Consider the past and you shall know the future.
Chinese Proverb
Barry Obama's Misguided Military Ebola Mission In West Africa
Public Teacher Union Pension and Other Scams
From Reason:
Writing at Forbes, OpentheBooks.com founder Adam Andrzejewski explains that in 2012, Illinois reformed its particularly loose public-pension rules specifically to squeeze out a lot of recipients who shouldn't really have qualified for taxpayer-funded retirements. The new law specifically came about after news leaked that two teachers-union lobbyists, Stephen Preckwinkle and David Piccioli, had managed to get pensions worth more than $1 million after substitute teaching for just one day apiece.
A Comment on the Idiocy of Economic Warfare: Sanctions, Boycotts, Shunnings, Etc.
I do not support economic sanctions against Cuba, Iran, etc. I don't think they're very effective; there are often ways for middlemen to arbitrage in a black market, etc., and the real damage is often collateral damage to the struggling population of the target nation.
Left-wing groups often target companies whose founders are associated with the politically correct, "wrong" cause, e.g., Chick-Fil-A over "gay marriage" and Domino's Pizza over pro-life founder Tom Monaghan (who sold Domino's in 1998 and no longer has a prominent role at the company). There was the BP boycott over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster, and the recent kerfuffle over former Clippers' owner Donald Sterling, singled out over some leaked controversial comments to his then mistress.
I generally dislike boycotts, shunnings, etc., because I think they're very crude weapons, they are arbitrary, and they hurt the wrong people. If I'm sufficiently annoyed, I'll engage in a counter-boycott. For a while in 2010, I reported in the blog I decided to buy exclusively BP gasoline, because the station owners held franchises and had no part in the 2010 tragedy--and that one disaster was not typical of BP's drilling operations. BP paid a stiff price for the accident, and so did BP's stockholders, many of them senior citizens on limited income, facing Draconian dividend cuts and capital losses. The last time I checked, BP stock was still selling at a far lower P/E ratio than its competitors. Consumers would not be better served by fewer competitors in the energy sector. Trying to cripple a company that needed cash flow to remedy ecological damages was, at best dubious and potentially could have led to the taxpayers having to fund the cleanup. Now I can't force other consumers to buy BP products any more than I can convince teenage boys to date available nice, sweet girls. People are entitled to make their own consumer decisions for any or no reasons, and the "real" reason can be anonymous.
There's a relevant distinction I make in my more libertarian perspective. I am against the War on Drugs, which is not to say that I favor the consumption of illicit drugs, overconsumption of alcohol, or the use of tobacco. I do not consume these products (in the case of alcohol beyond an occasional social drink); I think they are generally bad for one's health, but I recognize consumer demand for these goods, and I think the enforcement costs, especially high incarceration rates, make for very bad, ineffective public policy. This does not mean I agree with what I regard self-abusive, indulgent transactions, but I would prefer to use my powers of persuasion.
I have had my share of disagreements with prominent libertarians on a number of issues, like intellectual property, abortion, and "gay marriage". But I would not boycott a company just because left-wing benefactor George Soros invested in it or Barry Obama's useful idiot billionaire Warren Buffett did the same. Jeffrey Tucker recently quoted Murray Rothbard, a prominent AnCap Austrian School economic historian, saying liberals/progressives were using "conservative" [meaning "authoritarian"] means. I agree many right-wingers have an authoritarian mindset, but I still claim the conservative mantle, while not agreeing to have the government infringe on individual rights. Over the past 6 months, I've published a number of critical segments on certain police abuses of power.
What really instigated my current wrath was a BCL discussion that touched on the "gay marriage" kerfuffle and about the right of vendors to "discriminate" against gay couples, particularly photographers, bakers, property owners to host weddings, etc. I don't buy into the "public access" talking point frequently raised to rationalize state intervention. For a lot of Christians, aiding and abetting "gay marriages" is a violation of their Christian moral/religious beliefs, and they regard said transactions as violations of conscience. You may/may not agree with them, and turning away good money may/may not be good for business, but as I've pointed out, where there is a need, the market will find a way. Forcing a businessman to accept business he doesn't want is a form of slavery. I've sometimes pointed out as a lefty, I can't buy left-handed scissors in many stores. Why? We are a minority of the population; I am not going to seek a government mandate to require lefty scissors or boycott, say, Staples if it doesn't carry them. There are specialty shops where I can buy them. The point is, almost any retailer makes choices of what/what not to carry. If they don't carry lefty items, they lose some business from me they would have had otherwise. It's an opportunity cost for them.
But what irked me was when the BCL moderator went out of his way to distance himself from the discriminating vendor. One of the commentators went out of her way to characterize these vendors as operating by "hate", one of the sacred words of political correctness, and talked of using socioeconomic weapons of boycotts, shunnings, etc., to drive a vendor out of business. I sarcastically replied that her intolerance of people who do not conform to her point of view was touching. That set in motion a wolf pack attack by politically correct trolls. My point was, and remains, that the consumer is better off with more choices, and targeting a business because you disagree with one of the owner's opinions or business practices is not in the public interest. I'm sure that I probably disagree with a number of opinions held or business practices by vendors I've used or their employees. But I'm buying a product or service for intrinsic reasons, not their political views. If a competitor leaves money on the table, it's an incentive for vendors to enter the market. That's the essence of a free market system--you find an unaddressed want or need and fulfill it.
One of the trolls followed me to my own thread where I argued that economic warfare tactics in my judgment violated in concept a well-known non-aggression principle widely held by libertarians: I argued when any organized mob attempts to intimidate you from your natural rights of life, liberty and property, it's essentially no different than State transactions against your negative liberties. It violates the principle of being left alone and is morally unconscionable. The troll, no doubt an AnCap, challenged my interpretation of NAP based on the writings of well-known libertarian authorities, and I suffer no fools gladly: how ironic and pathetic is it for any alleged libertarian to resort to appeals of authority? Donald Sterling or any other NBA owner may have had 1001 politically incorrect views--what did that have to do with a couple of dozen pro athletes busting their asses for the fans' entertainment? An owner should be judged on his ability to hire good team management and players, to maintain decent, accessible venues, not on eavesdropped stupid conversations. If the lesson from the aftermath of these incidents is to limit free speech to a need-to-know basis, all these aggressors accomplish is obfuscation of the status quo. All the Christian vendor has to say is he can't handle the transaction for business reasons; maybe he can refer them to other vendors, like when one vendor couldn't handle taking my passport picture. You don't have to specify why you can't accommodate transactions. If I say I specialize in traditional marriage arrangements, how different in concept is that from saying I specialize in fitting big and tall people's clothing? Let vendors compete for nontraditional marriage arrangements; it's the American way.
Learning Economics Via South Park: Really?
Facebook Corner
(The Independent Institute). Senior Fellow John Goodman: "Doctors are the only professionals in our society who are not free to re-package and re-price the services they offer to the market – when technology changes or demand changes or the state of knowledge of the profession changes."
Goodman is simply allowing medical professionals to work more naturally, efficiently, and effectively without costly third-party overhead. I sometimes felt that I was like my doctor's ATM card. To give a telling example, I once had to arrange time off work and still arrived late to an appointment he, not I, initiated--to go over my latest blood workup; they refused to fit me in--I would have to make another appointment--to get 5 minutes of blood test results. He always worked round-robin with up to a half-dozen patients in different rooms; I typically had to wait 20 minutes to see him for all of maybe 5 minutes. Why? Because he made his money on volume. He ended up dropping me as a patient because I was late, and I had to put off outpatient surgery for 4 months while I had to find another primary physician (closer to me, more competent and patient-friendly, by the way).
It would have been far easier to discuss things in a phone call or email and notify my pharmacy, but that's not how the third party rewarded him. In a later case, I was used to getting a notification before an upcoming doctor visit, but I had an interim appointment for blood work but no notification. The doctor visit was to discuss a blood workup that never happened; I thought I was showing up for the blood work, so I had to cancel the appointment. Very inefficient. There was always all sorts of paperwork--do you still have the same insurance, etc, and to make out an invoice it wasn't integrated through a computerized system but doing lookups on paper price charts. If I had to get a prescription refilled between visits, I might have to navigate voice mail and/or leave a message. I once asked if there was a way to send an email; "our systems can't handle that, sir". I once had to play phone tag with the doctor, because he wanted to know if I had had my eyes checked (in fact, I did, through a doctor he recommended). [I had gotten a note in snail mail saying ominously the doctor had tried but failed to reach me. I had given the second doctor the first doctor's contact information.]
Now, granted, these inconveniences are minor compared to other people's experiences, but to an IT professional with two graduate business degrees, it came as a bit of a culture shock. In my political blog in late 2012, I described the process of renewing my passport for a job overseas that eventually fell through. I discovered that I had to first set an appointment, and appointments were literally being maintained in a paper notebook at the local post office. I had to pay a visit to the post office and wait in a queue just to make an appointment. Twenty years earlier I had been teaching undergraduates the basics of computerized spreadsheets, but the government operates in its own world.
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| Via The Libertarian Catholic |
(continuation of a BCL thread from yesterday)
You realize that the people who boycott you have the right to free association as well, right?
I understand they are goddamn hypocrites who don't believe that you have a right to your own opinions. Economic warfare is a violation of the non-aggression principle. It's one thing to associate freely and/or to compete, but if and when you try to attack my economic liberty, you are no better than a Statist regime doing the same.
(Bring Classically Liberal). (M.P.) I didn't win the Nobel in economics today. Sorry guys, maybe next year.
Just follow Krugman's lead and pen opinions on trillion dollar coins and preventing invasions from outer space...
(separate comment)
They also failed to give Greenspan, Bernanke, and Yellen lifetime achievement awards
(Being Classically Liberal). Do you feel offended when someone burns an American flag? I ask this because apparently the Ferguson protesters are doing just that (burning American flags).
I was raised a military brat and find the practice of flag-burning deplorable, but so long as they are burning their own flag and not my property, I don't let these attention-seeking bastards pull my chain. I am so tired of the Politics of Symbolism and its high priest, Barry Obama.
(The Libertarian Catholic). “City council members are supposed to be public servants, not ‘Big Brother’ overlords who will tolerate no dissent or challenge.” Houston, the Constitution-free zone?
An unambiguous attempt by Statists to intimidate religious speech and liberty.
Proposals
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Eric Allie via IPI |
Linda Ronstadt, "Love Is a Rose"
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