Political Philosophy

Navigators of the Economy

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Life aboard ship in the age of sail was brutal, even by the standards of the day. Ordinary sailors worked in horrific conditions for months on end for little pay and often for nothing more than just a stake in the profits of the voyage.  

Easily, the cushiest   job on a ship was that of navigator. Navigators were quite often hired guns who had no other duties. A navigator often needed to work no more than four hours a day. He would come on deck two or three times a day to take sightings, then return to his cabin for an hour’s worth of calculations. Compared to the physically taxing, mindlessly repetitive and dangerous work of a sailor, navigators did nothing and risked nothing.  

Yet navigators often received as much as much as 25% share in the profits in a voyage. Even when they worked for pay, they received a wage many, many times that of sailors who did much more arduous and even critical work. Why did those who owned shares in a voyage, from the cabin boy to the landlubber investors tolerate paying the navigators so much?

The answer is obvious: if the navigator made a mistake, it didn’t matter how hard everyone else on the ship worked or how competently they did their jobs. The skill of the person doing the navigating determined the success of the voyage or even if anyone survived. People paid navigators a lot because if they didn’t, it didn’t really matter how much they paid anyone else.

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Demonopoly

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From a comment  for this post [h/t Instapundit]:

This is also fun and educational for your kids:

Play Monopoly. Wait until some of the kids start to amass a nice pile of money. As they collect rent, take 36% and distribute it to the kids that aren’t doing as well.

If you’re a parent, you know that screams of “That’s not fair!!” are guaranteed.

Use this opportunity to explain the Democratic (mis)definition of the word “fair.”

I think I’ve just found my next computer game to program. I wonder how such rules would affect how many hotels get built on Baltic Avenue?

Why Socialism Will Not Die: Meat!

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Despite all the death, misery and poverty that socialism has wreaked over the past century on all scales from Stalin to Detroit, one would think that a species capable of learning would figure out that socialism’s negatives eventually outweigh its positives. Worse, looking back across the history of humanity, we see   the core socialist idea of forced redistribution occurring again and again across culture after culture.  

Why do humans seem to have an in-built urge for socialism? Why won’t it die? I think socialism will not die because primitive humans lacked refrigerators.  

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First Tobacco, Now Food

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I was not happy with the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement for many reasons.

One of my main objections was that the entire premise behind the complaint against the tobacco industry was that they used advertising to control the minds of their customers. It seems extremely obvious that the dangers of using tobacco were well established long before my birth in 1964, yet it was claimed that tens of millions of Americans were too stupid or weak minded to pay attention. Consenting adults in this country could be trusted to choose political leaders in elections, but they were helpless to resist when confronted with a picture of the Marlboro Man.

One of the most moronic claims by the anti-tobacco crowd was that the cartoon advertising mascot Joe Camel was enslaving the youth of America. It was said that children recognized Joe more readily than they did Mickey Mouse, even though the cigarette ads only ran for 9 years and giant amusement parks featuring the anthropomorphic camel were never constructed. It looked to me to be a blatant attempt to demonize an industry in order to force them to pony up some cash.

The title of this article is “10 Things the Food Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know”, and it shows that some people figure the same methods used against Big Tobacco will work just fine when applied to the food industry.

Click on that last link and all the same tricks are on display. Food companies target little kids to advertise unhealthy food. They sponsor studies that obscure the fact that unhealthy food is bad for you. The industry puts pressure on legislators to keep them from passing laws limiting consumer access to fattening and sweet foods. They bankroll front groups which fight anti-obesity laws. And so on.

This appears to me to be exactly the same tactics used against tobacco companies. They are evil, unconcerned with the health of their customers, and all too willing to employ Jedis working on Madison Avenue to use their powers on the minds of vulnerable little children. (“Broccoli is not what you want to eat! Ice Cream would be much nummier!”)

The author of the article claims that obesity is a major health concern, and I have no problem with that. But I do object to the idea that people in this country are so stupid that they just can’t figure out that eating unhealthy foods will make you unhealthy.

How long will it take before state legislatures combine resources to blackmail the food industry into making a huge payment? I figure about ten years on the outside.

I see the campaign against the tobacco industry, and now the food industry, as an attack on the free market system. Free markets means free choice, which means that individuals have to be allowed to make bad personal choices if that is what they want to do.

I mean, isn’t that the very basis of American society?