Harry Potter: Libertarian Manifesto

I'm reading the Harry Potter series to my son, Fang. The farther we get, the more convinced I am that J. K. Rowling is a libertarian.

Here are my reasons:

1) Any wizard or witch can ride on a broom. That's pretty freaking cool right there. No control or regulations whatsoever on your own personal, high speed aircraft. No helmet law, either.

2) One of the few collective institutions is the wizard school, Hogwarts, where everyone is taught how to turn people into newts, create dangerous and exciting potions or poisons, see the future to cheat on the stock market, and beat the lie detector when they get busted for insider trading. I made the last two up, but you get the idea.

3) Everyone gets a wand. If you've got a wand and you know the spells, you can disarm, torture, maim or even kill. The only thing stopping you is your own conscience, or the fear that the other wizards might fling you into Azkaban, the wizard jail, which brings me to ....

4) The wizard government sucks. With very few exceptions, government committees in the wizard world are ignorant, cruel, clumsy and corrupt. And the head of state, the "Minister for Magic" is wimpy political expediency personified, bending or ignoring rules to suit himself. What kind of government keeps Dementors on staff, and turns them loose without a referendum?

5) Spoiler Alert. When the bad guys are finally stopped for good at the end of the fourth book, its not the Ministry  -- its the wizard militia who finally pulls it off.

6) Harry's world is a very dangerous place. People fall off their brooms, break their legs, fly magicked up cars into trees at high speeds, grow cat fur on their faces by mistake, have all the bones in their arms turned to jelly, fight dragons, etc. And nobody gets upset and starts a Wand Control movement, or insists on caging all the dragons or restricting potions classes to the politically reliable. They just roll with it.

I'm sure there are more. Post them in the comments, or disagree entirely if you find that more pleasing.

I Hold These Truths to be Pretty Darn Clear (Even If Nobody Else Does)

While there is plenty to argue about today, these issues should not be on the list.
Afghanistan.
Somehow we confused fighting a war in Afghanistan with our national interest, which is keeping the US safe by killing terrorists. Since the Islamic fundamentalist insurgency is convinced the United States is fighting an global anti-Muslim war, could we find some way to fight them that doesn't hand them a propaganda victory every time we drop a bomb?

Iran
 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does say some crazy shit, but that doesn't mean his opponent Mousavi is a noble humanitarian. Mousavi was Prime Minister when Iran founded the Hezbollah, if that gives you some clue to his political leanings. 

I know lazy reporters call him  a reformer, but he just wants to make Iran a better theocracy, not turn it into the 51st state. If this guy was running the show in Tehran, the Flying Spit Index might dip, but other than that, we wouldn't notice.

Two more things from the bleeding obvious pile.
1) Iran's internal struggles are none of our business. Can we focus on their nuclear program?
2) Even if Mousavi was Thomas Jefferson come again, any support from the US would hurt him way more than it helped.


Back Home
The US is a not-particularly-ideological center-right country and that isn't going to change. What's new is we're now an angry center-right country. Gas prices are going nowhere good, the house is an unreliable ATM, people are getting laid off all over the place, and we're running two wars.

The defining political characteristic of 2009 is not a resurgence of racism or socialism*, but anger. The electorate threw Bush out of office, and is impatiently waiting for Obama to fix things.
The key to political victory in the next couple years is figuring out why the electorate is angry (not hard) and what to do about it (very hard). Will the voters give them chance? Angry people are tough to predict. Anyone sitting in Congress or the Oval Office should try very hard not to make them angrier.


*All the bloviating about racism and socialism is "fun", but ultimately pointless. Being nasty has a long and glorious tradition in this Republic. Go read what Benjamin Bache wrote about George Washington in the Aurora after the Jay Treaty was signed, if you don't believe me.

Also, most of the internet political readers ARE ideological and do have a clear political philosophy, so if you're angry about creeping socialism, and have proof, you may indeed be livid, but I'm not talking about you. You've probably been mad for a while.  We are hugely outnumbered by the not-particularly-ideological and we live in their world.

Everybody Is Famous For Something....

.... And here at the MANP blog, we revel in the news that we are apparently the Number 1 search result for the Google search term "Bat Shit Crazy Blog".

If I'm reading the Google Webmaster tools report correctly.

This is probably why.

The Plow, The Surplus and The Idiot

Civilization began in the great river valleys in Africa, Asia, and Mesopotamia. Every year the waters would rise and fall, refreshing the soil, irrigating the land.

But it wasn't until we began to farm that we stayed in one place to harvest and plant again. And it wasn;t until we developed tools like the plow that our nascent nations were able to produce a surplus of food, and allow some of the population to spend time not hunting or growing food.

The creation of the plow allows priests, merchants etc. to genuinely emerge and flourish.

I told you that so I could ask you this:

The following comes from a Vegan Roomate Wanted ad on Craigslist (Best Of). Do you believe, as I do, that our western Democracies must have an amazing amount of surplus production to allow this sort of person to appear?:

Vegan household only. No animal products in the house; no new leather shoes (I am not going to shun you for an old pair of hiking shoes�I am an avid dumpster diver and may have old stuff in my life too that is on its last round), no honey, no bee pollen, no wool, no down comforters. I am a liberationist animal rights person who has a total commitment to veganism. It is a defining feature in my life.

I take care of inside-only cats. It is important to be aware of the cats when opening the door, because they are inside only,but they are older and mostly you do not have to worry about escapees, just when bringing in groceries or something like that. I scoop the cat litter everyday and vacuum very often. I am very clean about the cats. They have been with me for a decade and are the sweetest older cats ever. I do not support the domestication of animals�they are rescue kitties from the streets. Their names are Mulder, Bromden, Theo, and Zen Mama.

It is important for me to live in a straight-edge environment. Please, no alcohol or pot or anything else in the house. Please be sober in the house, even if it is not your lifestyle.

I am an environmentally aware person. I do not have an air conditioning unit, I use the heat on low in the winter (lots of layers). I shop at People�s coop and Food Fight!, I recycle, reuse, reduce. I am very DIY. I do not have a garden (there is hardly a yard here). But you can bring compost waste to various places around town if you like. I am childless by choice and do not want any kids living here, sorry parents.

TAMCO Steel: The Eternal Enemy. By Way of NPR, The Other Eternal Enemy

A couple weeks ago, I got an invite from my wife to take one of those insufferable Facebook quizzes -- "What NPR Correspondent Are You?"

I refused on the grounds that no matter what answers you gave, the result would be "Smug Leftist."

And yesterday, distilled essence of smug dripped out of the radio and pooled in the wheel wells, as NPR correspondents reported on Project Isaiah. Project Isaiah is the name given by TAMCO Steel to its work with law enforcement, melting down guns seized by California law enforcement during raids, traffic stops, etc.

You could hear the glee in Steven Cuevas' voice as he described how the Evil Evil guns are turned into rebar by a blast furnace that heats up to about 10,000 degrees.

Given that these guns are already in police hands, its hard to see how anyone is made safer by their destruction. But, that's just what NPR and TAMCO claimed.

If that doesn't annoy you, try this: one of the guns melted down yesterday was a Depression-era Thompson.

While We're On the Subject of Statist Idiocy, Theft and Medical Records...

If you march into your doctor's office and demand (or even ask nicely for) your medical records, the surly bitch* behind the counter has to give them to you.

Why? Because they are yours. Your medical records are your property and you own them.

So why don't you get a say in this government-inspired crusade to turn your paper records into bits and bytes?

When you go to a doctor's office for the first time, they make you sign a release listing the people with whom your medical affairs may be discussed. But apparently the privacy regulations don't cover changing your records from paper to a digital, interchangeable format that can be accessed from any facility in the USA.

While I understand the advantages of networked systems**, I wonder why We The People don't get to opt out of a system that could have our personal medical data stolen by Russian hackers and sold to anyone who wants a list of all the people in Nebraska with a prescription for Oxycodone.

I'm also not thrilled about the records coming into the possession of nosy and officious government burocrats who decide that since Joe Smith took Valium for nerves 10 years ago, he can't fly a plane or own a gun.

Finally, the glibness with which meatpuppet talking heads throw around the term "digital medical records" just irks me. Its pretty clear they've never had to make 2 stakeholders agree on a common standard for anything, to say nothing of every doctor's office in the country.

*Apologies if you work in administration in a medical facility and are a sweet angel whose voice is likened to the choirs of heaven. There should be more of you and its a pity you don't work in my neighborhood.

**Blah blah blah, waste fraud and abuse. Blah blah blah improved efficiency. Blah blah blah, better understanding of the patient. Some of these are good arguments, but the downside of digitizing the nation's medical records isnot getting enough news.

Statism Kills

This is where socialism takes you folks, and this is where this lefty Congress and their pet president will take us.

Police, firefighers and paramedics refused to go to the aid of an accident victim lying in just 18 inches of water because they believed it was too dangerous.
A senior fire officer banned his men from using ropes and ladders to climb down a 15-foot-bank to the victim, who drowned, after carrying out a 'risk assessment'.

Acting on advice, ten police officers who attended the emergency also failed to rescue father-of-three Karl Malton, 32, as he lay head-down in the shallow water.

As the article points out, was he dead already? They'll never know because no one had the elasticity of mind or the stiffness of spine to try and find out. It's a perfect metaphor for where England is right now actually - face down in a watery ditch, drowning.

Should we help? Can anyone help?

Silicon And Its Discontents

Technology scares me. I still love it, but with the Greatest Generation of Social Engineers in the White House, the implications for personal freedom and privacy are quietly terrifying.

The guys over at Google keep talking about 'scale,' which is the notion that a technology solution for a given problem can serve a very large number of customers, more efficiently than whatever it was you had before.

A simple example is the web server -- publish your blog once and anyone with a computer can read your paranoid scribbling and profane ranting.

But with scale comes the potential for centralized control and high levels of surveillance.

Amazon just deleted -- of all things -- George Orwell's novel 1984 from all the Kindle e-books in the USA. Apparently the publisher didn't have the rights to sell digital versions in the USA (oops), so Amazon deleted the book from the account of everyone who bought it and issued them a refund. I suppose I'm naive, but I never realized to me that Amazon could reach out and delete anything they sold from a hard drive.

Legally, Amazon has a watertight case. Without a 'recall' they'd be an accomplice in selling stolen property, but it's still terrifying. Its only a short hop from deleting what I sold you to knowing the entire contents of the hard drive that you bought, own and consider 'private'.

Will ebooks be as ubiquitous as ipods and cell phones in 20 years? Will vendors like Amazon know what you have on your personal hard drive and be able to ban it whenever they want?

Next on my list of Ominous Developments -- digitizing medical records. Hailed as a panacea for eliminating waste and inefficiency in the health care system, this is actually a large crock of shit, and anyone who has ever worked on enterprise level databases and applications knows it.

Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh computerized their entire health care system in 2002, requiring nearly everything that was once written down to be typed or entered into a computer. The system was so badly designed that in the emergency room, one doctor had to attend a patient while the other typed instructions into the computer. Emergency transfer patients began dying twice as fast, after the new system was installed. Nearly everything else the doctors did was slower and less efficient.

In 2003, Cedars-Sinai Hospital in LA tore out a computerized health system and junked it, after the doctors refused to use it.

And even when the systems work, the fact that they are so massive and scalable means that your privacy, your rights and your job are more at risk than ever.

Just a week ago, the Canadian Press reported that hackers broke into the Alberta Health Services computer system and viewed the medical files of 11,582 people, including names, addresses, health-care numbers, lab test results and diagnoses, officials said yesterday.

In the past, this blog has mentioned the Virginia state site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. Hackers copied, then deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

Still want the results of your AIDS test, or the dermatologists record of your genital wart removal, or your prescription for Prozac or Viagra up there?

Yurrp Is Odd

The other day on the radio I heard two stories that reinforced to me just how odd Europe is.

One of these reports was a refutation of the notion that women on corporate boards do a better job of governance than men, but included in the analysis was the fact that in Norway, 40% of the seats on corporate boards are reserved for women, with the result that in Norway you find women who sit on the boards of 8 or 10 companies, which is apparently rather a lot of work.

The other report was a mention of a brothel in Germany (where prostitution is legal) that offers a 5% discount if you arrive by bike or public transportation.

The Real Problem With Lefties...

...is that they really have no concept of private property. I used to listen to our local Air America station pretty regularly on my way to and from work. During the election I had to give it up because even the calm, logical afternoon guy, Tom Hartman, felt it was likely that Sarah Palin's child wasn't really hers. In short - he is just as batshit insane in his own way as Mike Milloy is.

Anyway, I'm driving in today and I pop over to Hartman's show for a lark, and it's his regular Friday hour with Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, a caller, and I'm assuming some yakking about Obama's health care putsch. The caller says, true to form, that if the right wing is so whiney about costs, "just repeal the Bush tax cuts" to which Hartman immediately responds "go back to the Reagan tax cuts".

Which is so prototypical it makes me laugh. Need money? Just take it from someone else.

And they really really really don't see anything wrong with that. I think that has to be the most primal difference between liberals and conservatives, and it's a telling one. It's why I have no problem slapping the label of "socialist" on most liberals and their ideas - because at their heart, most of their ideas involve the concept that nothing really belongs to anyone; everything belongs to The State.

Oh Brave New World That Has Such Dumb-Assery In It

I just can't wait march into the broad sunlit uplands of a new era, illuminated by (but not limited to) such amazing elements as nationwide compulsory computerized medical records.

And this is why:

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

And the reason why this could never happen again, and my soon-to-be-digitized medical records are perfectly safe is what, exactly?

Another Member of the Reality-Based Community

Recently we've heard a lot of self-indulgent blather from the left wing on how 'free market capitalism is dead.' I've posted about this before, mostly because it presented an overwhelming temptation to call Arianna Huffington nasty names. And in principle, when tempted, I fall.

Anyway, Megan McArdle tackles this issue much better than I did:

Especially odd is the notion that the only tenable position, unless we are to go Marxist, is social democracy. Would we not have had a financial crisis if we'd had really super single-payer health care?

It is true that the belief in both tighter bank regulation and a larger welfare state cluster on the left, but if social democracy is some sort of preventative cure-all, how come the US economy is outperforming places like Denmark, Sweden, and Germany, not to mention the OECD as a whole? Why, if the problem is "American style capitalism", are the biggest GDP declines found elsewhere? I understand that the left finds it politically convenient to link the uninsured and the banking crisis, but this seems only very slightly less silly than blaming it on gay marriage--indeed, looking at the countries worst effected, the latter's correlation seems stronger.

Go read the whole thing.

Once More Unto the Breach...

Looks like our Great Leader may nominate Kansas Governor Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services. I wonder if she paid her taxes....

Why There Were No Mumbai-Style Attacks in Beijing

The crack Chinese Red-Banner Counter-Terror Rapid-Strike Segway Brigade was ceaseless in its energetic defense of the Chinese homeland, striking fear into the hearts of its cowardly enemies, the lickspittle running-dog lackeys of the bourgeoisie.

Newsflash: NY Gov. Patterson Thinks He Can Legislate the Diet

You can't legislate to enforce morality. I'm not even sure passing laws against murder stops people from killing eachother.

So why the hell does the Democrat Governor of New York think that by taxing juice, he can make people eat healthy?

New York Gov. David Paterson is fighting obesity and budget deficits in a proposal for an 18 percent tax on soda and other sugary drinks containing less than 70 percent real fruit juice.

The plan is to raise 404 million bucks in the next year through this inane tax.

The governor is suddenly consumed with the health of his constituents, or is he actually facing a multi-billion dollar budget shortfall, and going after something people buy anyway.

H/T to BobG, who has an excellent blog of his own.

Favorite Quotes

"It is not enough that I should succeed. My friends must also fail." -- Francois duc de La Rochefoucauld

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." -- Alexis de Tocqueville

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." – Samuel Adams

"If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an out-right ban, picking up every one of them... 'Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in,' I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here." -- Senator Dianne Feinstein on banning guns.

"We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas." – H.L. Mencken

An Unlikely Target For My Ire: National PTA

I recently got an email from the National PTA showing what happens when soccer moms and kindergarten teachers decide that they are a national child advocacy organization.

(I didn't know a National PTA existed until I got their email.)

Here is what they sent me. Let us fisk:

The Federal Government should provide parents multiple opportunities to be active participants in their child's education.

Absurd. Is it the federal government's job to take any role in my relationship with my children or their school? Parents who want to talk to their kid's teacher or the principal manage just fine without federal guidelines.

And I am infuriated by the notion that I won't read to my kids or help them with their homework unless bureaucrats in Washington offices help me out. Parents who want to be involved in their kid's education already are, and no amount of statist crap from Congress or the federal apparatus will change the ones who aren't.

Studies have documented that regardless of the economic, ethnic or cultural background of the family, parent involvement in a child's education is a major factor in determining success in school.

This is probably true, although I can't see why it the federal government to spend tax revenue to regulate things and make rules.

Though Congress cannot mandate parental engagement, the federal government should create a system of accountability designed to encourage parents to be active partners in their child's education while ensuring local flexibility.

I sense a note of regret here. I'm fairly confident they would send the Gestapo after anyone missing a parent teacher conference if they could. After all, the National Parks Service has a machine gun-armed SWAT team. (I am not kidding. More on this later.) Why not the PTA?

Further it is imperative that parents know immediately that their child's school is failing, the exact cause of the failure what the state is doing about and the options available to parents and students -- all in a very clear and understandable manner.

I get it now. The Leninist Vanguard at the PTA thinks we're too dumb to realize if our school is failing. Not only are we too dumb to notice, but the teachers we talk to and the administration of the school at the local and state level is apparently also too dumb to tell us anything. And even if they did, it would probably be too complicated unless the Feds make rules about how they explain things.

I'm not about to start home-schooling my kids, but this is the kind of thing that could push me over the edge.