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.

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Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

I’m hearing reports that nearly $1 billion has already been spent on US House elections alone. Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics predicts “$3.7 billion will be spent on this midterm election.” That’s 30% more than last time. It’s no surprise that the more legal plunder government is able to redistribute, the more people are willing to spend to gain control of the state. Obama is making Bush the Younger look thrifty and the next president will likely do the same for him. The increase in electoral spending will continue apace.

Such a distraction and waste of money political elections, especially national elections, are. As I explained in Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons: “The very existence of [a] centralized voting system for deciding public matters of moral importance encourages citizens to focus their energies on this formal democratic process, which is to say that it encourages the wasting of time and money on vote getting (or buying), at the expense of getting anything actually productive done in a timely fashion.”

Republicans distracted their base from important issues, for example, by whipping up ignorant, bigoted hysteria and rage at Muslims and the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” Fellow TLS blogger Matt Mortellaro recently discussed their latest gambit, an attempt to defund NPR (and PBS), ostensibly saving $608 million dollars next year, under the guise of defending the 1st Amendment rights of a liberal political pundit (Juan Williams) because he said something they like about Muslims. Political theater.

So let’s see… $3.7b spent (by Demopublicans) vs. $608m saved. Nice.

Well, at least all that spending is stimulating the economy… Oh wait.

Imagine what could be accomplished with all that wasted money, manpower, and brain power if only it were spent on — nay, invested in — something other than electoral politics. New companies started, existing ones expanded, more actually productive jobs created. Productive innovation in business models, manufacturing, science, technology. Socio-economic problems solved by direct action.

But forget all that. I guess it’s more important to get the “right guy” elected so we don’t have to be “fearful of the state” for a few years. Good luck. I suspect the Tea Party Congressional candidates and the next Republican president will prove just as disappointing to Republicans as Obama was to Democrats though.

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Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

An organization called 10:10, whose mission is to promote a global campaign to get everyone to (voluntarily) reduce their carbon emissions by 10% starting in the year 2010, has produced what is perhaps the most ill-advised publicity campaign ever.

Apparently they thought it would be funny to highlight the allegedly voluntary nature of this campaign by, um, alluding to the very justifiable fears that many environmentalists are willing to impose their values on others by (deadly) force. It would be wonderful if everyone would make some small sacrifice to reduce their carbon emissions by 10%, so the campaign goes, but if you don’t want to, that’s cool. It’s your choice. No pressure. Red button pressed. BOOM!!! SPLATTER!!! Such a pity you made the wrong choice. Tee hee!

I’m not kidding. Watch the video below. But be forewarned: it is graphic.

The video, in light of the organization’s 10% campaign, ironically brings to my mind the Roman disciplinary practice of decimation. Decimation was a punishment imposed on Roman military units for failure, cowardice, or mutiny in which one in ten (10% of) soldiers were selected by lot to be slaughtered by their comrades. Only the decimated victims in 10:10′s video are chosen for this ultimate punishment by their failure to make the “right” choice. No pressure.

Decimating the global population sure is one way to reduce carbon emissions by 10%…but it is not very humane. The video is strategically clueless and in poor taste at best.

I really don’t understand what 10:10 was thinking in making this video. They have since pulled it from their own website, stating that apparently not everyone found it to be funny and hinting that some were even offended. Gee, I wonder why. Likely, the video will prove to be great fodder for skeptics of global warming alarmism and statist environmental policies for years to come.

Here is 10:10′s explanation. See if you can make any more sense of this fiasco.

NO PRESSURE

Sorry.
Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called ‘No Pressure’.

With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.

As a result of these concerns we’ve taken it off our website. We won’t be making any attempt to censor or remove other versions currently in circulation on the internet.

We’d like to thank the 50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras and who gave their time and equipment to the film for free. We greatly value your contributions and the tremendous enthusiasm and professionalism you brought to the project.

At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.

Onwards and upwards,

Franny, Lizzie, Eugenie and the whole 10:10 team

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Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

In a previous post I pointed out the slippery slope in accepting government-backed licensing of “crucial” professions. The problem with slippery slope arguments is that they tend not to be rhetorically-compelling to those without a sufficiently cynical, I should say realistic, conception of the state. They are simply not convinced that allowing certain “reasonable” policies now will set a precedent that will lead to unreasonable policies down the road. Our worries are discounted as merely hypothetical possibilities. They are quite content to put off discussion of crossing that bridge when we come to it…if we come to it, as they see things. And, in any case, something needs to be done about the current problem now, dammit! The trouble is, by the time we reach that bridge of unreasonableness (wherever it happens to be for our interlocutor), we have already gathered so much momentum from sliding down the slope that it is difficult, if not impossible, to halt, much less reverse, the slide. Along the way, with each new government intervention, people grow increasingly used to turning to government solutions for every little problem — they lose the ability to even imagine the possibility of private, market solutions — and what was once thought unreasonable no longer seems so.

We libertarians have more than merely consequentialist, slippery slope arguments against government policies, of course, but I still think it is useful to point out dangerous precedents, particularly when our worries are not just theoretical as we are already well on our way down the slide. The acceptance of professional licensing of “crucial” professions has over time been expanded into ever more areas, even to the licensing of florists in my home state of Louisiana and now to calls for the licensing of parents.

Others have pointed out that despite seeming like natural allies, the divide between anarchists and minarchists is actually greater than the divide between minarchists and (other) statists. Minarchists give away the game at the outset when they accept that a government monopoly in X or Y service (say law and security provision) is necessary. This is especially true of small government types who can’t imagine how the free market can provide, for example, roads or postal service. It is fairly trivial for left-liberals to extend the reasoning behind the need for government to provide such services to the need for government to support their own pet projects.

With that in mind, consider a recently published paper I just came across written by a left-liberal philosopher, Eric Thomas Weber, who is an acquaintance of mine. He cleverly co-opts an institution beloved by conservatives, arguing that the Founding Fathers’ arguments in favor of government postal roads and services can be extended to expanding broadband services through a government initiative. What principled argument can Republicans, and even minarchists, offer against this? Indeed, on his Facebook page, he relates that after giving a presentation of this paper a fellow from AEI told him he had been convinced. Another case in point, the first person to comment on his Facebook Wall post claims to be libertarian-minded (!) and yet convinced by Weber’s historical-constitutional argument that broadband would meet his personal criteria for acceptable government involvement.

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Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.