Sifting the historical record for cases affirming that the majority was on the right side of an issue fails to turn up a single "decision" where this was the result. So where is it written that the majority should rule? In the absence of affirmative evidence, a clever wag once offered the following argument:

The majority is infallible. Because no matter how stupid the propositions decided or the ones elected, the majority was always the stupider for having done so.

Another commentator pointed out that most people obtain their sense of right and wrong by counting noses. Accordingly, the notion of an infallible source of authority becomes a statistical abstraction. Too bad statistical abstractions aren't real.

In logic, majority rule is a fallacy known as an argumentum ad populum (Latin for appeal to the people, however this is supposed to be done). It is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true merely because many or most people say they believe it; which alleges: “If many believe it so, it is so.” Never mind the question of how the many arrived at the truth of their belief, if any, or whether the beliefs of the many were even traceable to entities with functional brains let alone accurately and faithfully obtained and ascertained, i.e. recorded, transmitted, collected and compiled before being stereotyped to label a uniform group of like believers. After all, data so collected cannot be backtracked to its source for confirmation. Statistics has a way of disconnecting its conclusions from its origins. A nose count is not a thought experiment.

The authority-of-the-majority argument goes by many names including appeal to the masses, appeal to belief, appeal to the majority, argument by consensus, consensus fallacy, authority of the many, and bandwagon fallacy, and in Latin as argumentum ad numerum (“appeal to the number”), and consensus gentium (“agreement of the clans”). It is also the basis of a number of social phenomena, including communal reinforcement and the bandwagon effect, not to mention Democracy. Dare we say that political government is based on fallacious argumentation?

Notice that none of the above named sources of authority has a brain. All are brainless collectives or groups of humans that do, incidentally as individual beings, have such an organ. No brain, no reason and no discrimination. Thus the appeal to the majority turns out to be just another cop-out.

However, notice that whoever speaks for the collective is a human individual. He has a brain. Otherwise, the collective could not even fake a semblance of volition. It is the chutzpah of the spokesman that gives the collective the superficial appearance of having a functional brain. Clever those politicians: they create the illusion of authority created out of thin air by some poll that is passed along to them for "safekeeping." In actuality, the group is more like a ventriloquist's dummy because the erstwhile human members of the group seem to turn off their brains in the interim leaving the spokesman free to masquerade his brain as the surrogate brain for the group.

Rare is the spokesman with the balls to openly admit he has usurped his position of authority. Usually, he hides behind a poll that is widely supposed to speak for the majority if only in esoteric terms couched in the language of numbers. Rarer yet is the person who questions that a poll speaks for the majority as if the majority was someone with authority. Almost nobody doubts that a majority speaks through a poll, which is also supposed to reveal the infallible opinion of the majority. Perish the thought!

Now let's suppose for the sake of argument that a poll is evidence that the majority has spoken. Can such a pronouncement qualify for rectitude? Can you question such a proposition in the same manner as you must to determine whether that which you "know" is right or wrong, namely look at the evidence? Likewise, can you seriously question what one of your fellow humans asserts is right or wrong by taking a poll of non-questioners and non-observers? Clearly, the proposition can qualify for treatment by the scientific method to the extent its underlying assumptions can be exposed to view and observed, examined and tested by you and your peers. By contrast, the results of the poll must be taken on faith because they cannot be traced back to their source if ever there was one. And even if they could be traced, there would be nothing but opinions to consider. Polls and statistics have a way of concealing the evidence that could settle the matter. By the same token, polls and statistics also have a way of avoiding the settlement of such issues as right and wrong.

Most people are conditioned to accept "majority rule" without a second thought. In doing so, they assume the majority is always right. Accordingly, they are resigned to accept whatever polling results prevail even if they may have personally chosen otherwise. This habit of thought is explained by the observation made by Jonathan Swift over three-hundred years ago that “some people have no better idea of determining right and wrong than by counting noses.”

Of course, there can be no argument with those people who are in a position to claim to be right in the perverse sense that “might makes right.” To the extent the policeman has a sanction from the majority, few will pause to question whether the "majority" can muster superior physical might in the population to suppress minority dissent. Thereby, the presumptive leaders of the "majority" obtain the superficial appearance of being in the right.

In actuality, the majority is usually wrong. It can be right only by accident because its predilections always represent the inclinations of the lowest common denominator of opinion. How else does a majority of diverse individuals come to a uniform consensus?

Who is the majority that "he" can have an opinion? Opinions like decisions are formed in a human brain or not at all. Since a majority is only a mindless collective mass of humanity, majority decisions are figments of human imagination. They are only the illusions of the participants in a poll, who are like the participants in a masquerade.

Given prevailing sentiments and illusions, the people's concern for the integrity of the ballot box is understandable inasmuch as its contents will determine who shall rule over them. The ballot box contents sanction the people (a fictitious entity) to rule the people (the actual population), who are not only the ones who cast votes but also the ones who didn’t. This clever sophistry resigns most people to submit to whatever the outcome of the poll as long as such outcomes are believed faithful to the ritual. Never mind that the "majority" is spurious and the decision illusory: blind faith rules. The outcome is considered fair as long as the sacrifice is uniform, universal and high-minded. Bring on the rituals. Let's have a parade. Feel good in the bosom of the group.

What passes for a decision of the people is a proposition that must be formulated by some person with a brain to be subsequently ratified by a ritual poll or vote count. Curiously, the outcome of this process can be radically altered by one anonymous vote more or less. Whatever raises doubt that the tally is at odds with an actual nose-count casts doubt on the outcome. Such doubt disturbs the faith. It shakes the belief in the legitimacy of the outcome and any succession to rule so ordained. The slightest hint that the vote count was corrupted, miscounted, miscarried or forged can quickly turn the mood of the subjects from doubt to outrage and on to outright rebellion. The reaction to even an abstract notion that the “decision of the majority” was thwarted by some evil conspiracy can produce panic in the streets.

Thus, a population of volitional human beings becomes a herd of political animals. Such a hysterical reaction might be expected from an invasion of alien plunderers. Alien invaders may be real or imagined, but plunder is a fait accompli when the rulers take over and shake down their peers. Plunder is traceable to the election in any case however conducted, and the plunderers will not be aliens. They will be domestic opportunists. Ballot box contents settle the issue as to who shall be anointed to do the deed with legal immunity.

Al Lowi (send him mail) has been a professional engineer in private practice in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, for the past 40 years.

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Writing in The Freeman recently, Roy E. Cordato explains how it is impossible to harm the environment. His conclusion is based on an examination of the so-called "polluter pays principle" from a property standpoint. The polluter pays principle states that "whoever is responsible for damage to the environment should bear the costs associated with it."

Cordato points out that the "polluter pays principle" sounds good because it appeals superficially to people’s sense of justice and fair play, as must every salient political program. As goes the popular argument, people should be held responsible for their actions and polluters who cause damage to others should "pay" for that damage. Now what man in his right mind could argue with that? But on reflection, these questions come to mind: what damage, to whom and by whom? The trouble is these questions cannot be answered in a political context.

In examining this popular principle of justice from a property-rights standpoint, Cordato discovers, naturally, that what is casually referred to as polluting can be the result of definite acts of specific humans that may cause damage. And if it does, it is because it results in harm to other specific humans. As he points out, real damage is harm measurable in terms of specific economic impairment to somebody’s property and the prerogatives that pertain thereto. In this realm of real responsibility and authority, there is a specific, measurable cause of action. In this event, science offers means of connecting causes with effects. Forensic science, in particular, seeks to trace particular consequences to particular acts, human versus non-human.

Ideally, the legal profession and the courts process such evidence to wrangle settlements between interested and affected humans according to tort law in a ritual known as "due process of law." If the settlement is consistent with the evidence connecting cause with effect, the outcome is known as "justice." This is the outcome Cordato has in mind. However, regardless of such an outcome, merely a day in court engaged in the legal ritual passes for justice more often than not.

Since the environment is not a person, either real or incorporeal, the environment can have no property rights that can be damaged by human action and resolved under tort law. Indeed, the environment is not property subject to any human authority. Furthermore, tracing specific human acts to actual permanent effects on the general physical environment — let alone "damages" — is a daunting task riddled with questionable assumptions. If so, “environmental protection” is a myth having no legal or ethical standing. Therefore, laws purporting to protect the environment are invalid, null and void. Prosecutions under them must be considered political scams because there is no identifiable property to examine for damage, let alone specific culpability for the consequences. Without a property issue, there can be no determinate cause and effect in society and, thus, no resolvable question of justice or welfare.

So how does "the environment" become a legitimate concern of government? It is not a constituency that is mentioned anywhere in James Madison’s Constitution of 1787. So the question arises as to how it came to be a province of government with all the legislative and judicial initiatives attendant thereto?

A plausible theory of environmental protection by government is paternalism, immortalized in the expression "papa knows best." The natural history of paternalism shows that "papa" must somehow supersede the bounds of biological kinship if he is to obtain indefinite and unlimited parental authority over his less-mature fellows, thereby to see to their welfare, need it or not. As an opportunistic expedient for implementing the paternalistic regime within a constitutional framework, environmentalists claim jurisdiction over "the environment" (whatever it is) for the government under the “general welfare” clause of the Preamble to the Constitution.

It is doubtful Madison could have imagined such a reach for power within the meaning and intent of his charter of government. That the general welfare of the people expressed as a mere sentiment in a perfunctory statement could be construed as evidence of a beneficent superhuman entity with rights of its own stretches the imagination of even the most modern person imbued with the romance of technology. Actually, personification or deification of the environment is a vestige of mankind’s pagan roots, such as Aztec Sun worship. It follows that environmentalism is the religion that worships the environment, whatever that is. Its "protection" is a sacred trust of the properly devoted, who are rewarded with the celebrity status of moral superiority. If fervent environmentalism is most moral, it is fair to ask how human welfare is enhanced by this religious practice. The answer is surprising. Akin to many ancient religious practices, environmentalism advocates human sacrifice. Human welfare is subordinated to the welfare of the environment as defined by the environmental clergy. How perverse!

But the environment is not a human being that can have moral standing. It can have no property that can be infringed, encroached, injured or damaged. Having no property, the environment has neither legal nor social standing either. This means that it plays no role whatsoever in the multitude of voluntary transactions comprising the market. On the other hand, the market, comprised as it is of the multitude of voluntary transactions between property-wielding-and-owning people throughout the population, constitutes the environment for human action. Protection of this part of the environment is a matter of concern for the general welfare. Such environmental protection consists of the housekeeping, hygiene, conservation, exchange and restitution practices common to proprietors and familiar to all still living on the planet. More specifically, it consists of upholding the integrity of the property principle. Sadly, Madison neglected to make this connection. Perhaps he could not foresee how his concept of "the general welfare" could be perverted.

Populist demagogues are delighted to have the state hold the bag for payments for "damages" to the "environment" because they expect to control the state with its monopoly of political power. The environment is nobody and the polluter is everybody. Goody! Goody! So in the name of the general welfare, legislators create a discretionary program to gratuitously remediate the guilt of others for alleged despoliation, otherwise known as living. Oddly enough, this intervention is called "public service." Never mind the restitution of real injuries. What’s that?

Environmentalists will object to Cordato’s work to resolve environmental issues under the property principle because it relegates the role of the state to tedious due process of law and then only on strictly individual human considerations. Libertarians will applaud Cordato’s work precisely because it is concerned with the fate of individual humans striving to survive and prosper in the mass of humanity. However, some may be impatient with his concentration on legal remedies instead of market alternatives.

Even though Cordato may not be entirely laissez faire in his approach to environmental issues, he succeeds very well in clarifying the nature of them. He makes it plain that environmental protection is nothing more than a political ruse. Without recourse to the property principle, environmentalism has no ethical, common-law or constitutional standing.

The only part of the environment that has any ethical significance is the market economy, which is the wholly social institution comprised of volitionally acting human beings. It is not the market but the physical and biological surroundings of the market economy and human population at large that exhibit such phenomena as climate, seasons, storms, temblors, volcanoes, conflagrations, and disease epidemics. These matters are virtually beyond human influence. There is little or nothing for humans to do in this arena of nature but to act defensively. The global physical environment is outside the realm and reach of human action. Adapting to this non-human environment is the subject of human evolution, a biological and technological process of adaptation that has been going on imperceptibly for eons as a matter of survival. Adapt or perish. There is no recourse or choice in the matter.

"Environmentalism" is an ideology that idolizes the Earth as a superhuman entity. Like most antique theologies, environmentalism ascribes to its deity anthropomorphic traits. The phrase "Mother Earth" is an apt expression in the liturgy of this religion.

As a theology, environmentalism is detached from reality. A curiosity of the faithful in this religion is that they worship dirt and disparage humanity. The clergy of the church of environmentalism is anointed with a mission to assuage the guilt of the mere mortals the mere mortals didn’t know they should have.

Fundamental environmentalism is also a form of collectivism. People are lumped together as "humanity," a mindless herd that is held to be culpable for injuries and insults to Mother Earth for which, taken as a whole, should be driven to redemption by those of superior moral standing. Round up all the strays for their own good.

Environmentalism is a political movement. As such, it is naturally anti-property, anti-libertarian, anti-individualistic and anti-social. In other words, it is misanthropic. An example of the environmentalists’ program is their campaign to wipe out carbon emissions by humans. Never mind that carbon is the essential element of all life on Earth, and that the carbon in the environment is from the planet itself (volcanoes, bogs, fires, etc.). Nevertheless, carbon in the atmosphere is demonized as the cause of allegedly impending catastrophic Earth warming.

Regardless of the realities and actualities of global climate, and any changes to it that may be in progress, the environmentalists’ concern with carbon is no conquest of physical nature. Make no mistake — it is the conquest of man. The mantra “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming” presages an excuse for a war of human conquest — a war on spontaneous human life that must be waged by the rabid environmentalist collectivists to empower their politically ambitious cohorts. Their objective is an old one, viz. to enslave humanity by capturing the seat of political power in the human population and suppressing all contenders. What is new in this program for conquest is the idea of mobilizing and regimenting humanity to prevent climate change, which is a fantasy. The rhetoric emanating from the rapturous environmental zealots is full of arrogance. It is mere pretense to control humans regardless of culpability.

If the environmental mystics are clever enough to deify dirt in the minds of the public, they very well might be able to convince them that every human breath is poisoning the environment and threatening the very world they live in. Then the fable of Chicken Little comes home to roost.

Some libertarians assert a continuum of belief in the environment as an entity deserving protection from human nature should be considered. They are looking for a balance in belief between outright totalitarian fascist tyranny involving draconian regulation of behavior and enterprise to some benign pollution taxes or a cap-and-trade regimen in mimicry of the market or enforcement of state court judgments under tort law. This continuum is envisioned as a spectrum in the level of application of the coercive power of the state for protecting the "environment" from allegedly insulting and degrading human behavior. But the Austro-libertarian or laissez faire market approach to the environment would not be found in this spectrum because it does not countenance the use of any state political power whatsoever.

Libertarians should be wary of looking for alternatives courses of action in a spectrum of coercive behavior even if they believe their cause is worthy, like the Earth really is warming and something must be done about it. But means must be consistent with the ends sought or all is lost. Even Cordato’s property-rights-based environmental protection scheme is in the middle of this coercion spectrum insofar as it depends on tax-supported state courts and legislatures having a monopoly in the implementation of his "the polluter pays" policy. This approach is not only hampered by political expedients and distractions but it is doomed to failure in the situations that actually occur.

Apropos of the above, recall Mises dictum:

“The middle of the road policy leads to socialism.”

There is no happy medium between coercion and voluntary-ism. The lesser of two evils is still evil. There is nothing analogous to public policy in the free market. The only notion that comes close in free-market parlance is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” which is definitely not an appendage on any politician’s arm, or even the long arm of the law.

Free market institutions cannot be introduced into the government’s "environmental protection" game except as corrupt rent-seeking rackets. Such fashionable rackets nowadays include the carbon emission cap and trade schemes. The government caps and you trade on some government franchised and regulated bourse. Trade or quit. Some market, not! A pollution tax is more honest. Tax is a euphemism for theft.

Humans should be alarmed not so much over perceived threats to their shared environment by careless human action, or even from the obvious abuses of opportunistic political government. Their real enemy is but the misanthropy of a righteous environmental movement that seeks absolute control of a strong political state and all who can be brought under its hegemony. If the environmentalists have their way, humanity stands to experience the misery of policide (politically inflicted social devolution). If you think global climate change is threatening, you haven’t considered the consequences of social devolution. The grand alternative to this state of affairs is laissez faire — spontaneous order evolving in free markets superseding political government altogether.

For what other reasons would the environmentalists want uncontested control of the state? Certainly not to control the global climate. They ain’t that stupid. They ain’t that reckless, either. They dread possible genocide of the affluent population of the Earth that pays the taxes they crave. But they risk this outcome in the formulation and pursuit of their policies, which cannot accomplish any of their climate aims because human life has so little to do with that aspect of the environment.

Environmental protection under the rule of statute law is impossible precisely because it does not fit the property principle. Neither law nor politics is relevant to global climate or any other environmental concern. If the Earth is warming, not even preemptive genocide would stop it. Nature would be taking its course and there would be no way for humans to intercede to control it, let alone stop it, with or without the full force and credit of government. The best they can do is adopt the Boy Scout Motto: "Be Prepared."

Al Lowi (send him mail) has been a professional engineer in private practice in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, for the past 40 years.

Alvin Lowi, Jr. Archives

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Substance abuse
is widely regarded as one of the foremost scourges of mankind. No
doubt the human toll is great. Tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine,
heroin, etc., altogether or separately, are frequently put in the
same class of abominations as weapons of mass destruction including
firearms and poison gas. Thus arises the urge to prohibit these
agents by resorting to legislation against production, sale, possession
and use. The government thereby empowered must then appropriate
the huge sums and resources for enforcement commensurate with the
"threat."

If the cause
is so righteous and the consequences are so clear, why doesn’t such
government work? It has been tried before (Prohibition Amendment,
U.S. Constitution Article Eighteen, 1920) with the same sad results
as nowadays. The "cure" is always worse than the disease
— if indeed prohibition could ever qualify as a cure for any social
"disease" any more than a hammer could qualify as a cure
for a headache.

A clue to understanding
such futile gestures and the debacles that follow them is the recognition
that the harm of substance abuse is fundamentally self-inflicted
by the individual acting entirely on his own recognizance. It is
not like an injury caused by aggression by one on another or other
such social assault against which an appeal to government for an
organized defense might be considered rational. Another clue is
that substance abuse, actual or imagined, is only an offense against
the moral sentiments of some righteous people who believe a social
apparatus of coercion can take such matters from their sight and
mind and make the world "right" in their view. Such sentiments
are not unlike those that buttressed the Spanish Inquisition in
medieval times.

Aggressive
or even brutal behavior is frequently associated with substance
abuse even though a snort is more likely to produce a vegetable
than a fiend. Aggression is more likely to be the consequence of
legal efforts to enforce a ban on certain volitional acts, not a
result of individual chemical intoxication. As long as the banned
substances are in wide demand from individuals inclined to experience
the effects of their use, supplies will come forth. Substance abuse
will happen and legal prohibition will be powerless to prevent it
because prohibition cannot achieve abstinence in an open society.
It can not even achieve abstinence in jails and prisons where drug
use is well known to be rampant even though government supervision
of that population is supposed to be total and absolute.

Contrary to
purpose, prohibition may actually make the forbidden practice even
more attractive for some. For example, in 1920 following the passage
of the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the manufacture, transportation
and sale of intoxicating beverages, per capita consumption of alcohol
actually increased. Coincidence? Not likely. If prohibition is sound
public policy, reduced per capita consumption should have correlated
with its implementation. Actually, experience with every known prohibitory
campaign of government has produced precisely the opposite result.
Yet, such policies continue to be popular notwithstanding the incidence
of the social conflict that does correlate with them.

No doubt a
certain amount of substance abuse is refractory, intractable or
incurable except by the death of the abuser. This is evidently an
aspect of human nature just as a certain incidence of police brutality
will doubtless always occur given the inclination of some to abuse
the powers of their office. It is also apparent that some people
are like prize fighters who care less what their faces look like.
They will flout proven proscriptions for rational behavior and exploit
such human foibles for personal gain. Thus, the strong correlation
of black market activity and police corruption with the enactment
of prohibitory statutes should not surprise anyone.

Look at the
history of prohibition under the Eighteenth Amendment, the previous
high-water-mark of moralistic legislation. Formerly, booze was an
ordinary and traditional commercial product widely used for both
recreational and medicinal purposes but well known to have some
hazardous properties when overindulged. Various temperance leagues
had long admonished the public against “demon rum."

Historically,
spirits distilled from fermented grain (grain alcohol or ethanol)
was an economical medium for the pioneers to get their surpluses
of corn from the frontier over the Appalachian Mountains to markets
in the coastal cities. Then, as now, there were cases of liver disease
and other ailments attributable to excessive and long-term debauchery
along with some poignant examples of family neglect and abuse. No
doubt there were occasional social insults due to individual binges.
Then as now, every family, regardless of its moral tradition, has
experienced the effects of alcohol abuse on the part of one member
or another. Alcoholism has long been a familiar disease.

Before prohibition,
“good booze” had always been cheap and readily available. Curiously,
the abuse of booze in those days was strictly a problem of adulthood
even though sale to minors was permissible. The merchants who made,
distributed and sold booze were largely good citizens as were most
of their customers. Although recreational consumption was tolerated
if not embraced by most people, a few were outraged by the very
idea of intoxication. The American temperance movement, rooted in
Puritanism, was the classical moralistic cause.

After the prohibition
amendment came a blizzard of statutes and ordinances during the
1920′s. Traditional consumption habits changed only to the extent
necessary to accommodate the new patterns of distribution, price
levels and standards of quality that accompanied the new legal risks
pertaining thereto. However, those risks presented something of
an exciting challenge to young folks who formerly left boozing to
their parents, grandparents and bachelor uncles.

Moreover, the
younger generation didn’t know the difference between “Old Tennessee”
and “old tennisshoe,” which made it somewhat easier for a new class
of merchants to enter the market. Even more fortuitous for the new
liquor “merchants,” the good-citizen merchants formerly involved
in the trade left the field under legal compulsion and went into
other lines of business regardless of their preparation. Few made
the transition successfully. Fewer still persevered merchandising
booze in the face of legal sanctions against the business. Thus,
the ban only worked on the good-citizen merchants who were easily
persuaded to abandon their businesses under threat of punitive sanction.
They were unaccustomed to taking bold risks with the law and were
mostly too old to start.

After prohibition
ordinances went into effect, the popular demand for booze submerged
into an underworld (black) market but grew nevertheless. To “drink
wet and vote dry” was the course most would take. Thus, hypocrisy
was institutionalized. It is doubtful that many tipplers actually
stopped drinking as a result of prohibition, but it is clear most
of them started lying about their habits.

If there is
an urgent demand for some commodity — and booze was and is one for
which there is an urgent demand — then nature ordains that that
demand will be served with a supply of some sort. Where home-brew
and moonshine had been unknown, “bootlegging” by opportunistic and
sociopathic gangs would fill the gap. Unlike their merchant predecessors,
these gangs were willing to take the risks of punitive enactment
in return for the large financial margins that were facilitated
thereby. Overnight, the law created a niche market for gangsters
whose main talent was skirting the law, not in making "quality"
booze and economically distributing it. Community consciousness
went out the window. The law created an underworld memorable for
its cynicism, greed, viciousness and promiscuity. Sound familiar?

Given the demand
and the futile nature of the ban, large profits were amassed on
the sale of "bad" booze. Then, along with the well-known
hazards of tippling grain alcohol, there would be a high incidence
of acute and systemic poisoning from alien chemical agents, not
to mention all the antisocial behavior of the new “merchants” (the
gangs) and their clients. And all the while, there were the large
costs of law enforcement to be borne by whom — the good citizen,
of course.

Naturally,
some of these illegal profits (meaning untaxed proceeds) went into
other businesses as a hedge against the risk forfeiture. Some of
the hedges were legal. However, the larger part went to protection
and lobbying efforts. Law enforcement officials were corrupted with
bribes. Legislators were corrupted with payola for a continuation
of prohibition. None was ever applied to remedy the effects of blindness,
death or other injuries caused by the defective products and activities
of the gangs. What a contrast with the “good old days” of free-market
booze when the merchants accepted responsibility for the quality
of their products and liability for any injuries caused by their
failure to meet the standards of good behavior and product. From
this it seems clear that, whatever the sad consequences to individuals
of substance abuse, the scourge of prohibition was incomparably
worse in social institutions.

It is widely
believed that prohibition ceased in 1933 when the Twenty First Amendment
was passed repealing the Eighteenth. This event, generally credited
to president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, supposedly ended prohibition.
But nothing could have been farther from the truth. Although, the
Twenty-First legalized the sale of alcoholic beverages nationally
subject to government regulation and taxation, it sanctioned prohibition
by state and county option thereby protecting the rackets. In effect,
the rackets were federalized, enabling the government to participate
in the lucrative liquor trade formerly the exclusive province of
the privateers. This stratagem also gave the privateers a legal
faade for their operations in return for paying taxes on their
formerly illegal income. Some, like Joe Kennedy, Sr., welcomed this
new legitimacy and proceeded to enter politics with their bootleg
liquor fortunes intact. Who could better administrate prohibitory
public policies? — “it takes one to know one.” Anyhow, enforcement
rarely occurs as long as the traffickers pay their taxes. Thus the
government itself became a protection racket.

This change
in the legal environment also gave the authorities a powerful new
enforcement tool. Where formerly it had been a difficult process
to convict a producer, trafficker or user entitled to the Bill-of-Rights
protections for individuals accused of illegal acts, under the new
regulatory regime equipped with the relatively new Sixteenth Amendment
(income tax) powers, it became a simple matter to prosecute most
of the usual offenses as tax evasions. Since tax evasions are treated
as crimes against the state, such offenders could be handled like
those indicted for treason where accusation is tantamount to conviction.
Under the new environment, citizens would find themselves confronting
a government as would a married man confronted by his boss who is
asking “when did you stop beating your wife?” All are suspect of
wrongdoing.

Under this
new regime, those accused of tax evasion could not readily resist
self-incrimination. One consequence of the Sixteenth Amendment was
that all residents would be compelled by law to declare the amounts
and sources of all their income, however derived, and pay the prescribed
tax accordingly. Failure to declare, in itself, would be a felony
offense against the government. Not to declare truthfully would
be another felony. For a black marketeer, to comply with such legal
obligations would be tantamount to confessing guilt to yet another
crime; namely, engaging in legally-banned activity. So shall the
vaunted American protection against self-incrimination be ended
without a whimper of protest.

Since the establishment
of the income tax by constitutional amendment, most major convictions
involving trade in outlawed goods and services have been on tax-evasion
charges. The recent State and Federal trials of Heidi Fleiss on
pandering and trafficking charges are good examples. For another,
had David Koresh lived through the siege of the Branch Davidians
by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF)
at Waco, Texas, it is likely that he would have been prosecuted
and doubtlessly convicted for tax-evasion rather than any of the
firearm, substance or sex crimes alluded to in the warrant the BATF
attempted to serve on him.

Old-fashioned
alcohol prohibition continues in some form or other everywhere to
this day. For example, in the “dry” state of Mississippi, more taxes
are collected on the sale of out-lawed alcoholic beverages than
from any other source, and the Mississippi State Tax Collector is
the highest paid public official in the country. This may be the
most blatant but it is certainly not the only example of official
hypocrisy in the country.

Regardless
of the constitutional standing of prohibition, it continues virtually
in full force and effect in the legislative practices of national,
state and local governments, and it has spread far beyond the sphere
of alcoholic beverages. For all practical purposes, the Constitution
now supports this moralistic notion of government because the Supreme
Court has, contrary to American tradition, gone along with the zealots.
So-called protection of the public via prohibition of private victimless
activity is now considered a legitimate function of government.
One wonders what Ben Franklin would say to this state of affairs.
Reflecting on the matter, Will Rogers quipped to a distressed taxpayer
“just be glad you don’t get all the government you pay for.”

Both gang rule
and political corruption have spread in parallel with the growth
in number and scope of protectionist statutes. The prohibitory impetus
behind such legislation is no longer limited to substances such
as alcohol. Drugs make a good case in point because of their phenomenological
similarity with alcohol even though it is no longer necessary for
anti-drug legislation to express the Puritan faith in outright legal
prohibition as in the Volstad Amendment of 1920. The many new angles
to government regulation serve the aims of protection-minded people
as well or better. Nevertheless, the end result is the same — anarchy.

The legitimacy
of legally prohibiting mind-altering drugs is rarely brought to
question nowadays. The war on drugs, widely supported as a “government-do-something”
measure, has been internationalized in part because the “good stuff”
is produced at such distances from the centers of demand. The former
hegemony of immigrant “family” criminal syndicates, originally founded
on the basis of trade in beverage, gaming, sex and labor contraband,
has now been overrun by international drug cartels (ostensibly run
by foreigners) that have succeeded in dominating not only the local
syndicates but also the local and national law enforcement organizations.

The drug cartels
may even control some national governments such as Mexico, Panama,
Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Thailand, Turkey, Russia and perhaps
even China, Viet Nam and North Korea. Regardless, the drug cartels
are shaping both the domestic and foreign policy of the U.S. Government
funded by both the American drug user and taxpayer when they are
not indeed one and the same. The various governments, including
especially the one in Washington, D.C., lust for control of this
huge untaxed trade and capital flow. As Jesse Unruh, long-time boss
of the California State Assembly and one of the world’s foremost
political authorities once said in a rare moment of candor: “Money
is the mothers-milk of politics.” Clearly, the government’s interest
in actual drug abuse is mere window-dressing. To paraphrase another
political truism: “It’s the money, stupid!”

A curious aspect
of prohibitory legislation is how it helps criminal organizations
create monopolies in selected commodities and services. Like booze
during the so-called prohibition era, drug distribution is “protected”
from competition from law-abiding segments of the greater market
economy while the habits and obsessions of the mostly American users
remain. The drug-running profits become grotesque but so do the
budgets of the “anti-drug” agencies. Meanwhile, the private citizens’
costs mount from the systematic antisocial behavior of the mostly
young unemployed but opportunistic members of the so-called American
underclass, who handle much of the retail drug trade and take most
of the legal risk (look at the jail population). However, they are
well paid on the street by ample drug price margins. Observe all
the gold chains, fancy clothes and expensive cars sported by many
youngsters in the inner cities. Mama’s welfare check, no matter
how generous, could not possibly cover such conspicuous consumption.

Now armed for
a righteous crusade, the government enforcement agencies that concern
themselves with the legally banned businesses engage more and more
frequently in ambitious but senseless brutalities. As happened with
alcohol prohibition, the young and restless are attracted to experiment
with the banned substances if only to experience the excitement
of flirting with danger, legal as well as toxic. Many of the same
are attracted to “trafficking,” unemployable as they are at any
comparable wage because of legal constraints (child labor, truancy,
minimum wage, etc.), lack of preparation (skill, know-how, literacy,
etc.) and attitude (entitlement sloth, parental neglect, peer pressure,
etc.).

The actual
toll on human life and welfare from drug abuse itself is insignificant
by comparison with the consequences of legal prohibition. The former
would actually be minimal if the stigma of illegality did not impair
employment opportunity or access to medical care or justify incarceration.
The latter turns government toward predation and corruption. Who
can say what that costs?

So where is
the reason? Clearly, prohibition cannot protect the innocent from
the lawless. Even more clearly, it cannot protect the substance
abuser from himself or his tormentors. But it can definitely protect
the positions of the gangs, syndicates, cartels and enforcement
bureaucrats. Oddly enough, drug prohibition has created lucrative
job opportunities for the street gangs of the inner cities. That’s
more than one can say for welfare, affirmative action and other
ill-conceived government experiments in social engineering. No one
rationalizes prohibition on that basis even though this perverse
form of government social activism may well be its only redemption.

As for the
self-righteous and sincerely moralistic supporters of this regime,
they have to be deaf, dumb and blind to ignore their complicity
in such social travesty. But perhaps they see life on earth as a
dreary purgatory and believe that adherence to moralistic notions
demanding forceful compliance by others will earn them a glorious
place in some imagined hereafter. Without any doubt, legislation
mandating their moral outrage against the vices of others has wrought
great havoc with the entire social fabric of this country. Intolerance
toward a little human weakness and self-inflicted injury becomes
a total outrage against all of humanity when that intolerance is
institutionalized by government.

The moralists
should be ashamed to have abandoned the tolerance for people of
ordinary virtue their religion professes to teach. And, they cannot
be very proud of their beliefs when they form political interest
groups and put themselves in league with the underworld.

Realistically,
there is a market for recreational drugs as well as ethical drugs.
No way can legislation abolish this fact of life. Abusive use occurs
in both arenas. All users are potential abusers just as all eaters
are potential gorgers. Shall food-stuffs be banned because of the
incidence of bulimia?

All users are
vulnerable not only to the familiar drug but also to alien substances
that may contaminate it. Consistent drug products of the sort in
demand are basically inexpensive generic commodities which if sold
“over the counter” would be cheap low-margin products like aspirin
and saccharin. Indeed, in a free market, most popular narcotics
might be even cheaper than aspirin because they are common derivatives
of naturally-occurring plant species rather than proprietary chemical
synthetics. Under such circumstances, who would need runners and
pushers? What would be the purpose of armed pickets and enforcers?
Is it conceivable that some Colombian gangs working out of primitive
laboratories concealed in the equatorial jungle could successfully
compete with the modern multinational pharmaceutical companies in
an open market?

It is conceivable
that the drug profit margins attainable in open competition might
not even support the kind of promotion given to snuff and other
tobacco products that have brand distinction. Without the cover
of illegality, the drug cartels would find themselves competing
with ordinary businesses in ordinary channels of trade. Their cash
bubble busted, the street gangs and other pushers would then be
looking for other lines of work. So also would a lot of jailers,
DEA’s, ATF’s and other bureaucrats, foreign and domestic. Could
they and their methods survive in an open, competitive world? I
doubt it! Could the addicts survive? Possibly. At least they would
have improved access to medical assistance and a more manageable
cost of living. And what of society? Why should the sober be inflicted
with the hangover pains of the promiscuous? Why indeed!

Many
otherwise rational thinkers despair — that society could not survive
a transition from prohibition to a free-market in substances. No
doubt, a relaxation of punitive enforcement activity would be accompanied
by increased consumption at first to slake the pent-up thirst for
too much of a “good” thing. One consequence might be a sudden increase
in lethal overdose cases. But these transients would soon moderate
as the veil of furtive adventure is lifted to reveal the true hazards
of indulgence and as competition dispenses with the intense, dedicated
and lucrative rackets that presently cultivate the habits of the
obsessed. Meanwhile, billions of taxes can be foregone (wealth left
in the hands of those who produced it) as enforcement and “correctional”
institutions wind down. This leaves more resources for self-help,
medical and other therapeutic and remedial measures to be implemented.

April
28, 2008

Al
Lowi (send him mail) has
been a professional engineer in private practice in Rancho Palos
Verdes, California, for the past 40 years.

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In his campaign for the President of the Republic, Representative Ron Paul has generated some controversy stimulating some fresh new public scrutiny of the nation’s foreign policy. Even though he is running as a Republican, his libertarian perspective stirs skepticism of heretofore settled political doctrine. Libertarian Ron Paul’s candidacy for President on the Republican ticket is not only disturbing the status quo but is attracting curiosity regarding the underlying libertarian message. He is earning respect for his intellectual courage in creating this new public forum. His following is ideological, not political.

Although elected to congress several times as a Republican, Dr. Paul has earned public recognition and respect as an independent thinker. To only a select few is he known and appreciated as a libertarian. Yet, his rural, small-town Texas constituency enthusiastically returns him to congress term-after-term on the Republican ticket. Who knew that libertarian ideas were that politically persuasive?

Ron Paul’s candidacy is raising the intellectual level of public discussion of war and peace. His principled views have provoked outrage from the entrenched and besieged establishment’s foreign affairs department. However, as a candidate in a partisan contest for a political office, he is saddled with stereotypes that prevent him from delivering a message that is fully consistent with his avowed philosophy and ethics. One wonders what Dr. Paul might say about foreign policy if he was not so inhibited? What would libertarian foreign policy look like unshackled from the status quo?

Perhaps a good place to start trying to figure this out would be with a consensual definition of the term foreign policy. From Wikipedia:

A country‘s foreign policy is a set of goals that seeks to outline how that particular country will interact with other countries of the world and, to a lesser extent, non-state actors. Foreign policies generally are designed to help protect a country’s national interests, national security, ideological goals, and economic prosperity. This can occur as a result of peaceful cooperation with other nations, or through aggression, war, and exploitation. It may be assumed that foreign policy is as ancient as the human society itself. The twentieth century saw a rapid rise in the importance of foreign policy, with virtually every nation in the world now being able to interact with one another in some diplomatic form.

Nominally, creating foreign policy is usually the job of the head of government and the foreign minister (or equivalent). In some countries the legislature also has considerable oversight. As an exception, in France, Finland and in America, it is the head of state who is responsible for foreign policy, while the head of government mainly deals with internal policy.

Central to this common-language definition of foreign policy is the notion of a political entity — such as a country, nation or state — which is presumed to be interacting with like entities. Such entities are not people or entrepreneurial concerns, but are collectives that have no brain with which to think, reason, develop values and choose preferences among alternative courses of action. Collectives don’t bleed real blood either, which conveniently palatalizes sacrifice. Without a brain, the only voice collectives have for communicating thoughts and ideas is that of presumptuous leaders who try to hide the fact that they are only speaking for themselves. Members of the collective have voices of their own even if they neglect to use them. Who speaks for the American people as a whole? No one.

Political entities are naturally prone to conflict because group interest is invariably the interest of the lowest common denominator of the crowd, i.e. the most juvenile of the humanity collected. Notice how the behavior of labor unions, political parties and national governments resemble schoolyard gangs. The U.N. is a classical case in point. By contrast, individual self-interest is for the most part an adult pursuit of happiness informed with first-hand knowledge of its owner’s goals, limitations and liabilities.

In the group, somebody else pays the bills. That’s the attraction to membership — something for nothing. Groups are also stuck with bureaucratic procedures (administration by non-owners) and diplomacy (negotiation between non-owners), which dooms them to predation, stagnation and oblivion.

On these grounds, libertarians are inclined to reject political rule as invalid, inept and illegitimate. They prefer the spontaneous social order of competitive capitalist enterprise in the voluntary marketplace, which they consider the appropriate paradigm of government of human society. After all, life is an adventure come what may, and libertarians appreciate the simple fact that every individual, left alone, knows how to mind his own business. He is the world’s foremost expert on his own affairs. By contrast, what does a bureaucrat know?

Civilized propriety for libertarians consists of individual humans left alone unmolested, each in his proper domain. This means that wherever there is aggression, it is a proportional response to trespass. Aggression by an individual in self-defense is natural, expected and appropriate. An organization of such defense is problematical. War, which is aggressive conflict between states, has no legitimate connection. Neither do strikes, riots, demonstrations and like group behavior. Libertarians consider all such political contests to be illegitimate.

If political statecraft is considered illegitimate, and the Wikipedia definition of foreign policy is accepted, there is no such thing as libertarian foreign policy. Indeed, the very idea of “policy” (specifically public policy) is at odds with individualism, which is the central feature of libertarianism. Policy is understandable only, if at all, in an organizational or collective context. Policy is a subterfuge to escape the bounds of proprietorship. The closest thing to policy for a libertarian is a statement of the owners’ charter for the use of his property by others. Moreover, property is private else it is not property. This means there is no such thing as public property. By the same token, there is no such thing as private policy.

Libertarians should be wary of the word "policy" because it comes from the same root as the word politics. The root is polity, which is another word for the state.

Foreign policy studies are notoriously difficult to reconcile with libertarianism because libertarian principles are irrelevant to making the state work. Harry Browne was one libertarian who believed the state could not be made to work by the application of any principles known to man.

Public policy is based on the false assumption that people can be forced to want what they get from government, yet work on their own recognizance to get what they want from the market. On account of this fallacy — that these “wants” are the same kind of thing — the state is bound to rely on coercion and compulsion to have its way with the people. The state continues only as long as it is able to maintain the illusion that it can and will force compliance with its policies everywhere on everybody within its province. In the absence of such a state of unreasoned fear of institutionalized coercion, there can be no state. An example is immigration to the United States where law enforcement is virtually ignored.

Curiously, the state always fails to work. Yet it never fails to coerce. Coercion is all the state has to offer. So who wants it? Who needs it? It is doubtful there are enough masochists to make a market for it. Persuasion is a futile gesture because the risk of rejection is too great to go to the trouble.

Clearly, the demand for state coercion is not a popular one. To the contrary, the demand comes from a select few elitists and cynics. The elitists presume a superior view of the world, which presumption entitles them to impose their will on others for their own good. The cynics seek benefit from the plunder of others, devil take the hindmost.

Chief among the beneficiaries of institutionalized coercion are the "rent seekers." Rent seeking is the process of obtaining legal privilege for financial gain. It occurs whenever an individual, organization, or firm seeks to win money rather than earn it. For every winner there is a loser. By contrast, earning allows all to win to some degree.

Rent seeking is a short-cut to riches enabled by political government. It consists of manipulating the economic environment rather than abiding it, bribing regulatory bureaucrats rather than seeking an honest buck in profit from successfully competing with moral equals in trade and production in the economic environment as it is. Rent seeking is a form of robbery in which the law is an accomplice. The rude hand of government is used at the behest of rent-seekers and do-gooders to manipulate the market. It is a kind of protection racket that can only be accomplished in an establishment of institutionalized coercion, which is the monopoly of the state or political government. (Mafia eat your heart out!) Rent-seeking is most frequently associated with government regulation, and it is always evidenced by lobbying the government for economic regulations, tariffs, tax breaks and subsidies invariably favoring a special interest. A related symptom is collusion between the rent-seeking firms and the government agencies assigned to regulate them whereby the agency relies on the "knowledge" of cohort firms about the markets to be affected and the regulations to be justified. (Conflict of interest anyone?)

In this era of national hegemony, foreign trade has become virtually impossible without some degree of rent seeking. "Globalization" has yet to overcome that burden completely. Tollbooths and check-points are still commonplace in the world, not least in the United States.

But the threat of state coercion eventually peters out as its impotence is discovered, such impotence being the most important of all state secrets. The state fails to work because it cannot substitute its policy goals for the myriad motivations of individual human beings who actually do the work, if any. The state is always on the verge of the demise suffered by that most famous of all eggs, Humpty Dumpty:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

The history was irreversible even if ordered otherwise by edict of the king. (Take New Orleans after Katrina, Rita, Nagin, Blanco, Bush and FEMA.)

Libertarian principles cannot be applied to foreign policy because they are irrelevant to politics. They only apply to relations between individual humans and their proprietary institutions because they are basically ethical and moral considerations. Libertarian concerns boil down to a question of “Whose property is it?” Contrary to popular opinion, ethical and moral considerations are irrelevant to collectives because they are not owners.

According to libertarian principles, ownership is the only legitimate source of authority in society. Ownership also determines responsibility and liability without which there is no justice. If there is anything analogous to libertarian foreign policy it would be the marketing strategies, risk management provisions, security and property safeguards and conditions of sale as compiled by all private profit-seeking businesses anticipating doing business with the world at large on a voluntary basis. A treaty backed up by military might is anti-libertarian. Only contracts freely entered into are libertarian. If there are no owners, there can be no contracts. Only conflicts. Caveat emptor.

So how might libertarians have proceeded in the historical encounters between the capitalists and barbarians like the Barbary Pirates? Assume for the moment no political states with large standing armies and ambitious foreign policies were playing geopolitical games with foreign territories. That such states as Great Britain and the U.S. were not bolstering the passions of the natives in favor of nation-building in opposition to the tenure of the pioneering entrepreneurs of whatever nationality. In such places as India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Mexico, Arabia, Egypt, Venezuela and Libya where the private enterprises were threatened by the indigents, the libertarian shareholders of those ventures would have seen to the eviction of the trespassers from their properties wherever and whoever they were as an aspect of self-defense. Owners seeing to the defense of their duly homesteaded properties would have brought to bear all the righteous motivation, industry, diligence and ingenuity inherent in the entrepreneurial breed without any taint of chauvinism or jingoistic saber rattling. Such a defensive posture taken in a timely manner could have thwarted the usurpations and expropriations of the Shah’s, the Saud’s, the Farouk’s and the like. The petroleum, shipping, navigation, telecommunications, industries and transportation facilities that were undertaken throughout the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and India in the past would have remained in the hands of the peaceful, productive and equitable private enterprises that created and developed them in the first place. Those primitives that wished to retain their traditional isolation to practice opportunistic plunder as if foraging for game would have been at a physical and moral disadvantage to the pioneers. Consequently, it is likely the thugs would have declined the challenge and returned with their camels to their tents in their desert encampments from whence they came where they could more clearly contemplate their experience and the terms offered for entering the modern world in peace.

As it happened, the history was written by ordinary foreign policy at the hands of the family of nations, not peoples. Nationalization took place under the protection and assistance of gratuitous military power from abroad, not industrialization under the impetus of private, profit-seeking enterprise. As a result, alien nationalism still festers in the remnant of stone-age populations as an indolent wound in the modern world.

The historical encounters between British Petroleum, Standard Oil, Shell, the Suez Company and kindred private concerns with the remaining aborigines of the world at the places of private, speculative technological development were opportunities for accelerating the growth of freedom. Sadly, these opportunities were lost to history because of foreign policy. But there will be other opportunities in the future hopefully under a more libertarian influence. And as long as libertarians like Ron Paul persevere with their ideas, the lessons of history will not be lost on those who cherish freedom and understand its prerequisites to obtain a more humane outcome from encounters with lesser-developed people.

Al Lowi (send him mail) has been a professional engineer in private practice in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, for the past 40 years.

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Politics

derives from the Greek word for civics, which is Latin for the art
of governing. In ancient Greece and Rome, governing was the privilege
of a minor fraction of the population known as citizens.

Political
government as we have come to know it was originally confined to
cities (polis in Greek). The "polity" of the republics
of Athens and Rome were the privileged citizen class. From that
usage our terms "policy" and "politics" derive.
Indeed, our modern political traditions are merely variations on
a theme by Plato.

An authoritative
statement of purpose for political participation, said to sum up
the views of professional politicians, is as follows:

“(Political)
participation is an instrument of conquest because it encourages
people to give their consent to being governed…(And) even when
voting does not itself produce a clear sense of public willingness,
the purpose of participation is nevertheless fulfilled because…deeply
embedded in the people’s sense of fair play is the principle that
those who play the game must accept the outcome…even if they
are consistently on the loosing side. Why do politicians plead
with everyone to get out and vote? It is because voting is the
simplest and easiest form of participation by masses of people.
Even though it is minimal participation, it is sufficient to commit
all voters to being governed, regardless of who wins.”

(Theodore
J. Lowi, Incomplete
Conquest: Governing America, Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
New York, 1981, p.25.)

Thus, political
participation enables a few to rule many. This is the other side
of the meaning of the official motto of the United States: E
pluribus unum.

To participate
in politics is to submit to conquest. The sinister genius of the
political ruler consists in his ideological coup d’tat by
means of which sufficient numbers of people volunteer
for servitude. Curiously, people are persuaded in
numbers to abandon their inherited autonomy in favor of a promise
of protection from the forces of nature without effort on their
part. The promise is wholly without merit but the prospect is nonetheless
enchanting, to say the least. So perhaps the politician is not so
much the genius as the opportunist.

Conquest by
plebiscite differs from military conquest only in the sense that
the former is bloodless and volitional. The result is the same.
The victims sanction their own servitude and then cooperate in their
own regimentation. Ideally, the only violence that occurs in politics
in the normal course of affairs is to truth and logic. Physical
violence is concealed under the umbrella of "rule of law"
administered by the so-called criminal justice system. Note that
the system is preoccupied with victimless crimes. The criminals
are having their way with the system. Who says crime doesn't pay.
If crime had not always existed, politicians would have to invent
it forthwith.

Voting and
related electoral rituals are not the only forms of political participation
that lead to conquest. “Cooptation” is another. Cooptation
is defined as “a political strategy for recruiting members of
the opposition for the purpose of weakening or eliminating it.”
Cooptation characterizes the proceedings of legislatures
where the elected representatives of the people receive special
dispensations of legal privilege by compromising their constituents’
rights. Plaintiffs retain the right to petition for relief. The
petition is prima facie evidence of conquest. A more ingenious
scheme for exploitation can hardly be imagined. Had cooptation not
been invented by the Greeks of antiquity, it would surely be legislated
forthwith.

Typically,
arguments for political participation assume humanity has no alternative
for enjoying private life than to submit to the kind of public order
brought about by political process and apparatus. (Theodore J. Lowi,
Private
Life and Public Order: Problems of Modern Government, W.W.
Norton, New York, 1968.) Most people are convinced that community
and other social accouterments to their private lives are gifts
from government. So the common idea of "doing something"
to improve human circumstances almost always takes the form of a
political initiative of some sort to get the government (somebody
else) to do something individuals would never consider undertaking
by themselves for themselves on their own recognizance. Individuals
never consider politics appropriate for themselves alone because
they shun violence, which is the ultimate recourse of political
initiative. Politics seeks to legitimize violence by institutionalizing
it on behalf of the multitudes — "one for all and all for one"
— never mind the possibilities in the real world. Thus, politics
collectivizes the population and subordinates ordinary individuals
to the herd. So politics makes a mockery of human dignity.

Politics is
sustained by a self-fulfilling prophesy: More politics to obtain
more government is supposed to be the remedy for all social inadequacies,
which are supposed to be due to "poor" government. In
other words, politics is the cure for the problems caused by politics
in the first place. That politics is mere ritual seems to elude
recognition. Political government is the premier social problem
because it preempts self-government, which is fundamentally the
only real government in society.

Political government
always fails to govern, but it never fails to coerce. What government
there is at any given time depends on the existence of self-governing
individuals. So before there is self-government, there is no government
whatsoever. Self-government consists of pursuing one's own wants
while adjusting to the similar pursuits of others. It amounts to
autonomy and discipline. A modicum of self-government is all it
takes for a human population to become a stable society. This condition
can be called economic democracy because every ballot is the clear
and irrevocable mandate of the buyer through which he expresses
his will, his aspirations, his freedom, and his personality. In
this balloting system, the votes (dollars) are never wasted, elections
are held every hour of ever day and the voting booths are the market
places everywhere in the world. In this balloting system there is
no tyranny by the majority. Every voter wins in the elections in
which he participates. If he reckons he can't win, he does not have
to play, or pay.

Economic democracy
exists without a political overseer. So who needs political government?
As it turns out, only the prospective political overseer needs it.
Accordingly, a political vote is a vote for the dictator of your
choice.

Politics inhibits
conflict resolution via voluntary human action, which is the only
type of human behavior that is social. To the extent politics inhibits
voluntary human action, politics diminishes society. Whereas nature
ordains that the best place in society to find a helping hand is
at the end of your own arm, political government aims to monopolize
all arms.

Political action
is urged on fellow sufferers as a sort of self-defense measure.
Somehow,
safety is to be found in numbers, never mind the fact that there
is no safety in numbers or anything else. Clearly, running
with the herd runs a great risk of getting run over in a stampede.
A solitary course might be lonely but it might also avoid that risk.
Yet, there are always other risks. Indeed, there is no such thing
as life without risk. Come what may, life is an adventure. Get used
to it.

Thus,
prudence dictates taking along some insurance. Contracting with
a fiduciary entity to share certain risks with like-minded individuals
is both practical and prudent. Indeed, insurance is a metaphor for
voluntary government. (Peter B. Bos, “The Societal Implications
of Risk-Sharing,” The Heather
Foundation, P.O. Box 180, Tonopah, NV 89049, April 8, 1997.)

June
16, 2007

Al
Lowi (send him mail) has
been a professional engineer in private practice in Rancho Palos
Verdes, California, for the past 40 years.

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Global climate
is always changing. It has always been so, and it is bound to continue
changing long after man has come and gone. As the global climate
changes, so does the distribution of temperature and atmospheric
gas composition around and about the Earth. And the converse is
also true. For whatever reasons yet to be learned by scientific
study, changes in the Earth's temperature and atmospheric composition
will lead to global climate changes regardless of what the Sun is
doing.

Which came
first, the chicken or the egg? The scientific study of the relevant
phenomena is a very recent endeavor in human history, which is a
few thousand years out of billions in geological terms. Knowledge
is skimpy and the few findings extant are subject to considerable
uncertainty. There is this old complaint: "Everybody talks
about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." This
is not quite true. Cloud-seeding
technology was developed relatively recently and is being practiced
in specific situations to produce local precipitation. The Chinese
government has disclosed plans
to employ cloud seeding on a grand scale in an attempt to improve
the air over Beijing during the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

Beyond such
puny measures, humans seem to have little or nothing to do with
the Earth's climate except to study it. In any case, understanding
the human contribution to global climate change, if any, would seem
to be a prerequisite for pontification on the matter. If sufficient
authority to pronounce the causes of global climate is not yet at
hand, there is certainly no illegitimate authority for regimenting
human behavior presumed to cause it. It is now widely believed that
the climate of the earth is warming and that such warming is a threat
to life on the planet. It is also believed that this global-warming
is caused by a so-called greenhouse effect exacerbated by the presence
of an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere put there by promiscuous human
activity. Alarm over the dreaded greenhouse effect is spreading
rapidly throughout the population via the mass media. A political
stampede toward the enforcement of draconian CO2 abatement measures
in society is in the making. The
sky is falling. Look out below!

Although the
threat to the planet, if any, is only hypothetical at this time,
few of the anthropogenic global-warming believers realize that the
forceful abatement of human CO2 emissions will inflict world-wide
human sacrifice. If they did, they might be more skeptical of
the hype and less patronizing of the promoters. As it is, ignorance
of the economic consequences of political action against CO2 emissions
is incomparably more threatening to humans than the CO2 they emit
into the atmosphere.

On account
of the booming political campaign for government control of carbon
compounds, understanding the consequences of atmospheric CO2 and
the human involvement in it is a matter of some urgency for the
public welfare. While the climate effects, if any, are imperceptible
at present, precautionary or preemptive political reaction already
in evidence is producing adverse economic consequences, such as
misuse of resources and misapplication of capital. Consider the
diversion of agricultural enterprise from foodstuff to motor-fuel
production at the behest of public relations and taxpayers' subsidies.
Government-sponsored production of boutique alternative motor fuel
(ethanol) has already resulted in doubling the price of milk and
corn tortillas. Hamburgers and hot dogs are next.

To put human
culpability for the weather into perspective requires first taking
an inventory of all CO2 emissions and consumptions, natural and
man-made. This is a task that is not only difficult but controversial.
Next is required a full explanation of the greenhouse effect, its
relative importance in global climate and the relative importance
of the various gaseous constituents of the atmosphere in the phenomenon.
Then, the question as to where the greenhouse effect ranks in significance
among all the other phenomena that possibly influence global climate
must be answered. Finally, the relative importance of geological,
meteorological, solar and cosmic effects in global climate formation
must be ascertained. Note that none of the latter has an anthropogenic
component. In a
previous article, I briefly examined the physics of global climate
formation and casually surveyed the various phenomena known to be
at play in its outcome. Thereby, I hoped to identify any significant
anthropogenic influence in the matter and to advance (at least my
own) understanding of what has become a major controversy in human
affairs. This publication exercise was good for me, but response
to the article indicated that not all readers were similarly gratified.
I opened my previous essay with this outrageous statement: "In
1991, the volcanic eruption at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines
put more carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere than did the
whole human race during the most recent century of the industrial
era." This statement provoked queries from several thoughtful
readers asking for sources, which proves LewRockwell.com readers
are paying attention. Thus prompted, I proceeded to examine the
Pinatubo event more carefully. I found an
authoritative report on the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo event, which estimated
this eruption put 921 megatons of H2O vapor and 234 megatons of
CO2 gas into the atmosphere.
If so, Pinatubo emitted in a matter of days about 1% of the
CO2 emitted by the whole human race in the year 2003.

Another
Pinatubo eruption source states the following:

The
University of Rochester physicists who conducted the study ”determined
the volcano climate sensitivity and response time for the Mount
Pinatubo eruption, using observational measurements of the temperature
anomalies of the lower troposphere, measurements of the long
wave outgoing radiation, and the aerosol optical density,” perhaps
inspired by what Hansen et al. (1992) had said of this eruption,
i.e., that it had the potential to exceed “the accumulated
forcing due to all anthropogenic greenhouse gases added to
the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began,” and
should “provide an acid test for global climate models.” Thus,
when the water emitted is taken into account, the total contribution
to the Earth's greenhouse cover by this one volcanic event justifies
my previous claim. Nevertheless, temporary Earth cooling was the
outcome of Pinatubo 1991. Whatever human activity contributed
to the Earth's greenhouse that year, it was eclipsed by Pinatubo's
other effects for a good while thereafter. Another
treatment of volcanic CO2 emissions found that 30 billion
metric tons of CO2 was being emitted every year from Mount Etna
alone as of the late 1980′s. This research also estimates the
current emissions from all volcanic sources (including geothermal)
at 264 billion metric tons CO2 per year. These emissions were
found to be in equilibrium with the ground. Specifically, the
CO2 emitted into the atmospheric is being absorbed in the soil
and oceans at a comparable rate by silicate weathering and alkali
buffering. Apparently, volcanic activity may well be emitting
an order of magnitude more CO2 than human activity per annum without
any exceptional eruptions like Pinatubo.

Volcanic activity
includes geysers,
mostly geothermal types. Some
geysers are actually carbon dioxide–driven, cold water
geysers. Many are submarine and uncharted, but could account for
certain vertical convection currents in the oceans that alter the
local CO2 distribution.

 Although
rarely found in media coverage, which concentrates lately on human
culpability and original sin, there exists a considerable cache
of actual data on the CO2 in volcanic eruptions. A geologist responding
to my previous article expressed surprise that volcanists don’t
publish more on this subject under the circumstances.  He also
thinks the climatologists should be more concerned than they apparently
are with the effects of volcanic activity on the atmospheric inventory
of CO2 because of the potential for the volatilization of huge volumes
of CO2 from mineral carbonate in the crust of the Earth.

However, climatologists
have reason to neglect CO2 emissions. In spite of what the alarmists
say, the greenhouse effect of CO2 is not that important in global
climate formation. 100 ppm (0.01%) more CO2 in the atmosphere over
a hundred years may be a lot of aerial fertilizer, but it is probably
negligible as a weather-maker. Too bad it probably won’t produce
some warming, which would be welcomed by most humans, plants and
animals. Apparently, volcanic activity has a significant influence
on the Earth's climate. It is also apparent that humans don't. Volcanic
exhausts have enormous potential as a source of atmospheric CO2.
The volumes may actually be greater than I represented in my earlier
article. The reason for this is that volcanoes volatilize tremendous
amounts of mineral carbon and carbonates residing in the Earth’s
crust. The potential atmospheric CO2 is far greater from volcanic
sources than from forest and brush fires, which in turn is greater
than from human fuel burning.

It is estimated
that 2 billion tons of CO2 are emitted annually from drained and
burning peat lands in Indonesia. About 80% of this is from peat
land fires and 20% is from the decay of drained and drying peat
swamps. This amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere, about a tenth
of what human industrial and agricultural activities produce, raises
the question as to how much of the Earth's total is coming from
forest and brush fires, and how much of that is caused by arson
versus nature (lightning)?

As of a couple
of years ago, anthropogenic
CO2 emissions were estimated at 26 billion metric tons per
year. If so, human CO2 emissions are about 10% of volcanic CO2 emissions.
And then there are previously mentioned forest and brush fires to
account for. Accordingly, human emissions of CO2 at present are
somewhat less than 10% of the total.

In any event,
all these carbon emissions are balanced by the natural, on-going
CO2 uptake and sequestration in vegetation, soil weathering and
dissolution in rain, lakes, rivers and oceans. An increase in the
concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases the rate of these
absorptions. As a result, ambient CO2 dissolution is a significant
buffer on the increase of atmospheric CO2 from increases in CO2
emissions from whatever source. Thus, most CO2 emissions never enter
the greenhouse to affect the climate.

It has come
to pass that CO2 emissions are popularly believed to be cooking
the life out of the planet via the greenhouse effect. It is widely
believed that humans are responsible for this global climate change
because they put the culprit CO2 to the atmosphere. Since few people
know anything about CO2 (most don't even know what it is or how
it creates a greenhouse effect), how were they convinced CO2 in
the atmosphere can play such a significant role in global climate
formation via a greenhouse effect? Did they ever consider the possibility
the more ubiquitous water vapor in the atmosphere (humidity) might
be a more important greenhouse gas than CO2?

Attempts to
forecast the future climate on Earth by mathematical modeling and
computer simulation are doomed unless they account for the water
in the atmosphere. They may be doomed even if they do because of
the uncertainty in the data and kinetics. Water is not only an independent
factor but it almost always accompanies CO2 emissions (e.g. hydrocarbon
combustion, respiration, etc.). Water is more prevalent and far
more significant than CO2 in radiation interchange with the sun.
Water not only absorbs solar radiation but also condenses to form
clouds that reflect and scatter the sunshine The cooling effects
of this radiative scattering utterly counteracts the heating by
radiation absorption in the greenhouse effect. But the scattering
is a much more complex phenomenon, an anathema to mathematical modelers.

The overwhelming
importance of water in the formation of global climate is the inconvenient
truth ignored by the environmental lobbyists and propagandists.
In their fixation on CO2, they claim to represent the findings of
a preponderance of scientists – indeed a consensus — on what computer
models say about the Earth's climate. The activists don't know any
better — they can claim innocence by virtue of ignorance. However,
the modelers, who have neglected the role of water in the atmosphere,
should know better. But in grazing for funding to support their
research budgets, they pander to those who can influence the public
outlays. Oblivious to such matters, the alarmists blithely represent
the findings of the technical authorities to the political authorities
as unimpeachable, and that their conclusions somehow ratified as
if by plebiscite, support urgent political measures, which they
(the activists) are ready, willing and able to deliver in terms
of a public stampede for protection from nebulous harm.

Who constructed
the computer models? Modelers. The modelers masquerade as the highly
credentialed academics they usually are, sequestered as they usually
are with their super-computers in government laboratories and in
university laboratories funded by the government. Their mission
is to create a mathematical surrogate of real world climate and
advise their clients regarding the formulation of appropriate public
policies as if government can do something about the climate. The
truth is, the government is powerless to do anything about the global
climate and the computer expertise involved is more relevant to
games, animated cartoons and other graphical forms of juvenile amusement.

 The difficulty
of modeling the climate of the whole earth for the purpose of making
long-term predictions with sufficient confidence to regiment human
life is highlighted by the fact that the big-budget meteorologists
can’t even forecast the weather in Los Angeles a week from now,
let alone the winds aloft over the poles at the end of the century.
Such modeling may be the most complicated problem ever contemplated
by man. Even global
climate data summaries (compilations of simple facts) over-simplify
the modeling problem.

Typically,
and most discrediting, modelers neglect water in the greenhouse
gas inventory. Also, they count only the readily observable “anthropogenic”
sources of CO2, albeit footnoted to the effect that the natural
sources, while possibly large, are too uncertain and difficult to
ascertain. Yet, the researchers blithely persevere while timidly
admitting that the natural sources are probably well over ten
times the anthropogenic ones.

The modelers'
results have been used to alarm the public over the future of the
planet as a suitable human habitat. Such alarm is out of all proportion
to the scientific credibility of those results. The modelers focus
on human CO2 emissions and greenhouse calculations virtually in
isolation from other climate influences. Such concentration is more
appropriate to a forensic investigation than basic climate research.
Whereas basic scientific research seeks to extend the bounds of
human knowledge of the natural world as it is, forensic science
seeks to find fault for injury to build a cases against the culpable.
Forensic science
(often shortened to forensics) is the application of a broad
spectrum of sciences to answer questions of interest to the legal
system in relation to a crime or to a civil action. It is not a
dispassionate knowledge-finding endeavor.

Whereas a
narrow focus on the simple radiative greenhouse effect facilitates
mathematical modeling, the truth is that blackbody
radiation interchange between the sun and the atmosphere is
dominated by the scattering effects of particles – dust, smoke,
water droplets, sulfates and other aerosols. Model that!!

It seems the
modelers have been hired to build a case against affluent human
life as a cause for political action. But who is the client? Who
is the plaintiff? Who is picking up the tab? Taxpayers, who else.
Do they have a cause of action against themselves? No. But there
are no lucrative political careers without taxpayers, who are the
resourceful and productive people that can be fooled and shamed
for their very industry. It doesn’t matter if there is actually
a crime that can be measured. So much the better for the politically
ambitious if it can’t. And if the affluent can't pay, who can? It
appears the alarm over human industrial emission of CO2 is a political
red herring in a wild goose chase to gain and exercise political
power. It is an old story: create public panic over an imaginary
threat to justify a futile and senseless campaign that amounts to
the conquest of the population. In the case at hand, strap the public
to a carbon abatement campaign and you have permanent conquest.
This campaign to stampede the public is reminiscent of a long line
of other prohibition movements (e.g. booze, drugs, prostitution,
etc.). All are doomed to messy failure.

Regardless,
it is never too late to learn as long as you are alive. For starters,
get your facts straight. Google makes it easy as never before. Hunt
for CO2 sources as a means to help put human life on Earth into
a proper perspective. But get more out of your CO2 emissions while
you are at it, and don't forget about the water.

Reducing CO2
emissions is an admirable strategy for improving the efficiency
and cost of living. For example, getting better mileage from the
fuel you burn will not only reduce your CO2 emissions but your driving
costs. Improving conventional power plant thermal efficiency reduces
CO2 and consumer electricity cost and conserves natural resources
in the bargain. But none of this is relevant to global climate change.
Although such emissions enhance the so-called greenhouse phenomenon,
they do not represent a threat to human life from changes in the
Earth's climate.

What is threatening
to human life on the planet is the public panic over a hyped-up
threat from nature supposedly caused by human emissions of CO2 as
a consequence of the good life. Man insults Mother Nature. Mother
Nature strikes back. How does She do this? She empowers some politicians
to shame the sheepish and stampede the guilty for protection. Protection
is the government's racket. The racket du jour is mandatory
CO2 emission control, which amounts to rationing industry and the
society it serves.

Arbitrary
reductions in CO2 emissions that are not matched by thermal efficiency
gains signify a decline in viability. Taken to the limit would result
in all entropy and no work, a consequence of Clausius’ Second Law
of Thermodynamics. Philosophers and apocalyptics fanaticize this
outcome as the red death of the planet. Society is immortal only
to the extent there are improvements in power generation and transportation
propulsion technology. Humans can and do control their CO2 emissions
to this end.

CAN HUMANS
CONTROL GLOBAL CLIMATE? No. Not even by controlling their emissions
of CO2. The best they can do is to inform themselves and to act
in self-defense according to their best judgment of the situation
as they find it, using the most appropriate technological means
at hand.

May
22, 2007

Al
Lowi [send him mail] has
been a professional engineer in private practice in Rancho Palos
Verdes, California, for the past 40 years.

DIGG THIS

“The people
who have a quasi-religious belief in man-made global-warming are
entitled to their religious beliefs, but they are not entitled
to make the rest of us worship in their church.”

~
Grover
Norquist

In 1991, the
volcanic eruption at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines put more
carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere than did the whole human
race during the most recent century of the industrial era. Notwithstanding
all the heat and fury released in the neighborhood of the volcano,
the event had a
cooling effect on the world as a whole.

Oblivious
to this bit of natural history, the
University of Minnesota is considering the award of an honorary
doctorate in climatology to Albert Gore for sounding an alarm
that human industrial activity is causing a global warming disaster.
It was a surprise to me that the administration of this prestigious
institution of higher learning considers Mr. Gore a climatologist.
Their gullibility regarding Mr. Gore's predictive powers should
raise the general level of skepticism. I wonder how this news was
received by established professionals and academics in the field.

However, it
is neither news nor scandal that the earth's climate is changing,
and you don't have to be a climatologist to recognize it happens.
As the refrain from the old drinking song goes: “We’re gonna have
weather, whether or not.” The same sentiment applies to the global
climate whether or not there are any humans alive to toast to or
to burn any materials in its atmosphere.

The activities
of industrious humans take place on only a small fraction of the
Earth’s surface. Local in execution and in sensible effect, only
in the fullness of time do the effects of human activity reach the
vast fluid volumes of the oceans and atmosphere, and then only after
much time has passed and the effects diluted to infinitesimal proportions.
It takes generations of skilled and patient climatologists to track
the consequences of such acts into global
climate effects. Even then there is no assurance of a reliable
determination.

So far in history,
people and their institutions have had a negligible physical effect
on the planet as a whole, strip-mining and clear-cutting to the
contrary notwithstanding. Compared to the volcanic activity from
within and the solar activity from without, mans’ surface shenanigans
have had but a puny influence on global climate if any at all. Volcanic
and solar activities dominate the natural outcome we call global
climate. All we mere humans can do about this result is to prepare
for and adapt to the consequences as best we can understand them.

It so happens
that the politically popular effort to banish human-generated emissions
of CO2 as a climate control measure is not one of the prudent measures
man can take to harmonize with his environment. To forcibly curtail
the emission of CO2 by humans is an attack on people, not climate
change. After all, CO2 is a product of respiration and, at this
stage of history, the number of people able to continue respiring
in the manner to which they have become accustomed will decline
as the energy derived from the burning of carbon-based fuels is
arbitrarily limited.

Legislation
aimed at curtailing carbon emissions by humans has been rationalized
as a proper government application of the so-called precautionary
principle. However, inasmuch as it would definitely impoverish humanity
without a chance of accomplishing an iota of global environment
protection, it seems an odd way for government to do its duty
to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide
for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure
the blessings of liberty…"

Carbon abatement
legislation is ill-informed and futile, as the following narrative
will show. It is a pathetic gesture analogous to the medieval ritual
of self-flagellation supposed by the victims to purge the consequences
of sin denounced by the church fathers. The modern environmental
church fathers and their misanthropic band of alarmists prescribe
anti-greenhouse medicine that, by their own calculation, can attenuate
global warming by no more than a couple of degrees. But the attempt
to roll back of carbon emissions that is involved will stymie the
world's economic growth and dissipate
most of its existing wealth in the attempt.

Even this small
degree global temperature control assumes the doubtful hypothesis
that human activity is the cause. But Mr. Gore and other like-minded
environmentalists must make that assumption because otherwise they
have no political campaign. Global temperature control is only a
pretense for global human control.

Mr. Gore proposes
to take the world to war. He has declared a world war on humans
to protect the environment from spoliation by industry. He proposes
to control human activity in an environment that is beyond human
control. Since he is only an amateur climatologist, he may not fully
realize his limitations. But he is a lifelong politician in the
national arena. His real profession is people control. And that
is as professional as it gets when it comes to controlling masses
of people using the social apparatus of coercion.

How does a
man get the idea he can affect the global climate? It is true that
paving Manhattan preceded historically higher local noon-time temperatures
in the City? Although this so-called heat island effect is real
enough, it cannot be extrapolated world-wide to explain the heating
of the whole Earth. For example, the local event cannot account
for any melting of Greenland’s glaciers up the coast, let alone
produce a perceptibly significant change in the world’s climate
as a whole. Not even the nuclear explosions in the Pacific military
theater during and after WWII made any world climate history.

Mr. Gore and
his acolytes dismiss scientific accountability with the claim that
human greenhouse gas emission is a moral issue that justifies political
action come what may. The church in Rome made such a moral issue
out of Giordano Bruno's teaching of Copernicus’s idea that the Earth
moved around the Sun instead of the other way around. Ultimately,
the church took political action to settle the argument: Bruno
was silenced on the stake in 1600. His intellectual descendent
Galileo subsequently faced a similar fate on substantially the same
issue. He recanted to save his skin, but was heard muttering under
his breath afterward “E
pur si muove,” which is Italian for "And yet it
moves." Science gave Copernicus, Galileo and Bruno the
last word on the subject and the church allowed the moral issue
to die quietly. Pope Clement VIII and Pope Urban VIII are remembered
only for their attempt to suppress of the truth about the solar
system. Mr. Gore and his church face a similar fate on the global
warming issue.

While there
is no scientific question that the Earth's climate is changing,
it is still highly questionable whether it is warming up or cooling
down at the present time and what is driving the changes. Determining
the magnitude of change of the planetary climate as a whole at any
instant of geological time is a project fraught with uncertainty.
Global temperature distributions East to West and North to South
are in constant flux. Relevant effects from whatever cause cannot
be reliably measured let alone controlled. If an understanding of
the phenomenon overall is so uncertain, how then should one regard
the suggestion that human life plays a significant role in the matter?
Which fly put what speck in the pepper shaker? It is probable that
whatever global climate change may be attributable to human life
is comparatively too small to be determined with any confidence.

Even if one
believes the temperatures relevant to the state of the global climate
are being reliably measured, the temperatures being reported by
the authorities show less change during our lifetime than the inherent
measurement error of the best
available thermometric instruments. Never mind tree rings, ice
cores, fossil worms, tea leaves and the like. This observation raises
the question as to how to take the temperature of the planet in
the first place. Archimedes’ answer to a similar question of global
import comes to mind. This ancient Greek mathematician said he could
move the Earth IF he had a place to stand and a lever
long enough. I have a pretty good idea where Mr. Gore stands and
where he has stuck his thermometer to ascertain what he wants to
learn about the Earth's political climate. But I have no idea where
to put the global thermometer for the physicist to read bona fide
global temperatures. The climatologists are still searching.

Maybe the
Earth is currently in the process of warming up. It has happened
before, which we know only in retrospect. Maybe human life is culpable
for such warming. This has never happened before and remains to
be proven. One thing is for sure: popular consensus has nothing
to do with the matter. Neither does the hot air of political debate
of which there is plenty. Contrary to popular opinion, there is
no such thing as a scientific consensus on this issue or any other.
Scientists don’t vote on scientific matters because knowledge is
not a matter of consensus. A consensus forms as a result of observational
agreement, not the reverse. If nature was a person, he wouldn’t
give a hoot what the public thinks of a matter of natural history.
It is as Jonathan Swift scoffed: “Some people have no better idea
of determining right and wrong than by counting noses.”

The science
of climatology is like all the other sciences except more so –
uncertain. The obligatory seed of doubt in scientific conclusions
is a permanent bar to the legitimacy of political exploitation of
them. On that account, science will never be able to justify the
coercion of some by others, academic honorees not excepted. The
hubris of public policy and the legislation that follows from it
is alien to science and hazardous to human health.

This much is
known with some confidence about global climate formation: one volcanic
eruption put more CO2 into the atmosphere than a century's worth
of industrial fuel burning. And the result of this event was global
cooling, not warming. Hundreds of active undersea volcanic vents
untouched by human hands heat the oceans and drive off megatons
of previously solvated CO2
and H2O into the atmosphere. This has been going for ages and
we still don't know if it is causing warming or cooling of the earth.

What about
the so-called greenhouse effect? According to the University of
Minnesota's favorite climatologist and Hollywood's
favorite documentarian, carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere
by hydrocarbon-fuel-burning humans since the onset of the industrial
revolution traps sufficient additional sunshine to doom the Earth’s
climate to perpetual warming. Such warming is supposed to have dire
consequences for the future of civilization as Mr. Gore knows it.
Watch
his computer make Florida and New York disappear under rising seas.

But physics
paints a different picture. According to established physics, the
most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is not
CO2 but H2O (water). Moreover, the burning of typical hydrocarbon
fuels in air produces a
greater volume of water vapor than carbon dioxide. Even so,
most of the gases in the Earth's atmosphere that came from combustion
resulted from naturally
occurring forest fires, not human activity. As the forests re-grow,
they take back some of the carbon out of the atmosphere. However,
the predominant source of greenhouse gas emissions is not
combustion but volcanic activity. The fate of this carbon is
hard to know.

In any event,
the importance of both the greenhouse effect on global climate and
the human contribution to it are widely misrepresented in the popular
media. One misrepresentation is that carbon dioxide is the most
significant radiation absorber in the atmosphere. Actually, the
most important gas from this standpoint is water vapor. Another
misrepresentation is that the greenhouse effect is preeminent in
global climate formation. Actually, the most important role of the
most important greenhouse gas in climate formation is not even a
greenhouse effect. Water is not merely a strong solar radiation
absorber. It also condenses in the atmosphere to form clouds, which
scatter solar radiation back to space before it has a chance to
be converted to heat in the atmosphere by gaseous radiation interchange.
Such scattering overwhelms the relatively weak greenhouse effect
of all the atmospheric gases combined. So even if the emissions
resulting from human activity were a significant fraction of the
whole greenhouse inventory (which they are not), the water associated
with the dreaded carbon “footprint” will probably cause more global
cooling than heating.

It should also
be noted that the heat absorbed in the atmosphere by radiation interchange
with the sun fails to reach the surface of the Earth directly. And
by the time it is brought there by convection from the atmosphere,
part of it is re-radiated back to space before it can do any more
heating of the Earth’s surface.

Admittedly,
modeling
the Earth's global climate gets complicated very quickly. The
reader should ask how I can presume to contest the mighty conclusions
of the esteemed technical authorities at NASA
and UNIPCC based on some elementary physics and naked eye observations.
Surely the government's
fancy computerized climate models programmed and run on super-computers
by an army of bureaucrats with PhD's account for all the above considerations
and more with unimpeachable authority.

Maybe
so. But the questions remain. What if the inadvertent effect of
human life on global climate is negligible? What, then, are the
chances that concerted human effort can control the weather? Who
is willing to live in poverty to give the government a chance to
try?

Free men must
judge for themselves. And they better judge and speak out on their
conclusions very soon if they expect to retain any degree of freedom.
If in doubt, say no.

March
1, 2007

Al
Lowi [send him mail] has
been a professional engineer in private practice in Rancho Palos
Verdes, California, for the past 40 years.

DIGG THIS

The better sort of conservatives often urge a return to the methods
of the framers of the American Constitution to achieve the type
of society that they crave, which is presumably one that tends toward
prosperity, harmony, and peace. Such a society is understood to
be "free," specifically free of political regimentation.

The recommended action exemplifies the dignified conservative approach
to social change. It urges all who care "get back on track"
by adopting the methods of our ancestors, namely to discuss and
debate the moral, political, and philosophical questions involved
before taking action at the polls to decide the matter. The goal
is social rehabilitation. The means to achieve this goal are political.
The sentiments are comforting.

The process we are exhorted to use to obtain our freedom is the
one venerated by the Constitutional Convention of 1787. But this
process institutionalized the monopoly of coercive power over people
now known and feared as the Government of the United States of America,
which we now bear. It has come to pass that this monopoly of coercive
power over people is not only the conservative choice of government
but it is the one most sought-after regardless of the political
party seeking power. It is the inevitable result of the misguided
political obsessions of our ancestors including the republicans
of Ancient Greece as well as the American Constitution framers.
Accordingly, all devotees of this American Government are conservatives.

The conservative design for government is widely supported but
the conservative program for freedom is conflicted. While political
means of social change are most definitely conservative, the stated
goal of such change is clearly revolutionary. At the time of the
American Revolution, there was no historical precedent for the society
envisioned by the Declaration of Independence. The historic constitution-forming
process, which is political, did not and does not lead to such a
society notwithstanding the sentiments of the Federalist Papers.
There was no historical support for any approach to humane society
building at the time. Certainly, nothing has happened in the interim
to accredit politics as such a process. To the contrary, two hundred
plus years of history is informative in the negative. So it is now
appropriate to ask, in the light of history, whether political means
are suited to the attainment of social ends.

Politics failed to achieve the revolutionary social goals of the
American Revolution. Nothing has occurred in the meantime to make
it relevant today. Today's advocate of the same political shenanigans
that subverted the American Revolution is deluded. His emperor is
naked. Imagining a libertarian suit of clothes for the emperor will
not fit his conservative physique. Arguing some abstract concepts
before going to the polls has a dismal prospect of achieving freedom.

Yearning for a free society is not a conservative impulse because
the object of the affection for which many of us yearn never actually
existed in the past. The comprehensive free society is an ideal
that is still a dream. However, this much is true: such society
is evolving, not by political processes but by economic ones. A
free society is emerging as a result of an expanding and irrepressible
market economy, no thanks to American government and its conservative
advocates. The spread of voluntary behavior is symptomatic of this
development. Ever since the American Revolution there has been this
irreversible movement toward prosperity, harmony, and peace for
all individual humans on the planet. This trend toward comprehensive
freedom is inexorable and stateless, and its primitive existence
at present suggests at least an asymptotic possibility for its realization.
It is a technological development, not a political feat. People
are learning how to govern themselves on the job. In self-government,
power is local, well-informed and competitive. Its growth is a check
on monopolies of all kinds.

Politics cannot be a remedy for insufficient society because it
is fundamentally anti-social. Politics is not an aid but a handicap
society must overcome. Political elections ostensibly for freedom
actually foment conflict by sanctioning coercion and regimentation.
Such is the nature of monopolization of social control in the hands
of a few, elected or not. This conundrum accounts for the pessimism
of politically active libertarians and conservatives.

Conservatism implores the freedom-lover to persevere on a traditional
political path. But it fails to provide an explanation as to how
freedom is attained thereby. Instead, we are offered only the assertion
that freedom is impossible without political voting.

On the other hand, it
easy to explain how it is impossible to achieve freedom via
political voting. As I explain, political voting is merely a bloodless
means of conquest (the opposite of freedom-building), which, once
instituted and ritualized, facilitates the maintenance of the status
quo by force of arms if necessary (and it will be) thereby prolonging
the agony of involuntary servitude. Lest there be any doubt of the
accuracy of this portrayal, try to go about your life in the United
States without paying taxes.

The founders of the American Republic may be forgiven for their
mistaken reliance on politics to realize the promise of the Declaration
of Independence. They could not have imagined the exponential growth
in voluntary economic behavior subsequent to it based on that which
was imperceptible until fairly recent times. Nowadays, this trend
is undeniable even by the monopolists and political commandoes.
This economic phenomenon now stands in stark contrast with the 230-year
record of political despotism. Accordingly, the allegiance of modern
conservatives and libertarians to political means of liberation
and justice is not so forgivable. Still, it is sad to see sincere
advocates of liberty, who long to see freedom in their lifetimes,
suffer depression and demoralization over the futility of their
political travails.

The practice of economic voting using an impersonal medium of exchange
has blossomed throughout the world since the American Revolution.
Such voting, largely ignored by conservatives, continues to manifest
the essence of freedom without a trace of ideological color notwithstanding
the massive distractions of political obsessions and antics. It
is heartening to see so many voting in the economic arena and staking
their fortunes on voluntary participation in the marketplace where
every person is free to advance his life according to his own vision
using means that are perfectly suited to those ends.

In the marketplace one finds a grand alternative to politics. There,
every freedom-seeker enjoys full authority over his choices including
"thanks but no thanks." There, every person is effective
in tending to his precious life. There, everyone has good reason
to be optimistic for the prospects of freedom. There, everyone is
not only practicing what he preaches but he is also doing what he
knows how to do and avoiding acts and situations that he knows will
detract from his life. Such behavior is recognizable as self-government.
That ordinary people persevere in this way is no mystery. It is
otherwise known as "the pursuit of happiness," and no
mere political contrivance can suppress it or substitute for it.

Oddly enough, political government depends on the existence of
a modicum of self-governing individuals. (Lowi, 1976, American
Government, Incomplete Conquest, p. 60.) Accordingly, before
there is self-government, there is no government, political or other.
So the development of self-government is the beginning and end of
government of any kind. Since self-government consists in the ability
to pursue one's own wants while adjusting to the similar pursuits
or wants of others, government consists fundamentally of individual
autonomy and discipline. The outcome of such self-government is
individual freedom, which is also known as free society when widely
practiced. Such self-government is the necessary and sufficient
condition for a human population to become a stable society without
a political overseer. This condition might also be called economic
democracy because the consumer (who is everybody) is the sovereign.
(Mises, 1949, Human
Action, pp. 271, 678) Economic democracy exists without
any need of political government, conservative or other. Its elections
occur around the clock using money for ballots.

Had
the Conservative advocate for voting been thinking strictly of the
economic variety, he would have been correct when he said it is
impossible to achieve freedom without voting. Since voting in the
marketplace is voluntary exchange, he would be entitled to optimism
for the chances of freedom to succeed in his lifetime. He would
find market behavior everywhere and growing, and he would realize
that such behavior can simply overtake and outlast the pernicious
effects of politics. He would see the spontaneous growth of society
in progress, in the process of superseding all the common political
anachronisms and abuses.

February
5, 2007

Al
Lowi [send him mail] has
been a professional engineer in private practice in Rancho Palos
Verdes, California, for the past 40 years.

DIGG THIS

It is commonly
believed that the ballot box contains a bona fide decision of the
people regarding the future course of human events. That is the
folklore. What is the truth? Is it really possible for "the
people" (whoever they are) to make such a decision? If not,
what is all the fuss about? 

In truth, the
ballot box is merely a receptacle for ritual responses to hypothetical
propositions. I say hypothetical because the propositions or their
objectives are either beyond the reach and authority of the individual
humans casting the ballots or are outright deceptions. For many
participants, the practice of voting politically is somewhat analogous
to tossing coins down a wishing well or casting bottles containing
fanciful messages to whomever into the ocean.

While the intent
of the Machiavellian proposition writers may be only thinly disguised,
the tokens placed in the ballot box are absolutely opaque as to
the issuer and his intent. Nevertheless, people have somehow come
to believe the ballot box contents represent a firm decision of
the people in the neighborhood when not even a majority of those
in the neighborhood have participated. How does it happen that a
few can bind all regarding the government of the neighborhood? Who
shall control a monopoly of political power over a human population
in which only a small minority cast inert tokens of assent? The
question exposes a hoax. The ballot box symbolizes an absurdity.

The ballot
box is merely the physical instrument of an imaginary entity popularly
known as the democratic majority the people. The so-called majority
plays a tune on the instrument that is supposed be the voice of
"the people." This story belongs in the library of fairy
tales. It is to the politically ambitious what the crystal ball
is to the circus fortune-teller.

Inasmuch as
ballots fail to include all valid alternatives including "none
of the above," the so-called decision is invalid. Such a decision
is a false alternative, a logical fallacy of the "excluded
middle."

The purported
decision of the people in the ballot box is also invalid because
it is a fraud. It is a fraud because it would delegate powers not
possessed by the participants in the ritual. Who among the electors
is endowed with the authority to commandeer the lives and properties
of his neighbors?

Political elections
take place to the mantra of "one man, one vote." This
ode to equality overlooks the failure of political elections to
achieve even a one-to-one correspondence between ballots cast and
counted and people affected. The participants pro and con may not
even represent a majority of those affected, let alone a unanimity,
which, according to legend, has the legitimate authority to determine
who shall rule and under what policies.

However, as
it happens, sorting the ballots according to assent to a proposition
determines not a majority but only a plurality of those who turned
out and gestured in the affirmative. And that plurality might be
just a minuscule fraction of the population to be affected. Such
an outcome is a far cry from a perfect tally of the invisible intentions
of the people presumed to be expressing their wishes unambiguously
regarding governance. It is not even or necessarily an expression
of the majority in the ordinary sense of the term, namely 50% of
the population plus one. But it is definitely a clique bent on conquest.
So speak the vaunted polls in a so-called political democracy.

Rare is the
person who questions that a poll speaks for the majority. Rarer
yet is the person who doubts a majority can speak, through a poll
or anything else.

Let's suppose
for the sake of argument that a poll is evidence that majority had
spoken. Can such a pronouncement qualify for rectitude?

Most people
are conditioned to accept "majority rule" without a second
thought. In doing so, they assume the majority is always right.
Accordingly, they are resigned to see whatever polling results prevail
even if they may have chosen otherwise. This habit of thought persists
notwithstanding the observation made by Jonathan Swift over three-hundred
years ago that “some people have no better idea of determining right
and wrong than by counting noses.”

Of course,
those people are right in the perverse sense that “might makes right.”
There is no question that the "majority" can muster superior
physical might in the population to suppress minority dissent. Thereby,
the presumptive leaders of the "majority" obtain the superficial
appearance of being in the right.

In actuality,
the majority is usually wrong. It can be right only by accident
because its predilections always represent the lowest common denominator
of opinion. How else does a majority of diverse individuals come
to a uniform consensus?

Who is the
majority that he can have an opinion? Opinions like decisions are
formed in a human brain or not at all. Since a majority is only
a mindless collective mass of humanity, majority decisions are figments
of the human imagination. They are only the illusions of the participants
in a poll, who are like the participants in a masquerade.

Given prevailing
sentiments and illusions, the people's concern for the integrity
of the ballot box is understandable inasmuch as its contents will
determine who shall rule over them. The ballot box contents sanction
the people (a fictitious entity) to rule the people (the actual
population), who are not only the ones who cast votes but also the
ones who didn’t. This clever sophistry resigns most people to submit
to whatever the outcome of the poll as long as such outcomes are
believed faithful to the ritual. Never mind the "majority"
is spurious and the decision illusory. Blind faith rules. The outcome
is considered fair as long as the sacrifice is uniform, universal
and high-minded.

What passes
for a decision of the people is a proposition that must be formulated
by some person with a brain, that is subsequently ratified by a
ritual vote count. Curiously, the outcome of this process can be
radically altered by one anonymous vote more or less. Whatever raises
doubt that the tally is at odds with an actual nose-count casts
doubt on the outcome. Such doubt disturbs the faith. It shakes the
belief in the legitimacy of the outcome and any succession to rule
so ordained. The slightest hint that the vote count was corrupted,
miscounted, miscarried or forged can quickly turn the mood
of the subjects from doubt to outrage and on to outright rebellion.
The reaction to even an abstract notion that the “decision of the majority”
was thwarted by some evil conspiracy can produce panic in the streets.

Thus a population
of volitional human beings becomes a herd of political animals.
Such a hysterical reaction might be expected from an invasion of
alien plunderers. Alien invaders may be real or imagined, but plunder
is a fait accompli when the rulers take over their peers.
Plunder is the result of the election in any case however conducted,
and the plunderers will not be aliens. They will be domestic opportunists.
Ballot box contents settle the issue as to who shall be anointed
to do the deed with legal immunity.

Curiously,
at this stage of human history, such plunder is tolerated provided
the illusion of majority sanction prevails. Still, it is surprising
that a majority of humans in a population would sanction an establishment
wherein a few of them receive services without rendering any. This
immutable outcome is a far cry from the popular notion of fairness
— uniform and universal sacrifice for a good cause. 

As if ordinary
theft or contamination of ballot box contents is not bad enough,
the new electronic voting machines threaten to defeat ordinary prudence
and protection of the count. This advancement in the technology
of manipulation is a boon to the masterminds of election fraud.
Add cyber crime to all the other usurpations with which a political
idealist must contend.  

But what’s
the worst that could happen? If you voted, perhaps you would have
been in the majority. Now, due to fraud, you are not. So the democratically
elected dictator is not of your choice. You chose a different dictator.
On the other hand, perhaps you merely deceived yourself in
the matter and have been denying reality ever since. If you
did not vote, you were at least resigned to your political fate
and the looting of your estate regardless of the outcome however
affected by whatever ballot scam. Perhaps you did not bother
to vote because you realize political democracy is a scam in and
of itself, and by abstaining, you weakened the electoral
deception foisted upon you and your fellows.

To the extent
the people go along with this gag, they have lost enough of
their individuality and autonomy to behave as a collective
— a herd of political animals – rather than a population of responsible
human beings acting on their own recognizance. Collective action
versus human action — that is the contest of the ages between legerdemain
and reality.

Ballot box
fetishes are symptomatic of a collectivistic habit of thinking.
Consider the phrase “the majority decides what everybody must abide.”
Notice the presence of "group-speak," a linguistic tool
that relies on the nonsense that a population of individuals can
behave like a decision-making entity. Actually, a collective has
no brain in which to visualize alternative courses of action and
make choices among them, nor a voice with which to articulate such
a choice. Such functions are provided by leaders and spokesmen,
who are usurpers and opportunists.

It follows
from the fantasy of collective deciding that such so-called decisions
are somehow owned by all the individuals as a whole without regard
for responsibility for consequences in any coherent sense of the
term. The vote creates the illusion of a collective entity (a fictitious
organism) that is exempt from responsibility. Therein lies its popular
appeal. However, appeal is only wishful. It can not create a collective
brain, any more than Frank Baum's "Wizard of Oz" could
give "Scarecrow" a brain.

Whereas a group
of people qua group has no brain with which to form a conclusion,
the individuals comprising the collective do themselves have brains,
and they could use them to make decisions, but only for themselves.
To attribute collective decisions to the group presumes the
individuals taken altogether as a whole are the property of
themselves as a whole, and that somehow all of them together as
a collective entity are able to conjure up a mental faculty attributable
to the whole. This is a conundrum of the following type:

The United
States (whoever that is) decided to send some of ‘its’ people
to Iraq to remove its counterpart state from power. The United
States ordained that the expenses of this campaign are to be paid
by certain of ’its’ people for the good of all of ‘its’
people, especially the elected spokesmen for ‘the people’ as a
whole.

This type of
language is pervasive, and the habit of thought that underlies it
goes unexamined at great cost. An apt analogy is the proverbial
“knee-jerk reaction" inasmuch as a knee jerk is an automatic
biological response to a physical stimulus, not a conscious act
of a volitional human being.

It is a consequence
of the collectivity mystique that those so-called decisions rendered
by government bureaus at the behest of interest groups are somehow
"better" than decisions made by individuals. However,
bureaus and groups are brainless, and brainless decision-making
is a myth.

Collective
decision-making is mere political ritual, but it may very well lead
to a spasm of ugly and painful consequences. When confronted by
such "decisions" and their consequences, the renowned
aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman quipped: "a camel is a racehorse
designed by a committee." Thus, decisions made by a committee
(a collective) are an illusion best. The worst is always yet to
come.

Only the decisions
of individual human beings can qualify as decisions in reality because
only they have the requisite brainpower. Real decisions applicable
to bona fide human action (as opposed to mob phenomena) can be made
only by someone with a functioning brain that is integral with a
functioning human individual. Mob phenomena are something else.

Mythical decisions
attributed to a mob inevitably lead to the imposition of force upon
all alike. The majority becomes a mob when, in the absence of reason,
it must rely on its only claim to rightness — physical might. Thereafter,
each member in lock step neglects his own volitional faculties to
its ultimate regret. Consequently, all rise and fall together as
the case may be.

Is this herd
behavior conceivably "better" than individual decision-making
that, seemingly chaotic, takes place at will in a market economy
where the consequences of myriad decisions are of limited province,
localized consequence and definite liability?

The fate of
collective decision-making is typified in the outcome of attempted
political regulation of the economy. Economists object to government
regulation on the grounds that the economy is too complex for anyone
to know sufficiently for that purpose, and therefore it is too complex
to direct or manipulate from a platform outside the arena of action
in a beneficial manner. Economist Daniel Klein illustrates the predicament
as follows:

Intellectuals
cannot know the local undulations of opportunity, just as intellectuals
cannot chart and predict the specific patterns of skating in a
roller rink. The skaters carry on, nonetheless, profitably and
without difficulty. The regulator who would direct and control
their activities is like the perambulator who presumes to accompany
the skater.

Like the patterns
made spontaneously in the rink by the skater that are too complex
for anyone to mimic on foot, economic movements due to purposeful
human action are too complex for an external observer to control.
The more complex is the system, the more the mischief in the outsiders'
attempts to control.

Imagine a multitude
of skaters on an unbounded rink. Such complexity does not confound
the individual skater. He need not interpret the whole before making
his moves. He is pursuing opportunities particular to his own time
and place with knowledge appropriate to his own circumstances and
competence. He moves defensively and opportunistically with ease.

In contrast,
the central planner and would-be regulator of a market is faced
with the whole complexity at once. Although he may be tempted to
try, he cannot stop the world in order to get a grip. He bargains
to manipulate the whole mishmash at once. His job is hopeless. He
has no access to appropriate knowledge.

Whereas the bizarre
spectacle of a perambulator imitating a skater might be entertaining,
the analogous consequences of government's attempts at directing
anonymous human lives in the economy are not amusing. History provides
countless ugly, even tragic examples. Indeed, it provides no exceptions.

The fantasy
of collective omniscience is perverse because its only claim to
"better" is by virtue of collective omnipotence, i.e.
superior brute force. But notice that brute force is irrelevant
to human progress except insofar as dynamite is an appropriate tool
for clearing boulders from a highway. Since politics is brute force,
it has no more relevance to human society than dynamite. Apropos
of this is attribute is Murphy's analogy: "To a hammer, everything
looks like a nail."

Since such
government is irrelevant to life in its natural habitat, it should
not be surprising that collectivistic attitudes cause misery in
the real world.

That
the ballot box contains a bona fide expression of the will of the
people is a myth as fantastic as any attributed to the ancients
in a more innocent age. It is a myth comparable to the genie in
the bottle offering the liberator three fantastic wishes. But this
myth is a key feature of an outrageous hoax perpetrated on a deluded
people by clever opportunists ambitious for power over them.

December
25, 2006

Al
Lowi [send him mail] has
been a professional engineer in private practice in Rancho Palos
Verdes, California, for the past 40 years.

There
is shortage of labor in this country. There always has been. In
a more primitive time, it was an excuse for chattel slavery. But
such a shortage is symptomatic of a growing economy usually considered
a boon to humanity.

Nowadays,
the national labor shortage is exacerbated by government price controls
on labor such as wage and hour standards and union shop statutes.
In addition, government subsidizes draconian birth control measures
including late-term abortion and other means of discouraging domestic
population growth. Thus, even if the United States was alone in
the world, its growing economy (as long as it lasts) will likely
produce shortages in the legal supply of labor. At the same time,
such shortages contrast with surpluses in the legal demand for labor
as evidenced by the government's unemployment statistics.

However,
the United States is not alone in the world. The labor shortage
in this country has come to the attention of people in other countries
where economic growth is unknown. Many of these people are attracted
by the opportunities for dignified and economically rewarding employment
that is out of their reach in their own country. This situation
is evidenced in part by rampant but illegal hiring of illegal residents
in this country.

Minimum
wage and labor standards laws have priced legal labor out of the
market for economically marginal jobs because of competition from
welfare and unemployment entitlements. This is a classical case
of price supports leading to surpluses, subsidies leading to indigence.
The labor surplus is evidenced by persistent unemployment of people
who can live as well or better on welfare handouts than on legal
wages for work they may not even qualify to perform economically.

Black-markets
exist wherever there are volitional demands for certain goods and
services that have been legally prohibited and are satisfied only
by methods and means condemned by law. Like moonshine during Prohibition,
there is now a black-market for labor in this country. It is illegal
for people to work for what many businesses are willing to pay to
remain viable. Meanwhile, even less pay may be attractive to many
non-natives who cannot find productive employment where they live
legally. While domestic labor contemplates the hypothetical question
"which
would you rather have, a job at $2/hr or no job at $10/hr?",
the immigrant scrambles to work for what he can get and hustles
to keep it up. Economic realities that elude urban labor union aficionados
are obvious to sojourners from rural Mexico accustomed to $2/day
when and if they can get anything at all.

It
may sound strange to a penthouse Bolshevik but many foreign nationals
consider this country’s legally minimum wage a king’s ransom. Never
mind fringe benefits and welfare and education entitlements. What
the stealth residents can get from the government is a minor lure
compared with honest wages. But, of course, they, like anyone else,
will take what they can get. This is also rule of law.

Only
the owner of a business is legally permitted to work for less than
the minimum wage and no fringe benefits. Businesses that depend
on more than the owner's labor may not be viable paying legally
mandated wages and fringe benefits to their workers. They may not
be competitive in a global economy (read Walmart) with a legal labor
force, let alone a unionized one. Not even Walmart can compete with
a union labor force.

Would
this country be better off without marginal businesses dependent
on low cost labor? One might think so from the look of public policy
on the subject. But I have doubts about it since I would not be
here now but for the struggles of a small entrepreneurial operation
that nurtured me as a child growing up in provincial Alabama during
the depths of the Hoover-Roosevelt depression years.

Illegal
immigration is commonly blamed for the country's perceived loss
of national security, whatever that means. However this much is
clear – illegal immigration was not a factor in the Wahabbis 9-11-01
Kamikaze attack on Americans. Those hijackers and murderers entered
this country in strict accordance with its laws regarding entry.
They were not looking for work at all. Had they come here with the
express purpose of finding gainful work, they would have been denied
entry by the first immigration officer they encountered. But they
were not looking for work, only workers to kill. Apparently, such
motives are not the concern of immigration law writers.

Curiously,
if to find work had been the avowed purpose of the al Qaeda hostiles’
visit to this country, the law would have denied them entry, not
because of their enemy affiliation but because the immigration laws
do not allow visitors from abroad to do honest work here. Indeed,
a young person cannot legally enter this country to work. So much
for the "Promised Land."

Nature
has ordained that labor is an economic commodity. It has its price
like anything else. The price of labor is a cost that must be covered
by the price of the goods and services it produces. Consumers accept
or reject these goods and services at the prices offered to the
delight or dismay of the producers who hire the labor.

Economists
attribute grave mischief to the popular misunderstanding of prices.
Especially egregious are the consequences of labor price ignorance.
Generations have been ideologically corrupted and economically injured
at the hands of so-called progressive labor politicians. Immigrant
life and death is daily testing labor price fallacies.

September
8, 2005

Al
Lowi [send him mail] has
been a professional engineer in private practice in Rancho Palos
Verdes, California, for the past 40 years.

In
his new book, The
Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty
(Knopf, 2002), Thomas E. Patterson poses the question “Where
Have All the Voters Gone?”  If anybody can answer this question,
Mr. Patterson should be the one. He is the Bradlee Professor
of Government and the Press at Harvard University’s John
F. Kennedy School of Government. In addition, he is the co-director
of the Vanishing Voter Project at Harvard University’s Shorenstein
Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, which is
generously funded by the Pew Charitable Trust. According to the
project’s web site:

”The
Vanishing Voter Project seeks to reinvigorate the presidential
campaign through research-based proposals designed to improve
its structure. The project has the goal of broadening and deepening
citizens’ involvement in the presidential selection process.”

Apparently,
the academic establishment is apprehensive that declining public
support for the elected head of state of the American union is weakening
the institution of political government and is undermining its control
over the population. And as the political establishment goes, so
goes the academic establishment.

When
Mr. Patterson says he wants to find out where all the voters
went, he is expressing concern over shrinking participation in political
elections. Why is the number of citizens showing up at the polls
on schedule so important? It is because citizen participation in
the political process is the main determinant of the legitimacy
of the government that supports "clients" and other dependents
such as Harvard academicians.

The
diminution of political participation in our so-called “democratic”
society raises the level of uncertainty as to the winner of the
race and bearer of the mace. Low turnouts at the polls cloud the
election of the president and commander-in-chief. In a game where
the winner takes all, ambiguity is worse than losing. In a "one-man-one-vote"
political democracy, a person is allowed only one chance to be on
the winning side, but the winning side gets a monopoly of power
over all until the next election. As a result, resentment and resignation
are inevitable consequences. Rancor over the presidential election
of 2000 is a case in point, never mind the fact that the national
popular vote count is not a constitutional criterion for the election
of American presidents.

To
discover why they are disengaging from elections, Patterson's project
interviewed nearly 100,000 Americans during the 2000 election campaign.
This evidence combined with polling data from earlier elections
established that voters are definitely disappearing from the political
scene. Patterson found voter turnout declined almost continuously
from before 1960 past 2000. Disappointing at the time, the turnout
for the 1960 presidential election was less than 65 percent of the
adult population. That figure fell to only 51 percent
in 2000, which was up from 49 percent in 1996. In the off-year elections
of 2002, a mere 18 percent turned out for the congressional
primaries with only 39 percent showing up for the November general
election.

Patterson
also reports sharp drops in the numbers of households listening
to the October presidential debates. For example, in 1960,
60 percent of the nation’s television sets were tuned to the broadcasts.
In 2000, viewers of those broadcasts had declined to less than 30
percent of the television households. (Halftime commercials on Monday
Night Football draw a bigger audience.) This drop the public’s interest
in political campaigns correlates with the declining numbers
of voters turning out at the polls.  

What
Is the Nature of Governmental Authority in a Political Democracy
When a Majority of Qualified Electors Shuns the Polls?

Patterson
asks rhetorically, “What’s going on here? Why is the bottom dropping
out on electoral participation?” These questions impart
an incongruous sense of urgency to a presumably academic research
project. However, the charter of the “Vanishing Voter” study betrays
this benign objective and seeks an active political role instead,
namely to ”reinvigorate” presidential elections. Apparently,
burgeoning campaign expenditures for lobbying and media exposure
by all political factions is not enough. Academic institutions have
been drafted into the campaign even as media outlays for
political promotion have grown exponentially. Campaign expenses
now exceed the national budget at the beginning of the Civil War
and still public interest in political campaigns and elections declines.

In
a different context, advertising pioneer P. T. Barnum complained
to his marketing staff:

”Half
of our advertising budget is wasted! The question is which half?”   

Barnum
could live with this uncertainty because he was a businessman accustomed
to dealing with change as the obverse of opportunity. But change
is anathema to politicians and academicians who rely on the status
quo, which depends on maintaining the legitimacy of the prevailing
political authority.

The
academicians are trying to "do something" about the
declining legitimacy of political office-holders. Since these efforts
are seemingly fruitless, they might well consider the legitimacy
problem of politics itself. A legitimate question is:

How
can Machiavellian political processes be trusted to govern a
progressive human population when history records only failure?

Clearly,
money won’t buy legitimacy or convert a confidence game
into a social technology — the recent history of political campaigns
is ample evidence. However, notwithstanding a wealth of data at
hand, Patterson is unable to answer his question “why
are they disengaging from elections?” Perhaps his definition of
voting and voter turnout is leading him astray.

“Where
Have All the Voters Gone?”

Fundamentally,
voting is a volitional choice from a menu of alternatives
excluding none and including "none of the above" as a
legitimate choice. Such choices take place only in the brain of
an individual human person. Thus, a valid "vote" can be
expressed only by a person acting on his own recognizance vis–vis
the world of alternatives excluding none. Considering all forms
of such choosing, Americans are easily seen to be voting more regularly
and enthusiastically nowadays than at any time in theirs or anyone
else’s history.

What
is the evidence? The evidence is a consumer economy turning over
more than ten trillion 2003 dollars worth of goods and services
annually with virtually the whole population participating every
day in every way! Notice that the preponderance of such voting takes
place continuously without any so-called class, race, age, gender
or party distinctions, or qualifications of citizenship, residence,
registration or official calendar. And this voting occurs in a purely
democratic manner, i.e., as a matter of self-determination without
duress, regimentation or prejudice. It is a process in which all
participants may and usually do win to some degree. As long as they
are free and independent agents of their own cause, they don't vote
unless they expect to win something with high probability. In principle,
there are no losers in this arena of human action.

This
paradigm of human action produces the state of affairs envisioned
by the original organizers of American government as expressed in
the Declaration of Independence. This document states in effect
that all men have an equal moral standing in the pursuit of their
own happiness as they reckon it, and that the purpose of government
is to see to it. Whereas the founders had realistic expectations
for the ambitions of their fellows, we can now see they did not
fully appreciate how politics could corrupt the purpose of government.

The
burgeoning, popular kind of voting takes place in an arena
wholly separate from politics. It must because the "majority
rule" that characterizes political democracy precludes the
sovereignty of individual consumers. The winner of political elections
"takes all" whereas economics merely accords "to
each his own." Politics produces a monopoly ruled by a minority
that presumes a sanction of the majority. By contrast, the economy
is open to all comers or else it is not economics. Every participant
can win in an economic "election."

So
where is this alternative arena of power? It is the free,
uninhibited (laissez faire, live-and-let-live) marketplace,
which is everywhere and always open to all who want to play free
of coercion. This is the place where consumers, which is everybody,
buy or don't buy at their sole discretion and in proportion to their
productivity and prudence in their parallel role as producers. As
a result of such buying and abstaining, the consumers rule
the producers, who are subject to competition for the patronage
of the consumers. The producers, all of whom are consumers as well,
are utterly dependent on the voluntary patronage of consumers. In
other words, all rule themselves and each other under the province
of competition. And competition prevails everywhere legal privilege
does not. Therefore, competition is the basic government in free
market and the basic law is the law of supply and demand. If there
is any such thing a consumer protection, competition is it. The
legal profession and its monopoly of the state's judicial system
is mere scam by comparison.

The
rule of the consumers, which is everybody, is known as economic
democracy. As expressed by economist Ludwig von Mises:

"The
very principle of capitalist entrepreneurship is to provide
for the common man. In his capacity as consumer, the common
man is the sovereign whose buying or abstention from buying
decides the fate of entrepreneurial activities. There is in
the market economy no other means of acquiring and preserving
wealth than by supplying the masses in the best and cheapest
way with all the goods they ask for."

The
Demise of Politics

Politics subordinates
the peaceful public province of the competitive marketplace to overweening
government by selected politicians, their bureaucratic minions,
client factions and other idle busy-bodies who subsist on extractions
from and impositions on producers by force, threat of force or defamation.
How does this stark contrast in the human style of life
– expressed in terms of voting – escape Prof. Patterson’s
notice? Perhaps he is focused so narrowly on the spectacle of political
contests for power over people that he is oblivious to all
the volitional phenomena going on around him. As a result, he fails
to see that the decline of political participation is merely
a natural shift in voter preferences from conflict to
cooperation, from regimentation to personal enterprise, from the
coercive affairs of politics to the productive volitional domain
of events in the normal pursuit of happiness.

So
where have all the voters gone? They did not go anywhere. They merely
remained in the market where they live and work. In doing so, they abstained
from wasting their precious time and consents on idle gestures,
nonsense, charades, wasteful efforts and destructive campaigns.
They abstained in self-defense. They looked after their own property
and made their estates grow.

Professor
Patterson asks the question “Why Do So Many Americans Hate Politics?”
An answer is suggested in this H. L. Mencken quip:

”It
is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you
know that you would lie if you were in his place.”

Self-respecting
Americans hate politics because they hate liars. They shun it for
the same reason.

Frank
Baum advised Dorothy and her toy companions through the voice of
the Wizard of Oz to “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
Can it be that Baum's message is finally influencing political participation?

Nowadays,
skeptics like Mencken and Baum are finding means to pull the curtain
and shine the light on the political imposters. The public now has
visibility of politicians in action in their natural habitat
like never before. The spectacle is perhaps more than either can
stand. And the profession of politics won’t stand scrutiny
on rational humanitarian grounds. It is definitely not social. Robert
LeFevre suggested it was a form of animal behavior, as in "political
animal."

Surely
the eminent co-director of the Vanishing Voter Project at Harvard
University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics
and Public Policy can see that the real cause of politics’ rapid
demise comes down to truth in advertising. According to this
well-tested theory, as bona fide information regarding social events
becomes more accessible to people on a timely basis, they become
better prepared to act, which they will on their own recognizance
every day to make the most of their lives while they have them.
Unless they are deceived and /or intimidated, people easily find
they need not postpone life-saving and life-advancing decisions
until the next political election. The market offers them alternatives
to exercise every day. 

Given
the choice, people don't vote on the false alternatives offered
by incompetent, unrealistic and irrelevant institutions in
relatively rare political elections. Authentic information not only
in print but also streaming over the Internet, cables and airwaves
enables people to see for themselves that politics is irrelevant
to their daily lives and future prospects. No wonder then that politics
is becoming increasingly passé. It is being overtaken by
a burgeoning population increasingly devoted to living their own
lives as best they can free of guilt for so doing.  

As
time passes, more people are finding they have real choices within
their own grasp and control in the purely social domain
– the marketplace – where they have practical and prudent opportunities.
By contrast, politics never delivers on its promises regardless
of the “issue,” and people are beginning to realize that political
participation only encourages more of the same old distractions
from production and progress.

Thanks
to Prof. Patterson, Harvard University and the Pew Trust, we
now have convincing evidence that people are increasingly exerting
their natural sovereignty in contempt of proxy political establishments
and their meaningless rituals. Political voters are found to
be vanishing. The data showing a quantitatively factual picture of
political participation confirms abstention from politics is a growing
phenomenon. Abstainers now outnumber political voters and the spread
is increasing with each succeeding election. The bandwagon
for political government seems to have lost its wheels.

Economic
participation is its own reward. It is the essence of individual
liberty and it needs no advocates to exhort "get out and vote."
Human freedom is the dynamically stable social paradigm after all. 
And human life goes on quite nicely on its own recognizance.

Ain't
nature grand?

September
23, 2004

Al
Lowi [send him mail] has
been a professional engineer in private practice in Rancho Palos
Verdes, California, for the past 40 years.

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Human Control of the Global Climate Alvin Lowi, Jr., on a pernicious myth.

Warming or Cooling? You be the judge, says Alvin Lowi, Jr.

Constitution Nostalgia Is it justified?

Ballot Box Folklore Alvin Lowi on the myth of the majority.

Black-Market Labor Alvin Lowi, Jr., on illegal immigration.

The Vanishing Voter Al Lowi says, Hurray.