefore, investing in real estate requires a commitment to pay down your debt in order to achieve the goal of the investment.

We live in a time when Becker is ignored, when cheap burgers are unappreciated and Beanie Babies are equivalent to home purchases.

And now we move into improving our health care system.

I used to think that Oregonians were different; smarter, more independent, less reliant upon others.

Then we killed Trojan. Because we didn’t understand nuclear energy. Ever since then I’ve been convinced that given the right set of beliefs, Oregonians would be willing to cut off an arm from an imagined wolf trap.

But, more about micro solutions to macro problems later.

Until then, take a look at the response of the Democrats and the inquiry into Countrywide Loans and mortgage crisis. It’s pretty hilarious.




“Towns’ action came after repeated public ridicule from the leading Republican on the committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), over Towns’s failure to launch an investigation into Countrywide Mortgage’s reported sweetheart deals to VIPs.”

The Democrats created the mortgage crisis. The Democrats defended the mortgage crisis. And the Democrats intend to kill again.

Spending money foolishly is your right. It’s your money. Of course, you have choices. You could provide for your family, or you could buy Beanie Babies. You could rent a modest apartment or house, or you could buy a home you can’t afford with a sub-prime loan. No matter how emotionally invested you might be with your choice, taking a step back may help you determine whether or not your choice is a good choice or a stupid choice.

Congressional hucksters are telling you a lot of meaningless things; global warming, cap and trade, a new, green economy. Affordable housing and free medical care.

But who pays?

Becker talks about the economics of crime. McDonald’s can tell you a lot about market innovation. Beanie Babies can teach you that not every bright idea you have is actually a bright idea.

It’s time to dispense with the accoutrements of thinking and replace it with solid logic. We, as a nation, can not continue to spend and spend and spend without “somebody” having to pay the bill. We are currently on a federal spending spree that is outstripping our capacity to make the payments that are required by the spending.

You have a choice. Do you want a nation of Beanie Baby collectors? Or do you want to seriously get down to the business of providing jobs, affordable energy and gain control over government spending?

Bleak Numbers For President Obama

You earn numbers like this. (.pdf)

Spend some time on Table 1.