Watch this political ad (below) promoting Washington State’s Initiative 1098, which seeks to dedicate $2 billion per year to fund education and healthcare for children. It’s always for the children! It’s not about soaking the rich! even though this other Yeson1098 video makes a point of demonizing the greedy rich. The slogan is “the wealthy pay more, the rest of us pay less.” Bill Gates, Sr., is presented as a grandfatherly figure sacrificing his comfort for the sake of childrens’ enjoyment while he explains the reasonableness of this new scheme to legally plunder the rich.

His son could donate $2 billion of his own money each year for a couple decades and still have plenty left over, thereby funding this initiative all by himself for a good long while, and yet wealthy progressives like the Gates’ eagerly volunteer the money of others.

You can’t really be generous or charitable with other peoples’ money. Taking from them against their will or volunteering them to be targets of theft is immoral and unjust.

Anyone who is in favor of funding this initiative can simply devise a voluntary payment scheme and put up their own money. Then we’ll see how much progressives really care about the children.

Instead, they waste creativity, time, and money manipulating the statist-democratic process and promoting majoritarian-populist initiatives with clever, emotional, yet substanceless propaganda.

Hypocrites.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

First of all, I found the title of the movie to be redundant from the get-go. The action scenes are mostly way over the top. The gore insanely so. Swords and other blades slice through body parts, even cutting men in half at the waist, as if they were hot knives slicing through butter. Ninja stars fly from hands like they are being fired from a machine gun. They even have chemtrails. Blood fountains and splatters by the bucket load. Our ninja hero takes dozens of lethal wounds, losing gallons of blood, and not only lives to tell about it but keeps on fighting. There is a bit of super-speed blurred movement and mind-over-body self-healing, so the movie is something of a fantasy action thriller. We’re treated to the cliché of the hero being down for the count, about to be killed, when someone he cares about is attacked and suddenly he discovers renewed vitality and determination and, inexplicably, an unbelievable (that’s saying a lot for this movie) leap in skill level.

For all that, I found the movie entertaining. The action scenes are well-done and stylish. And I particularly liked the parkour-inspired sequences. The plot is interesting and tightly executed. The story even has a couple of elements of interest to libertarians. There are a number of ninja clans that kidnap orphan children and train them to be assassins, indoctrinating them with the belief that the lives of individuals are valueless compared to that of the clan, which is one big family to which they owe unquestioning and unwavering loyalty and obedience. The ninja clans apparently act as secret private contractors for governments around the world, assassinating targets for 100 lbs. of gold. Our ninja hero is one particularly promising pupil of the Ozunu clan. He buys into the propaganda at first, but falls for a pretty young girl, a fellow trainee, who does not. She attempts to escape, and is recaptured and executed in front of all the ninjas-in-training as an example. When he is later faced with killing another girl, whom he is told has similarly betrayed the clan, as the final requirement of becoming a full member of the clan, he refuses and is nearly killed. The bulk of the movie is about his quest for revenge against the Ozunu clan with the help of a female government agent.

Though it is a classic revenge tale, the negative portrayal of coercive and aggressive collectivism is a nice touch. The notion that the individual should be subservient to and acquires his value and ultimate end from The Collective, whatever it be named (the Family, the Clan, the Tribe, the Race, the Nation or State), is an insidious sickness. It that permeates the communitarian classical republicanism of Rome (as I explain in my working paper “Roman Virtue, Liberty, and Imperialism: The Murder-Suicide of Classical Civilization” (pdf)), which, along with classical liberalism, with which it is in tension due to the conflict with the latter’s inherent individualism, was one of the major influences on the so-called Founding Fathers of the United States of America. It is also inherent in nationalism and, of course, the modern collectivist political movements of our age. At the risk of being redundant, a truly libertarian and civilized society exists for each and every individual’s own well-being – not the other way round.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

A 10-year-old boy is taking a stand for “liberty and justice for all,” refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance until gays and lesbians enjoy equal rights. Good for him. But this will be best achieved by getting the state out of marriage entirely. Let people define marriage how they will. Barring that, the second best option so long as the state monopolizes the definition and the legal system is to insist that the state has no right to limit marriage to opposite-sex unions, thus denying homosexuals equal legal rights, tax benefits, etc., within its auspices.

The state can never bring “liberty and justice for all” so it is incoherent, though a good rhetorical device, to make one’s pledging allegiance to it contingent on its doing so. Pledging allegiance is itself morally suspect insofar as it carries connotations of feudalism, and morally bankrupt insofar as allegiance is pledged to the state. I think it is no accident that the Pledge was not created until after the Civil War, in 1892, roughly a hundred years after the signing of the Constitution and not long before the US government’s first overseas imperial war. Nor that its creator, Francis Bellamy, was a statist-socialist intent on promoting nationalism in public indoctrination camps schools. (Incidentally, as an aside, the phrase “under God” wasn’t added to the Pledge until 1954, and “in God we trust” wasn’t the official US motto until 1956.)

Quality Time With The Kids – Watch more free videos

Consumer Reports reports that hookahs are not as healthy as many people seem to think. I’m not surprised. What I find interesting and disturbing is the view about law and the state that is expressed by the CR employee’s kid Daniel at the end of the article. What is this guy teaching his kid, huh? “They wouldn’t make something legal if it were so unsafe.” As if everything is naturally illegal by default, and it is the job of wise state’smen to choose what to make legal (allow us to do).

Ever wondered why the cost of college tuition keeps going up and up and up? Well, here’s your answer. Now, go get even and put an end this insanity.

I added a new quote to my Favorite Quotes page. I hope it is not too pretentious of me, as it is one of my own, albeit but a modification of a great Rothbard quote on ignorance of economics.

Here they are for comparison:

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” – Murray Rothbard

“It is no crime to be ignorant of philosophy, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be abstruse and of little relevance for life. But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on philosophical subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” – Me

And yes, there is a real living inspiration for this little piece of creative modification, but the person or persons shall remain nameless – or at least unnamed by me here. ;o)

It’s not the kids; it’s the education system that’s stupid.

There’s a new study out in the July 2007 issue (Vol.XL, No.3) of PS: Political Science & Politics, published by the American Political Science Association (APSA). It purports to rank universities by the quantity of quality job placements of the Ph.D.s graduating from their political science departments.

86 schools that awarded at least 30 Ph.D.s over the 15 year period from 1990-2004 were ranked; those that didn’t, weren’t. Included in the weighting system are the following criteria: percentage of Ph.D. recipients placed in tenure-track faculty positions; prominence of the schools at which they are placed; corrected for the size of the department, in terms of number of faculty, from which the Ph.D. recipient graduated; corrected for the size of the department, in terms of student graduates, from which the Ph.D. recipient graduated (with a per-capita measurement derived by dividing each row of the matrix by the number of Ph.D.s granted by the institution). Not all of us get tenure-track jobs, or university jobs at all for that matter – shocking and horrifying, I know.

Where does LSU come out on this ranking system? 52 out of the 86…of the universities that met the criterion noted in the first sentence of the above paragraph. There are probably a lot of universities not ranked at all because they don’t meet this criterion. LSU ranked close behind Vanderbilt, UC – Davis, and Penn State. It ranked ahead of, in descending order, Arizona State; U. of Florida; SUNY, Binghamton; Notre Dame; George Washington; SUNY, Buffalo; UC – Santa Barbara; Washington State; Georgetown; Purdue; Claremont Grad.; Hawaii; Fordham; Catholic University; U. of Nebraska; Temple; and Texas Tech, among others. This is not bad news for me…I think.

Whew! The semester is finally over and I survived intact with three A’s, and most of my students survived too! I finished grading Tuesday and, hopefullly!, finished with fielding questions about final exams and with the begging (and demanding!) for higher grades. My grade distribution turned out pretty skewed towards A’s and B’s, probably because of the optional extra credit paper and the fact that I dropped some of the lowest quiz grades. 15 A’s, 14 B’s, 7 C’s, 3 D’s, and 3 F’s. One of those F’s, though, was someone who apparently forgot to drop the class because I never saw him and he never took any of the quizzes or exams. Aside from Mr. Absentee, I ended with 42 students after starting with 51. Not bad. I think my first time teaching seems to have been a success. At least a few of my students mentioned that they were intellectually stimulated and challenged.

On a different note, it is amazing how the least deserving in the class will come to their professor expecting to be given a higher grade simply because they want it or need it. I had this one student who skipped well over half of the class periods during the first half of the semester. She failed the first exam, managed to improve to a D on the second exam, and barely pulled off a C on the final. She actually started coming to class semi-regularly during the second third and regularly during the last third of the semester. Sure, that shows some improvement and a recognition that she hurt herself in the beginning. She also did the extra credit paper. But it was too little too late. She came up 10 raw points shy of a C for her final grade. One of the reasons was that I don’t think she was doing the reading, and probably not paying attention well in class, as evidenced by still relatively low quiz grades. She claimed she worked so hard to improve her grade, the hardest of anyone in the class, and deserved “a way better grade.” (I’m also a harsh grader, by the way. ;o) ) But obviously she didn’t, and she wanted an undeserved C. Opportunistic egalitarians demanding the undeserved get my hackles up, so needless to say I didn’t give it to her. Besides, where am I going to come up with 10 points to fill the gap? If someone is just one or two or three points away from the next highest grade and he or she has given me reason to suspect that s/he really tried hard, then I might be able to give him/her the benefit of the doubt. I can’t do anything with such a large gap though. Oh, and that girl claimed she went all-out and pulled an all-nighter to study for my exam. Sorry! That just isn’t good enough. Complex material like that of political philosophy takes time to absorb and understand. For someone who has been struggling through the class, one night of intensive studying just ain’t gonna cut it.

Anyway, now that the semester is over I should be posting on here more often and more regularly. Expect the latest version of my “Death and Harm” paper to be uploaded soon!