SelfAdoration.com

Will Republicans repeal Obamacare next January — or ever? Don’t hold your breath. Mainstream politicians of both parties are addicted to corporate campaign contributions — and who knows what other kinds of bribes? — so what we will get will be a pathetic, cosmetic “reform” of Rotarian Socialist medicine. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

If you want to restore the liberty of the American people, you will need to change the United States Constitution. And you will have to do that by constitutional convention and state-by-state ratification, because there is no way that Congress will vote for the necessary changes.

In a very short summary, here is what needs to be done, if the head of steam built up by libertarians, by free-market conservatives and by the Tea Party movement is not to be wasted. The text within the quotation marks is proposed amendatory language, followed by a discussion of the objective to be achieved.

1. “The words ‘general welfare’ appearing in the United States Constitution or its Amendments do not create any powers of the legislative, executive or judicial branches of the government of the United States. Any legislation authorized by the words ‘general welfare’ is repealed.” This gets rid of one of the most pernicious pieces of federal elasticity.

2. “Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that clause is repealed.” This does away with the power of the federal government to regulate commerce. The interstate commerce clause is second only to the general welfare clause as a means of enlarging the power of the national government.

3. “Amendment 16 to the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that Amendment is repealed.” Goodbye federal income tax. The federal government will have to return to taxation by capitation — the head tax.

4. “Amendment 17 to the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that Amendment is repealed.” This language puts the Senate back under the control of the states. This was a vital check on federal power. (more…)

I’m writing this the day before the United States Supreme Court is expected to announce its ObamaCare decision. It’s possible that the court will rule nationally-socialized medicine “legal,” or, more probably, a majority of the justices will declare that some or all of the law is “unconstitutional.”

This is all just so much religious theater, like the breathless anticipation of the announcmeent of a new pope. The United States Constitution is the devoutly-worshipped charter of a criminal cartel, and we imbue these matters with a sacramental holiness in order to avoid admitting that we are all of us serfs engaged in our own gradual self-enslavement. The question at bar is this: Is the process to run a little more quickly or at a slower pace? It doesn’t really matter, since the terminal destination — a police state — is the same either way.

This is the reality of the 1789 Constitution, quoting from Man Alive!:

For your whole life you have been told — and you have probably believed — that the United States Constitution is a grand and noble document that exists to safeguard your liberty. In reality, it is a sort of peace-treaty drafted by three corrupt political factions in early America. The owners of the newly-erected factories in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states wanted to impose high tariffs on goods manufactured in England, thus to make their much-shoddier products more appealing to American buyers. Planters in the Southern states wanted legal protection for and official sanction of the despicable practice of human slavery. And poor ordinary people wanted “free” land, to be expropriated by the U.S. Army from the Native Americans who had occupied it thereto. The liberty-loving revolution of 1776 was contorted into a rent-seeking coup d’état by 1789, and the whole wretched abomination was rationalized in The Federalist Papers — which you very probably pretended to read in high school or college.

The constitutional language that will matter most in the ObamaCare decision is the “commerce clause,” the source of most of the federal government’s abuses against human liberty:

[Congress shall have the power] “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, (more…)

If you read the early reviews of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO series, you will have discovered that people in the news business don’t get fiction and really, really hate to be criticized from their left flank.

The show is good, as everything Sorkin writes is good, provided you are willing to indulge the beliefs that news people are good, despite Dan Rather and all his brothers-in-lies, and that government is good despite all those mountainous piles of corpses. Even so, Sorkin actually thinks about the things he writes, so he manages to land near the truth, now and then, even in spite of his prejudices:

The issue is a specious dichotomy, the Fallacy of Many Questions: Is government good, or is self-reliance bad? It’s absolutely necessary to ignore those piles of corpses, of course, or there is no debate at all: How many people fail at self-reliance and then perish through no fault of their own?

In the action of the drama, we learn that oil companies would not cause environmental disasters if only they paid for their own oil-rig inspections — this because they could not possibly bribe the inspectors they would be compelled to pay for.

This is all just dumb, self-admittedly-Capraesque hagiography of historical thugs whose crimes are hidden behind the mists of time. “We” can do better, because “we” have done so very well up to now.

But the idea of the conversation humanity is having is a good one, even if Sorkin is squarely on the wrong side of the issue. There is no “we” — you are in this all alone — and every time you delude yourself with the idea that “we” “must” “do something,” your are simply licensing a new set of thugs to rape and despoil you, ultimately tossing your corpse to the top of the nearest pile.

This is me on the idea of “The Conversation,” a video I made two months ago:

Government kills innocent people by the hundreds of millions and rapes and despoils everyone it suffers to live another day. Self-reliance, by contrast, is where the incredible wealth and the ineffable art Sorkin (more…)

Six years ago Friday, I launched BloodhoundBlog with the words cited in the headline:

In a subsistence culture, the work of the mind is precious and literally unsupportable. We are by now so rich that millions of people can create intellectual resources that they give away, in turn to be remarketed by others. This may or may not work in the long run for companies tapping into and amplifying open-source-like works of the mind. Consider that aggregator software levels the playing field for small players. The interesting thing is what it will do to companies whose entire business model is based on scarcity and hoarding. If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?

I’ve hit that theme again and again over the years: How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free?

Stewart Brand said “information wants to be free”. This has intellectual property implications far beyond ordinary information. But with respect to that ordinary information — news, opinion, fiction, poetry, almost all music, etc. — the war is over. Hoarding lost. The challenge amidst this vast abundance is not getting people to pay for your information — but simply getting them to pay attention to it.

The daily newspaper has no hope whatever of nicking me for fifty cents. The question that will decide if there is even to be a newspaper is, can they hold onto my eyes for as long as fifty seconds? And will someone pay for those eyes in the random hope of piercing my vast indifference to advertising?

It comes down to career advice, I think, for the newspaperati and for all of us: How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free? Maybe not the same work, but so close that any differences become academic. And: If you’re committed to sharing information even in a marketplace where ordinary information is so abundant as to be without monetary value, what are you going to do to make a living?

At Forbes magazine, Susannah (more…)

From The Wall Street Journal, the background on the founding of Udacity, the free and massively disruptive on-line computer sciences university.

The scions of the ruling class like to make believe that their silk neckties and secret handshakes imbue them with super-powers. In fact, they have until now been lucky enough to stand at the far side of an insanely stupid chokepoint, artificially limited education. All that changes with these words from Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun: “Online education will way exceed the best education today. And cheaper. If this works, we can rapidly accelerate the progress of society and the world.”

Read on:

Frustrated that his (and fellow Googler Peter Norvig’s) Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version. They got few takers. Then he mentioned the online course at a conference with 80 attendees and 80 people signed up. On a Friday, he sent an offer to the mailing list of a top AI association. On Saturday morning he had 3,000 sign-ups—by Monday morning, 14,000.

In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. “I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said ‘If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?’ And I said: I. Don’t. Care.”

In the end, there were 160,000 people signed up, from every country in the world, he says, except North Korea. Rather than tape boring lectures, the professors asked students to solve problems and then the next course video would discuss solutions. Mr. Thrun broke the rules again. Twenty-three thousand people finished the course. Of his 200 Stanford students, 30 attended lectures and the other 170 took it online. The top 410 performers on exams were online students. The first Stanford student was No. 411.

Mr. Thrun’s cost was basically $1 per student per class. That’s on the (more…)

That would be English, of course:

There is a huge shift underway, and it has become extremely rare to meet a scientific researcher or international business-person who cannot speak fluent English. How else would Peruvians communicate with the Chinese?

But wait a minute. Peruvians speak Spanish, the world’s second-biggest language, and Chinese has the largest number of native speakers of any language. Why don’t they just learn each other’s languages?

Because neither language is much use for talking to anybody else. Chinese won’t get you very far in Europe, Africa or the America — or, indeed, in most of Asia. The same goes for Spanish almost anywhere outside Latin America. Since few people have the time to learn more than one or two foreign languages, we need a single lingua franca that everybody can use with everybody else.

The choice has fallen on English not because it is more beautiful or more expressive, but just because it is already more widespread than any of the other potential candidates.

Mandarin Chinese has been the biggest language by number of speakers for at least the last thousand years, and is now used by close to a billion people, but it has never spread beyond China in any significant way. Spanish, like English, has grown explosively in the past two centuries: Each now has over 400 million speakers. But Spanish remains essentially confined to Central and South America and Spain, while English is everywhere.

There is a major power that uses English in every continent except South America: The US in North America, the United Kingdom in Europe, South Africa in Africa, India in Asia, and of course Australia (where the entire continent speaks it). All of that is due to the British empire, which once ruled one-quarter of the world’s people. For the same reason, there are several dozen other countries where English is an official language.

Of course, the British empire went into a steep decline almost a century ago, but the superpower that took Britain’s place was the United States, another English-speaking country.

After another century during which everybody dealing in international business and diplomacy — indeed, any independent (more…)

Say goodbye to Hollywood: The business model funding the television business is failing:

We still consume some TV content, but we consume it when and where we want it, and we consume it deliberately: In other words, we don’t settle down in front of the TV and watch “what’s on.” And, again with the exception of live sports, we’ve gotten so used to watching shows and series without ads that ads now seem extraordinarily intrusive and annoying. Our kids see TV ads so rarely that they’re actually curious about and confused by them: “What is that? A commercial?”

In the abundance economy, every business model based on charging a toll to cross a chokepoint will fail:

There are still wannabe barons in our economy, people scheming to find a way to hold us hostage with our own grain. But the last laugh will be ours: They will defend to the death the stout gates they have built across economic chokepoints. And we will go wherever we choose — in a world without walls.

More:

Nothing happens as quickly as we expect it to, looking forward, and everything seems to have happened much faster than we had realized, looking backward. More important, I think, than the plummeting cost of data processing, is the massive and seemingly irreversible horizontalization — the democratization — of information. The most significant man-made chokepoints centered around restrictions upon access to information and concentrations of expertise. When we use the word “disintermediation,” what we really mean is not getting rid of the middleman, but, rather, the dismantling of arbitrary economic chokepoints. As those barriers erode away, one by one, the consumer cost of everything associated with them drops dramatically. The semantic web, Web 3.0 — wherein the information that you want finds you — should only hasten this process.

If your income is based on getting in your customer’s way — prepare to go broke.

Can we find our way back to political liberty peacefully? I sure hope so. So does James Piereson, in an interesting read called The Fourth Revolution.

And thanks to the internet, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the (more…)

Do you have the idea that Republicans are pro-capitalist? Friends of business? Job creators? Innovators?

Think again. From The Hill: GOP governors bolster online sales tax push. This is not a new issue, but the new news is that some Republican governors are campaigning for Congress to impose in-state sales taxes on out-of-state on-line vendors. The crux of the matter is the Tenth Amendement, which says states’ rights are paramount except where they’re inconvenient.

Here are a couple of choice quotes from the best friends human freedom never had:

* “The application of sales taxes only to ‘brick-and-mortar’ retailers, many of which are small businesses, puts those very entities at a competitive disadvantage.”

States could repeal sales taxes and cashier the folks collecting them, but that would make too much sense.

* “It is simply unfair for some retailers to be responsible for proper local taxes and for others to avoid that responsibility, which would deny state and local governments their properly owed funds.”

I think the original source of that quote may have been Elmer Fudd, grumbling about “that wascally wabbit!” What kind of taxes do crafty politicians love best? The kind imposed on people who cannot vote against them.

We all know how real businesspeople think: When they are at a disadvantage in the marketplace, they do what they can to take the objection away.

Since on-line vendors cannot offer you the immediate satisfaction of touching the goods, comparing one real item to another and then taking your selection home immediately, they do what they can to level the playing field by giving you free shipping.

Brick-and-mortar stores can give you that tactile satisfaction and immediate gratification, but they can’t share on-line reviews with you. And even though you don’t have to worry about shipping costs, you will have to pay a huge premium on your purchase in sales taxes.

City, county and state governments can make brick-and-mortar businesses more competitive with on-line retailers overnight simply by eliminating sales taxes. This is what any truly pro-liberty politician would do, which provides you with an easy test for evaluating candidates.

Meanwhile, since, for now at least, there are no pro-liberty (more…)

[This week’s movie is concerned with the kind of behavior many people deride as being “arrogant” — behavior I consider thrillingly normal in human beings. The text quoted below comes from a post I wrote at BloodhoundBlog.com. –GSS]

Extracted from BloodhoundBlog post #1590:

This came in as a comment last night.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be competitive and wanting to win, but, reading your posts the last few weeks, you ego is a little bit too big at times. Yes, you are a heck of a writer and you have one heck of a blog and you have assembled a heck of a team of contributors, but your ego is getting a bit cocky.

This is ad hominem, so it violates our comments policy, but I’m not averse to discussing the issue it raises in a general way.

[….]

A Bloodhound’s virtues are genetic accidents, but that doesn’t make them less than perfectly admirable, whether evidenced in the dog or anthropomorphized and expressed in thoroughly conscious human behavior. Brought up right, a Bloodhound is a natural alpha, regal and indomitable. The dog will move with a lanky, un-self-conscious arrogance that is simply heart-breakingly beautiful to look upon: This what a thriving organism looks like.

I am steadfastly, philosophically opposed to the idea of humility. I think it is one of many evil ideas foisted off on us by malefactors who love us best at our absolute worst. To say to me, “You’re arrogant,” or, “you have a big ego,” is no reproach. On the one hand, it is a statement of obvious fact. But on the other, it puts me on my guard against you. A healthy, normal human being moves and acts and thinks and speaks with the lanky arrogance of a healthy, normal Bloodhound. When people don’t behave that way, I want to know why. When they affect to preach against healthy, normal human behavior, I go on defense — and not by half-measures.

The comment quoted above is nothing, just so much word salad. People repeat what they’ve been told their whole lives — monkey-see, monkey-do — for no reason they can name. (more…)

If you have followed the anti-educationism movement, you will be familiar with John Taylor Gatto. A one-time New York State Teacher of the Year turned apostate, Gatto has spent the last twenty years denouncing traditional public schooling and promoting home-schooling.

The Odysseus Groups is making Gatto’s book, The Underground History of American Education available for free, in chapters, over a span of 18 months. If you can’t wait that long, you can always buy the book.

Here’s a little taste to get you started:

You aren’t compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn’t have to surrender her children. What happened?

If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?

One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about your family, culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams. In the confusion of school affairs even teachers so disposed don’t have opportunity to know those things. How did this happen?

Before you hire a company to build a house, you (more…)

Today’s Spreecast explores an argument from Man Alive!, specifically from Chapter 2, which is currently under discussion at FreeTheAnimal.com:

1. “We now know we know nothing!” Either your mind is inherently unreliable or the world outside your mind is fundamentally incomprehensible.

2. “Your good behavior is not to your credit, but at least your bad behavior is not your fault!” The actions you think of as being morally good or evil are either causally unavoidable or are caused by something other than your free will – hormones, brain chemistry, genes, brian defects, drugs, diseases, your upbringing, your environment, your wealth or poverty, memes, etc.

3. “Dancing bears are just like us!” Either animals such as apes or dolphins (or even “artificially intelligent” computer programs) are just as smart as you, or you are just as flailingly ignorant as an animal.

These kinds of reductionist claims are all bogus: They are self-consuming, with the result that no one actually believes and acts upon them in his real-life, existential behavior. But affecting to make believe to pretend to uphold them necessarily results in cognitive dissonance and could lead to an enduring philosophical fatalism — the belief that nothing can be changed.

I discuss that kind of fatalism briefly with respect to the Tea Party’s victories this week, then tie it all back to the idea of evangelizing egoism.

Wednesday I had my first guest, and today I had my first heckler. I’m getting better, I think, at doing this kind of video, but I’m always eager to talk with people on these Spreecasts. If you have a topic you would like to take up, email me and we’ll figure something out.

The audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find the SelfAdoration.com podcast on iTunes.

Tuesday night, celebrating the Tea Party’s electoral victories, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the Instapundit, offered up these words in the Washington Examiner:

As millions of Americans were drawn into politics for the first time, many of them learned something important: It’s fun. It’s fun to elect candidates, fun to win elections — fun even to lose, sometimes, compared to staying home and shouting at the TV.

Politics is sanctified crime: Pushing innocent people around by force, usually by stealing the wealth they have earned and giving it unearned to your political allies. We have a name for people who find that kind of behavior “fun” — sociopaths. Not letting up on the terror, Reynolds goes still further:

Once involved in politics, people tend to stick around.

Ain’t that the truth?

I love it that liberty-loving candidates are running for electoral office — with a real chance of winning. But I fear for them, too — and for the rest of us. If we are to reduce the pestilence of government in our lives peacefully, we must shrink the leviathan state as we grew it — incrementally. That means that we must replace the politicians seeking to enslave us with others pursuing our manumission. But government is a cloying addiction, especially if you find politics “fun.”

I have many fears for liberty-seeking politicians, once they take office. For a first, power corrupts. What’s the point of having a sports car if you can’t push the accelerator to the red line? And once people start working together, enemies become friends. It’s easy to reach casual compromises when you get to know your philosophical opponents personally. Who doesn’t want to be cordial at work? And there is always the risk that earnest folks will choose to “do something” — that is, enact more sanctified crimes — in the face of some putative emergency.

I have a salve for those fears, though, a governing philosophy for Tea Party and libertarian politicians in one word: Cut.

If liberty-loving office-holders will focus only on eliminating government, never on growing it, nor even “reforming” it, they will be safe from the siren song of the state — (more…)

With no over-arching theme, here are some links to articles I’ve seen this week that I think are interesting:

Looking for a reality show worth caring about? A Dutch entrepreneur is going to use a reality show to populate a human colony on Mars. The idea put me in mind of The Man Who Sold the Moon.

Are economists little more than tools for tyrants? (h/t @jamesdeantx – James Pruitt)

Is IQ a valid measure of anything? Kindasorta — if nothing changes. But when rigorous education penetrates into formerly underserved populations, the Flynn Effect kicks in: IQs go up. So: Will online education bring on a “super” Flynn Effect? I think this is a wonderful possibility, potentially a massive increase in intellectual capital — the only true capital in all of human wealth. If you paid a ton of money for a bullshit academic education, you might not be quite as happy as I am.

Finally, when you are stuck waiting your turn at some government office, take a moment to consider the logistical nightmares of the Roman Empire. Standford has created a geospatial network model of the Roman world:

Spanning one-ninth of the earth’s circumference across three continents, the Roman Empire ruled a quarter of humanity through complex networks of political power, military domination and economic exchange. These extensive connections were sustained by premodern transportation and communication technologies that relied on energy generated by human and animal bodies, winds, and currents.

Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information. Cost, rather than distance, is the principal determinant of connectivity.

For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.

Taking account of seasonal variation and accommodating a wide range of modes and means of transport, ORBIS reveals (more…)

My second Spreecast was better and worse than the first.

It was worse because we got hit with a few technical gremlins, resulting in the videocast being split into two segments, which are embedded below.

But it was substantially better because I had my first live victim guest, Brian Brady from sunny San Diego, California.

Brian was one of the winners in the Tea Party’s victories last night, taking a seat on the San Diego County Republican Party’s Central Committee. He and I talked about his win last night and about the Tea Party’s prospects in office.

These were my notes for the broadcast, fleshed out to a fuller summary:

• Tea Party victories — Detailing last night’s wins, especially in Wisconsin and California
• Anti-Occupy Santa’s Lap? — Was part of what we saw last night a counter-reaction to the childish nonsense of the Occupy movement?
• Big reforms — What might the Tea Party accomplish in Washington? What could we hope that they might repeal?

• Commerce clause
• General welfare clause
• 16/17th Amendments
• Sovereign immunity

• Repeal business regulation
• Eliminate agencies and departments

• Cut, cut, cut — This is what I hope will be the governing philosophy of Tea Party candidates
• Cut spending
• Cut taxes
• Cut regulation
• Cut government staffing
• Cut government-owned real and chattel property — especially weapons
• Cut red tape

• The family business — It’s hard to say “no” to people you like
• Earnest men of good will — get sucked into sanctioning atrocious crimes
• Power corrupts — and absolute power corrupts absolutely

Here are some links to articles I have written in the past about achieving a gradual reduction in the size of government:

• A strategy for the Republican party that can actually win elections
• It’s not enough for the tea party movement to throw the bums out. To contain the federal government, we have to cut its powers.
• A rallying cry for the Tea Party rebellion: “You’re not the boss of me!”
• A real-estate professionals’ guide to anarchy in the USA

And here are today’s Spreecasts:

I’m doing this again Friday (more…)

Come Spree with me today at 11 am MST. I want to play with Spreecast.com to see what kind of talk radio video magic I can make. I have some Big Ideas I want to take up, but I’m also interested in talking to people about their ideas.

You’ll need to take yourself to the Spreecast link for Man Alive! — The Spreecast. If you create a free account, you can participate, either by text chat or by video. The videocast will stream live, and then it will be available by embed forevermore. Spreecast is a very cool service, putting shout-show style video into the hands of ordinary people.

Updated: Here is the finished Spreecast:

No one joined me live, alas, but 43 people watched at least some of the Spreecast in real time. I’ll do this again tomorrow, and I hope you will join me then.

The audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find the SelfAdoration.com podcast on iTunes.