The big news lately is Edward Snowden’s heroic whistle-blowing. Perhaps it has more to do with my interests than with any reality, but when I confront any story of this sort, my thoughts always turn to the question – how does this relate to the education system?

I do not think this is solely an attempt to change the subject, though. The schools are related, in important ways, to everything that goes on in society. The schools are microcosms of society; more importantly, since they are designed, in large part, by politicians and intellectuals, they tell us what these groups wish for society to look like. They show us how these two groups would shape our society if freed from any difficulties in doing so – since children are the most powerless group in society, their lives can be arranged and micromanaged in ways that would prove difficult on a larger scale. On the other hand, schools also impact the society at large in powerful ways. Many thought patterns become fixed in youth and during the teenage years – this allows schools to impact powerfully the way the society will think in one generation. The impact of schools, though, can actually be felt much sooner than this would suggest. We tend to underestimate children, but children are intellectual forces to be reckoned with – the process of growing up is, for many, a shrinking of the imagination, a loss of divergent thinking, and the sacrifice of ideals to reality. As a result, children are more idealistic, and also better at logical argumentation, than most adults. Their arguments impact those around them, exercising decisive force on, for example, parents’ voting habits. This impact is often seriously underestimated. It’s also, in many ways, a good thing – the society is better off if more imaginative ideas are expressed and taken seriously, and if more people hold passionately to their expressed ideals.

The Snowden case touches on two important ideas – privacy and the treatment of whistle blowers. Let us look, then, at how these issues are handled in schools.

Privacy

Interestingly, while there is a lot of discussion about whether or not Edward Snowden was right, one hears very little discussion about the underlying fact that he revealed that we are a secret surveillance society. This is similar to the Bradley Manning case – eerily absent from public discussions of that case is the gutless, sociopathic soldiers who shot civilians and journalists from helicopters. In general, we can derive people’s opinions on the underlying question from the positions they express – those praising Snowden would tend to favor privacy, and those calling for him to be jailed or killed – among them Donald Trump and Peter King – would be expected to be against privacy, and likely all civil liberties. Yet, the point is, this is not a part of the public discourse. So thoroughly has the basic idea that government can be criminal, and that violations of privacy are wrong, been destroyed, that the closest thing we have to voicing them is defending a whistle blower.

This is not the only way that the public discourse is mistaken, of course. That there is even a debate about whether or not it is correct to reveal massive wrongdoing is a sign of just how broken our civilization is. Anyone who trumps out the right of government to privacy – a non-existent right, but parallel in form to the real one being defended here – can no longer claim for themselves or their country the banner of democracy. Democracy, if it has any value at all, is valuable insofar as it allows voters to hold leaders accountable for wrongdoings on their watch. If wrongdoing cannot be revealed, on what basis will voters make decisions?

If the very notion of privacy as a legitimate right has disappeared from our society, it is reasonable to look to the place where many of us learn our values to see how this happened. Not only does a typical student enjoy no right to privacy – the very idea that privacy is possible in school is outrageous.

Schools show no respect for the highest, most important form of privacy – the private thoughts within the mind of the individual. Under the prevalent philosophies of schooling, the interior of your head is public domain. Students have no say as to what they will learn, or whether they will learn at all. Why is this? If a reason is even given, we will be told it is so that students can be properly valuable to society – you cannot control your own mind, we will make use of your mind as it suits the hive.

Nor does the invasion of the mind end with telling students what they will learn. Frequently, students’ emotional state is a matter for discussion and regulation. While students are, as noted above, allowed little or no input into the matter of whether, or what, they will learn, academic failure is frequently attributed to a failure of the student to show adequate motivation or interest. Thus, students are not only commanded to involve their minds with unchosen topics, but they are further given the impossible command to be interested in these topics – even if they aren’t! Students are further instructed to participate eagerly and with a positive attitude. Students are expected to like their teachers, and can be punished via grades for obvious dislike – while their teachers carry out the mandatory schooling and frequently assign disproportionate penalties for small infractions.

Moving forward, students receive little ability to be discrete about things most of us consider extremely private. For example, almost none of us would excuse ourselves from a room by extrapolating on the excretory function we plan to do upon exiting, but such explanation is considered obligatory for students. Not only that, they are expected to request permission to perform this most basic physical need! Teachers consider student sexual relations to be fair game for discussion. Perhaps most importantly, privacy is based on the idea of bodily integrity – that we may decide what to do, at a given moment, with our bodies. If such an idea does not exist, then privacy cannot exist – which is why privacy cannot exist inside a school. Students have no base assumption of bodily integrity. Alone among non-criminals and non-military folks, they can be punished and even jailed for not being at a specific place at a certain time. No one else can suffer criminal consequences for leaving a place they do not wish to be in.

Many times, this is compounded by telling students that learning is their job. We are all familiar with jobs: jobs are freely chosen places of employment, and pay wages. School fits neither of these descriptions. Furthermore, jobs are done because they benefit others – those who pay us, directly or indirectly, to perform our jobs. But learning is not paid for by anyone, except under the coercion of taxation. Which leads us to another reason schools cannot allow privacy – they are the property of everyone in society except those who must attend. Every taxpayer can claim ownership of the schools – by extension, so can every interest group – but students do not pay taxes. When entering private property, we lose some of our privacy rights – the owner may demand no smoking, for instance, or the wearing of a specific uniform. This loss of privacy is generally limited by the fact that we usually only go places where the owner wants us – a visit to a friend’s home, a store, a place of employment, and so on – and so owners will not place such odious restrictions that we refuse to go. Schools have no such concerns – students attend under duress, not by choice. Also, owners of property tend to only be concerned about a few things – most people just don’t have a ton of obsessions. However, when a place is owned by all of society, each person’s craziness must be taken into account – producing any number of privacy-destroying rules.

Whistle Blowers

Much of the discussion has centered on how Edward Snowden should be treated – that is, on the treatment of whistle blowers. It would seem that our society is hopelessly confused on this topic – most will affirm that whistle blowers must be protected – but too many of those same people will then offer various exceptions. Most commonly, it is denied that Snowden (and Manning) are whistle blowers since they went public rather than reporting the problem within their hierarchy – but in both cases, the problem was with their superiors! In any case, this argument is absurd in many ways. Why should whistle blowers be subject to this requirement, when it often puts them in increased danger and thus decreases the likelihood that the situation will be corrected? In this particular case, it seems reasonable, anyway, to say that the general public is the end of the chain, and that these individuals had every right to go to their highest superior. Consider also that we do not place this rather silly requirement on those reporting a crime – no one goes to the police to make a complaint, only to be told that their landlord is a more appropriate authority to turn to. Even if the policies these men wanted to inform the public of were limited to a certain level of the organization, nothing we know about those organizations suggests that they could be resolved from within. Finally, how are we to hold people accountable for wrongdoing if situations are to be dealt with internally?

In any event, though, the point stands that we recognize that whistle blowers need to be protected, even if we are inconsistent about it. So, what is the treatment of whistle blowers within schools? To ask the question is to answer it. Students reporting teacher misdeeds will most likely be ignored or disciplined. Unlike Snowden, though, even taking the issue outside of school is unlikely to produce a public reaction. Most of the society considers children to be inherently not worth listening to.

We should also consider how few avenues students have to speak out. The media within schools is entirely controlled by the school administration, which must approve every article and issue before publication. Outside media looks to the school administration for quotes and cues. There is a distinct lack of checks and balances within the school – even when an administrator knows that a teacher is wrong, the cult of ‘stand behind the teacher’ often prevails. If this same description were given of a country, no one would fail to identify it as totalitarian.

Why Should Schools Be Better?

I have been asked, more than once, why schools should be fair, treat students correctly, and so on. Usually the question is phrased as – why should schools be fair, if the world isn’t? That is, don’t schools need to prepare students for the unfair world, not release them with the delusion that the world is fair? There are many responses to this. For one, schools can teach about the unfairness of the world without imposing it on students. For another, as the above shows, in many ways schools are worse than the rest of the world. The question itself – why should one treat children well – strikes me as evidence that the speaker either dislikes children, or does not understand the role of adults – we are supposed to protect children.

The most important answer, though, is that the role of schools is not to reproduce the current society. Students should not be socialized to accept bad things being done to them, so that they are fit to live in a society that does bad things to people. They should be socialized to not accept such treatment, so that they will improve the society. The purpose of school ought to be (if we are to have schools at all) providing the tools necessary for the next generation to build a better society. In each generation, there is, in theory, more accumulated wisdom, more old ideas proven incorrect, and so on – schools can help transmit what the previous generation knew, so that the next can build on it, disprove parts, and come to conclusions that the older would not come to.

Conclusion

If we are outraged by what Snowden has revealed – and we should be – we have every reason to be far more outraged by what is done to children every day. Children are powerless and defenseless – we should always worry most about what is done to them. We must also realize that nowhere else in society would we tolerate what is done every day to children. How many of us would expect to ask permission to use the bathroom, to be forced to do physical labor every time we are late – and to be required to participate and display a positive attitude about this treatment? Would we accept a full day of unasked for obligations every day, with no pay?

Furthermore, that it is done to children makes it far more likely that it will happen throughout society. Children who grow up – as they have for generations – with this treatment are less likely to be vigilant for such abuses. Schools may not succeed in teaching math and science, but they have taught respect for authority, unquestioning obedience, and acceptance of totalitarianism. Furthermore, when we fight it in the schools, we are putting our leaders on notice that we consider such behavior unacceptable. What message does it send – to politicians and to children – when we object loudly when it is done to us, but remain silent about the worse forms of abuse imposed on children?

The Best of Joshua Katz

The state of Connecticut can now congratulate itself on having gun laws that, if not the most restrictive in the nation, are at least very close to it. Legislators are to be thanked for their hard work discouraging gun ownership among the law abiding and making felons of the innocent. Rapists, home invaders, and murders will, I hope, put out a press release thanking our leaders for making their jobs safer and easier.

Oddly, though, the representatives and senators who worked so hard to pass this bill seemed not to want any credit. The passed the bill under cover of darkness, holding the final vote at 2:30 am. Debate, of course, did feature many comments from our Masters about just how hard they are working, just how proud they are of themselves and their colleagues for seeing through, in just one day, the entire process of disarming the citizens.

What’s that, just one day? Indeed – the text was completed on the same day the bill went to a vote in both houses. No senator or representative, then, could make even a pretext of reading the bill they were voting on. There is no time for such wasteful activities as seeing what abuse they are heaping on the taxpayers. The bill was passed under a procedure known as Emergency Certification, invented for such situations as an on-going invasion or other situation requiring immediate action in response to a crisis. Using it in this situation simply reinforces the contempt those in Hartford feel for those who elect them. The procedure bypasses public hearings and committee referrals, bringing the bill immediately to the floors of both houses of the assembly. Our Masters do not want to hear from the irritating plebians they claim to represent.

The vote was almost party line, with an important exception. While most Republicans found the spine to vote no, almost the entire Republican leadership in both houses voted for it. This, while stunning, is not at all surprising. The higher one rises in government power, the more one comes to fear armed citizens and to embrace the power of the state.

Most frightening, though, is the attitude of those who found the strength to vote no. The bill combined three ideas: universal background checks, magazine restrictions, and mental health restrictions. The most commonly voiced complaint from those opposing the bill was not that the Constitutions of the US and the state of Connecticut explicitly recognize the right to keep and bear arms. Rather, the most common complaint was that the bill should really be three separate bills. Almost without exception, they told of their struggle to decide how to vote, since they opposed magazine restrictions but, of course, favored the mental health provisions. That is, among gun rights supporters, there is almost unanimous support for mental health restrictions.

We have finally found, then, a gun control method for conservatives to love! What could possibly be more popular than hating The Other? The liberal, of course, need only conjure a picture of hunters, Constitutionalists, preppers, and Nascar fans to find the hated Other. The conservative has long opposed gun control because he does not think of this type of person as the Other. That role, though, can be filled by the so-called mentally ill. Now the conservative, too, can join in the game of fearing those who differ from him and disarming those he fears.

The tactic, used by supporters of gun rights, of scapegoating others to save the right to keep and bear arms – of saying “no, no, it’s not us – attack them over there!” – is not new. Sadly, those who stand up to fight for some particular right have, with few exceptions, been willing to throw others under the bus. Those who fought for the right to interracial marriage hastened to assure their listeners that they weren’t interested in the rights of ‘perverts and deviants.’ Today, gay marriage advocates rush to demonstrate that they are discussing only extending legal privileges to monogamous homosexuals – emphasizing that they love men through no fault of their own, certainly they would never choose to deviate from middle-class values – not endorsing polygamy or in any way wanting to protect the rights of others who deviate more than they do from the norm. Liberation movements, sadly, have almost exclusively been interested in bringing their members into the fold of privilege, not fighting for uniform rights for all. Their members are brought into this fold by targeting some other group as the real bad guys.

So too, we now see gun rights defenders struggling to identify the real bad guys who should be stripped of their rights. Rather than pointing out the obvious – that there is no epidemic of mass-shootings, that infrequent bad events do happen, are a byproduct of being human, and that even utter tyranny cannot prevent them – in fact, makes them more common – they look for other bad guys. The NRA first settled on children, calling for more armed policemen in schools – knowing full well that those officers would be used as enforcers against the children, keeping them more firmly enslaved in the system of mind control that we call education. The consensus now, though, is that rather than sacrificing our children to gun rights, we should sacrifice the mentally ill. This is a far better choice, as the mentally ill appear far more scary than children.

One problem with this approach is the obvious immorality of purchased your freedom at the cost of another’s, who has done nothing to harm anyone. Another problem is that it won’t work. Banning the mentally ill from owning guns is not a way around gun control, it is an end-run towards gun control. Mental illness is fundamentally undefined and indefinable. The word means nothing more or less than making others uncomfortable – and gun owners, it is well known, make many uncomfortable. Anyone wanting a gun is presumed either to be paranoid about crime or desirous of protecting himself from government tyranny – which, of course, marks him as crazy, hence not permitted to own a gun.

The face is, mental illness is a catch-all phrase for signifying that a person behaves in a way that is undesired, either by society at large or by the power structure. Children are routinely drugged for behaving like, well, like children – wanting to run and play, not sit and be instructed on abstract matters beyond their developmental level. Mental illness is an artifact of a system of social control in which no person should be discomforted by the actions of another, or by anything they find unpleasant. It is an artifact of a system of social control in which a person is judged by their adherence to the norms instituted by the powerful, for their own purposes. The schools are a perfect example of this. Children are expected to behave in a way that maximizes, not their own benefit, but the ease with which teachers and administrators can get through the day with a minimum of thought and difficulty.

Psychiatrists are simply one arm of our social control systems, working in tandem with police, courts, and prisons. This is the system to which conservatives are now comfortable turning over gun control. To them I ask – if you do not believe that government has the right to restrict access to weapons, as I do not – then how can government delegate this power to psychiatrists? As unaccountable as government is, are we to trust a medical monopoly more – especially a branch of medicine which explicitly disavows any objective means of verifying an illness, and insists that illness can be defined by committee and diagnosed by symptoms only – so long as the clinician has been duly accepted into the club?

The mentally ill are those who are out of step with society – an ever increasing group in this age of statism, in this age where the orthodoxy grows ever more demanding. It is expected that the statists, the control freaks among us, will want to deny the right of self-defense to those who are too different. It is a sad day, though, when the friends of freedom, liberty’s only friends – the defenders of one of our most important rights, the ability to defend oneself against tyranny – when these, too, join in the crusade. It is a sad day when defenders of gun rights turn around and say “yes, well, except for Those people.”

If it means anything to stand for freedom, it means to stand for unpopular freedoms. It means to stand for the rights of those whose actions you don’t quite understand. It means to let your love of freedom overcome you fear of what others might do. The mental illness loophole might be a form of gun control that even a conservative can love, but the true defenders of freedom and of gun rights will not be fooled. Self defense and defense against tyrants for all – usual and unusual mental processes alike!

The state of Connecticut can now congratulate itself on having gun laws that, if not the most restrictive in the nation, are at least very close to it. Legislators are to be thanked for their hard work discouraging gun ownership among the law abiding and making felons of the innocent. Rapists, home invaders, and murders will, I hope, put out a press release thanking our leaders for making their jobs safer and easier.

Oddly, though, the representatives and senators who worked so hard to pass this bill seemed not to want any credit. The passed the bill under cover of darkness, holding the final vote at 2:30 am. Debate, of course, did feature many comments from our Masters about just how hard they are working, just how proud they are of themselves and their colleagues for seeing through, in just one day, the entire process of disarming the citizens.

What's that, just one day? Indeed — the text was completed on the same day the bill went to a vote in both houses. No senator or representative, then, could make even a pretext of reading the bill they were voting on. There is no time for such wasteful activities as seeing what abuse they are heaping on the taxpayers. The bill was passed under a procedure known as Emergency Certification, invented for such situations as an on-going invasion or other situation requiring immediate action in response to a crisis. Using it in this situation simply reinforces the contempt those in Hartford feel for those who elect them. The procedure bypasses public hearings and committee referrals, bringing the bill immediately to the floors of both houses of the assembly. Our Masters do not want to hear from the irritating plebians they claim to represent.

The vote was almost party line, with an important exception. While most Republicans found the spine to vote no, almost the entire Republican leadership in both houses voted for it. This, while stunning, is not at all surprising. The higher one rises in government power, the more one comes to fear armed citizens and to embrace the power of the state.

Most frightening, though, is the attitude of those who found the strength to vote no. The bill combined three ideas: universal background checks, magazine restrictions, and mental health restrictions. The most commonly voiced complaint from those opposing the bill was not that the Constitutions of the US and the state of Connecticut explicitly recognize the right to keep and bear arms. Rather, the most common complaint was that the bill should really be three separate bills. Almost without exception, they told of their struggle to decide how to vote, since they opposed magazine restrictions but, of course, favored the mental health provisions. That is, among gun rights supporters, there is almost unanimous support for mental health restrictions.

We have finally found, then, a gun control method for conservatives to love! What could possibly be more popular than hating The Other? The liberal, of course, need only conjure a picture of hunters, Constitutionalists, preppers, and Nascar fans to find the hated Other. The conservative has long opposed gun control because he does not think of this type of person as the Other. That role, though, can be filled by the so-called mentally ill. Now the conservative, too, can join in the game of fearing those who differ from him and disarming those he fears.

The tactic, used by supporters of gun rights, of scapegoating others to save the right to keep and bear arms — of saying "no, no, it's not us — attack them over there!" — is not new. Sadly, those who stand up to fight for some particular right have, with few exceptions, been willing to throw others under the bus. Those who fought for the right to interracial marriage hastened to assure their listeners that they weren't interested in the rights of u2018perverts and deviants.' Today, gay marriage advocates rush to demonstrate that they are discussing only extending legal privileges to monogamous homosexuals — emphasizing that they love men through no fault of their own, certainly they would never choose to deviate from middle-class values — not endorsing polygamy or in any way wanting to protect the rights of others who deviate more than they do from the norm. Liberation movements, sadly, have almost exclusively been interested in bringing their members into the fold of privilege, not fighting for uniform rights for all. Their members are brought into this fold by targeting some other group as the real bad guys.

So too, we now see gun rights defenders struggling to identify the real bad guys who should be stripped of their rights. Rather than pointing out the obvious — that there is no epidemic of mass-shootings, that infrequent bad events do happen, are a byproduct of being human, and that even utter tyranny cannot prevent them — in fact, makes them more common — they look for other bad guys. The NRA first settled on children, calling for more armed policemen in schools — knowing full well that those officers would be used as enforcers against the children, keeping them more firmly enslaved in the system of mind control that we call education. The consensus now, though, is that rather than sacrificing our children to gun rights, we should sacrifice the mentally ill. This is a far better choice, as the mentally ill appear far more scary than children.

One problem with this approach is the obvious immorality of purchased your freedom at the cost of another's, who has done nothing to harm anyone. Another problem is that it won't work. Banning the mentally ill from owning guns is not a way around gun control, it is an end-run towards gun control. Mental illness is fundamentally undefined and indefinable. The word means nothing more or less than making others uncomfortable — and gun owners, it is well known, make many uncomfortable. Anyone wanting a gun is presumed either to be paranoid about crime or desirous of protecting himself from government tyranny — which, of course, marks him as crazy, hence not permitted to own a gun.

The face is, mental illness is a catch-all phrase for signifying that a person behaves in a way that is undesired, either by society at large or by the power structure. Children are routinely drugged for behaving like, well, like children — wanting to run and play, not sit and be instructed on abstract matters beyond their developmental level. Mental illness is an artifact of a system of social control in which no person should be discomforted by the actions of another, or by anything they find unpleasant. It is an artifact of a system of social control in which a person is judged by their adherence to the norms instituted by the powerful, for their own purposes. The schools are a perfect example of this. Children are expected to behave in a way that maximizes, not their own benefit, but the ease with which teachers and administrators can get through the day with a minimum of thought and difficulty.

Psychiatrists are simply one arm of our social control systems, working in tandem with police, courts, and prisons. This is the system to which conservatives are now comfortable turning over gun control. To them I ask — if you do not believe that government has the right to restrict access to weapons, as I do not — then how can government delegate this power to psychiatrists? As unaccountable as government is, are we to trust a medical monopoly more — especially a branch of medicine which explicitly disavows any objective means of verifying an illness, and insists that illness can be defined by committee and diagnosed by symptoms only — so long as the clinician has been duly accepted into the club?

The mentally ill are those who are out of step with society — an ever increasing group in this age of statism, in this age where the orthodoxy grows ever more demanding. It is expected that the statists, the control freaks among us, will want to deny the right of self-defense to those who are too different. It is a sad day, though, when the friends of freedom, liberty's only friends — the defenders of one of our most important rights, the ability to defend oneself against tyranny — when these, too, join in the crusade. It is a sad day when defenders of gun rights turn around and say "yes, well, except for Those people."

If it means anything to stand for freedom, it means to stand for unpopular freedoms. It means to stand for the rights of those whose actions you don't quite understand. It means to let your love of freedom overcome you fear of what others might do. The mental illness loophole might be a form of gun control that even a conservative can love, but the true defenders of freedom and of gun rights will not be fooled. Self defense and defense against tyrants for all — usual and unusual mental processes alike!

Joshua Katz, JP(L) [send him mail], Chair of the Mathematics Department at the Oxford Academy in Westbrook, CT. He is overseeing the overhaul of the mathematics curriculum and the creation of a new curriculum to use mathematics to develop the rational mind and moral character of students. A critic of traditional schooling, he works to ensure that his department is a place where diversity of opinion and pursuit of individual passions is welcomed and encouraged, and where groupthink is forbidden (except for those who like it.) He is Secretary of the Connecticut Libertarian Party and, as a member of the Westbrook Zoning Board of Appeals, the only current Libertarian officeholder (by party) in the state of Connecticut. He is a paramedic with the Westbrook Fire Department, and an avid participant in Crossfit. He was state co-director for Gary Johnson 2012, and is current state director for Our America Initiative..

The Best of Joshua Katz

The time has come for you to make a choice. You must choose where you stand. You must take a stand and decide what society you wish to live in. Do not tell us that you follow orders, we dealt with that one decades ago. We don't want to hear that policies are set far above you, by those with more power than you. They have no power without you; you are their power. Without your willing participation, they are nothing more than miserable creatures, talking to the walls in overly decorated rooms. You convert their statements into physical actions. You decide which orders to follow, and from whom. It is your call.

We know why you joined the force. You wanted to protect the weak and the innocent from the strong and vicious. You desired a society where justice is done, the guilty punished. You abhor the use of violence against women and children. You wanted to stand for good, protect those who need protection. Are you doing this now?

Have you noticed the decline, over the past few decades, in public regard for your profession? When I was growing up, the friendly police officer was a part of our neighborhood. Children aspired to grow up to be policemen; the job was respectable. Seeing a police officer nearby meant safety. Today, citizens are fearful of you. When you drive by, they shudder — the innocent as well as the guilty. A policeman in close range no longer is resassuring. Citizens today worry that they will be assaulted, be electrocuted, or in other ways be harmed by their former public servants. Children worry that they will raise suspicions. Your job has changed from keeping the peace to enforcing various arbitrary, bureaucratic dictates. Have you wondered why?

You are the hired muscle of a small group. You no longer work for us, but for an alliance of businessmen, politicians, and bankers. They are determined to make society over in the vein they wish to see it. You are their muscle, their enforcer. This is why the public no longer respects you, but rather fears you. It is why your ranks have become full of sadists uninterested in the tasks that motivated you to join the force. It explains the orders you have been receiving.

Perhaps, though, you are thinking that the men you take orders from know best. Look around you. Is our society better than it was 50 years ago? Are we better off? Are we a more moral society? Take a drive down any of our highways in your cruiser, but this time, rather than looking for speeders, take a good hard look at what you see. Count the billboards advising drivers to part with their hard-earned money for a small thrill. Notice how much of our economy is simply entertainment — playgrounds for grown-ups — designed to take away the boredom and disillusionment we all feel. How many psychiatric offices will you see? How many people stream in and out of those offices each week, perfectly healthy, except that they need a vial of pills to get over the pointlessness of their lives? Can a healthy society ever be one in which most adults take anti-depressants? Will you see the obese people lining the sidewalks? After your drive, study what has happened to our food chain, and how the government has influenced it.

As you drive, notice the traffic patterns. Don't use your lights, drive as the rest of us do. When I question the need for government, I am often referred to roads as a prime example of the good done by government. Drive through a metropolitan area, if there is one in your jurisdiction, and observe the traffic patterns. Ask yourself if government has done a good job with the roads. Are the cars moving and merging in ways that seem safe? Are the roads designed to serve the driving public, or do they seem designed to facilitate the movement of weapons first, to make access to major corporations easier second, and the safety and comfort of the public a distant last concern?

Ask yourself what it would feel like to drive down that road as a civilian. Notice that, when you aren't in the mindset of giving orders, driving becomes a matter of being given orders, almost constantly. Signs direct you, under threat of physical violence, to move in certain ways. Is a healthy society one in which citizens receive constant orders and threats? In a decent society, would every sign indicate "Prohibited"? Drive the speed limit for a time. Do you feel quite sure that going faster would be unsafe?

People move in constant fear of, quite by accident, violating some rule or other, and suffering a penalty at your hand. When you issue a ticket, who is enriched by the fine? Is it you, or is it the faceless bureaucrat who issues your orders? Are you punishing evil behavior, or a simple inability to follow the many arbitrary and contradictory rules? Why should you spend your time taking money from a man who drives safely, but in excess of a number posted on a sign, and delivering that money to men who spend their time planning mass murder?

The men you serve have had their chance; the world we have today is the one they have delivered. Have they done well? Theirs is a world in which some are forever rich at taxpayer expense, others are forever poor due to regulations preventing them from improving their lot.

You are not a leader. You are not a CEO, and you will never be paid as one is paid. You will never be granted access to the ruling class; your assigned lot is to remain forever hired muscle. You are working class, what OWS calls the 99%. Why do you serve those whose lot is different? You work hard and want a peaceful world; they start wars and collect their bailouts. Why do you choose to protect them?

Speaking of OWS, they have been cleaned out of the park. Men like you were ordered to remove them; ordered by a Wall Street billionaire. How much of his money was made honestly? My guess is none of it. He lives on bailouts, and demands that you and others like you use violence to eliminate anyone who calls him on it. Right or wrong, do you think they should have had the chance to speak? Do you think it was correct to order the use of weapons and SWAT teams against peaceful protestors? How did you feel when that took place in other countries — why is it any different when it takes place here?

It is time for you to consider where you stand. The government is force, not eloquence, not reason. The symbol of government is the barrel of a gun — a gun you hold. The government has allied with carefully selected men — not with you — to siphon wealth from the rest of us and award it to the selected ones. They regard you as the unthinking, uncaring tool of their desires. They will rip us off, trample on our rights, and you will carry it out, all without gaining a thing for yourself. Will you prove them right? Or will you stand against this? Will you join us in calling for a free market, one where some participants do not get bailed out while others get regulated into oblivion? Will you join us in calling for freedom? Or will you help them to keep their boot directly over our throat? You are one of us, not one of them, do not continue as their deluded tool. Return to your mission of protecting the innocent from the depredations of the strong — protect us from government by bailout.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the Legislative Director and Secretary of the Libertarian Party of Connecticut. A graduate student and college instructor, his areas of interest include mathematics, logic, non-linear dynamics, philosophy of mind, and the use of the synthetic a priori.

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Imagine that you are a university administrator planning an orientation event. Having been informed that the university needs to cut costs, you ask your staff "what do you think about cutting meals?" All nod, except the student intern. This intern, who happens to be an economics student, provides the following argument:

"Who needs to cut costs, exactly? Certainly not just us — rather, the entire university needs to cut costs. But it would be just as good — better even — to instead increase revenue. What really matters is not costs as an absolute, or revenue as an absolute, but profit, which is revenue minus costs. Very well — so we need to analyze this decision in terms of the university as a whole. Now, in past years, where have we bought meals from?"

At this point, deciding to humor the intern, you inform him that meals have been purchased from campus dining services.

Continuing his argument, the student proceeds:

"Let’s look at the meal purchasing transaction, then. Step one is we pay, say, $5,000 to dining services. As far as the university is concerned, there’s no loss here — we transferred $5,000 from one department to another, so no cost has been incurred. Step two is dining services sends up $5,000 worth of food. Now, again, from the standpoint of the university, items have been transferred from one department to another, and no cost has been incurred. But, in fact, it is incomplete to simply say that things are no worse than they were before the transaction took place — things are better! Why, notice that dining services purchases their supplies from other campus vendors, namely, the campus dairy and the campus farms, and that dining services has a higher marginal propensity to spend than we do — so we’ve stimulated the campus economy. In fact, we should buy more food than last year, and if we buy enough, we’ll single-handedly solve the entire budget problem!"

At this point, we can assume, everyone in the room with a lick of sense — especially those who are not burdened by a college education — will begin to laugh hysterically. The more erudite will point out the obvious problem — the food will be eaten, and while the school will have the same amount of money floating around, it will have fewer assets. It will either have to spend money to replace those assets, or simple have fewer on hand. In any case, the point is obvious — you can’t have your cake after you’ve eaten it. It turns out, then, that you cannot consume your way to prosperity.

Again, no one at all, except an overly enamored economics student, would think this argument makes sense. The student will, hopefully, sneak out the room, red-faced but having learned a lesson in just how much economic sense he has lost through his education. Furthermore, adding more businesses to the university makes the argument no more convincing. The student already added a third link the chain, as it were, moving the loss of assets down to the university dairy and farms. We could add a fourth link, presuming that the university also maintains power plants, oil pumps, and facilities to make its own fertilizer. The argument will remain implausible.

Let us, then, add the entire US economy, one item at a time, to the university. In our minds, we let it grow to include, as separate departments, each business and household in the country. Presumably, at any stage in the process short of having added the entire economy, we can bring the intern back into the room, have him present his (now much longer) argument, and verify that, indeed, he is still laughed at. It follows immediately, then, that anyone laughing at the intern’s argument should laugh just as hard at any politician proposing a "stimulus package" or a "cash for clunkers" or any other such ludicrous program.

One might object, though, that I have only brought the intern in at a stage prior to the complete incorporation of the US economy into the university — might not something change once the entire economy is added that makes the argument correct? In other words, couldn’t something happen at that particular stage that was not predicted by the previous stages? Notice, though, that the same can be said of any stimulus package that a politician suggests — regardless of what emanates from Washington, I plan to continue to increase my savings and cut my spending. Thus, any stimulus plan will necessarily not include my household in the chain, and therefore, if some property did come about whereby a stimulus package could work for the whole country, but not any proper subset, nonetheless, no stimulus package would work. (Don’t make the mistake, of course, of presuming that I think such a quality exists; I’m simply arguing that even if it did, it wouldn’t help the stimulus case.)

My point is not, of course, that stimulus packages don’t work — we all know that. My point is not to ignore all the specific damage they do, as can be seen on a business cycle analysis. My point is only that, not only do they not work, but every person who votes for a politician who proposes such packages, or cheers such packages, or thinks that such a package has "pulled our economy out the mess" (they have no idea what suffering we’re in for in the near future) knows, in a smaller context, how ludicrous such an idea is. Every Obama voter would have laughed at the intern’s argument, yet somehow they think that, by adding enough links to the chain, such an argument can be made plausible. All that is left to convince them, then, is that the facts do not depend on the length of the chain.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the Legislative Director and Secretary of the Libertarian Party of Connecticut. A graduate student and college instructor, his areas of interest include mathematics, logic, non-linear dynamics, philosophy of mind, and the use of the synthetic a priori.

The Best of Joshua Katz

Nonetheless, piracy remains a hot topic today. Piracy on the high seas, of course, has long been a problem faced by merchant vessels. Today, though, the pirates are attacking ships flying the American flag, raising piracy from some minor problem for the rest of the world to a top priority. Such is the way the American mind works. The discussion is mostly limited to a narrow range of opinions — the various ways that the military should be involved in fighting piracy. Not asked is the question of whether the military should fight piracy, or if the task of protecting a vessel properly belongs to the owner of the vessel.

More to the point, we hear very little discussion about just what is wrong with the act of piracy. In their usual overblown hyperbole, the chattering classes tell us that piracy is among the most infamous of crimes, that no punishment less than death is fitting for a pirate — as if piracy were anything more than armed robbery and kidnapping committed in an unusual location. No, our politicians assure us, it is a crime without equal. The Chinese kill pirates with the firing squad.

Now, it might seem odd to raise the question of just what is wrong with being a pirate. After all, it appears obvious that threatening people with weapons (in a non-defensive way), holding people for ransom, and stealing the contents of large vessels is not a particularly nice way to make a living. To us normal folks, this is a perfectly reasonable explanation of the evils of piracy. However, this explanation is not available to our chattering classes, since there is no action involved in piracy which they do not cheer when committed by others.

These chatterers, be they media or politicians, have no complaint against the detention of the crew of a vessel carrying drugs or weapons. These crews might be held for ransom, known as bail, or held without any ransom. Is it worse to hold a man for ransom than to hold him and offer him no means to free himself? Any vessel coming onto shore will have a portion of the value of its cargo taken — we call it duty.

What of the deeper principles at work here? Certainly the chattering classes all agree that property may be taken at will from those who produce wealth, either for redistribution to the poor or for the immediate needs of the gunmen taking the money. If the pirates purchase weapons with the money they have raised, how is this different from the purchase of arms by governments with tax revenues? As far as redistribution to the poor is concerned, no one denies that the inhabitants of Somalia are poorer than Americans. Our own government frequently takes our property by force and sends it to Somalia. Now the Somalis have cut out the middleman and are taking it directly. The only difference would seem to be efficiency.

What’s more, the case for piracy is stronger than the case for redistribution. In by far the vast majority of cases of domestic redistribution, the money is taken from people who did not earn it on the backs of those to whom it is given. As John Perkins has detailed, though, the average American finds himself richer than he otherwise would (all else remaining equal) but for economic and military conquest of foreign lands — Somali’s history being a prime example.

Ah, but you might respond, they only approve of these actions when undertaken by governments, not ordinary mortals like these pirates. This is hard to argue against — certainly the average statist, for instance, speaks of disarming the ordinary mortal while drooling over the thought of bigger and better weapons for the government officials. So this must be the relevant difference. A difficulty remains, though — Somali has no government. It seems undeniable that the statist thinks that the actions undertaken by governments are good things — that is, that the actions themselves are not morally objectionable, and that the outcomes are better than the outcomes available by not taking them. The statist wants money taken from productive citizens and either given to the poor or used to buy weapons. Why should the absence of a government prevent these worthy endeavors from being undertaken? It is one thing to say that, in the presence of a government, private help is not needed in these tasks. It would be a far different thing, and not consistent with the general belief system of the statist, to say that the absence of a state dictates that such things simply shouldn’t be done.

More to the point, just what distinguishes the pirates from a state? Certainly, they are not hired by democratically elected leaders, but there are plenty of recognized states in the world which are not democratic. Some of the oldest states consist of little more than self-appointed kings, so this feature hardly seems important. They seem to exercise little concern about living conditions, and as part of the warlord culture, have no interest in doing anything other than living as parasites off of the other members of society. This certainly is not a distinction — this is the definition of a state. The state is not recognized by other states nor by the UN, but neither type of recognition can be a precondition to statehood without involving logical absurdities. If statehood requires the recognition by existing states, then there can be no first state, and hence no future states. If statehood requires recognition by the UN, which is itself an assembly of states, and whose members are all states, then once again our definition cannot get off the ground, as there would be no states to form the UN to recognize states.

The differences, it seems, are largely cosmetic. If the pirates wore silly white uniforms, had larger weapons, and used different terminology when approaching boats, we would regard them as the Somali Coast Guard. Rather than saying "we’re pirates, we’re here to steal your stuff and kidnap you" they would need to say "we’re the Coast Guard, we’re here to tax your stuff at a rate of 100% and detain you."

So, it isn’t clear just what objection our chattering classes can make to the actions of the pirates. This serves, of course, not to let the pirates off the hook, but to question what we accept on a daily basis. We would not accept such behavior on the high seas — the last uncivilized frontier, in most people’s minds — yet we accept it in our cities and in our homes. Why do our media talking-heads and politicians harp on the subject so much, though, if they have no objection to what the pirates do? Clearly, it helps to reinforce the impression that the world is a scary, scary place outside the borders of the US. Our government in its current form could not last, I predict, if most Americans had any concept of what the world looks like outside our borders. More importantly, it drives home to the unthinking just how dependent we are on government. After all, it was privateers who held a ship captain hostage and a government who freed him. Never mind the question of how our Navy obtained the funds necessary to buy their boats — or how their jurisdiction extends to the Somali coast. The point is to understand that all good in the world comes from your government, and everything foreign is scary and dangerous — oh, and for good measure, you should realize that you are impotent and unable to fight off any threat, and entirely dependent on your government. This is an important message to drive home.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the Legislative Director of the Libertarian Party of Connecticut. A member of the faculty of Oxford Academy in Westbrook, Connecticut, his areas of interest include mathematics, philosophy of mind, and the use of the synthetic a priori.

Joshua Katz Archives

In recent months, I’ve been drawing closer to my Jewish faith. I have begun to practice many observances, begun to study Judaism on a daily basis, formed relationships with two study partners with whom I meet weekly, and regularly stay over at my rabbi’s house. I now keep a kosher kitchen, keep Shabbat most weeks, and have committed to many other well-known observances.

Judaism is a legalistic, rabbinic religion. It relies heavily on the ability of rabbis to understand and interpret the laws of the Torah, applying them to new situations. So it is quite difficult for me, as a newcomer to the religion, but mindful of the importance of rabbinic authority, to claim that one of the leading rabbis in the world is wrong. So, this blog post gave me pause, and left me uncertain of how to respond.

First, let us not forget that God gave us the ability to reason, and specifically to reason about ethics and behavior. So, while situations do arise where we will find ourselves having difficulty knowing what is right and what is wrong, there are certain tests we can apply to most situations we face. One is "is the proposed action murdering thousands, hundreds, or even one innocent person?" If so, then most likely it’s not an appropriate action. Actions which shock the conscience tend to be unethical. Sure, there seem to extreme counterexamples from religion. Let’s look at one of the most famous. Surely, all intuition and ethics suggests that killing one’s own son, with no provocation, is wrong. Surely, such an action shocks the conscience. Yet, does not the Torah record that Abraham was prepared to do exactly that, on God’s command? Abraham is singled out for praise, and is richly praised and rewarded for this action itself, so isn’t the lesson that sometimes, acts which shock the conscience are appropriate? It seems that we should learn to rely on God’s word, not one’s own, possibly flawed, moral compass.

Consider, though, that Rabbi Eliyahu relies on Moses Maimonides, medieval rabbi, philosopher, and doctor, as the authoritative source for his ruling. Philosophically, the rabbi must also make the above justification for why the halacha (Jewish law) should be accepted despite shocking the conscience. Yet, what does Maimonides himself say about the binding of Isaac? He tells us that the story of the binding is included in the Torah to teach us about the clear nature of prophecy. In other words, we know from Abraham’s willingness to do as he was bidden that his prophecy from God must have been clear, distinct, and obvious. If he were able to write it off as a bad dream, a hallucination, or even a misheard prophecy, he would have done so. So, Maimonides tells us that the entire incident comes to teach us that prophecy cannot be confused for these other things.

Now, why does Maimonides assume that Abraham, founder of the monotheistic faiths, one of the greatest prophets and most committed Jews, would have looked for other explanations for what he heard? Certainly because the action he was about to undertake was so shocking to the conscience. That is, even Abraham (who the Talmud tells us obeyed the entire Torah before it was given, because he was able to reason from his knowledge of God to the halacha) could not have followed any path of reasoning bringing him to embrace clearly unconscionable acts. He could only undertake such acts on the strength of a prophecy. If Rabbi Eliyahu did not receive a prophecy telling him that carpet-bombing Gaza is appropriate, then, it seems he should pause and reconsider his halachic logic.

Now, let us look more closely at Rabbi Eliyahu’s reasoning. He refers us to Maimonides’ commentary on the story of the rape of Dinah. In Rashi’s understanding of the story, Shechem kidnaps and rapes Dinah, then desires to marry her. He asks his father, who asks Jacob for Dinah’s hand in marriage. Jacob discusses the situations with his sons, who reply that they will only consent to the marriage on the condition that the entire area (of which Shechem’s father Hamor is King) is circumcised. They never intended, though, to allow the marriage — instead, on the third day, when all the men of the area are in pain from their circumcision, Simeon and Levi attack the town and kill all the men. Upon hearing of this, Jacob rebukes his sons, saying that they have endangered the position of the family now that others will know that they deal with others in this manner.

Maimonides argues that the slaughter is halachically proper. It is this example which Rabbi Eliyahu wishes us to refer to. The argument is as follows: the Torah commands all people to follow the 7 laws of Noah, included among which are prohibitions against murder and rape. It follows from this that all communities are obligated to set up mechanisms to prevent and punish violations of these laws. The people of Shechem had no such mechanisms — thus, the entire community was liable for the neglect of this obligation. Similarly, Rabbi Eliyahu would argue, the Palestinian community in Gaza has set up no mechanism to apprehend those who launch rockets into Israel, and so are equally liable.

Maimonides’ approach, though, has a major difficulty — why does Jacob criticize his sons? Rabbi Michael Rosensweig comments that we can understand Jacob’s position within Maimonides’ position as referring to the duplicitous manner in which the sons acted. Not only must the law be upheld, Jacob is telling his sons, but we must also behave in an upright, morally unquestionable manner. In fact, as Rosensweig puts it: "Yaakov, according to Rambam’s scheme, projects the principle that halachic conformity alone is not always sufficient to justify radical conduct when other halachic principles and values are at risk." So, even if the laws justify this action (as Maimonides holds), Jacob is still critical of choosing to do this particular permissible action because it conflicted with the responsibility to demonstrate morally upright behavior, and with the necessity of honesty in dealings with others. Should not similar concerns apply to the Gaza bombings?

In fact, I personally would take this kind of analysis a step further than Rabbi Rosenweig does (perhaps unjustifiably). Not only does Jacob seem, in my eyes, to be critical of the dishonesty and duplicity, but perhaps he is also reminding us of the sanctity of life. After all, while the Torah includes a good number of offenses for which one is liable to the death penalty (adultery, murder, Sabbath desecration, certain types of non-kosher eating, idolatry, the son who is wayward and rebellious, and so on) the Talmud explains, through the Oral Tradition received by Moses at Sinai, that the court is to seek any means available to not assign the death penalty. Indeed, the Talmud says that a High Court which sentenced a man to death every 7 years was considered a murderous court — and records a dissenting opinion that this applied to a court which sentenced a man to death every 70 years! Clearly, the sanctity of life, even of those who have done wrong, is an essential element in Jewish tradition, and affects many areas of halacha. In many places in the Jewish liturgy, we refer to God desiring repentence, not the death of even the most wicked — the longer a man lives, the longer his opportunity to repent of his ways, no matter how evil. Certainly this understanding, together with the command to “be Holy, as I am Holy” suggest that Jewish law, too, must respect life above almost all else.

In support of my interpretation of Jacob’s anger, I would point out that it is much in the vein of Rabbi Rosenweig’s, giving me what to rely on, and does not contradict his understanding. Additionally, consider Jacob’s remarks when he blessed his sons before his death:

“Simeon and Levi are brothers — their swords are weapons of violence. Let me not enter their council, let me not join their assembly, for they have killed men in their anger and hamstrung oxen as they please. (The attack also included the livestock of the area.) Cursed be their anger, so fierce, and their fury, so cruel! I will scatter them in Jacob and disperse them in Israel.”

It seems that no comment is necessary here to suggest that Jacob is horrified, not just as the practical results of their action, but at their violence and bloodshed, their failure to respect life. The passage almost speaks for itself.

A more radical reading of Maimonides would suggest that Jacob’s criticism is only for tactical purposes. One can go further and suggest that Jacob is just wrong, that he didn’t see as far as his sons. This reading would provide the strongest evidence for Rabbi Eliyahu’s position. Even on this position, though, there’s reason to think that Rabbi Eliyahu went too far. After all, he didn’t just say that the bombing was permissible — he specifically called for carpet-bombing Gaza. On what grounds does he claim expertise on the tactical question?

We can go further than all this, though. Nachmanides, another medieval rabbi, directly responded to Maimonides on this question. In his commentary, Nachmanides argues Jacob was critical of Simeon and Levi because they violated halacha in their action. He advances the position that failing to punish others who engage in rape and murder is not itself a capital offense. Nachmanides explains that Jacob’s anger demonstrates the importance of refraining from vengeance even when we feel that our personal honor is at stake.

It seems that Nachmanides can more easily explain the common-sense reading of the passages. Jacob’s rebuke certainly implies that the action under discussion was incorrect. Further, before his death, Jacob once again rebukes Simeon and Levi, suggesting a relationship between this action and their later instigation of the attack on, and sale of, Joseph. All authorities agree that this latter action was incorrect, and is treated harshly by Torah. Why, then, does Jacob connect the two actions, if the first was correct? Furthermore, it seems to me that there are compelling reasons to rely on Nachmanides here. Taking as a given that we wish to do as God desires, we learn from even a casual study of the Torah that no men have ever perfectly understood and carried out God’s will without fail. We would do well, then, to consider that we may be, in any particular instance, incorrect. We need rules for acting, then, in the face of such uncertainty. In situations, such as keeping kosher, where the only consequence of strictness in our approach is having less variety in eating choices — that is, where I bear the cost of my strictness — strictness may well be appropriate. We have no right, though, to impose our understanding in a strict way on others, certainly not violently.

There is, though, a yet stronger reason for rejecting Rabbi Eliyahu’s argument here. I know that no God I will worship could order the outright massacre of thousands of innocents. Such behavior is called evil for a reason. It’s not just our intuition and emotions that cry out at the thought, but our reason, our intellect — every bit of moral fiber we possess. If God could order such a massacre, then such a God would be impossible to worship or serve. If Rabbi Eliyahu could somehow prove that such slaughter is God’s will, a further question would remain — why, in that case, should I carry out that will? To threaten me with eternal damnation would not at all answer the question — if ordered to harm others, at the threat of suffering myself if I do not, I would choose to suffer myself before harming others. How can a man morally choose otherwise? I believe that this is not the case, and that this is not our actual concern. If it were, though, I see no reason that would change our answer here. Even in the face of uncertainty, there are some attributes which must be possessed by any moral code worthy of the name. Banning mass murder of innocents is one — and if God can order otherwise, then how could we worship Him as "just, merciful, and loving?"

In short, what message do I wish to send? I want to make clear that Rabbi Eliyahu does not speak for, at least, this Jew. I want to point out that there are authorities who responded to Maimonides and on whom one can, and should, rely, for an understanding of Jewish law which expresses righteous horror at the thought of carpet-bombing a region, home to thousands, because of the actions of a handful. I have not dealt with the question of the existence of Israel, of the plight of the Palestinians — why the UN held that the massacre of Jews in Europe at the hands of the German government required the removal of Palestinians from their homeland in order to allow Jews to settle there, and so on. Such points, while important, are not necessary for this discussion. One need only look in a basic way at Jewish understandings of ethics — the Jewish tradition puts solid rules of ethical decision-making far ahead of "listening for God’s voice" precisely because that voice is hard to hear, and easy to manipulate. God endows man, in the Jewish understanding, with reason, and the ability to understand the moral dimensions of man’s relationship with man. A conclusion which flies in the face of our moral sense might be interesting intellectually but, I believe, should not be acted upon in a violent manner against innocents. This position is tenable, in fact, even on Maimonide’s understanding of the law. On the argument of Nachmanides, the argument for genocide is nonsensical. One who wishes to argue for genocide must cherry-pick, while one who argues against it is supported by the full weight of Jewish tradition and ethics, has amply rabbinic sources to rely on, and manages not to construct an argument which flies in the face of nearly all conceptions of humane ethics. The choice is not difficult.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the Legislative Director of the Libertarian Party of Connecticut. A member of the faculty of Oxford Academy in Westbrook, Connecticut, his areas of interest include mathematics, philosophy of mind, and the use of the synthetic a priori.

Joshua Katz Archives

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Why did you do it, Dennis? Your party laughed at you when you ran for President. They hid your name when you won the polls, they kept you out of their debates. Why did they do it? Because you dared speak the truth, because you were willing to say, publicly and in full view of the voters, that the President lied us into a war. You attacked their security state, you pointed out that America had become a rogue nation, a nation that sanctions torture, that attacks sovereign nations without provocation. You called on Congress to fulfill its Constitutional duties and impeach the men who violated numerous federal laws. You demanded that our troops return home, that we stop policing the world, and that we dismantle the domestic security state.

In return, they called you a kook. They said you were crazy, that you believed in aliens (even as they believe in a self-regulating executive — which is more likely to exist?) They disenfranchised your supporters and used every dirty trick in the book to keep you down. Your party was every bit as guilty as that other party — they voted for the wars, they sanctioned the torture, they cheered for the loss of civil liberties. They knew it, and you knew it, and that’s why they kept you down. Your party leader visited your office and promised you would be defeated in your primary if you dared expose the lies and crimes of that other party, and you bravely did it anyway, and yet still won your primary. I was proud to support you, to send you money to do your good work. Although you weren’t my favorite candidate, you were up there, far above the fools and pretenders who tried but failed to compete with you.

I turned my face the other way when you told your supporters in Iowa to vote for Obama if you had less than 15%. After all, I comforted myself, you were talking to people who were already at the Democratic caucus, you couldn’t tell them to support the man you really would have liked to endorse. I tried to tell myself you hadn’t sold out when you ended your campaign and failed to endorse Ron Paul, or, for that matter, Mike Gravel — after all, perhaps you sought the VP slot, perhaps you had more good left to do.

Then you went to your convention, and sold your soul. You spoke eagerly, energetically, in support of a man whose positions you don’t share, and who hasn’t an ounce of your courage. You criticized the war in Iraq, but neglected to mention that the man you were endorsing has no intentions of cutting back our warfare state — that he complains that Bush hasn’t sent enough troops to Afghanistan. You spoke about the war contractors, but gave no indication that you were endorsing a candidate who promised to spend more on defense than Bush had. You told us about Big Pharma and their control over our healthcare money — but neglected to mention that they had achieved that control because of government involvement in healthcare, and that the man you were endorsing promised more of the same. You criticized the security state — while endorsing a man who voted for domestic spying without warrants, who has never opposed the horrific loss of civil liberties, and who promises to do more of the same.

You appeared, as always, as a man who is outside the system, who bucks the trends, who stands for what is right no matter what the cost, for justice though the heavens fall, but you endorsed a man who is nothing but an insider, a man whose promises of change and hope sound so empty and hollow. You, the man who defends the Constitution, endorsed a candidate who promises, with every speech, to ignore that document. A man who voted for war, who promises AIPAC that he will be their defense candidate, who sends chilling threats to Iran, to Russia, to the world.

Why did you do it, Dennis? How could you speak at a convention of men and women who sought to destroy you, who did destroy your campaign, who worked so hard to make sure that the truth wouldn’t be heard? How could you endorse a man who promises to build a better, stronger warfare state, who despises civil liberties? Did you want to gain the approval of evil men? They will never approve of you, Dennis, and you know it. You’ve fed the tiger, but remember that, when it serves him, the tiger will not hesitate to bite off your head. Today, they love you; but they will toss you aside if you ever pose a threat to them again, make no mistake.

You had a role model; there was a man who demonstrated to you the right way to lose a primary. Ron Paul promised that he would not endorse a candidate who desires to misuse the armed forces, who wants more wars, and he didn’t. He organized a massive counter-convention, keeping his supporters eagerly involved in a massive campaign for liberty, for peace, for the Constitution. He built a promising organization to keep his ideas alive, his supporters built their own media network and worked to defeat FISA — a bill Obama voted for, the same Obama you dared endorse.

You, too, built an organization — you called it “Integrity Now.” Where was your integrity, Dennis? Where was your integrity when you urged your supporters to give up their efforts for peace and civil liberties, and instead vote for a man who despises both? I met so many of your supporters when I, a Ron Paul supporter, protested at your exclusion from the debates. They struck me as having more integrity than that. I don’t think they will sell out so easily, be so easily persuaded to support a man who opposes their principles. There were men you could have endorsed, and women too. Did it occur to you what an endorsement would mean for Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Chuck Baldwin, or any other candidate who continues to fight bravely for peace and liberty, to fight the battles you once did? With your support, these campaigns could have been energized and ignited. Instead, you chose to hand your soul to the Devil, in exchange for what? For the knowledge that you, yes you, contributed to the continuation of the American Empire, that you helped elect a man who took away the last of our civil liberties? Why not sell your birthright for a bowl of lentils?

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the Legislative Director of the Libertarian Party of Connecticut. A member of the faculty of Oxford Academy in Westbrook, Connecticut, his areas of interest include mathematics, philosophy of mind, and the use of the synthetic a priori.

Joshua Katz Archives

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There is much excitement in some libertarian circles over the entrance of Bob Barr into the race for the Libertarian Party’s nomination. Even the mainstream media has been reporting his candidacy, as well as that of Mike Gravel. Based on the way these men are covered, you would have thought that the party had previously planned not to run a Presidential candidate, or that it hasn’t run a candidate in every Presidential race since it’s founding. Nonetheless, many are thrilled with the idea that, if we nominate Bob Barr, this press coverage could continue. Others see the Barr candidacy as an opportunity to continue the energy of the Ron Paul campaign. I believe the excitement over the Barr candidacy is misplaced, will lead to disappointment, and that Barr should not receive the LP’s Presidential nomination.

While Barr seems, in some ways, to be among the more libertarian-leaning conservatives, he is not a libertarian on the most important issue of our time — foreign policy. I have yet to hear an unambiguous commitment to immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Unlike Paul, he also has not promised to remove our troops from the other 150 countries in which they are stationed. Barr’s campaign website uses the rhetoric of non-intervention, but a perusal of the articles available on that same website gives the lie to any idea that he opposes foreign intervention.

In these articles, Barr argues for intervention in both Iran and South America. He affirms the US as a “stakeholder” in Iranian political decisions, and supports sanctions. Regarding South America, he says that troops should be sent from Iraq to South America in order to stop the flow of illegal drugs. This demand makes sense on only two assumptions: that the war on drugs is right, and that the United States owns the world. He arrogantly refers to current American policy in the region as “benign neglect,” under which the citizens allegedly “chafe.” It is hard to know where to begin criticizing this claim — with the fact that benign neglect is a term applied to British imperial policy toward its colonies, that the colonies liked benign neglect and rebelled because it ended, or with the observation that, in fact, we already intervene plenty.

Barr calls for the use of foreign aid — money stolen from Americans — to achieve better drug enforcement — forcing Americans to pay in order to be foiled as consumers. He has praised Bush for the surge, which “is working,” supported the use of military tribunals, and argued for reauthorization of the Patriot Act — an act for which he voted. He used his article to express his regret when crazed neocon John Bolton stepped down as US Ambassador to the UN, praising him for pushing for American security. No mention is made of the security of those nations which Bolton advocates invading.

Much is made about Barr’s libertarian voting record in the US Congress. Yet the man who claims to be for privacy, who runs the Privacy Watch List, voted for what was, at its time, the most egregious violation of privacy on the books. Even if he now says he regrets this vote, what does it say for his judgment, for the positions he will take in the future? Besides, to what extent can he truly regret voting for the Act, if as recently as 2005 he was advocating for its reauthorization? The Patriot Act was not a difficult decision, and he made the wrong call on it. As President, he will face more subtle and difficult decisions. He has given us little reason to trust him.

Ron Paul argued for the elimination of the income tax, to be replaced with nothing. Barr argues for the elimination of the income tax — to be replaced with a revenue-neutral national sales tax. Just a few years ago, the Republicans ran a candidate who promised “no new taxes.” Are the Libertarians now to run one who promises to push for a new tax?

Barr is said to have the greatest name recognition, estimated at 36%, and is polling at 7%. Members of the House of Representatives do not earn 36% name recognition outside of their districts unless they are associated with a particular issue or event. Barr has both — he is known nation-wide as one of the strongest advocates of the war on drugs, and is associated with the Clinton impeachment. Will running a famous drug warrior build understanding of the libertarian message? It is true that Barr has repented this position. It is also true that he now advocates for medical marijuana — hardly a radical libertarian position. Consider his appearance on Fox news on April 10, 2008, in which he clarified that he would not support an outright legalization of all drug use. Do we wish to tell the world that this is the face of liberty?

On the other hand, participation in the Clinton impeachment is a good thing, isn’t it? Most libertarians would agree that all recent Presidents deserved to be impeached. However, there are some questions to be asked here. For one, just why is it that Barr hasn’t expressed any interest in impeaching Bush? Under what reasoning can Barr believe that Clinton was worthy of impeachment, as he surely was, but not feel a need to impeach a President who authorized torture, lied the country into war, and who publicly admits violating federal law to spy on citizens? Some could argue that they oppose impeachment on principle, but that answer is surely not available to Barr.

There is also a strategic question to be raised as regards the Clinton impeachment. For many years now, the libertarians have played mostly to the right. Those on the right who have an interest in liberty are aware of what libertarians have to say — and those with a commitment to it have already exited the Republican party, or perhaps stuck around to support Ron Paul. Particularly since 2001, it seems unlikely that there are significant numbers of libertarians identifying themselves as Republicans. Ron Paul pulled 10% of the vote, showing that at most 10% of the party opposes red state fascism. To further the message, and interest more people in learning about libertarianism, it is necessary to target the appeal to independents and Democrats. Ron Paul, a relatively unknown Congressman, was able to do that. He carried very little right-wing baggage, and so liberal-leaning independents and Democrats were willing to look at him and learn what he had to say, particularly once they realized he was the most anti-war candidate in the race. Bob Barr cannot have this effect. No independent or Democrat approaches the man with an open mind, which means Barr will have little ability to change minds on the left. Do we really wish to alienate the left and the middle from the get-go?

The idea that Barr’s position as a former Congressman will pull more press attention, and allow his campaign to continue at least part of the Paul energy, discounts relevant facts about the political landscape. Most importantly, Paul ran as a Republican and was in almost every debate. Barr will not be in the debates, and will not receive even the modest coverage that Paul did. It is highly unlikely that Barr will ignite the same intensity and passion that Paul did. Also, the Democratic race is now down to 2 candidates; anti-war enthusiasts have made their peace, so to speak, with that party. They will not cross the aisle again — particularly if they are not presented with a solid anti-war position.

The Paul campaign, and its level of success far higher than any previous liberty-oriented campaign in recent days, should have taught us a few things. For one, Paul succeeded as well as he did not in spite of his radical positions, but because of them. In fact, I believe that his unapologetic radicalism, together with his personal demeanor, was the most important factor in his success. Barr brings the same conservatism as Paul, but none of the radicalism. If he is a libertarian, he is a moderate one at best — or, as he describes it, a “grown-up” libertarianism, a phrase I can only take to refer to an abandonment of any consistent application of principle. Paul also raised a crucially important issue — the Fed and monetary policy — which Barr does not seem interested in raising. We learned that the Fed actually does excite people — it was an unfamiliar issue, one on which the debate was not yet poisoned by the mainstream media. Barr doesn’t mention it in his literature, and even if he did, could not do it justice the way Paul did, as Barr shows no evidence of familiarity with Austrian economics.

The Ron Paul campaign opened many people to hearing about freedom — the LP must now run a candidate who can continue to feed this interest, in addition to attracting more. To do this, the candidate must be uncompromisingly radical — people can only be inspired by a candidate able to present, in a convincing way, the hope of a world without coercion. It is imperative that the LP put forward a consistent, principled libertarian, one well-versed in the libertarian scholarship, in order to continue the educational task. Every day, I meet people who are reading Bastiat, Mises, Hoppe, Rothbard, and Menger because of Ron Paul. I have students who are asking questions about liberty, and about Mises, because they saw my Ron Paul poster and looked him up. A Republican retread, who is moderate on issues which require radicalism, will not attract the same interest. To nominate Barr now would be to prioritize short-term concerns — a doomed attempt to win the Presidency, an attempt to influence the race between the two major parties, or a desperate play for votes — over what should be our primary focus: the long-term return of freedom to our nation.

Note: For more information on Barr’s positions, please see the website BadBarr2008.com, which is replete with Barr quotations on these and other vital issues.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the Libertarian Party of Connecticut’s candidate for State General Assembly in the 23rd district. A member of the faculty of Oxford Academy in Westbrook, Connecticut, his areas of interest include mathematics, philosophy of mind, and the use of the synthetic a priori. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie as an after-dinner treat.

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The best indicator of a society in decline is not what a society will accept, but what it will laugh at. We all know that people can be convinced to accept great evil in the name of the state. We can all agree that this is not a good thing. I think, though, that once a central state is in place, all people everywhere and at all times will tolerate great evil, with only a few in any society actively opposing it. So, that people have passively accepted illegal, unjustified wars, torture, denial of habeas corpus and due process, search and seizure without warrant, and so on is not a surprise, and is not necessarily an indication that the people and their moral sense have declined more than usual.

Indeed, even the fact that more and more citizens are willing to actively support such extraordinary things may not be a terribly dramatic indicator. The people who support such things today, had they lived in another time, would likely have been just as quick to support them then.

There is, though, an ultimate indicator that our society and culture have declined to such an extent that they will soon be unable to bear the weight of civilization. When people do not just accept tyranny, do not just provide intellectual justification for tyranny, but laugh at tyranny, joke about tyranny, then a dark age has been entered. Such a society is not likely to turn around before sinking into the lowest depths of depravity. This is the situation I fear we now face in America.

The proximate cause for my concern is the forthcoming release of a movie titled Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Guantanamo should have entered our culture as an outrage, as something we are ashamed to have our tax dollars pay for — something that we must demand an end to. It didn’t, it entered as a topic for discussion. This, though, is far worse than what it is now — a punch line. When Guanatamo is a punch line, the culture has been destroyed.

This, though, is only the proximate cause. Our culture has, over the last few years, grown used to laughing at all manner of atrocities. I have seen students wearing t-shirts with the phrase “Don’t tase me bro.” Some decades ago, such shirts may have functioned as a mild form of protest. Today, they are worn as a joke, and we are able to immediately identify that this is so. People believe that the line is hilarious. In fact, just around New Years, I saw a VH1 countdown of the funniest you-tubes of the year. The incident in question was ranked just above a cat vomitting.

Just the other day, I heard laughter erupted from the computer lab at school. The students were doubled over with laughter as they watched a video of American troops training Iraqi soldiers. We might be the first culture ever to consider the illegal occupation of a foreign country as a source of comedy material.

I will be called a prude, a kill-joy. I am nothing of the sort; I am, though, unfortunately aware that making a joke out of atrocities lessens their impact and signals the final stage of their acceptance. A culture that is willing to debate the ethics of torture is not in good shape, but at least it understands that there is something which they must argue for. A culture which will literally laugh at the thought of torture has lost the sense that atrocities must either be fought against or justified.

Let’s be clear what these events all signify. Guantanamo Bay is a place where people are held, without charges, for 7 years now. In order to avoid judicial oversight, the executive has flown these people outside the boundaries of the United States; there is no law in place to protect them. The people held there, who have not been convicted, or even charged with a crime, are routinely tortured. At the University of Florida, a student asked a Senator a question about what he suspected was a stolen election. In response, he was electrocuted, beaten, and arrested. These are not jokes, these are deadly serious actions which establish, beyond all doubt, that a tyrannical order is being built. Our culture has turned them into jokes.

Why do I say that this is the final sign that the culture is done for? The fact is, civilization is precious, and hard to maintain. A culture must work to avoid falling into barbarity and strife, the characteristics of the uncivilized land. Unfortunately, war, arrest without charges, and torture are not unusual, historically speaking — they are the norm. What is unusual is their abolition, which is why protections against their reinstatement must be upheld constantly. The surest way to eliminate these practices, as we well know, is anarcho-capitalism; that is, the elimination of feudal privilege, and of the ruling class. Short of this, even in the context of a state, we can at least try to build legal protections, which will work to a greater or lesser degree. However, because the state is assumed by most to be subject to a different morality than the people, there are difficulties involved with any effort to hold it back from behaving in these ways. Inevitably, a feeling will emerge that what the state does is right by definition, and that those who stand up to it, even in the name of ideals which all acknowledge, are wrong. This is natural, and to be expected, and it is one of the reasons that the formation of a state tends inevitably to lead to the destruction of civilized norms.

There remains, though, some capacity for moral outrage. The remnant remains, to petualantly remind the people that such actions are wrong. So long as people feel a need to argue for barbarity, the potential remains that the culture can be saved from barbarism. As Mises explains, government ultimately does reflect society’s beliefs. The potential remains, then, that people could be convinced of the need to stop such actions. Making a comedy of it, though, lessens the moral blow, and renders the society at large deaf to the reminders of the remnant. Once people begin to laugh at the notion of arresting a man without charges and sexually abusing him, they will no longer be reachable through moral reasoning. If we could but step out of our own culture, something libertarians seem more able to do than most, the horror of it would be obvious. The people would not just be sitting complacently by while their government does horrible things in their names, not just tolerating it so long as they have creature comforts, food, beer, and football, not actually laughing at it — getting enjoyment out of another’s suffering — when that suffering is being inflicted in their names! The horror simply defies explanation.

The argument has been made that such comedy arises out of a repressed horror at what is happening. After all, this line of reasoning runs, what else is a man to do? He cannot stop what is happening, he can do nothing to help, and he must find a way to cope. Perhaps he would get drunk or take drugs, but those things are hard to do legally unless you go to a psychiatrist. So, he laughs at it rather than crying. The answer is, if this is the case for all men, or even for a significant portion of men, then the evil of the comedian is even larger than I am suggesting. If men are only living with this evil because they are laughing at it, then if they stopped laughing, they could end it. Mises’ statement runs both ways — if the society turned so that such events brought widespread moral outrage, then the government would no longer be able to behave this way. No violent revolution would be necessary — or possible, the actions would simply end. They continue only because they receive passive support — support which, under the terms of this argument, is received largely because people are kept laughing too much, and crying too little.

Men who laugh at torture and warfare are able also to laugh at men who work diligently to stop evil, men like Ron Paul, and Austrians, and the remnant. That Paul’s campaign was considered laughable by many is evidence that our humor has wrought the consequences I claim. For all candidates in the race to acknowledge that Paul was the only one who honored the Constitution; for all citizens to acknowledge that Paul was the only man of integrity to run for President in recent years; for the society at large to recognize that Paul was the only candidate calling for freedom and the rule of law — and yet for all these to also believe that he has no chance, and ought to have no chance, that he is a joke, to literally laugh in his face at the debates — indeed, the culture is beyond saving.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the Libertarian Party of Connecticut’s candidate for State General Assembly in the 23rd district. A member of the faculty of Oxford Academy in Westbrook, Connecticut, his areas of interest include mathematics, philosophy of mind, and the use of the synthetic a priori. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie as an after-dinner treat.

Joshua Katz Archives

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I remember only one event from first grade. It happened on the first day of school, a time of excitement and new challenges for all of us, I’m sure. I was excited to be a "grader" — that is, to be in a grade which ends with "grade." The school had a milk program, where parents could pay each week for their children to receive a pint of milk at snack-time. My parents had paid, and so I was to receive milk at snack.

As the school day began, the teacher settled down the class and taught us the basic rules for the classroom. Some were familiar from previous years — don’t hit each other, don’t put your finger into the pencil sharpener, don’t put your finger into the door — in fact, most rules seemed to revolve around keeping our fingers out of places. However, one was new and unusual — if you have something to say, raise your hand, don’t just shout or jump out of your seat.

In earlier years, shouting and jumping out of our seats had been the normal way to get the floor in order to speak. Now we were introduced to this new idea of "raising the hand." The teacher would then recognize each student in turn, and each would get a chance to talk. I have never been one to respect authority all that well, particularly as a child when I didn’t yet have the discernment to differentiate legitimate and illegitimate authority. Nonetheless, this rule immediately struck me as wise and worth obeying. I was quite clear that any reasonable person would choose to follow this rule, given that the consequence would be that all others would follow it too. Even lacking universal assent, it would work unilaterally too — those who choose to follow it can simply ignore anyone jumping around and screaming to get his point across. I resolved to follow it immediately and flawlessly.

Such was my state of mind when snack time came around, and the teacher asked, "Who has a milk account?" I responded the way I considered proper — by raising my hand. My fellow milk-drinkers, though, immediately began to jump out of their seats and shout. Having just learned of the alternative to such behavior, I considered their actions atrocious and quite unsuited for polite society. I kept my own counsel, and kept my hand raised.

You can probably figure out where this all led — I didn’t get any milk that day. My response to injustice was then, as now, a combination of surprise, resignation, and shame. I don’t know why injustice should make its victims feel shame, but it does always seem to — and this, by the way, is a fundamental principle on which the state feeds. My feelings, though, were that I had been cheated out of milk, yet had remained true to the rules. The others may have had their milk, but had surely lost some portion of their education.

When my mother came to pick me up, I was ashamed to mention the milk incident, but she questioned me about the milk situation persistently, perhaps already sensing, at that young age, that I was more inclined to do what I considered right than to demand that which was mine. Finally, I broke down and admitted that I had not gotten any milk. She had me wait outside while she went into the school to find out the whole story. Returning, she told me that the teacher had said that she had no idea that I had a milk account, since I hadn’t identified myself. As a side note, it immediately struck me what an absurd system that was, to have no independent record available to the teacher, who doubled as milkwoman, of who had paid for milk. Nonetheless, I responded with what seemed to me an obvious answer — "I raised my hand."

Libertarians often find themselves in a similar position. We support principles that we know everyone else has learned, and it seems that most people in polite society believed in them at some point. We were taught as children about not hitting other people, and we still believe it. Sure, we have more developed philosophies now, stronger arguments for why we ought not to hit people, but the basic principle remains. There are basic rules, like not hitting people, without respect for which no human society can function.

Even the rules regarding self-defense find themselves expressed in elementary school terms. The only viable defense, when caught hitting another child, is "he started it." Any just teacher will recognize that, even if the response was not quite proportional, the child who hit the other first deserves at least more blame. So, libertarians grow up understanding, along with everyone else, that the only time it might ever be acceptable to use force is in response to an aggressive attack. Then we find our neighbors advocating all kinds of force — wars of aggression, taxation, imprisonment for non-violent crimes. It seems as unfathomable to us that people would promote such things as it did to me that the only way to get milk was to break the hand-raising rule. No parent allows their children to take toys away from other children, but rather they encourage their children to share their own toys. Yet the children grow up to think that they can take away people’s property to give it to others, and to not share their own wealth.

As a result, we libertarians often find ourselves tongue-tied in debate. We can address all the economic issues, and point out the utilitarian benefits of liberty, but that’s not what we really want to do. We want to point out the morality of freedom, the evil of coercion — but we are unable, precisely because it is so obvious to us. We cannot effectively answer those who say "We must imprison drug users because it’s the government’s job to protect people from themselves," because it is so unbelievable to us that anyone would think it acceptable, nay, obligatory, to hit someone who has not hit someone else himself. I am often reduced to looking at such a person with a mix of horror and incredulity, and wondering how someone can think such a thing.

We make what seem to us completely obvious points — that we ought to follow our basic moral codes, and the necessary rules for civilization. We think that this ought to work, just like I expected raising my hand to work. We are puzzled by those who proudly and arrogantly proclaim that they are above the rules for civilization, just as I was puzzled by the fact that the children who broke the rules got their milk.

Consider the masses who laugh at libertarianism. Ask them just what, exactly, they oppose. Is it the idea of private property? Is it opposition to theft, or to murder? These are the fundamentals of our position, are they not? Or do they challenge the application of the position to specifics? Would they maintain that it is something other than theft to take away money from Peter to give it to Paul? What word is more applicable?

You’ll quickly find that most don’t oppose anything specific at all. They just think libertarians are weird, kooky — and to a certain extent, we are. While the diversity of the movement continues to grow by leaps and bounds, we remain a somewhat eclectic bunch. How could it be otherwise in a world with a public education system, where "normal" folks are taught never to look behind the curtain? Yet, this is no argument against our positions. In an insane world, only those who appear out of step with the rest will be sane. I appeared weird to my classmates, too, when I sat quietly, following the rules, and raising my hand. When breaking important rules is profitable, why not join those who break them? Look around you — success is in the government sector! Why not join in? Why not indeed. How about — because it is wrong to hit people?

Yet, in the end, we will succeed. In the end, a world run by a system based on hitting people cannot function — which is precisely why we have rules against hitting people in the first place. As the violence becomes more obvious, and it must, such a system loses supporters. People come to realize, too late perhaps, that the libertarians had a point after all. No society can exist if its members don’t believe in the basic rules, it will simply crumble. So society has a choice — to cease to exist at all, or to accept these rules. Our society has widely accepted them. Yet the government only has power because people believe that it is good to break these rules. As the contradiction becomes more obvious, the power of government will be diminished.

I am not counseling apathy or inaction. For the contradiction to be fully understood, there must be faithful guardians of the message present. The idea of non-aggression, together with all its beautiful philosophical and economic clothing, must be presented and kept on view at all times. Then, when the contradictions become too much for an individual to bear, that person has somewhere else to turn, knows of an alternative. That’s where we come in. This is the value of this very website, of the Mises Institute, of the Ron Paul rEVOLution, and of anything which exposes more people to the libertarian alternative. Most people will not spontaneously become libertarians when they become aware of the contradictions, but if libertarian ideas are in view when they are made aware of it, then they are likely to be persuaded. This is how our movement will grow. So, our goal must be outreach and education. We must remember, though, never to beat anyone over the head with our message — we need only to put it out there, to present it well, and they will come, just as supporters from all communities have flocked to Ron Paul. That government is violence institutionalized has become more painfully obvious in recent years, with taser incidents, loss of habeas corpus, and wars started on lies and continued despite the opposition of the people. The result has been more interest in libertarianism, and in particular the Ron Paul campaign.

Our message, although dressed up and more cogently argued, really is nothing more than the kindergarten creed. But adults cannot embrace what they learned in kindergarten, they fear they will look foolish. So we must argue for it through economics and through philosophy, but the message is still the same — don’t hit people. Go forth and spread the word.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the Libertarian Party of Connecticut’s candidate for State General Assembly in the 23rd district. He is on the mathematics faculty at the Oxford Academy, Westbrook, Connecticut. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He still holds the title of Chief of EMS for the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation, and will return to full-time service there in the summer. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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Picture me as I sit each night after work — dressed in my silk smoking jacket and ascot, reading The Principles of Economics or some other such work, perched on my sofa, with a cup of wine sitting neatly on my coffee table. A warm fire blazes in the fireplace, and I would describe my situation as the epitome of luxury and leisure.

Picture, now, that you come flying into my home, douse the fire, rip my book to shreds, and destroy my fine clothing. I have to admit, I’d be quite taken aback by this event, and certainly I would not be pleased with the turn that events have taken. I have to imagine that I’d be quite upset with you. As a side note, you might find yourself not entirely pleased with how events would go from there, since on my mantel I have two swords, and my martial arts training included the use of swords. Suffice it to say, though, that I’d be quite surprised, and displeased, with the entire situation.

Imagine my further surprise, though, if while doing this, you were to state "I’m doing this for the sake of your comfort, and to improve your luxury." Now I’d be more than upset — I’d also be extremely puzzled. This claim would be simply unaccountable to me, and I would have no way to explain how you could make it. I don’t like to be confused, or to be presented with inexplicable riddles, and so I’d naturally not be happy about this turn of events either.

Luckily, this hasn’t happened to me. However, the state of Pennsylvania has engaged in a very similar action against its citizens. That state has banned the use of voluntary labeling on milk and dairy products which advertise the fact that the milk inside comes from cows not treated with rBGH or rBST. Milk may now not be labeled, for sale in Pennsylvania, with anything indicating whether or not these chemicals were used on the cows that provided the milk. I happen to be somewhat concerned about the presence of these chemicals, and many years ago, when I drank store-bought milk, I’d preferentially buy milk from untreated cows. Even if you think this is a silly concern, though, you should recognize that some people are concerned about it. Furthermore, those people create a market niche, which producers work to fill, by growing their cows organically and proudly displaying this fact on their milk. The producer might be just as unconcerned about rBGH as you are, but simply trying to capture this portion of the market. It is true, there is no government bureaucracy that checks on these labels, but private groups and organizations do. For this reason, I consider the labels far more trustworthy than government-backed labels. In any event, prices for labeled milk tend to be higher than prices for regular milk, and it is this profit incentive which led producers to develop organic farms. This activity began, by the way, 12 years ago, when the FDA began allowing voluntary labeling. Before that, the FDA did not allow such labeling, on the argument that no FDA rule allowed it, therefore it was forbidden. This is also a puzzling argument, as there is also no FDA rule allowing me to sit at my desk, but I suppose I shouldn’t point that out to the bureaucrats.

Now, the state of Pennsylvania has outlawed the labels. This is quite harmful to producers who built organic farms, which are much harder to build and maintain, on the expectation of being able to obtain a higher milk price. Now that the milk is not labeled, there will be no price differential, and soon enough there will be no untreated milk available for sale in the state, I’d wager.

Of course, the worst harm is done to the consumers who desire this untreated milk. They gladly paid extra for it in the past, but now find themselves protected from such treatment — and unable to obtain what they want for any price. This is a dreadful state of affairs for the birthplace of the Constitution.

Thus far, we have only established that Pennsylvania’s actions were wrong, and harmful. It gets worse, though. The stated reason for these regulations is perplexing — the legislature and the governor tell us that these regulations were passed because of the need for consumers to be well informed about the contents and conditions of their milk! This is quite similar to the man who destroys my smoking jacket and ascot out of a desire to ensure that I have easy access to luxuries and leisure.

So, we find ourselves, in addition to being disturbed and angry, also perplexed. This is not a desirable state of affairs. Then, a glimmer of hope appears — it seems an explanation is possible. So, while we will still be disturbed and angry, we will not be puzzled anymore. On the other hand, the explanation will likely make us far more angry.

Our explanation for this action can be found outside of the state of Pennsylvania. In fact, the explanation lies in a small region of the United States which happens to fall within no state at all for purposes of representation in Congress. That is, the District of Columbia, where so many bad ideas are born, where good ideas go to die, and where base men go to become far baser. In Washington, DC we find a sales pitch which agriculture giant Monsanto tried at the FDA, and which failed. Monsanto, through its significant lobby force, had asked the FDA to do precisely what the PDA did. Monsanto, which just happens to hold the patent on rBGH, argued to legislators and FDA bureaucrats that voluntary labeling on milk was "misleading" and should be banned. Of course, it is immediately evident that Monsanto stands to earn no profit from such a ban, and obviously Monsanto is only interested in the common good in promoting such legislation.

Now, having stated the obligatory utter lie, we ask a reasonable question — aren’t lobbying efforts more likely to work in Pennsylvania than in Washington, considering that Pennsylvania politicians, while just as base as federal politicians, are not generally quite as rich? Any gift to a politician or bureaucrat there is a larger proportion of their income and total wealth than a gift of the same size to a federal bureaucrat or politician. Federal politicians and bureaucrats have been around the system long enough that their future is more or less secure — they’ve done enough to help corporations destroy their competition, or to help them secure contracts, that they are fairly certain of getting a cushy job at a major corporation after their time in Washington is over. Pennsylvania politicians, on the other hand, are far less certain of their futures, and therefore must do more to secure their futures. So, after failing at the FDA (one does wonder, though, how this failure took place at all — does someone at the FDA object to arbitrary bans on package labels? Most likely they were just too lazy to make a new rule for it) Monsanto seems to have succeeded in Pennsylvania, and so will at least pick up some additional market there by putting organic farmers out of the Pennsylvania market.

So, we no longer need to be perplexed on this issue, but there remains one perplexing question. How can anyone see this and yet continue to believe that the government should be more involved in our lives? There are people who understand this type of regulatory capture, and yet propose to respond to it with larger and more powerful regulators. What this case illustrates is a larger point — that the creation of a body with the power to compel behavior to any degree will produce, in an amount proportionate to the power possessed, a field of lobbyists and others ready to pay for protection and for actions against corporate competitors. Since the body will be staffed by people, they will accept the payoffs. So, leaving aside the absolute immorality of creating such a body to begin with, it can be guaranteed that it will never produce the desired outcomes — in this case, the FDA was created with the hopes of improving health through promotion of healthful foods and drugs. Instead, we have less healthy food and drugs forced upon us, in accordance with corporate demands. So, even from the leftist perspective, the system can be seen to be in dire need of abolition.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the newest member of the mathematics faculty at the Oxford Academy, Westbrook, Connecticut. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He still holds the title of Chief of EMS for the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation, and will return to full-time service there in the summer. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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The other night, while flipping through the tv channels, I happened to see some tiger cubs being raised in captivity. I don’t care who you are, one thing you cannot deny is how incredibly cute a small, young tiger cub is. Even if you’re a dog person, come on, they’re adorable. So, given the cuddly nature of a tiger cub, why don’t more people take them in as pets?

The answer is immediately obvious — we’ve seen full-grown tigers, and we’ve seen the way a housecat wakes you up in the morning to ask for his breakfast. One such wakeup call from a full-grown tiger and you won’t be serving breakfast, you’ll be dead. We’ve also seen the way cats show affection, nibbling on our fingers, or rubbing our legs with their paws. Again, we realize that we don’t want a tiger doing this to us.

Consider also the biological messages we send to pets. Given all the work we do for our pets, I would suggest it’s clear that the pets regard the house as their territory, and put up with our presence simply because of the tribute we pay them — that is, what we feed them. So, when a fresh, warm kill is on the table, the animals have a clear idea as to who should get to bite into it first. With a housecat, this doesn’t cause much trouble, as they can do little but sit and whine, or attempt to jump up only to be pushed down. Eventually, they give up and satisfy themselves with scraps after the meal, which is plenty given their size. A tiger, naturally, would be less tolerant of the situation.

However, the reasoning just employed might not seem obvious to some people. Imagine that a loved one of yours had decided to take in a tiger cub due to the cuteness factor. You try to explain to your beloved the folly in this course of action, pointing out that it will grow up. You even drag him to the zoo, plant him in front of the tiger exhibit, and exclaim "see — that’s what tiger cubs grow into! See the problem now?"

Imagine now that he turns to you and says, "yes, but what has that to do with me? That’s a very large predatory cat — I’m only taking in a small cub."

You try once again to explain the situation, "the cat you are taking in is small now, but that tiger in front of you was once just as small — he grew up."

Finally, your message seems to get across to your beloved friend, and you silently give thanks. He has seen the problem, and seems ready to abandon his plans. Then, however, a smile creeps across his face, and he shouts, "ah, but there is a way to handle this! I’ll simply demand that my cub not grow larger — in fact, I’ll write him a contract, explaining what he may and not do. I’ll enforce the contract with the power of my newspaper! Surely I can discipline a small tiger cub this way, and he’ll be contractually obligated not to grow up. If he does grow up, I’ll hit him until he stops."

It’s likely that your next stop would be the loony bin. This is clearly a preposterous idea. One cannot simply demand that a thing not grow to its full size, and hitting a tiger with a newspaper is a Darwinian tactic for removing yourself from the gene pool.

What if the situation were even worse, though? What if instead of one loved one, people all around you, important people in your life, were taking in tigers? All your family members began reporting to you that their adorable tiger cubs are just so much fun. In fact, they literally insist that you have a tiger, and forcibly place a tiger cub into your home, with strict instructions not to remove it. How long would it take before you stopped reasoning with such people, and instead cut them out of your life, tigers and all?

Yet, clever people fall for far more dangerous ideas of the exact same form. In Philadelphia, a group of remarkably intelligent men came together to form a government. These men had seen full-grown governments before, had in fact just freed themselves from one. Yet here they were, feeding and nourishing a small baby government, playing with it, considering it so cute and adorable that they just had to have one. Not just that, but their neighbors had to have one too, and their descendents, and their neighbors descendants. They pushed this dangerous creature onto all these innocent parties with the assurance that they had instructed the baby not to grow. What’s more, they had provided enforcement mechanisms. The states could secede, and if even that failed, well clearly the people could enforce the contract. Here’s your rolled up newspaper, good luck! As Party Leader Creedy taunts V in the film V for Vendetta, "you’ve got nothing. Nothing but your bloody knives and your fancy karate gimmicks. We have guns." Just change karate for newspaper and we have the situation faced by a citizen attempting to bring a government back into line after a contract violation, the situation faced by a pet owner trying to bring his tiger back into line when the beast won’t stop eating his legs.

But our Founding Fathers are not to blame, or at least not primarily. The primary blame rests with those who watched the tiger grow, who could have intervened while it was still small enough, but did not. As the tiger grew, it should have been clear to any observer that the supposed limits on tiger growth were not working, that it would become with time a full-grown tiger and a dangerous threat. Yet, with just a few scratches, it could have been removed from the home still. Now, it is fully grown, and cannot be removed, or even challenged. Attempt to take some food from it and you will feel its full wrath — don’t even think about asking it to change or think.

Despite that, our guilt runs deeper still. As we watched the tiger grow, not only did we not get rid of it, but we took advantage of each increment in size to request that the tiger do more for us. "Ah, now you’re big enough to get my slippers," we said, and then when it was a bit larger, we wondered why our slippers had become food — and with time, our feet as well.

When the tiger was big enough, we handed him our income and asked him to distribute it in a way he felt was more equitable. Not so surprisingly, we ended up with a lot of tiger food, and not much else. Even less surprisingly, we also ended up with floors that only a tiger can walk on safely, but which are difficult for a human to cross. The tiger also spent our money outfitting the house with booby traps which catch humans, but which tigers are able to easily avoid. We took this all in stride, and saw no danger in these developments.

Noticing the tiger’s large teeth and claws, we figured the tiger would be useful for settling debates with our neighbors. It bothered us that our neighbors carried guns, so we sent the tiger to go take the guns away from him. Never did it occur to us that now the tiger had the teeth, the claws, and the guns. When economic growth wasn’t as fast as we would have liked it to be, we asked the tiger to print money and give it out, but to do so at only the proper rates to speed growth without being selfish and enriching himself at our expense. The tiger laughed all the way to his bank. If we felt some businessman was being unfair, not extending himself enough to benefit us, or giving something away in a manner unfair to his competitors, we set the tiger after him to level the playing field. Little did we notice that now the tiger had tasted blood, and hungered for more.

Who is guilty in all this? The tiger, for acting like a tiger? No, of course not, the tiger did what came naturally. We are guilty, for giving all these tasks to a tiger, knowing a tiger’s nature. We are guilty for have tolerated the presence of this tiger in our homes, and we are guilty for having relied on this tiger to harm others, but then complaining when the tiger came after us.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the newest member of the mathematics faculty at the Oxford Academy, Westbrook, Connecticut. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He still holds the title of Chief of EMS for the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation, and will return to full-time service there in the summer. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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There are three ways to remain sane in an insane world. You can believe that you are free, a path entirely blocked to anyone who is paying attention. You can believe that you will someday be free; this remains a possibility, but as various forces close in, it seems less and less likely. Unlike the world faced by victims of previous tyrannies, we have no United States to escape to. Finally, you can believe that men someday will be free, that there will come a time once again when men will be permitted to think.

It is this last hope that I cling to. In the future, I believe that men will understand the futility of anyone putting their hope and faith in the power of armed masters to control them. There will come a time, perhaps shortly, perhaps not so shortly, when men will not be controlled by others but will live for themselves. There will never be a utopia, but there will be a time when crimes and attacks are dealt with harshly as the crimes that they are, not accepted as the price of civilization. Civilized men do not kill those who don’t conform, so such attacks cannot be the price of civilization; they have nothing at all to do with civilization.

What will these men think of us, assuming that our small portion of history remains available to their historians? If they study our times, how will they judge us, the last generation to live, for a time, in a world where free thought was permitted? No, we never enjoyed the levels of freedom that they will enjoy, but nonetheless, we did live some time before the renewal of tyranny. We lived in a world where we owned property, thought what we wished, and expressed ourselves freely. We lived in a world with LewRockwell.com, in a world where HR1955 was unthinkable.

Will they accept our excuse that the machinery had been set in motion long before we arrived on the scene? We will plead, our voices coming through loud and clear on the pages of their books, that powerful men did this, that we had no choice, no way to stop it, that special interests, AIPAC, and the neocons are to blame. What we say will be true, but will it absolve us? The first future generation to breathe free will have fought for it, will have worked hard to educate themselves, preparing the world for freedom, to push aside the tyrants and reclaim their world. Will they find it in themselves to forgive us, who let this great prize slip our hands?

Perhaps there is nothing we can do to repair their judgment of us. Certainly we will not save our freedom. HR1955, when it passes the Senate and is signed, will be only the last step of a long process to destroy men’s minds. The mind was previously numbed through public schooling, through the introduction of Prussian teaching methods, by the tremendous addition of sugar, MSG, and soy to our diets, by the pushing onto us all of psychoactive, mind-destroying medications, and through the ceaseless stream of propaganda from that hideous box in our living rooms. HR1955 is aimed at only that small, small minority that survived the previous attacks on the mind. If all else fails, it allows violence to be used to silence those whose minds still operate. This will be the last straw, the last hope for freedom in our lifetimes.

Not only have we not stopped it, but we the people have practically begged for the coming of this time. Didn’t the people wail and beg for their protectors in Washington to disarm the population, and attack the integrity of those who resisted, calling them names, attacking them as terrorists, or worse? Those who asked the government to disarm their neighbors will find their neighbors unable to protect them. Didn’t the people ask Washington to provide something for nothing, to give out handouts in the name of compassion? Didn’t they know full well that nothing comes from nothing, that those handouts came at the expense of robbing their neighbors? Those who called for their neighbors to be robbed to provide for them will find their neighbors unwilling to save them now. Didn’t the people break themselves into small interest groups, each one demanding protection from the others? Those who hated their neighbors without cause will find now that this petty bickering unleashed upon them a far worse danger than those with dark skin or long last names could ever produce. Didn’t the people empower the government to bomb and kill innocent people around the world, or at least remain silent when this was done in their names? Those who allowed their tax money to be used to bomb foreign nations will find foreign nations unwilling to intervene to protect them, or to offer refuge and asylum, when this force is turned on them.

Yet, can we assist the men of the future? Can we make their task easier, when it comes time for them to perform it? We can, by doing what men have done countless times in the past, often at great personal cost — by being the Remnant, keeping hope alive, and carrying through the generations the message, the idea of freedom. What we must not do is make future men begin again from scratch — we must ensure that we pass on to them the philosophy of freedom. We need to make sure that when their time comes, they will have access to Rothbard, to Mises, to Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison, to Rand, yes, to Rand, to Lew Rockwell, to Nock, Ron Paul, and Mencken. This work is being done in large part by the Mises Institute and by the Foundation for Economic Education. But each of us can play a role in it as well — great works do not interpret and explain themselves. We can ensure that we pass on to those younger than us the ideas in these books, as well as the books themselves. We must instill in those to whom we entrust these ideas a fervent desire to see to it that someday in the future the ideas become reality, and make them understand that it is their responsibility to pass on the message, just as we have passed it to them. By doing so, we keep the remnant alive.

If they speak of us, the men of the future will look and, I expect, wonder just what we thought we were doing when, standing just on the brink of tyranny, we threw ourselves and our energy into a political campaign, thinking it could make a difference. These men will understand the failings of democracy, and will wonder what difference we thought a political campaign could make. They will understand, with a wisdom born of distance, that the campaigning matters not when one party controls the counting of the votes. Perhaps they will even know the name Diebold, most likely as an expression of scorn, a name directed at those who behave in an unfair, aggressive way. But this in no way means that we are wrong to throw ourselves and our hopes into the Ron Paul campaign — we must act in a way that makes sense to us, with our worldview, our understanding, not some hypothetical future understanding which has yet to dawn on us.

More importantly, however much they may ridicule us for this campaign, they will also be indebted to us for it in ways they likely will not imagine. The campaign is the largest movement for liberty in modern United States history — and, as I predicted 2 years ago, it came from the revitalized Austrian economics movement. It is injecting new life into that movement, and spreading it further and wider than it has been spread before. The mainstream is fighting hard, but is unable to completely stop the discussions from arising — people everywhere are now talking about the Federal Reserve, gold, and the free market. Regardless of what happens politically, this is guaranteed to increase the size of the remnant as we head into the coming dark age. Not only that, but it is consolidating the remnant. Spread far and wide, out of contact with one another, the disenfranchised the world over are coming together, pulled in by the magnet of the Ron Paul campaign. Austrians, run-of-the-mill libertarians, and the punk teenager with a nameless anger and distrust of "the man" are all united in the Ron Paul campaign. College students are waking up to the missing ingredient in their view of the world — to the fact that corporations do not carry guns, but governments do, and the evil done by corporations is done by first gaining the ear of government. You see, the middle-class family scared and angry at the loss of their savings through inflation, the loss of their son in Iraq, and the loss of their jobs through overregulation — this is part of the remnant too, but they never would have guessed that they were until now. This family is not well read in the literature of freedom, doesn’t know a von Mises from a hole in the wall, and never would dream that they have anything in common with an anarchist philosopher — but they support Ron Paul, the politician who seems to have appeared out of nowhere and burst onto the national scene just to speak for them, to voice their concerns, to say what no politician has said before. So, if he’s part of the remnant, that’s good enough for them — if his books quote Mises, by golly, there might be something there.

So, widely disparate worldviews, sharing only a distrust of centralized power, are being drawn together, being shown that they really aren’t all that different because they agree on the primary, most central issue for any political theory — just who will get to shoot whom, and why?

To the men who live in a time far from now, who breathe free and think what thoughts they please, who control their minds and remain free in their minds, we say, we are sorry. We are sorry for what you have had to endure to reclaim what we lost. We, the last people before you to know freedom, can never apologize enough to you for what we have done. We allowed them to build around us a network of social control, each beam built under cover of a different excuse. This beam only attacks junkies, who are worthless, this beam protects you from poverty, this beam from terrorism — but we should have seen through it, we should have known better. What did we think would happen when corporations promised more in defined benefit pensions than they could hope to collect from the future economy? Did we not think the response would be the growth of an industry designed to sicken us, to lower our lifespan? When corporations moved into defense, what did we expect? We should have stopped it, but we didn’t. We made you work hard to regain what should have been your birthright. We, your great-great-great grandparents, let you down. We embraced our momentary desires, and sold your world for our short-term pleasure. How can we ever repay you for what we have done? You know better than we do what horrific sacrifices have been made, how the generations between have suffered, how hard you worked to restore freedom to this land. You know of the friends you lost, friends we caused you to lose before their time. The debt we owe to you cannot be repaid.

To you, we leave all that we have of value — the memory of freedom, the work done by those who came before us, who were better than us. We could not hold onto the most precious gift the world bestows on those who are worthy of it, but we did manage to hold onto the memory of how to regain it. Read it, cherish it as we should have. Read the books that we will pass onto you, listen to the ideas that we will explain to our children, and that will then make their ways to you. We have placed upon you the burden to reclaim liberty, but also the roadmap, the directions on how to do so, and the instructions on what to do next, what a free society will look like, and how to rebuild an economy. You will concentrate on the task that history has assigned to you, since you will not be charged to build the study of economics from the first brick, nor will you need to rediscover the principles of epistemology, of metaphysics, or of economic methodology — these all will be passed onto you as developed bodies of knowledge, to which you will need only add a gloss. For all that we did wrong, we at least knew enough to keep those ideas through whatever may have befallen us, and to get them into your strong hands. Be better than us, be stronger than us, be vigilant in the ways we were not. We failed you — do not fail your children and descendants in the same way. We passed onto you a world that was worse than the one we received — pass to your children a world that is far better than the one you were given. We ask you, humbly, to redeem our error, and perhaps, to forgive us.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the newest member of the mathematics faculty at the Oxford Academy, Westbrook, Connecticut. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He still holds the title of Chief of EMS for the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation, and will return to full-time service there in the summer. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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One effect of the Ron Paul campaign that I did not anticipate has been to bring together many of my disparate interests. Of course, libertarianism and Austrian economics interest me, along with related philosophical endeavors, but, surprising as it may seem, I have others interests as well. In particular, I am interested in health and fitness, especially nutrition. Yes, yes, there are health and diet articles on LewRockwell from time to time — I even wrote one a while back. The fact is, though, that until recently I considered these two interests quite separate. If I had to guess, I would have guessed that many libertarians were interested in nutrition, but that there was very little interest in liberty among those pursing their interests in diet. It seemed that most people in those areas tended towards socialist/leftist thinking, worried about the FDA not regulating industry closely enough, or wanting bans on certain drugs.

Then a funny thing happened — Ron Paul ran for President. I started noticing that more and more information outlets on health were turning political — and libertarian! Dr. Mercola endorsed Ron Paul for President, the Weston Price Foundation started loudly praising Dr. Paul for his fight against the NAIS, and I started hearing discussions about, of all things, the gold standard among people who shared an interest in low-carb dieting. On Facebook, information is provided about "related groups." For a given group, a second group is related when a great number of the members of the first group are also members of the second group. Check out the Weston Price group, or the Dr. Mercola group, or the raw milk group — you’ll find that Ron Paul groups are related to almost all of them. How does it all fit together?

There is more to the dangers facing us than outright government action. Government action, legislation and so on is frequently simply the last step of a process our masters set in motion in other ways. In many ways, several institutions in society together have woven a net around us, a net which continues to tighten and constrict us further. In other words, the ways of tyranny are unified — the natural reaction to which has been that the ways of freedom have had to unify.

It is my purpose here to explain a bit about how this net is constructed. I will take as the most obvious example the legal situation regarding milk drinking. It is easy to speak about laws banning raw milk as "nanny government," "diet dictocrats," or "safety Nazism." Certainly, there are people who support milk laws for those reasons, and even legislators may favor them in the interest of "public safety." Yet, are these the real purposes of these laws? I suggest that they aren’t, and arguing against them on these grounds may end up being self-defeating. I propose that our masters are not interested in dictating good health, and trying to do it in a misguided way — instead, they are interested in dictating poor health.

A bit of context is in order. For most of human history, any milk we drank was raw. Up until 1900 or so, raw milk simply was called "milk." Yet we did not see massive pandemics of lysteria and tuberculosis. We also didn’t see massive epidemics of obesity, like we have now. Interestingly, there was a physical culture movement in this country, started by Bernarr McFadden, which emphasized the importance of raw milk. McFadden even recommended a "milk cure" for many serious illnesses — and in many cases, it worked. The "milk cure" had also been popular for, well, as long as there’s been writing, as a cure for tuberculosis. Weston Price’s research showed the tremendous differences in health value between raw milk and the pasteurized garbage we now consume. It used to be said that "milk is blood." Dr. Pottenger, with his famous cat experiment, demonstrated the same differences. Raw milk saved Gary North’s life. Yet, this wonderful substance is illegal in 33 states. To seek out one reason for the ban on raw milk, consider the massive lobbying efforts by the dairy industry that resulted in the passage of those laws. They knew perfectly well that the small farmers would be unable to compete once these laws were passed. In combination with the minimum milkfat law, the large dairies were able to consolidate the market and largely drive small family farms out of competition.

If asked to defend these laws, the government is denied any of the usual excuses. There is no such thing as secondhand milk, nor does drinking milk interfere with one’s ability to drive a car. There is no externality argument available to them. This makes the milk laws a powerful wedge to use in arguing for liberty — the only reasonable explanation is that these laws exist for the benefit of certain industries.

It is clear how these laws benefit the large milk manufacturers. I submit that they also serve a second master, and a far more insidious one. In the interest of benefiting the pharmaceutical companies, the government has undertaken a series of steps designed to weaken and sicken the population. Combining this with a widespread awareness of just how sick we are, together with completely backwards tips on how to fix the situation, the government encourages all of us to medicalize our problems, and treat them with the various drugs available. Just turn on the tv and watch the ads.

The government food pyramid can accomplish only one purpose — the building of a fat, sickly population. The American diet provides a 30:1 ration of omega 6 to omega 3, while the proper ratio is 1:1. The government recommends that the majority of our calories come from refined carbohydrates — and yes, even that whole-grain bread is a refined carbohydrate, and will block your mineral absorption, and then wrings its collective hands as obesity and diabetes rates skyrocket. Yet, they then try to convince us that type-2 diabetes comes from a high-fat diet! Diabetes mellitus is a disorder of sugar metabolism, and type-2 diabetes is a result of chronically elevated insulin levels. High fat consumption will not cause that, but tremendous sugar and carbohydrate consumption will. Government funded research conflates saturated fats and trans-fats, concluding that we need to avoid traditional, highly nutritious fats such as lard, butter, and coconut oil. Cultures that eat tremendous amounts of these fats, but no trans-fats, do not suffer American health problems. How, then, can American health problems be caused by whatever remnant of these traditional foods are left?

The very idea is preposterous. If we are to believe these claims, then we have to believe that the proper diet is devoid of anything that can be called real food. Every item eaten, on this claim, needs to be highly processed and artificial. Fat is bad, but chemically modified fat that leeches your body of minerals (Olestra) is good. Milk and meat are dangerous and unhealthy — but extruded, bleached grains stripped of their fiber and cooked into bread and pasta should be eaten in large quantities. Cod liver oil is taken only by crazy people — there is no good reason why people took it for centuries. Not only are these claims impossible to believe, but it is impossible to believe that the people making them believe them. They are relying on public schooling to make them seem credible to the deluded masses.

With the population sickened by these recommendations, the people will turn to pharmaceuticals to help them. Of course, the drugs will only make them sicker, especially considering that in many cases the manufacturers themselves don’t understand how or why a drug works, and considering that in many cases the anticipated effect of a drug is, in actuality, not helpful. Consider, for instance, cholesterol-lowering medications. No one has ever established a link between cholesterol levels and heart disease, yet anyone whose cholesterol level exceeds an arbitrary standard is put on these hepatotoxic drugs — then the doctors who prescribe them have the nerve to warn all of us against excessive alcohol intake for the damage it does to the liver! Sure, they usually try to address it with diet first — by cutting fats further, and increasing carbohydrates. This conveniently enough guarantees that the dietary approach won’t work.

The increasing levels of sickness also cause people to turn to the government, oblivious to the fact that government caused these problems in the first place. They ask for universal health care — oblivious to the fact that most doctors are contributing to these problems, and are basically sales people for the drug companies.

Yet, it gets worse. The government doesn’t want your body so much as it wants your mind. In addition to other health symptoms, an imbalance in omega fatty acids is linked to decreased brain function. The government-recommended formulas cause these problems in babies, and the government recommended food plans continue the imbalances as the child grows up. Following the government recommendations, Americans consume pounds of sugar every year, mostly refined and stripped of any fiber or nutrients. This produces children who are unable to focus, and often unable to control their bodies, constantly moving and unable to sit still. Of course, these same symptoms are exacerbated by jailing the child in a government-run school, to be taught irrelevant and misleading information, or out-and-out lies, in an ineffective and absurd manner. Yet, when these symptoms are produced, we respond with a diagnosis, as if the problem were caused by something inside the child — ADHD. Once we have a diagnosis, the answer is immediate — drugs. So we now have a youth culture based around constant use of psychoactive medications. While an adult who chooses to use drugs is not permitted to, children are forced to use amphetamines, and drugs similar in effect to cocaine.

The net effect of all this is to destroy the mind. In following this path, the government has managed to produce a society filled with stupid people. I mean this literally — the remarkable level of stupidity around you is not genetic, but rather results from the combination of psychoactive medication and horrendous diets. Why does everyone who goes on a low-carb diet rave about how much clearer their mind feels? Because consuming massive amounts of sugar, being deficient in omega-3 fatty acids, and consuming additive-filled processed garbage leaves a person literally unable to focus. Add in some amphetamines to the mix, and it’s no wonder why Americans cannot, by and large, handle abstract ideas. They cannot focus long enough to get past the buzzword level of cognition. All this, of course, is exactly the way the government wants it. A stupid society is an easy society to lead, and an easy society to scare. The government can routinely make contradictory claims without being called out on it. If anyone does challenge government pronouncements, it is easy enough to convince the stupid masses that the dissident is a danger to "our freedom and way of life." To come full circle, if a candidate gathers $4 million in donations in a single day, it is easy to convince the dumb masses that all this money comes from "alienation — and is futilely given to a candidate who has no chance to win." Or that this candidate is a terrorist, whose supporters spam every poll he wins, or an anti-Semite, or whatever slur happens to cross the mind first, it’s not hard, really.

Many different institutions need to come together to make all this work. The government has to legislate properly, and make the proper recommendations on the basis of "disinterested research." Research institutions, flush with government money, need to churn out the right conclusions. Pharmaceutical companies need to produce the correct harmful drugs, advertise them, and gain control over the doctors through the AMA. Large food manufacturers need to produce processed, additive-stuffed, sugar-coated garbage, and market it as the only thing normal people eat. Yet, this doesn’t imply a conspiracy. Every step, each part of the program, is independently profitable. Sure, some collusion is obvious — such as the powerful lobbyists, and the government funding of research. Mostly, though, these different groups come together not out of collusion, but each out of their own agendas. So, these arguments are not the sole property of conspiracy theorists, although the effect is exactly what the conspiracy theorists fear — a stupid, fat, obedient population, turned into slaves without knowledge of what masters they serve.

NOTE: Among those who can still think, the vast majority lean towards libertarianism. Where they run into difficulty is regarding exactly the topics just discussed. They see the major corporations run rampant, turning us into sick, stupid slaves, and ask "but who would control them if not government?" One response is — has government controlled them? This isn’t the best response, though, since it assumes that government has failed, when in actuality government has achieved exactly those ends it desires. Furthermore, it leaves the statist the ability to say "but how much worse would it be without control?" This is a reasonable response, once the libertarian has acknowledged that government has an interest in controlling evil corporate actions. The point we must make instead is that the government is actually behind these evil actions. We must emphasize, from the very first stage of the discussion, the agreement in the interests of government and corporations, and the ways they work together to accomplish evil goals. Remember, concern about runaway corporations — which are real — is for many people the only thing holding them back from becoming libertarians. This is especially true among those in the natural foods movements who are not libertarians. They must be made to see, not just the abstract right to property, but the impossibility of the corporations doing much of what they do now without government — the ways that government provides them the means to force their will upon the rest of us.

For more information:

• http://www.westonaprice.org/
• http://www.mercola.com
• http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the newest member of the mathematics faculty at the Oxford Academy, Westbrook, Connecticut. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He still holds the title of Chief of EMS for the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation, and will return to full-time service there in the summer. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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Working as a high school teacher, I sometimes feel a moment of unease while teaching, advising, or supervising students in the dorm. While haranguing students about a minor language or noise violation, or lecturing a student who has once again failed to do his homework, I feel as though really, it isn’t as important as all that. My students, for all their shortcomings, don’t lie to me about why they are launching invasions of foreign countries. For all their carelessness, they don’t toy with nuclear weapons, nor do they shoot children, electrocute college students, or physically threaten those who disagree with them.

More to the point, it isn’t clear exactly what service I am providing to them. We like to say we are preparing them for future success, but this doesn’t seem quite right. The world we will be sending them into appears to be one in which success is quite unlikely. Furthermore, the pathways to success that do remain mostly seem to be things we wouldn’t approve of them doing. After all, success is mostly attained by working as a government thug, a media shill, or a collaborator with the Federal Reserve in its crimes against the currency. As children prepare to go into debt to go to college, they are living in a reality where most of the wealth they could hope to earn in the future has already been spent and promised to others. They already are saddled with massive debt, and live in a country with a currency under fierce attack. Even more importantly, it is clear that our republic is dead, and that we are in the process of installing a totalitarian police state. With the Bush administration, the process is nearing completion, as dissent is violently shut down, government transparency and accountability eliminated, and wars are fought without reason or cause. Indeed, Americans are now subject to random arrest and imprisonment, without any right to habeas corpus; Americans may now be tortured freely, the accused have no rights, and none of us is secure in our possessions or our person. The massive power inherent in government has been unleashed and freed, and all of us are now subject to it. In this kind of world, do we really remain convinced that getting good grades, going to college, and getting a good job are the keys to success?

Yet, live on we all must — it beats any known alternative, certainly. How do we adjust to such a life? The first point we must recognize is that our situation is not new in any sense. Murray Rothbard tells us that the story of human history is the story of a struggle through the ages between the individual, yearning to be free, and the forces of the state, yearning to control him. In most places, at most times, the state wins. The state wins most of the time, not because of its overwhelming force and firepower, but because men’s minds can so easily be won over. The state promises men certainty and security in an inherently unsafe, insecure world, and we accept the bargain. When the state grows and expands, some men choose to ignore it, confident that "their" state would not desire totalitarian power over them; others cheer it on, hoping some day to take their place as a ruler in the system; others cheer even without hoping to rule someday, just eager to avoid having to make hard choices. Once the mythology of the state is planted in the minds of the population, growth from the night-watchman state to the all-powerful state is all but inevitable. And so it is that throughout human history, most men have lived under the control of a tyrannical state.

Neither is it really new for the United States. Although the external appearance might be new, the powers assumed by the current government have always been implied, in one sense or another. That they were held by the judiciary, or the legislature, and now are held by the executive is not really such a change. It has always been the case that, if the government grabbed the powers, they would not be stopped from exercising them. The powers had remained latent until this time, but since the government could always exercise them, we always existed in a state of potential tyranny. Now they’ve gone and done it, is all.

The fact that we are not the first to live in tyranny, of course, is of small comfort. Yet, flip through a history of art textbook, or look carefully at the history of ideas. Ask yourself what great products have been produced in the midst of a totalitarian rule. There is no need to conclude that, because we now live under a tyrannical government, our lives are wasted, or that achievement is impossible. If we are now subject to arbitrary arrest and denial of due process, and if that fate awaits you, it awaits you regardless of how you spend your time until it comes. You can spend that time mourning the loss of freedom, and fearing the moment when you will feel the full power of the state coming down upon your head. You could also spend that time achieving something real, leaving behind great philosophy, art, or literature for future generations, generations whom you can picture as overcoming tyranny, living as free men. Then you can picture a time when what you produce will be valued, will be of importance to men living freely. Which sounds like a more noble use of time?

Yes, we should fight — we should produce Austrian literature advancing the cause of freedom, explain economics to men who have lost the art, campaign for Ron Paul, and take advantage of every opportunity to advance the cause of freedom, and push back the totalitarian state that hovers over us at all times. After all, if future generations may live free, it follows that there will come a time, later than now and sooner than an uncertain then, when freedom will prevail. Who knows, that time could be tomorrow. The Ron Paul Revolution, the marches in Jena, the outrage over Duke, anger over a coming currency collapse — any of it could be the tipping point, the time when the forces of freedom overwhelm the forces of evil and the process of restoring freedom begins. I am not counseling defeatism, nor do I suggest that we give up the fight. I am merely suggesting that, if we don’t win tomorrow, we can still live tomorrow. Men can live under tyranny — not well, not pleasantly, but it can be done. Even if the victory doesn’t come in your lifetime, what you do with your life can make a difference, can contribute to the victory your children of grandchildren will fight for.

All that having been said, some changes do make sense. For one, we need to revise our understanding of success. In a free world, or even a relatively free one, it makes some sense to measure success in terms of money. Bear with me a minute — a fortune, honestly amassed, is at least prima facie evidence in a free economy of having done something worthwhile. After all, if you weren’t serving others, you wouldn’t have earned their money. So, your bank account is an indirect measure of success — it is an easy way to see that you’ve helped others in your life. The problem is, men come to forget just why money was an indicator of success, and use "successful" simply to mean "rich." Then the rules change — we enter a world with a Federal Reserve, with intense regulation of all aspects of the economy, with oppressive taxation and extremely well-paid thugs — and this measure of success becomes entirely ludicrous.

Acknowledging that we now live under a totalitarian government, it is necessary to face the fact that, no matter how much you serve others and do the right thing, you may end up penniless or worse. In the United States today, 1 in every 37 people is either in prison or an ex-inmate; I’d expect this number only to rise. So, you may do the right thing and still end up in prison. We can no longer define success in terms of a good career, either — you may do everything right and have no career in any meaningful sense. Much of our time will be spent complying with regulations, and we will live in an economy which will only worsen. Defining success in terms of staying with a company, or receiving promotions, will only set you up for failure. Success must now be defined in terms of helping others, making person-to-person connections, and doing what is right. The external measures have lost any validity they might have once had. It isn’t your fault you will never be wealthy, or even "comfortable," if you have spent your life doing the right thing and helping others. For that matter, if you wind up in prison, that’s the fault of others, and no reflection on you. If up until you were no longer able to, you were serving others, then you can consider yourself successful, even if from that point on you wind up in prison or worse. These are the ways we need to redefine success to fit the world in which we now live.

So, what kind of lifestyle does this imply? Quite clearly, it implies increased involvement in activities outside of your job. Because of heavy regulation, it is likely that most people can no longer find fulfillment in their jobs, their employment options having been so severely curtailed. So, it would make sense to work the minimum amount necessary to pay for your present lifestyle, along with decent savings (preferably in gold), while making strides to simplify your life further. With the remainder of your time, local volunteer opportunities become important. As the government turns on its citizens, reaching out to your neighbors becomes more important, not less. As government attention focuses more on attacking us, and less on keeping up a pretense of providing traditional government services, new ways of providing these services will be needed. In addition to increased volunteer opportunities, this will mean new market opportunities for well-positioned firms. However, these will have to be small firms, able and willing to work under the radar, as the government will not welcome this competition. We are already starting to see some of this activity — for example, Acadian Ambulance is being hailed as the "anti-FEMA" for its effective rescue operations during the Katrina disaster, and the thousands of lives saved by its employees at that time. Yet can you imagine how angry this must make the FEMA higher-ups?

Education will remain important, when properly understood. As I said before, we need more than ever to educate ourselves in the areas of philosophy, economics, the classics, logic, and all other areas of relevance to freedom. The Remnant needs to continue to operate, and in fact pick up its operations. Those who love freedom must continue to write, to speak — if only to a future world which will need guidance in restoring liberty to our land. Like Orwell’s Winston Smith, we will find ourselves writing letters to an uncertain future. That’s alright — for all we know the day may even come in our lifetimes when educated leadership will be needed for a freedom revolution. So reading Austrian works, as well as other authors of relevance, will be key. Besides the Austrians, and those read by the Austrians, Orwell will be of particular importance, as well as Huxley, Szasz, and Rand.

In the area of education, I have an innovative plan for decentralized, customer-controlled, inexpensive education, complete with unaccredited degrees. Keep an eye out for further details as I work them out.

So, in closing, we know it is possible to live through these dark ages because most men, throughout history, lived in them. Even in the United States, our history already includes Hamilton, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Wilson, and Nixon. The difference between these men and our current leaders is only one of degree, and the fact of increased technology permitting greater spying. The other difference, perhaps more important, is that our present leaders came to power after all those men, and so can take advantage of the earlier precedents already set, a process that allows each despot to be worse than any who came before. Not only can we live, but we can live successful lives by understanding what success really is. Measure success not in dollars, but in lives touched, men helped, and how much you have done to spread the liberty message, which is the most crucial message in any time. We must lay the groundwork for the restoration of liberty, either in our times or in some later time, and we must teach our children to do the same. The job is hard, but lovers of liberty are up to the task.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the newest member of the mathematics faculty at the Oxford Academy, Westbrook, Connecticut. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He still holds the title of Chief of EMS for the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation, and will return to full-time service there in the summer. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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It’s a small, petty complaint. In the grand scheme of things, with a government lying us into war and letting loose Blackwater thugs in American streets, a 5-minute wait on my way home from the health food store is not really such a big thing, even if I did have 2 gallons of milk in the car and it was hot out. Yet, petty intrusion builds on petty intrusion. Imagine the world we would live in if every minor, petty irritation placed upon us by the government were met with fierce resistance. A government faced with rebellion over miniscule taxes or petty regulations would not dare try the large-scale intrusions our government has practiced for the last few decades. Conversely, a government whose population easily tolerates smoking bans, road-use restrictions, speeding fines, and so forth can expect to meet little resistance when it wishes to come out with wholesale tyranny. After all, the citizenry has already shown itself to be willing to put up with government coercion, or even to welcome it. As a mathematician, I work with abstractions, divorced from their specifics — I’d claim that the latter description just offered is an abstract history of every modern nation.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I had gone to the health food store to pick up two gallons of milk. In Connecticut, unlike other states, the government actually deems us adult enough to buy real milk in stores. Although, I must point out, the state does require nonsensical labeling on the milk — "Raw milk is not pasteurized" — shocker there, really. So, my local health food store does carry raw milk, but only by order. You need to place your order on Tuesday, and you can pick up your milk on Friday afternoon. So, I had picked up my milk this particular Friday afternoon, and was heading home.

As I drove down the street, I came upon a roadblock. All lanes of traffic were stopped in all directions, with several police cars being parked perpendicular to traffic flow, creating the stoppage. The police cars, although empty, all had their flashing lights on. Only some terrible danger, you’d think, could create such a situation, or perhaps a disastrous accident with emergency crews still working, after half an hour, to extricate the hapless victims. If you thought that, you’d be wrong.

Well, then, maybe some celebrity was in town, and traffic was stopped for his convenience. Now you’re getting closer, although you’re not quite there. As I sat, waiting, hoping that I’d get home (I didn’t turn around and go another way, mind you, because there is no other way. An interesting thing about the Shoreline is that there are many locations reachable only by the Boston Post Road, and there is no other route to my home from where I was), a flow of children began to cross the street. As I watched, approximately 50 students paraded across the street, on their way from the nearby elementary school to the bowling alley directly across the street.

Now, I have no particular objections to children, and I think bowling is a far better way for the children to spend their time than being in school. If asked, I wouldn’t mind waiting 5 minutes for the children to cross the street. The problem, though, is this: say what you will about our educational system, children learn things in school. The fact that they graduate without being able to do simple arithmetic or read does nothing to disprove this, it just shows that reading and arithmetic aren’t what they learn. They are learning something, though.

So, what did the children learn from this small adventure? First, they learned that "the policeman is your friend." Certainly, the man who stops traffic (in a child’s mind, traffic is a force of nature, and stopping it is little short of a miracle) so that you can go bowling is no threat to you or your freedom — he gives you the freedom to cross the street, doesn’t he?

Next, they learned that it’s perfectly acceptable to unilaterally decide to inconvenience others for your own desires. What other lesson can a child take from watching dozens of motorists sit motionless on the road so that they can do what they want? The children were not instructed by the teachers to ask the motorists if they would agree to the arrangement, or even to say "thank you." I’m sure, though, that they remembered to thank the friendly, nice policeman who would never, ever do anything bad to anyone. The hierarchy was clear — policeman, students, then the rest of the world. Why would a student lower himself to thank a lowly "other"?

Of course, the market has a way of ranking needs and ensuring that the most urgent needs are met first — the price system. If you wish to inconvenience others in order to obtain your own ends, you have to be willing to pay the price. The statist approach that the children learned on this day, though, prevents one from having to reimburse others when harming their interests for your own, and precludes the market from operating to move resources to their most urgently-needed ends. Instead, the force of arms decides the matter. Now, you might object that I’m going too far — of course the children didn’t really pick up on all these details, true as they may be. If that’s what you’re thinking, try this thought experiment. Just imagine finding those children, and asking them what would happen to a motorist who drove past the police barrier. I’m willing to wager they’d get the answer right — they’d tell you that the policeman would get him, by which they’d mean either arrest or kill. They could immediately tell that they were being given the right of way by force, not by consent. Only an adult with his sophisticated means of denying reality could insist otherwise.

Finally, the student learns not only that you can put your needs ahead of the needs of others, by force, but that it is also perfectly acceptable to force those very others to pay for the privilege of being so bothered. After all, I am a taxpayer, the student is not. The student has not been forced to pay for the upkeep of the road, nor is he forced to pay the salary of the police officer — I am forced to pay for both of these, only to have that very police officer stand between me and my enjoyment of the road — for the benefit of those who do not pay for either.

We need to stop complaining that children don’t learn anything in school. Instead, we need to start thinking about the horrific things that they do learn. If the schools truly were unable to teach anything to the students, we would be in far better shape. Instead, the schools turn out children who have been intensely educated in the philosophy of control, in the mechanisms of statism. The disastrous harvest we reap from that is altogether too predictable.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the newest member of the mathematics faculty at the Oxford Academy, Westbrook, Connecticut. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He still holds the title of Chief of EMS for the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation, and will return to full-time service there in the summer. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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My father once told me that education is a process where, on a yearly basis, the teacher corrects the lies you were taught the previous year. I can see much of the truth of this, both in my experiences as a student and as a teacher. It’s not so much lies, usually, as necessary dumbing-downs, which are removed later. The algebra I teach to high school students isn’t a lie; it’s just a very, very small part of a specific kind of algebra. The lie is presenting it as Algebra when really it’s just an algebra. In philosophy, it’s somewhat more subtle. Take a statement like "Kant was an idealist." Is it a lie, or truth? Some philosophers argue that it’s true, others that it’s false. Would it be more reasonable to present the situation as "there are idealist and realist readings of Kant"? Sure it would, but then you’d have to delve into it, explain how the realist reading works, in the process going above some heads, and then leave your students with an uncomfortable feeling of ambiguity. This isn’t what you want in an intro class, and the idealist reading is so much more natural, and easy to explain, that you just go with it. Then the student gets to grad school, and one of two things happens. Either he finds himself still unable to comprehend the realist reading — because for 4 years he’s associated Kant with idealism — or he feels like he was somehow lied to or misled. It’s really unavoidable, though.

I mention this by way of explaining some problems with the teaching of history. We teach history in a simplified, black-and-white manner as well, pretty much content for students to learn key phrases, knee-jerk associations ("Bismarck=German Unification"), and some important dates. That there are subtleties and ambiguities to historical interpretation doesn’t really belong in a basic history course. The student later might learn some of these interpretations, and similarly either reject them as impossible because they conflict with his knee-jerk understanding of history, or feel he was lied to.

There are also outright lies we tell because the truth would be far too hard to explain. Explaining the Holocaust is one thing — but how can you teach a room full of high school students about normal, everyday Germans going along with it? So, you talk about propaganda, about official secrecy, about keeping the information away from the people. This is all nice and plausible, but completely false. Not only were the horrors not a carefully held secret, but the German government was producing movies portraying the murders. Normal Germans — folks kind of like your neighbors — were going to the cinema for a fine evening, and watching Jewish women being raped and then strangled to death. There was no sense of shame, no fear of an uprising if the secret got out — the people went along with it willingly! It might very well be impossible to explain this to children, who haven’t yet had the ideas of revolution and personal truth drummed out of them.

There was more to the production of these movies, though, than simple entertainment. It’s not just that the people liked seeing Jews tortured, and so they wanted to attend movies showing it. Putting such things into movies has a few effects. First, it creates the effect among the population that, well, other people accept it, and so I should go along too. More importantly, it fictionalizes it. We can deal more easily with inhumane things in the context of fiction than we can when they are presented as facts. Then, once we’ve seen the fictionalized version a few times, we are desensitized, and can deal with a factual version more easily, even support it.

Putting something into a movie, a fictional form, also makes it okay to discuss. This was the case, for instance, with Minority Report a few years ago. This movie was critical of a truly monstrous idea — preemptive arrest. Of course, preemptive strikes are also monstrous, but that’s another story. The problem was, the movie pointed to a particular problem — the computer that does the predictions making a mistake, and someone being arrested who wasn’t going to do the crime. It avoided the larger problem — that the entire enterprise was indefensible. In so doing, it opened up discussion of the pros and cons of the idea as a conversation civilized people could have. Leaving the movie, people felt free to debate whether or not it would be a good idea, to what extent it could be perfected to avoid mistakes, etc. Without the movie, these people would have never even discussed it, they would have known immediately that it was wrong. By fictionalizing it, you can discuss it — after all, real people aren’t getting hurt, only characters in a movie, right?

In a related development, a new movie is coming out soon. The plot line that follows is what I gleaned from a coming attraction. A man steps off an international flight, and is approached by airport police. The officers inform him that they have an urgent message for him from his wife. Concerned that his wife might be in trouble, he goes with them — and immediately has a gun in his face, and a hood slapped over his head, his hands and feet shacked. He is then flown to a foreign country for torture, while his wife struggles to find out what happened to him, where is his, and how to help him.

The problem with this movie is obvious — it isn’t fiction. This is happening, for real, to real people. I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t the very reason the movie was made. At present, when we hear about cases like this, it’s in a newspaper or, more likely, online — in a factual setting. We are hearing about it as a real event. When this movie comes out, people will be exposed to it in a fictionalized setting. This will desensitize them, and people will be less concerned about this horrific practice. People will even be able to leave the theater, discussing the pros and cons of it — it violates human rights, but on the other hand it makes us safer (safer from what? Certainly not from government…) — and after all, it’s easier to have this theoretical conversation about the fictional treatment of a movie character than it is about the actual treatment of a real live person.

Germans managed not to go down in history as the people who ate popcorn while their countrymen were slaughtered. Will Americans be remembered for eating popcorn while discussing torture, for eating overpriced candy and considering the complete abolition of every idea of liberty and freedom on which their country was founded? Surely this would be a bizarre, but fitting, end to a country that sold its freedom for safety.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the newest member of the mathematics faculty at the Oxford Academy, Westbrook, Connecticut. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He still holds the title of Chief of EMS for the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation, and will return to full-time service there in the summer. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

~ Thomas Jefferson to C. Yancey, 1816

America, former home to the finest universities the world has known, mourn their loss! It is fitting that, after decades of conservative hand-wringing about leftist infiltration of the university, hand-wringing that was mostly accurate, the death stroke was delivered at the hands of the right wing.

Indeed, life at universities had liberalized; this was not an entirely unwelcome fact. I for one felt it to be a positive that, at most schools, young ladies no longer needed a chaperone when leaving the dorm in the company of a man. As a college student living in a coed dorm, what surprised me was how easily we all adjusted to this environment, and the relatively low levels of sexual tension. A less controlled, regimented social life in the colleges was entirely a plus. No longer were students walked to the dining hall by faculty escorts, and no longer did they sit in assigned seats. College students were being treated as, well, fully capable human beings, able to make their own choices. Sure, this was a more liberal approach than had been seen in the past, but it worked.

Not that there weren’t problems, of course. The tenure system did attract radicals opposed to the idea of a market for talent. Once tenured, opponents of private property and individual freedom from the left did attempt to influence students in their direction. If they had a magic button that would allow them to eliminate ideas they find unpleasant, there is little doubt that the leftists would have pressed it. The fact is, though, that the laws of economics they so railed against limited their ability to do so. Colleges make money from paying (or federally paid for) students, and are ranked on their selectivity and retention. Colleges answer, in some ways, to market demands from students. Yes, leftist professors mark down students expressing private-property ideas — but they cannot immediately fail all such students. Doing so would simply produce a flight of students from the school, and the subsequent end of the school — and their tenure. So they made life unpleasant for students, but the worst a student would experience from crossing a teacher would be the loss of a letter grade, or perhaps even one failed class. I promise that one failed class is hardly a life-changing experience.

Yet the relatively limited and highly checked power of left-wing professors sent such writers as Bloom and D’souza into terrified, foaming-at-the-mouth tirades. They screamed of the loss of academic freedom, and warned that our nation would be bereft of intelligent right-wingers. This last fear, of course, might have come true, but had more to do with the watering down of conservatism and the crusades against paleos than with anything the left could do on campus. After all, are even the most intelligent students supposed to be unable to think for themselves in the face of a propagandizing professor?

No, the left could not shut down the ability of the mind to think for itself. Students taught by leftist professors can still be libertarians after graduation. Yes, one with different ideas can even enter into discussion with a leftist! Those who enter the professoriate, no matter how biased they may be, no matter how rabid in their beliefs, have at least some of the intellectual character in them, and can be engaged in discussion. I was nominated for Phi Beta Kappa, by the way, by a far left professor with whom I cannot remember ever agreeing prior to 2001. We disagreed, but engaged in civil discussions, drawing on philosophy, history, and so on.

The left no longer largely controls our campuses. The new masters, right-wing law-and-order types, do not engage in civil disagreement. If the students dare challenge them, the taskmasters will not simply mark down their grade, or fail them. No, today if you challenge the real power on campus, you will be beaten and either killed or arrested. Now that so much money flows even to private schools from the state and federal governments, control of the campus is no longer effectively exercised by the administration or the faculty. Nowadays, the administration is unable to stand up and defend the students when they are under assault from the agents of the state, whether they be university police, or an outside police agency with jurisdiction.

I remember the University Police Department when I went to school at SUNY Geneseo. Sure, they gave you parking tickets from time to time — but most of the time, interactions with them were civil and peaceful. You truly felt that the officers were there to help you safely spend your 4 years at the college. They felt no desire to hassle the students, who after all are the purpose of the college. Never could I have pictured our unarmed officers abusing students violently. Nowadays, well, just watch the videotapes.

It was with this idea in mind that I felt inclined to reread Ayn Rand’s essay "The Cashing In — The Student u2018Rebellion.’" Among the usual assortment of head-scratchingly odd remarks about Kant, philosophically naïve epistemological and ethical pronouncements, and warmongering (don’t get me wrong, I find a lot that I like about Ayn Rand, just not any of the topics I just mentioned), I found an interesting statement. While listing what she considered the worst of the student rebel’s demands, she writes "…declarations of the freedom to join, organize, or hold meetings of any organization…abolition of tuition fees; control of law enforcement by the students and faculty…" Admittedly, some of these demands are somewhat bizarre, particularly the abolition of tuition. That doesn’t seem like a particularly libertarian demand. But what of that last one? Control of law enforcement by the students and faculty…what if we had granted this demand so many years ago? Might we have avoided the complete loss of the universities we have experienced today?

Of course, nowhere else does this principle hold. Of course, it should hold everywhere — we pay their salaries and expenses, do we not? Nonetheless, one can understand why the student rebels made this demand, and the eminent sense the demand makes. For one thing, unlike at my house, at a university there are layers of powerful administrators, each layer of which can offer additional protection from the forces of law and order. That is, such a suggestion can be implemented far more easily at a college than at regular private property, since the mechanism for enforcing it is built into the institution already. For another, universities can only survive in the presence of real debate and the expression of ideas, which are precisely what are being shut down today. Finally, without universities, a civilized society cannot survive in any shape resembling that of a free nation.

Let this point not be misunderstood — we cannot give up the universities. They control the airports — we can do without flying. They control the public schools — we can homeschool. But when the universities are destroyed, collapsed under the weight of an iron fist — there is no real alternative. Universities are the home of ideas; if the university is destroyed, our society loses the power to spread, grasp, and analyze ideas. Without this, we are doomed. Make no mistake about it — what is happening in our universities is not just about narrowing the range of ideas which may be expressed. It is about the destruction of ideas as such. It is about the replacement of the battle of ideas with the battle of bodies. Physical force is not just being used to support one idea over another, it is being used to eliminate ideas from the playing field. With society bereft of ideas and utterly confused, there can be no means to mount a meaningful resistance to tyranny. Already, we are close to that point, but ideas still live, to some extent, in our universities. So long as professor and student sit down together and discuss them, ideas are alive. Now the right has destroyed our colleges, tasering students who express disregard for President Bush, brutally beating foreign students for, well, studying in the library, and what’s far worse, justifying these behaviors.

Some have asked why the police continue to engage in these outrageous behaviors in so public a manner. After all, don’t they know about YouTube, don’t they realize that attacking students in the library will get their faces on the internet and seen by thousands? The answer is — they don’t care. There was a time when the presence of a videocamera, particularly a small one that might be in the hands of any of the hundreds of people in the library — offered some protection. For such a video to matter, though, there has to be a realistic means of seeking remedy. There has to be a system in place for examining such complaints that has as its goal seeking justice and avoiding abuse. We have no such system nowadays. In no branch of government is there concern with oversight of the agents of the state. The video will be shown on YouTube, be emailed around to concerned citizens — and nothing will come of it. There is no realistic means of protest, no realistic way of bringing these agents under control. For every 20 people who see the video, 10 will think the actions were appropriate, 8 will be upset but say "that’s the price of freedom," 1 will be outraged but think of nothing to do, and 1 will call the police department and complain — an action which will lead nowhere. With numbers like that, why should the state be concerned about what is posted on YouTube? Heck, if it actually became a problem for them, Fox could always buy it.

Also useless is the advice often given by well-meaning internet dwellers to call the police department involved, complain, and demand action. Does anyone really think that anything will come of doing that, other than the telephone number you called from being logged for future use? If public pressure turns up high enough, sure, someone might be sent out as a sacrificial lamb — none of this does anything about the real problem of the growing police state, though — or the particular case of the growing police state on university campuses.

Conclusion

The right-wing crackdown on dissent in the universities has destroyed the American university as a place where ideas may be freely discussed. We cannot fight to save the university — it is already gone. We must reclaim it, and we must do so in an entirely non-violent way. We must fight only through the power of ideas, so that if we win, our victory will be moral, and pure. A tainted victory here is truly a defeat — one cannot forge a place for ideas in a violent manner, in a way that denies the power of ideas. However, we cannot take our places in the battle of ideas as defenders of a status quo against those who challenge it — we must realize that we lost once, that the university is gone and that we are trying to rebuild it. Let me emphasize that, on our side, we cannot raise one fist in anger, let alone spill any blood for our cause. This is not the type of battle we face — we need to proceed on the assumption that the most important thing in the world is the power of an idea. We must proceed on this assumption because it is true.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the newest member of the mathematics faculty at the Oxford Academy, Westbrook, Connecticut. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He still holds the title of Chief of EMS for the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation, and will return to full-time service there in the summer. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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The right wing consistently claims that the problem with this country (how come they’re allowed to say there are problems with this country, but if anyone else suggests that America is anything less than perfect they are suspected of treason?) is moral relativism. Moral relativism, they claim, is tantamount to an "anything goes" philosophy where there is no right and wrong. Thus, people just "do their own thing," common decency and virtue go out the window, and society is destroyed.

There are more things wrong with the right-wing claim above than I can hope to fit into this brief article, but I simply want to expand on a few of the more glaring problems. Most obvious is that this isn’t what moral relativism says. There are essentially two moral relativist positions, the social and the individual. According to social relativism, each society has its own norms and standards, independent of norms of other societies. Of course, even an absolutist can acknowledge this fact — but the social relativist also claims that this is a correct state of affairs, while the absolutist simply says that some societies are wrong. According to individual relativism, on the other hand, each individual has his own moral code, independent of the norms of those around him. The former position, it should be clear, cannot lead to the "do your own thing" philosophy that the right wing so fears. Even individual relativism, though, still affirms the existence of a moral code that each individual is bound to follow. Furthermore, relativism in no way implies that there will be no common elements to the various moral codes. It would in no way be inconsistent, for example, for a relativist to say that, while individual moral codes vary on other topics, all moral codes must contain prohibitions on murder and rape. There would then be a variety of arguments available to the relativist to prove this claim — metaphysical, logical, teleological, argumentation ethics, etc. The point is that relativism doesn’t mean that there are no common moral grounds among people — just that some things are not common. It seems to me, as an aside, that a consistent intuitionist, if honest enough to admit that people may have different intuitions, would end up as an individual relativist. Does this somehow imply that intuitionism leads to the denial of morality? Of course it doesn’t.

Without getting into the merits of relativism and absolutism, let me merely reflect that it is palpably absurd to think that no society has the correct moral code except a nation engaged in aggressive wars, with a negative savings rate, and with the highest percentage of its population in prison. This last point is particularly hard, I’d say, for the conservative to square with his view of America as the supremely moral nation. Either our corrupt government imprisons people unjustly, or, as the conservative is more likely to see things, the country is full of criminals, and has more of them than any other nation. Either way, it doesn’t say much for us.

On the other hand, maybe the conservative is right, and the nation’s morals are under attack from an onslaught of relativism, or, what the conservative more likely means, nihilism. I don’t see it, though. In my experience, people do not do bad things because they think there are no morals — they do bad things because they believe them to be right. What I do see around me, though, is a disquieting form of absolutism.

In America nowadays, perfection is expected at all times. This doesn’t mean refraining at all times from raping and murdering — the conservative himself admits that the wrongness of these actions is relative. Instead, we are expected to be perfect on a whole host of minutia, which until quite recently either didn’t matter at all, or was regarded as silly even by those who enforced the restrictions. Have you been pulled over recently? It used to be, you were speeding, you were pulled over — and you and the cop both knew he was meeting a quota, doing a job — and he knew that you knew. The cop knew that everyone speeds, and some people get caught — it was recognized for the game it was. Not so recently — get pulled over for speeding now, and the cop will sneer at you, sermonize to you about how wrong your actions were, and then write you the ticket. The officer is shocked, just shocked, that you would dare exceed the posted speed limits. After all, those limits were made by our wise and trusted masters.

My grandfather and uncle once got into a fistfight with a police officer. My grandfather was arguing with the police officer as the officer wrote him a parking ticket, the officer made threatening gestures, and my uncle saw and reacted to protect his father. The fight ended with the two of them being arrested, but not before they got a few good punches in. The charges were later dropped. What would the outcome be if this happened today? Just take a look at the typical police officer — at least 50 pounds heavier than his counterpart would have been 30 years ago, more muscular, goateed, head-shaven, more militarized — and more likely to think of his job as a battle between him and the civilian population. If this happened today, I can almost guarantee that my uncle and grandfather would be dead. More frightening, though, is the fact that most conservatives would fail to see the relevance of what I have just said. The expected response would be "so, they hit a police officer, of course they should be killed." This is a sad end to the movement that gave us Barry Goldwater and promised small government and more freedom.

It isn’t just in the world of law enforcement that perfection is now expected, though. Our speech must be perfectly free of any hint of prejudice, or any trace of offense. Our trash must be perfectly sorted — don’t you like the planet? The games we play must never make light of any culture, nor may they reward aggression. Activities we engage in must be perfectly safe — Ralph Nader will take away any toy than can be swallowed or used to hit a child on the head, don’t worry. Playgrounds must be plastic, to avoid splinters, and low to the ground. Risk to reward tradeoff? Never heard of it, risk can never be accepted. Children no longer can simply play sports for fun and enjoyment. Instead, your 5-year-old must play perfect baseball, so that he can land a scholarship in 13 years time. What, learn to swim for fun, exercise, and survival near the water? Never — if you want to swim, you need to get serious, hire a coach who has won Olympic gold at least twice, and get yourself to a dietician.

In a monument to the absurdity of all this perfectionism, I wish to comment on Britney Spears’ VMA performance. I don’t know much about dance, singing, or music, so I have nothing to say about technical critiques of her performance. I will say this, though — I saw a picture of her in her skimpy outfit, and my jaw dropped. I remember Britney as being moderately attractive prior to her recent head-shaving, car-smashing episodes. Certainly I never thought she was ugly, but she also was not the be-all-end-all of female beauty. All that changed when I saw her new look in that picture — if Plato’s theory of the forms is correct, than the new Britney is the embodiment of the form of beauty. I was stunned, therefore, to read the article that the picture was attached to. A culture in which news writers can call Britney Spears fat, likely while eating their third donut of the morning, has gone off the rails. I would comment here that, like in other areas of life, we aren’t looking at the big picture. Instead of simply admiring beauty, we take it apart and demand perfection in each aspect of beauty. So, Britney is criticized for not having a vanishingly small waist and rock-hard abdomen, regardless of being absolutely stunning. The big picture is not the point — instead, we focus on minutia. We tone our abs in order to be beautiful — if we are beautiful already, then our abs need not be any more toned.

Once upon a time, we thought laws should make us more virtuous. Now, we use laws to attack the virtuous, by demanding the impossible standard of perfection. Is safety and caution a virtue? Perhaps, and going no faster than safety allows in your car can then be a part of virtue. But if a man is virtuous, then it serves no purpose to attack him for not obeying the arbitrary standard set.

So, the failing in our society which leads us to embrace as sexy images of starved women, and to reject as ugly the most beautiful woman most of us will ever see, also leads to the injustices of our so-called justice system. Meanwhile, those who have pushed along this process, embracing law-and-order and demanding that the rest of us get in our places, never taking a step out of line — look at the disaster their ideas have created, and blame the carnage on "relativism" — the label they pin on the one individual who remains courageous enough to declare that the insane is insane, to step out of line and point to the truth. This troublemaker, they declare, is the cause of your problems — not the system we created for the purpose of jailing more people and creating chaos in society, making it impossible to know when you are within the law and when you aren’t. No, all problems in society come from the individual who points this out. This is the new conservative creed.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is the newest member of the mathematics faculty at the Oxford Academy, Westbrook, Connecticut. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He still holds the title of Chief of EMS for the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation, and will return to full-time service there in the summer. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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"Let the donut be cut in two, and each of the claimants be given…death. I’ll eat the donut." ~ Homer Simpson, speaking for the American criminal justice system

One of the more absurd activities the government has taken upon itself in the past few years is the criminalizing of discrimination. When we hear the term "discriminating art critic" we now wonder if it is a term of praise, or a line on an indictment. In informal surveys, I have found that most public school children I present the phrase to think it is a criticism. Such is the current zeitgeist. Discrimination, we are told, is bad. In many cases, it is used as the reason for criminal or civil charges — pretty terms for using brute force to compel one person to open their property to another.

What, then, do we make of discrimination which is not just allowed, but encouraged and even required by the government? Employers are subject to legal risks should they buck this trend and offer a job to a member of this permanent underclass. Furthermore, despite what the right wing will claim, one does not become a member of this class by choice, but rather by sheer luck of the draw in many cases. This is the class of criminal convicts.

In an ever-expanding range of fields, employers are required to subject potential new-hires to a criminal background check. If a person is hired with a known criminal background, the company faces increased liability should they commit a crime while employed — liability the company would not face if they weren’t aware of the past background. These facts combine to mean that companies have to have a damn good reason to hire a convict, even if he is the most qualified applicant for the job.

But, you may wonder why I claim that convicts don’t end up that way by choice, but rather by luck. Consider how easy it is to be arrested — all a person with a grudge has to do is swear out an accusation and most likely you will be arrested and jailed. Consider also that previous arrests, even if they resulted in a dismissal or acquittal, are known to law enforcement agencies and to prosecutors in future cases. The police are likely to view such a record and say "oh, he got away last time," thus cutting less slack in the new event. Prosecutors are liable to do the same. Innocent until proven guilty is no longer the law of the land in the United States.

On top of this, we have developed the plea bargain system, in which convictions are routinely gained from innocent people. In fact, if the accused claims to be innocent, and insists on going to trial, all parties involved will believe that he is "wasting the court’s time" and deal with him more stringently. The mind boggles at this phrase — isn’t this why we have courts? Besides, why should one be punished for exercising a constitutional right? Quaint, antiquated thinking, I know. So, many a rational accused person will accept a plea bargain — especially if the fine to be imposed is less than the cost of a trial. This person, through no fault of his own, is now tarred with the word "convict" for the rest of his life.

What’s more, even most people who are guilty of a crime have harmed no one and present no danger to employers. Most people convicted of crimes in this country are convicted to absurd crimes — drug use, tax evasion, prostitution, or other non-crimes. Just turn on Fox to see how one insidious crime is created — resisting arrest. The police will be called during a dispute, despite the lack of an actual crime. On arrival, the police will find the accused obviously angry — he was involved in a dispute, for one thing, and now realizes he faces arrest for no good reason. Despite being angry, he will not physically resist the police — but the officers will push him onto the ground, put a knee on his back, and state repeatedly "stop resisting" which then gives them a basis to claim the suspect was, in fact, resisting. Often in such cases, the person will be convicted of resisting arrest, but no charges will be filed in the initial complaint, meaning a criminal has literally been created out of thin air. For that matter, if self-defense is generally permitted, why is it a crime to resist armed men who, with no provocation, grab you, cuff you, and throw you into the back seat of their car — and then lock you up in a secure facility with no means of escape? Ought this really to be a crime?

Now this person who was unlucky enough to be convicted of a crime, or to have pled "no contest," finds that despite being well-qualified for positions, he doesn’t get one, because of the state-mandated criminal background check. Why take the risk, the employer asks, when another candidate who is almost as good exists? There used to be a time, I am told, when criminals paid their debt to society, whether through a fine, prison time, or probation — and then were free to return to society. This system wasn’t perfect, by a long shot — for one thing, no one can have a debt to society. Even then, most crimes were victimless, and when it comes to violent crime, the debt is to the victim, not to "society" — but it does seem that, when the state initiates violence against the citizens, it is somewhat preferable to minimize that damage.

In addition to employment woes, the convict faces significant other challenges in daily life. For example, a convict is frequently less able to defend himself against aggression — and in many cases, his convict status is printed in the local newspapers, thus alerting aggressors to this fact. After all, in many cases the convict will be forbidden from owning weapons, or denied the right to carry a concealed handgun, often for the rest of his life. Furthermore, even if he decides to defend himself in a hand-to-hand situation, he will often find himself in trouble. After all, imagine the situation once the police arrive and scan the ID of the two parties. Regardless of any statements, the individual with a criminal background will immediately be viewed as being at fault, and likely arrested. Thus, many convicts simply do not defend themselves, preferring to be robbed over being arrested. Certainly, a convict finds it difficult to call the monopoly provider of security services for help — how seriously will they take his claims of aggression? The answer is, not very. Police officers tend to divide the world into three categories — the good, the okay, and the bad. The good consists primarily of other police officers, and other people in similar jobs, such as EMTs and firefighters. The okay consists of just about everyone else in society — these people are liable at any moment to become the bad, but for now shouldn’t be beaten or jailed. If they earn more than police officers, they find they are closer to the bad. The bad includes, certainly, anyone with a criminal background, since the system is infallible. Thus, in any future encounter with the police, the convict finds that he is taken to be a bad person, and any attack he suffers is considered deserved.

So, we see that the state creates the permanent underclass of convicts, discriminates against them, and then compels others in society to discriminate against them as well. This activity, from the organization that considers itself profoundly good, and which lectures all others about the evils of discrimination on irrelevant characteristics, would be hard to understand if we didn’t already know that the state is, by definition, evil. However, we can, in a small way, fight this particular aspect of the state. How can we do this, you ask? When it makes sense for you and your company, hire a convict. Stop the practice of putting to the bottom of the stack any application with a "yes" to the first question, and start looking at the whole applicant. If it is a victimless crime, stop considering it at all, other than to express your sympathy for the way they have been treated. If it is a violent crime, find out the circumstances before coming to a decision. This practice, by the way, would also cut down on recidivism — the convict is far more likely to return to crime if he finds that the honest world rejects him without giving him a fair shake.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is Chief of EMS at the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port. He has recently been offered a faculty position at the Oxford Academy in Connecticut beginning September 2007.

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I’d like to ask you to consider, if you would, two elements of "common wisdom" in the US today. They are:

1. Money can’t buy happiness.
2. Poor little rich girl (said with a dismissive tone.)

The former is, I think, true, although I don’t think it proves as much as those who say it seem to suspect. Having more money, all else being equal, gives you more options and the ability to pursue higher-valued ends, and so tends to contribute to happiness. However, all else is usually not equal; to have more money you have to do more work, work in a field you might not like as much, and save or invest more, which means putting off consumption. At many times, I have chosen less money, now and in the future, because I believed the opportunity costs of higher income were too high. So, while still desiring money, I can agree that money isn’t everything and that we cannot pursue happiness solely by predicting future money income.

The second statement above is a sarcastic, biting remark about rich people. It expresses the idea that a rich person who is upset by other aspects of their life is ungrateful, and an object of scorn and ridicule. Worse, it is an expression of jealousy. The speaker means to say "if I had all her money, you can bet I would be happy." These two ideas are, of course, contradictory. If money doesn’t buy happiness, there is no reason to think that the rich should always be happy. Certainly, one should not expect the rich to be happy while an oppressor is attacking, humiliating, and imprisoning them.

I bring up these topics because of the poisonous current mood in the United States. A vicious public assault has been launched on Paris Hilton, the Hilton heir, and there seem to be near-universal support for this assault. It is fashionable for the media, private individuals, and politicians everywhere to express their distaste for Paris. For some libertarians, this distaste has even overpowered opposition to the state.

Prior to her recent legal problems, public opinion was already solidly against Paris. She is criticized for not working — as if most of the speakers would continue to work at their current jobs if they suddenly inherited billions. I know I wouldn’t — I’d go back to grad school and spend the remainder of my life studying one subject after another. But that’s my preference — Paris prefers the party scene. Why begrudge her freely chosen preferences with her own money?

In any event, this widespread hatred erupted when Paris was arrested. Otherwise civilized people can be heard to make crude remarks, suggesting that being raped and beaten in jail might teach Paris "a lesson." What lesson is that? The very idea teaches me that envy is a powerful, although evil, emotion. I learn from these remarks that most of my fellow citizens consider inmates suitable agents of punishment, a curious position to take. By the way, isn’t it true that the guilty inmates would tend to be the most brutal in assaulting the weaker inmates, and the innocent would be disproportionately attacked? Moreover, why in the world would convicted criminals be appropriate agents of justice?

What is Paris being jailed for, exactly? She had the temerity to drive her own car, on roads paid for out of her taxes, after consuming more alcohol than the state approves of. For this crime, she received probation, with the attendant irony that probation generally requires employment. Her probation is now being revoked, on the grounds that she was caught driving with a suspended license. Of the many absurd laws we deal with on a daily basis, this may be the most absurd. The widespread acceptance of driving-licensing is strong evidence of the success of the education establishment in brainwashing the public. Perhaps a case can be made for licensing of, say, doctors. I wouldn’t accept this case, but I have an inkling of how it would go. Licensing of lawyers is to be expected — after all, we immediately see the state’s interest in making sure that all who work in the justice system are suitably "educated" in statism. But a license to drive your own car, on roads they tax you to pay for? This is simply an excuse to charge bureaucratic fees, and to make people carry identifying papers. That we accept this is a testament to the ability of the government to warp the minds of the citizenry.

So, for this non-crime, Paris Hilton is being sent to jail. The irony is palpable — a system supported by theft, which operates largely through threats and coercion, is presumed to be morally superior to a blonde who inherited some money and seems to laugh too much. These thugs will lock up a peaceful, if immature, young woman, while the population cheers and anticipates the horrific beatings she will receive. In our left-right political spectrum, opposing such a thing is called "lacking a moral compass."

Can the Paris haters point to one particular action of hers that is supposed to have harmed anyone? Yes, she made a TV show about her inability to hold a steady job — who cares? This certainly won’t put her on the welfare lines anytime soon, and making a tv show probably pays better than holding a steady job anyway. She entertains countless people, and has attacked no one. Yes, she had sex with her boyfriend, which of course puts her beyond the pale of normal teenage behavior — sure. She dresses sexy, also completely unusual behavior for a shapely blonde. Why hate her?

Celebrities tend to reject those arguments which most vindicate them. Paris, no doubt, would be horrified by an anarchist suggestion that those who murder, rape, and steal — the state — are not fit to judge and jail others. Instead, she told Governor Arnold that she was "too pretty to go to jail," inviting more ridicule from the Paris-haters. In attacking such a statement, though, they ignored one important point — she’s right. She is too pretty for jail. However, so is everyone else in the civilian world. There are plenty of people who have done something wrong — a few choice statements from Jesus come to mind here — but I am hard pressed to think of one whose behavior even approaches that of men like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and their ilk. Yet these men are held in high esteem, and criticizing them is considered unpatriotic, "the politics of personal destruction," or worse. Meanwhile, vicious hatred towards an airy blonde is acceptable behavior.

By the way, I am particularly curious about male Paris haters. Aren’t men supposed to defend and protect women, not laugh while they are abused and beaten? Furthermore, aren’t these values held in particular esteem by the so-called conservative men who are most likely to hate Paris?

So, spare me your jealousy over Paris’ money, and the vicious little idea that, because someone is rich, you may attack them at will. Spare me the absurdity that the rich girl shouldn’t complain while being jailed, because this makes her a "poor little rich girl." The rich have problems too — for instance, being attacked by those who hate them for being rich. If you set your hatred of Paris aside for a moment, it becomes clear that she has harmed no one, and the so-called crimes she was convicted of are absurd non-crimes. Then let us free Paris, and focus our attention on those who actually do evil.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is Chief of EMS at the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port. He has recently been offered a faculty position at the Oxford Academy in Connecticut beginning September 2007.

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Note: I had written this on April 5, 2007, and planned to submit it on the 20th of April. In light of recent events, I have decided to submit it now, as it is applicable to the latest tragedy as well. I have elected not to make any changes or updates to this essay. The reader, therefore, might be struck by the fact that it still answers charges made in the days to come.

Eight years ago, suburbanites became aware of their own mortality. The experience of gun violence, which was supposed to be confined to the underclasses in the ghetto, shattered their own worlds. That, though, isn’t all that happened eight years ago.

Eight years ago, the government convinced the middle class that children killing children was a symptom of having too many guns, not of a problem with the children. It is only natural, they said, that children will seek to harm and kill other children if their parents own guns. This has gone on throughout human history — except it hasn’t, not within a society, within a neighborhood. Children play war, they don’t slaughter each other. For a child to so sadistically stalk and kill his prey is uniquely terrifying, and reducing it to the gun is completely absurd. That, though, isn’t all that happened eight years ago.

Eight years ago, they convinced us that the horror in a government institution, shaped by governmental forces, under the eye of state administrators, justified ever-growing governmental control over our lives. The logic may not seem to hold, but such is the logic of the state, every crisis an opportunity to create fear, each ounce of fear an invitation to seize more control. Still, that isn’t all that happened eight years ago.

Eight years ago, Americans utterly failed to ask just why it is that SWAT teams move efficiently and quickly when attacking citizens, when making raids on those who peaceably provide to people chemicals that they desire, but that SWAT seems utterly incapable of acting when called upon to protect our citizens. Their cars may say "to serve and to protect," but one never sees a policeman serve another, nor did they seem particularly anxious that day to protect. For hour upon hour, we watched and waited while the police discussed whether or not they should enter the building and stop two teenagers who were slaughtering innocent children. Perhaps if we saw this type of deliberation before drug raids, at least they would stop entering the houses of, and killing, completely innocent people — they might at least check the address. Perhaps that was what they were doing for all those hours eight years ago — making sure they didn’t enter the wrong school.

They must, we are told, protect themselves, and had to wait for their own safety. This, of course, is what any of us would do — after monopolizing the power to protect, and swearing to protect these hundreds of children, not do so until we were completely assured of our own safety. Such bravery these men showed.

Just what are the children of this country being taught? For public school children, let us consider. They spend at least 6 hours a day, 5 days a week being educated by the government. The government teaches them our current national mythology. There is no real right and wrong; morality is best viewed in terms of logical positivism. Rights are granted by men with guns, and only insofar as they benefit the men with guns; those men can take them away at any time. Appropriate heroes for them to admire are policemen — the heroes who failed to save them, soldiers, Presidents, and, well, teachers. Are we naïve enough to suggest that these kinds of lessons do not have an effect? When you destroy a child’s moral intuition, tell him that theft and murder are alright sometimes, as long as they are done with good intentions, tell him that the most noble figure is the soldier invading foreign lands, are you surprised that he solves his problems with violence, or at the point of a gun?

It is easy enough to dismiss the killers’ stated reason for the attack — their lack of popularity and having been bullied. Granted, these are not good reasons to launch a murderous assault on innocents. But, then, are Saudi hijackings good excuses to kill innocent Iraqis? When the much-to-be admired Bush expresses his dislike of other’s actions with blood, why cannot our children do likewise?

Let us ask the question — just how much does a child have to be bullied, how cruel do his classmates have to be, for him to ever consider such an act? Just what has happened when it is considered acceptable for children to bully one another until they reach this point? Where were the adults?

Not helping, that’s for sure. The state compels children to attend their schools, and once there, the children are thrown together into forced association. The adult supervision is limited, it seems at times, to forcing this integration, not to monitoring the way the children behave towards one another. Forced into this artificial community, where children face punishment for separating themselves from the group, the children are left to fend for themselves, after all, it isn’t the school’s fault if the children just won’t get along. Segregation, even self-segregation, is anathema — the quiet, sensitive boy must be kept in constant contact with the wise-assed athlete, despite the fact that every time he draws near he is the subject of abuse, verbal or otherwise. In the absence of government coercion, these two would never be near each other, and as the school forces them together, so does their desire to separate grow. The school is happy so long as they associate, even if that association is the athlete belittling, insulting, and perhaps even striking the other boy. After years and years of such behavior — of being pushed by irresistible forces towards a hurtful actor — is it a wonder that frustration grows, that violence may even result? This is not to excuse murderous rampages, but rather to understand them. If we can find the cause, we can prevent future rampages.

Give up your guns and your freedoms to prevent disaster? What greater folly can you imagine? We have been told for eight years that disasters in a government-run building, pressurized and pushed towards explosion by government-imposed rules, and unable to be stopped by government-sanctioned heroes, are reasons to cede ever-greater portions of our lives to the wise oversight of the government. Have we gone so far that we cannot recognize obvious scams like this when we see them?

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is Chief of EMS at the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He presentlyworks in EMS atLegacy EMS and Harris County Emergency Services. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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The changes in the political scene since 9/11 have been vast. I would argue that the realignment of interests, and the changed meanings of political labels, signify the largest change since FDR altered our understanding of "liberalism." That the Democrats have become popular while not adapting to these changes is not a counterargument. It always takes politicians longer than us regular folks to understand the significant of changes, and popular support for the Democrats has grown out of a, perhaps misguided, hope that they would reverse Bush’s actions, if only for political reasons.

These changes have been uncomfortable for many. As has been noted here, James Baker-type conservatives are uncomfortable that our new political discussions center around warfare and taking away civil liberties. They prefer the older way of doing things, where wars, murder, and torture were carried out quietly, secretly, while public discussions centered around the welfare state, a topic on which they appeared moderately better than their colleagues on the left. Having to publicly justify these things makes them squeamish.

Lesser remarked, but also dramatic, is the challenge this new tone of discussion poses to libertarians. We see ourselves now aligned increasingly with the political left, as mass murder and domestic spying present more immediate and serious threats than entitlement programs. This is alright as far as it goes, but the real danger comes when we become aligned with those who actually differ from us on the very topics of warfare and civil liberties.

An example of this is the discussion of creepy, faceless, scary semi-private companies, such as Blackwater, Halliburton, and Bechtel. The rise of these oddly all-encompassing companies, which always describe their business model in euphemisms, is something the hard left has long warned about. The corporation which rules the world is a popular concept in movies; we are all familiar with this “doomsday scenario.” It was, in my view, handled in the most mature and sensible way by Stephen King in the Dark Tower series, but it is by no means the sole, or primary, purview of horror fiction. It is an omnipresent theme. The trouble is, it is really happening now, and this has brought us into a position of sounding similar to anti-private property left-wingers, who believed such a tendency was present in the free market. This claim, by the way, was easily demolished by Murray Rothbard, who asked how a company that runs “everything” could possibly continue to be profitable, since the pricing mechanism would cease to provide meaningful information. Nonetheless, the position of these companies is entirely indistinguishable from that presented in fiction.

To illustrate the point, I’ll tell a brief story. In order to do my clinical training for my paramedic class, I had to submit a full FBI background check. I was pressed for time, and the fastest way to do that is to use a computerized request, rather than the older method of having a police officer fingerprint you on a card, which is then mailed to the FBI. In Texas, a company known as Identix has the contract to provide this service, namely a monopoly. I made my appointment with Identix, and was provided with an address and directions. Since I was given a suite number, I expected to find an office building. I was understandably concerned, then, when I found instead a shady, room-by-the-hour hotel at that location. Assuming I must have been misinformed, I figured I had come that far, and might as well try. I walked up to the desk clerk and asked if a company in the hotel did fingerprints. I was surprised when, instead of a blank look, she said “oh, yes” and gave me the room number — the same, I noticed as the suite number I had been presented.

Walking into the hotel room, I found a regular room, bed and such intact, but all visible surfaces covered with computer equipment, file folders, and other such items. There was a computer in the sink in the bathroom! The room was hard to walk into, so full of equipment and people was it. There was one employee working there, who appeared to also live there. She hardly greeted me, seemingly oblivious to the principle of not being rude to customers. I was taken aback by the people in the room — with only one exception, all the customers were very beefy, tall men, with crew-cuts. Many wore t-shirt or polo shirts bearing the name of a police department or contractor firm. All glared at this newcomer as I sat down to wait my turn. The employee herself looked more capable of handling an M16 than a wineglass. Shockingly, I saw that, behind her Identix nametag, she wore a Halliburton nametag! That’s what I’m talking about when I say these companies are everywhere, doing everything.

The problem is that the nature of the criticism of these companies too often misses, or even completely reverses, the problem. Typical is the following from Jeremy Scahill, who has written extensively on this topic:

Right now in this country there are more private law enforcement agents than there are official law enforcement agents. That’s incredible! That should disturb people. Because it’s not just about “is the private sector more efficient than the government?” It’s about accountability and oversight. Where are the laws that govern these privatized forces? We’ve seen that in Iraq there’s no laws that govern them, and in a way it’s the same at home here. If your kid gets killed by a private security guard outside of a Best Buy, what happens? How do you get justice for your son? I mean, I have a friend whose son was killed by a security guard. He’s gotten nowhere with it. What laws govern these people?

Ah, so the problem with Blackwater is that it’s making a profit, like those other murdering companies, Microsoft and Whole Foods. It is dangerous because it is not the government. It follows, then, that if the government were to simply do these awful things themselves, it would be perfectly fine and sensible. Indeed, many critics seem to glorify "serving your country" and contrast it with working for a private firm concerned only with money. This is very weak as anti-war arguments go. As an aside, what happens if your kid gets killed by a cop outside of a Best Buy? How do you get justice for your son? I mean, I drove through a town today where dozens of people were killed by cops. Their families have gotten nowhere with it. What laws govern these people? (This is true, by the way; I drove through Waco this morning.) Scahill really should know better, having been one of the people to point out that, in the aftermath of Katrina, Blackwater employees patrolled the streets of Louisiana wearing badges issued by the state to serve as state law enforcement officers. This is a firm that is entirely a part of the private sector?

In this way, the left and right close ranks, aligning Bush with privatization, as if a company that has only one customer, the government, were some scary part of the free market. Yes, Blackwater fits the old nightmare scenario equation, but how can everyone be so willfully ignorant of the fact that Blackwater exists only to do things the government needs done? That Blackwater’s only income is paid from taxes, not voluntary exchange? This is fascism, in the old sense, not privatization. Yet the politicians and media agree to speak of it as if it were a free-market move, as if libertarians were whispering into Bush’s ear and encouraging this sort of thing. Then criticism of the war can become criticism of the contractors, which becomes criticism of libertarians. Is torture going on? Then it must be overzealous contractors responding to profit signals! Hideous free marketers! Damn you libertarians, supporters of poverty, haters of the poor, and now friends of torture and massacres!

So we see that these mercenaries are not the free market outdoing and taking over a formerly government-controlled business, Blackwater is not an exemplar of the security firms Rothbard spoke of when describing anarchy. What is Blackwater? It is an arm of the state, and is paid out of the executive, making it essentially a private army for Bush.

Let’s be clear here. In a state of anarchy, could there be a company like Blackwater? Sure. Could someone purchase all the services Bush has purchased, and do great destruction, as Bush has done? Yes, but this is not a criticism of anarchy, since it is happening now. More importantly, how many people could afford it? Do we honestly think Bush could ever have earned enough money to buy all this? Of course not, he finances it out of taxes. Not even Bill Gates could long afford to behave this way — the entire population of the United States is now straining under the bill! You would have to be insane to try to open a private army to take over the world on behalf of a private individual — this model is only profitable when you have a guarantee of a client with unlimited ability to take other people’s money. So, far from a part of the free market, Blackwater exists because a demand exists in government for its services, a demand that could not exist without government.

Katrina provided a taste of what is to come, unfortunately. The state uses disasters as testing grounds for what will later be adopted as policy. This is similar to testing policies in the TSA before adopting them for general police use. It is not unique in history to have a separate, special military force be created for use by a tyrant. As most readers of LRC will know, a revolt of the generals has been going on. Highly-placed military officers are speaking out against Bush and his misdeeds. This might be creating a desire for a special Republican Guard, answerable only to Bush, without the protections of Congressional and Supreme Court oversight. The generals speak out knowing that Bush cannot fire or kill them without Congress getting all huffy about it, but Blackwater’s executives answer only to Bush — who would object if he fired the firm and hired a new one? The CEO knows that the only way he can keep from going bankrupt is to please Bush.

Back up a bit to 2000. Right-wing commentators are screaming about another doomsday scenario — an administration so hell-bent on power that it refuses to leave the Presidency. In this case, Gore was seen as a proxy for a continued Clinton administration, and the situation was his challenge of election results. It is both difficult and scary to back up your mind and remember how you viewed Clinton in those days, when you consider how far we’ve come. A libertarian can now look at a cold-hearted killer like Clinton as relatively likeable and wish for the carefree days of Clinton, with his Oval Office blowjobs, renting out the Lincoln Bedroom, playing the saxophone… It isn’t that Clinton has gotten better, of course, but that Bush has moved to a whole new plane. In any case, that doomsday scenario can now be played out again, only for real. Last time the only threat Gore presented was a court challenge — Bush has purchased a private army, and has already used it on American citizens once. Might it be used in keeping Bush in office, or installing a like-minded individual who has not won the election? Will Blackwater patrol the polling booths, or make appearances at opposition campaign events to provide “security”? I propose that there is a scarier scenario than even that — that they won’t be needed, that a disaster or terror attack of some sort, perhaps a black-flag operation — will lead to a public outcry for keeping Bush in office or installing a like-minded individual without honoring election results. Stay awake, and look out.

Joshua Katz, NREMT-P [send him mail], is Chief of EMS at the Town of Hempstead Department of Parks and Recreation. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He presentlyworks in EMS atLegacy EMS and Harris County Emergency Services. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie, but has discontinued this practice on a regular basis, due to the sugar content of the port.

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Like many Austrians, I was first introduced to libertarianism through the writings of Ayn Rand. Despite having had many years to correct the errors I picked up from her, I still at times fall prey to the belief that rich businessmen are a class of victims, abused by the state. Certainly the state apparatus labors to make it appear so. However, getting up close and personal with this group quickly eliminates this illusion.

A few days ago, I was asked to provide EMS coverage at a major golf tournament, attended by all the rich types. I expected the surprised glances as the millionaires walked by, scratching their heads and asking "who invited him to the party?" for just a moment, until they realize that I am the hired help. I expected the patronizing conversation, the overly-gracious thanks when I provided a band-aid (no doubt impressed that a member of a less privileged class had the forethought to bring band-aids to a first aid station.) I was prepared for the "you all are soooo appreciated, you have no idea how important firemen are" speeches given by the women treated for faintness after their first experiences of walking outside in the sun. For the record, I’m not a fireman.

What I had failed to prepare myself for were the glaring reminders of just how wealth is accumulated in the New America. The preppy, faintly handsome men making conversation with me after receiving their band-aids tended to wear the name of their company emblazoned on their polo shirts. "That’s odd," I would think, noticing that the skinny, geeky man in my first aid station is upper-level Halliburton management, "he doesn’t look like a murderer." And so it went. Perhaps the specific evils engaged in would be different in other regions, but here in Texas, the wealthy seem to be entirely in oil or contracting. Now, certainly, I don’t want to suggest that oil companies are comparable to defense contractors. I have had it up to beyond here with accusations of price-gouging and all the rest, yet I can’t help but be a little suspicious of an industry that profits so much from the government’s splendid little wars. Before you start screaming that contractors are much-needed privatization in an area previously controlled by government, remember that the definition of fascism has to do with this nice little public-private partnership. Remember also that what we want is a free-market of consumer-chosen goods, not government-chosen bads. Do not try to convince me that Halliburton, Blackwater, Bechtel, and KBR are shining exemplars of free-market capitalism. You sure as heck can’t get away with that one post-Katrina.

So, these mild-mannered, geeky, annoyingly nice men are the people leading our new mercenary groups, working out the contracts, laying the groundwork and propaganda leading up to a war…and watching other men hit little balls with clubs. But that’s not all I saw. After so many years of hearing those standing to profit from death and mayhem extol the virtues of supporting the troops, what I saw that day was seemingly ironic, but in actuality all too pervasive.

The gentleman, bearing a ticket duly issued by the PGA, had come to the attention of EMS after falling several times. His medical history revealed that he had drunk several beers, but regularly had trouble maintaining his balance anyway, as he suffered from sciatica, vertigo, and PTSD. PTSD, hmm? Yes, apparently, after 2 tours in Vietnam, culminating in a purple heart.

Well, a purple heart veteran, surely a welcome guest among those who so loudly support our troops. He must have been a guest of honor at the party. If you believe that…no, the attendees looked at the man with distaste, and disgust. EMS consulted with PGA guest relations specialists, who called for the police. This skinny old man was then arrested by no less than 5 heavily armed, strapping young men, representing various police forces. The sense of helplessness that fills one as he witnesses severe injustice committed by a paramilitary police force is heavy, a burden on the head and heart.

The supposed charge was refusing to leave. This is an odd charge, as I many times watched the man ask the various people around him to direct him to a bus stop so that he could leave. They also added on public intoxication (if this is so public, why is the PGA able to ask him to leave?), as if the other attendees weren’t toasted. As the man insisted "I’m too drunk to drive, I need a bus" the police officers noted his intention to drive home, apparently also a crime now. Not that it was all business and no fun; the police officers took the time to make fun of and laugh at the man.

Yes, yes, this was private property, or at least rented. But it seems to me that if I agree to let you into my house, and then change my mind, all I can do is ask you to leave, not lock you in a cage. If you are in the process of leaving, I cannot label you a trespasser and lock you up, all while prohibiting you, at gunpoint, from leaving. Certainly, I have no moral right to call upon agents funded forcibly by others to do so. But, more to the point, as I once overheard Roderick Long remark, there are bad things in the universe other than rights violations. Halliburton executives harassing an injured veteran may not be a rights violation, but it certainly strikes me as wrong. How dare they generate pro-war propaganda, smearing me as insufficiently supporting the troops, and then treat the product of their actions so horribly?

In another timestream, this man might have been a lawyer, President, or maybe even something useful. Had the war planners not gotten Vietnam and their draft, maybe he would have gone to medical school, or gotten in on computers early; anything other than destroying his body and mind parachuting into hostile lands filled with people who hated him — for the damage wreaked on their lives by others in the same uniform. At this very moment, these executives are helping to create a whole new generation of lost potential, men who instead of having happy lives will be forever scarred, physically and emotionally, and unable to enjoy a normal life. For all that might have been, the truth is that now this man is the object of ridicule and scorn, laughed at and jailed. This so that other men, the older version of the very men now demanding that he be removed from their sight, might make their money and play their games. Now we live through the horror again, having learned nothing.

Support the troops, my ass. I plead to bring them out of harm’s way, where they sit in service of nothing but the wallet of the man asking me for a band-aid, and am told I hate the troops. They squirm at the sight of their victims, and have them hauled away in handcuffs, and tell us how much they support the troops. This is the New America, and really, you don’t need any part of it. Move to the country, or out of the country, and live a quiet life of reflection, making enough money to live comfortably without trying to keep up with anyone. You’ll be happier, and able to look at yourself in the mirror. You could earn "a phone number" working for these folks, but how would you wake up?

Joshua Katz [send him mail] was Chief of EMS at the Town of Hempstead Park and Recreation for the past three summers. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He is presently tutoring and volunteering, as well as reading voluminously, while waiting for Texas bureaucrats to renew his EMS certification. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie as a way to safeguard his health, lest he need treatment by a doctor.

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Having spent two years in the Brazos Valley region of Texas, I will soon be returning to New York for the summer, and from there, onto parts unknown, following a trail of twisted bodies and sick people — that is, moving where I get the best job offer in EMS. It seems appropriate, on this occasion, to write about the food of the Brazos Valley. If you are coming here, what are the local favorites to enjoy? As our culture grows increasingly Walmartized and suburbanized, local foods remain one of the few elements of regionalism left. Texas barbeque is still different from New Orleans barbeque, even if we do shop at the same grocery stores now. One way to enjoy the local flavor, then, is to do so literally.

As you know, I advocate and eat a low-carb diet. Indeed, you’ll find that there is a wide array of carnivorous delights available in the Brazos Valley. However, there are many fantastic things to treat yourself to as well. If you aren’t in desperate need of weight loss, and will only be here for a short time, you might want to allow yourself some room to cheat, and some room in your pants to grow, in order to fully experience all that we have to offer.

Also, please note that the Brazos Valley is home to the Texas Engineering Extension Service, the applied engineering part of Texas A&M University, which includes Brayton Fire Field, the largest and best known fire training school in the country. Thus, in each category, I will label one selection "Firemen’s Favorite." This indicates the most popular destination for students at TEEX’s famous Recruit School, a 13-week academy for entry-level firefighters from all over the country. If anyone knows how to eat, it’s a fireman.

Barbeque

I once asked a neighbor if he had met our new mutual neighbor, and what he was like. The answer I got was that his brisket was a bit dry. This is a common fact of life in Texas — you can judge a man by his barbeque. When Texans talk about barbeque, they mean beef brisket, sausage, and pork ribs, cooked low and slow, for a minimum of 12 hours, with no sauce applied until ready to serve so that one "tastes the meat, not the heat." This is a fantastic arrangement for low-carb dieters, as the sauce is almost always served on the side in Texas.

• Martin’s Place — Bryan, Texas. This is a true Texas landmark, same-family owned since the 1920′s. When TV stations do shows featuring Texas-style cooking, they go to Martin’s. If you’re used to big-city ways, this place may make you feel a bit out of sorts, but go with it, it’s worth it. If you are familiar with the legends, you’ll be surprised by the undecorated exterior and small, almost cramped interior. Take a seat, and the one waitress, naturally a family member, will greet you by and by. The best thing here is the ribs, but you’ll need to time your trip appropriately. Until 3PM or so, the ribs will not be cooked enough to enjoy completely. After 6PM, the ribs are sold out. In between, though, I recommend a pound or two of the best ribs in Texas.
• C&J’s Market — College Station, Texas and Bryan, Texas. This small chain serves a simple, unencumbered brand of barbeque that tends, unfortunately, to be excessively salty. Come here for the jalapeno-cheese sausage.
• J-Cody’s — Bryan, Texas. Firemen’s Favorite When a restaurant is located next to an ambulance base (or at least used to be, until the ambulance base moved) and is literally packed full, all the time, of firemen, police officers, and EMS workers, the food will rarely disappoint. Remember, emergency workers spend a great deal of our time driving around, trying local restaurants. We know what’s good, and J-Cody’s is. This is the only place where I will eat smoked chicken, and the brisket is exceptional. I’m not all that impressed with the ribs, but the true specialty here is ribeyes, cooked on their mesquite grill. You order at the counter, and receive a number, which will later direct a waiter to your table. Dessert is not worth the effort here, though. If you’re in the mood for some carbs, I recommend the cornbread and homemade white bread, available next to the buffet bar. The creamed corn here is famous, or at least deserves to be.
• Buppy’s Buffet — College Station, Texas. No matter how many times you are warned not to, you will try this place for lunch. Since you’ll go, drawn by the $5 all-you-can-eat bbq, I beg you to please go on a Thursday. The brisket is edible, but barely, and the sausage is not. However, Thursday is the day that a passable chicken fried steak is included on the buffet, which makes it worth the price.

Steaks and Chicken Fried Steaks

• Sodalak’s Original Country Inn — Snook, Texas. Firemen’s Favorite This restaurant is known around the world for having the fattiest specialty dish — chicken fried bacon. This is fatty bacon, breaded in a mixture of pork fat and breading, fried in bacon drippings, and served with a heaping bowl of cream gravy. I am not aware of any graduating class at TEEX that didn’t pronounce it their favorite dish. Steaks here are always moist and tender, and seasoned nicely with garlic and pepper. The small sirloin hangs off the edges of the plate, so you can imagine what the large looks like. I recommend the sirloin or porterhouse.
• Sodalak’s Beefmasters — Bryan, Texas. Apparently, having one exceptional location wasn’t enough, so they decided a second, mediocre location was needed too. Yet Beefmasters always has a wait and at the Original Country Inn you’ll have a waitress to yourself. Go figure, then go to Snook.
• Czech-Tex Steakhouse — Snook, Texas. The steaks here are carefully seasoned and well-aged, then cut paper-thin and grilled, in order to remove all taste and texture. Good barbeque, though.
• Longhorn Tavern — Bryan, Texas. Truly a bizarre concept — a Longhorn-friendly restaurant deep in Aggie country. They are forgiven, though, by virtue of perhaps the world’s greatest Chicken Fried Steak. They have raised this food to a work of art, and this is the place to go for the definitive version of this Texas favorite. The small is quite small, and the large is exceptionally large. Go for the large. Don’t let them fool you — Aggies go here, although they will swear up and down that they don’t. Look around and notice all the masks and paper bags being worn.

Donuts

• Shipley’s — Bryan, Texas and College Station, Texas. Firemen’s Favorite Certainly not a low-carb destination, this is certainly the most popular old-fashioned donut shop in the Brazos Valley. Go on a Sunday and you’ll find dozens of families eating their post-church meal here. Go any other day and you’ll find a collection of retired men, meeting daily over fritters and coffee to chew the fat (and, I suppose, the sugar.)
• Daylight Donuts — College Station, Texas. Another name for this place is "the other donut place." I have never eaten a donut here, but I’m told they are excessively sweet beyond all bounds of propriety. The staff is friendly, and will patiently explain the intricacies of the donut selection, though. This might be a good place to go if you prefer to eat your donuts without a crowd, but I’m told that the raised donut here is not a good choice.

Ice Cream

Surprisingly, ice cream in the Brazos Valley is dominated by chains, particularly Marble Slab and Cold Stone. Of course, a large market share is taken up by Dairy Queen, the original Texas ice cream. However:

• Shakes — College Station, Texas. This is a way upscale Dairy Queen, only much better and without any of the other stuff. The only product available here is called a Cement, which is the same as a Blizzard, only higher quality and you can’t turn it upside down. Highly, highly recommended.

Kolaches

These are a Brazos Valley specialty, and people will travel from miles around to buy them. I have no idea why. Cut one down the side and you have an inferior sandwich, usually made with a salty Vienna sausage and fake cheese. Whoopty-doo.

Chinese

Go to New York.

Delis

Yes, they have things here called delis. You want a deli, go to Brooklyn. Same for bagels and pizza.

Mexican

• Freebird’s World Burrito — College Station, Texas and Bryan, Texas. Firemen’s Favorite This might just be the best burrito in the world. Offering the half bird, freebird, monster, and super-monster, be aware that the monster is the most burrito per dollar. They offer a wide variety of flavored shells and high-quality, fresh ingredients. You can watch them grill the steak and chicken right in front of you. Make sure to get your card stamped for your 11th burrito free.
• Taqueria Arandas — Bryan, Texas. They have pictures of goats on the sign. They have goats inside. They also have the best breakfast tacos ever made.
• Mi Cocina — Bryan, Texas. Best quesadillas and enchiladas in the state. Also a very good place for corn chips, which are free.
• Casa Del Sol — Bryan, Texas. Everything is fantastic.
• Any scary-looking Mexican restaurant — if it’s dirty and raunchy looking, the food is great. Carry a gun and enjoy.

Beverages

• Shiner. Duh. Shiner Bock is the standard, Shiner Hefeweitzen for special occasions. Who needs anything else? Oh yea, there’s water too.

Raw Milk

• Check on the Weston Price website. Raw cow and goat milks are readily available here. I get mine from Water Oaks Farms in Bryan, which offers delivery and, if you’re a regular customer, exchangeable glass bottles. Very nice folks, very good milk. If you haven’t had raw milk, your trip to the Brazos Valley is the perfect time to try some. They also sell Brazos Supreme Ice Cream, made with raw goat milk. If you aren’t aware of the health benefits, do some reading. Start with Mercola.com, the Weston Price website, or asking Gary North why he’s alive.

Coronary Care Center

• St. Joseph’s Regional Health Center — Bryan, Texas.

Bariatric Surgery

• The Physician’s Center — College Station, Texas.

Joshua Katz [send him mail] was Chief of EMS at the Town of Hempstead Park and Recreation for the past three summers. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He is presently tutoring and volunteering, as well as reading voluminously, while waiting for Texas bureaucrats to renew his EMS certification. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie as a way to safeguard his health, lest he need treatment by a doctor.

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It isn’t clear that there is a single, good libertarian answer to the issue of student free-speech rights in public schools. Libertarianism, it must be admitted, has nothing to say about how best to carry out government interventions. Similarly, there can be no libertarian public school curriculum. However, sometimes the details of a debate can provide meaningful fodder for libertarian reflection, and such is the case in Morse vs. Frederick, coming Monday to the Supreme Court.

It seems Frederick, an 18-year-old-high school student, wanted to get on tv and annoy his principal, simultaneously if possible. So, when the Olympic torch came to his town, he was there to greet it, with a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." He achieved all of his goals, as he was noticed by tv cameras and suspended from school. Morse, the principal of his school, said the banner promoted drug use and was religiously offensive.

In terms of promoting drug use, the principal seems correct on the facts, that the banner does promote drug use. As far as being religiously offensive, I’d say the principal is brighter than I am, because I am unable to obtain any religiously meaningful message from the words of the banner. We can grant, though, that it probably was not pro-religion. So the principal seems to have gotten the facts right here. What is the consequence?

Regardless of the question of the existence of public schools, both charges seem incredibly hypocritical when viewed through libertarian eyes. After all, what of a teacher who comes into class with a steaming hot cup of coffee, and sips it, explaining to the students that he needs the caffeine to stay awake? Certainly, he is promoting drug use. The distinction is that the student is promoting illegal drug use, which most libertarians would agree is a distinction without a difference. More to the point, wasn’t there a time when educators did not attempt to settle contentious public questions, such as the status of marijuana, by simply banning one side from being expressed? What kind of stimulating discussions go on in social studies classes in this school if pro-drug messages, such as "the war on drugs should be ended" result in suspension?

One has to work hard to think of an institution more generally intolerant of religion than public school districts. Religious students are forced to recite the dogmas of evolution, and listen in silence as their beliefs are marginalized and belittled. Private prayers are forbidden, while the confessions of the secular faith are required. Students are taught the importance of embracing the open lifestyle, that homosexuality is not only to be tolerated, but loved and respected. Condoms are handed out openly, but speakers who dare mention the dreaded A word are banned. All sorts of alternative lifestyle groups are guaranteed after-hour use of school facilities, while religious groups are excluded. So, it is particularly ironic to see Morse being supported by school boards from around the country in punishing a statement she considers religiously offensive. Perhaps the problem is not at all the insult to religion, but the fact that the student dared write Jesus at all!

Now, the assumption that suspension is a punishment is difficult. In the face of mandatory attendance laws, suspension might be seen, not as a punishment, but as freeing the student from an onerous legal obligation. Nonetheless, the student clearly considered it a punishment, as did the principal, and so for the purposes of this case, we might as well consider it a punishment. This seems to be in line with Austrian subjectivism.

Moving past this hypocrisy, though, there are more absurdities to this case. For one, the entire incident took place off school grounds! An employer who punishes an employee for activities engaged in outside of work, even entirely relevant activities (environmentalist activism, say, for a petroleum engineer) will quickly find himself the subject of an equal opportunity and civil rights investigation. Yet this principal proposes to suspend students for holding strange banners off of school property. Morse argues that, although not a school function, the event is within her domain because, well, the school cheerleaders appeared there. No wonder Bush backs Morse on this case — this is quite similar in form to his absurd comments about Iranian meddling in Iraq. After all, Iraq is subject to American oversight, and meddling restrictions, because the Marines are there.

The case also illustrates well the complete irrelevance of the Constitution, precedent, and laws in today’s legal climate. In Tinker vs. Des Moines, the Supreme Court ruled that students have the right to free speech within the schoolhouse. With this in mind, the following surprisingly clear-headed analysis from Harvard Law professor Martha Minow seems to say it all:

“The student has a better case than the school. But the trend of the Supreme Court has been toward curbing student speech and increasing deference to school administrators."

Well, there you have it. Legally, the student is right. But the Court may rule the other way because, well, it feels like it. Putting it differently, the Court now rules on its own opinions and the politics of the day, without necessarily consulting the law-books.

So, despite there being no clear libertarian answer (although it’s fairly clear which way I lean), free speech cases in schools still are worthy of libertarian discussion. Oftentimes, it is the discussion of the case that can teach us the most or make the most important points.

Joshua Katz [send him mail] was Chief of EMS at the Town of Hempstead Park and Recreation for the past three summers. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He is presently tutoring and volunteering, as well as reading voluminously, while waiting for Texas bureaucrats to renew his EMS certification. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie as a way to safeguard his health, lest he need treatment by a doctor.

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It is seemingly ironic that the intense, perhaps unhealthy attention paid to, well, health and fitness is correlated with the tremendous obesity levels now seen in America. It is only seemingly ironic, of course, since most of the advice given in this regard is nonsense. We are advised to eat a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, prompting the release of insulin, a chemical which causes our bodies to store more fat. Such advice, it seems, must be given by those who wish to sell weight loss products, to ensure that people will not lose weight on their own. Also, a brief stroll through your local supermarket will make you aware of an odd fact — to follow this advice, you’d need to mostly shun natural, unprocessed products, and reach for only the highly processed, refined items. It would be curious and in need of explanation if our health problems were caused by natural foods and could be avoided by eating unnatural foods. This would be particularly odd in light of the fact that our largest health concerns have only become epidemic in the last 50 years or so. Why should natural foods cause these problems only as people eat less of them?

I would suggest that, in light of these considerations, the typical dietary advice can easily be dispensed with. I don’t have cool slogans for what I do, so I don’t think I’d get rich selling my nutrition ideas. I readily admit that I have no scientific backing or evidence for what I do, and so I can’t even get poor selling it academically. Instead, I’ll just describe what I do, and you can take it or leave it.

Given the intense attention paid to weight loss, it is unsurprising that if someone finds an old picture of me, their first question will be "how did you lose all that weight?" Indeed, over a 2-year period, I lost 100 pounds and have kept it off for 2 years since. Since my diet was pretty simple, I think how I kept it off is a more important question. It’s one I’m still experimenting to figure out. As a result, as I describe what I’m changing now, I might be describing things that are sure to make you gain back all the weight you lost. You’ve been warned.

As I suggested above, my first rule is a general preference for natural foods. In general, the less that’s been done to it, the better. My second rule was the inverse of the typical advice — I tried to eat more fats and less carbs. While trying to lose weight, I ate no grain products, very few fruits, and no refined carbs or sugars. During this phase, I did violate my natural principle and eat some artificially sweetened items, although I tried to keep it to a minimum. I followed the Atkins principles, but didn’t count grams, weigh foods, or other boring things that tend to make me lose interest. Instead, I just focused on what I was eating. Pasta — bad. Meat — good, provided it hadn’t been ruined with trans-fats and fillers and flavorings and such.

You’ll notice that following these basic rules simplifies things. There’s no need to agonize over individual ingredients, worry about trans-fats, or so on as long as you control the food item being eaten. Butter isn’t partially hydrogenated, and neither is anything else that’s found with minimal processing. I didn’t worry much about specific ratios or numbers or anything — if you don’t eat starchy or sweet things, the amount of carbs you eat drops without too much effort.

One thing I’ve come to believe now that I didn’t follow when I was dieting is hesitancy about diet foods. At the time, I justified the use of them, pointing out that it’s a food thing to fall back on if otherwise you’ll cheat. Now I’m not so sure that the actual bad food isn’t better, as long as you follow some conditions. First, cheat only on special occasions. The reason is obvious — if I eat a slice of cake on my birthday, I’m not telling myself it’s okay to eat cake every day, whereas I am doing exactly that if I eat a slice just because I feel like it. Second, never cheat at home. Again, your home eating is what you think of as normal, while eating out is what you think of as special. Keep the cheating special. There is a big difference in what it does to your head if you eat a small ice cream cone after getting together with long-lost friends at the beach, at a favorite ice-cream shop, versus sitting down to a bowl after dinner just because. Now, eating a low-carb ice cream at home may be the worst yet — now you’re telling yourself that you’re eating something sweet, and it’s not cheating at all. Plus, I get the feeling that even sucrose may be better than some of these things dreamed up in labs. Yes, I know about stevia, but see my more general reasoning above. Another rule for cheating is to eat only small amounts, and only one serving. In other words, if I’m at the famous bakery and it’s a special occasion, maybe I’ll get something — but just one item, and a small one. That makes the whole thing really special. Plus, make sure the cheating item is a high-quality, expensive item. That keeps you from repeating it too often. I’ve noticed that, whereas before my diet the idea of ordering a small ice cream was ludicrous to me, I’m now more than satisfied with a small. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Finally, even if I eat, I never feel guilty about it. I do a cost-benefit comparison, and decide to go for it. So why regret it later? You don’t get fat at one meal if the general habits are sound. But I won’t cheat by grabbing a quick slice of pizza — that sets me up to cheat every time I’m in a rush. Occasions for cheating might be, for instance, a celebration to brings me to Sodolak’s Beefmasters, a Texas steak restaurant I rarely visit. Since I’m only there once in a blue moon, I might order their world-famous deep fried meal. This consists of chicken-fried bacon and chicken-fried steak, all with cream gravy. Is it worth it? Not every day, but once a year, absolutely.

It may be that I’m more able to handle cheating now because I’ve started doing more cardiovascular exercise. Whereas before I was almost exclusively interested in weight lifting, and did my cardio as a chore, I’ve since found ways to make cardio more interesting. Having recently purchased an MP3 player, enabling me to listen to Mises.org lectures on the elliptical, certainly helps. It seems to work best if I do it before breakfast.

As I transitioned into weight maintenance, and also developed more of a desire to get stronger, I have increased my carbohydrate intake. Largely, this has consisted of eating a few pieces of a fruit a day, although I will also eat sprouted or true whole grain breads. I’ll also eat sprouted cereal on occasion, or puffed ancient grains. Wheat seems to be the worst grain to me, and I won’t eat it unless it’s been sprouted. I have my milk delivered by a local goat farmer, raw and fresh. I’m not sure if it’s healthier or not, but it tastes a lot better than supermarket milk. If nothing else, it’s grass-fed, with no antibiotics or growth hormones added. As I have increased by intake of carbs, though, I’ve tried to reserve them for early in the day, and rarely eat them other than at breakfast and mid-day snacks. The grains I pretty much only eat at breakfast, whereas I will eat fruits up until 1pm or so. Carbs seem to provide faster energy, and so are better eaten when they will be used. Of course, I always eat a good helping of fat with them.

Another thing that goes against common wisdom is that I like to keep my meals during the day lighter and smaller, and then eat one very big meal at dinnertime. My big meal, of course, will be some kind of roasted or grilled meat, with some vegetables but nothing starchy. A typical daytime snack might be a slice of sprouted bread with lots of butter, or a handful of nuts and a slice of cheese. I also love a big salad with feta cheese and some chicken as a small daytime meal. I find that if I eat bigger meals during the day, I get sluggish and my brain doesn’t function as well. I’m told doing all your eating at once should mess up your metabolism and throw off your blood sugar balance, but it seems to do the opposite to me. Again, I only know what I see.

Part of this transition revolved around my discovery a little over a year ago of Weston Price and his works. While I’m not entirely convinced that studying the teeth of hand-picked natives is a good research methodology, the ultimate advice he gives seems reasonable enough to take it seriously. The Weston Price Foundation’s debunking of the Mediterranean Diet myth is, in my opinion, a crucial addition to the literature on this question. Americans tended to interpret the Mediterranean dietary habits in ways that follow our usual patterns, eating tons of bread and pasta and calling it the Italian Food Diet. As the Foundation has pointed out, Italians drench their foods in butter and olive oil, eat lots of fresh vegetables, eat long, slow meals at which pasta is a first course, not an entrée, and eat lots of cheese. When you add in the famous salamis and other cured meats, it sounds less and less like a low-fat diet. Also important is that traditional Italian meals didn’t include pasta made from highly refined white flour, low-fat Parmesan cheese, or the other such items which have been the hallmarks of the diet in America. Mediterranean breads are famous for their hard crusts, dense, chewy substance, and complex flavors. These properties come from whole-grains lovingly prepared, and are not found in the local supermarket’s "Italian rolls."

I do believe that the American diet tends toward imbalanced consumption of fatty acids, and so try to eat seafood once a week. Also, while I try to get my vitamins and minerals from large quantities of a variety of vegetables, I do supplement omega-3s with cod liver oil.

So, what my diet comes down to is, during the day, small meals and snacks, consisted of fruits, vegetables, and whole or sprouted grains, along with dairy and some meat. This is then followed by a massive nightly meal, beginning with a pound or so of vegetables, followed by 2 pounds or more of simply prepared meat. Meat can be smoked with a simple rub, roasted with garlic, or grilled. I also have a big cast-iron skillet for pan-frying steaks in a mix of coconut oil and butter. Once a week, the meat is replaced with a few pounds of shrimp or scallops, stir-fried with vegetables in lots of butter. On special occasions, everything goes out the window, and I fight back simply by eating very small quantities of the best unhealthy foods.

I will readily admit that I think a lot of other contemporary "facts" about health are just plain wrong. The most ridiculous current belief, I submit, is the idea that the sun will kill you. How long have humans lived under the sun? Long enough that when Solomon wrote "There is nothing new under the sun," he didn’t feel a need to point out that the sun also wasn’t new. Now, suddenly, it’s healthier to smear toxic chemicals on our skin or just stay inside than to be exposed to sunlight. Bizarre. Has anyone ever thought that maybe the skin cancer they observe has something to do with the combination of sunlight with the massive quantities of man-made chemicals being ingested? When people eat few if any natural foods, ingest scary quantities of trans-fats, and eat 50 times more omega-6 than omega-3, and also get exposed to sunlight, it is very odd to blame the sunlight for their cancer.

Conclusion

I won’t give advice for fear that some liberal will read this site and sue me. However, I will sum up what I do. I eat natural foods, focusing on getting lots of natural fats, and strictly avoid unnatural fats and processed grains and sugars. I eat lots of meat and fish, tons of vegetables and fruits, and small quantities of whole or sprouted grains and fresh dairy. The exception is butter, which I eat more of than anyone else I know. I go through a four pack of butter every week — and I live alone. I put butter in everything I cook and top most things with it. I eat whole foods, and only use one supplement, which is cod liver oil. I also drink milk after every workout. Speaking of which, I get sweaty for 30 minutes three times a week, and I lift weights 2 or 3 times a week, focusing on compound lifts for the major muscles. I have two workouts, one focusing on building endurance by doing high-rep work on lighter compound lifts, such as stiff-legged deads, overhead squats, and dumbbell clean and press. The other focuses on strength, doing a few low-rep heavy sets on regular deadlifts, shrugs, squats, bench press, and so on. These are done with sufficient rest intervals to recover almost fully. I’m not going to win any strength competitions, but I’m strong enough to get through the day and lift all but the fattest patients. Not enough to write a book about, and it won’t start any fads, but it works for me.

Joshua Katz [send him mail] was Chief of EMS at the Town of Hempstead Park and Recreation for the past three summers. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He is presently tutoring and volunteering, as well as reading voluminously, while waiting for Texas bureaucrats to renew his EMS certification. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie as a way to safeguard his health, lest he need treatment by a doctor.

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It seems to me that statists can be divided into two general groups. First, there are the few arch-villains of statism. These are the folks who want a state simply because they want one. Most of them desire to rule the state, while others, perhaps the vilest of all, wish to escape responsibility for their own decisions by being ruled, along with everyone else. I once worked for a physician who was of this type. Having learned that I supported freedom, she responded "Oh, heavens no, people have to be controlled." I at least appreciated her honesty. It was refreshing after hearing so many people say "I favor freedom, but…"

The larger class of statists, I think, doesn’t think much about power. The evil statists worship power, but most statists don’t think in those terms. Instead, most believe that the existence of the state brings about desirable consequences, usually economic. These are the statists who can be convinced through economic education. If someone favors state interference in the name of prosperity, and can be shown that prosperity best results without state interference, we have a potential convert. As an example of this mindset, I present today another physician, Robin Cook.

Robin Cook is only secondarily famous as a statist. Primarily, he is famous as a novelist, and not a particularly bad one either. It is an odd irony that, among ideological fiction, statist novels are more often still entertaining than libertarian ones (I don’t think I need to say who this is a jab at (anyway, she’s dead)). Cook writes medical fiction featuring evil doctors, evil drug companies, and evil researchers. His government regulators, while not evil, at least are not heroic. Generally, they are inept bureaucrats who are told repeatedly of a barbaric and insane plot, and presented with clear evidence, and respond with disbelief. This continues until the evil plot affects the bureaucrat’s offspring, at which point they spring into action.

A good example is Mindbend, which I have just finished reading. In this novel, a drug company finds an interesting way to get their drugs prescribed. They send doctors on fancy cruises, drug them, and then drag them down to an on-board operating room where they implant electrodes into their brains. The electrodes, of course, order them to prescribe the appropriate medications (and to indicate DAW, presumably) but also have some untoward side effects.

The storyline isn’t bad, although I was unable to identify with the main characters. The hero is a bully to his wife from the book’s start, and while it is frustrating that his wife never trusts him, it should be noted that he never gives her any reason to.

More important, though, is the sermon with which Cook ends the novel. After concluding the story, he addresses the reader directly, and tells the reader also what to think of the story. He writes that this story is supposed to illustrate that medicine has become a business, and is not operating altruistically. While we all would respond with wild cheers, Cook apparently thinks this is a major crisis for medicine. In an inversion of Smith, he seems to be saying that we get our life-saving care from a doctor who is pursuing a profit, rather than depending on the doctor’s generosity — and this is very bad.

More to the point, how exactly is this story an illustration of that claim? Drug companies, in point of fact, do not implant electrodes in the brains of doctors. If they did, it is likely that when that news got out, people would stop using that brand of drugs. Business could never behave like that with impunity. The only organization that could get away with that would be government — the agency which Cook thinks should compel medicine to behave more altruistically!

To highlight the absurdity of this claim, consider Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart operates like a business — in fact, it is one. Nonetheless, Wal-Mart does not implant chips in the brains of its customers, causing them to shop there. Rather, it encourages business in a low-tech manner — by having lower prices and offering customers more!

Cook’s solution, naturally, is to outlaw and ban various things. Direct-to-consumer drug advertising is an easy example, although based on the story, it would seem that he would also like to restrict or ban drug advertising addressed to physicians too. He points out that drug companies spend more on advertising and lobbying costs than on research. Lobbying is largely necessary due to the government interference we already have, and in any case, would go away with the abolition of government. So it is hard to see how this statistic, without a further breakdown, helps Cook’s case at all. Suppose we left lobbying out of it, though, and drug companies spent more on advertising alone than on research. What of it? Companies don’t enjoy spending money for the heck of it — the research to advertising ratio is dictated by the concern for profitability. If massive amounts are spent on advertising, then these costs are necessary for the business to earn profits. How long, exactly, does Cook expect a drug company to continue to conduct research while not profiting off of new drugs?

It might be responded that drugs aren’t like other products. Drugs, after all, massively affect the body. If a drug is necessary, doctors should already know about it and prescribe it. Such a claim might be bolstered by referring to the increased number of doctor visits following the innovation of direct-to-consumer drug ads. With massive advertising, might drug companies not be luring people into taking drugs they don’t need?

To respond, let us first point out that some drugs aren’t necessary, but are quite helpful. It isn’t necessary to use medications to improve one’s sexual stamina, or regrow a head of hair, but it isn’t harmful either. Without advertising, people might not know that such drugs exist. They will then not mention to their doctor that they can’t keep it up, and not receive medical treatment.

Regarding the claim that physicians should know about necessary drugs, it must be pointed out that we aren’t living in a neoclassical costless information world. If doctors are to know such things, they need to be told them. A doctor who finished his residency 40 years ago might not be quite up to date on the newest medications, particularly if he has a busy practice. For drug reps to inform him of new medications, and to buy him lunch, isn’t a nefarious practice, it’s a means of spreading information.

Even if drug companies pay doctors to prescribe medications, or implant electrodes in their heads, or whatever, last I checked, prescription pads didn’t come packaged with bullets. Admittedly, I haven’t worked in a medical office in over a year, but I doubt that this has changed. Patients are not required to take dangerous medications simply because they have been prescribed. The exception is psychoactive medications. Importantly, though, the enforcement doesn’t come from the drug company or the doctor, but rather from the state. So in the only case in which drugs are really forced on consumers, the villain is again the organization which Cook suggests should solve problems.

Suppose we grant that consumers are helpless, stupid automatons who cannot question a doctor’s judgment. The obvious question is then why we should care to protect them, but we’ll set that aside. Competition between doctors should, even in this case, put out of practice the bad doctors. If we suppose that the drug company pays more to the doctor than the costs of lost patients, it becomes reasonable to ask why the company will continue to pay so much to this doctor while his patients die or unsubscribe. As he loses patients, his prescription pad loses value, and so the drug company will not be willing to continue to pay such high fees. What prevents this mechanism from working? Why, our good friend the state! By ensuring uniformity of medical practice through the litigation system, and by granting the AMA a cartel on doctor training and approval, the government has brought about a situation in which doctors need not compete. So the concerns Cook raises are only conceivable to the extent that medicine does not operate like a business! For instance, why does the AMA allow medical schools to have drug reps teach classes, as long as the drug companies pay the AMA? Simple, the AMA allows this practice because it can get away with it. If there were alternative accrediting agencies, this practice would put the AMA out of business.

The only real competition to the medical establishment today is the rise of non-physician healthcare providers. This is very limited competition, however. Mid-level providers, for one thing, must be supervised by a physician, and receive orders from a physician. When you get paid for every dollar your competition bills, there is little need to fear your competitor. For another, the general impression is that while NPs and Pas can handle routine cases, for complicated medical problems, a doctor is needed. This means that, effectively, there is no competition for doctors. This ensures the continued threat of exactly the problems Cook cites.

If Cook understood the economics of the situation, would he continue to advocate for enhanced government oversight? It seems far more likely that he would immediately begin to campaign for the reduction of medical regulations. Therefore, what it would take to convert Cook to the libertarian cause would not be ideological campaigns, which in fact wouldn’t work at all. It would take an understanding of praxeology, and of how to reason logically and economically. This firmly puts Cook in the second, non-evil class of statists.

Joshua Katz [send him mail] was Chief of EMS at the Town of Hempstead Park and Recreation for the past three summers. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He is presently tutoring and volunteering, as well as reading voluminously, while waiting for Texas bureaucrats to renew his EMS certification. He enjoys a glass of port and a wedge of Brie as a way to safeguard his health, lest he need treatment by a doctor.

What this comes down to is not a vote on the tax levy, but rather a vote on an increased tax levy. If the budget is passed, you will pay more taxes than last year. If it fails, you pay the same taxes as last year.

Even so, it might seem that this mechanism can, in fact, impede the growth of the state and even, through inflation, reduce it. As we know, however, if this were the case, the law would never have been passed. Its purpose is to pretend that citizens have a role in their school budget system, so as to reduce their outrage over the increased bills each year, while ensuring that the budget will not fail. Let’s investigate how this works.

Recall that a failed budget means that the district will collect the same amount of money as it did the previous year. Logically, since inflation doesn’t add up to much in a single year, the district should be able to provide the same services as the previous year. However, built into every budget are automatic raises for district and school administrators, as well as sweetheart deals for unnecessary land purchases, building work, etc. which are not eliminated if the budget fails. As a result, services are indeed rolled back. The district will enter what is called u2018austerity’ and many of its services will be eliminated.

I wrote a few weeks ago on this site about my misgivings regarding a standardized curriculum. Shortly thereafter, I ran into a woman I knew from my tutoring work. I had tutored her son in math. The boy was failing math horribly, and yet when I spoke to him, he demonstrated near full knowledge of the material he was supposed to know. Looking at his work, I noticed that full credit was being taken off for what were essentially stylistic problems. In some circumstances, he did do manipulations which were incorrect, and I agree that these should lose full credit even if the answer is right. In most cases, however, his thinking was absolutely correct, but followed a different line of attack than his teacher had. I explained the situation to his mother, explained that I could not be a successful tutor, and offered to help her speak to the teacher. When she communicated this information to the teacher, the reply was "Yes, I know full well that his method is correct and his answers are right. I was testing him on doing it my way, though, and he failed entirely at that."

Furious, his parents had taken him out of the high school and placed him into a program known as BOCES. In New York, BOCES schools offer a variety of curricular choices, mainly focused on technical and vocational training. Since his family owned a boat repair business, he studied boat and auto mechanics. Setting funding aside, I feel quite positive about BOCES. I can only imagine, of course, how much better it would achieve its purposes if it were private. In any case, the boy is now in his junior year and has already been conditionally accepted to an excellent engineering college.

His mother told me how, not able to keep up with tax increases, she had voted no on the budget and cheered when it failed. The district then announced their austerity plan. Of course, it included entirely eliminating the BOCES program, which would leave her son with no viable way to graduate from high school and pursue this college acceptance.

This, then, is the way u2018consumer sovereignty’ is carried out in the public sector. First, make all uses and non-users alike, pay for the u2018service.’ Then, provide a poor service, or, in the case of the standard high school curriculum, a positive harm. Of course, since most don’t notice this and assume the schools are actually providing an education, private schools find it hard to compete with the government schools. When your competition can be attended at no additional cost, it is hard to compete indeed. Many parents who would prefer the private schools lack the ability to pay for them, while also paying for the government schools.

Of course, with all obligated to pay the bills, there is no reason not to continually raise prices and use the extra to pay yourself more. The only check on this is rising anger as the taxpayer is squeezed harder each year. This rises to the level of a real concern because school board members and administrators in many cases actually live in the community. They don’t have the distance that the President does; they wish to be invited to block parties and have to shop in local stores. Thus, there must be a safety valve — a way this pressure can be released without being directed at the guilty parties. The obvious way to do it is by making the people themselves bear the guilt — let them do it to themselves, democratically!

The final task, of course, is to ensure that they will not actually use the choice they have been given. Logically, if the people are to do it to themselves, they must be given a choice not to. One good way to keep them from exercising it is by blackmail. After crowding out private provision of needed services, make it clear that those services are the ones that will be lost if they don’t agree to the tax hike.

This isn’t the only tactic used, of course. School administrators and teachers appear on local radio to discuss the need to "support our schools and our children." It goes without saying, of course, that principals don’t mention that the tax hike will go primarily to raises for administrators, not expanded services. In most cases, the schools do not increase services at all each year, and put all the extra money into raises. Entire class days are spent "teaching" the students about the wonders of public school funding, and the importance of passing the budget. I went to public high school in New York, I remember it. Parents who are not particularly knowledgeable in politics or economics will find themselves hard put to deny their child’s tearful request that they "go tonight and save my school…if you don’t and the bad people win, I’ll have no future."

Conclusion

Any time you hear a government advocating for democracy, rest assured that the election will change nothing. People will be blackmailed and bludgeoned into voting u2018properly.’ If they choose not to do so, and vote the wrong way, they will simply be punished, like small children, until they learn to behave. It is with this in mind that I reflect on the American crusade for u2018democracy’ in the Middle East.

Joshua Katz [send him mail] is Chief of EMS at the Town of Hempstead Park and Recreation for the summer. He has studied philosophy of mind, logic, and epistemology of economics from an Austrian perspective, and is a former graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He is planning to return to Texas after the summer, in order to seek work in EMS there. He enjoys a glass of port, a wedge of Brie, and a chapter of Cicero as a way to start his day.