Recently by Phil Maymin: Einstein Was Wrong When It Came To Socialism

One guy beat another guy in vote totals this month, but they both lost, even in their combined total, to None of the Above. For the fourth Presidential election cycle in a row, and the 27th time out of the past 30, most eligible voters opted not to vote.

Since 1896, the candidate with the most votes has gotten an average of 22 percent of eligible voters; all of remaining candidates combined have averaged 20 percent of eligible voters. None of the Above has dominated the past century with a 58 percent average.

A mandate is the implicit support of the people for government policies. When a candidate sweeps into office on a large majority, other elected federal officials, fearing for their own future campaigns, go along with the new proposals. When a candidate earns a meager victory, they are less prone to hop on. Indeed in eight of the last thirty elections, the winning candidate didn’t even get a majority among those who chose to vote: his resulting mandates were much weaker.

But what about nobody? Nobody has been consistently winning in a landslide. Nobody’s supporters are loyal and reliable: once you vote for nobody, you almost always vote for nobody. Government media would have you believe that nobody’s supporters are lazy, shiftless, racist, uneducated, ignorant, bad citizens. They are disparaging the majority of adult Americans, the silent majority that places nobody first, the silent majority that knows, despite all the rhetoric, that nobody listens, nobody will protect us, nobody really cares.

What if nobody’s mandate won? What if no new laws had been passed for the past four, eight, sixteen years — would we be worse off, or much much better?

Dr. Phil Maymin [send him mail] is an Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free Your Inner Yankee and Yankee Wake Up. His latest book is Financial Hacking.

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When it came to politics, Einstein was no Einstein.

Albert Einstein was one of the smartest scientists ever. But when it came time for him to convince others of his socialist views, he essentially rejected all of the foundations of science.

Science is founded on facts, models and experiments. Facts are basic observations about reality anybody can confirm. Models are the stories that we tell to explain the world in a useful way. Logic lets us develop the new predictions of our models, and experiments let us test them.

A few years before his death, in the inaugural article for an American socialist magazine, Einstein argued that the facts we have observed about economics have emerged from at least somewhat capitalistic systems and therefore must all be discarded in discussions of how to overcome such “predatory” systems.

He also claimed that models for economics are difficult because “observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately.” Furthermore, the models of economics we have learned have been foisted on us by immoral “conquering peoples” who have controlled our education; therefore we must dispose of all models that are not socialistic.

Even logic fell by the wayside after socialism invaded Einstein’s soul. “Science cannot create ends,” he explained. “Science, at most, can supply the means.” So who can supply the ends? “The ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals.” Einstein left unstated who these lofty personalities are who ought to control our lives.

Einstein abandoned all of the foundations of knowledge and truth. He wrote, quite plainly, “We should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems.”

“Man can find meaning in life,” he asserted, “only through devoting himself to society.”

He was totally and utterly wrong. You and I have found meaning in our lives without devoting ourselves to society. It’s not a model, because it doesn’t explain the world. It’s certainly not logical. In fact it’s self-contradictory. To devote to a cause means to willingly give yourself over to it. But if every individual gives himself over to a society, then there is no longer any will left to oversee and manage the devotion. And it would fail by experiment. You and I are counterexamples.

Einstein envisioned a centrally planned economy, a single world government, with all means of production publicly owned, with work distributed equally among all those who are able, with a guaranteed livelihood to every person on Earth, and with an educational system oriented towards social goals.

What would Einstein do with those who were able to work but didn’t want to? Or those who wanted to exchange some of their guaranteed livelihood today for a chance at great wealth tomorrow (and were willing to risk poverty for it)? Or those daydreamers who wanted to challenge accepted principles? Would he simply educate all the ambition out of them?

Socialism is a worm, a worm that even Einstein couldn’t shake. If the greatest physicist of the twentieth century can succumb to the socialist infestation, then anybody can. Perhaps our only defense is to maintain an even stricter adherence to the search for truth than he did. When it came to politics, Einstein was no Einstein.

This originally appeared in the Fairfield Weekly.

Dr. Phil Maymin [send him mail] is an Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free Your Inner Yankee and Yankee Wake Up.

The Best of Phil Maymin

This raises even more interesting questions than just about Beck himself: what makes a person a phony? At what point can a person with formerly statist views be considered to have had an authentic change of heart?

The funny thing is that those who think he is a true libertarian tend to watch him; those that think he is a fake do not. I was one of those who did not, and it caused a lot of debate with those who did. Why not watch him? He is interesting, he raises good questions, and so on.

I finally watched him last night as he discussed the book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Thaler was my dissertation advisor a few years ago when I received my Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Chicago. I read an early version of their book. I even provided an extra Simpsons reference for them. I am mentioned in the acknowledgments. I have read every single post on the Nudge blog, sent them useful links, and commented on items. In short, I am intimately familiar with the themes and the content of Nudge.

Watching Beck, I discovered the truth about him: neither those who claim him as a libertarian nor those that denounce him as a phony are right. Beck is not a libertarian; he is a deep-seated socialist. But he is also not a phony; it is so deep-seated in him that he doesn’t even realize it.

I had three problems with Beck’s show. The first is that he provides the right conclusions but he gets there with the wrong arguments. This is extraordinarily frustrating to watch. Suppose you like a girl, or a boy. Or you find a particular religious text magnificent. Then imagine how you would feel hearing someone praise your girl or boy, or your religious text, but for all the wrong reasons. You want to simultaneously object and agree. Yes, the object of your heart is wonderful, but not at all in that way. "Thumbelina is beautiful. She is so tall!" Huh?

Beck’s main message is that if governments nudge people to do the right thing by changing their default options, then that will eventually lead to riots and the collapse of society. I do agree that government nudges are a bad idea. But Beck’s argument is essentially a slippery slope argument. And there are two big problems with slippery slope arguments.

First, regardless of disclaimers to the contrary, they implicitly assume that the current proposal in and of itself is harmless — for example, replacing the default choice of unhealthy fries with healthier carrots in, say, a kid’s meal. That’s giving up on the fight. Perhaps there is some truth to the slippery slope, that indeed in a world where we accept government regulations of defaults we will become more acquiescent of further government interventions. But that will never win you any converts. "We’ll just deal with it later," people will think. Or they will suggest we just vote on the current proposal and when the really bad stuff comes, we can revisit it then. A slippery slope is a vacuous counterargument because it leaves the person you are trying to sway simply feeling that this current proposal, whatever it is, is not so bad by itself.

Second, a slippery slope argument does not bind the person arguing. In other words, Beck leaves himself wiggle room to later change his mind completely and support nudge-like policies. How? He can just say, "A-ha! I have discovered a way to block the slippery slope. We just need to also do X, and that’s it." Then with some magic, the fries lead not to riots, but to world peace. There is no intellectual commitment with a slippery slope argument.

My second problem with Beck was his exaggerations and misstatements of major issues. If all I had known of Nudge had been from watching his show, and then I was to debate Thaler or Sunstein, they would destroy me. Numerous times Beck claimed that nudges remove or restrict options. Thaler would quite clearly argue that this is not so, and he would win that argument hands down. Most nudge policies are simply about changing defaults, such as the default 401k plan you invest in, or the default health plan you choose. You can always choose whatever you would have otherwise chosen, if you so wish. But those who don’t care or don’t know would be opted into a better plan, not as viewed by Thaler or even Beck, but as viewed by people just like them, or in some cases, even by themselves.

There are ways to argue against nudging people through government force. But slippery slopes and false statements are not good ones.

How would I argue against nudge? First, I would point out that it is wonderful and completely unarguable when it comes to private companies or households. It probably is a great idea to hide the fatty foods in your kitchen and make the healthier ones more easily available. You will probably snack a little better. If you run a company providing pensions to your employees, why not default them into what you and other employees clearly view to be the best alternative, rather than just bonds or just stocks? Whoever disagrees can easily change it, but whoever didn’t think about it wouldn’t regret it much later. Perhaps you disagree with an example here or there, but at heart Nudge provides a set of useful tools to help people without being abrasive. In a private, free market setting, that is hard to argue against. It is hard not to cheer for it.

Second, I would point out that when it comes to government nudges, it is not the same thing. Government nudges are wrong. I have had this debate with Thaler and we disagree. He thinks libertarians are irrelevant because we don’t address practical questions. I think governments that implement nudges in areas they are not supposed to intervene are continuing their unconstitutional activities. Should the default military armor for soldiers who can choose otherwise be X or Y when we are fighting an unconstitutional war of aggression? I don’t think it is being irrelevant to say that that question is silly, and that the bigger question of non-interventionism ought to be addressed.

But Beck does not make a single case against immoral government behavior. In fact, he agrees with the principle. And this is the third, and biggest, problem that I have with him.

He started and ended his show with the same scenario, saying that America is facing a choice, a choice between socialism and freedom. And that while there are some that support socialism, there are more of us who support freedom, and books like Nudge are implicitly supporting socialism without actually saying so, and therefore depriving the American people of the debate. Let’s just have it out in the open, he says, and let the people decide.

And that’s where he is most wrong. Some things are absolutely not up to the people to decide. If a majority voted to execute an innocent person without due process, that is wrong. If they voted for genocide, that is wrong. Morality and majority vote are not the same thing.

But Beck thinks they are. And that’s where he reveals his statism and his socialism. Majority vote is the very basis of socialism. But true libertarians know that even 95 percent of a county can be wrong. And the important fight is to win the war in the hearts and minds of people with truth and actual engagement of the details, not sweeping things under the rug, arguing about slippery slopes, or playing clips of a handful of people.

Beck does not realize he is a socialist. It is an unstated assumption of his that of course we should leave it up to the people.

We’ve tried that, Glenn. When people can vote themselves your property, they will.

The fundamental tenet of socialism is that whatever the people say is right.

The fundamental tenet of libertarianism is that the initiation of force is wrong.

By explicitly and continually arguing that we need to all make a decision together, Beck has shown himself to be a socialist at heart. It is almost as if he is saying, "Look, I would prefer freedom, but if the people vote for socialism, then that’s okay."

Glenn, it is not okay.

Dr. Phil Maymin [send him mail] is an Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free Your Inner Yankee and Yankee Wake Up.

The Best of Phil Maymin

Barack Obama’s administration now wants to be able to see the headers on all e-mails that you send, even if there is no probable cause, no warrant, no judicial oversight and no disclosure to you or anyone else that the FBI even peeked. As far as I can tell, Obama’s bill modifying the Electronic Communications Privacy Act would allow the FBI to secretly track information in the from, to, carbon copy and subject fields, among others. The bill would likely also include the history of web sites you visit.

I use terms like “likely” and “as far as I can tell” not only because the language is vague — it would merely insert the four words “electronic communications transactional records” into an ever-growing list of exclusions the FBI can rely on to avoid getting a warrant — but also because there doesn’t seem to be any plausible way to object, review, or punish an overbroad or unnecessary FBI investigation.

Meanwhile, just try and find the analogous records between people who communicated with Bush and those who communicated with Obama. Why is it that the two administrations are so similar? Who is pulling the strings? What information could possibly be more important to American security than knowing why two seemingly different individuals continue to pursue the same big-government policies?

Yeah, good luck with that. The law is intended as a one-way peep show only, and we are the ones on a stage with a pole.

One often hears claims that this law or that law will have a “chilling effect” on free speech. The term was part of a 1965 Supreme Court decision striking down an odd postal service law requiring anybody receiving communist political propaganda to specifically authorize receipt before the post office would deliver it. Speech was iced: people could not say what they wanted to say. In a sense, the law was a kind of prior restraint on speech, which is unconstitutional.

How does effectively cc-ing your emails to the FBI and letting them snoop around your browsing history cause a chilling effect? Here’s one example. Try to fact check the assertion in the first sentence that Obama continues to approve the “targeted kill” program to authorize an assassination of anybody on earth, including an American citizen like you, at any point in time, even using an unmanned drone, if he decides you are an imminent threat.

Perhaps you might resort to Google, but with what search term? Bear in mind that your search is part of the web address. If you search for “Obama,” your address bar will say “q=OBAMA” somewhere in there. That information is likely part of your electronic communications transactional records. Say hi to your local federal agent. How comfortable would you feel searching for the term “Obama target kill?” The FBI may decide to share your name with the Secret Service, under their “better safe than sorry” doctrine.

And when the president also claims the right to assassinate anyone without due process, you may not even have time to regret the loss of your judicial rights if you are deemed an imminent threat.

This article originally appeared in the Fairfield Weekly.

Dr. Phil Maymin [send him mail] is an Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free Your Inner Yankee and Yankee Wake Up.

The Best of Phil Maymin

Those who support redistribution tend not to ask or allow others to ask basic questions about it, out of feelings of guilt and shame. Redistribution needs to be believed in and if you question it in any way there must be something wrong with you.

Those who oppose redistribution simply view it as stealing, and asking these questions is akin to asking what optimal amount of mugging should be tolerated in a city. It’s repugnant.

But let’s you and I think about it a little bit, on this April 15th day of taxes and spending. Most of the federal budget is spent on redistribution in various forms: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, and many more. Let’s be a little abstract so that we can distance ourselves both from the guilt and the repugnance that quashes our natural curiosity. Let’s ask some basic questions.

How much money should be redistributed from the wealthy to the poor? Is it a fixed number that depends on the needs of the poor, or is it a variable number that depends on the profits of the wealthy? What does it mean to be wealthy, high recent income or lifetime accumulated assets?

How should the largess be distributed? Equally to everyone below a certain threshold? Should those who are poorer receive more? What does it mean to be poor, low recent income or lifetime accumulated debt?

How often should the redistribution took place? Once, to account for past injustices, or repeatedly, like clockwork?

Most importantly, how can we objectively think about these questions without resorting to character accusations?

One approach is to proceed by analogy. Start with your body. Just about everybody has extra blood. By all of the standard arguments for redistribution — need, excess wealth, not the result of hard work, fairness — blood should be redistributed. Along with your 1040, you should send along a baggie of blood. Should everybody be forced to redistribute blood?

People need blood. According to America’s Blood Centers, someone needs blood every two seconds. One in seven people entering a hospital will need blood. One pint of blood can save up to three lives. Here, the redistribution questions are easy: everybody who needs blood for medical reasons should get all that they need, whenever they need it.

Only a small minority have the appropriate blood. Only 38 percent of the U.S. population is eligible. And everybody in that blood-wealthy group can spare a little. The amount of blood to be redistributed depends only on the amount needed to save people, not on the amount the donors can spare.

Your blood type is not the result of hard work or ingenuity. Taking some of your blood, unlike taking some of your money, won’t affect your incentive to work. Therefore, we could redistribute this repeatedly.

It is only fair that those who have better blood through no credit of their own and who could safely give some of it up, be forced to do so, to redistribute it to those who need blood through no fault of their own and whose lives could be saved.

Blood is better than money because politicians can’t even pocket any. All of it goes to the intended recipients.

Do you support forced redistribution of money? Do you support forced redistribution of blood? If your answers to the two questions are not the same, you have a problem on your hands.

This article originally appeared in the Fairfield Weekly.

Dr. Phil Maymin [send him mail] is an Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free Your Inner Yankee and Yankee Wake Up.

The Best of Phil Maymin

On Dec. 20, 20 or so people crowded into Dorothy’s home to await Sananda. The clock struck midnight. No visitor. One Seeker noticed a second clock showed only 11:55 p.m. The Seekers reached a consensus that it was not yet midnight.

When even the slow clock showed 12:10 a.m., one guy put on his hat and went home. Perhaps he thought he could get his job and wife back. The rest stayed, in stunned silence.

A little after 4 a.m., Dorothy got another message. The disaster had been called off. The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God saved the world from destruction.

The next afternoon, the group called newspapers, friends, anybody who will listen, to spread their message. Their single, most important prediction had proven blindingly obviously false, but their reaction was renewed vigor and belief.

Sound familiar? For 50 years, our government dispersed our military to every corner of the globe, whether the locals wanted us there or not. Resentment grew, and that resentment grew into a movement. One of its results was the hideous terrorist attack on 9/11, in clear retaliation to our unjustified imperialism. What was our response? More troops to countries entirely unaffiliated with the 9/11 attackers.

For almost a century, our government has controlled the value of money through the central bank. Inflation has ravished the dollar. Regulations and guarantees only encouraged reckless risks. In the Great Depression, much as in the past few years, the mistakes of centralized economic planning became obvious. What was our response? More centralized economic planning.

A few years ago, a campaign called Earth Hour started with feeble support. The intent was to have people switch off electricity in their homes and businesses to make a point about the environment. In the last year, global warming has been shown to be fraudulent and simply wrong, as proof came that scientists essentially fabricated evidence. It’s clear the effects of humans on the environment is negligible. But Earth Hour founder Andy Ridley said recently the movement has only grown. The environmentalists reacted just as the cult did to the exposé of the myth: spread the word. This year, a thousand landmarks and the offices of many global companies across 300,000 cities in over 100 countries darkened for Earth Hour.

Why does this happen? We actually know why, because three psychologists infiltrated the Seekers, testing what was then a new theory of cognitive dissonance, that uncomfortable feeling you get from holding conflicting ideas. The psychologists predicted that when the aliens failed to come, those who had invested the most in being rescued would strengthen their resolve.

Five conditions must be met for someone to become a more fervent believer after disconfirmation. First, the belief must be held with deep conviction. Second, the person must have made substantial commitment, the more irreversible the better. Third, the belief must be such that events could refute it. Fourth, the undeniable evidence must occur. And fifth, most importantly, the person must know others who support the idea.

Fanatics can’t be reasoned with. If our government is like Dorothy, we are in trouble; even though the rest of the cult eventually dispersed, she continued to act as a channel for Sananda until her death. But perhaps we can draw inspiration from her husband. He never supported Dorothy’s visions. On the eve before the cataclysm, he slept soundly through the night.

This article originally appeared in the Fairfield Weekly.

Dr. Phil Maymin [send him mail] is an Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free Your Inner Yankee and Yankee Wake Up.

The Best of Phil Maymin

A small
movement for freedom begins in one of the most statist countries
on the planet.

With Tea Parties
all around us, President Obama’s approval at all-time lows
and dissatisfaction with government seemingly ubiquitous, you might
wonder if this kind of discontent is happening in other countries.

In Israel,
one of the world’s longest-lasting bastions of socialism and
concentrated state power, the flower of liberty has not yet started
to bloom, but seeds are afoot. Boris Karpa, a graduate student of
history at Tel Aviv University, is spearheading a libertarian uprising.
His Israeli freedom blog is at www.libertarian.org.il.
Karpa agreed to an exclusive interview with the Weekly.

What is
the history of libertarianism in Israel?

In general,
libertarianism and market liberalism are not a big part of Israel’s
history. Aside from an abortive anti-tax party in the 1970s and
similar such marginal attempts, there’s precious few libertarian
activists in this country. There are several think tanks, however,
that do great work promoting libertarian ideas, especially libertarian
economics, through seminars, press releases and so forth. I must
especially commend the Jerusalem
Institute of Market Studies, who focus on the promotion of Austrian
economic thought.

Why is it
do you think that Jews and libertarianism don’t get along?
I would have thought the pair would be a perfect match, with the
shared focus on law and justice and freedom. Next week is Passover,
the Jewish festival celebrating their exodus from slavery, one of
the most libertarian holidays anywhere.

I think that
the main issue is that, when you look back to the history of zionism,
it didn’t grow up in a vacuum. Zionism was inspired greatly
by the nationalist movements of Europe, and these movements were
very influenced by socialism and collectivism. So the principal
idea of classical zionism, which is what the dominant strain of
zionism was called, was that the Jewish state must be socialist
in some way. And that the capitalist, bourgeois life of European
Jews – who as you know often tended to work as attorneys and
engineers and white-collar bourgeois types – was a form of
moral corruption. Therefore, the zionists felt they had to focus
on creating something they called “The New Jew.” We’re
talking about the leading faction of zionists here, the people who
later held power in Israel for its first few decades. And so the
New Jew had to be re-accustomed to manual labor. That’s part
of why the Kibbutzim were created. The idea was to take this stereotypical
Jewish attorney and make him into a hard-working farmer – a
socialist, hard-working farmer.

That’s
disgusting. I never realized that.

And of course
they realized not everybody could be farmers. But the thing you
need to understand about early Israel is that it was led by very
statist people.

This might
be a difference between our countries. Americans are at heart very
libertarian. They deeply believe in freedom and distrust government.
Do you feel Israelis, at heart, are also freedom-loving people or
do you feel Israelis are really and truly statist, meaning your
road is much harder than ours?

I think our
job would be harder, to some extent, than yours is, because Americans
can fall back on the inspiration of people like Thomas Jefferson,
who were not libertarians, perhaps, but who were anti-statist and
understood the dangers of an out-of-control government. For us,
these founder figures we look up to are people like Ben Gurion.
But I think the average Israeli realizes at some level how high
the taxes are, how crazy the bureaucracy is, that he’s lost
freedoms and money to the ever-growing state.

But there
are far older heroes for Jews. Do you think there are libertarians
in the Old Testament? Who is the most libertarian?

Samuel, definitely
Samuel, he’s the most libertarian guy. … [I]f you recall,
originally, the Jews had no king. Their religious life was administered
by the priests who also led them in battle, and some form of wise
men they respected served as judges locally. The only police we
have in the Bible are fellows who enforced order on the temple grounds.
But at a certain point, the Jews decide that they want a king. And
if the Bible is to be believed, Samuel gives a long speech warning
them about all the evils a king can do – about the king taking
a tenth of their income in taxes and drafting their sons to ride
his chariots and his daughters to be his slavegirls. He goes on
and on in this vein. You know, when the Israeli Center for Social
and Economic Progress printed Milton Friedman’s Free
to Choose in Hebrew, they printed Samuel’s speech on
the front page.

What is
the biggest problem in Israel? What argument for liberty resonates
the most with people?

I think the
main problem in Israel is the bureaucracy. You see, government in
Israel operates in a vastly different principle from American government.
The U.S. has several levels of legislature, and when they want to
make a new law, they pass a bill of 1,500 pages because they want
to leave as little as possible to the bureaucrats. Here we have
one legislature and some city councils that are virtually powerless.
And the legislature passes a bill of 20 pages which creates bureaucrats,
and they create regulations as they see fit. And so there’s
an enormous army of bureaucrats in every level of government making
rules and determinations and licenses, which every citizen must
contend with if they want to do something.

Well, we
also have tons of agencies, like the SEC, FDA, EPA, etc., who create
their own rules, but you’re saying there’s something even
more?

Absolutely.
Because the rules are made by appointees. For example, we have the
Beach Protection Council.

Sounds sexy.

If you want
to have a new development on a beach, then after going through all
the regular planning hoops, you must also get the council’s
approval. And because their job, as they see it, is to protect beaches
from those nasty developers. … Bottom line, the council measures
its success in how many applications it denied. … Another example:
The government made motor racing legal several years ago. But they
made it conditional on a committee making up some safety regulations
and so forth. And because the committee is still working on it,
we still can’t have motor sports in this country. Can you imagine
what would happen if Congress banned NASCAR?

This article
originally appeared in the New
Haven Advocate.

March
24, 2010

Dr. Phil
Maymin [send him mail] is an
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free
Your Inner Yankee
and Yankee
Wake Up.

The
Best of Phil Maymin

Why are good
guys so dumb? Pick any movie over the past few decades that had
a protagonist with a heart of gold; chances are they also had a
head of brick. The bad guys are always clever and smart but evil,
and we are left reluctantly rooting for the virtuous but somewhat
slow hero. They are all a bunch of Homer Simpsons, bumbling and
making mistakes for 89 minutes before their moral sense kicks in
and they channel their inner strength to do the right thing before
the credits roll.

Is it just
a Hollywood formula or is there a deeper truth? Does too much smarts
obscure your moral compass?

In the world
of academia, it is a cliché to observe that the more educated
the faculty the more likely they are to be socialists, but that
might be a combination of effects, including the ivory tower feeling
that we can and should control the masses, if only we had the right
people in charge.

In your own
life, you probably knew all there really is to know about right
and wrong when you were a toddler. Don't take other people's stuff.
Don't hit. Since then, you've grown a lot smarter. Now, it is okay
to take other people's stuff if someone else wants or needs it more.
It is okay to hit if the person looks like someone you don't like.

Except you
still have a niggling doubt in the back of your head, a tension
you can't quite reconcile. You know it is still wrong to take people's
stuff, so you call what you are doing "redistribution."
You know it is wrong to hit, so you call it "spreading democracy."

Maybe there
is a bug in the human psyche, a moral cancer, that grows and takes
over our basic, simple understanding of right and wrong the longer
we live, the smarter we get. Maybe it's why we look down on those
who still cling to their childlike beliefs in good and evil.

Our country
was founded by Yankees, and Yankees originated essentially right
here in Fairfield County. But Yankee started off as a derogatory
term. By the time of the revolutionary war, the British were using
it condescendingly to describe our kind of stupid but determined
forefathers. They called us "Yankee Doodles," basically
ignorant dolts. We stuck a feather in our cap and called it macaroni
— how droll!

But it was
us Yankees who kicked Britain's rump right back across the pond.

The original
etymology of the term probably came from the diminutive Dutch first
name Janneke, meaning Little John. And ironically
it probably came from us Connecticut people using that name to describe
the Dutch settlers of New York, but an outside group, the British,
began applying it to us.

Sound weird?
It's happened before and it'll happen again. Here's the phenomenon.
Group A insults closely related Group B with a derogatory term T.
Then outsiders come in and hear this term T being bandied about
but they can't really tell the difference between A and B. The differences
A and B perceive among themselves are too small for an outsider
to notice, but they can hear the tone behind the term. Just as the
first words you learn in a foreign language are the insults and
swears, so too do the outsiders start disparagingly applying the
same term T to members of both A and B.

You already
know of another example: Eskimos. There are actually lots of different
types of people that we broadly call Eskimos. One of the groups
is the Innu. They speak a language called Montagnais. The Montagnais
use the word assime-w, either meaning "person who laces
snowshoes" or "people who speak a different language"
to refer to the neighboring Mi'kmaq people. But we call all of the
different indigenous northern people assime-w's or Eskimos,
just as first the Brits and now the rest of the world refers to
all Americans as Yankees. In fact, the Mi'kmaq live in northeastern
New England. With a slightly different history, all us Yanks could
have been Eskimos.

The Cherokee
people are another example. They don't call themselves Cherokee.
Even the word Cherokee is hard to pronounce in their own language.
It was what another Native American tribe called them. The Cherokees
call themselves Tsalagi, meaning "Principle People."

And of course
you've heard of Guido's. MTV's Jersey Shore stirred up enormous
controversy recently by launching a new reality show throwing together
a bunch of Italian kids in a summer house and seeing who does what
to whom. Initially, they even used the word Guido in their promos,
but it was considered a derogatory term for Italians, so they stopped,
but they couldn't stop all of the guys from proudly referring to
themselves as Guidos and all the girls from admitting that they
were Guidettes, only interested in landing themselves a nice Guido,
a term that seems to mean an Italian man who works out obsessively
and spends enormous time in the bathroom styling his hair and making
himself look good (though no episode has yet aired with any Guido
sticking a feather in his cap).

When we the
smarter people encounter these weirdos who still keep things simple,
and seem to us a little slow, we are always curious. I know because
I am one of those weirdos. I am a libertarian, and the libertarian
party is the party of principle. We keep things simple. Don't steal.
Don't hit. After my debate at the University of Connecticut in Stamford
in 2006 against the Republican and Democratic candidates for the
fourth district Congressional seat, the spouse of one of my opponents
was waiting at a crosswalk with me. "How does a libertarian
cross the street?" she joked. She was quite nice and we chatted
for a bit, but I now understand what she and many others must think
about libertarians, about Guidos, about Yankees and Eskimos, and
what I think about all those film heroes: they're all a little off-putting.
They remind us of our own simpler core. And we don't like it. We
need to bring them back to size, and a derogatory term makes us
feel better.

Imagine a world
of hunchbacks. You and I used to walk normally but as we grow old,
we slouch and our posture takes a permanent dip. When you meet someone
who walks tall, do you not want to ask them how's the weather up
there? What's stuck up your bum? Why are you walking so tall? Relax,
man!

Let's not forget
that it is these tall-walkers, slow-talkers, and macaroni-cap buffoons
who are the only ones who ever have or ever will fight for freedom,
a freedom that benefits even those that make fun of them. We all
still have that core moral compass inside us, if we just brush off
the years of dust.

It's been 89
minutes. We've made our mistakes, with the economy, with war, with
health care, with too much government in general. It's time to channel
our inner strength, free our inner Yankee, and once again do the
right thing.

This article
originally appeared in the Fairfield
Weekly.

January
19, 2010

Dr. Phil
Maymin [send him mail] is an
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free
Your Inner Yankee
and Yankee
Wake Up.

The
Best of Phil Maymin

Do you believe
everything the government tells you? Economist and statistician
John Williams sure doesn’t. Williams, who has consulted for individuals
and Fortune 500 companies, now uncovers the truth behind the U.S.
government’s economic numbers on his Web site at ShadowStats.com.
Williams says, over the last several decades, the feds have been
infusing their data with optimistic biases to make the economy seem
far rosier than it really is. His site reruns the numbers using
the original methodology. What he found was not good.

Maymin:
So we are technically bankrupt?

Williams:
Yes, and when countries are in that state, what they usually do
is rev up the printing presses and print the money they need to
meet their obligations. And that creates inflation, hyperinflation,
and makes the currency worthless.

Obama says
America will go bankrupt if Congress doesn’t pass the health care
bill.

Well, it’s
going to go bankrupt if they do pass the health care bill, too,
but at least he’s thinking about it. He talks about it publicly,
which is one thing prior administrations refused to do. Give him
credit for that. But what he’s setting up with this health care
system will just accelerate the process.

Where are
we right now?

In terms of
the GDP, we are about halfway to depression level. If you look at
retail sales, industrial production, we are already well into depressionary.
If you look at things such as the housing industry, the new orders
for durable goods we are in Great Depression territory. If we have
hyperinflation, which I see coming not too far down the road, that
would be so disruptive to our system that it would result in the
cessation of many levels of normal economic commerce, and that would
throw us into a great depression, and one worse than was seen in
the 1930s.

What kind
of hyperinflation are we talking about?

I am talking
something like you saw with the Weimar Republic of the 1930s. There
the currency became worthless enough that people used it actually
as toilet paper or wallpaper. You could go to a fine restaurant
and have an expensive dinner and order an expensive bottle of wine.
The next morning that empty bottle of wine is worth more as scrap
glass than it had been the night before filled with expensive wine.

We just saw
an extreme example in Zimbabwe. … Probably the most extreme hyperinflation
that anyone has ever seen. At the same time, you still had a functioning,
albeit troubled, Zimbabwe economy. How could that be? They had a
workable backup system of a black market in U.S. dollars. We don’t
have a backup system of anything. Our system, with its heavy dependence
on electronic currency, in a hyperinflation would not do well. It
would probably cease to function very quickly. You could have disruptions
in supply chains to food stores. The economy would devolve into
something like a barter system until they came up with a replacement
global currency.

What can
we do to avoid hyperinflation? What if we just shut down the Fed
or something like that?

We can’t. The
actions have already been taken to put us in it. It’s beyond control.
The government does put out financial statements usually in December
using generally accepted accounting principles, where unfunded liabilities
like Medicare and Social Security are included in the same way as
corporations account for their employee pension liabilities. And
in 2008, for example, the one-year deficit was $5.1 trillion dollars.
And that’s instead of the $450 billion, plus or minus, that was
officially reported.

Read
the rest of the article

December
25, 2009

Dr. Phil
Maymin [send him mail] is an
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free
Your Inner Yankee
and Yankee
Wake Up.

The
Best of Phil Maymin

The popular
explanation is that the eternal flame of the Temple in Jerusalem
burned for eight nights on a supply of purified olive oil that should
have lasted for only one. This was after the Temple had been rededicated
following the Maccabees Revolt, in which a Jewish rebel army ousted
the Seleucid Empire, which had outlawed the practice of Judaism,
from parts of Israel.

Yet in the
contemporary accounts of the rededication, the oil is not mentioned.
Even in the apocryphal Books of the Maccabees, no miracle is mentioned.
Instead, the success of the revolution is the reason for the celebration.
Four hundred years later, when many of the oral traditions of the
religion were first put to parchment, no mention is made of the
miraculous oil. It wasn't until 300 years after that, in the Talmud,
that the miracle first appears in writing.

Perhaps a fuller
history is needed.

Antiochus IV
was the king of the Seleucid Empire, which covered the parts of
the Middle East where the U.S. is either fighting right now or looking
to fight — Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, Israel, Lebanon,
Syria, and, of course, Iran. Although it is popular to compare America
to the Roman Empire, in its rise and scope and ultimate fall, it
is probably closer to the Seleucid Empire.

Like almost
all leaders past and present, Antiochus liked war. He attacked Egypt
twice, and failed twice. The second time, he encountered Gaius Popillius
Laenas, an old Roman envoy, who, standing alone, demanded Antiochus
withdraw from Egypt or consider the Seleucid Empire at war with
Rome. Antiochus said he would discuss the matter with his council.
The envoy then literally drew a line in the sand, encircling Antiochus,
telling him to give an answer before he crossed the circle. Antiochus
meekly complied and withdrew. This is the origin of the phrase "line
in the sand."

If
you like this site, please help keep it going and growing.

Antiochus returned
home from Egypt a loser, and his need for tyranny unfulfilled, so
he outlawed Judaism. He looted the Temple in Jerusalem. He massacred
anyone possessing Jewish scripture. He made observing the Sabbath
illegal. He brought a statue of Zeus onto the Temple and ordered
people to sacrifice pigs to it, an abomination and idolatry under
the traditional Jewish religion. Whoever failed to pray to the Greek
gods was executed.

One family
resisted. Mattathias, the father, refused to worship the Greek gods.
A Hellenistic Jew tried to take his place and offer the idolatrous
sacrifice. Mattathias killed him. He and his five sons then fled
into the wilderness. A year later, the father was dead, but his
son, Judah Maccabee, using guerilla tactics, led a makeshift army
to victory over Antiochus. They immediately went to cleanse and
rededicate the Temple. (Hanukkah translates as "dedication.")

The first couple
of decades after the Maccabees revolution saw relative peace and
independence, but then the military leaders established the Hasmonean
dynasty, which engaged in more war. Ultimately, the dynasty ended
in Roman subjugation.

Perhaps the
editors of the Talmud wanted to downplay the Hasmonean dynasty,
partly because they felt only descendants of the House of David
can rule Israel, and the Maccabees/Hasmonean were not, and partly
because it was a violent regime. Perhaps they thought if Hanukkah
celebrated olive oil instead of bloodshed, that would be a good
thing.

We are now
building our own empire on the basis of even flimsier rewriting
of history. None of the 9/11 hijackers were from any of the countries
we are now occupying or eyeing. None of those countries have weapons
of mass destruction. Without our military interference in the Middle
East over the past 50 years, it is possible al-Qaeda and other extremist
Muslims would have never existed or would have eventually fallen
into obscurity. Where is our Laenas today? Nobody has drawn a line
in the sand for America.

This article
originally appeared in the Fairfield
Weekly.

December
24, 2009

Dr. Phil
Maymin [send him mail] is an
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free
Your Inner Yankee
and Yankee
Wake Up.

The
Best of Phil Maymin

If you think the First Amendment of the Constitution explicitly
grants you the right to free speech, you are completely wrong.

The First Amendment does not grant you that right. You
have the right to free speech, as well as all of the other
rights that come from being a free person, such as the right to
self-defense and freedom of worship, not because some governmental
entity grants them to you, but because you are human. What the First
Amendment does is explicitly clarify that the government is restricted
only to certain enumerated powers, that it shall not, in particular,
step on your inherent freedom of speech.

This is not a subtle point. The American constitution is remarkable
in acknowledging the legitimacy and sovereignty of every individual.
Every free human being intrinsically has rights, and the purpose
of government is to protect those rights.

Contrast this with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. This document states that certain rights are granted
to certain individuals in certain circumstances by the government.
The Constitution enumerates the few things that the government can
do; everything else is prohibited. The U.N. document enumerates
the few rights that people are granted; everything else is prohibited.

A few weeks ago, President Barack Obama authorized the U.S. to
become a co-signatory of a U.N. draft resolution regarding freedom
of opinion and expression. Had he taken the founders’ view of freedom,
the resolution would have said something like, “No government can
abridge the natural and preexisting right of an individual.” In
other words, it would have limited government.

Instead, this resolution implies free speech is important not because
we are free people, but because it is “one of the essential foundations
of a democratic society” and because it is “essential to full and
effective participation in a free and democratic society.” In other
words, free speech is good because it helps the government.

If free speech were a natural right not to be abridged by government,
as our founders clearly intended, this would be the end of it: Simply
forbid the government from zipping our lips and government’s role
is fulfilled. But if free speech is a privilege granted to support
government, it must be supported by more laws. It is now the government’s
responsibility to ensure freedom of speech.

So how does the draft resolution Obama wants to sign ensure the
government’s grant of free speech?

Obviously, we must be educated. The resolution “reaffirms that
full and equal access to education for girls and boys, women and
men, is crucial for the full enjoyment of the right to freedom of
opinion and expression.”

And of course, the government can’t explicitly grant you the right
to say bad things. That would reflect poorly on the government.
Your freedom of speech can’t extend to racially discriminating speech
or any speech that might cause someone else to discriminate –
literally, to choose. The resolution “condemns, in this context,
any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes
incitement to discrimination.” (Note there is no such problem if
we consider our rights truly ours and the government’s job merely
to protect them – then the government is not responsible for
us, we are.)

There’s more. No matter what you say (so long as it is pre-approved
by the government), you cannot be discriminated against by anybody
else. If I want to rent my apartment only to libertarians, I will
be thrown in jail, because I am discriminating against those who
exercise their freedom of opinion that large government is great.

There’s still more. “[U]ndue concentration of ownership in the
media in the private sector” must be broken up. If I have a successful
media company, one that people voluntarily pay to read or watch
or hear, my success may prevent other people’s opinions from being
heard as loudly as mine are, and from the government point of view,
that is bad.

How interesting that the government will decide what concentration
is due or undue, regardless of the people voluntarily paying for
my service. How interesting that even undue concentration in the
public sector – government-run media – is okay.

If the founding fathers had thought people had a right to health
care, they would have written an amendment, something like, “The
government may not infringe on the people’s right to provide health
care for themselves or their loved ones.” Period.

Today’s politicians would write the law the exact opposite way:
Government grants people the right to health care because healthier
people are better voters. Now the government is on the hook to make
sure it provides what it promises. Should we have a public option?
Should we regulate insurance? Should we grant them anti-trust exemptions?
Should we offer regulated and subsidized medical care to the elderly?
All these questions are atrocious to a founding father, but follow
inevitably once we are fooled into thinking the government grants
us our rights.

This article
originally appeared in the Fairfield
Weekly.

November
5, 2009

Dr. Phil
Maymin [send him mail] is an
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free
Your Inner Yankee
and Yankee
Wake Up.

The
Best of Phil Maymin

Here’s
his plan: Merge the Federal Reserve (“the Fed”), the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of Thrift Supervision
(OTS), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) into
one single entity. Basically, the Fed is America’s central
bank, the FDIC insures bank deposits up to a certain amount, the
OTS oversees savings and loan institutions, and the OCC regulates
all national banks.

Here’s
his rationale: Banks, he claims, have been able to choose which
entity supervises them, and competition among these various agencies
for “business” (i.e., justification to continue to get
public funding) has led to looser regulation than would have been
the case had there been just one monolithic regulatory agency. Essentially,
his reasoning is the same as President Bush’s was for creating
the Department of Homeland Security as an amalgamation of functions
from other agencies, and it is the same reasoning as President Obama’s
is for making health care a federal issue rather than one to be
decided by each state. It is also the same sort of reasoning used
by nearly all politicians throughout history to concentrate power.

Here’s
the superficial difference between his plan and Obama’s bank
regulation plan: Obama wants the Fed to take on a larger role in
regulating “systemic risk,” but Dodd wants that role to
be taken on by some kind of council. (Perhaps, if he loses the next
election, he might graciously accept the honor of sitting on such
a council?) That’s as different as garbage and trash.

What does it
mean to “have confidence” in a private, voluntary, free
market transaction? If you deposit money in an ATM, how can you
be confident that the cash you put in will be available to you later?
If you pay an insurance company for future protection, how can you
be confident it won’t go out of business? If you invest in
the stock market, how can you be confident you won’t lose money?

Those three
examples are straight from Dodd’s mouth. He says you should
be confident buying stocks, making an ATM deposit, or buying insurance.
It’s an absurd claim. Each of those transactions is inherently
risky. If you are not confident enough to do it, you should not
do it. And neither Dodd nor Obama nor Bush nor Fed chairman Ben
Bernanke should take your money in an attempt to make you feel more
confident. It’s not their money.

Here is how
to understand all of financial regulation, current, past and proposed:
It all goes back to the FDIC. You’ve seen their proud little
plaques in every bank, announcing that deposits are backed by the
full faith and credit of the United States government (that means
your tax dollars). If you deposit money in a bank and that bank
fails, don’t worry – Uncle Sam has your back, up to a
quarter million dollars per depositor.

Why does Uncle
Sam make this guarantee? Shouldn’t it be up to me where I put
my money? After all, what does a bank do but turn around and make
loans with my money to other people?

A deposit in
a bank is an investment in a lender – you should be worried!
Some banks make better loans than others. But with the FDIC, we
don’t care about lender quality. Furthermore, why should you
have to invest in a lender as a way to put your cash somewhere?
Perhaps you should invest in Apple instead.

Everything
there is to know about financial regulation comes from this insurance
– because regulation is really intended to insure against bank
runs.

What is a bank
run? It’s what happens when depositors realize the bank is
garbage and decide to pull their money out. The bank, of course,
doesn’t have the cash on hand and can’t return it all,
so it goes out of business. With FDIC insurance, you should be less
likely to care if the bank is terribly run, and you wouldn’t
withdraw your money from it, since you will get it back anyway.

Yes, the FDIC
is a pre-bailout. It protects bad banks.

The real situation
is even worse. Banks have “reserves,” some amount of cash
they keep on hand as a portion of the amount of money they lend
out. You might think that if you deposit 100 dollars in a bank,
that the bank would loan out 90 of those dollars, and keep 10 as
a reserve. Uh-uh. It puts the entire 100 in its reserves, and loans
out 900 more.

What? Where
did it get the 900 more? From the Fed. Banks borrow from the central
bank and loan out to whomever they want. Yes, the Fed is a pre-bailout
of every single person who has ever walked into a bank looking for
a loan. And the only reason the Fed can make this Ponzi-like bet
is because the FDIC keeps deposits more stable than they would be
if people knew the truth.

So what is
the “system” Dodd, Obama and others think that we, the
unwashed masses, need to have more confidence in? It is the FDIC/Fed
axis of evil. It is the insurance scam that encourages over-depositing
and the central bank scam that encourages even more overlending.
Heaven forbid citizens actually put their money where they want,
in enterprises they deem useful. No, we need to have the citizens
run their money through the banking system first, for a little light
rinse before it is sent out to arbitrarily bad lending destinations,
such as subprime mortgages.

The system
the politicians want to protect is exactly the system that needs
to collapse. The Fed and FDIC ought to be abolished. If you want
insurance on money you gave to a bank, you should buy it from some
other insurance company. Just like if you want insurance on money
you used to buy a stock, you should buy puts or credit protection
from somebody else. And if you want insurance on your insurance
company, buy some of that from somebody else too. And if you want
fire, flood or health insurance, it’s up to you to buy it from
who you want or choose to self-insure.

Yes, the world
is risky, and you will have to choose where to invest your savings.
If you want to give it to your neighbor for his new business, you
can, but you take the risk, not all taxpayers. Pretending the risk
doesn’t exist, which is what the current “system”
does, simply makes things look a little better for a little bit
until they get much worse for a lot longer.

With the Fed
and the FDIC gone, there will be no need for the OCC or the OTS
either. You want to lend out money? Go ahead. You want to pool your
money with a couple friends and loan that out? Go ahead. Want to
start your own business? Go ahead.

The current
financial regulatory system is exactly identical to paying off credit
card debt with new credit cards. For a little while, it looks like
you have a bunch of free stuff. But when you can’t get any
more credit, everything comes tumbling down. That’s the “system”
Dodd et al. want you to have confidence in. Politicians are the
original confidence men.

This article
originally appeared in the Fairfield
Weekly.

October
8, 2009

Dr. Phil
Maymin [send him mail] is an
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free
Your Inner Yankee
and Yankee
Wake Up.

The
Best of Phil Maymin

According to
philosopher Daniel Dennett, Hull called his trick “The Tuned Deck.”
It was a variant of the old “pick a card, any card” routine. After
you put your card back in the deck, Ralph would riffle the deck
and listen to the sound it made to figure out your card, then produce
it with a flourish. The secret, Dennett explained, is that, “The
trick, in its entirety, is in the name of the trick… and more
specifically, in one word: ‘The!’”

The audience
thought he did the trick the same way each time. A trained magician
might suspect him of doing a palm, but the next time Ralph made
it obvious he wasn’t palming. Maybe it was a false cut? But next
time, there was no cut at all. Because Ralph kept changing the method
but keeping the illusion the same, no one ever figured out his secret.

The federal
government is using the same trick. “The” federal government. As
if it was a single entity with all parts operating in unison, always
increasing its power over us in the exact same way.

Though the
size and power of the government does increase under any administration,
the mechanism changes each time. Government grew under Reagan, Bush
I, Clinton, Bush II and now Obama, but in different ways. Government
grows with any combination of Democrats and Republicans controlling
the legislative and executive branches. It grew when everything
was under Republican control, it grew when the two parties split
control, and it grows now under Democrat control.

Sometimes it
grows primarily through foreign policy, as under Bush II, and sometimes
through domestic policy, as under Obama. But previous policies of
growth are rarely reversed: Our military is still in Iraq and Afghanistan
and Germany and South Korea. We still have the Departments of Energy,
Labor and Education. We still have the Federal Reserve.

Just when the
populace figures out what tricks the current incarnation of the
federal government is pulling, the government changes the method.

So what is
a citizen to do?

Are we really
supposed to waste our time reading bills when those who vote on
them don’t bother? Must we pore over the minutiae of politics and
protest each particular attack on our freedom? Who has that kind
of time?

The lesson
from Ralph Hull is that it wouldn’t matter. Pick a politician, any
politician. Maybe one particular election swings because of a hanging
chad. Maybe another is a choice between two candidates who differ
in no substantive way. No matter who you vote for, the Patriot Act
is presented with a flourish. So is war and socialized medicine
and bailed-out banks.

No, trying
to expose the federal government’s tricks is a pointless endeavor,
because the tricks change but the performance does not.

What happened
with the magicians who kept trying to figure out Hull’s secret?
With each repetition, and each rejected hypothesis, their resolve
grew weaker and weaker until they simply stopped trying to figure
it out.

And that’s
what will happen to us too if we just keep fighting each particular
infraction on our liberty as it occurs. We’ll get tired, and they’ll
keep going. We tried protesting the war under the previous administration.
We tried Tea Party protests and Town Hall attendance under this
administration. Did it help? Are we out of Iraq or Afghanistan?
Have we stopped bailing out banks? Have we removed regulations limiting
our health care options?

If Ralph Hull's
secret had gotten out, people would simply stop watching him; when
you ignore a magician, he doesn’t get your money. But that's the
difference with government: they will take it anyway. The government
is like one of those annoying guys at parties who says, “Give me
a twenty and I’ll make it disappear.” The only solution is to not
let them take your money.

So how do we
get the federal government out of our wallets, when they can tax
us anything they choose and print however much more they want? We
need some magic of our own. We need to saw some laws in half, levitate
a couple amendments, and make many government agencies disappear.

A version
of this article originally appeared in the Fairfield
Weekly.

September
9, 2009

Dr. Phil
Maymin [send him mail] is an
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free
Your Inner Yankee
and Yankee
Wake Up.

There are already
public options for mail delivery and mass transit — the United States
Postal Service and Amtrak. Sure, those entities do under-perform
the private alternatives, such as FedEx and Greyhound. But at least
the public option is supported by monopolistic laws preventing direct
competition! No private party can deliver regular mail or run trains,
even if they could do it for cheaper. We want public options to
have some advantages, don’t we? If they didn’t have any legal advantages
over private competitors and were intended to be self-sustaining,
we might as well offer them as another private option! That’s just
silly.

America has
a long and proud tradition of public options. Did you know that
one of the first states, Connecticut, used to have a public option
in religion?

From 1636 till
1818, the Congregational Church was the state’s established church.
By default, you attended and tithed to that public church, but it
was not always mandatory. You could opt out of the Congregational
Church. Under the Act of Toleration of 1708, you just had to declare
yourself a member of a different religion and then you could attend
the other church. Did you still have to pay to support Congregational
Church ministers? Well, sure! It was a public option, you know,
and we all pay our fair share for the public option — just like
the public option on education. You can send your kids to any school
you like, but we all must pay our share for public schools.

Over time,
Connecticut even granted certain exceptions. Episcopalians could
opt out of paying taxes to support the Congregational Church starting
in 1727. Baptists and Quakers could do so in 1729. As long as you
were on the short list of approved alternate religions, and you
could prove you were supporting other ministers, you could opt out
of the religious public option. Easy.

You might have
noticed what you assumed was a typo above. A state church in 1818
— when the Bill of Rights, whose very first amendment separated
church and state, had already been in effect for nearly three decades?

That is no
typo. The Bill of Rights, like the rest of the Constitution, serves
as a guideline and a goal, not as a blind, mindless restriction
on the government’s ability to provide for the well-being of its
citizens!

With enough
time to properly plan a transition, in 1818 Connecticut removed
the public option and moved closer to compliance with the First
Amendment by issuing a new state constitution. Sure, it still explicitly
favored Christianity, but it was a step in the right direction.
By 1843, Connecticut had even recognized that Jews have a right
to worship. Talk about progress!

The only conclusion
one can reach from all this is public options are of course a great
idea. They should also be applied to sports.

Sports and
health care? Are the two even comparable in terms of impact on the
economy?

They are. We
pay about as much for health insurance as we do for sports. Health
insurance companies had total revenue of $405 billion in 2007, according
to the Highline Data Health Industry Aggregate. Total sports revenue,
including the NBA, NFL, NHL, MBA and golf, are now around $400 billion
a year, according to Plunkett Research, Ltd.

And not just
revenue, but the same arguments about rising costs of health care
apply to sports. Just try to get Knicks tickets for the whole family
without selling a kidney.

Sure, fans
currently have a choice about which team to follow, but why not
offer a government-funded one, just as an extra option? Consider
the Federal Bureaucrats as a new NBA team.

The ‘Crats
would offer equal NBA access to all. Your grandmother could play
point guard and your toddler could play center. The coach would
be a former Goldman Sachs partner and only the top lobbyists and
political fundraisers would be allowed in the locker room.

And if Shaquille
O’Neal finds himself with a decided advantage over a two-year-old,
or Kobe Bryant keeps swiping the ball from Grandma, that’s where
we call foul, and that’s where the true advantage of a public option
comes into play:

We own the
referees.

This originally
appeared in the Fairfield
Weekly.

August
27, 2009

Dr. Phil
Maymin [send him mail] is an
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free
Your Inner Yankee
and Yankee
Wake Up.

We know that
Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens (i.e., us humans) overlapped
for tens of thousands of years. Neanderthals existed for about one
hundred thousand years before going extinct, and the bulk of the
evidence suggests they did not interbreed with us, though we did
share a common ancestor. They were our distant cousins.

There must
have been some critical difference that let us flourish but killed
them off, but no one knows for sure what that difference is. We
both used sophisticated tools, hunted animals, built shelters, buried
our dead, sang and talked, and wore clothes. Our DNA is between
99.5 and 99.9 percent identical with theirs.

Common perceptions
of Neanderthals as being short, hunched over, hairy, stupid, and
clumsy cavemen are wrong. It turns out some of the first fossils
found were of arthritic Neanderthals. In fact, they walked as upright
as we do today. Some lived in caves but some lived in huts. They
were about as tall and as big and as hairless as an average American
is today. They had the same physical capacity for speech. You wouldn't
do a double take if you saw a Neanderthal on the street.

There were
some physical differences; they were a different species, after
all. They couldn't run as well as early humans — then again, with
the exception of a small percentage of athletes, how many Americans
can really run that well anymore either? But they were about as
smart and as well armed with weapons as our ancestors.

They also had
some social differences. Neanderthals lived in smaller communities
and took care of each other more. They used herbs to cure disease
and even buried their dead with medicines. Fossils have been found
that show individuals with life-threatening illnesses had been healed
and continued to live. And Neanderthals didn't specialize as much
as we did: both men and women hunted, and there didn't seem to be
as many class divisions.

Basically,
they lived in communes. They were proto-socialists.

Could their
commitment to community have caused their downfall?

It's not surprising
that they cared more for their sick and shared their chores more
equally. The smaller the unit of government, the closer it can approximate
pure communism without crumbling. Think about your own family or
your circle of very close friends. Don't we all chip in to help
out? Don't we try to reach consensus on what movie to watch or where
to eat?

But then think
about your world at large. You hire a taxi driver to take you exactly
where you want to go, his particular desires be damned. You pay
for a meal off the menu without regard to the personal tastes of
the waiter or the owner.

The larger
the unit of government, the closer it must be to pure libertarianism
to keep from collapsing. If there are infinitely many people, it
would take infinitely long to ask everybody's opinion, to vote,
or to redistribute income or wealth. The only practical solution
is local: every person talks to whichever other people he wants,
and others nearby only get involved in the event of a dispute. That's
pure libertarianism. It doesn't mean you don't care about your own
family — quite the contrary! It means you have hierarchies of caring.
It means you care more for your family than you do for a
stranger. A Neanderthal doesn't distinguish.

Will you help
someone who is sick? Will you do someone a favor? A Neanderthal
says yes, of course, no matter who, because to him, any other Neanderthal
is a part of his group. An early Homo sapiens asks, who is it, exactly,
and if it's not one of my closest relationships, what can I get
in return? The Homo sapiens learned to trade better because there
were more gains to his exchanges. The Neanderthals were just one
big happy family. From the perspective of a Neanderthal, if someone
asks you to pass the salt, you don't say, "Give me a nickel."
If someone asks you to save a life, you don't say, "Pay me
for my time."

Now, we are
likely to soon see a Neanderthal system of government applied to
hundreds of millions of Homo sapiens. Barack Obama's health plan
will force us all to pay for the life-threatening illnesses of strangers
while higher taxes and new regulations will continue to discourage
free trade.

We will take
money from those that have it, pay a reasonable wage to the doctors,
and save the lives of everybody in our community. What kind of inconsiderate
person would balk at slightly higher taxes for more universal health
coverage?

That's exactly
what the Neanderthals must have thought about those selfish, greedy,
grubbing new humans over there. Just look at them, each only caring
about a few particular people instead of everybody all at once.
How barbaric. They'll never last, those upstarts.

If they were
alive today, how would a Neanderthal participate in politics today?
They would always support more government, on all issues: they'd
support Bush's wars and invasions of privacy, and they'd support
Obama's health care plan and bailouts. Anything less, to them, would
be considered uncaring.

Recently, the
entire Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been mapped. Perhaps they
could eventually be cloned and brought back to life.

But what would
be the point? And how could we tell the difference?

This originally
appeared in the Fairfield
Weekly.

August
12, 2009

Dr. Phil
Maymin [send him mail] is an
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free
Your Inner Yankee
and Yankee
Wake Up.

Already we have millions of people without government. You see
them all around you, hanging out on street corners, unemployed,
smoking pot, begging. Without explicitly provisioning for more government,
we will be responsible for these people anyway. We will have to
taser them and jail them and feed them. And that will mean an even
higher cost of government.

We are on the brink of disaster. And we can clearly see that the
private sector has failed. Unbridled capitalism has failed. Competition
among greedy, self-centered individuals has utterly failed to lower
the price of government. Only a public plan can hope to stall the
rapid and unsustainable growth in government.

Many people have already written to, called, or visited their legislators
about this current crisis. One woman broke down in tears when describing
her life without government. Fortunately, a kindly and gracious
politician immediately provided her some life-saving government,
but without drastic, quick action, millions of other Americans will
die without equal access.

With the new public option, people who wish to remain at their
current level of government can do so, but those who are ready to
step boldly into the future can opt in. The new plan offers not
only more government, but also better, more affordable government.
The essential insight is to allow those who opt into the public
option to not bear the costs of the plan. They can all get more
government for free.

Indeed, with more government, we can lower the cost of all government.
Administrative overhead will be minimized. Organizational synergies
can be effected. Just imagine how convenient it will be to pick
up your government at the same place where you get your mail or
recycle your garbage.

And it is not only that the direct costs of government will be
lowered with more government: there are numerous indirect costs
that will fall as well. Our justice system is plagued with multiple
private competitors suing each other over frivolous contract and
intellectual property violations. Individuals also sue corporations
for fraud or breach of contract, and vice versa. Many of these inefficient
judicial proceedings can be replaced with a single, effective federal
agency in charge of dispute resolution. The whole process can be
streamlined to ensure quick, accurate, and fair decisions to any
conflict.

Furthermore, not only can we make government better, cheaper, and
more efficient by making it larger, we can also leverage these same
principles and apply them to other vital issues. We have been fighting
wars all across the globe for decades with no end in sight. We have
been legislating against climate change for years. We have been
regulating financial entities and maintaining a tight grip on health
care. We have been monopolizing the price of money.

We have been going about it all wrong. The right solution is more.
(The left solution is also more.) More soldiers will end the war
faster. More legislation will end pollution. More regulation will
stop our economic malaise and make everyone healthier. A bigger,
more secretive Federal Reserve will be able to issue more money
and keep the currency stronger.

But these changes should not be incremental or marginal. The mistake
we have been making is to think that we need "just a little
more" to accomplish our goals. This is an error. There is no
single piece of legislation short enough to be read by those voting
for it that can do what needs to be done.

To have maximal effect, we need sweeping new legislation and powers.
Powers so sweeping, we won't know for years or decades what they
really mean. In some cases, we may never find out. In the days and
weeks to come, you will be introduced to a variety of new agencies,
committees, and entities formed for the purpose of reducing the
costs of government and increasing the availability of government
to all. To the extent certain unavoidable payments are to be incurred,
they will be paid for through debt and various esoteric operations
by the Fed. And not to worry — even the future interest payments
will be paid for through new debt issues as needed.

We have indeed discovered a way to guarantee more government to
everybody with nobody of consequence paying more. We will be putting
this plan into action immediately, with or without your approval,
so you are encouraged to publicly express support for the plan in
order to be among the first to receive your generous share of the
increased government.

A glorious new world order is right around the corner, if only
we have the courage and conviction to see it through. Perhaps someday
we can all live in a world where no one wants any more government.

August
4, 2009

Dr. Phil
Maymin [send him mail] is an
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University. He is the author of Free
Your Inner Yankee
and Yankee
Wake Up.