Political Philosophy

Gasping For Air and Energy

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Environmentalists claim they aren’t extremist. They claim they don’t want to make radical and dangerous changes to our technological life-support systems, they just want to make a few minor adjustments to protect not only the environment but the health and safety of humans as well.  

They’re lying. When it comes down to it in the real world, environmentalists will kill people just to gain an utterly trivial  environmental  benefit. As a political movement, environmentalism has crossed over into a kind of religious fetishism.  

Look at the example of the banning of CFC asthma inhalers. [h/t Instapundit] Here we have a clear-cut tradeoff between the deaths of thousands of asthmatics and prevention of a degree of damage to the ozone layer that is so small that we can’t even begin to consider measuring it.  

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Masculine Bullies in the Workplace

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A disturbing  bit of sexist thinking in the business world:

“Just the mention of men treating other men badly on the job seemingly shakes the men’s movement to its core. It is what Peggy Klaus, an executive coach in Berkeley, Calif., has called ‘the blue elephant’ in the room. . . . ‘We believe that a sense of pride in men’s accomplishments is important in getting men to help one another,’ Ms. Lau said. ‘To have this sense of pride, men need to be aware of their shared identity as men.’ In the workplace, however, it is unlikely that men will constantly think of themselves as members of one group, she said. They will more likely see themselves as individuals, as they are judged by their performance.” –[Instapundit]

Honestly, what is our country coming to? Can you imagine a more cooperation-destroying idea than one in which people should think of themselves first as members of a group and only secondly as individuals? Do we want men looking at their  colleagues  and judging them based on their sex instead of their merit? This is especially true given men’s clear advantages in educational achievement which means that in the future a higher percentage of men will hold management positions than do women.  

Do you want to live in a world in which your male boss believes that he has a moral responsibility to side with the men working under him instead of the women? Imagine if that kind of sexist thinking occurred at every level in management! Women might find the entire workplace a hostile environment where a woman would have to be twice as good as a man to get the same reward!  

I find it disturbing that we seem to have developed an entire political movement around the idea that men should look at women as some kind of enemy against which they should collectively and automatically circle the wagons.  

Men just have to bite the bullet and accept that they have to judge other people as individuals instead of as members of any type of group. Only then as a society will we receive the benefits of meritocracy and social justice.  

Monkeywrenching Socialism – Ratchet Smashing I

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The effort needed to make government bigger is much less than the effort needed to make government smaller. This is the basic principle that underlies the government ratchet effect. The beneficiaries of government action are concentrated and thus both have more at stake and know it than the beneficiaries of shrinking government which are very often the general public who derive at best a diffuse benefit that is often not even noticed or even understood.

But I believe this pro-socialist ratchet dynamic only happens so long as the starting question is “should government (or program x) be cut?” What if we start from a different question? What if the assumption is that there is a lot of bad government out there and that as a matter of course 10% (or 5% or 15%) of the government can and should be turned over each year so that poor past decisions don’t hang around forever. Which part would get cut? The answer becomes obvious, the corrupt, useless, inefficient parts, of course. The corrupt, useless, and inefficient caucus is tiny (at least when it’s identified as such). Nobody supports corrupt, useless, and inefficient government out loud, even self-described socialists. This sort of government is supported by ‘middle of the night’ bill insertions and inertia.

The counter-argument would be to assume that good, efficient, honest programs would be disrupted and now we wouldn’t want that would we? But this assumes that a significant chunk of government programs are incapable of being reformed and improved by termination, privatization, or reform. That’s something that needs to proved, not assumed.

Most everybody right now wants to protect their own ox from getting gored. so there is a fear that ‘my’ programs are going to be disproportionately targeted and ‘your’ programs will be protected by political juice. The trick to avoiding this sort of cynical CYA is to identify the targeted bottom percentage in a fair way. This is where things get sticky because it’s something of a risky proposition to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

What if we simply asked everybody who would have an expert opinion, to simply rate the worthiness of every program, to the extent they can. All members of the legislature, all members of the executive giving their opinions to identify the stinkers. What if we made it a job requirement? Of course the system would be gamed but it would be a massive improvement on current practice and would significantly reduce the ratchet effect.

Right now, there is no generalized expectation that the legislature will periodically review government expenditures, pick out the worst, and either let bad things expire, privatize the solution, or provide a better, more efficient, less expensive way to solve the problem using government action. Cutting government in this system becomes progressive, not reactionary. Getting through less than 10% of the government is a real world assertion of incompetence on the part of incumbent legislators. And all that need change to bring about this happy state of affairs is to change the expectations game. Legislation will follow to eliminate the free riders.

Time to Play “Who is the Rube?”

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So, why aren’t leftists upset at Obama for holding the same beliefs on gay marriage as  Carrie Prejean? [h/t Instapundit]

Easy, they assume that he is  lying. They think his Christianity based justification for opposing actual marriage for gays is simply a lie to fool the rubes on a hot-button issue. They know he might have lost critical support from left-of-center religious conservatives if he had really stated his true beliefs on the matter, so he just lied about his real beliefs to  bamboozle  the rubes.  

Their comfort with this assumption that Obama is lying reveals a lot about  contemporary  leftists’ mores and their systematic contempt for their fellow citizens. They’re so full of themselves that they believe that the important thing is for them to have power, and that it really doesn’t matter how they get it. If Obama has to lie about his real beliefs about gay marriage then that’s acceptable in the cause of the greater good.  

The only question for the rest of us is whether the leftists know the real Obama better than we do. In other words, who are the rubes? Are they the people who believe that Obama was stamped by a gay-leery African-American Christian community in Chicago, or are they the people who believe he was stamped by the far-left Northside intellectual subculture that supported his rise to national office?  

Time will tell, I suppose.  

Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act as Bad as We Thought

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Remember how leftists mocked when, earlier this year, people warned that the hastily passed  Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act granted overly broad powers to regulate even small businesses and thrift shops? Well, it’s actually worse than people thought. Reason quotes from the the official CPSA Handbook for Retail Stores and Product Resellers:

This handbook will help sellers of used products identify types of potentially hazardous products that could harm children or others. CPSC’s laws and regulations apply to anyone who sells or distributes consumer products. This includes thrift stores, consignment stores, charities, and  individuals holding yard sales and flea markets.

You rarely go wrong in assuming that government will grab all the power it can.