Prayers out

Prayers out to the families of all of the victims of the mass shooting today.

Still here

     So I haven't been abducted by aliens or anything, just haven't gotten around to writing anything as of late. However, I have quite a bit to write about, so I will get to it soon.

What Happened to Free Speech?

     I wish I had gotten around to addressing this a few days ago, but didn't. Anyhow, it concerns a pet peeve of mine, this whole response from the administration to the video that supposedly (but which they now know otherwise) caused all of these protests and violence around the Middle East. First the U.S. embassy in Egypt condemned the video. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also condemned the video. And then there are the claims coming from many that respect for other religions is a cornerstone of America's democratic system.

     Some people have also insinuated that the person/people who created this video are engaging in the excess of free speech, doing the equivalent of crying "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. The administration also "asked" Google to reconsider their policy of allowing the anti-Muslim video to stay up on the Internet.

     Well to respond to all of this:

1) Rather than condemning the video, why didn't the administration either, or at least in addition to the condemnation, also stand up for our principle of people having a fundamental right to freedom of speech?

2) People are wrong in their claim that respect for religions is a cornerstone of American democracy. Tolerance for other religions is a cornerstone, but not respect. This becomes quite apparent in all of the ways that Christianity and Christians get mocked and offended all the time. This can range from plays to skits on comedy shows to comedians such as Bill Maher to "artists" who create "artwork" ranging from "Piss Christ" (where a cross of Jesus Christ was put into a jar of urine), a statue of Jesus covered in dung, portraying the Virgin Mary as a whore, etc...note if any Christians were to complain about any of this, they got the free speech argument.

Free speech is free speech. You are free to mock, make fun of, and criticize a person's religion as you please. The difference here though is that Christians across the world do not start rioting and killing people over minor offenses. In saying that, I am not claiming that Muslims themselves all do either. I am no expert on Islam, so I make the default judgement that most Muslims are peaceful, and it's just a portion of them that are violent. There are about 2.2 billion Muslims in the world, which means even if only five percent of them are the violent kind, that's about 110 million people. So in terms of sheer numbers, there's a sizeable enough number of the radical kind of Muslims in the world to create a lot of havoc.

3) Making the video is not the equivalent of crying "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. Doing that makes people behave in a way that is not of their own free will. They think there is a danger and thus respond accordingly. Criticizing a religion, on the other hand, is far different. In that, the people who do the violence and the rioting are acting of their own free will. They are choosing to respond in the way that they are.

One could say, "Well, true, BUT you have to be a moron to not think there's a risk that such a video could cause violence." That is true, but even then, the onus is still on the people doing the rioting, not on the video maker. Any suggestions about seeking to ban making fun of Islam out of fear of the potential for violence is putting the blame on free speech as opposed to the radicals themselves who choose to act in this manner.

The other major problem is that one would have to ban any and all speech regarding Islam period. You would not be able to so much as criticize Islam, as even this can set off people doing violence. Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, produced a film called "Submission" which criticzed Islam for its repression of women. he was assassinated by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Morrocan Muslim. And let's not even get started on the issue of cartoons, such as the Jyllands-Posten Muhummad cartoons controversy, or the cartoons by Lars Vilks. Kurt Westergaard, who drew one of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons (one featuring a Muhummad with a bomb in his turban, apparently the most contentious), was attacked in his own home by an axe-wielding Muslim who wanted revenge (over a cartoon!).

Now when you're dealing with people this radical, who resort to rioting, murder, assassinations, bombing embassies, and so forth, over criticism and minor mockery, then the only way to (hopefully) prevent them from rioting over speech would be to ban all speech about Islam altogether. Which will be very dangerous if that ever happens, for multiple reasons, ranging from allowing radical Islam to ascend to being an ever larger threat to Western civilization to the fact that when push comes to shove, Western civilization folds on what is supposed to be one of its most cherished principles.

4) Who do the government think they are in trying to intimidate a private company into clamping down on free speech? Google is perfectly within its rights to take down a video if it feels it is violating its Terms of Service. The government is not. When the United States government, who have the power of the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department, etc..."asks" a private company to do something, there can be quite the implied threat there.

As it is, Google says that the video does not violate their Terms of Service and will be allowed to stay up. I think it would be very bad if they had folded. But Youtube has loads of videos making fun of all religions, so it would be hard for them to make the argument that the video violates their ToS as well.

      It is of extreme importance that the Western world show strength in the face of these extremist Muslims. They are not going to grow to like the West for weakness, or perceived weakness. I am not saying to just blatantly insult Islam, as people's lives are on the line, but when it is criticized, and when people do happen to insult or mock it, their speech must be protected.

RIP

RIP to Ambassador Stevens, the Marines, and others who were killed in the attack in Libya.

Three Good Things for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

     Just read a very interesting article. To summarize, the three things that will really aid companies in the near future are:

1) Very cheap data-crunching capabilities. Due to innovations such as the "Cloud" and how cheap computing is becoming (it won't be too long before the PC as we know it (big and bulky) becomes obsolete and personal computers become the equivalent of appliances), smaller and medium-sized businesses are now able to offer services and have access to capabilities that previously were only the domain of much larger companies. This will allow for the creation of whole new services altogether most likely.

2) Wireless mobile communication

3) 3D Printing Manufacturing technology - this is going to really aid smaller companies in being able to prototype very quickly and produce complex, sophisticated components that previously might have only been the domain of larger companies due to the fact that the equipment required was so expensive.

IMO, amazing to think about how this is going to really revolutionize the ability of smaller and medium-sized businesses in America to compete in the global economy.

Obama Is No Bill Clinton

     One of the themes of the Democratic National Convention was about how when Bill Clinton was president, we had a great economy, and achieved a balanced budget, and Clinton is a Democrat, and Barack Obama is a Democrat, so therefore, if you want the same types of policies we saw during the Clinton years that gave us said great economy and balanced budget, vote for Obama.

     What Clinton failed to mention is that his policies were almost to the complete opposite of what we've seen from President Obama and what President Obama is proposing. Bill Clinton tried, initially, to govern as a left-wing Democrat. He signed a tax increase, pushed for government healthcare ("HillaryCare"), pushed for allowing gays to openly serve in the military, and signed the Assault Weapons Ban. This caused a backlash, and the Congress switched to being controlled by the Republicans for the first time in four decades, led by Newt Gingrich. Bill Clinton then pivoted, and made the statement, "The era of Big Government is over."

     His "pivot" essentially consisted of going on to govern like a conservative Republican. First on the agenda was welfare reform. Bill Clinton actually vetoed this two times, but the Republicans in Congress kept sending it back up to him until he finally signed it. To say it was controversial was an understatement. The Republicans had to use the reconciliation process to pass it (a questionable process I'd imagine as the Republicans railed over the Democrats using it to pass Obamacare), the Democratic party was very much against it, and some prominent members of the social welfare bureaucracy resigned over it (two members of HHS), saying it would be disastrous (it wasn't, as the economy being healthy, the people then went out and got jobs). It is very interesting how Bill Clinton talked about welfare reform at the DNC, as he made it sound like it was his program. It was a Republican piece of legislation that he had to be convinced to sign after multiple vetoes.

     Then there was the completion of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Clinton at first did not like NAFTA. It had been started by Ronald Reagan, but Bill ended up completing it and regarding it as one of his great accomplishments. Democrats and their various special interest groups have of course always hated the bill (unions in particular). Belief in free-trade tends to be a more right-wing thing. Both Hillary and Barack Obama ran against NAFTA in 2008.

     Bill Clinton also signed a "tax cut for the rich" when he signed a capital gains tax rate cut in 1997 (the rate was reduced from 28% down to 20%). And then in 1999, he signed the Financial Services Modernization Act, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which removed the decades-long barrier that had existed between investment banks and commercial banks.

     To claim that it is Obama who has the policies similar to what we saw under Bill Clinton during the 1990s 1994-and on is engaging in a huge degree of historical revisionism I'd say. President Romney has some real low-hanging fruit here I think with which to go after the Obama campaign, and I am surprised that he hasn't made any speeches outlining just the above to crowds. It seems though that he and his campaign are doing the same things that John McCain did during his own campaign in 2008, i.e. to ignore all the low-hanging fruit that exists with which to go after President Obama. President Obama himself has most definitely not minced anything in going after Romney, doing everything they can to paint him as an evil, horrible man.

They Know So Much That Isn't So

     Ronald Reagan once said, "The trouble with our liberal friends isn't that they're wrong, it's that they know so much that isn't so." The Democratic National Convention was a textbook case of this I think. It seems all Democrats, and especially the major ones, all have no idea what the Republican party, conservatism, or the right-wing in general actually stands for.

     Bill Clinton in his speech said that with this election, Americans have a choice: choosing between a "We're in it together" society, which the Democrats support, or a "You're on your own society," which the Republicans supposedly support. The problem with this whole view is that it assumes that government and society, government and community, are one and the same. To them, you are either for big government programs and thus a society where we care about one another, or you are against big government, and thus by default, support a society where it's just a straight "every person for themself" type of system, where no one helps anyone else. It never occurs to these Democrats that one can very much be for a society where people care for one another, care about their community, do charitable work and giving, etc...but believe in limited government (and do all this without big government). It doesn't occur to them that society and government, that society and community, are not the same thing. To them, government is at the center of our national life, a core part of our being citizens.

     But yet, it's what the Democrats believe. Nancy Pelosi said in a speech that Republicans want to take away our clean air and clean water. Barney Frank, Julian Castro, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama (in his "You didn't build that" speech) all have made the case that we as a society have to care about one another and we can't just be a society where everyone is on their own. They literally have no concept of what conservatism, or the right-wing in general, is about. Conservatism is very much about community and helping one's fellow human. As the columnist Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, conservatism is about the family, the community, the church, charity, etc...one doesn't need government for these things.

     It is sad that the Democratic party still has not bothered to learn what the Republican party or conservatism or the right in general believes in. One can very much understand the arguments of the political right, but just say that they disagree with them. Instead though, the Democratic party adheres to what is a giant strawman of a belief about conservatism.

     I am rather surprised that Bill Clinton sank himself to saying that in his DNC speech, as I think he knows better. This is a man who is a Rhodes scholar and who the late, great free-market economist Milton Friedman said was one of the two most brilliant presidents he ever worked with (the other brilliant one being Nixon). So I think Bill Clinton knows what conservatism and the right-wing really are about. My mother (yep!) said she thinks Bill is playing nice for the Democratic party because his daughter, Chelsea, is making her first forays into politics now and in order to get anywhere, she is going to need the Democratic party's help. Also Hillary may be thinking of making a run for the Presidency in 2016, so she'll need the party's help as well.

    

Neil Armstrong Dead at 82

RIP to a great man.

Media Double Standard

     So anyone watching the news the past few days will know about the shooting at the Family Research Council. Now personally, I do not at all like this group in terms of their anti-gay marriage stance. Some gay rights advocates say they can be classed as a hate group. I don't know a whole lot about their actual activities myself, so I won't go so far as to call them that, and with these types of groups it depends. Some conservatives are just anti-gay marriage, while others will present themselves as just anti-gay marriage, but behind-the-scenes are actually viscerally anti-gay period, pushing for legislation behind-the-scenes that is very anti-gay.

     Some say this is what the FRC does. Well as said, I haven't researched it, but either way, hate group of not, I think it is a complete double-standard of the worst kind that the media has barely bothered to report the shooting there! If that had been a Tea Party member shooting (or trying to shoot) up let's say a Planned Parenthood, I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money that it would have been 24/7 in the news cycle, with talk about the way groups like the Tea Party breed hatred, the dangers of right-wing hatred, and so forth. We saw what happened with the Gabriel Giffords shooting by Jared Loughner, a man who cited The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books. Despite this, the general "climate of hate" was blamed for it, with said climate being blamed on the right-wing (even though the Left continue to participate in such harsh rhetoric (not saying the Right don't do it too, but the Left do it a lot as well)), and Sarah Palin accused of having influenced Mr. Loughner (!!!).

Yes, the media has reported the incident, butI think nothing like they would have had this been a right-wing nutcase as opposed to a left-wing nutcase.

Paul Ryan Announced As Mitt Romney's VP Running Mate

     So this will be interesting to watch. I think Paul Ryan can aid Romney's campaign in how knowledgable and fluent he is on the issues, and how he can come across in a very non-aggressive, non-mean sort of way, which is good. The Democratic party is going to attack him on his Medicare reform plan with the misconception that his policy is to get rid of Medicare as it exists whether people like it or not. It will be interesting if Ryan is criticized for lacking foreign policy experience, when the same critics were okay with Barack Obama's complete lack of foreign policy experience when he was running for President. But that's politics! I guess the Romney campaign wants to get this whole thing out-of-the-way early. I do wonder though if President Obama will keep Biden as his running mate, or switch to making Hillary Clinton as his running mate.

Gun Regulations and Semi-Automatic Guns

Another thing I wanted to point out regarding semi-automatic firearms is that semi-automatic guns in the United States have to be manufactured according to specific regulations from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that make them difficult to convert into fully-automatic weapons. Any semi-automatic gun that can easily be converted into an automatic weapon is classed as an automatic weapon.

Chick-Fil-A

So anyone who's been following the news lately is probably aware of the hoopla Chick-Fil-A's owner stirred up when he said that God will punish the United States for embracing gay marriage. The mayors of some major cities such as Chicago and Boston moved to ban Chick-Fil-A from their cities. Chick-Fil-A got a major sales boost from supporters however as a result of this.

Now me personally, I am fine with gays and gay marriage. But I think it is wrong to try to bully a business because its owner has anti-gay marriage (or even anti-gay) views. By law, the business cannot put up a sign saying that they do not serve gay people, so gay or straight, you can go in there and buy food and eat. We cannot become a country where people have to literally start being careful about what opinions they have or else their business will be outlawed from an area. That sets a very bad precedent that could spill over into other things.

The beauty of the free enterprise system is that if you don't like the views of the business's owner or the business itself, then don't buy their product.

The Politics of Guns and the Second Amendment

     So every time a major shoot occurs, the subject of gun control always comes up. The problem with this whole issue is that it is always made with the mindset that if only we tightened up the restrictions of firearms, it would stop the criminals from getting them. There's also the argument that people should not be allowed to own "military-grade" firearms. As a generally very pro-gun person, here are the problems I see with these types of arguments.

     One of the biggest pieces of mis-information going through the media reports regarding the Colorado shooting were that James Holmes was armed with an "AR-15 assault rifle." The problem is that the AR-15 is not an assault rifle. Another thing people say is that "military assault rifles need restrictions, people shouldn't just be allowed to go out and buy them."

This has to be one of the biggest misconceptions about firearms, that assault rifles are readily available to civilians. They aren't. The problem is that too many don't know just what an assault rifle is.

Simplified, an assault rifle is a rifle with automatic fire capability that fires rounds from magazines. It is thus classified as a machine gun (a gun that fires rifle rounds automatically---a sub-machine gun fires pistol rounds automatically), and is not protected by the Second Amendment. The word "arms" in the Second Amendment does not cover machine guns. M-16s and AK-47s that have automatic fire capability are assault rifles. Yes, you can buy them, but doing so involves the following:

1) 6 - 9 month waiting period
2) Background check
3) Fingerprinting
4) A bunch of paperwork and approvals
5) About $10K to $20K

Owning them is a privilege. Now, the AR-15 (one of the weapons Holmes had) is the civilian variant of the M-16. It looks the same, but mechanically it is not. It has no automatic fire capability. It is a semi-automatic rifle that fires rounds out of a magazine. For comparison, numerous hunting rifles are also semi-automatic and fire rounds out of a magazine. In fact, there's now even a lot of crossover between the two as there are AR-15s meant for hunting now and hunting rifles that are based off of military platforms. In fact, hunters have been adopting military rifles to use for hunting since World War II. Some weapons are used for multiple purposes, hunting, police, military, sport shooting, home defense, etc...The AR-15 is thus not an assault rifle. It's just a semi-automatic rifle that fires rounds from a magazine. Yes, it may "look" military or menacing, but that means nothing.

Here is a Browning BAR (semi-automatic hunting rifle that uses magazines):

Here is an AR15 (semi-automatic rifle that uses magazines):

Now the AR-15 may "look" menacing or "military" but it mechanically at its core is no different than the Browning BAR. There isn't something that magically makes the AR-15 more dangerous then the Browning BAR. IN FACT, the standard AR-15 is too weak to even be used for hunting, as the rounds are too small. The hunting variants use a larger-caliber round. Which means many a "civilian" hunting rifle are actually more powerful and can do more damage than a regular AR-15 (as it takes a more powerful weapon to take down a large animal than a human). And the one shown in the picture above isn't even a full rifle, it's what's called a carbine, which is a shortened version of the rifle that can fire the same rounds, but at a slower velocity and less range.

Here is the AR-15 Predator hunting rifle:

Now here is version of the Remington 870, a pump-action shotgun that Holmes also had:

Looks like a "civilian" gun. Now here's another version of the same gun:

All the same weapon, but some models look "civilian" while others look "military." Again, how the weapon "looks" doesn't tell what kind of weapon it is. Remington 870s are used for everything, hunting, home defense, sport shooting, military, law enforcement, etc...

Regarding the word "arms" in the Second Amendment, they are defined as the following:

"Weapons commonly owned by ordinary law abiding citizens that they would be expected to muster to militia conscription with."

     In the event of such a thing, you'd expect to see people showing up with AR-15s, various other semi-automatic rifles, shot guns, pistols, and so forth. All of this is important because had Holmes gone in with a fully-automatic weapon, say an M-16 with a 100 round drum, and cries for gun control were occuring, the ridiculousness is that such weapons are already heavily regulated. Regulating people's ability to buy weapons such as the AR-15 thus wouldn't do anything to address the issue of criminals acquiring assault rifles.

     People such as Senator Dianne Feinstein who talk about how people shouldn't be allowed to buy "military-grade assault weapons" just do not understand what they're talking about. As said, there is nothing about an AR-15 that makes it some special deadly military weapon that can kill far and above other rifles. She is going by the appearance of it. She said people shouldn't be allowed to buy weapons meant for "close-quarters combat," weapons meant to kill people. Well first off, a rifle is a rifle, hunting rifle or military platform. In the hands of a skilled person, it's not going to matter much. Two, there isn't some special difference between humans and animals. Biologically, humans are animals. A high-functioning animal, but still an animal, and quite a savage one in its raw state (we invented civilization so as to be able to live peacefully and even within those, violence occurs). A rifle meant for hunting is going to kill a human just as it will kill animals. Not all rifles designed for military use can kill large animals (regular AR-15s are bad for this), but when adopted to use larger rounds, they can, and a regular AR-15 is fine if you need to shoot small animals.

     In addition, does Senator Feinstein think hunting rifles are only meant for shooting at long-range? Does this make hand guns, meant for close-range, "military-grade assault weapons?" Weapons meant for close-range fighting are not more dangerous than ones meant for long-range shooting. Sub-machine guns like the Uzi and MP5 (which fire pistol rounds) are meant for close-range fighting, but you would not do infantry work or go hunting anything big with one of those. They are used when you need a really small weapon where distance and caliber aren't that important. SWAT teams sometimes use MP5s for example. 

     Something that should also be remembered is that the Second Amendment isn't about hunting. It is so that citizens can form militias when required, protect themselves, and in extreme cases, resist a tyrannical government. During the times the Second Amendment was written in, citizens were expected to own literal military arms. The difference of course is that then military arms were muskets and at most cannon, today military arms are everything from battle tanks to attack helicopters to nuclear weapons and so forth. But by this, one could probably make the argument that fully-automatic assault rifles are protected by the Second Amendment, even though legally right now it has been determined that they are not.

      If you buy more then two firearms at once, I believe that such a purchase must be reported to the government by the seller (so if you buy four AR-15s in one purchase, the government will learn about it).

Some other things to consider:

1) The 1997 North Hollywood shootout, where two guys clad in body armor and assault rifles were fighting the police. This during the Assault Weapons Ban, in one of the most anti-gun cities, in the most anti-gun state in America. A lot of good the laws did in stopping those guys.

2) A year ago to this week, a man killed 78 people in Norway, a country with very strict gun laws.

3) Tear gas is not legal for civilians, but Holmes still somehow acquired it.

Gun Crime in the United States
     So for the claims made by people such as myself who say that gun control laws mostly result in the disarming of the law-abiding citizens, why is it that the United States has such high levels of gun violence? The simple answer is certain socio-economic factors:

1) Inner-city crime. Most gun-violence in the United States occurs in the major metropolitan areas (ironically the areas with strict gun control), and of those, mostly in the inner-city areas. The inner-city areas tend to be populated by poor black people where gang violence is very common. This is due to a long-list of things ranging from social engineering policies that created bad incentives for poor women to give birth to children without a father, to the problem of drugs being prevalent in these areas, which not only leads to many men impregnating women and then not sticking around to help father the child, but also outright warfare over the drug trade.

2) Unlike some of the European nations which are relatively uniform race and culture-wise, the United States is a huge salad-bowl of races, ethnicities, cultures, languages, religions, etc...many of which do not like one another. This leads to more violence and makes the country more complex to govern then say Sweden. An example for example could be the outright race war that has been occurring between blacks and Hispanics in certain major cities in California.

3) America overall, for other reasons, has tended to have higher rates of crime and violence than other nations. For example, even back when England had gun laws akin to what the United States had, violence was still less in England (which today has more restrictive gun laws). It would be wrong to say that guns drive violence, as the Swiss own outright assault rifles in large numbers, and the Israelis also have a large ownership of guns, yet both of these nations experience low levels of gun violence.

Gun violence is not so much "gun" violence as it is violence due to racial and ethnic hatreds, drug warfare, and so forth in which guns just happen to be used. Such violence would occur regardless. Humans have been slaughtering one another for thousands of years without guns, so lack of guns is not going to stop anything. And this is making the HUGE assumption that one could actually eliminate the black market for guns. Drugs are already illegal, but they are prevalent. Alcohol was once outlawed, but it was prevalent. Drunk driving is illegal right now, but yet thousands of people get killed by drunk drivers every year. When a wolf slaughters sheep, further disarming the sheep is not the answer.

Prayers Out to the Folks in Colorado

Prayers out to the folks in Colorado who lost loved ones and/or were wounded from the shootings that took place.

President Obama is Wrong

     So as anyone who has been following the news lately will know, President Obama recently made statements talking about how the government contributes to economic growth through infrastructure and how it is wrong for business owners to insinuate that they themselves are the ones who've built their businesses up.

     However, in my opinion, he took it way too far when he said, literally, that if you have a business, "you didn't build that." Here are my arguments on this:

1) Technically, yes, government could be said to contribute to economic growth via infrastructure development, funding of research and development, and so forth. But I don't think anyone really argues this point except for hardcore far-right libertarians (who would have been the types against say the Interstate Highway System as being too socialist). It is a complete strawman to use this as an argument in favor of higher taxes the way he is. They are two completely separate issues, especially considering that we have no direct way of knowing what the government would even spend the additional tax money on.

     If we were a country with virtually no infrastructure, then you could make an argument perhaps for some higher taxes for a revenue-starved government under the argument that the money spent on infrastructure would eventually be paid off from all of the economic growth and investment that would result from the infrastructure. But we are not such a country right now. Regarding upgrading our existing infrastructure, well this is a president who blew almost $1 trillion dollars in the name of stimulus and didn't focus it on infrastructure upgrades when he had ample opportunity to.

2) Who is he to talk about what it takes to build and run a business? This is a man who has never so much as run a 7/11. Businesses do not just arise out of nowhere. Even those businesses that utilized the research and development that was funded by the government to create new products and services, well the actual creation of those products and services was done by the businesspeople themselves, not the government.

3) He points out that the Internet was "created" by the government. Well a few things on this. Yes, it was started by the government, via DARPA (at the time ARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency, itself created by the space program), in order to have a wya to keep the national communications infrastructure from going down in the event of a nuclear strike. But much of the development of the Internet today was created and developed further by private companies. Furthermore, it wasn't really "the government" in the way he thinks of it, but the defense department, which he is seeking to cut in funding right now.

4) Much of our modern technology is attributable to infrastructure and research and development from the space program and defense. Well if that's the case, then by Obama's standards, shouldn't we gun up the defense budget and the space program even further? Why cut them? He is arguing for raising taxes to bring the government more money on the idea that it is the government that drives economic growth, but then he is cutting the two major areas of government that legitimately have helped drive economic growth.

5) A great point (attributable to Greg Gutfeld on the Fox News show "The Five") I thought is that claiming that the existence of infrastructure means the government deserves some credit for the creation and growth of businesses would be like claiming that the government is also responsible for any murders conducted by criminals who have used the roads and bridges to drive around and kill people.

Irony

So I find it rather ironic that two days after my post in which I point out that scientists have yet to find the "God particle" if you will, scientists announce they believe they have found said particle, the Higgs boson.

The Arrogance of Scientists

     So during a panel at the SETIcon II conference in Santa Clara, California recently, the physicists there got into a debate about whether or not a god or divine power was needed to have created the Big Bang. The answer from most of them was "No." Some said for example that the Big Bang could just have occurred as a result of the laws of physics being there. Which of course then prompts the question, "What created the laws of physics?"

     Now the thing that gets me with this entire discussion is, does it not occur to these physicists that maybe this is a question that is literally beyond the ability of humans to answer right now? There is a saying that goes, "Show me someone that has all the answers and I'll show you someone that hasn't asked all the questions." I think that aptly applies with this fundamental question. In truth, BOTH answers I find rather ridiculous personally, which really just means that humans are not capable of answering this question.

Think about it:

We have this MASSIVE, gigantic, super-enormous universe that is SO enormous that we can barely comprehend it. I mean just to go from one end of our galaxy to the other side, at the speed of light, takes at least a hundred thousand years (maybe two hundred thousand). So going at 186,282 miles-per-second, you'd cross the galaxy in a hundred or so thousand years (and that's assuming humans could reach that speed, which technically no physical object can). Of course, there are billions (yes billions) of other galaxies out there, some of them much larger than our own galaxy. Our own galaxy has at least hundreds of billions of stars in it. "Nearby" Andromeda galaxy has an estimated two trillion stars in it. And the galaxies themselves are millions of light-years apart.

Then we have those oddities called black holes, which are singularities. We have the force known as gravity, which we can understand in a quantitative sense, but not necessarilly a qualitative sense. At the sub-atomic level, things also get really, really weird as far as how nature works. Scientists keep searching for a "smallest" particle, and have thus far discovered thousands of tiny particles, but no one has found a tiniest particle yet. We also have the electromagnetic force, which somehow causes a positive force and a negative force to attract one another (again, understood quantitatively, but not really qualitatively, as no one can really picture just "what" that force is that pulls a positive and negative together, they just do).

And we have other aspects of the universe that we do not understand, such as "dark matter." The galaxies, one might think, are held together by the gravity of their stars. For example, that the gravity of our own Sun is intertwined with the gravity of the other stars in our galaxy. And then our own galaxy, as a whole, has gravity, which causes some smaller galaxies to orbit it. But as it turns out, that gravity isn't enough. If all you account for is the gravity of the individual stars in a galaxy, then the galaxy in any computer simulation flies apart. The stars are just too far apart. So the question is then, "What holds the stars in a galaxy together?" Scientists really have no clue, so they call it "dark matter," which they believe is a form of matter that we simply cannot detect at the moment. It's either that or our theory of gravity is actually wrong.

Well I am going way off-track, but I mean the universe is so complex and magnificent in scope, that it sounds rather ridiculous to just say that there was no creator involved in it. All of this can't just have "come about" on its own. There has to have been SOMETHING that created it all, right? But this becomes a very problematic argument, because then one is obliged to ask, "Who created the creator?" Now religious people will just say, "God doesn't need a creator! He's God." Well that may satisfy religious people, but to me it makes no sense. You can't say that the universe is so complex that it needs a creator, but then reason that the creator themself did not also need a creator. Of course, then who created the creator? And who created the creator of the creator, who in turn created the universe?

If you reason that the (obviously) very magnificent creator of the universe did not itself need a creator, well then technically you could just reason that the universe itself did not need any creator. I mean why should the universe have needed a creator but the creator itself not need its own creator as well?

     So what we really are seeing here is the limitation of human brain power. Logically, it doesn't make much sense to say that the universe had no creator, but it also doesn't make much sense to say that it did have a creator. So the true answer is actually beyond the reasoning capability of humanity. I was once talking about this with a guy who said that he thought this line of reasoning, that the ability to answer such a question is beyond the capability of the human brain, was a cop-out. But in thinking more about it since then, I think he had it completely backwards. Realizing that this question is not answerable with the current human reasoning is not a cop-out, it's just an acknowledgement of the limitations of human reasoning.

     In my opinion, the true cop-out arguments are that the universe just somehow magically appeared out of nowhere, the laws of physics, the matter, everything, it just all somehow magically appeared. That's a cop-out. It does away with answering the hard question of how did everything begin. But the alternative, that a divine power created everything, is also a cop-out. Because then, as said, you must ask who created the divine power. And if you reason that the divine power doesn't need a creator, well then neither did the universe itself, thus eliminating the requirement for a divine power and returning us to square one.

     Thus both arguments are rather ridiculous I think. Saying that the question isn't answerable isn't a cop-out, it's just acknowledging that we aren't capable of answering it right now. I think some scientists over-estimate the capability of the human brain. In comparison to all the other animals on the Earth, the human brain is the most developed. But who says that it couldn't be more developed? Just because we can't understand something doesn't mean it won't be understandable if we get more brainpower. For all we know, our trying to answer this question is like a chimpanzee trying to understand calculus or nuclear physics. No matter how smart the chimpanzee, it won't happen, because they lack the requisite brainpower.

     Let the human brain evolve up another level, to the point that modern homo sapiens are the equivalent of chimpanzees in comparison to what this next level of evolved brain would be. We might find a lot of these questions and physics issues become a lot more understandable. It thus amazes me though that these physicists don't recognize this. No one can answer with a resounding "Yes" or "No" about whether there was a divine creator regarding the universe.

     For all we know, what we think of as "the universe" may not even be the true universe, as our Big Bang might just be the inside of a black hole in some other "universe" somewhere (as the Big Bang was a singularity and a black hole is a singularity, so do black holes create Big Bangs on some other side?).

To read an article on these physicists, go here: LINK

Leftist Elites and Totalitarianism

     You know, one thing I cannot get over is how so many on the Left seem to admire the "China model" of economy. You read talk about China's "benevolent dictatorship" and how it is headed by a group of "enlightened" people (Thomas Friedman there). But I mean, seriously? Many of these people are the same kinds who RAILED against the policies of the Bush administration as being too oppressive. Well the Bush administration, love it or hate it, was no equivalent of the Chinese Communist Party. If anyone questions that, try criticizing the Chinese Communist Party from within China the way people criticized the Bush administration.

     These people remind me of the types who would sit from the comfort and freedom of a Western democratic country and romanticize about the (supposed) greatness of the Soviet Union or Castro's Cuba or even Mao's China. But yet, few of these types would ever go and actually live in such a country. Now we see the same with these admirers (almost all on the left-wing end of the political spectrum) of the so-called China model. Oh, they will sing the praises of authoritarian government so long as it is doing the things they like and want to be done, and usually so long as it is in a different country.

     But it probably isn't very difficult to describe how these same China-model admiring elites would respond if say a Republican administration took control of the government and decided to implement its own brand of authoritarian rule. As I've pointed out, it's generally thought that economic freedom cannot exist without political freedom, although this isn't known for sure (and transitioning from an authoritarian government to a liberal democracy can take some time). For example, if China's economy is allowed to become freer (which the government isn't allowing at the moment), will it eventually lead to China becoming a liberal democracy? There's a joke that in the late 19th century, Germany began adopting the principles of liberal democracy and market capitalism, and within only sixty years, West Germany was a vibrant market capitalist economic system and liberal democracy. Of course, as everyone knows, there was a whole bunch of other very bad stuff that happened in between! Similarly, with China, it could take a few decades to get to liberal democracy, and in the intervening space, some nasty things could occur. So anyways, what if some form of "right-wing" authoritarian govenrment decided to take over in America, where it would seek to maintain an authoritarian government while at the same time maintaining a strong market economy. I'd be willing to bet that these same elites would blow a fuse.

     Many people would rightly blow a fuse over something like that (myself included), BUT, I can never get over how so many who railed against the Bush administration and would rail against any kind of right-wing authoritarian government in the United States, actually show admiration for the actual authoritarian government of China, all because that government is able to do the things by force that the Left want to do to America. Many among the so-called Progressives it seems only admire liberal democracy when it counters right-wing ideas. However, whenever liberal democracy prevents them from being able to push through a whole bunch of big government schemes and proposals they have, well then you get people like Thomas Friedman saying, "Why can't we be China for a day?" And the real kicker here is that a lot of the things that he thinks would be great for America if only we could force them through, would actually be terrible for America at the moment (i.e. high-speed rail, alternative energy, etc...) (in which I say thank goodness we are a democratic system).

     One final thing, but in pointing out that so many of the China admirers are on the political left, I am not saying that all people on the Left admire China's system (many disdain their lack of democracy), but just that of those that do, they all seem to be on the Left. I don't know of any limited-government right-wing free-market oriented people who admire the Chinese system.

On Healthcare Again

     So I am wondering now how our nation will fare in the wake of this ruling. Was Roberts a genius or did he fold to political pressures in fearing that if he completely struck down the mandate, that the Court was be assailed as hyper-partisan and so forth? Many conservatives are saying that the Court has now given the government a brand-new power to be able to coerce us to do as they please via the power of taxation and thus their striking down the ability to control anything and everything via the Commerce Clause is essentially worthless.

     Now I am no legal scholar, but this argument confuses me some. For example, many say that the purpose of a tax is to raise revenue, not penalize, and thus the mandate cannot be a tax, that it's a flimsy argument Roberts engaged in. For example, a traffic ticket is not a tax, it's a penalty. One example used by Roberts was the government using taxation to affect behavior such as putting a tax on gasoline, which conservatives have countered is activity you voluntarily engage in, not inactivity. The right also point out that a tax has to originate in the House, which the mandate did not, and thus technically, the mandate cannot be a tax (although this is disputed: LINK The thing is though, the "mandate," from what I understand of the bill, does function as a tax. The administration may have sworn up and down that it is not a tax (they argued it "was" a tax before the Court, now that it has been upheld as a tax, they are again saying it's not a tax, talk about politics!), and the bill itself I think claimed it wasn't a tax, but it:

1) Exists to raise revenue to fund the PPACA ("Patient Protection Affordable Care Act")

2) Is enforced by the IRS

So the only thing that seems to keep it possibly from being a tax as far as I can tell are that it is a tax on inactivity, meant to compel people into engaging in activity, not a tax on activity people voluntarily engage in. However, the thing is, as mentioned in my previous post on the mandate, the hospital system is required to treat people regardless of whether they have health insurance or not, and this is a law that most Americans want to remain in place. The only way to be able to make such a system sustainable is to have a special tax. The way I see it, one could have a tax which you either pay or that you can be exempted from so long as you purchase your own health insurance. This is part of what the PPACA does.

     The thing is, as a tax in this sense, it isn't solely a tax meant to control people's behavior. For example, it isn't the government saying, "Use Energy Star appliances or else pay a tax," it's the government saying, "We provide this service that you, the population, want to remain in place, so therefore to be able to pay for said service, we are going to levy a tax on you, and if you don't want to pay this tax, you can be exempted from it if you choose to purchase your own health insurance."

     While the ability of the government to use taxation as a means to control people is very bad, I think that the government in the end might have a lot of trouble implementing any such policy. The Court struck down the idea that the Commerce Clause allows the government to regulate inactivity, so now any such attempts by the government will have to be framed as a tax. The Democratic party and the Left in general may be partying right now over the PPACA being able to remain law, but, in the longer term, this could be a real roadblock to any attempts to seriously expand the power of the federal government. Any attempt to impose a tax to regulate inactivity or coerce people will give the political opposition a lot of ammunition to use (we see that from how this current administration has sworn that the mandate is not a tax and still is swearing such). I don't know if the government could try to implement such taxes by calling them a "penalty" or whatnot, or if they now would all have to be called a tax, but I hope that their having to be a tax will be sufficient to keep the government from seeking to expand federal power by excessive amounts.


     I must say that I do wish the Court had just out-and-out struck the whole thing down. It would have simplified things by getting rid of the bill outright. And I do not agree with those on the Left that were hoping that it would be struck down so as to make way for full-on single-payer healthcare, as I do not think the Democrats would have been able to get that implemented. As for those that would accuse the Court of having ruled in a blatantly partisan manner, I'd say let them. Their arguments I think would have been incredibly flimsy as it is difficult to argue that the Commerce Clause allows the government to actually mandate that people purchase something, that it allows them to regulate inactivity. I think many conservatives could have pointed out and explained quite clearly that the Court had ruled in a non-partisan manner had such a ruling occurred, and it would be the four dissenting justices, who ruled (even in the ruling that did happen) that the Commerce Clause does allow the government to do such things, that were ruling in a partisan manner.

On Small Business

     So one thing I have been reading as of late in some publications on small business that I hadn't thought of before, and that I think many don't take into consideration, is that the definition for "small business" in our nation is over-simplified. Now I was well-aware of this regarding the term "entrepreneur" from the author Michael Gerber. Gerber writes in his book "The E-Myth" about how most small businesses in America are not started by people who could truly be called entrepreneurs, as they aren't started for entrepreneurial reasons by most people.

     The average person starting a gas station, opening up a small store, opening up a restaurant, opening a dry cleaners, etc...isn't starting said business for entrepreneurial reasons, i.e. identifying a need in the marketplace, then seeking to fullfill that need in a very efficient and effective way. Instead, for most such people, generally starting a business is about just being able to make a decent living for themselves or because they just want to work for themselves and get away from their jerk of a boss. It isn't necessarilly about whether or not an actual "need" exists for such a business in the marketplace.

     But just as many people misunderstand the term entrepreneur and what it really means, we also as a result misunderstand small business in America as well. For example, it is often stated about how small business is the major, or at least one of the major, job creation engines for our economy, how small business is a major source of innovation for our economy, how tax credits should be aimed at small business to incentivize them to hire more people and grow, and so forth.

     The problem with this argument is that it completely misses that not all small businesses are started/owned/operated by people who could be defined as entrepreneurs. For a great many small businesses, maybe even most small businesses, things like innovation and growth are not what the owners are after. The average store owner or gas station owner, for example, is not out to completely shake up and re-form their industry. IF ANYTHING, change is something they fear, as it could mess up their business. They don't want change, they want security. They want the ability to have a decent retirement, send their children to college, and live an okay lifestyle. So the idea that small businesses are responsible for a lot of innovation, well that would likely be only a small portion of the total number of small businesses that exist in the country. Probably your various technology startups, certain franchise startups, and so such.

     On job creation, it also means a problem. When new small businesses are started, yes it can mean job creation for the economy from those businesses that are successful, but this job creation will be limited as the business is not likely going to grow that much. The owner only needs to hire an adequate number of employees to be able to run the business. So when it comes to something like tax cuts, this creates a problem. Because small businesses that already have an adequate number of employees are not going to hire more than they need, no matter what the tax cut. If a restaurant needs ten employees, the owner isn't going to hire additional employees that aren't even needed just because they get a tax cut. This is something that policymakers seem to miss however, due to the oversimplification of the term "small business" in trying to create ways to incentivize economic growth.

Individual Mandate Upheld As a Tax

     Something told me that people were doing too much assuming on this, in assuming that, due to the nature of the questioning during the oral arguments, that the Supreme Court was going to strike down the individual mandate. Maybe it is the natural pessimist in me though. Anyhow, the individual mandate has been upheld. But at least it seems that Justice Kennedy, the swing vote, took seriously the question of whether or not the government actually has the power to mandate people purchase something.

     In terms of the mandate being upheld, it's an obvious loss for the right-wing. But it was upheld as a tax that is collected via the IRS, not as within the government's power via the Commerce Clause. So in an odd kind of way, I think it can be said both sides won. The left got their mandate, and the right got the idea of it being constitutional via the Commerce Clause to mandate people purchase insurance shot down. As a tax, I've always been okay with the "mandate" as hospitals are required by law to treat patients even if they lack health insurance, and as Milton Friedman, the late great economist once said, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

     The SCOTUS also ruled that the states can choose to opt out of the Medicaid expansion part of the bill without the federal government being able to punish them by threatening to take away all of their Medicaid funding.

Awesome Night Sky Video and Pictures

     This video won the Starmus astrophotography competition. Check the other links for an article with some really neat pictures and the guy's website for some really great pictures. These photos I think show more stuff than can be seen by the naked eye on a night without light pollution because the camera can absorb more light. For anyone unaware, that big band of light in the night sky, from which the name "Milky Way" is derived, is our galaxy's center, as we are in one of the arms of a spiral galaxy. Somewhere within that center lurks a big black hole.

Ocean Sky (video)

Article

Website

Scott Walker Wins Re-Election In Wisconsin

     This is a major blow to the public-sector unions. It will be interesting to see how this affects how other states deal with public unions and if this means a shift in the political climate of Wisconsin for the November presidential election. Some say it will benefit the Republicans now, but some have pointed out that many of the people in Wisconsin who supported Walker also support President Obama, which is one reason some speculate Obama stayed away from this election, because he didn't want to alienate pro-Obama, pro-Walker supporters.

     Personally, I am happy with this, as I do believe public-sector unions need to be reigned in. Also, even if one vehemently disagrees with Walker's policies, what he did wasn't criminal, and recall elections are usually supposed to be for literally criminal actions on the part of the governor. Walker was the third U.S. governor to face a recall election, and is now the first to survive one.

Happy Memorial Day!

Salute to all who have died for this great nation.

More on China...

Will the China Bubble Burst?
China's Corporate Leninism

Dragon Has Made It!!

     They did it! The Dragon capsule was captured by the robotic arm of the ISS and has now for the most part been berthed. The crew wil lbe performing tests on bolts, a pressurization test, etc...but for the msot part, the mission was successful. Tomorrow the crew will open up the capsule. NASA TV will be showing it live starting at 5:30 AM EST. They covered the berthing today as well (for anyone who missed it, they probably have it recorded for a person to watch). This marks a very historic day, as it proves the viability of private commercial spacecraft and is the only private company to have launched and docked a spacecraft at the ISS, something that beforehand was only accomplished by NASA, the European Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and the Russian Space Agency. If all goes according to plan, we will be able to start launching astronauts to the space station on this spacecraft in a few years. And then there's NASA's future spacecraft for deep space missions, SpaceX's planned Falcon Heavy rocket, and quite a few other private space companies working on their own spacecraft. Provided they are successful, we will have entered into a new era of private spaceflight.

Huge congrats to both SpaceX and of course its founder, Elon Musk. One HELL of an accomplishment to make in only a decade!

Congrats (So Far) to SpaceX!

I just caught the launch on television and got to watch it live! The Dragon capsule is now in orbit and is headed for the International Space Station, which will take a couple of days, but if all goes according to plan, then Space X will become the first private company to successfully launch a payload to the International Space Station. The Falcon 9, one of their rockets (and used on this mission), provides the lowest cost per pound/kilogram and does so with huge improvements in reliability. It is also a reusable rocket. On Thursday, the Dragon spacecraft must demonstrate its guidance, control, and communications systems. If successful, then on Friday it wil lbe allowed to fly within 10m of the ISS, where the crew will grab it. The company was launched by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. What is really amazing is that all the critics said what Musk is trying to do is impossible, that he doesn't know what he is doing and was doomed to fail. Each time he'd meet a goal, successfully launching a rocket, they'd then say, "Okay, he made it that far, but he won't make the next goal." When SpaceX started up around a decade ago, no one gave it much serious thought, that it was just the fantasies of a tech entrepreneur but never something that would become a serious contender for space launching, but it seems like now it will be a serious contender for giving America the ability to launch its own astronauts back into space without having to rely on other countries like Russia (and also not having to rely on other countries to launch our satellites and supplies to astronauts in space).

NASA in 2008 selected SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch vehicle (rocket) and Dragon spacecraft capsule for resupplying the International Space Station, although first SpaceX must complete a set of milestones established by NASA to win the contract. Prior to this, the business of launching satellites has been dominated by the big defense/aerospace companies and as such, they haven't had much need to innovate as there was a lack of competition. SpaceX's rockets, which it seems will be both cheaper and more reliable, are going to give them a real run for their money though it seems. The cost of launching satellites has been increasing each year, so if successful, Space X will really lower the cost, allowing NASA to spend more money on other things. SpaceX's biggest planned rocket is called the Falcon Heavy and that will be able to lift neary twice the payload of the Space Shuttle and more than twice the payload of the Delta IV Heavy. The next few days will tell if they are successful or not in reaching the ISS, but there was HUGE applause though as the rocket got into orbit and then they showed live the solar panels on the spacecraft deploying. The Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft are designed to carry astronauts to the space station as well. Once they complete a mission in which astronauts are launched, Musk will have really done our nation a truly national service, giving us space launch capability and private-sector to boot! He already has done a national service I think, but when they start launching astronauts will be really cool.

It is really neat in the sense that the modern world as we know it is a result of the space program. The computer, the Internet, the GPS system, modern electronics, and a whole host of other things too numerous to list here, would literally not exist or would exist in a much more primitive form, had it not been for the space program. But now we see the private sector, utilizing the technologies that have come about from the space program, advancing America's space launch capabilities. Maybe America will again make it to the Moon and back, through a combination of NASA and private enterprise.

Here is the statement from the White House from John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology:

"Congratulations to the teams at SpaceX and NASA for this morning’s successful launch of the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Every launch into space is a thrilling event, but this one is especially exciting because it represents the potential of a new era in American spaceflight. Partnering with U.S. companies such as SpaceX to provide cargo and eventually crew service to the International Space Station is a cornerstone of the President’s plan for maintaining America’s leadership in space. This expanded role for the private sector will free up more of NASA’s resources to do what NASA does best -- tackle the most demanding technological challenges in space, including those of human space flight beyond low Earth orbit. I could not be more proud of our NASA and SpaceX scientists and engineers, and I look forward to following this and many more missions like it."

The policy of relying more on the private-sector is great, but I disagree with the President for cutting the funding for NASA, as that is the one government program that actually is partially self-sustaining because it continues to pump out new research and development that the private sector takes advantage of. It's probably the one government program that should not see any real cuts, as it is already a miniscule protion of the budget. And until the private-sector proves its mettle, we want NASA to continue working on its own replacement spacecraft (currently the Space Launch System and Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle). Thie Chinese have made it clear that they want to be the first back to the Moon, and if the U.S. did it with 1960s technology, I'm sure the Chinese could eventually pull it off.

As a side note (and something I mentioned in a post some ways back), James Cameron recently made a record-breaking dive to the bottom of the Marianna Trench (in a submersible which he designed too, he also has worked at designing special camera, both for movies and space exploration), making it the fourth time any craft has successfully dived down that far. He spent three hours down there, the longest ever (the last time any person went to the Challenger Deep (deepest part) was the U.S. Navy in 1960, two men for twenty minutes). Cameron was the first solo dive and the longest manned dive. The dive was the culmination of seven years of planning and the design and construction of a special submersible (Cameron is very big on ocean exploration, hence the movies The Abyss, Titanic and also the aquatic-based world of Avatar). This dive was really big-time as well in that not only is his craft revolutionary in design as far as submersibles go, but it is also private-sector, not government. And the deep sea is harder to explore than outer space (more humans have walked on the Moon, and for far longer, than have explored the bottom of the ocean), so that was also a big deal.

Good times for human exploration!

Time for a Rant

New York State Democrats Seeking to Increase State's Minimum Wage from Current $7.25/Hour to $8.50/Hour

::::BANGS HEAD::::

REALLY!?!?

     We are in the middle of a recession, youth unemployment is at an all-time high, and these guys want to increase the minimum wage all the way up to $8.50/hour!? The minimum wage is a price control. It artificially increases the cost of labor to businesses in the same way placing a tax on gasoline increases the cost of it and gets people and business to purchase less of it, provided the increase is high enough. LABOR IS NO DIFFERENT. You artificially increase labor's cost, and you are going to see a spike in the unemployment rate. Yes, you can increase the cost of labor artificially without seeing a spike in the unemployment rate if the increases are minimal, but this depends on the type of unemployment rate as well. In terms of the overall unemployment rate, the minimum wage probably doesn't increase it that much. Where the minimum wage increases tend to have a bad effect is on the youth, which are the people that the media are always pointing out are suffering through a very high unemployment rate right now (in order for the minimum wage itself to really begin to raise the overall unemployment rate, you'd probably have to implement something like a "living wage" as many on the Left desire).

     Well what do these Democrats think will happen if you raise the cost of cheap labor (often youth) to business? They will higher less such workers. Thus, we have another case of the left putting the working person up onto a pedastal and then, well-meaning or not, trying to push through a policy that is only going to send the economy even further into the crapper. Note how House Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver says the following:

Silver said the issue was about "a full day's pay for a full day's work."

"When push comes to shove, this is a moral issue," he said.
Note the phrasing, "A full day's pay" (whatever that is supposed to mean) "for a full day's work." Words that are very arbitrary in meaning but that are meant to appeal to the empty-headed on this issue. The amount you make as a laborer depends on what skills you have to offer. What value can you provide to employers on the labor market. Obviously if you have a Ph.D in computer engineering and know how to design microprocessors, you are not going to just start off at minimum wage. Minimum wage is because such laborers are generally unskilled. They have virtually nothing to offer except very basic labor skills. But this is fine for youth, such as teenagers, who are able to get jobs and thus garner work experience and begin their foray into adulthood.

     Saying that the minimum wage should be increased not only prices youth out of the labor market, but it also is entitlement-minded. No one is entitled to a decent-paying job that allows you to live a nice life. If you want to live a nice life, then you need to research what skills are needed in society, then acquire said skills and this way you will be more highly-valued in the labor market. Or you can start a business and produce goods and/or services. Either way, the economy works where you have to produce something of value to society, which is determined by the market. That is when you are then traded money, which you then can trade for other goods/services. If you have a nice home and car, it means you have a skill that is valued highly or own a business that produces enough of some good or service that you make enough money to own those things. Saying the minimum wage increase is a "moral issue" relies on the entitlement mindset and ignores economics.

     Some say, "The cost of living in New York State is very high." Yes, it is. But you aren't supposed to just make minimum wage for the rest of your life. Thinking that you should be able to just get a job and be paid minimum wage, but that minimum wage should be adequate to afford you a nice lifestyle and raise a family and all that, is an entitlement-mindset in the extreme. It's basically saying, "I am too lazy to acquire any skills or do anything whatsoever to make myself valuable in some way to society, so I want to use the force of the government in order to legally increase how much an employer must pay me." If all you can continually earn is minimum wage, then you have virtually nothing to offer to society. It is up to YOU to acquire the skills to create value in some way to offer to society.

     I think the truly moral thing to do (albeit not necessarilly politicially popular as too many people do not know any better) would be to eliminate the state minimum wage (and the national minimum wage) outright. This would lower the price of unskilled labor to the market level and allow more people to actually get work. And the Republican party seems utterly idiotic in how they are counter-arguing the issue. They aren't pointing any of this out, but instead are using the argument that the minimum wage hike will result in higher taxes and reduced social services. Well maybe, but they could completely turn this issue on its head with the Democrats by making the argument that the truly moral thing to do is to leave the minimum wage fixed where it is at, or else risk raising the unemployment rate further, and in particular the youth unemployment rate.

     They could say, "At the end of the day, this IS a moral issue, and as such, we do not want to be artificially increasing the cost of youth and unskilled labor to businesses, which will result in them having fewer opportunities for employment in this economy." I don't know for sure, but I would be willing to bet that this push for an increase in the minimum wage is also tied to the unions, who push for minimum wage increases because the minimum wage protects unionized labor from cheaper non-union workers, and also a lot of union contracts are tied to the prevailing minimum wage, which means that an increase in the minimum wage increases the amount of money the workers, and hence the union, will make, which thus increases its power.

Then we get this:

Myrna Capaldi, a single working mother of a teenager from Kingston, led two dozen demonstrators with the Workers Justice Center to Skelos' office. After a 25-minute wait, the bilingual family social services worker was happy to meet with Skelos' aide.

"Every dollar I earn is already spent before I get my paycheck," Capaldi said.

MAYBE YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE POPPED OUT A CHILD WHEN YOU DIDN'T HAVE ANY SKILLS, AND STILL DON'T HAVE ANY SKILLS, TO MAKE YOURSELF VALUED MORE HIGHLY AS A LABORER.

Rant over.

Government Study of Government Study of Government Studies

Yes, you read that correctly. Back in 2010 the Pentagon issued a study to learn how much all the studies that the Defense Department was being inundated with cost. However, that "study of studies," if you will, hasn't been producing results and is still on-going, so the Government Accountability Office was ordered to perform (you guessed it!) a study of the study of studies: LINK

Should Police Be Allowed to Use Drones?

     This is a subject that gets into the area of letting the police do the things they need to do to enforce the law and prevent crime versus protecting people's rights. The Left and the Ron Paul libertarians are generally opposed to the use of drones, but some among the neoconservative right, who are usually okay with more expanded governmental powers for stopping terrorism (for example the Patriot Act, which many on the left and libertarian right are against) and maintaining a strong standing military, are also against this.

     The reasoning is that drones are an instrument of war, and their use will end up being abused, even if they try to create safeguards to protect against such a thing, and thus that police forces should not be allowed to utilize such tools of warfare. Just like the standing military, modern police forces are militarized a lot more than they used to be. With the problems of terrorism and modern weapons and so forth, and in major cities in particular, the police forces are in some ways paramilitary forces, some capable of counter-terrorism, complete with highly-trained fighting units that wear helmets and body-armor, are equipped with high-powered weapons, snipers, armored vehicles, etc...but at the same time, just as with granting the government some extended capabilities to deal with terrorism, there is a limit, after which you really begin infringing on people's rights and freedoms. With police, it's the same. Police may be more militarized today, but there's still a limit in terms of just how much capability they should be given.

     Charles Krauthammer, a prominent neoconservative, believes usage of drones by police should be outlawed completely, which I find very interesting. This is one of the things that has made me interested in this issue, as usually the folks like Krauthammer are the ones arguing about how the Left, the ACLU, and the Libertarians are blowing things out of proportion and that America is not becoming a police state as they often claim. But in this case, he agrees completely with them.

Should Mark Zuckerberg Wear a Suit?

     So Wall Street was not very impressed last week with Mark Zuckerberg's wearing of a hoodie as he launches the campaign for Facebook's IPO. It has started a debate about whether Zuckerberg should or should not wear a hoodie. Some say he shouldn't have to, that by now he has earned the right to dress how he pleases, that it's results that matter, not appearance, and that he may even purposely be thumbing his nose at the establishment if you will. Others say that not wearing the hoodie is a mark of immaturity and very disrespectful and unprofessional, and that if you want investors to hand you lots of their money to a company, then you need to show them some respect.

     I do agree that results matter more than looks, that just because someone is dressed nice has absolutely nothing to do with what skills they have. While I have no empirical proof of it, I have a hunch that techie culture also tends to be wary of dressing nice because many techies were the "uncool" kids in high school that were ignored or made fun of by the "cool" kids (who usually are nicely dressed). Techies respect one another not by fashion or looks, but by brains and accomplishment. The thing is though, Zuckerberg has already proven himself a great deal, so why not just be respectful to the investors and show up in a suit?

     I think another reason many techies disdain the suit is because they see it as too constricting and too conformist. If you are used to dressing comfortably, and not necessarilly even grooming much as is the case with lots of long-haired and/or bearded techies, the idea of putting on a uniform (just the word there, uniform, says it all for them) that requires wrapping a thing around one's neck and tying it, and then having to have a haircut, be clean-shaven, etc...it just goes completely against their psychology. To them, the whole get-up represents comformity, standardization, lack of creativity, boring, and so forth. They see the suit as the clothing of the bureaucrat, whether corporate or governmental.

     While it is true that a lot of people who wear suits are conformist, non-creative types, I disagree entirely with the notion that the suit represents such a person. And except during very hot days, a suit and tie should not be uncomfortable at all unless it is fitted wrongly. But a person could very much be an individual-thinking, creative person, but yet still wear a suit. Suits can be individualized as well. The most common-looking suit that all the politicians wear is the black suit, which I don't care much for myself for this reason. But there are other colors, such as blue, gray, brown, etc...in different shades, and in different patterns and materials, that one can wear. There's tweed, herringbone, linen, cotton, there's pinstripe, Glen Plaid, Prince of Wales, and so on. In terms of designs, there's the two-piece suit, of which there's one-button, two-button, and three-button two-piece suits, there's single-breasted and double-breasted, and there's also the classic three-piece suit, which I think is really cool:

The above doesn't look like a conformist to me. To the contrary, it's a very classical and timeless look (all suits used to be three-piece until World War II, when due to fabric shortages, they started making them two-piece).

     And there are all different kinds of ties, with all sorts of different patterns. One can individualize the suit through wearing different shirts, ties, cufflinks, etc...you could technically wear the same suit day after day, but make it look different each time via a different color of shirt, tie, different cufflinks, and so forth.

     One of the things I find interesting is that, in the techie world, they don't like to wear suits because they consider them conformist. But the thing is, SO MANY of them dress in plain clothes, that if you saw a guy like Mark Zuckerberg actually wearing a suit, one could reason that THAT would be a truly individual, non-coformist thing to do. It's a case of people doing something considered radical, but then so many people begin doing it, that what was once radical becomes the norm, and what was once the norm becomes the new radical. Dressing in plain clothes used to be rebellious, but now it's the norm among many of those guys. A twenty-something techie wearing say a three-piece suit, now that would be unique.

     If I was Zuckerberg, I would wear a suit, but try to really individualize it with a special custom tie, say a tie with a pattern on it that somehow relates to Facebook. A lot of ties have playful patterns to them, of small animals for example and other colorful and playful things. Hermes started this trend in ties I believe back in the 1980s. So Mark could wear a suit to show the Wall Street investors respect and look professional, but at the same time, retain that techie rebelliousness by wearing a tie patterned in some playful way that relates to Facebook or social networking or whatnot.

     I think one other reason Zuckerberg should wear a suit is that while Facebook is a huge social network and is valued very highly, in terms of actually earning lots of money, it has yet to do this. Facebook's revenue in 2011 was $3.71 billion. That's not much for a company that is going to be valued perhaps as high as $100 billion dollars. If Facebook's actual revenue and profits matched such a valuation, then I could more see Zuckerberg's wearing the hoodie if he feels like it. But he has yet to really make Facebook earn the big money. Until this happens, he should be humble and respectful to the investors I think. None of this is to take away from what he has accomplished, but there is still a lot more that he must accomplish and you need to come across as respectful when you are expecting investors to give you lots of money for what is still an unproven company at the moment.

China Again

 Jim Chanos on China: LINK1

New York Times article: LINK2

Fascism - Left-wing, Right-wing, or Both?

     This is unrelated to any current events, but a subject that I nonetheless find very interesting. It is also among the most controversial political subjects in existence: namely, is fascism ultimately a system of the left-wing, of the right-wing, or of both? Many people over the years have tried to tackle the question of just what defines fascism, with differing conclusions. According to the political Left, the standard rhetoric is that fascism is of the right-wing, and that the modern Republican party are the inheritors of quasi-fascist concepts. The storyline is generally that Soviet communism (and other similar socialisms) were of the far-left and that the fascist systems were of the far-right. This is also the view held by certain left-wing historians of fascism who often like to criticize the political right as being fascists.

     However, many people, in particular those on the political right, have a problem with this point-of-view, as anyone on the right-wing who studies the fascist systems of the early 20th century in-depth finds little in common between them and the modern right-wing. For the most part, this view of socialism = leftwing, fascism = rightwing went pretty much unchallenged for years. There were multiple challenges to this opinion written by others in the past, but these are not very known outside of those into studying subjects such as economics, political science, and so forth.

     One such example was the economist Friedrich Hayek's book "The Road to Serfdom," in which he made the argument that fascism, rather than being a reactionary movement of the right-wing against socialism, was actually, unto itself, a socialist movement, and of the left. This book enraged the political left at the time and has since always been controversial. In the book, Hayek points out in detail how the philosophical roots underpinning the fascist movements were the same as those underpinning the socialist movements. He points out how during the 1930s, many people could not decide whether they were communists, socialists, fascists, or whatnot, but just that they hated capitalism. And so forth (it is a very good book, one all people should read).

     It was not until 2007 however, with the publication of Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism that the subject really came into the limelight. Goldberg makes the argument, long-held by many conservatives and libertarians (and people adherent to classical liberalism such as myself), but never widely expressed to the public, that fascism is of the political left and that there is very little, if anything, right-wing about it. The book became a best-seller and sparked intense debate. What is interesting is how lacking in knowledge at the time many people, even conservatives, were of this argument. So many people regarded the book as a radical new theory, when really there was nothing new about it. Others found it highly-insulting, and the political left were (once again) enraged.

     What I personally found really interesting, and odd, was how some people, including professional historians of fascism, who are supposed to be experts in the subject of fascism, in reviewing the book and criticizing it (some of the leftist ones very harshly), showed an utter lack of knowledge about the subject of just what fascism is. One such journalist, David Neiwert (a man who regularly accuses Republicans of being on the verge of fascism), accused Goldberg of writing a book akin to the history of fascism what the Da Vinci Code was to religious history and of essentially being the equivalent of a Holocaust denier. He also criticized Goldberg as lacking credentials in that Goldberg was a not a formally-trained historian. Well three things on this:

1) Attacking the credentials, or lack thereof, of someone when they make an argument is usually what professional gurus do when challenged and unable to counter the argument of the person challenging them. This happened to Albert Camus when he wrote a book critical of communism. The criticss panned it on the basis of his lacking credentials (when Raymond Aron wrote the book "The Opium of the Intellectuals" which was highly critical of communism, they were unable to do this as Aron had formal credentials). So it is a lousy and classless way to go about having a debate.

2) What exactly makes a historian qualified to define exactly what fascism is anyhow? The question of what fascism is is a question of political science/political theory, not history. In their critiques of Goldberg's book, many historians, while very knowledgable on the history of fascism and fascist regimes, seem to lack a lot of very basic political and economic knowledge regarding just what fascism was/is (I will get to this in a bit). But in this case, that means that they, as historians, are technically no more, or less, qualified than Goldberg to write a book on the subject of fascism.

3) One of the most seminal and widely-cited works of historical scholarship, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," was written by a man, William Shirer, who wasn't a credentialed historian either. He was a journalist. Two other great writers on the subject of social thinkers were Albert Camus and Eric Hoffer (who worked as a dockworker and then longshoreman for twenty-five years and was completely self-taught; Eisenhower cited his work "The True Believer" in one of the first televised broadcasts, and Hoffer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983).

Another critic, who was more moderate in tone, Robert Paxton, also made a few major mistakes of argument in his review of the book (I will get to these a little later).

     So much of the rage over the book seems to be over the argument that fascism isn't right-wing, but left-wing. However, too many people, for whatever reason, have interpreted this as saying that if fascists are leftists, therefore leftists are fascists. That is not the case, and something that Goldberg repeats throughout the book. Myself, I have always found this odd that so many leftists think this. Arguing that an oppressive system is leftist is not calling all leftists oppressors.

     A prime example is socialism. No one ever gets upset over it being pointed out that Stalin or Mao were leftists. And there are multiple type of leftists and socialists. Some socialists believed in liberal democracy and were pacifists. Fabian socialists for example believed in liberal democracy and supported the gradual implementation of socialist institutions into society. Other socialists support violent revolution and the implementation of a dictatorship. Yet, all of these people would be classified as leftist. George Orwell, author of "Animal Farm" and "1984," was himself a socialist. But he was a democratic socialist. YET, if one decides to make the argument that fascism is also on the left, immediately sparks start flying.

     Some have compared "Liberal Fascism" to being the equivalent of an Ann Coulter book, as in basically a book written to insult the left and please the right in a purposely provocative manner. A work akin to when some left-wing highly-political person writes a book attacking the right-wing as being fascists. But the problem is that "Liberal Fascism" is no such book. It is a very serious work of scholarship, with a tremendous amount of footnotes and sources (something that irked some of the reviewers, as if Goldberg should have written a big fat book saying fascism is of the left without bothering to cite any sources).

     So what is the central argument as to why fascism is ultimately of the left, and not the right? Well, the main factor that almost everyone seems to miss in trying to define fascism is that it is always about expanding the power of the State over the individual. And in the political sphere, political movements generally can be boiled down to two things: those movements that seek to expand State power at the expense of the individual and those that place a primacy on the sanctity of the individual and thus seek to limit the power of the State.

     In modern America at least, our general definitions of "right" and "left" rely on this core belief. Most of the other things are just side issues. In order to try to figure out what fascism is, scholars have thus relied on issues such as militarism, nationalism, racism, sexism, and so forth. It is these issues that lead many to see fascism as being of the extreme right-wing, because many far-right-wing movements in both the United States, and throughout the world, are racist and admire the Nazis. Also, the political right are known for being very patriotic and for being for a strong military. One could argue that one could also look at the type of govenrment supported as well.

     In this sense, it almost seems like a no-brainer to those who don't know any better. Republicans are for a strong military and patriotism, so therefore fascism, with its nationalism and extreme militarism, must be the extreme version of the right-wing beliefs the Republicans adhere to. Nazism, being a fascism that was also extremely racist, also fits this when people see right-wing racism.

     The problem here is that the people using all of these things to try and claim fascism is right-wing are making four major mistakes:

1) They ignore that one can find every single one of these things among certain factions on the political left as well; that something is racist, nationalist, militarist, sexist, etc...really doesn't tell us anything about whether it is right-wing or left-wing; both the right and the left have extremists that are racist

2) They show a tremendous lack of understanding about just what the right-wing's political philosophy is and what it actually stands for

3) They completely ignore the economic aspects of fascism

4) They seem to not understand the collective mindset of a fascist

     On issue one,  the examples here are legion. Racist left-wing movements? Look at the likes of the Black Panther Party. Or the anti-Semitics found among many on the political left. The Soviet Union had a lot of anti-Semitism. One of the most infamous examples, which Goldberg makes sure to point out in the book, are the Progressives of the early 20th century, the forebears of the modern "liberals" of America, who were major supporters of the eugenics movement. Something that isn't widely known, in fact, is that the eugenics movement was started in America and influenced the Nazis greatly, as if gave scientific (well pseudo-scientific, but at the time it was considered science) legitimacy to what they were intending to do. The political right, on the other hand, tends to be very opposed to anything even remotely eugenic, to an almost extreme degree. The abortion issue here is a good example. The history of the abortion movement is tied up with the history of eugenics (many prominent supporters of abortion were also eugenicists, Planned Parenthood was run by a eugenicist up into the 1960s, etc...). The issue is the State and the ability of the State to determine the intrinsic value of human life. In its light-hearted forms, it can be abortion and euthanasia, in its more severe forms, it can be the forced sterilization of people (along with the forced unmarryings of interracial couples and the forced commitment to mental institutions of certain individuals), which happened in the United States from the early 20th century all the way up into the 1960s---California, being the most progressive state, performed more forced sterilizations (of women deemed "unfit" to reproduce) then any other state in the union.

     The one exception here, which I think also adds to the confusion, are those portions of the political right, who are among the extreme right, that are racist (as said, there are racist movements on both sides). These people on the extreme right can be the complete opposite of the early Progressives regarding military and economic policy (no foreign wars, no strong standing militaries, no strong central government, no Federal Reserve, etc...) but can be okay with "purifying" the race. These people do not believe in the sanctity of the individual in the way the classically-liberal right-wing does.

     Nationalism? The Soviet Union was very nationalistic. So is North Korea (North Korea's form of socialism entails a very strong nationalism). Militarism? During the early 20th century, it was the right-wing that was very suspicious of a strong standing military, and very much against American military interventions overseas. To this date even, this faction of the right still exists among many conservatives and almost all Libertarians (who disdain the neoconservatives, who are for a very strong standing military and active foreign intervention). It was the Progressives of the early 20th century who supported American involvement in both World Wars I and II (something Goldberg points out in his book as well). And of course, the Soviet Union, which was Russia the master nation holding a bunch of smaller nations to it by force, thus forming an empire. In addition to this, it had a slew of overseas colonies, actively funding communist uprisings all over the place. Sexism? There was only one woman who ever made it into the Politburo in the Soviet Union. And on and on.

     Even social conservatism. This is generally associated with the right-wing. But there are plenty of leftist, blue-collar workers, who are socially-conservative. They may be for labor unions, communism even, but they will be against gay marriage and be religious. One can also look at much of African-American culture and Hispanic culture, which tends to be very socially-conservative and religious, yet economically, more left-wing.

     On issue two, too many on the left seem to have no understanding of the political philosophy of the right. The right believes in the principles of classical liberalism, i.e. liberal democracy, market capitalism, limited government, fiscal conservatism, either no or a limited welfare state (depends on the type of right-winger), responsible citizenship, charitable giving, and so forth. They believe in the sanctity of the individual, individual rights and freedoms, and in limiting the power of the state. They generally believe in a strong national defense and are patriotic. They also tend to be very suspicious of the welfare state as a tool with which to solve poverty, seeing it as at best not fixing poverty and at worst making it even worse. Too many on the Left are unfortunately completely clueless of all of this though. To them, the right just "don't care." Two areas where the Left also make a major mistake is in confusing maintaining a strong military and being patriotic with militarism and nationalism.

     As pointed out above, the right used to be very suspicious of a strong standing military, and to this day, many on the right are. Ron Paul for example is always giving speeches about how America must stop maintaining its "empire" of military bases all over the world. The policy of maintaining a strong military mostly comes from the neoconservatives, who are usually accused as being fascists, and generally hated by both the old-fashioned right-wing (who will often proudly say, "We are right-wingers, but we are not neocons!") and the left-wing, who see them as one step short of being outright Nazis. But the reason for this view from neoconservatives is that neoconservatism arose as a response to the horrors of Nazism and Soviet communism. It is a form of conservatism that recognizes that, in the modern world, the old-fashioned conservative view of maintaining a military only adequate for defense, and staying out of world affairs for the most part, is not realistic. Another contributor to neoconservatism were disaffected leftists, people who became disillusioned with the left over the violent nature of the communist regimes.

     Maintaining a strong military to counter the imperial ambitions of a Nazi Germany or a Soviet Union is completely different to wanting a strong military for the sake of conquest. The other misunderstanding is regarding nationalism versus patriotism. Although they may seem similar, the difference is that nationalism is generally a collective movement. It is a mania, a "wave" if you will, that people get caught up in. That is generally what powers it. Yes, there can be exceptions, people who are devoted, lifelong, radical nationalists, but those are rarer. In addition, generally nationalists tend to think of their own country/culture/people as superior to others. Patriotism, on the other hand, is something individualistic and not elitist. Patriotic is something that someone will be whether it is popular or not. It is the person who loves their country, culture, people, etc...and has great pride in them, but who does not think they are better or superior to any other country/culture/people necessarilly (and if so, only for legitimate reasons---for example, the patriotic American who sees American culture as superior to a culture that sends children off with bombs strapped to them to blow themselves up and kill others).

     A really great example of patriotism I think could be when many on the Left, during the Bush administration, said that the most patriotic thing one could do was to dissent. Obviously this mindset, even if one disagrees with the policies supported by the left regarding how to deal with terrorism, was not a collective mania that people on the left were caught up in. It was a legitimate disagreement regarding what direction to take the country in.

     On issue three, this has to be one of the most oft-missed aspects of fascism, in that too many people flat-out do not understand the economic aspects of the fascists states (it seems that the left in particular do not understand the economic philosophy of either the classically liberal rightwing or the fascist regimes). Simply put, they were socialist systems. There was nothing right-wing about them. This point is crucially important I think, and a major one that puts a large hole through any argument trying to claim fascism is right-wing. The major fascist systems have always been dictatorships that entailed an economy which was controlled by the government.

     Something many people also never take into account is what the actual right-wing economists of the time said about fascism. For example, the infamous Austrian economists (definitely NOT socialists!) Friedrich Hayek (who I have mentioned already) and then his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, who said:

The usual terminology of political language is stupid. What is

"left" and what is "right"? Why should Hitler be "right" and Stalin, his
temporary friend, be "left?" Who is "reactionary" and who is "progressive"?
Reaction against an unwise policy is not to be condemned.
And progress towards chaos is not to be commended. Nothing should
find acceptance just because it is new, radical, and fashionable. "Orthodoxy"
is not an evil if the doctrine on which the "orthodox" stand is
sound. Who is anti-labor, those who want to lower labor to the Russian
level, or those who want for labor the capitalistic standard of the United
States? Who is "nationalist," those who want to bring their nation
under the heel of the Nazis, or those who want to preserve its independenc

---from Mises's book Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, page 90, at the end of Chapter VII

     Some may question whether there is such a thing as a "right-wing dictatorship," as some will argue that if a dictatorship exists in conjunction with a free-market economy, that this makes it a right-wing dictatorship. On this, there probably could be some right-wing dictatorships, but they would most certainly not be (classically) liberal, as no dictatorship can exist with classical liberalism. Whether in China or Dubai (both dictatorships with market components to their economies), free speech is oppressed. This is because you can't maintain a dictatorship if you are going to allow people to openly criticize the dictatorship. You will get lots of people questioning why the government is a dictatorship, and why the ruler or ruling party doesn't allow competing political parties that people can vote on. This repression of free speech and jailing of dissidents is extremely illiberal and a violation of human rights.

     One thing that is debated is whether or not a dictatorship can exist in conjunction with a market economy. Some say that it can temporarily, but that otherwise a market economy will always lead to the dictatorship being replaced with a democratic system of government or the dictatorship will replace the market economy. This is because in order to maintain a dictatorship, generally the government must grab control over the economy. Others say that it can exist with a market economy, but just will not be liberal. There are many people on the right-wing who are illiberal in certain ways while being fine with a free-market, for example people who want to combine church and state in government, while at the same time being for economic liberalism. Generally, a nation's economic system is a result of its economic institutions, which themselves are a result of its political system, which then is a result of its political institutions. The natural urge of most people in a government is to seek to expand their power, which is usually why dictatorships and free-markets don't work out too well. Because the politicians will seek to bring aspects of the economy under their control and influence so as to enrich themselves.

     It is much easier to accomplish this in a dictatorship then with a liberal democracy, because in a liberal democracy, with a free press and free speech, the people will criticize the politicians for attempting to do this and the politicians want to be able to remain in power. Now if one looks at countries like China or the city-state Dubai, this type of thing is done quite a bit, with various state-owned enterprises that compete alongside private enterprises, or with whole sectors of the economy being strictly state-owned (such as banking and finance).

     China does have a market component to their economy, but the majority of their economy is still-state-run and the Chinese government has not taken any steps to further free up their economy, likely due to fear that it will cause the Communist Party to lose too much power. Also, many of the leaders in the Communist party in China do not want to change a system that allows them to enrich themselves so much right now. The Chinese financial and banking system is entirely state-run and many other aspects of the economy are also state-run. Dubai is a very interesting case. Dubai is a dictatorship that is part of the United Arab Emirates, and the UAE as a whole rates a 69.3% on the Economic Freedom Index, which is maintained by the Heritage Foundation (definitely not a bastion of leftism): LINK

If one scrolls down to the section labeled "Background," one will see the following quote:

Dubai is the fore­most center of finance, commerce, transportation, and tour­ism. Free trade zones that offer opportunities for 100 percent foreign ownership with zero taxation help to diversify the economy, but UAE nationals rely heavily on public-sector employ­ment and subsidized services. Hydrocarbons still account for roughly 80 percent of total government revenues.

     So while a dictatorship and with a decent amount of economic freedom, most of the actual UAE (and I'm assuming thus Dubai) nationals themselves are employed by the government. And oil accounts for most of the government's revenue. What this would mean is that while Dubai may have a lot of economic freedom, it is primarily for foreigners it seems, as opposed to being for the people of Dubai itself. This could explain how Dubai can maintain an oppressive dictatorship in which Sharia law is dominant and free speech is oppressed, yet still have a decent amount of economic freedom.

     Getting back to the discussion of the fascist systems however, none of them entailed a dictatorship with a market economy. They were all economies that were controlled by the government. In Nazi Germany, the government had a central bureaucracy that directed all businesses on prices, wages, production, and so forth. Any businesses that refused to cooperate were nationalized. Some Nazis wanted to outright nationalize certain parts of the economy anyway, for example the major German banks. The big banks were willing to go along with the government's orders, but resisted outright nationalization. And the fascists looked at the economic policies of the Progressives in America at the time and vice-versa. Hitler's National Socialism called for what is known as dirigisme, which allows for continued private ownership over most businesses, but requires that those businesses be regulated in accordance with the collective interests of the State. So things like price controls, wage controls, investment controls, job security, dividend controls, production quotas, and state-directed trade were enacted. Germany at this time also had the largest state-owned and operated company in Europe at the time, the Reichswerke-Hermanne Goring. 
.
     What I think confuses many, and where the historian Robert Paxton makes a major mistake in criticizing Goldberg's work, is that he says that since the Nazis allowed for private property ownership, that this thus wasn't really socialism (and that therefore Goldberg is wrong to call fascism a form of socialism). But this is only true is one goes by the Marxist-Leninist definition of socialism in which no private property ownership of any kind, whatsoever, is allowed. To the Marxists, any socialism that allowed this (such as the German National Socialism or the British Fabian socialism) was heresy and did not constitute "real" socialism). The Soviets themselves actually had to violate their own principle however, with regards to their agriculture industry, by allowing partial privatization of farms, because collectivized farming was such a complete and total failure that they had to do this to prevent the whole country from starving.

     The more appropriate definition of socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are controlled by the government, regardless of who actually owns them. Because control is what counts ultimately, not ownership. If the government outright owns and runs the steel industry of a nation, versus allows private ownership of the steel industry while having a central economic planning bureau that gives out constant orders directing the steel companies on things like prices, wages, production quotas, etc...is there really a difference between the two in terms of the overall ultimate outcome for the economy? If the government allows Wal-Mart to remain publicly-traded and private-sector, but otherwise directs Wal-Mart regarding the wages it can pay, the prices it has to sell its goods at, what it can sell, etc...you're not going to see much difference then if the government directly owned the operation.

     Now some might argue, if there is little difference between the government controlling an enterprise versus the government outright owning and running the enterprise, then why would the German banks have resisted nationalization? How would it have been any different? The difference is that by allowing private ownership, the major executives who run the firm can still make big profits and thus become, or remain, very rich. Outright nationalization would end this. We see this with the big health insurance companies of the United States. Many think the major health insurance companies were against Obamacare, but they actually supported it, because it guarantees their profits. If you are a high-level executive of a major health insurance company, Obamacare means that yes, your company gives up a lot of control to the government, but in exchange, you get security. No more competition. Now your profits are guaranteed because everyone is mandated to purchase health insurance, those who do not purchase it are fined, and those who outright cannot afford it are subsidized by the government.

     However, had the government proposed to outright nationalize the major health insurance companies, the health insurance companies likely would have very fiercely resisted this. The situation was likely the same with the major German banks. So while the economic outcome for the customer/consumer will be the same, for the executives running the operation, there still is a difference between private ownership with governmental control versus outright government ownership.

     Another misconception I have seen some make is in confusing the existence of private businesses, or capitalism, with a free-market. The existence of private businesses, even if they are not controlled by the government, does not constitute liberal, free-market capitalism. For example, I was debating with a person who said that the Nazi government handed control of the German economy over to the German big business. This isn't true, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that it was. That still wouldn't have been right-wing. Such a move would have entailed a complete infringement on the free-market. It would mean that the government essentially would have had to wrest control over the economy away from the market, and then hand it over to the big businesses, as those big businesses would need special protections from the government to prevent any other businesses or entrepreneurs from competing with them. So the existence of private businesses controlling the economy without any government direction still does not make the system right-wing at all, because government is required for their protection. It would be a weird socialism by proxy essentially.

     Other things not paid attention to are that the Nazis and the fascists overall were no fans of market capitalism and limited government, or ideas such as the sanctity of the individual (fascism entailed the glorification of the State, a collective form of mindset). The Nazis agreed with many of the Progressives at the time that market capitalism was on the way out. One of the things that led to West Germany adopting a market economy after World War II ended was that the German people did not want anything to do with the Nazis by that point, and socialism was associated with the Nazis. So the German government (against the wishes of many German economists at the time who said it would be disastrous) adopted a market economy (and went on to become one the most prosperous nations in Europe).

     And finally, regarding issue four, many people do not seem to realize the collective mindset of the fascist. Fascism emphasizes the glory of the State and the central leader. The life of the individual, of businesses, etc...is to be devoted to the State. The ideal person in such a system is the equivalent of a human automaton, not an individual, thinking human being. So essentially you had a political philosophy that was collectivist in three areas: nationalism (a collective mindset that people were caught up in), socialism (albeit a nationalist form of socialism), and glorification of the State over the sanctity of the individual.

     Regarding the historian Robert Paxton, Paxton makes a few mistakes in asserting that it is wrong to call the Nazis leftwing because the Nazis crushed labor unions and the Nazis also hated and killed socialists and communists. But crushing labor unions does not mean the movement is itself right-wing, nor does fighting other versions of leftist. Labor unions didn't fare well in Stalin's Soviet Union, for example. In addition, different versions of fascist fought one another (Gregor Strasser's versus Hitler's), and socialists fought one another (Stalin's versus Trotsky's). Leftist political philosophies share a lot in common with religions in this sense (indeed, some of them essentially are religions, such as Marxism). Like religion, they tend to be utopian and all who do not agree must be slaughtered. In religion, we see how Christians and Muslims fought one another. Different versions of Christians also fought one another. No one would say that Protestants are not Christian because they fought Catholics, or vice-versa. Different versions of Islam fight one another to this day, such as the Sunni and the Shi'ite.

     David Neiwert, a heavy-duty critic of Goldberg, who also likes to imply that the right-wing in modern America are just shy of being fascists, criticized Goldberg's work by saying that the fascists hated liberals. He seemed to be unaware of the fact that the liberals fascists hated were those of the classical variety (human rights, individual liberty, market capitalism, limited government, etc...), not the modern American term of liberal as we know it.

     Something very important I think that should also be kept in mind when researching fascism is that no where does one find the intellectual roots of the fascist movements inspired by the likes of John Locke (natural rights), Charles Montisquieu (separation of powers), Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson Alexander Hamilton, Alexis de Tocqueville, and so forth, the people that influence the modern right-wing Republicans and libertarians in the United States. And their economic philosophy was not inspired by the right-wing economists of the time, such as von Mises. How could movements that completely reject right-wing economics be considered right-wing? As I mentioned above, the fascists saw such economic policy as a failure and a thing of the past, with socialism being the wave of the future. Many at the time thought the Great Depression represented the final blow to market capitalism and that socialism would now finally begin taking over. The question was what kind of socialism.

     This also leads to another point people should consider more about these totalitarian movements. Usually such movements occur during very harsh economic times. If you have a prosperous free-market, democratic society going, it is pretty hard to convince people that they need to rise up, revolt, and establish a dictatorship (or grant the government dictatorial powers). Radicalism in the form of racial and ethnic hatred, religious hatred, etc...is also hard to stir up.

     In order to get such movements going, the economy has to really be in the toilet, with the people suffering badly. John Maynard Keynes, the late great economist, was one of the first people to recognize this. Keynes was one of the people to predict that a second world war would likely occur from the very harsh reparations that were imposed on Germany by the Allied powers as revenge for World War I. Keynes said that such reparations would only wreck the German economy, which would make the country ripe for radical politics.

     Keynes outlined this in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It is also for these reasons that Keynes supported his policies of large governmental intervention into the economy. Keynes was not a socialist, but he saw it that without government adjusting the economy in certain ways, and providing safety nets, that it could make a country ripe for radical politics and thus susceptible to a real, hardcore socialist gaining power. In this sense, he was correct to a degree. FDR pursued a very left-wing economic agenda with his New Deal, and when the Supreme Court began declaring much of it unconstitutional (they saw that it was combining the powers of the executive and the legislative), he then threatened to stack the court. On this, both the Republicans and the Democrats revolted, and FDR backed down, but the threat worked, and the SCOTUS then began approving the New Deal legislation. The public accepted much of his policy because he also began establishing safety nets (unemployment insurance, Social Security, etc...).

     One of the reasons America likely did not swing to the left as many on the left thought it would with the 2008 economic crisis and ensuing recession is because of all the social safety nets in place. Without the likes of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, etc...modern America might right now look like a repeat of the Great Depression, and thus politically find itself susceptible to voting in a really far left-wing person (one that owuld make Obama seem right-wing). But with those safety nets in place, the recession's effect is more cushioned, and thus people want the government to get the excessive spending, debt, and deficit under control. They do not demand larger government.

     As an aside on Keynes, Keynes was not the socialist leftwinger that many on the right accuse him of being, although many adherents of Keynesian economic policy have been on the far left and oftentimes quasi-socialists as well, or believers in socialism as an alternative workable economic system (Paul Samuelson for example). Keynes saw government intervention in the market economy as a tool with which to prevent socialism from occuring. The German government during the 19th century followed a similar policy, enacting various social safety net programs so as to prevent the socialists from being able to gain any real influence.

     But to get to my major point here, in a society in which the economy is in the toilet, has anyone ever seen far right-wing economic policy really take hold with the masses in countries? This virtually never happens. If the economy completely tanks, and people are starving and homeless and so forth, this creates an ideal environment for socialism of some form to take hold. It usually even creates an ideal environment for knocking on market capitalism. No politician can get up in such circumstances and start talking about the greatness of market capitalism and free trade when the financial system is collapsing or the economy in a depression. As such, it would be very odd for any truly far right-wing politician to grab hold of power in such a situation. To myself, this thus also puts another very large hole into the argument that the fascist movements were right-wing at all. People don't want to hear anything about why the government shouldn't do anything in such conditions, they instead want to hear what the government is going to do to help.

     To conclude, one thing that is really fascinating is how offended so many on the left have been by this book, as Goldberg very clearly is not calling modern leftwing Democrats fascists, no more so than anyone pointing out that Stalin was a leftist is calling leftists Stalinists. So many on the left have been fine to throw this term at the right-wing, but seem unable to handle it when it is pointed out that fascism is just another totalitarian leftwing movement. Some really conclude that they themselves are being compared with the likes of Hitler and Mussolini (and seem strangely oblivious to the point about Lenin-Stalin-Mao also being on the left), while others, in particular people who regularly call the right fascist, seem really bent-out-of-shape over it.

     One criticism I'd also like to address that is made about Goldberg's book goes like this: "Goldberg 'claims' he isn't really calling leftists fascists, but he writes this repeatedly throughout the book. If he really isn't calling leftists fascists, then why must he repeat himself so much throughout the book?" Basically this implies that Goldberg really IS calling leftists fascists, but just doesn't want to admit it. Well the reason I'd say he repeats this so much throughout the book is because of how overly sensitive so many on the Left are with regards to this subject. Writing such a book is kind of like filling up a water balloon with gasoline, tying it up, then tossing it into a fire. There are going to be some big flames. The right tend not to be as sensitive, being used to this kind of attack from the left (just Google "Bush Hitler" or "Republicans Nazi"). But the left are very reactive to it, and Goldberg foresaw there would be hell to pay.

     I think one thing that really irks a lot of leftists as well is how Goldberg points out the connections between the ancestors of the modern American left, the early 20th century Progressives, who were very racist, created the eugenics which the Nazis adopted, supported many of the same economic policies as the fascist regimes, and openly admired the fascist leaders. The modern left evolved off of these Progressives, but are not at all the same animal. Their version of eugenics consists of abortion and euthanasia. Their support for "war" is for a national program to fight something like climate change for example or poverty. And so forth. Goldberg once made the point that calling oneself a "modern Progressive," is in many ways like calling oneself a "modern Confederate." One would ask such a person if they knew anything about what the Confederacy stood for.

     But even with this argument, I do not see the point of the fire-through-the-ears responses. So the modern American left are descendants of a group of people who were racist and warlike. So what? Elements of the Democratic party once supported Jim Crow laws as well but that doesn't make the modern Democratic party racist at all. What Marxists, fascists, Progressives, modern leftists, libertarians, neoconservatives, etc...all show is that there are different flavors of both left-wing and right-wing, multiple ones of which are bad and multiple ones which are good. Pointing out that one evolved from another isn't saying they are the same.

     As an aside, another book to check out which is less-known is called The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century in which fascism, socialism, and modern social democracy are all pointed to as cousins. But adherents of social democracy are not fascists.