lexicography.com

I am totally, completely, absolutely frozen at how willing the average everyday American is to apply the power of the state to his fellow citizens.

It started with me reading comments at Jane’s place, Asymetrical Information . Everyone was willing to use the powers of the state (which means physical force up to and including handcuffs, jail cells and guns) to determine how other citizens spent their wealth. The assumption was that the wealth was gained legally. If you wanted to buy a big house to impress your guests, well, they were perfectly willing to just simply take away your dollars, your earnings, as taken from a criminal, to make you do things with your money they more approved of.

Well you know, I could identify with your position, but it ends up with the most ruthless and dishonest political operative taking everything from any and all sundry. The whole idea that a good argument justifies taking property from someone leads to better and better arguments, and intimidation plus arguments, and intimidation alone and ultimately, brute force alone.

Then you will spend all your time trying to get on the good side of brute force and no time producing any goods. Everyone you know will spend all their effort and time getting on the good side of brute force and no time producing any goods at all.

In the end, you will look like the Soviets or the Cubins or the North Koreans.

Hear, hear, Jane.

I think that prison rape is one of the most appalling moral failings of our society, and I’ve said so before. Not that it happens at all . . . there is a real problem with prison design, which is that if you let the prisoners socialise, they will terrorise each other, and if you don’t, they go crazy. But that we basically don’t bother trying to stop it, and worse, that it is in fact the most prominently deterrant feature of our prison terms

Only, it is not an unsolvable problem of design. We are a wealthy beyond belief society. Give each prisoner a private room to sleep in. Place cameras in public areas and punish any prisoner who assault’s another prisoner.

Cost objections are a non starter. There are doggy day care centers with in ground pools springing up all over the place. The cost of a dorm room for each prisoner is peanuts.

Selective colleges widely discriminate against women.

Identical records will get a boy in to Harvard and a girl wait listed or rejected. That’s because girls have much, much better academic records and no co-ed college wants the girl to boy ratio to get out of hand. Once a college becomes something like sixty percent women, it becomes less attractive to women and men applicants alike, causing a real problem for it.

Sex is an immutable (mostly) characteristic. Discrimination against women should run into Constitutional 14th Amendment problems.

Let us all get on board and require colleges receiving federal dollars to take the sex (gender) identifying information off their applications. The applicant could be referred to by first and middle initial and last name. The sex (gender) box should be deleted. Interviews should be by written submission of questions with answers videotaped with voice and appearence disguise.

You know, when I wrote sex is immutable, of course I thought of sex change operations. Knowing the parents around here, they would consider changing their girls into boys for a better shot at Harvard. Totally unnecessary. Under modern thought, your sex is whatever you want it to be, boy, girl, neither or both. An operation is not required to change. Tell your little Patty to write her name as Pat, check the male “gender” box and enjoy the Ivy Edumacation.

Most above average girls can get into Harvard if they were believed by the admissions office to be boys.

I made a spate of comments at other blogs. I guess it lowers my blood pressure.

At Asymmetrical Information I objected to the general view that individuals should be allowed to do only what the body politic allowed. Over there rich individuals, should be subject to more taxes because they were more likely than poor people to waste their assets on things the commentators deemed worthless.

At some DA’s blog I defended jury nullification with posts about how the law makes us all felons nowadays.

Neither comment gained much traction.

I suppose we just have to play this hand out. Well at least I can make some Lexicography Predictions:

The difference between prosperous countries and poor countries is POLITICS. Past colonialism is irrelevant - the richest economies such as United States and Australia, were former colonies. Today, the politics of a country determines directly whether its people have want or abundance.

Now I did it, I got my tracker getting p-rn references. Guess I learned my lesson. No bad words for me.

Jane Galt, a libertarian, presumably believes in no initiation of force to take value from another person unless:

This is not an argument against redistribution per se, as some of my readers erroneously assumed. I think that there are good reasons to redistribute income (or in some cases, at least reasons that I would be prepared to debate): preventing hunger, cold, and premature death; maximising the opportunities that children have to lead a rich and satisfying life; giving a helping hand to those who have been brought low by fate, or even their own earlier bad decisions. I was not arguing that disfiguring Cindy Crawford was in any way equivalent to these; it is not.

Cite. If someone is hungery, your property is insecure, if someone is cold, your property is insecure, if someone’s kids need tuition to Harvard, you pay, someone who would have a valid claim on their insurance policy, if they had insurance, can instead reach into your pocket since you managed to run your affairs so as there are a few dollars in your pocket to take.

How is this libertarian?

I was shocked at the comments to the following post:

Should we cut down the tall poppies to give the shorter ones more light?

It is a basic question about how we should order our lives. I was shocked because maybe ninety percent of the commentators seemed to agree that if they, or they plus a majority of other people, did not agree with how a rich person spent their money, it was a legitimate political enterprise to readjust those rich people.

Some might say: You may spend $10 million for an old master painting because I agree on the value of old paint on canvas, and your money may be spent on what I agree with, but if you buy something I deem just a purchase to impress others - well, we should tax the money away from you before you could waste your money on such things.

Ownership and cultivation of real property is a crime or parasitic? What would you have, collective ownership of real estate in America? Do yo have any idea how this collective ownership would play out? Someone would have to control the use, in the name of a collective. How will the use someone puts the property to be judged in relation to the interest of the beneficiaries? Will the beneficiaries vote (the whole body politic for each land use)? Will the users be fiduciaries subject to judicial review? What court is equipped to judge if a use of land is the best use of the land for the common good of a large political group?

What I find most frightening is that the post authoress, Jane Galt, identifies herself as a libertarian yet says:

While I am much more sanguine than most libertarians about redistributing material wealth from the richer to the poorer (though by the standards of the rest of America, I am still a hard-hearted materialist lout), I cannot believe in this sort of redistribution–”cutting down the tall poppies”, as I believe the Australians call it.

What libertarian principle allows redistributing material wealth? If this is use of words as commonly used, the “distributing” in the “redistributing” above is assumed to be done by force. When someone voluntarily buys a Coke from the corner store no one calls it redistributing money.

The “re” in the “redistributing” means change from one givin distribution to another distribution for no other reason than the topography of the original distribution. Redistribution of wealth means mostly taking form high income to give to low income.

What libertarian agrees to movement of private property (wealth) from one person to another by force because the first person has more than the second? Jane, I know one million people on the face of the Earth that have less wealth than you do - not personally but sure as anything there are a million.