Quotulatiousness

October 6, 2010

Follow up: burning the free market for government failure

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:06

The story about the fire department letting the house burn down has been used to “prove” that it’s a case of market failure and that free markets can’t provide public goods. Given that it wasn’t actually a “free market” entity, that argument doesn’t hold much promise:

National Review’s Daniel Foster jumps in to say that this is why conservatives need to curb their enthusiasm for the market economy. A colleague in the “anarcho-capitalist” camp stuck his head into Daniel’s office to explain that fire protection is not a human right, so it makes sense that the house was allowed to burn. Paul Krugman (he never goes away) adds that this is a case against the market in general. “Do you want to live in the kind of society in which this happens?”

I don’t get this debate at all. It is not even a real debate. The fire-protection services were government services. The fee in question was a government-mandated fee. The county lines in which the fee was applicable is a government-drawn line that is completely arbitrary. The policy of not putting out the fire was a government policy enforced by the mayor. As he said, in the words of a good bureaucrat, “Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t.”

So why is the market being criticized here? This was not a real market. Instead, this is precisely what we would expect from government. In a real market, there is no way that a free-enterprise fire service would have refused to provide the homeowner service. They would be in business to provide that service. The fire would have been put out and he would have been charged for the service. It is as simple as that. It is the same as lawn-mowing services or plumbing services or any other type of service. Can we know for sure that the market would provide such services? Well, if insurance companies have anything to say about it, such services would certainly be everywhere.

As it was, the fire burned down as a result of government policy, a refusal of service because the homeowners did not pay what amounted to a tax! The poor homeowner begged for help and offered to pay. He had paid the year before and the year before, so his credit was good. Even so, the bureaucracy refused!

Gun hobbyist’s dream

Filed under: Liberty, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:23

L. Neil Smith, in an ideal world (that is, after the Libertarian revolution), would like to do some serious gunsmithing:

I have some interest in reclaiming good technology that has been abandoned by our civilization, usually for the most stupid of reasons. Living in a free country would mean that I could return to a dream I’ve had for years, of becoming a weapons-manufacturer. For example, as a gunsmith, I don’t believe that history and humanity are quite through with the design known as the “Broomhandle Mauser”, the first commercially successful semiautomtic pistol. The Broomhandle is so different in conception and execution from the Browning-invented weapons we’re all used to, as to seem like the product of an alien mind.

If you’re not familiar with the Broomhandle Mauser, here’s a picture from http://www.g6csy.net/c96/database.html:

Some folks don’t like the Mauser’s grip, which I find perfectly comfortable, and seem to forget that we almost never shoot a revolver today with handles shaped like its frame. I love neoprene grips like the Pachmayr “Presentation” model, myself. They make shooting magnums pleasant. Others don’t like magazines situated in front of the trigger, rather than inside the handle, but they’re happy with sport-utility rifles like the AR-15 and the AK-47 built exactly the same way.

What killed the “Broomie” was the inadequate cartridge, 7.63x25mm, it was made for. By the time a more effective offerng was available — 9mm Mauser Export, which rivaled the .357 Magnum — it was too late. Browning designs and their imitators had taken the field over. But with modern steels and production techniques, in effective calibers — like .40 S&W, 10mm, or .45 ACP — there is still a place for the Mauser design. I’d even like to make a miniature that shoots .22 Long Rifle.

Make no mistake, I absolutely venerate St. John Moses Browning’s 1911, and his P35 Browning High Power is also “of the best” — or at least it would be if it could be made for a worthwhile cartridge without messing up its marvelous handling qualities, as I find the .40 caliber version does. I have some fresh ideas in this area, beginning with a 145-grain .375 bullet loaded into a modified 8mm Nambu parent case.

The Browning 9mm was first handgun I ever fired, and is still one of my favourites:

At the same time, however, I would bring the Dardick pistol back, an absolutely revolutionary design that combines the best qualities of automatics and revolvers, without any of the drawbacks of either. Critics at the time of its introduction said it looked too weird — rather like an oldtime Weller soldering gun — but how do you suppose the Broomhandle, the Luger, and the 1911 looked to generations of revolver-shooters? Aesthetics are arbitrary, and shooters would get used to the Dardick as they did to other weapons, if it served them well.

The Dardick was indeed an odd-looking weapon:

The Dardick used special plastic-cased cartridges with a roundly triangular, or trochoidal, cross-section, loaded with a .38 caliber bullet. It was pretty clearly aimed at the police market, where the standard at the time (the late 1950s) was the wildly-successful Smith & Wesson Model 10, of which it is said more than six million were produced.

There’s no reason that the Dardick concept couldn’t be mated with much better calibers than it was offered in. With its double-action works, and an astonishing magazine capacity (in 1958) of fifteen “trounds”, it might well have nudged the Model 10. But it fell victim, not to the market, but to a corporate boardroom dispute, and history lost one of the most effective devices for personal defense ever invented.

As Neil pointed out in one of his books, the Dardick was the answer to a bad crime writer’s prayers: it was literally an automatic revolver. (For those following along at home, an “automatic” has a magazine holding the bullets which are fed into the chamber to be fired by the action of the weapon: fire a bullet, the action cycles, clearing the expended cartridge and pushing a new one into place, cocking the weapon to fire again. A “revolver” holds bullets in the cylinder, rotating the cylinder when the gun is fired to put a new bullet in line with the barrel to be fired. The Dardick is the only example I know of that combines both in one gun.)

It’s probably a good thing that I live in Canada, where owning handguns is a legal marathon, otherwise I’d probably have another expensive collecting hobby . . .

October 5, 2010

I thought this only happened in the bad old days

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

One of the arguments that used to appear regularly whenever anyone proposed privatizing public services is that “in the bad old days”, when fire departments were run by insurance firms, they’d only put out fires that endangered paying customers. Apparently that sort of thing still happens today:

Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won’t respond, then watches it burn. That’s exactly what happened to a local family tonight.

A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn’t do anything to stop his house from burning.

Terrible, isn’t it? A strong refutation to that whole crazy libertarian notion of privatizing essential services. So which greedy corporation runs the fire service?

Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.

The mayor said if homeowners don’t pay, they’re out of luck.

Interesting.

H/T to BoingBoing, where many of the comments seem to be from folks who didn’t read that it wasn’t a private fire service.

Another new think tank . . . but this one’s different

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Randomness — Nicholas @ 07:19

These days it seems that there’s a new think tank springing up on every corner, covering so many different issues and interests. But there’s one area that’s still underserved in the think tank world, so Adam Thierer is inaugurating a new think tank to cover those areas:

I’m pleased to announce my new venture: The Sin Think Tank. The mission of the Sin Think Tank will be to promote prurient interests, gun play, gambling, unhealthy eating, and alcohol and tobacco appreciation. Some of our positions or programs will include:

* The Bob Guccione Fellow in Cultural Studies
* The Joe Camel Chair in Environmental Analysis
* The Smith & Wesson Institute for Peace
* The Jack Daniels Center for Spirited Discussion
* The Center for Gambling Promotion
* The Dunkin Donuts Nutrition & Nourishment Initiative (aka, the “Feed the World” initiative)
* The Hunter S. Thompson Foundation for Free Living & High Times

October 4, 2010

The war heckler’s latest book

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:39

P.J. O’Rourke has a new book coming out soon:

O’Rourke, the reformed ex-radical, editor of National Lampoon during the “Animal House” era, war correspondent and, lately, target of what he calls “ass cancer,” continues the anti-statist argument in his new book, “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards” (Atlantic Monthly Press). References to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith (to whose “Wealth of Nations” he once devoted an entire volume) prove O’Rourke can do the philosophical heavy lifting — yet make it all float on a fluffy cloud of wit. Among his best one-liners:

* “The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can.”

* “We’re individuals — unique, disparate, and willful, as anyone raising a household of little individuals knows. And not one of those children has ever written a letter to Santa Claus saying, ‘Please bring me and a bunch of kids I don’t know a pony and we’ll share.’ “

* “The most sensible request of government we make is not, ‘Do something!’ But ‘Quit it!’ “

* “Conservatism is a flight from ideas. As in, ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ ‘What’s the big idea?’ and ‘Whose idea was that?’ “

O’Rourke, 62, is a cool Republican. It’s a lonely job. What can the rest of the party do to join him?

“I don’t think Republicans have ever been cool,” he says. “Abraham Lincoln tried growing a beard.”

Yes, and look what happened to him.

“It’s always going to be cooler to have wild visionary ideas for society and the future. All we can really do is see that we’ve got a society where as many people grow out of cool as fast as they possibly can.”

H/T to Paul Davis for the link.

October 3, 2010

Personal responsibility is key

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:41

A post at The Economist looks at the ongoing debate on liberal/libertarian joint concerns:

My colleague noted the other day the discussion Matthew Yglesias has been having with his readers over whether liberals and libertarians can agree on some regulations they both hate. So, here’s a regulation I hate: you’re not allowed to swim across the lake anymore in Massachusetts state parks. You have to stay inside the dinky little waist-deep swimming areas, with their bobbing lines of white buoys. There you are, under a deep blue New England summer sky, the lake laid out like a mirror in front of you and the rocks on the far shore gleaming under a bristling comb of red pine; you plunge in, strike out across the water, and tweet! A parks official blows his whistle and shouts after you. “Sir! Sir! Get back inside the swimming area!” What is this, summer camp? Henry David Thoreau never had to put up with this. It offends the dignity of man and nature. You want to shout, with Andy Samberg: “I’m an adult!“

I would gladly join any movement that promised to do away with this sort of nonsense. For example, Philip K. Howard’s organisation “Common Good” works on precisely this agenda. Common Good’s very bugaboo is useless, wasteful legal interference in schools, health care, recreation, and so on. But what you quickly note with many of these issues is that they’re driven by legal liability concerns. You have a snowblader in Colorado suing a resort because she crashed into someone. You have states declining to put up road-hazard signs because the signs prove they knew the hazard was there, which could render them liable for damages. You have the war on children’s playgrounds. The Massachusetts swimming ban, too, is driven by liability concerns. The park officials in Massachusetts aren’t really trying to minimise the risk that you might drown. They’re trying to minimise the risk that you might sue. The problem here, as Mr Howard says, isn’t simply over-regulation as such. It’s a culture of litigiousness and a refusal to accept personal responsibility. When some of the public behave like children, we all get a nanny state.

As Robert Heinlein put it, “The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skimmed milk because the baby can’t eat steak.”

October 1, 2010

QotD: Principles versus positions

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:56

As I was explaining to an attractive young woman the other day, most of my views — my basic political commitments — have not changed in twenty years: I support freedom of expression, equality of opportunity, equal rights for women, etc. and so forth.

Twenty years ago my views were called left wing and these days my views are called fascist.

Nicholas Packwood, “True Colours”, Ghost of a Flea, 2010-10-01

September 30, 2010

It’s Banned Books week

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:53

Patricia Wrede had some disturbing discoveries when she tried to look up book banning incidents for a panel discussion:

[. . .] I told them about the teacher who almost got fired when a parent objected to her reading Calling on Dragons in her classroom, because “it taught witchcraft!” I mentioned the fellow YA author who was disinvited from a school visit (these are day-long programs where an author talks to several classes worth of kids and usually has lunch with the teachers, and for some YA authors, they contribute a goodly chunk to their income) because a parent noticed a title on her extensive bibliography that “sounded occult” (it was a mystery, with not a whiff of the supernatural anywhere in the text). I pointed out the well-publicized attempts to suppress the Harry Potter books (the series is #1 on the ALA’s top ten most challenged books of the decade for 2000-2009), and a few less-well-publicized attempts to remove from school shelves things like The Wizard of Oz (because Dorothy is too independent and solves her own problems), The Lord of the Rings (because it is “Satanic”), and Grimm’s Fairy Tales (because the stories are “too violent”).

None of this was, I thought, stop-the-presses news — certainly not to anyone who writes fantasy. But the other writers at the table were shocked all over again. One of them happened to be on the program committee for the regional conference, and she went home and put the panel together.

When she asked me to be on the panel, I immediately said yes, and then I went off to the internet to do some research. I wanted some examples that would hit closer to home. I found quite a lot, but as I looked through the web sites, I noticed something interesting. I live in Minnesota. All of the descriptions of book-banning incidents in Minnesota were from the websites of organizations based in distant states: Florida, Texas, Washington D.C., Georgia.

So I poked a little more. There were quite a few local web sites publicizing Banned Books Week, and all of them did indeed have descriptions of surprising book-banning incidents. Incidents that took place in other states, like Texas, Georgia, and California.

September 29, 2010

Cory Doctorow on what George Orwell got wrong

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:03

September 27, 2010

Air travel: does the punishment fit the crime?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:18

Terry Teachout isn’t enjoying his air travel experiences on his current trip. A selection of his Twitter updates from this morning:

First: I’m at LaGuardia and seized with an all-consuming hatred for air travel, every aspect of which is disgusting, degrading, and dehumanizing.

Second: I’d also like to throttle most of my fellow travelers, including all who are conducting cell-phone conversations within earshot of me.

Third: Finally, I’d like to offer a special welcome in hell to the people at Gate D6 who are reading self-evidently stupid books and magazines.

Fourth: Gee, you wouldn’t think that I’m H.L. Mencken’s biographer, would you?

Fifth: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Sixth: I guess I’m in what I like to call one of my exterminate-all-the-brutes moods. This, too, shall pass…

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve pretty much given up on air travel since my last flight experience. I’ll use it for extreme long distance or trans-oceanic travel, but otherwise, I’ll continue to avoid it as much as possible. (Probably my worst trip overlapped with one of the attempted terrorist attacks.)

September 25, 2010

QotD: The price of locavorism

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:53

The local-food movement’s ideological parochialism would be dangerous if it were somehow enacted into law. But as persuasion, it tends to focus on the positive: the delights of local peaches and fresh cider, not the imagined evils of Chilean blueberries and prepeeled baby carrots. In this regard, it resembles the English Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century. William Morris, who is remembered today more for his wallpaper and book designs than for his social theories, didn’t manage to overturn the industrial revolution. But he and his allies left a legacy of beautiful things. Pleasure is persuasive.

Virginia Postrel, “No Free Locavore Lunch”, Wall Street Journal, 2010-09-25

September 21, 2010

Canadian women more free than American women

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:56

. . . if only in the right to bare their breasts in public:

A court has ruled that women’s nipples do not enjoy freedom of expression under the US Constitution.

The case was brought by a 16 year old girl, who was one of three women accused of exposing their breasts to passing traffic on an Indianapolis street last year.

She would have faced a misdemeanour charge of public nudity if she had been 18 or over.

She took issue with the fact that exposure of male nips would not have been covered by the law, as Indiana law specifically prohibits exposure of female nipples.

She decided to take the issue, and presumably the breasts in question, to the State Appeals Court. Her argument was that the equal protection afforded by the 14th Amendment meant her breasts should be treated the same as male breasts. The amendment holds that States may not “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It has been a feature of civil rights cases since the 19th century — not always in the ways you’d expect.

Of course, having established that right several years ago, very few Canadian women actually exercised that right . . .

September 20, 2010

“I can do whatever I want”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

H/T to LibertyIdeals for the link.

Comparative prices for marijuana

Filed under: Economics, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:22

By way of Tim Harford‘s Twitter feed, a site which claims to track the current prices for high, medium, and low quality marijuana:


Click on the image to go to the site

September 16, 2010

QotD: Trial By Jury

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:03

In 1850 Spooner published A Defence for Fugitive Slaves, Against the Acts of Congress on February 12, 1793 and September 18, 1850, where he argued that juries “are judges of the law, as well as the fact” and are therefore justified in nullifying federal fugitive slave laws. “No man can be punished for resisting the execution of any law,” Spooner wrote, “unless the law be so clearly constitutional, as that a jury, taken promiscuously from the mass of the people, will all agree that it is constitutional.” Today we call this radical approach “jury nullification.”

Two years later, in Trial by Jury, Spooner developed his argument in full, expertly tracing the right of jury nullification back to the Magna Carta. “It is indispensable that the people, or ‘the country,’ judge of and determine their own liberties against the government,” he wrote. “How is it possible that juries can do anything to protect the liberties of the people against the government; if they are not allowed to determine what those liberties are?” According to Spooner, it was essential to distinguish between trial by jury, which meant trial by the people, chosen by lot, and trial by government, which was an illegal usurpation of the people’s power. “If the government may decide who may, and who may not, be jurors,” he wrote, “it will of course select only its partisans, and those friendly to its measures.” Furthermore, he said, if the government had its way, it “may also question each person drawn as a juror, as to his sentiments in regard to the particular law involved in each trial…and exclude him if he be found unfavorable to the maintenance of such a law.”

Of course, that’s exactly what happens today when potential jurors who oppose the death penalty are prevented from serving on death penalty cases or when those who oppose drug prohibition are excluded from drug cases, thereby stacking the jury in the government’s favor. As Spooner presciently observed, “if the government may dictate to the jury what laws they are to enforce, it is no longer a ‘trial by the country,’ but a trial by the government.”

Damon W. Root, “Clarence Thomas’ Favorite Anarchist: The radical anti-statism of Lysander Spooner”, Reason, 2010-09-16

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress