A series of short ostinatos took umbrage with my post on Botswana. She says:

“I can’t help but notice that this is being reported by The 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, a product of The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal? All you have to do is count the number of times the word “free” is used as a replacement for “unregulated”. Also, scroll to the bottom and read the bit about “Labor Freedom.” Right. I know what this is trying to say and what it’s really saying, and I’m calling bullshit.”

Now the Wall Street Journal, while less bad than the rest of the MSM, is still fairly statist and buys into protectionist and keynesian fallacies, and the staff of that paper lacks the stones to say what needs to be said.

But lets just assume that the WSJ / Heritage Foundation is as “capitalist” as this person says. So… by the standards of capitalists, Botswana has a freer market than their neighbors. And according to stats from numerous sources, Botswana is a better place to live than their neighbors:

Libya $11,354

South Africa $11,035

Botswana $10,866

Tunisia $8,223

Algeria $7,095

Gabon $6,977

Namibia $6,658

Cape Verde $6,287

Morocco $5,765

Swaziland $5,181

Egypt $4,282

Angola $2,829

Ghana $2,601

Sudan $2,417

Zimbabwe $2,413

And it goes downhill from there. Equatorial Guinea is an oil-state, with 70% of the population living under $2 / day. Mauritius and Seychelles are tax-haven Islands, so I threw them out.

So yes, countries that have free markets by the capitalist definition of free… do better. All you did was say “these are capitalist standards of freedom”. Which they are, which is why the predict prosperity so well.

But on the point of “regulation”. What we know about what is labeled a regulation is that you will have some force applied to you if you behave in a way deemed illegal. That is what is objectively true about a “regulation”. If you believe some “regulation” is needed or that some are not, that is an issue to be debated.

For more on regulations watch one of my many videos on this myopic subject, or just read my book which is a great book that you objectively ought to read.

http://www.heritage.org/Index/Country/Botswana

GDP (PPP):

$25.5 billion

-1.0% growth

3.5% 5-year compound annual growth

$13,392 per capita

“Botswana is a regional leader in economic freedom. Competitiveness and flexibility are promoted by a sensible business regulatory environment, openness to foreign investment and trade, and relatively flexible employment regulations. The financial sector remains relatively well developed, with an independent central bank and little government intervention. The independent judiciary provides strong protection of property rights.”

Any by easy, I mean the answer is easy: free markets. By the time Botswana’s neighbors have equality with the US equivalent of a “white trash” former colonial white minority in their country, Botswana will have “equality” with western europe.

Obviously the implementation would be difficult.

Weight Loss Hypnosis

Alrighty, I did one of these a while back, and I’d be interested in the viewer response to this. I’ve seen people on youtube doing these, and I thought “I can do that”, so this is my attempt at a hypnosis. For my first one I’ll be doing it on weight loss. No promises though, I have no idea if this will work or be fail whale.

I remember talking to a more serious hypnotist about what he does, and got on the topic of politics, and he said, “No lets not go into that, that breaks the trance like you wouldn’t believe”. Well it’s a bit late for me!

I had my window open so you get to hear the wind blowing past the mic.

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Now it’s fine to disagree on things. I think orchestral metal is the best music genre evar, and most people disagree. That’s fine. My favorite color is green, most people’s favorite color is blue (that’s why all the big websites are colored blue), and more people have red as their favorite color than green. I prefer vanilla bean and I don’t find chocolate ice cream worth the effort of eating.

But those are all in the category of “subjective values”, as opposed to “truth”. When I disagree with someone on matters of truth, then obviously either one of us or both of us are very very wrong. Since truth is the goal, we should then argue until one of us convinces the other, or perhaps we convince each other on things. But once this process is over, we should find ourselves holding identical positions on the matter of truth in question.

When I was debating the “anarcho-capitalists”, it was a perfect match, because they broadly think this way too. So I would continue arguing with them - over a period of weeks - nonstop, trying to convince them and understand at the same time, until I found myself holding “their positions” which are now very very much my own.

But this leads to a curious development: the analytic thinkers eventually all end up believing the same things (for the most part). Not only that, but they begin to realize which arguments are the best for the identical position, and thus all say the same arguments. Culty? Well it appears that way to people with more tolerance for disagreements on matters of truth.

I do not get it, it’s just bizarre to me. These people will go on the internet or discuss IRL philosophy and politics, disagree, but then smile and say, “that’s interesting, I never thought of that” but then go on holding different positions. WHY WERE THEY EVEN TALKING IF THEY WEREN’T GOING TO CHANGE THEIR BELIEFS BASED ON THE COURSE OF THE DISCUSSION!!!???

This leads to the curious result of groups of holistic thinkers being:

1. More diverse in their views on matters of truth than analytic groups of people and

2. Less likely to change their positions in response to reasoning than analytic groups of people

That is, they’re more diverse and more operationally closed-minded.

Now I view this as just being the way realized truth manifests. “We” all agree on gravity and on the earth being round. The whole world agrees on this and will use very similar arguments to defend these positions.

So really we are all on a continuum of holistic and analytic thinking. Some things are so obvious at this point in history that everyone agrees on it, though some things are only obvious to small pockets (that the very notion of a state is utopian).

Cult? More like a mutation. Most new ideas, like most mutations, fail. But without mutations, progress never comes. And this is one reason I hate universities - they reify truth and prevent mutation.

Some would say, “on a completely free market, think tanks and organizations will pop up spouting all kinds of out-there ideas!” - which is totally true. Lots of mutations. Problems with that? Not really, since on a total market there’s no state, no army, no apparatus of compulsion, and states cannot be sustained by force alone (read my book, I’m not spelling that out here).

There’s little debate on the nature of god among atheists. There’s little debate on morality among moral nihilists. And there’s little debate on the optimal nature of the state among anti-statists. All three groups are lockstep. So when someone repeats the old “dogma” dogma and cries cult over alternative consensuses, just think about how truth has won out in other subjects.

The 24 Types of Authoritarian

Expanding Horizons

http://anarchyinyourhead.com/2009/05/22/soul-crushing2/

I was drinking soda, and I saw the last line, and I spurt stinging soda out of my nose after reading the last line. I showed it to some peeps, and they were like, “dude, it’s not that funny”. Oh I disagree!

http://anarchyinyourhead.com/2010/02/19/a-clean-butt-is-a-happy-butt/

2010 FDA Budget Total: $3.18b

From Congressional Budget Authority: $2.35b

From User Fees: $828m

——————————————————————

Outlays in millions of dollars

Foods: 828

Human Drugs: 908

Biologics: 305

Animal Drugs: 171

HQ and Commissioner Office: 205

National Toxicological Research Center: 59

Rent, Facility Maintainence, and Misc.: 313

——————————————————————

Profits from the 8 largest US Pharmaceutical Companies in 2009

Eli Lily: 4.328b

Bristol-Meyers Squibb: 4.420b

Abbott Labs: 5.746b

Astrazeneca: 7.544b

Novartis: 8.454b

Pfizer: 8.635b

Johnson & Johnson: 12.226b

Merck: 13.024b

Now lets grant some very generous assumptions. Lets grant that all the stuff the FDA spends money on is necessary, lets not question the FDA budget at all. Then lets assume that these 8 pharmaceutical companies would have to pay for the entire FDA budget, which is $3.18b, ignoring that $828m already come from companies that are regulated.

These 8 companies would have to spend 4.9% of their profits to cover the expenses of the entire FDA. So in terms of financial burden, regulation on a free market is not a problem. You may say there is more of an incentive problem, and I would disagree, but for now we can agree that food and drug regulation is not an issue in terms of the companies having enough money to do it.

But this is a misleading comparison, because really there are many more companies, including food companies and biotech companies, and these companies are already paying about 1/4 of the FDAs fees. But I’m not going to analyze across all industries affected by the FDA, so I’ll just guess each of these companies would really only be losing about 1% in profit.

“Unlike these companies you mentioned, the comparative amount of money needed to put heir stamp on a drug verses a toaster or dishwasher is an astronomical difference. This ensures that it is a hard to enter market, and one or 2 companies would hold the monopoly. The idea is one I’ve heard of before. Any agency like this, as profit is their only goal would also be just fine with just appearing to be safe as opposed to actually being safe. BP is treating this crisis as a PR problem mostly”

Well we’ve already debunked the first assertion, and the second assertion is just silly. I guess the less than 4.9% reduction in profits is going to knock eli lily, bristol-meyers squibb, Abbott labs, astrazeneca and pfizer out of the market.

But the second statement is really bizarre. Profit. Well first off Underwriter’s laboratory and the American Dairy Association and Council, the companies anubis is referring to, are non-profit companies. I’m not sure what ADA he’s referring to, but the American Dental Association is non-profit, and the American Diabetes Association is a non-profit, so there are plenty of non-profit trade associations, but unfortunately these agencies have lost their teeth once state regulation came to dominate.

But aside from that, all individuals attempt to profit. Agents of the FDA are going to try to get the most out of doing the least, that is FDA officials have just as much an incentive to cut corners than any other agency. Profit and loss don’t disappear just because it’s a state agency, they just manifest in different ways. Fear of profit is just inane.

Moreover, the FDA will not go out of business. So if say FDA agents get bribed, and it is uncovered, maybe some people will get fired in a congressional hearing, but the FDA will still be in business. Now if you’re the owner of a grocery store, and you hear that one of the regulatory agencies you rely on is taking bribes, would you seek out some other regulatory agency? I would. And if my company was a large chain like Albertsons, Wal-Mart, Vons, Costco or whatever, this process would be standardized.

If the FDA is found to take bribes or cut corners somehow, it doesn’t matter. You still have to get approved by them.

Then Anubis brings up the BP spill. Now what actually happened is that Ken Salazar, Obama administration secretary of interior, granted Deepwater Horizons, the oil rig that failed, a categorical exclusion from inspection. I have a video just on that which I’ll link in the description, but no, the BP disaster was a failure of government regulation, and Walter Block outlined a system of private property in oceans and how it would work better, which I’ll link to as well.

“You do realize that UL and the ADA are also government regulated right? Both work so well because there is a government and civilian oversight. 2 layers of coverage is better than one. If the drug companies wanted to they could probably easily set up something of the same but it would be regulated too, they just have not found it financially worth it.”

Well I have no idea what he means by “is government regulated”. All companies are “regulated” somehow. 

And if you want two layers of oversight, you can have two different agencies, so it’s more difficult to bribe one or if one cuts corners you’ll still get your product properly inspected by the other company in time for you to find another backup. You don’t need government to have multiple layers of coverage.

And the reason there aren’t third party drug testing companies is because these companies have to comply with the FDA. That is, there already is a third party, and while it may make sense to have one, it doesn’t make sense to form another now that the FDA exists. Though pharmaceutical companies do test their products in their own labs, but they don’t need to make it third party because the public already believes the FDA is the third party.

Now this is actually a very dangerous situation, because the FDA is overestimated by the public as all government agencies are. And this is something close to an analytic truth, because states cannot exist by force alone as proven by revolutions, thus they are sustained by belief - which need not be gung-ho patriotism but could just be resigned acceptance - the belief in either the inevitability or necessity of the state. This means that people believe that agents of the state are for some reason insulated from the problems of human action, which results in them saying absurd things like, “people can’t do X, thus we need people called state to do X.”

If it was just some private rating agency, people would be much more skeptical, which they should be with the FDA because there’s no reason to believe the FDA is any better than a private company.

Let me end this by saying that I don’t support a stateless society because I think products would be safer, I think they would be about as safe as they are today. I support a stateless society for other reasons. This stuff on regulation is purely defensive.

Video On Which the Comments Occurred:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZLb7L5oFZY

FDA Budget:

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AboutFDA/ReportsManualsForms/Reports/BudgetReports/UCM153879.pdf

List of Largest Pharmaceuticals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pharmaceutical_companies

Walter Block’s Idea:

http://mises.org/media/5197

The Free Will of British Petroleum:

http://fringeelements.info/post/686234867/the-free-will-of-british-petroleum-something

An example of FDA Fast-Tracking their Favorite Companies:

http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10003609/amphastars-accusations-v-fdas-woodcock-look-like-maneuvering/

People are greedy, all are. Some value money, some value reputation, and they do what they believe needs to be done to get what they want.

So when a firm gets caught violating the property of others (as BP did with this oil spill - pollution is just a form of property violation and would be treated as such on a total market), saying it was caused by “greed” means nothing. For the BP oil spill, it was caused by BP thinking they could get away with cutting corners - since they weren’t being inspected thanks to Obama admin. Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar granting BP a categorical exclusion from environmental inspection.

If they didn’t think they could get away with it, they wouldn’t have done it. The obvious solution to the problem is to come up with some sort of private property arrangement with the oceans, as outlined by Walter Block:

http://mises.org/media/5197

But I’m getting ahead of myself. “Greed” is a non-answer. People are greedy, all are, including Mother Teresa, and as far as we know will be forever. So when one says a bunch of tripe about “greed”, it’s probably because they lack any legitimate understand of the incentive structures involved.

Competing Currency Being Accepted in Mid-Michigan

Unfortunately, government agencies only accept Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs), and you must pay your taxes in FRNs. And so the need to FRNs will never go away completely, they can be marginalized to the fake economy. Real money for real productivity, fake money for fake productivity.

“The Series that Needs to be Done” is now “The Series that NeedED to be Done” … because it’s done.

And it is linked.

Enjoy, or not.

But I can rest now, it’s like a large abcess that had been growing on me has just been drained. Though I doubt anyone on this site can relate once they read it.

My political compass

“emergentist” = me, though not the wikipedia definition.

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There wasn’t much fanfair about the general turn in the institutionalist’s response to libertarians.

I think at first they didn’t know how to respond, but then came the tea parties, with their unorganized and hence uncensored message. Racism.

The Ron Paul memos which - as far as I know didn’t say anything factually incorrect, though said it in a rather heavy-handed way - were a clue. It was in the past, written by someone else, and so wasn’t very effective per se.

But then some idiot bloggers decided to meet up and have a “tea party” - unorganized and unscreened propaganda - then swarms of idiots throughout the land started doing the same thing. Lets say 5% hold overtly racist signs - that’s thousands. That’s enough to make it look like a majority on TV. Then came the birthers, then came Rand Paul’s defense of property, though executed poorly.

So, from this debacle we can glean 3 things:

1. The propaganda campaign wasn’t planned, and so it’s DOA. The GOP establishment tried to co-opt the “tea partiers”, and I believe they tried to to do damage control and censor the protests. Unfortunately, the GOP establishment is part of who the tea partiers are railing against, and so they can’t control it.

2. Tea partiers and many “libertarians” hold signs decrying the number of immigrants, which doesn’t jibe with the concept of “liberty”. This prevented the “tea partiers” in general from being able to fall back on principle.

3. Rand Paul made his absolute support for private property, but Rand Paul also supports immigration restriction. Thus his stance cannot be characterized as principled, but is ad-hoc. And given the way demographics are going, libertarians are going to have to win the hispanic vote anyway.

So what the libertarian movement needs is:

1. Greater centralization of protest events. You can’t just allow anyone to be part of a protest group, they need to be screened and bad seeds forcefully excluded and dissociated.

2. A centrally determined and strict limitation of membership. So if Glenn Beck rails at too many brown people “infesting” Arizona (as if they’re some disease), and then tries to say “I’m a libertarian”, the party would say, “no you’re not”.

3. More focus on deep economic education in a readable way. My book is a model for this, though my knowledge and writing ability is limited, but it would be something like my book, but much much better. The goal would be to print millions of copies of this book and hand them out to people. Make then ubiquitous. If they can be printed at $10 each, then $20 million in donations would lead to 2 million books.

- Of course the institutional media would set about to debunk it, and that’s fine. When 5 different talk show hosts talked about how terrible this book is in very serious tones… wouldn’t you be a bit interested in what this book said? And since the book is ubiquitous, it would be very easy to get one - or read online since the content will be creative commons / share alike.

4. A clear and unambiguous open-borders stance. Be the only party that takes that position. Without a clear open-borders position on the one hand, one cannot effectively defend race-based exclusion of property on the other (which will happen on a total market. It does, though veiled, even today).

And lastly, this border debate is going to be remembered similar to the Jim Crow debate. For now it’s a battle with the “moderate” position being limited freedom, but in 50 years there’s only going to be one position on this issue. So make sure to say “open borders!” loud and clear enough for the people 50 years in the future to hear you.

And look: any political movement, to survive, is going to have to win a big chunk of the mexican vote anyway. There will be no “white victory”, those days will soon be gone. To win, you’re going to have to win in multiple blocs.

Since “libertarianism”, I believe, has been prevented from making any new ground, what is needed is a new movement that is consistent and centralized and focused on establishing principles - which just means handing out books that explain the philosophy from top to bottom.

Trying to get on TV and reach an audience in larger blasts doesn’t work because you don’t control it. They can take your clip, cut it up and play bits out of context and then “cover” your response in a way that does much of the same. Don’t waste time on media outlets you don’t control.

I was at a pro-immigration rally where I live, and I got to see the protest - the type I saw on TV, right up close. This protest was not spontaneous, it was highly organized. In the protest were a few people with some signs that offended me, saying some things about white people, the kind of thing Rush and FOX would pick up on. The designated organizers, with bullshorns and an orange vest, told these people with these racist signs in no uncertain terms that they would not be a part of the main group.

The “tea party” movement, from what I can tell, has no real head. There are a few people who are trying to co-opt it, but no central agency controls the tea party movement, the tea party movement is a spontaneous movement, and that is why it will fail, or some say already has failed.

I was reading this thing on “psywarrior.com”, and it had a section on what goebbels said about propaganda. Now for propaganda, Goebbels and Hitler are the guys you want to listen to. The Nazi Party was heavily demonized by the establishment media in Germany, and so they had to make their own propaganda outlets to deal with the combined opposition of the conservatives, communists and social democrats. And the nazis were able to get enough votes that it was close enough that they could rig the election and intimidate certain people away from the voting booths. I’m of the opinion that the nazis didn’t have majority support, but they got enough to where they could smash and grab that last 5% or whatever Hitler needed.

Anyway, that page said that one of goebbels’ principles was that “Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority.” And when I read that, I thought about that protest organizer who kept out the racist mexicans, and how the “tea party” is NOT doing that. Because it is spontaneous, the racist elements come to the fore and are not censored. And conservatives tend not to protest as much, and so are inexperienced. “Leftists”, for lack of a better word, know better.

I’m also reminded that Vladmir Lenin hated spontaneous revolts as well. The russian revolution, often portrayed as having a dramatic shooting battle on a winter night with scores of revolutionary workers  storming the gates, was really just a few sailors, methodically and rather haphazardly firing a few shots at the winter palace in Leningrad. This was all premeditated and led by Lenin, with planning every step of the way.

The important thing is not the protest itself, but the show it puts on for the cameras. For example, the Nazi rallies had their own cameramen who used tricks to make the rally look larger, and only showed clips of individuals when they agreed with Hitler. That is what worked.

In short, spontaneous revolutions and protests are fail whale. Don’t do them, because idiots will carry idiotic signs and can be pointed to, and the whole “movement” gets tarred with that. If I were to lead a protest, it would be highly organized with a central agency that printed enough signs for everyone. People could make their own signs as well but they would have to be approved.

A New Direction

Holistic vs. Analytic thinking, and propaganda.