ReasonTV
Published on 17 Apr 2018Jordan Peterson is an unlikely YouTube celebrity. The Canadian psychologist lectures about things like responsibility. Yet millions of young people watch his videos, line up to hear his speeches, and buy his book 12 Rules for Life. It was number one on the Amazon bestseller list for a month.
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John Stossel asks: What could make a book about responsibility take off?
“People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom,” Peterson tells Stossel. “There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.”
The other side of the story, according to Peterson, is that “it’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.”
Peterson instead advises: “Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth….That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.”
Many leftists hate Peterson. They attack him for saying people should be “dangerous.” Peterson explains to Stossel that he means people should have the capacity to be dangerous, but control it.
“People who teach martial arts know this full well,” Peterson says. “If you learn a martial art you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously you learn to control it.”
Advice about that, and responsibility, bring Peterson big audiences.
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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
April 18, 2018
Stossel: Jordan Peterson on Finding Meaning in Responsibility
April 11, 2018
Mumbai’s high court demonstrates lack of economic knowledge in theatre ruling
Movie theatres and multiplexes generally charge more for the concessions than sometimes adjacent businesses in the same area, and also usually forbid patrons from bringing in their own food to consume on the premises. A recent case before the Bombay High Court argued that this was unfair to moviegoers and the court agreed:
Bombay High Court in Mumbai
© A.Savin, Wikimedia Commons
This is an interesting little test of the judicial system – you know, those told that the Beatles were a popular beat combo – on the subject of property rights. The Bombay High Court has just failed this test too. The question is, multiplex cinemas, why is the food so expensive in them? The correct answer is because the owners of multiplex cinemas make a profit in that manner. According to the court this doesn’t wash. In fact, they seem not to have even considered the argument in that manner:
The Bombay High Court has ruled that food items and bottled water be sold at regular prices inside multiplexes. The directive was issued by a division bench of Justices S.M. Kemkar and M.S. Karnik last week in response to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Mumbai resident Jainendra Baxi. He had challenged the prohibition on carrying outside food in movie theatres and multiplexes across Maharashtra.
The economics here is simple enough. The people who order food inside the cinema, at those higher prices, subsidise the others who only buy the ticket to see the movie. Sure, that’s not the first round outcome, but it is the competitive equilibrium. Cinema owners being able to profit from food makes the basic ticket cheaper.
The rights based part is also simple enough. I’m running a business, I can and should be able to decide how people access that business. If I’m running a restaurant I’m entirely at liberty to insist that you only get to consume things at my table that you’ve bought from me. Even if I show a film at the same time.
Another way to put this is that the judges have just failed Chesterton’s Fence. They’ve not grasped why the limitation is in place to start with, therefore they see nothing wrong in ridding everyone of the limitation. And the net effect of this is going to be higher multiplex cinema ticket prices for everyone in Maharashtra.
April 6, 2018
QotD: Bordertown, USA
Welcome to Bordertown, USA. Population: 200 million. Expect occasional temporary population increases from travelers arriving from other countries. Your rights as a US citizen are indeterminate within 100 miles of US borders. They may be respected. They may be ignored. But courts have decided that the “right” to do national security stuff — as useless as most its efforts are — trumps the rights of US citizens.
Tim Cushing, “Wall Street Journal Reporter Hassled At LA Airport; Successfully Prevents DHS From Searching Her Phones”, Techdirt, 2016-07-22.
March 22, 2018
QotD: “Sustainability”
Today on the radio I heard an ad for a DC-area supermarket chain that boasts that it now has on sale – as in, selling for a reduced price – “sustainably farmed fish.”
I really dislike the word “sustainable” (and all of its variations) as used today to signal holier-than-thou environmental ‘awareness.’ As Robert Solow said about this concept,
It is very hard to be against sustainability. In fact, the less you know about it, the better it sounds.
But advertising “sustainably farmed fish” – implying, as it does (rather bizarrely), that unsustainably farmed fish are common – is especially annoying. While the absence of property rights in oceans and other large bodies of water, and in uncaught fish, might well lead to overfishing (that is, to a genuinely unsustainable manner of acquiring fish for human consumption), the very essence of a fish farm implies property rights in the fish stocks. And where there are property rights there is sustainability. A fish farmer is no more likely to allow his stock of fish to be depleted than is the owner of Triple Crown winner American Pharaoh to allow his horse to be slaughtered for sport, or than are you to allow the cost of motor oil to prevent you from ever changing the oil in your car.
[…]
It’s depressing that those people who today are most likely to worry about resources being “unsustainable” – people who are most likely to prattle publicly about “sustainability” – are those people who also are most likely to disparage private property rights and to argue for government policies that weaken and attenuate such rights. Such people are those who are most likely to wish to further collectivize the provision not only of environmental amenities such as park space and animal conservation, but also of health care, of education, of housing, and of a host of other private goods and services. Such people also are those who are most likely to protest prices made higher by market forces, and to applaud rent-control and other government-imposed price ceilings on a variety of consumer goods and services.
In short, the people who today howl most frequently and loudly for “sustainability” are those who most frequently and loudly oppose the legal and economic institutions – private property and market-determined prices – that alone reliably promote genuine sustainability.
Don Boudreaux, “‘Sustainability’ is Fishy”, Café Hayek, 2016-07-26.
January 20, 2018
November 4, 2017
October 24, 2017
More on Quebec’s niqab ban
Ted Campbell is emphatically against Quebec’s attempt to ban facial coverings for Islamic women:
These laws are stupid … but they are worse than stupid, they are an assault on individual liberty by a bunch of political nincompoops.
Now, there are a number of variants of head and face coverings, they are especially common among some Muslim women …
… and some restrictions on some of them in some situations are, pretty clearly, justified on common sense or security-identification grounds. We, most of us, can probably agree that a lady should not wear a burqa or chador or even a niqab when she’s driving a car (it might restrict her vision) or when she is applying for a driving licence, which is a pretty common form of recognized identification … and it seems pretty clear that airport security should insist that a burqa or chador must be removed for security screening (to permit positive facial recognition).
But, why the hell does the state ~ the BIG, collective, state ~ care what any individual wears when (s)he boards a bus. It ought to care that she deposits the correct fare, of course, or taps her card to pay, but why does the state care if her face is covered? It’s arrant nonsense, and it is an infringement on a fundamental right.
Reminder: you (and I, and Muslim women, too) have lots of rights but four of them are quite fundamental: life, liberty and property as defined by John Locke in 17th century England and privacy, as defined by Brandies and Warren in 19th century America. These rights all accrue to all individuals, only, and they, those individuals, need to have their fundamental rights protected against constant threats from collectives including religions, societies and states, themselves. These new laws, passed by big, collectivist states, are threats to individual liberties and must be challenged and overturned. Liberals, like Justin Trudeau, will not do it because they are progressives, not liberals, and because people like Justin Trudeau cannot think about fundamental rights … only about partisan, short term, political advantage.
Let me be clear about my own position:
- Women may wear whatever they want for their own (good or not so good) reasons; but
- It is wrong for anyone (including any father or husband or rabbi or provincial premier) to force women to dress in some certain way for social (including political) or religious reasons.
Your religion is a wholly private matter between you and your gods … you may never try to impose your beliefs on others, including your wife and children.
October 5, 2017
QotD: Legalizing drugs
It is not the business of the State to tell adults what to do with themselves, or how they interact with other consenting adults. Where drugs are concerned, any disadvantages in leaving people alone are greatly outweighed by the costs of the War on Drugs, which has reduced large parts of the world to violent chaos, and corrupted every law enforcement agency involved in fighting it, and been made an excuse for the destruction of due process rights in England and America.
Sean Gabb, quoted in “Wayne John Sturgeon talks to Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance”, Sean Gabb, 2013-08-26.
August 31, 2017
Words and Numbers: Do Americans still have freedom of speech?
Apparently, James and Antony have given up the YouTube version of Words and Numbers and reverted to an audio-only version (at least I can still embed the player version):
These days, everybody is nervous about what you can say in public without getting slammed by retribution. But is that a free-speech problem, or does it only become one when the police start showing up? Do we live in a truly tolerant society if voicing an opinion, even if it doesn’t land you in jail, ends up ending your career? Antony and James explore these intricate issues.
August 26, 2017
QotD: The American Constitution
All things considered, this New Republic piece on Randy Barnett and the libertarian constitutional movement is really pretty good. But I thought this part was revealing:
Barnett believes the Constitution exists to secure inalienable property and contract rights for individuals. This may sound like a bland and inconsequential opinion, but if widely adopted by our courts and political systems it would prohibit or call into question basic governmental protections — minimum wages, food-safety regulations, child-labor laws — that most of us take for granted. For nearly a century now, a legal counterculture has insisted that the whole New Deal project was a big, unconstitutional error, and Barnett is a big part of that movement today.
If your entire program is called into question by the notion that individuals have property and contract rights, maybe the problem is with your program.
And to the extent that, as believed by many, the Supreme Court’s eventual accommodation to the New Deal was the product of duress in the form of FDR’s court-packing scheme, then isn’t that accommodation, in fact, illegitimate?
Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, 2015-08-31.
August 14, 2017
The NRA as a “domestic security threat”
Kevin Williamson on the recent calls for the National Rifle Association to be viewed in the same way as the KKK, al Queda or ISIS:
Representative Kathleen Rice, a batty New York congressman — and, significantly, a former prosecutor — […] called upon the U.S. government to designate the National Rifle Association and its public faces, including Dana Loesch, “domestic security threats.” This demand comes in response to the NRA’s having shown a recruiting video in which Loesch criticizes sundry progressive bogeymen (the media, Hollywood, etc.) and calls upon like-minded allies to “fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.” It was immediately denounced by the usual opportunistic nincompoops as a call to violence and sedition, even a call to overthrow the government.
It is of course no such thing. It’s a dopey bit of cheap PR hackery from an increasingly partisan NRA that has made the lamentable decision to branch out from what it is good at — its enormously successful and historically bipartisan campaign of agitation for gun rights — and go all-in with Trump (a fickle friend of the Second Amendment) and the kulturkampf associated with his movement. None of that adds up to “domestic security threat” or anything like a domestic security threat. The only thing the NRA or Loesch have done violence to is a decent respect for the limitations of metaphor.
“Domestic security threat” is a term without legal meaning, being a conflation of two terms that Democrats like to employ against their critics: “national-security threat” and “domestic terrorists.” That should give us some idea of what Representative Rice would like to see done in response to the “domestic security threat” she imagines. Recent precedent here is not particularly inspiring: The Obama administration assassinated an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, for the grave offense of being “the Osama bin Laden of Facebook,” a phrase that would be hard to say without laughing in a context other than the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen.
Gun owners and gun enthusiasts have been targeted for some time by Democrats, who have insisted, among other things, that the federal government ought to suspend the constitutional rights of people put on a secret blacklist by the federal government with no due process and no course of appeal. Democrats dream of registries, property seizure, and other invasive measures reminiscent of the totalitarian excesses of the 20th century — so long as those tools of tyranny are used on their political enemies.
What are the possible offenses of the NRA? It is an organization that does nothing more aggressive than political organization and political communication. Its efforts are labor-intensive: Contrary to the ignorant assumptions that inform our political discourse, the NRA is a relatively small spender when it comes to campaign donations and lobbying, being at the moment the 460th-largest campaign donor and the 156th-highest-spending lobbyist. The NRA has long excelled at its core mission because it excels at arguing its case in public and at delivering the votes, particularly in tight House races. And it is for this — for ordinary political activism of precisely the sort that the First Amendment exists to protect — that Representative Rice and others seek to have the NRA punished as a criminal organization, or as a terrorist organization. That these authoritarian measures are cheered by people who still call themselves “liberals” suggests a widespread moral and intellectual failure among a significant portion of the American public.
August 11, 2017
Penn & Teller on Gun Control
Published on 11 Feb 2013
Penn and teller explain the 2nd amendment in very simple, easy to understand terms. Just the way it was written.
July 25, 2017
“‘Legal fiction’ sounds better than ‘lie’, but in this case the two terms are near synonyms”
The Instapundit Glenn Reynolds in USA Today on US Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ passion for civil asset forfeiture:
Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to steal from you.
Oh, he doesn’t call it that. He calls it “civil forfeiture.” But what it is, is theft by law enforcement. Sessions should be ashamed. If I were president, he’d be fired.
Under “civil forfeiture,” law enforcement can take property from people under the legal fiction that the property itself is guilty of a crime. (“Legal fiction” sounds better than “lie,” but in this case the two terms are near synonyms.) It was originally sold as a tool for going after the assets of drug kingpins, but nowadays it seems to be used against a lot of ordinary Americans who just have things that law enforcement wants. It’s also a way for law enforcement agencies to maintain off-budget slush funds, thus escaping scrutiny.
As Drug Enforcement Agency agent Sean Waite told the Albuquerque Journal, “We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty. … It’s that the money is presumed to be guilty.”
“Presumed to be guilty.” Once in America, we had a presumption of innocence. But that was inconvenient to the powers that be.
As Tamara Keel said “Appointing Sessions was the opposite of ‘draining the swamp’; it was basically pumping in a whole bunch of vintage swamp water”
July 12, 2017
Someone at the NRA finally speaks out on the shooting death of Philando Castile
Radley Balko on the problems the NRA creates for itself by its reflexive support of the police, which weakens its efforts on upholding gun rights for ordinary Americans:
At long last, someone from the National Rifle Association has spoken up about Philando Castile. Sort of. During a CNN segment, NRA spokeswoman and pundit Dana Loesch said this:
I think it’s absolutely awful. It’s a terrible tragedy that could have been avoided. I don’t agree with every single decision that comes out from courtrooms of America. There are a lot of variables in this particular case, and there were a lot of things that I wish would have been done differently. Do I believe that Philando Castile deserved to lose his life over his [traffic] stop? I absolutely do not. I also think that this is why we have things like NRA Carry Guard, not only to reach out to the citizens to go over what to do during stops like this, but also to work with law enforcement so that they understand what citizens are experiencing when they go through stops like this.
As Jacob Sullum points out at Reason, this is pretty weak stuff. A law-abiding gun owner was shot and killed by a cop after doing everything he was supposed to do. It then took more than a year for anyone from the nation’s largest gun rights organization to comment, and when she did, she offered a vague, heavily qualified, quasi-criticism of the cop while implying not only that Castile contributed to his death but also that he might be alive if only he were carrying an NRA Carry Guard card.
This is about par for the course for the NRA. This is the group that claims to be the only thing preventing the government from obliterating the Second Amendment, yet they’re noticeably quiet about the people doing the most violence to the Second Amendment — the armed, badge-wearing government employees we call law enforcement officers. For all the NRA’s dire warnings about government gun confiscation, the real, tangible threat to gun-owning Americans today comes not from gun-grabbing bureaucrats but from door-bashing law enforcement officers who think they’re at war — who are too often trained to view the people they serve not as citizens with rights but as potential threats. Here, the NRA just doesn’t want to get involved.
[…]
In short, the NRA seems to think we’re at risk of creeping tyranny and abuse of power from all sectors of government except from the men and women armed, badged and entrusted with the power to kill. That’s a problem, because if armed agents who enforce the laws on the ground aren’t required to respect our rights, our rights don’t really exist.
The Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way on the Castle Doctrine for the next 25 years, but if the police continue to kick down doors with impunity, law-abiding gun owners will be at risk, and the Second Amendment will be more of an empty gesture than a constitutional protection. The Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way on conceal carry for the next 25 years, but if the organization keeps pushing the line that cops are at war, that the populace is dangerous, and that every citizen is a possible threat, the right to carry a gun in public will always be constrained by cops conditioned to see every weapon as a threat to their existence.
Finally, the Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way and abolish all the state laws like those that ensnared Shaneen Allen, but as long as the NRA and its allies push rhetoric that makes white people (and white cops) see all crime with a black face, the right to bear arms for people who look like her — or who look like Philando Castile — exist only in theory.
June 12, 2017
“They have gradually moved legislative power out of Congress and into administrative agencies — to be exercised, in more genteel ways, by persons like … themselves”
Glenn Reynolds (aka the Instapundit) on the unelected bureaucracies that have taken on more and more executive power over the lives of ordinary American citizens and their businesses:
Watching the ongoing clown show in Washington, Americans can be forgiven for asking themselves, “Why did we give this bunch of clowns so very much power over our nation and our lives?”
Well, don’t feel so bad, voters. Because you didn’t actually give them that much power. They just took it. That’s the thesis of Columbia Law Professor Philip Hamburger’s new book, The Administrative Threat, a short, punchy followup to his magisterial Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Both deal with the extraordinary — and illegitimate — power that administrative agencies have assumed in American life.
Hamburger explains that the prerogative powers once exercised by English kings, until they were circumscribed after a resulting civil war, have now been reinvented and lodged in administrative agencies, even though the United States Constitution was drafted specifically to prevent just such abuses. But today, the laws that actually affect people and businesses are seldom written by Congress; instead they are created by administrative agencies through a process of “informal rulemaking,” a process whose chief virtue is that it’s easy for the rulers to engage in, and hard for the ruled to observe or influence. Non-judicial administrative courts decide cases, and impose penalties, without a jury or an actual judge. And the protections in the Constitution and Bill of Rights (like the requirement for a judge-issued search warrant before a search) are often inapplicable.
As Hamburger writes, “Administrative power also evades many of the Constitution’s procedures, including both its legislative and judicial processes. Administrative power thereby sidesteps most of the Constitution’s procedural freedoms. Administrative power is thus all about the evasion of governance through law, including an evasion of constitutional processes and procedural rights.”
