Month: June 2011

In January, the funny but irreverent Bill Maher argued that the NFL is an example of the success of socialism, because “they literally share the wealth, through salary caps and revenue sharing – TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put all of it in a big commie pot and split it 32 ways.” He called it an example of the Democratic philosophy that everyone deserves an equal opportunity, and said this is why the tiny town of Green Bay has just as good of a chance as a metropolis to produce a Super Bowl winner, unlike, say, baseball with its Yankee dominance.

Continue reading NFL Lockout: Socialism Doesn’t Solve The Greed Problem

A quick recap for those out of the loop… The transition from monarchy to democracy across the globe in recent centuries had largely been ignored by Africa and the Middle East. Then suddenly in 2011, a bunch of citizens got fed up and started rioting, and it spread across several countries. Maybe it was food prices; maybe it was Twitter. But rulers started getting overthrown and it was officially dubbed the “Arab Spring.” Some of the rulers weren’t too excited about abdicating their thrones, and started mercilessly slaughtering protesters in an attempt to quell the rebellions.

Especially in Libya. Except the rebels became more organized and started fighting back. Dictator Gaddafi brought out military aircraft. Talk about escalation! Everybody from the U.N. and the Arab League started talking about creating a no-fly zone to protect the rebels. Finally, they did. Of course the United States, with a military budget nearly as big as the rest of the world combined (depending on who’s counting), helped out – firing over 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles and stuff like that.

Continue reading It’s Getting Bizarre With Obama And Libya

One of the kinda cool things about the United States is states’ rights, or what’s left of them. The federal government controls a bunch of stuff, but all 50 states have branches of government that do lots of stuff and set lots of rules, and people like to compare different states to try to learn about the pros and cons of various policies – although due to the complexity of it all, and the inherent geographical differences between a lot of states, it usually just ends up in confirmation bias.

Such was Salon’s accusation of a recent “Koch-funded study” that ranked states based on their level of freedom. They claim that these sorts of libertarian-esque studies tend to deliberately pick factors that will put the red states at the top and the blue states at the bottom. The producers of the study want you to think that the freer states are much better places to live. But Andrew Leonard, the author of the Salon piece, asks a very valid question: if super-liberal states like California, New York, and New Jersey are such horrible places to live, why are they among the country’s highest populations? “Sixty-five million Americans in just three states cower under a totalitarian shadow!” he jests. If these freedom-less societies are really so bad, why don’t they all move?

Continue reading If CA and NY are so horrible why does everyone live there?

The raging Arizona wildfire, which was recently determined to be the largest in state history, makes an excellent case study for postlibertarian thought. Now here are externalities if I ever saw them: hundreds of thousands of acres across multiple states being burned, communities being disrupted or temporarily displaced… and just think about the opportunity cost of all the firefighters working on this thing! And all because of some irresponsible campers (at least that seems to be the running plausible theory, and we’ll go with it for the sake of thought experiment).

Clearly it is in society’s interest to prevent such things from happening. The general libertarian free-market approach is pretty simple… find who caused it and make their consequences very large. It may not change what already happened, but it will give everyone else the incentive to not let something like that happen again, right?

But what if that’s the fallacy of Assumed Information Flow? What if we never figure out who caused it? Or what if we figure out and lay hefty penalties but the next round of irresponsible campers doesn’t even know that all of that happened?

The statist response to preventing forest fires would probably involve something like requiring explicit permits to have campground fires, limiting all fires to within 25 feet of any tree over 6 feet tall, and setting up an agency with funds to initiate regular campground inspections to ensure that everyone is following the rules.

But like many other regulations, the cost to freedom might be very high. What if it incentivizes people to avoid campgrounds altogether? What if the arbitrary numbers in the rules aren’t optimal? What if the inspections aren’t actually carried out regularly, accurately, and bribe-free? (Oh, wait, I forget, that never happens with any existing regulation enforcements…)

Proponents of freedom believe that it comes with a price – the risk of some bad things happening – but they generally believe that it’s worth that cost because trying really hard to eliminate some kinds of risk just isn’t worth the cost and the negative consequences, and it’s not often not effective even if it was worth it.

Of course, that response is not going to give much comfort to anyone whose home was destroyed by the wildfire. And it’s not going to refill whatever coffers are currently being drained by the firefighting battles. The statist response above is a bit of a straw man, of course – I haven’t seen anyone honestly calling for such things to prevent forest fires, but maybe there is something that can reasonably done to enhance the flow of information about irresponsible campers and encourage them to take more responsibility without damaging freedom in an unacceptable way.

Ultimately, it’s true what Smokey the Bear has always said. Only you can prevent forest fires. If we tried to make the state responsible, I don’t think it would work. Postlibertarianism is not about trying to make the state responsible; it’s about being open to incentivizing responsibility out of other people who don’t want to be responsible. I don’t know how easy or hard that would be, but I’m open to smart personal-responsibility-encouraging regulation over “no-regulation-forever-and-ever.” The question is whether such “smart regulation” actually exists and has any more chance of being accomplished in the world than regular state-responsibility regulation…