Sunday, January 24, 2010

The NEXT debt crisis!

To combat the next American debt crisis, the College Crisis, I foresee in a few decades we will have a whole new sector in the education industry, targeted skills training.

The goal of TST is to avoid both the hassle and the expense of the "university life" which most students aggrandize beyond its usefulness--sociology degrees don't get jobs, put bluntly.

Instead, educators need to reestablish their ties with industries (computer, engineering, service, construction, etc.) to offer simple apprenticeships to young people looking to get ahead in the business world.

Instead of 4 years of debt for a useless degree, kids as young as 16 can shadow a master in their chosen craft for little or no pay, do whatever work needs to be done, and receive skills training to become journeymen themselves.

The benefits are clear--to the business, cheap labor, voluntarily given. To the apprentice--skills learned, quickly and on the job. The system perfected during the middle ages still applies for us today--we need fewer students ruining their financial portfolios chasing after illusory degrees, and more apprentices in those sectors hurting from low employment, struggling to build capital.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Anarchy and Statism, refined...

(formerly a response to this blog discussion on the YAL website that I thought would make a better post of my own... go back and read the others if you want to get a sense of where I'm coming from.)

I would like to recommend Stephan Kinsella's "What Libertarianism Is" because it refocuses some of our discussions on how libertarian philosophy is not an either-or choice between state and chaos. Anarchy, unlike one of the posters above, simply means "no ruler," and is not synonymous with chaos.

The idea that we need somebody else to enforce our rules on others is in violation of Kinsella's discussion of the non-aggression axiom, which simply means that one ought not (moral, not legal, proscription) to use force (direct, through physical violence, or indirect, through representational violence) to deprive another person of their life, their liberty, or their property without just cause.

Certainly, people can and have been detained by other people without it violating the non-aggression axiom: murderers are detained until the aggrieved party is vindicated for their loss; you are bound by your oath to continue at your job, or your boss can justifiably sue you for breach of contract, etc. But simply passing the buck of federalist violence onto individuals is not a logical move; simply put, government offices and individuals are not the same creatures and do not act in the same way or have the same self-interest.

Governments are parasitical entities at their core, dependent upon the host body to survive but needing to mask their inherently lecherous activities. Rather than simply eat the organs of the host (which would destroy the parasite's home), the parasite will instead steal from the food source or the nutrients of the host (such as a tapeworm), growing fat off the effort of the host but not directly endangering his life--only his product.

Government officials have no money to run their business, so they use ours, or they run our businesses for their own profits; but they often cannot do so openly or they risk damaging or killing the country's economy, the source of their nourishment (i.e., Zimbabwean land-scheming by govt. officials bankrupted the country in only a few years). So instead of taking businesses, now the government merely oversees them, ensures that they pass muster, quality control, checkpoints, any and every conceivable way to make it difficult (but not impossible) for us to live, all the while telling us this is for our benefit, that the bogeyman will get us if we don't have an underpaid chair jockey test a few random batches of meat out of 500,000 and deem all 500,000 "safe."

Where most people run into trouble ethically is how they would live their lives without this singularly important chair jockey and his magical rubber stamp--for example, what if we didn't know if the meat was safe before buying it? Answer: we would learn, as we often do, from market sales. Company X keeps getting lawsuits and bad press from salmonella poisonings; their sales tank as their meat withers at the factory because Company Y institutes a massive new campaign of safety (whether real or perceived) to take advantage of their competitor's weakness, and thus corners the market. Notice how this is already done anyway; the childish notion of "fairness" in business is directly contradicted by the scarcity of resources and the ingenuity needed to get those resources--only the strongest survive.

Turns out, strength in today's economy means an ability to provide consistent quality, reliability, and cost-effectiveness in every product--in essence, tailoring the entire business to us and our self-interest (our greed). Walmart, Target, Lowe's, and numerous other big-box stores have done the math and have managed to give us exactly what we want at exactly the price we'd be willing to pay, with as little overhead and as much global commerce as possible. After all, our patronage is needed to keep all those plants open in China and all the workers employed in honest labor (their once-verdant country is turning to sand thanks to the unsustainable farming techniques adopted by the Communists there).

Yes, "sweatshop" factory work is honest work. Because without governments forcing businesses to shut down because they don't fit a predetermined model of usefulness, all sorts of new opportunities arise--some good, some bad. But people are neither sheep nor doxies--they will not let themselves be slaughtered willy nilly or outsourced as slave labor if they have a choice in the matter. Unfortunately, governments often collude with businesses to deprive people of their rights to leave a contract (a point on which I disagree with Walter Block, who does defend voluntary self-enslavement in Defending the Undefendable). Passport-hoarding, false promises, coyote smuggling, and a host of black-market evils set in once strong government disallows things like cheap factory labor.

In "Where Sweatshops are a Dream," Nicholas Kristof explains that apart from factory work, which is generally done inside, often sitting down, and for reasonable hours, many impoverished people have few employment options, especially young women and children who cannot do hard manual labor. The alternatives of factory labor are such laudable activities as rock-breaking, garbage-collecting (the woman interviewed in the story had her son die while collecting plastic to sell from a trashheap; the son was backed over by a garbage truck), prostitution, and starvation. Not all poor places are terrible to live, but in those worst places, where the work is indeed cheapest, the difference between living on a sulfurous mound of toxic waste, unable to breathe or bathe properly for one's entire life; between that life and 12 or 14 hours going blind at a sewing machine in low light while getting a paycheck on average 6 times what you'd been making prior... which would you choose?

But instead of being thankful that our businesses are using their own self-interest (their desire to maximize profits) to help out the world's poorest populations, we seek to bankrupt and destroy these companies, and use governments as the tools of our zeal, not realizing the true catastrophe of lives ruined and money wasted on overfed unionized domestic laborers. To make an apropos straw man, if you had 2 laborers and one was constantly diligent, hard-working, self-sacrificing, willing and able to work long hours and never once asks for a raise, are you really going to fire him and keep on his colleague, a worker who demands (not asks) for consistent raises without ever demonstrating an improvement in performance, uses government lobbies to force you into negative company equity just to support extravagant benefits plans that he has shown no qualifications for deserving, and who will walk off the job site, stopping production and threatening the solvency of your entire business if you do not immediately acquiesce to his demands? If he were in your position, responsible for the smooth and continued operation of the company, this second worker would be ashamed at his own actions, and recognize how industrious and worthy of employment your first laborer remains.

In short, government allows for individuals to bully from afar; people in positions of power in government can make others ruin themselves and their businesses just for their own self-interest. Kinsella notes that self-interest is neither good nor bad, but a trait of human nature; but when combined with the moral and legal authority that is modern government, self-interest is downright lethal, as over a million Iraqis and many more Middle Easterners have already found out. That is why anarchy is not just a possibility--it is a necessity of modern life; the vast differences between rich and poor are purposefully exacerbated by governments to maintain their extravagant lifestyles.

The greatest concentration of world wealth and world power are one and the same today, but they do not have to be. China's recent boom made many elites here in the "first world" question their diminishing buying power. Osama bin Laden is successfully waging a Vietnam-esque campaign against us in the Middle East, weakening our national defenses by drawing us into random invasions of the Arabian peninsula while masterminding any and all attacks to unsettle the population at home. Eventually, we will either tire of him and his ilk and leave Arabia unceremoniously (unlikely), or we will spend ourselves into bankruptcy trying to catch smoke.

Let me be crystal clear--if every individual American man and woman had to support, with their direct funds from their own bank accounts, the Iraq, Afghani, Pakistani, and now potentially Yemeni and Iranian wars, there would be no wars in the Arabian peninsula. The only reason we have these wars is because our governments are playing us like suckers at a carnival. We've been properly marked, and we're being taken for all that we have. Do we have the courage to know when we've been had, and cut our losses? Can we simply say to the government, "No"? I believe we can: Nullification.