The mouth-breathers over at FrontPageMag.com are at it again, no doubt gesticulating wildly and foaming at the mouth while accusing everyone who disagrees with them of treason. There's also a cute article by Tim "I'm a soldier so everything I say is right" Ryan, who can't seem to go four sentences without saying "aiding and abetting the enemy" just because he's mad that the media doesn't spend more time talking about the one sewer system we built and instead -- gasp -- focuses on the masses of innocent people being slaughtered there. These moronic Horowitz devotees seem to be incapable of addressing dissent against the war in any reasonable manner, and so fall back on their hyper-tough-guy patriotic garbage to drown out and shout down anyone who dares question the wisdom of starting a war that has killed tens of thousands of innocents and almost 2000 Americans.

What is it with Republicans and the whole treason thing? It must be a last resort for these simple minds who can't stand actually debating with others who don't share their same blind faith in big government and the war machine, but honestly it gets very very old. I'm also a big fan of the smears that we shouldn't dissent against stupid wars because its the troops that give us the right to free speech. Actually it isn't the troops who give us the right to free speech, and if these idiots knew anything about history or the principles upon which our nation was founded they would know that the founding fathers considered a standing army to be the greatest threat to all our freedoms. Even if they are making the argument that our troops protect our country so that we have freedom of speech, they are still wrong because our military hasn't actually protected us against any sort of invasion that would endanger our freedoms since WWII. Even then, if our government completely collapsed and we were left without anyone kind enough to grant us poor feeble citizens the right to speak, people with minds would realize that freedom of speech is something people have intrinsically, and that the "right" that the government grants us is only them refraining from jailing and/or killing people for doing what they naturally should be able to do. There is nothing heroic or wonderful about the bully government not beating you up for doing something natural and human.

Even funnier, these simpletons see no contradiction between their brink-of-a-lynching rhetoric and their loudmouthed dissent when Clinton was in office. Why was opposing a war ok when Clinton went into Kosovo? Don't expect any real answers to these questions, because that would require critical thought, not just yelling.

Anyone heard of freedom of speech? Apparently our good friends at the NYPD haven't -- they shut down a protest right after Cindy Sheehan spoke, and arrested one man for using electronic amplification equipment in the park where the demonstration was. This is the same park where musicians, breakdancers, magicians, and every sort of performer come and blast their music and give shows. Could this possibly be any more blatant a violation of free speech?

Excellent and hilarious segment from the Daily Show about Bush's Katrina relief package.

Here's a great article from the Christian Science Monitor about government spending vs. charitable giving, and the response to Katrina.

While they say that private charitable organizations are more effective, they don't really delve into how much more effective they are. From an article at the Foundation for Economic Education:

"Several years ago it was calculated how much would be required to lift every man, woman, and child in America out of poverty by simply giving them money. The figure came to one-third of what was spent on poverty programs."

So this, combined with the CSM article, only reinforces what we should already know: government programs are wasteful, ineffective, and stifle people's natural charitable instincts. Furthermore, the state forcefully taking money and giving it to the poor is not charity at all -- not any more than it would be charitable for me to steal $20 from you and give it to a homeless man on the street.

Open Your Eyes. You're Being Duped

Quoth Bill Maher: "The devil didn't fly up from hell and knock a hole in that levee. The levee just didn't get built because the money for it went to rich peoples' tax cuts and pork projects and corporate welfare."

True, Mr. Maher, but the money also went to failed and wasteful welfare programs, wars, our growing police state, propping up failed airlines, and every other inefficient, corrupt government program that our Congress has thought up to exceed their authority since the New Deal. In fact, even if those rich people hadn't gotten their tax cuts, and if the pork projects were eliminated, and if we hung huge corporations out to fend for themselves like we should, the government still would have done a terrible job. And that's just because they have no reason to do a good job.

People like to point out how under capitalism people only act to maximize profits, and don't do the right thing. Well, the same holds for government, only things turn out a thousand times worse because politicians don't even have to do anything except steal to get their money. At least private corporations have to make something or do something for someone. As much as you might hate Wal-Mart, you don't have to spend your money there. When government negligence makes a terrible disaster even worse, the government just demands more money. We have virtually no control over the processes of government, because most people just don't care enough to hold politicians responsible for their egregious errors.

As long as we're stuck in this false dichotomy between Republicans and Democrats, we will fail to realize that the real problem is that the vast majority of politicians, no matter what party they are in, are at least marginally corrupt and largely incapable of doing that which they promise to do. In the sea of apathetic voters that is America, your vote means nothing, and the same imbeciles will continue to pick your pocket year after year, no matter how angry Democrats get that their favorite Skull & Bones frat brother didn't win the 2004 election.

Here's a video of a pretty intense debate between Bush apologist Christopher Hitchens and human pitbull George Galloway on C-SPAN. George Galloway calls Christopher Hitchens a court jester, calls Barbara Bush "Marie Antoinette". I actually thought Hitchens made some decent points, however he also made some very stupid statements about our troops learning valuable lessons in Iraq that they used in New Orleans, and things like that. I also thought Galloway was much better when he testified in front of the Senate Committee a while back. The sad thing is that Hitchens seems to be a rather smart person, yet for some reason he insists on defending so many of Bush's ridiculous policies.

It was interesting to see the Baruch College crowd go completely insane whenever Hitchens said something. Although some of what he said deserved to be booed at, that's kind of sad when people can't stand to let someone voice their opinion. Antiwar activists should persuade people with reason, not shout them down. When people watch C-SPAN and hear people swearing and making animal noises, they aren't going to convince anyone that this war is a bad idea.

The O'Reilly clip I posted earlier got me thinking about the commerce clause in the constitution, and reminded me of the recent court case of Gonzalez v. Raich. This is an excellent example of activist judges, although one that Republicans never cite.

In Gonzalez v. Raich, the court held that the federal government has the authority to prohibit growing medical marijuana in one's back yard because doing so affects interstate commerce. They had to establish this since all federal drug laws are based on the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the constitution) which grants the government the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."

In their insane leap of logic, the court held that the person growing the plant would buy it from someone else if they could not grow it themselves, and therefore the growing influenced price levels across state lines. Because of this, growing things in your back yard is "interstate commerce" in the eyes of the federal government. What kind of idiots do we have as judges in this country? By this logic, the federal government could put a tax on tomatoes you grow in your back yard, tax you for transferring ownership of a shirt to your children or siblings, and basically tax, regulate, or prohibit pretty much any production or use of anything they can think up. They could even, by the same logic, prohibit teaching children that drugs and alcohol are harmful, since doing so would influence whether or not they purchase these things, and therefore influence the prices of these goods across state borders.

Congress has for a long time been using the Commerce Clause to claim federal powers they very obviously do not have under the constitution, but this case shows just how insane their claims to these powers really are, and how little we can trust the courts to control the government from exceeding its authority.

You have to love our free* country, and the freedom** we have because of our limited*** government.

*not free
**slavery
***not limited

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." – George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

Sometimes I like Bill O'Reilly, but he just proved himself to be an absolute idiot. In this video, from Crooks and Liars, O'Reilly's guest mentions the Commerce Clause of the constitution, upon which a good number of the federal government's actions are based. O'Reilly's reply? "The commerce clause? I don't know anything about it." So... he doesn't know about one of the most important clause in the constitution.

Good thing people all across the country are getting their political insights from him. Well done Mr. O'Reilly.

Roger B. Myerson has an excellent analysis of the Iraqi constitution over at Juan Cole's Informed Comment.

Myerson discusses how the federalist system (the separation of federal and state powers) established by the constitution will be beneficial for forming a solid democratic state. There are some problems, however, like a section in the constitution which establishes incentives for smaller provinces to combine into larger ones, thereby decreasing the ability of local governments to meet the needs of the people, and increasing the risk of secession as larger provinces are more likely to desire independence than smaller provinces.

While this analysis only deals with the form of the new government, there are other issues with the constitution from a human rights perspective, including the provision that no law may contradict Sharia, or Islamic law. This may result in laws which discriminate against women, or sanction some forms of abuse towards women. Also, the provisions protecting freedom of speech are extremely weak, stating only that freedom of speech will not be infringed except by law. There are numerous other touchy areas that westerners would gasp at, however the constitution is distinctly Middle Eastern, so this is not surprising.

The most unsettling part is, as Myerson discusses, that the constitution may make secession and civil war even more inevitable than they already seem, in light of the many ethnic and religious divisions that threaten to tear the country apart.

Imagine that you bought a new computer for $800, and that the computer then exploded, seriously injuring you or a member of your family. Imagine that when you went to the store to lodge a complaint, the computer company told you that you had to give them $200, and that then the next computer you bought would not blow up. I imagine you would tell them to take a hike, only using a number of four-letter words other than "hike."

So why is it that when the government, who we pay to protect us (whether we like it or not), completely fails to do so, we accept it when they say that all they need is more money? Why is it that, after Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast and government failures made the situation worse, people are now calling for more funding for FEMA, for more government programs to protect people in the future? How much do we honestly think it could cost to evacuate a couple hundred thousand people from New Orleans in a timely manner? More than the $10.7 billion in pork (a euphemism for what should be criminally corrupt government spending) that was recently passed as part of the latest highway bill? Why do we think more money is what is needed? Of course the government loves it when people respond in this manner, since throwing money at a problem is the easiest thing to do, and since government officials pocket a large portion of whatever money is thrown at them.

We should not be surprised at this response, since government has been dealing with problems this way for as long as it has been around. When welfare failed to substantially improve the lot of poor people in our country, we responded by throwing more money into the bureaucratic black hole, and of course nothing got any better. As public schools have gotten worse and worse with time, we have thrown more and more money at them, and they have only gotten worse. You would think by now people would realize that maybe the problem isn't the amount of funding, but the institution we are funding. The government doesn't really do anything well. Government is wasteful, corrupt, and ineffective -- it always has been and always will be.

Going back to the costs of protecting people from hurricane Katrina, if the $10.7 billion in wasteful pork from the last highway bill had been used to get people out of New Orleans, the government could moved the entire metropolitan area of New Orleans, that's over 1.3 million people, and spent over $8000 on each person. Money isn't the problem. The problem is government. The problem is that those in government have no natural incentive to do any more than what is necessary to stay in office -- and politicians need not do much at all to stay in office. It is always easier for politicians to do a bad job and point fingers later, since the politician has no vested interest in the lives or property or well-being of anyone but themself, so long as he or she can deny responsibility for their failure. As every child knows, it is easier to lie and make excuses than do the right thing.

If something needs to be done, and that something doesn't involve killing, stealing or jailing people, it's better not to ask the government to do it.

There's a good article over at LewRockwell.com by Lila Rajiva about hurricane Katrina, with an excellent Nietzsche quote:

"Whatever the state saith is a lie; whatever it hath is a theft: all is counterfeit in it, the gnawing, sanguinary, insatiate monster."

On the other side of the world in Southeast Asia, Thomas L. Friedman writes about how Singapore is such an excellent country to live in, and that they would have handled the Katrina disaster very well. Nevermind, he says, the fact that in Singapore still uses barbaric forms of punishment like caning, and forget that their strict system of law makes it a crime to use a toilet and not flush afterwards. It is also illegal to possess chewing gum, not to mention spitting will most likely get you a hefty fine. Furthermore, Friedman praises Singapore for paying politicians millions of dollars in salary, saying that this is so they get the "best-qualified and least-corruptible people." Who does he think gave these politicians such absurdly huge paychecks? I would guess it was the politicians. Paying so much is not a way to avoid corruption, but a form of corruption itself. What would you call it if our Congress voted to raise their salaries to a couple million dollars a year? What kind of insane totalitarian state is this? And why in hell is Thomas Friedman defending this overbearing and evil government?

People are always insanely claiming that Singapore is a model to be emulated and praised, since there is such a low crime rate. Of course people attribute the low crime rate to the totalitarian system of police surveillance and harsh penalties. In fact, even if the complete annihilation of freedom in the name of security and a low crime rate was desirable, there is nothing to indicate that the situation in the small city-state of Singapore could be duplicated, especially in a huge country like America.

Of course I do not question that Singapore would have done a much better job of hurricane preparation and relief, partially because such a disaster is always a threat in the minds of government officials, and partially because the American federal government is vastly larger, more bureaucratic, wasteful, and incompetent than the relatively small national government of Singapore. Friedman, however, takes this rather unsurprising fact and extrapolates that Singapore is an excellent place to live. This is nonsense. The government of Singapore has very little if any respect for human rights or human freedom, and only acts as a means for politicians to get rich. It seems sometimes like Mr. Friedman only writes articles to say, "Hey, I'm in Singapore. How cool is that? I travel all over the world, and I'm definitely cooler than you." Just as in almost ever article he says something along the lines of, I was talking to so-and-so in Punjabi, who said that people are all the same, and are made out of clay. Mr. Friedman thinks that all kinds of sentimental nonsense sound profound, so long as the nonsense is coming out of the mouth of someone whose culture he doesn't understand.

Once again, Friedman shows himself to be an idiot, as has been abundantly clear since he published the book "The World is Flat". Oh really, Mr. Friedman? It is? Coming from him, I would bet the book somewhere claims that the world is literally flat. Like a tortilla. That would be no more absurd than most of the drivel this man spews all over the pages of the New York Times.

To be fair, the one good part of the article is where Friedman states:

We let the families of the victims of 9/11 redesign our intelligence organizations, and our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured. Our economy seems to be fueled lately by either suing each other or selling each other houses. Our government launched a war in Iraq without any real plan for the morning after, and it cut taxes in the middle of that war, ensuring that future generations would get the bill.

It is funny, though, that Friedman criticizes the war in Iraq, given that he was an ardent supporter of it before it was launched. He loved the idea of killing people halfway across the world, but then just didn't approve of how it was being done by our government. Sigh.

In case you haven't heard, a federal judge has declared the plege of allegiance unconstitutional. Most people are up in arms because the decision resulted from the inclusion of the words "under God" in the pledge. What never seemed to cross people's minds, however, is how sick and evil it is to make children into little government-loving zombies, forcing them to recite this prayer to the state. Since when does the government have the right to make people swear allegiance to idols? Maybe in 1960's Maoist China this kind of thing is legit, but here in our "free country", children should be able to (and can) burn the flag if it suits them, not be forced to praise it like a god. Even patriotic Americans should see that patriotism is not something to be forced and indoctrinated into children like the love of Chairman Mao, but rather something that people should come by naturally as they experience the benefits of living in a free society. The necessity of such a pledge comes from the fact that our society is really no longer a free society, and thus people must be brainwashed by this kind of repetitive propaganda, lest they realize that our country has been in a downward spiral for quite a while. It is very interesting to see the history of the pledge, and how it became more and more important as people lost more of their freedoms and independence. Good riddance to the pledge of allegiance. If only all mindless garbage like it could be washed away too... But then again, some people might miss Fox News.

Breaking News: Republicans are Conservatives? Majority-of-clowns leader Tom DeLay recently stated that our government was running efficiently, declaring an "ongoing victory" for Republicans and saying that nothing more could be cut from the budget. Way to go, small government! Apparently a $223 million bridge from nowhere to nowhere does not qualify as the kind of wasteful, corrupt pork that Republicans might want to cut from budgets. Add to that another odd $700 million or so in assorted pork from the same representative, and you have $941 billion of wasteful, corrupt spending. Just in case you are skimming, that's $941 million, as in almost a billion dollars. And the bridge is useless. This also only part of $10.7 billion of wasteful pork in the highway bill. Now don't you ever say the government is a bunch of criminals... they're serving the good of the people, right? I'd rather have the mafia in charge -- they don't build big worthless bridges, and they kill fewer people than the corrupt sacks in D.C.

O D H A V B L O G is now Interactive!

Big news for you O D H A V B L O G fans, I just updated everything and now you can write comments by clicking the link "# Comments" underneath every post of mine. So if you think I'm full of it, let me know. If you like what I'm saying, let me know. Now we can discuss the wonder that is the BLOG, underneath every post.

And of course, you can take advantage of my hard work in setting up this site, using my comments section as a podium to preach from! You can change the world, one blog comment at a time.

Earlier today I came across an article written by economist Walter Block concerning unionization, wage rates and left-wing rhetoric. He offers a very concise explanation of how wage rates, just like prices, are determined by market forces of supply and demand, and how efforts to artificially raise or lower these rates can only result in harmful market distortions and unemployment. Here is the section dealing with the economics of the matter:

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According to our friends on the left, the reason we need unions is because without them, employers would grind employees into the ground. Were organized labor to disappear, wages would plummet; workers would have to work on Sundays ("If you don’t come in Sunday, don’t bother coming in Monday"), tip their hat to their bosses, and suffer all sorts of other indignities, including losing virtually all improvements in working conditions made over the last century.

Of course, this is all wrong. Wages and working conditions are not set by firms. Rather, they depend upon the productivity of labor, more technically on the marginal revenue product of the worker. This can be defined as the extra amount of revenue brought in by adding one more person to the payroll. For example, if there were 1000 workers creating an item that sold for $x, and then the 1001^st employee came on board and the firms sales rose to $x + $7, then the marginal revenue productivity of the last person hired would be $7 per hour.

Wages cannot long be higher than this amount, or the company will lose money on every worker it hires. For example, if compensation is $10, and revenue taken in due to the efforts of the worker is $7, then the firm loses $3 every hour the man is on the shop floor.

On the other hand, a situation cannot endure where wages are lower than this amount. For example, suppose pay was $2 per hour, while productivity remained at the $7 level we are considering. Then, the employer would earn a pure profit of $5 every hour. This cannot last for two reasons. First, other companies would have incentive to hire such a worker away from his employer. Assuming that the productivity of the latter would be the same $7 on the premises of any member of the industry, a competitor could offer, say, $2.25. This would be a substantial increase over and above the present salary of $2, and yet would allow the newcomer to earn a profit of $7–$2.25 = $4.75. But if this would work, so would a bid of $2.50, $2.75, $3.00, etc. Where would this process end? As near to $7 as allowed by the costs of finding such "underpaid" workers and convincing them to switch jobs for higher pay. Second, workers talk to each other. An employee worth $7 but paid less than that would be tempted to quit if he found out that his associates at other stores or factories were earning more. Thus, wages for workers of this skill level will tend to earn $7. This does not mean that under free enterprise there will be no deviations from this amount. There will be. The market is continually changing. But there is an inexorable tendency for wages to continually move in the direction of this equilibration.
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Thus it is clear that, for the same reasons that prices for similar goods are close to the same equilibrium point, wages naturally approach a point where it makes sense for employers to give people jobs. If the employer is forced to raise these wages above the natural point (by minimum wage laws, coercive union actions, etc), he will raise the prices of his goods or let workers go in order to offset his losses. If he does not do one of these things, he will go out of business and all his employees will be unemployed. If he raises prices, these costs are passed on to the people who buy his products, that is, other workers. In the end, this can only result in price inflation, and the average worker is not any better off. Simply put, price controls and minimum wage laws do not work, and only hurt the workers they claim to help.

*Note that this only concerns unions who coercively prohibit new workers from replacing those who are on strike. These workers, who union members derisively call "scabs", are in fact nothing but workers who are even worse off than the striking workers. These unions champion the worker well enough off to go without wages for weeks or months during a strike, while showing contempt for (or committing acts of violence against) those previously without jobs who want nothing but to make money for their familes. This is nothing but hypocrisy, and in facts only prohibits hard-working, honest men and women from feeding their families.

Aren't you tired of those stupid democrats trying to drag President Bush into the Katrina disaster? Everyone knows it was the result of only failures by the local and state governments, since the federal government is divine and perfect. Oh wait. Bush just took responsibility for screwing up. I think this means he now has to give himself a medal, or force himself to resign a la George "Massive Intelligence Failure" Tenet, who received the Congressional Medal of Freedom, and Michael "You're doing a great job, Brownie." Brown, who was just forced to resign from his position as head of FEMA.

On a related note, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has also taken responsibility (video) for his part of the failures surrounding Katrina. This leaves only Governor Blanco, who is yet to apologize for anything. Ooh! Ooh! She's a Democrat! So what! They all screwed up, and they're all incompetent. This is because they are the damn government. They're all Republicrats, and they all do the same stupid crap.

Also, to my amazement, it seems that John Roberts, despite being nominated by the worst president in history, might actually have his stuff together. Check out this link of him actually answering questions directly. He even seems to know a little bit about the Constitution! (Although probably not enough.) Video here.