Standing up for you? Is that why he's leaning lazily up against a shit-brown wall?



The slack-jawed idiot pictured to the left is Dan McTeague, member of the Liberal caucus in the Canadian parliament, member of parliament for Pickering—Scarborough East, Ontario. You see, Toronto has been having some trouble with gun violence. So Danny Boy thinks the smart thing to do would be to ban 50 Cent, barring him from entering Canada during his upcoming tour. Fucking moron. Yeah, banning individuals or works that say stupid, ugly, or unpopular things really works well and it's totally acceptable in a free society, right? Or even in a semi-free society like Canada?

Don't get me wrong; I hate 50 Cent. I think his image, his lyrics, and his music are stupid and boring. Right now, though, I hate Dan McTeague even more.

McTeague has written to Immigration Minister Joe Volpe, asking him to stop Curtis Jackson (a.k.a. 50 Cent) from crossing the border. The last I heard, Mr. Volpe has not yet responded.

Mr. McTeague's web site is here: http://www.mcteague.ca/

The Honorable Dan McTeague, Moron at Large

Standing up for you? Is that why he's leaning lazily up against a shit-brown wall?



The slack-jawed idiot pictured above is Dan McTeague, member of the Liberal caucus in the Canadian parliament, member of parliament for Pickering—Scarborough East, Ontario. You see, Toronto has been having some trouble with gun violence. So Danny Boy thinks the smart thing to do would be to ban 50 Cent, barring him from entering Canada during his upcoming tour. Fucking moron. Yeah, banning individuals or works that say stupid, ugly, or unpopular things really works well and it's totally acceptable in a free society, right? Or even in a semi-free society like Canada?

Don't get me wrong; I hate 50 Cent. I think his image, his lyrics, and his music are stupid and boring. Right now, though, I hate Dan McTeague even more.

McTeague has written to Immigration Minister Joe Volpe, asking him to stop Curtis Jackson (a.k.a. 50 Cent) from crossing the border. The last I heard, Mr. Volpe has not yet responded.

Mr. McTeague's web site is here: http://www.mcteague.ca/

Libertarianism on the UK Virtual Economy

The Virtual Economy model has been online for quite a while. I remember playing with this years ago. Since we now have a libertarian blog, I thought I'd give a go at it once again and show you the results. I try to apply as much capitalism as I can. Here are my choices for each category (in the advanced model) :

* Income tax : as low as the model permits, with the highest brackets. That means 6%, 10% and 22%.
* Income tax allowances : as high as the model permits.
* Macroeconomy : Unfortunately, the model does not allow for stabilization of the monetary supply or controlled deflation, so I choose "keep inflation at base level". I halve spending on health care, education and defense (assuming that the first two will be covered by private systems and charter systems, and the latter reduced to self-defense).
* National Insurance : as low as the model permits, with the lowest brackets.
* Indirect taxes : abolish duties on beer, spirits, wine. VAT abolished. No change to petrol, tobacco, fuel tax and car tax.
* Benefits : all children-related benefits are reduced as much as the model permits. Working tax credit is maximized. Pension stays the same (it's not the old people's fault if they lived in a crappy system). Tax credits withdrawal rate is set at 10% (to maximize the number of families who have access to the credits - the lower the %, the less the credit tapers off as you go in higher incomes).

Aaaand... run model !

And you get great results. For one thing, all the family scenarios save more money except for the two unemployed parents one, from 1k more (in low-income families) to 47k more (in the case of two employed parents making 100k a year). As predicted, poor families benefit greatly from the abolition of the sales tax, while rich families benefit greatly from the abolition of the income tax.

The government also benefits greatly from this change - tremendous growth and lower spending means more money :



Unfortunately, because of the stunning growth we're stuck with murderous inflation :



But the GDP per capita skyrockets, even adjusting for inflation, which seems to indicate that this inflation is probably entirely caused by the rise in salaries coupled with a growing monetary supply :



And we're going to need major immigration to fill out all these new jobs, otherwise the economy is gonna stagnate pretty fast :



All in all, I think this would be a rather rude shock treatment, and that progressively introducing free market measures would probably be better. But I think living in such a society would be pretty good, all things considered.

Unions Hurt the Economy, Society

General Motors, the world's largest automaker, announced recently that it will be cutting 30,000 jobs and closing about a dozen facilities in an effort to save $7 billion a year and return the company to profitability. Those 30,000 jobs that will be cut represent about 22% of General Motors' hourly workforce.

But the United Auto Workers union may make things difficult for GM. They of course have blasted the move as unfair:

Not surprisingly, the leadership of the United Auto Workers union blasted the move as unfair.

"We have said consistently that General Motors cannot shrink itself to prosperity. In fact, shrinking General Motors only exacerbates its problems," UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and Vice President Richard Shoemaker said in a joint statement. "Unfortunately, it is workers, their families and our communities that are being forced to suffer because of the failures of others," they added.

...

The company's contract with the United Auto Workers union essentially prevents layoffs before it expires in September 2007, as the company needs to pay union members whether or not there is a job for them.

To a small degree, the UAW is right: you can't simply shrink a company into prosperity. But what you can do is manage a company into prosperity. And some of that management involves cutting excess capacity, which is a big, costly problem for GM right now. And given the fact that the UAW contract guarantees pay for these 30,000 employees through 2007, it looks like GM has its hands tied. GM will be facing many difficulties in adjusting their payroll and excess production capacity in order to keep the company thriving.

What is the UAW doing essentially? They are telling GM what to do. They are restricting GM's ability to manage itself as a company, and contract and expand as the market demands. Of course, UAW would never have any problem with GM expanding its workforce, because that would mean more union members, more union dues, and more clout for the union itself. But whenever GM tries to cut back, the UAW fights tooth and nail. The UAW serves as the greatest impediment to GM's attempts to become profitable again. Ironically, the longer it takes GM to turn a profit, the more financial hot water the company gets in, and the hourly union jobs currently in force become even more at risk.

In my opinion, GM (and all automakers in North America) should refuse to hire union members. The UAW doesn't make cars: GM does. The UAW doesn't make its own jobs: it takes money from those who have jobs, and the UAW itself has only a small payroll for the union administrators. But if it weren’t for automakers like GM, Ford, and others, the UAW wouldn't even be able to pay its own administrators or collect union dues. The UAW's entire existence is dependent upon auto giants like GM to employ its members. And yet here we have the UAW telling GM how to run itself. Maybe GM should tell the UAW how to operate, and tell it to shut the hell up.

What does a union like the UAW do? It fights for "decent pay," for one thing, which amounts to an artificial minimum wage within a niche industry (in this case, automotive jobs), and we all know how minimum wage situations hurt society and the economy. They also fight for as many jobs as possible, which restricts the employer’s ability to turn a profit, and in the long run only endangers the job security of everyone that works for the company. Indeed, it puts a greater risk on the mere existence of the company. And to top it off, the pay raises that the UAW fights for are either nullified or reduced in effectiveness for the union members because of the mandatory monthly union dues.

A union can do some good in a monopoly job market. But this is a capitalist economy, where over a dozen different automakers have huge operations in America, and the UAW is obsolete and superfluous. There is a literal automotive job market, where auto manufacturers naturally and necessarily have to compete with each other to offer the best jobs to attract the most capable workers. The unions don't need to exist to protect anybody's wages or job security. The nature of the free and competitive job market does that automatically.

But let's look at the heart of this particular issue: the 30,000 employees that will be laid off. It will be unfortunate for these 30,000 people to receive pink slips. But why artificially protect their jobs through coercion or restrictive, long-term contracts? These 30,000 people will have plenty of options once they get laid off. They can find other jobs at other automobile manufacturers. For example, if GM is laying them off due to lower sales, yet the car market is expanding (which it is), then that means that other companies like Toyota or Honda are increasing their sales. Those other companies will need to hire more people to produce the extra cars that are being sold. These 30,000 people can get jobs at the other companies (yes, Toyota and Honda have many large facilities operating locally in North America). Or the 30,000 people could get jobs in other fields. Or they could start their own car company!

If the UAW is right, and they think they know how to operate a car company better than the people who run GM, then why don’t they organize and start their own car company? It’s a free market and nobody is going to stop them from starting up a competing automobile company. They already have a 30,000 person strong workforce to tap into, after all. I already know what a UAW representative would answer to that question: they would say that the automaking industry is fierce and that they would be squeezed out of the market before they got a chance to sell a car. In other words, they would be admitting that they wouldn't be able to run the company efficiently and competitively enough to survive. So who the hell do they think they are telling GM how to sail its own ship?

The UAW has the attitude that their members have a right to a job. That’s bullshit. Nobody has a right to a job, ever. What all those union members do have a right to, is the freedom to seek a job and be evaluated fairly for the job based on their own merits. This concept is totally foreign to the UAW, and the message is lost in the minds of its members if it ever reaches them at all. They would rather have an organization represent them and coerce a company into keeping them on the payroll rather than face the risk of market forces and merit-based employment. What a bunch of pussies.

Unions do not belong in a capitalist society. They do not belong in a competitive job market. They definitely should not be telling their members' employer how to run itself. But GM is also partly to blame for this problem, because they enable the UAW's evil behavior by agreeing to hire its members and by signing restrictive contracts. GM should stand up for itself and refuse to hire any more union members or sign any more contracts with the UAW.

Looking at the situation from a bird’s eye view, we see a competitive job market and a variety of employers. Then we see a monopoly of sorts, and that monopoly is the UAW. Is it any surprise that the UAW is the entity in the puzzle that's screwing everything up? I hate unions and want them all to disappear, but for sheer smart-ass irony value, I'd love to see a competing union sprout up and drive the UAW out of business. Wouldn't that be something!

Anti-consumeurism and the war against the poor

Anti-consumeurism usually flares up as the holiday season nears, but it's always in effect. The basic belief of anti-consumeurism originates in sacrifice religions like Christianity and Islam, which decry "the world" and prosperity as evil, and continued in communism, nazism, and other statist extremisms which decry rich people as exploiters and abundance as evil.

This belief is that consumption is an inherent evil, a product of unnecessary greed, which is bad for our moral fiber or religious fervour and can only be tempered by some form of economic collectivism or social engineering.

However, this belief, while being explicitly an attack against the most prosperous amongst us, is really part of the war against the poor. While all these collectivist belief systems preach equality, they promote radically assymetrical systems with strong ruling classes. Sacrifice religions have their clergical ruling classes, communism and nazism had their dictatorial ruling classes. Both stand to benefit the most from the suffering of the masses, in that they can channel that suffering for their own utilitarian ends. This has always been their mode of functioning and is still their mode of functioning (the perpetual wars in our modern democracies are oen example).

The masses are the most vulnerable to economic conditions and the availability of cheap products. Take health care, for example. Socialists in Canada always say that a capitalist health care system creates a "two-level" system that is bad for the poor. And yet that is what we already have in Canada today : friends of the state and celebrities get VIP treatment, and the rich can always go to the United States for treatment. The social elite can compensate for bad economic dynamics better than the masses can. Joe Sixpack need Wal-Mart, but Kevin Costner doesn't. Once again, this comes back to the notion I already discussed of capitalism being a boon for the masses more than for the ruling classes.

A dilemma related to anti-consumeurism is, where do we draw the line ? Obviously buying the food necessary for our survival is all right (although some extremists take it to the absurd and preach self-sufficiency), so how much is too much ? Well, the answer is obviously whatever their value system tells them is "enough". Like any other part of the cultural war, this is a battle of value systems, and the anti-consumeurists seek to make their value system law.

Is Christmas too commercial ? In fact, anyone who knows the history of Christmas also knows that consumeurism saved Christmas. To praise Christmas and then complain that Christmas is too commercial is a contradiction. To villify gift-giving is incredibly callous. But to the collectivist mind, force, not compassion, is the rule.

Anti-prosperity, anti-greed and anti-consumeurist beliefs stand in direct opposition to the expression of individual values in Western society. They know very well they can't persuade people to change their values, because they have nothing to offer, so they complain and try to pass laws. That's how all these anti-social types operate. Wal-Mart is a good example of this.

In fact, Wal-Mart proves nothing better than the fac that people are idiots, and follow Franc's Principle slavishly. People hate Wal-Mart because it drives inefficient and limited competitors our of the market, but they love Wal-Mart when it tries to drive its smaller, minimum wage competitors away by driving wages up. So once again, people hate the free market, people hate the poor (as main beneficiaries of low-priced competition), people hate the expression of values (through the capacity to consume more), and people love government control. No surprises there.

About Wal-Mart, I am looking forward to the movie "Why Wal*Mart Works and why that makes some people C-R-A-Z-Y!". Of course, the statists on Amazon are already complaining of propaganda. And we accuse them of propaganda. The more relevant question is : who's right ?

Why I am not open-minded

As individualists, we argue against collectivist belief systems of all kinds - whether religious, political, or otherwise. We get a lot of True Believers, be they Christian, Islamic, liberal, conservative, Greenie, nazi, New Age, or just plain crackpots, telling us that we're intolerent and close-minded (of course, they all want us to listen only to them, not other equally valid belief systems).

Isn't it hypocrite for individualists like us to attack people on the basis of their belief system ? After all, everyone is different. And for someone like me who advocates strict "live and let live" limits to advocate the persecution of other belief systems ?

I am an individualist, but not because I think all positions are equally valid. I don't have any problem with different lifestyles or even value systems, even if I think they are immoral and disgusting. People have the right to hurt themselves and consenting friends as much as they want, in the name of any destructive ideal they want. But when they start abusing children, and coopting the democratic system to impose their value system, that's when I stand and speak up, and where you should also.

For example, I've already explained why I consider Christianity one of our cultural enemies on Goosing the Antithesis. It is a belief system whose basic premises are a principled attack on Western civilization and modern values. In some countries, like the United States, this indicts all other belief systems because they are all tools of the Christian establishment. In other countries, we have to look at them on a case-by-case basis. But in all cases, belief systems only stifle individualism and individual rights - that is the only constant.

And brainwashing of children into any belief system represents child abuse. With more benign belief systems, such abuse is likewise benign - telling a child that liberals are right is not likely to give any trauma. Raising a child in a Marxist environment, for example, and brainwashing a child into mental submission and hatred for other value systems, causes lifelong mental trauma and disrupts moral development.

In the mental model of these belief systems, other people are not individual on their own rights, but representatives of their value system, and they must hate "the bourgeois", "the capitalist", "the exploiter", or in other cases, "the unbeliever", "the world", "the other races", "the materialist" (in either sense), "the liberal" or "the conservative", and generally anyone who dares to disagree with, or just doesn't fit in, the dogma of a given belief system.

For all these reasons, we can only "live and let live" until these belief systems have no more power to attack our lives and those of innocent children.

You also get the argument, usually by patriots, that wanting to impose a value system on everyone is "common good" and "unity", and that wanting people to live separately and isolate themselves is "selfish" and "worldly".

Well, my position is, of course, that selfishness and worldliness are morally superior. But more importantly, they have it all in reverse (as usual). It is the raving activist or preacher who is "selfish" and prey to "worldly" desires (at least in the meaning they give those words) by trying to subvert the entire society, indeed the basis for our civilization itself, to his perverted notions of morality. And it's the individualist who is promoting the "common good" and "unity" (once again, using their meanings) by stopping social warfare. The idea that we can forcibly unite everyone under one flag is sheer lunacy and a refusal to acknowledge the fact that we all have different value systems, and always have.

US map of libertarianism

For the Americans amongst you, check out this US map of libertarianism. Here it is in smaller :

Reading between the lies, part 1

Francois has invited me to continue to do here something that I've already been doing from time to time at the Graveyard of the Gods, which is to post articles about what I see and think about political goings on. Many of these, but not necessarily all, will be specifically about Canadian politics.

So, without further ado, here's a snapshot of the political shenanigans going down in Ottawa so far this week.

The leaders of the opposition parties got together this past weekend to work out a strategy for bringing down the Liberal government without triggering an election campaign that would interfere with the Christimas holidays. Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party (socialist), would offer the opposition's cooperation in passing a budget update bill this week (being a money bill, it's a confidence vote) in exchange for the Prime Minister promising to dissolve parliament after the Christmas break, causing an election campaign to start in January with a general election taking place in February. If the Prime Minister didn't go for that, Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper would introduce a non-confidence motion in parliament at his next opportunity, which would probably be next week. The result of that would be an election campaign running through the holidays and the opposition would try to spin it so that Canadians would blame the government for the inconvenience.

Prime Minister Paul Martin's response to that was, essentially, that the proposal is irrational. He is saying that it's a binary question: either you do or don't have confidence in the government. He's saying that the opposition's proposal would mean that they do have confidence in the government but only for the next six weeks or so, after which time that confidence would magically disappear. I suppose there's something to that.

The reason that the opposition parties give for wanting the government to fall is the corruption within the Liberal party, as exposed in Justice Gomery's investigation and first report on the infamous sponsorship scandal.

Background on the scandal in general
Gomery's first report

However, the NDP members, in particular, are obviously not being honest in presenting Liberal corruption as their reason for wanting to bring down the government. They were fully prepared to continue to prop up the government as long as the Liberals passed legislation for certain items of social spending that are near and dear to the socialists' hearts. However, when the Prime Minister "no" to the NDP wish list, the government was suddenly too corrupt to continue. That's some funny kind of morality.

Justice Gomery's first report did clear Prime Minister Martin of involvement in and knowledge of the scandal but, as members of the Conservative Party have pointed out, the Liberal Party itself defrauded Canadian taxpayers of millions of dollars. The Conservatives have been fairly consistent in condemning the government, unlike the NDP.

So, anyway, it looks like an election campaign probably will be triggered soon. One of the funny things about it is that the Prime Minister had already promised to call an election within 30 days of Justice Gomery releasing his final report, which is due on February 1st.

However, the reason the opposition doesn't want to wait just a few weeks longer for an election call is that they don't want to give the government too much time to use the power of government in what they claim, with some justification, is partisan electioneering before an election is called.

A budget update was released today which could well be seen as a pre-election move on the part of the government. The update includes some significant personal income tax reductions and some spending which is likely to be popular (we are told that the government surplus was larger than expected). The Liberals are saying, "Merry Christmas, Canada. Here's some money." (Never mind that it was our own money to start with.)

Oh well. At least an early election call will kill a surveillance bill which the Liberals introduced today. It would give police and intelligence officials the legal ability to force telephone and internet companies hand over personal information about subscribers. They could get your name, address, phone number, cell phone number, IP address. The Liberals defend it, saying that it's merely an update of old wiretap laws. The death of this bill due to an early election would probably only be a temporary reprieve, though. (For more on the surveillance bill, go here.)