Octopodial Chrome

As we all know, assimilation is key to successful immigration: foreigners immigrate, assimilate and their grandchildren are just as American as those whose forebears came over on Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery. Unfortunately, immigrants from Mexico are not assimilating; in fact, assimilation is reverse in some cases. This is hardly healthy.

A disturbing statistic is that one in ten children born today has a mother born in Mexico; of those half never completed high school. This is not at all good for our republic: 10% (at least) of our citizens have roots in a culture which is not at all republican, and half of those come from uneducated families. The survival of our republic and our liberties relies upon an electorate which is cognisant of its history—what will happen when it feels more affinity for the failed policies of a failed state (Mexico is the very definition of a failed state: it has gotten so bad that it openly encourages the emigration of its citizens) than for those principals which made our union great?

Dr. Lawrence Huntoon has written a great article about health care costs. He says pretty much what I’ve been saying for years, so naturally I think him a genius. Medical insurance is no longer insurance at all, but rather inefficiently pre-paid medical care. Since it is generally obtained through an employer (due to tax laws dating back to the Second World War), it is more inefficient and harder to keep. The uninsured face a nasty tax liability ($19,000,000,000 per year). The way to fix rapidly-escalating health care costs is via a market mechanism using medical savings accounts.

Of course, this applies to just about everything. We’d all be better off if the money we’d spent on Social Security all these years were in a 401(k) or IRA or other investment vehicle.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a reasonably strict libertarian in both economic and social issues. I tend to think that the State has no business regulating private affairs, and my definition of private is fairly broad. I don’t believe, for example, that marriage should be an institution of the State (it is God’s creation, not man’s). This has led me to oppose the anti-polygamy laws not because I support polygamy (I oppose it) but because I don’t think that punishing polygamy is the proper business of the State any more than punishing the wearing of shorts by grown men (an offensive practise far more common) is the proper business of the State.

Rich Lowry has an article which gives me pause. He points out that polygamy as practised in Islamic and fundamentalist Mormon circles inevitably results in some pretty severe social effects. The most notable is that a few high-status men have many wive, leaving low-status men on the fringes of society, with little hope of marriage and children.

He’s right about the problem, although he doesn’t seem to realise that this is an effect of polygyny (multiple wives) rather than polygamy. A similar effect would probably be seen with polyandry (IIRC that was common in Tibet at one point, with brothers marrying a single wife).

The article provides a good reason for polygyny to be illegal: its negative effects spill over to the population as a whole. It may be that even a few polygynous marriages would be enough to have widespread negative effects.

I wonder though if those effects would hold in a generally polygamous society in which there were group marriages, polygynous marriages, polyandrous marriages and true marriages. And I wonder if polygamy would actually be all that common even were it legal. Certainly the majority of the churches would refuse to perform such marriages (though no doubt the Episcopalians would rush to be the first to allow them). Most women would object to a plural marriage as strenuously as they would to an affair. And I think most men really don’t want the extra bother.

Still, it does demonstrate that private choices can have public consequences.

The esteemed playwright David Mamet had discovered that he is no longer a brain-dead liberal. Apparently considered thought and careful reading revealed that his leftist tendencies were in part incorrect.

One hopes more leftists will have similar epiphanies.

Apparently homeschooling one’s children without a teaching certificate is illegal in California. Naturally, the teachers’ union is happy about this, as it helps cut down competition for their services. Interestingly enough, most of the great men of history were taught by teachers without credentials, and they turned out alright. Moreover, so far as I can see the education of teachers is sadly lacking in any sort of realistic philosophy of education, as can be seen in the end-product of both our public and private schools (and to be fair, many home schools as well).

What’s really sad is that we know how to teach; we just don’t want to teach. Rather, we want to be seen to have taught, which is something very much different.

Lisa Schiffren writes about polygyny in New York City. I’m of two minds about polygyny in particular and polygamy in general. On the one hand I don’t see that it’s any of the State’s business who sleeps with whom, or who lives with whom, or any of that. But on the other hand it’s clearly unacceptable for women to be brought over illegally and kept in subjugation to autocratic husbands; moreover given that the modern State in its limited wisdom sees fit to award funds to pretty much anyone, it’s inappropriate for the rest of us to have to pay for the kids produced thereby.

Jonah Goldberg demonstrates how progressivism and fascism were intertwined in the early twentieth century.

Here’s a truly disturbing picture: an Iraqi woman holding her slain six-year-old son in her arms. The family was headed home after enrolling the boy in school when terrorists fired on their car, killing one boy and wounding another. Different people have different reactions to it: some people want us to leave Iraq; others react with hatred towards Bush; but I have a different reaction entirely.

I believe this picture show why we must remain in Iraq. We’re there to prevent murders like this when we can and to punish them when we can’t. If we leave, we give men like those who slew this boy leave to do whatever they will to other sons and daughters.

Whether or not we should have invaded Iraq in the first place is immaterial now; whether our invasion caused more death and suffering than would otherwise be the case is also immaterial. We invaded; that’s a fact. Whatever death and suffering we have caused has already been caused. The question now is what the best course of action going forward is. If we stay, there will be some amount of death and suffering; if we leave, there will be some amount of death and suffering.

I hold that our staying is better than our leaving, that if we leave the misery will be greater than if we stay. We fight in order to hunt down and punish the men who killed this boy; we fight in order to stop men like them from killing others.

As a side-note, if your response to the photo is to want to leave Iraq, the you and people like you are part of why the boy was killed. One of the goals of his murderers is to drive us from Iraq; they believe they can do that by killing innocents.

Britain has a socialised health care system, one which works more-or-less. Its physicians are now asking to withhold treatment from smokers, drinkers, the obese and the elderly. This is the result of socialised medicine: those whom society deems unworthy are denied medical treatment.

The result of a private system, of course, is that those whose labour society does not appreciate and whom society is not charitable towards are denied medical treatment. I imagine that a private system treats more people.

Mencius Moldbug proposes a novel theory for the causes of anti-Americanism. A very interesting read. See also his iron polygon theory. He’s a smart guy and writes well. I don’t know if he’s right, but he is at the least provocative.

A fool of a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has led her students in a frivolous, self-important mock constitutional convention, complete which over-serious theatricality and rights which aren’t rights at all, e.g. a right to affordable housing, a right to sports and the other such addled products of juvenile minds and a yet more juvenile professor.

It’s truly pathetic what has become of our educational system. We no longer produce free citizens of a free republic; we now produce thugs who would gladly use the State to take from some and give to others, and expect to be thanked for their efforts.

Christopher Hitchens points out that Mitt Romney must talk about Mormonism and its influence upon him.

Ever wonder why Warren Buffet loves the estate tax? It turns out that he personally profits from the estate tax regime.

The science-fiction Jerry Pournelle (generally considered fairly right-wing) has an excellent article on drug laws and federalism.

Many cities and states unconstitutionally infringe upon their citizens’ right to carry and/or own knives and swords; Knife Rights is working to reverse these laws. They’re worthy of support.

David Harsanyi (the best man the Denver Post ever hired) writes on the return of Prohibition. From people getting arrested for a BAC of .03% (a single glass of wine, well below even the strictest legal limit), to revoking the license of a man who drinks heavily but never drives after drinking, to arresting bar patrons for drinking (without ever entering cars), states (egged on by MADD—whose own founder regrets the organisation’s neo-Prohibitionist slant) are outlawing alcohol in all but name. To quote a Virginia police chief, you can drink at home. Or at someone else’s home. And stay there until you’re not drunk.

Alcohol has certainly caused a lot of evil and suffering. It has also caused a lot of good. Banning its consumption is not the way forward.

Jonathan Foreman asks why the Pentagon is damaging the war effort. From leaving poorly-performing commanders in place, to mismanaging the media, to simply not getting the right equipment together, Foreman believes that the Department of Defense (aside: which really, really should be renamed the Department of War) has fallen down on the job.

Fred Reed points out that America is not a free country. Another of his essays, The Suicide of Marlboro Man, is a must-read for anyone wondering how a nation of free men can turn into what we’ve got now: the short answer is it’s inevitable; freedom leads to its own end.

Ron Paul on why it can happen here, and has already begun to. My visit to Washington, D.C. this summer really brought matters home: we are become a less and less free country, and that’s wrong. I don’t agree with Paul on everything, but I believe he is the least incorrect of our modern political figures.

Slate asks why moonshine is against the law. The reasons given are distinctly unsatisfying. The first is that the US government makes a lot of money on distilled liquor taxes—$27 on every gallon of pure ethanol. This isn’t that big a deal. Homebrewers and home vintners already are allowed to make 100 (if single) or 200 gallons (per household) of fermented alcohol tax-free each year, and so far as anyone can tell federal taxes are not negatively impacted to any significant degree ($116.12 max per year for beer; $680 max per year for wine). Why not allow us to distill the alcohol we’re already allowed to make? Heck, don’t even remove the federal tax: allow us to distill the stuff, but require us to pay taxes. Give me a downloadable PDF form and a postage-paid envelope and I’d quite cheerfully mail in $13.50 per proof-gallon. Yes, some people wouldn’t comply: some people are already not complying. I own my home; I have a full-time job; losing those and my freedom are simply not worth a thousand dollars in federal taxes.

The second reason given is that moonshine can be dangerous if improperly made. This is highly disingenuous of the government: if home distillation were legal, then stills sold to the home market would be regulated so as not to contain any lead solder or similar stuff. The health dangers are precisely the result of being illegal, of moonshine being made in secret from stills manufactured in hiding.

I should note that the federal alcohol tax was created by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton in order to pay off our debt to France after the Revolutionary War: proof that a tax once instituted never goes away. I’m not even all that highly opposed to retaining it; I would like the regulations surrounding alcohol production to be loosened such that it’s easier to get into the business. I would dearly love to start my own microbrewery: there’s no practical reason why I couldn’t buy a $4,000 half-barrel brewery and make one keg of beer per day; I could then sell that beer for $50-$60, paying $3.50 in taxes and about $30 in materials and energy, realising a profit of roughly $25/keg. After about six months I could purchase another half-barrel brewery and make one barrel a day; after another three months I could expand to two barrels a day; six months to a year after that I would have the capital to rent premises in an industrial park and start a proper brewery. There’s no practical reason I cannot do that; instead, due to the regulations surrounding brewing I need to get together $300,000–500,000 in capital. This is rather more difficult than getting together $4,000.

This ties in to a lot of stuff: in general, going into business in this country is very difficult and expensive due to massive regulation, licensing, zoning and so forth. The marginal cost of complying with a new regulation is negligible for an existing corporation, but a steep barrier to entry for a new business; thus existing corporations support an awful lot of regulation and licensing as it costs them next to nothing and prevents competition. Our entire system is geared around huge corporations, not around individuals. You see the same thing with health care, where if one works for a large corporation one has excellent, cheap health insurance; if one works for a mom-and-pop operation one probably has nothing, or poor-quality, expensive health insurance at best.

Anyway, there’s no reason for home distillation to be illegal. I would dearly love to distill (if nothing else, it gives me something to do with disappointing batches of beer); I am willing to pay taxes on it. Please, change the law and let me distill!

Orson Scott Card has a comprehensive proposal for weaning America off of the automobile. He correctly points out that we currently subsidise cars and big-box retailers to a remarkable extent and that we penalise pleasant neighbourhoods. I don’t agree with all of his suggestions (I’d rather get rid of all regulations than replace anti-neighbourhood ones with pro-neighbourhood ones), but they are not a bad start at all.

If we simply start building nice, mixed-use (retail & residential), mixed-income neighbourhoods composed of a higher-speed commercial street, then some streets of houses and on the periphery a few apartment buildings; if we’d allow commercial streets to have garrets and other residences; if we’d quit mandating huge parking lots (thereby wasting space and forcing driving); if we’d instead build sidewalks oriented towards pedestrians: if we did those things, we’d have a safer, healthier, more pleasant America.

A man was arrested in Norfolk, Virginia for carrying a gun openly. Only one problem: it’s legal to do so, and the city ordinance against it is illegal. So over hundred gun owners showed up with guns on their hips to protest peacefully. Amusingly, I think that the city more-or-less got the message. Except for the councilman who walked out to protest the protest: he should be impeached. An elected official has a responsibility to do his duty.

Steve Tucker returned to society a year ago, after ten years in federal prison. His crime? Selling lightbulbs. He, his brother and his sister-in-law had owned & operated a hydroponics store, and some of their customers used the systems to grow dope. Despite the fact that they would eject any customer who mentioned marijuana; despite the fact that they returned any merchandise bearing a hemp leaf; despite the fact that they refused to sell High Times, rolling papers or anything else to do with the weed culture; despite the fact that they were a legitimate business selling a legal product, they were thrown in prison for 10, 16 and 10 years respectively.

Their real crime? Not allowing the DEA to install surveillance cameras in their store. Yes, in return for not co-operating with America’s Stasi they were thrown into prison.

Reason magazine have a wonderfully hilarious review of stadium-building issues. Read it; learn it; love it.