Are sugary-drink-guzzling New Yorkers getting a reprieve from Big Brother?

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s looming law to ban Big Soda is vicious in all kinds of ways.

The idea is to stop an individual from drinking “too much” sugary drink during a snack or meal. Under the ban, sometimes you’d be able to buy more than 16 ounces of soda in a single container, sometimes not.

Bloomberg has touted the ease of evading the regulation as a reason not to be disturbed by it. Settle down, doomsayers! If you’re so thirsty, just buy a more expensive multiple of small servings! Meanwhile, he’s saving us from the plight of obesity, or so he pretends to think. People are dying, Bloomberg reminds us. True enough, we’re all mortal. And we all take various risks in the process of living our lives. Sometimes in relation to the food and drink we ingest! Ergo, why not make the time we have left as uncomfortable and tyranny-ridden as possible? (Hmm…mightn’t the oppression itself, though, serve to abbreviate our life spans–or anyway chip away at the quality of our lives–by thwarting our ability to judge for ourselves how to sustain our lives, including how to apportion what we ingest, as well as by depressing our spirits vis-a-vis how hard it has become to escape the mandates and rhetoric of the gun-toting nannies of the world? It might!)

Whether the ban is futile or one more step toward telescreens in every room to monitor our every nutritional move, or both, New Yorkers who reject this immoral violation of their rights now have a friend in Justice Milton Tingling, who has blocked implementation of the ban in part on the grounds of its “uneven enforcement.”

“Uneven enforcement” is the least of the problem. I’m sure you can imagine that if the law were allowed to stand, Bloomberg and other government functionaries bloated with statist inclinations would have no problem saying “hey, sure, let’s harden the prohibition to make it more consistent.” Next he’d be soliciting bids from telescreen companies.

To be sure, Justice Tingling also decries the blubbery “administrative Leviathan” that would be spawned by the ban.

The city is appealing the ruling. Who will win? Bloomberg, arch enemy of adipose and individual rights, or the rights of liquid-drinking New Yorkers?

A partial solution to the it’s-in-a-box-somewhere problem

Having moved so often, I have become skilled of the art of moving. Perhaps I am not a professional but at least I am a gifted amateur. One thing I learned to do is label boxes of books “A,” “B,” and “C,” in the order in which they were to be unpacked. It takes a long time to unpack the boxes. After my most recent move I never did finish unpacking them, in part because I don’t have the room to shelve them all.

The point I am approaching is that I often know that I have a certain book in my library but am unable to easily get the book because it’s in a box somewhere instead of on a shelf. Recently I came across a recommendation of The Art of Cross-Examination by Francis Wellman. This volume, purchased many years ago, is in my library and may even be on a shelf, but I did not bother to look. Via Google I soon found two free pdf editions, one more cleanly typeset than the other, and downloaded the cleaner version to the Goodreader app on my iPad mini. These days, a reasonably readable free electronic edition of almost any classic text out of copyright can be gotten within a few minutes.

Part Two of The Art of Cross-Examination includes transcripts of famous cross-examinations. I began reading John K. Porter’s examination of Charles J. Guiteau, who assassinated President James Garfield on instructions from God, as Guiteau believed or pretended to believe. Wellman writes that the defendant was “cleverly led [by Porter's cross-examination] to picture himself to the civilized world as a moral monstrosity.” Porter grills the assassin about when God inspired him to do the deed, when he realized the notion had been instilled by God, whether he initially disagreed with God about the feasibility of killing the President, etc. Goiteau’s thought of killing Garfield seems exactly like the kind of thought that might occur to a person had no deity implanted it. His insistence that God authorized the deed seems like what a rationalization of his own decision to commit it would seem like.

If one believes in God, how does one distinguish between a thought that has not been injected into one’s head by God but which one has convinced oneself (or at least is trying to convince oneself) has been thus injected, and a thought that has in fact been thus injected? In light of the fact that there is no God, there is no way to do it, no distinction to be made. The former is always the case.

After Obama’s reelection, give up or give clarity?

The only chance to achieve major progress toward a fundamental alternative to Obama’s socialism and dictats is to offer a fundamental alternative to these. Never mind about ground game, polling methodologies, tactical blips and blunders. Suppose Romney had managed to eke out a narrow victory. How then could he have proceeded to repeal Obamacare and lead the way to the massive spending and tax cuts that are needed? Would he have even been inclined to fight for them?

Of course Obama is hard-core leftie and vicious, much worse than Romney; so we would have had a better chance to expand our freedom and improve our economy with Romney than with Obama. But Romney is muddled at best. In Massachusetts, he signed off on Romneycare, the proto-clone of Obamacare. Romney would most likely have sought to entrench aspects of Obamacare he “could agree with,” and otherwise fecklessly prepared the way for the next Democratic incursions. It may well be true, as Romney infamously speculated, that 47%+ of voters “can’t” be–or, at least in the short term, won’t allow themselves to be–reached by any appeal to values of freedom and self-reliance and non-robbery-of-thy-neighbors. But let’s find that out instead of trying to guess at it by offering only a muddled and self-contradictory alternative to full-throttle Obama-style statism. Alleged friends of freedom who divine from this defeat that the best way to proceed is to give up for lost even more of our rights and freedoms so as to avoid alienating the most recalcitrant Obama supporters are following the same failed strategy that has so often served to entrench and expand the welfare state since at least the New Deal. You don’t win battles you don’t fight.

What should Republicans in Congress do now? For one, obstruct. Don’t, for example, raise the debt ceiling–i.e., act instead as if the ceiling is a ceiling. Offer, at the very least, a balanced budget. Why not? And push for it. Don’t give up when demonized by the lib-dems. Expose their obfuscations and lies. Etc.

For two, explain–clearly, simply, repeatedly–what is at stake, what will happen to our wealth and freedom if the looters of our wealth and freedom are allowed to keep on stealing them and eroding our ability to foster our own well-being. Explain how our wealth and freedom will decline, ever more precipitously. And how it will then be harder not only for the productive people, but for everybody, to survive. Europe is the preview. Explain also that stealing stuff is wrong.

Did Roy A. Childs Jr. suffer from ‘Archist Illusions’?

Two distinguished libertarian and anarchist friends of the late, great Roy A. Childs Jr. (1949-1992) suppose that Roy likely had suspect motives for his change of mind about anarchism later in life, and perhaps also for his failure to explain his reasons for his change of mind in print during the years of his declining health before he died in 1992.

In a recent post at Cato’s libertarianism.org in which he endorses psycho-speculations of Roy’s motives offered by Ron Neff, George H. Smith reports that Roy toward the end of his life told him that he believed that anarchism is impractical. But a sarcastic remark by Smith, which he recalls now with regret, unfortunately ended the conversation before Roy could elaborate. Ron Neff, for his part, cites Roy’s earlier reference to the messy situation in Lebanon. “He referred to the condition into which Lebanon had fallen after the shelling of Beirut by Israel in September of [1982], and he said that that was what anarchism would produce.” For Neff, the import of this example is somehow unlikely to represent what he calls “the whole story” of Roy’s rejection of his famously influential anarchist views. Another old friend of Roy’s, Jeff Riggenbach, offers a fine profile of Roy for Riggenbach’s Libertarian Tradition podcast that stresses the influence of Roy’s early anarchism but also scrupulously neglects to mention his eventual repudiation of that anarchism.

That anarchism or anarcho-capitalism can’t coherently function to objectively protect individual rights doesn’t seem a bad reason for believing that anarchism is impractical from the perspective of someone who values life, justice, rights, liberty. In the anarcho-capitalist society, what indeed is to be done about competing gangs—oops, competing “defense agencies”? Would a government concerned about (actual) rights and (actual) freedom and (actual) justice be justified in outlawing fundamentally competing brands of physically-enforced justice? Would a genuinely just, libertarian “defense agency” be justified in “competing with”—i.e., using force to stop—a “defense agency” determined to impose reparations for slavery, to impose reparations for the taking of Indian land, to stop abortions by force, or to extract the “surplus labor value” that the rich capitalists “steal” from their employees?

That anarchism is incompatible with the protection of individual rights is obvious from reading the news. Look at what the Mafia Defense Agency does. Look at what the PLO Defense Agency does. Look at what the Al Qaeda Defense Agency does. Such annoyingly obtrusive facts as the chronic conduct of these defense agencies are meaningless, though, we’re told. Anarchists tend to reply, “There you go again. That kind of bloody conflict among power-lusting gangs is not what we mean by defense agencies or an anarcho-capitalist society. What we mean is the smoothly functioning rights-respecting ‘defense agencies’ of our disconnected-from-facts-on-the-ground theoretical books and journal papers, a society in which everybody is always carrying around a copy of the Libertarian Law Code and has sworn to it eternal fealty, ever ready to submit to arbitration in case of a dispute the defense agencies can’t resolve amongst themselves as if the last three thousand years of human history had never happened. Human beings aren’t evil by nature, after all.”

In other words, anarchists merely assume that none of the proposed defense agencies would in fact actually be competing at the most fundamental level—i.e., at the level of what vision and package of justice, rights, and proper use of coercion they would be promoting in the brochure—a level at which they would not be inclined in good faith to accept binding adjudication of disputes if they happen to hold the exact opposite view of rights and justice as the party doing the adjudicating.

What happens, according to the anarcho-capitalists, in the anarcho-capitalist society with respect to fundamentally different uses of coercion? Is it that the defense agencies will be free to compete at the very most fundamental level, but that they simply won’t want to, all criminal, leftie and jihadic motivations for violating actual rights having evaporated as soon as the anarcho-capitalist program gets the go-ahead? Or would there, after all, be some kind of mutually accepted and enforced ban on the wrongful use of force? If the latter, would there or would there not be enforceable mechanisms in place for adjudicating disputes among the defense agencies, and for declining to renew the license of a defense agency that tries to blow up World Trade Centers in the name of the Allah Defense Code?

Problem, though: as soon as any such reasonable, enforceable constraints are imposed on the defense agencies independently of their preferences in a particular dispute, we are talking about an apparatus of limited government, not about anarchism or anarcho-capitalism. The defense agencies would be governed by this government. They wouldn’t be allowed to secede to institute a contrary program of justice, rights and coercion.

To be sure, unfettered government is also misbegotten with respect to the purpose of safeguarding genuine rights. So what, then, would be a practical means of protecting life, liberty and property in a society? We the people would have to institute a government restricted to the defense and enforcement of individual rights, an institution the attaining and maintaining of which depends a lot on education, ideas and culture. (Which means that anarchists are wrong to suggest, as some do, that governments virtually automatically devolve into tyrannies—ideas and culture being potent in their view except when they matter not at all.) Such a limited government could accept a lot more competition in means of protecting rights than we see today; but it could not permit citizens to protect their rights anywhichway whatever, especially when there is no immediate threat to life and limb.

According to Neff, it’s unlikely that Roy Childs could have honestly come to the view that his youthful and rationalistic arguments for anarchism were mistaken. (By rationalism, here, I mean theoretical web-spinning that may be very smart and persuasive on its own self-contained terms but which inadequately takes into account critical facts on which the theory should be based.) For Neff, Roy’s change of mind was more likely strategic than genuine, a product of short-term political calculation. “I do not think he meant by [his claim that anarchism is not practical] that anarchism was an ideal that could never be achieved, or that competing defense agencies could not behave justly. I think he meant that anarchism merely exacerbated the alienation from American culture its adherents already felt, especially adherents who came from an Objectivist background,” Neff contends, as if Roy hadn’t pointed to Lebanon. (Only Roy’s every explicit reference to the question of anarchism versus limited government in his later years would tend to suggest that he meant what he said.)

Says Smith: “Though speculative, Neff’s explanation of what was really going on with Roy’s refutation of anarchism is, in my judgment, exactly on point, so I refer readers to his account for additional details.” In the same article, Smith also suggests that Roy’s employment of Objectivistic arguments in certain essays defending anarchism was mediated primarily by his desire to appeal rhetorically to Objectivist readers rather than by his own sympathy with Objectivist ideas.

All this strained imputation of merely strategic profession of conviction strikes me as gratuitous at best, a smear at worst. If Smith and Neff are right, Roy, dead at 43, was one of the most disingenuous severely-ailing non-writers of an essay he never got around to that ever bestrode lower Manhattan. But is it really so implausible to suppose that their good friend changed his mind about anarchism because Roy was a good thinker and a man of integrity who concluded that anarcho-capitalism is incoherent as a means of instituting a free society in large part due to the hardly irrelevant fact that it is?

No, Apple did not commit a crime by introducing the iPad 4

Traumatized IPad 3 owners may be demanding “justice” for the terrible precipitation of their buyer’s remorse, but no injustice is involved in Apple’s bringing out a successor to iPad 3 faster than expected. The capacities of the iPad 3 are not impaired by the arrival of iPad 4, and Apple is not contractually obligated to adopt a slower update schedule than is feasible and that Apple deems appropriate simply because some customers would have preferred a slower schedule. Buyer’s remorse comes with the tech territory. There’s no “injustice” implied by rapid technological development or by a firm’s desire to produce better products than rivals are producing.

Would it be bad if Apple were able to introduce substantially improved versions of the iPad, or of any of its flagship products, once a month? On the contrary, it would mean a much faster pace of technological development than is currently possible. It would mean a net benefit for all new customers of these products. This would be “unjust”?

Ebooks are not overpriced if you are buying them at their price

Animating some of the commenters in this Amazon discussion is a certain medieval “just price” notion according to which certain books, and in particular ebooks as a category, are supposedly “overpriced.” (I assume that this complaint exempts the hundreds of thousands of books we can obtain for 99 cents each or for 0 cents each.)

If Amazon were to charge $1,000 for an ordinary paperback that would typically sell for $7.95, it is unlikely that Amazon could move a single copy. But this $1,000 paperback would not be overpriced with respect to some Platonic abstract principle of The One True Price to which a disgruntled reader might appeal as he flings accusations of “greed and price-fixing.” It is, rather, overpriced with respect to what can be sold and earn a profit in the marketplace.

If I own a rare first-edition copy of a paperback in pristine condition, and I know I can sell it on eBay for $1,000, should I sell it for $7.95 (or perhaps $2.95) for the sake of protecting myself from JoCr’s accusations of “greed and price fixing”? If I seek a profit by participating in the marketplace, my profit-seeking is per se “greedy,” i.e., self-interested. But as philosopher and commentator Tibor Machan has often noted, the buyer is “greedy” too; he wants the most bang for his buck, just as I want the most buck for my bang. The buyer makes the trade because he values what I’m selling more than what he gives me in exchange for that good. If he knows that he can get a better deal in terms of price and convenience, though, he’s apt to take that better deal.

As a seller, I can “set” any price I wish for my wares (at least if Uncle Sam doesn’t intrude with orders to desist from alleged “price fixing”). But I must take into account how market conditions, including the valuations of buyers, determine the range of prices I can charge if I am to both sell my product and earn a profit. To overprice my product means to sell it at a price that too few customers will pay or that none at all will pay. That’s an error, of course; but it’s not in itself reprehensible. Similarly, I would not call a customer maleficently greedy for missing out on a good deal because he erroneously thought a better deal was just down the road.

Get ready for still more tightening of the leash, O holy socialists

Some devout Catholics who have supported Obamafascistcare but who oppose contraception and who especially oppose the use of abortifacients, i.e., the kind of contraception that kills incipient fetuses, are upset by the Obama administration’s recent decision to compel church-run institutions to provide contraceptives free of charge to their charges and employees.

What did religious socialists expect? That only their own judgment and conscience in matters directly and indirectly medical was not to be downtrodden by the rulers and regulators imposing the million and one rules authorized by Obamafascistcare?

If one awards a government dictatorial new powers, as Congress did when it passed Obamafascistcare over the objections of the merely sane and informed, those dictatorial powers will be used to–guess what–dictate. Persons will be given orders about how they must spend their time and money. And if, today, in response to widespread uproar, the Obamafascistcarers deign to compromise or to pretend to compromise on the exact terms of the latest dictat, one must not be surprised if, tomorrow, the Obamafascistcarers coyly roll back the rollback, i.e., JustMoveOn now that everybody has had a chance to become accustomed to their new roles as meekly subservient thralls to Obamafascistcaring.

The most fundamental objection to government’s compelling anybody to provide anybody In Need with anything other than redress of a demonstrated violation of the recipient’s actual rights is that such compulsion is itself a violation of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the person being thus unjustifiably compelled. Yes, if you are religious and are opposed to the use of contraception, you will object to being compelled to provide your employees or students with free contraceptives on the grounds that being forced to aid and abet the use of contraception is against your religious precepts and conscience. But there are a great many things that individuals will be forced to do under Obamafascistcare which they would not have done were they not being compelled and to which they might object; and these objections will be informed by many different personal concerns.

The objection to Obamafascistcare that everybody should share is that being compelled by government to live one’s life in a way other than that which is in accordance with one’s own judgment and values is an immoral violation of the rights of the individual. To flourish as human beings in society, we must all seek to disseminate our values by persuasion and voluntary cooperation, not by force. We need to leave other people alone and we need other people to leave us alone; we should not, directly or by proxy, be ordering each other around at the point of a gun.

Is the only way to build a “lasting” economy to destroy what remains of the freedom of this one?

The Times reporter quotes a sacred new Obama Administration budget document that the reporter says is “permeated by” the language of the President’s State of the Union address. In the words of the budget plan, it is time to “construct an economy that is built to last.” Why didn’t we think of this 223 years ago?

Time for whom to construct it? Central planners in Washington DC–or individual planners making decisions alone or in voluntary cooperation with other individuals about how to spend their own resources and how to advance their own businesses and futures? What happens if a part of the Obama-plan-built economy, say a major company, threatens to go out of business? Will it be enabled to “last” anyway? From whom will the funds needed to prop up failing companies be extracted? From those capable of running more successful companies and who need the resources to expand on their own successes rather than to subsidize and perpetuate the failures of others?

According to Obama’s budget document, “We must transform our economy from one focused on speculating, spending and borrowing to one constructed on the solid foundation of educating, innovating, and building.” 

It’s as if the President of the United States has no idea that his socialist plans are based on wishful thinking of the most logic-defying, experience-defying, facilely speculative sort–and on the power of government guns to overcome any cogent objections which our rulers cannot refute. It’s as if he has no idea that he himself has been an avid supporter of trillion-plus budget deficits every year so far of his administration, an avid supporter of untrammeled spending of other people’s money and of untrammeled borrowing and untrammeled inflation.

It’s as if the President has no idea that the government’s growing power to tax, regulate, and destroy the true educators, the true innovators and the true builders of the country can tend only to impede or kill learning, innovation and building. It’s as if he has no idea that the innovators who deserve our most heartfelt thanks are the ones who give us the most powerful and efficient ways to escape the government’s slithering and strangling tendrils.

It’s as if the President has no idea that his administration’s fuzzy and contradictory incantations about how we must “win the future” (by destroying the futures of those who know how to win it)–the incantations which pass for bright, noble and self-evidently true economic, political or social insight–can serve only to further clog the ability to think of anyone who cons himself into believing that this stuff makes sense. It’s as if he has no idea that one does not by such anti-educative means “educate” persons whose capacity for rational thought has so often been assailed rather than nurtured by the curriculum and principles of public schooling. Unless we take “education” to be a mere synonym for “brainwashing.”

You don’t build by destroying. You don’t unleash innovation by shackling and punishing those best at innovating. You don’t teach or inspire people to learn or to gather and assess evidence or to logically analyze patently fatuous claims by peddling bullshit as if it were the aromatic and incontrovertible distilled wisdom of the ages.

The evil that men do when they buy and sell like buyers and sellers do

An NYT reader accuses B&N of “evil behavior” toward small book shops, an indictment others seem to accept; but after making this broad accusation of evil does not condescend to say in what the evil consists. Does it have something to do with providing books and other products that customers have wanted to buy? Did not the smaller shops also commit this evil of the selling of the books? Unless the reader is suggesting that it is evil per se to sell stuff, it sounds like he simply dislikes B&N, or perhaps all chain bookstores, or perhaps all chain stores to which customers have responded with their willing patronage and which have therefore achieved commercial success.

But if Barnes and Noble has been evil for selling books and for causing the downfall of those bookshops which it has out-competed, are not all the many customers who conspired in this process also evil? These customers knew darn well that they were buying books from one place and not from another place. They wickedly followed their very own preferences in the matter. Oh, they knew what they were doing. Going to Store A instead of to Store B. They KNEW!!

A response to responses to @DavidPogue’s response to those who think costs of gadget components are total costs

Readers who say that New York Times technology reviewer David Pogue is missing the point of gadget tear-downs when he rebuts the claims of those who miss the point about total costs of gadget production miss the point. Sure, some persons know that retail prices are not mere markups of component costs. But many do lack a good grasp of what it takes to make things, to run a company or to earn an honest profit, or what kind of policies would make it easier for capable firms to earn and hire. Some of these insight-deficient persons read New York Times articles. Some write New York Times editorials. Some are presidents of the United States.

It’s obvious that a computer tablet may sell only for a price way below average cost of production if few persons want it at “the market price” for more popular tablets, thus requiring its maker to slash prices to get rid of a warehouse stockpile–or if, as in the case of Amazon, the producer is selling a lot more than the gadget in isolation and therefore both expects and will accept a short-term loss in exchange for a longer-term gain. But contrary to what some readers of Pogue’s article imply, prices are not merely “set” by Values floating in the air. Prices are the results of complex interactions that include the costs that a producer confronts and that he expects to confront, his estimation of demand, broader economic conditions, whether there was an earthquake in Japan last week, and the values and purposes of both seller and buyer as they participate in a market or decide to refrain from participating in it. Nobody would “value” a typical car at thousands of dollars, or pay that much for one, if, as a result of technological advances and market processes, it were to become as cheap to produce a Chevy as to produce a pencil.