The War On Bullshit

We all know about cops abusing their Tasers. Well, it seems someone decided to give one Louisiana officer a taste of his own medicine.

In Natchitoches, Louisiana, an unnamed officer was Tasered with his own ‘nonlethal’ weapon - though I’m sure while he had 50,000 volts burning through him he was crapping his pants and wondering just how nonlethal these things really are, in light of past police brutality cases involving the stun guns. It appears that the suspect, Marcus Slaughter, made an attempt at running away, and the dedicated officer caught up to him. Bad idea.

Slaughter disarmed the officer and Tasered him with the weapon. This guy is my new hero - if he wasn’t a drug-addicted, lunatic redneck, I mean. It appears codeine dealers are good for something, though.

Seriously, though, what do cops expect? There was a time when running from the cops was dumb as hell - it’s what got you beat down, Mr. T-style. Now, though, it’s the folks who are already in custody, handcuffed, that the cops decide to brutalize.

Now, it almost feels more sensible to fight back. Screw getting beat up without a fight. Taze the cops.

Last week I wrote about the difference between big government and big market intervention. The purpose here is to change the debate from the impractical (should government be big or small?) to the useful (what services, exactly, should government run?) I promised an answer to the latter, more meaningful, question, and today I deliver.

1. National Defense

Anybody who has read Machiavelli will understand why government has to run the military. It’s quite simple really: if the military were independent from the government, whoever was in charge of the military could take over the government. Yes, concentrating military power also enables tyranny, but assuming military power is concentrated, it is pretty clear that it must be run by government, not private industry.

2. Critical Infrastructure

Certain services are necessary for a functioning society: running water, electricity, and transportation are typical examples. Without these things, society collapses. Leaving it to the market to provide things like electricity is too risky because of the asymmetry of penalty when things break.

If, for example, the power fails in the entire city you live in, for three days. The power company loses a 365/3 = less than 1% of its potential revenue for that year. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of businesses in the city that require electricity ALL lose three days’ revenue, many people don’t get paid because there’s nothing for them to do at work, and the whole city basically shuts down. And nobody can sue to recoup their losses because an unregulated power company could write a software-like end-user license agreement that says they’re not responsible for power failures.

Free-market enthusiasts will fallaciously claim here that somehow the market will provide uninterrupted service to those willing to pay for it, but this is not backed up by the facts. The barriers to entry for a competing power company are enormous when there is already an incumbent power company with the huge installed base of capital equipment. You would need to raise billions upon billions of dollars just to get a new power company off the ground, and many people wouldn’t pay the extra cost for a guarantee of no blackouts.

Therefore, critical infrastructure such as power companies must either be government owned or heavily regulated.

What else is critical infrastructure? If you look at the dependencies between modern life and services and then among the services themselves, critical infrastructure would include at least the following things: electricity, transportation infrastructure (e.g., roads, rails in airports), public transportation (e.g. buses, trains, planes), telecommunication (e.g. phone and Internet), running water.

Yes, I am implying that government should run or heavily regulate companies that provide phone, Internet, bus service, flight and so on. It is frightening but true that electricity depends on telecommunication, telecommunication depends on and electricity, running water depends on electricity, transportation depends on all three, and we as a society fundamentally depend on transportation, telecommunication, electricity and running water. Subjecting these services to market forces is inherently risky.

3. Any industry in which economic consequences undermines efficiency or morality

In some cases the quest for profit will, from a societal perspective, have an unacceptable cost in either efficiency or morality (although this often applies to critical infrastructure, here I refer to non-infrastructural cases).

As an example of profit interfering with morality, two cases come immediately to mind: health care and education. In an unregulated, privatized healthcare environment, the care a person receives is proportional to their wealth. I’m going to go out on a socialist limb here and claim that sick people deserve treatment, regardless of their income. Moreover, the care received by children should not be determined by whether they were lucky enough to be born to rich families. Similarly, all children have a right to a good education regardless of the wealth of their parents. Of course I recognize that rich kids will always have advantages poor kids do not (although the reverse is true is well), can you imagine the problems with a fully-privatized education system? The rich kids go to the expensive schools with all the good teachers and equipment, the poor kids would be lucky to learn to read. It would be classism in its worst form.

As an example of economic consequences destroying efficiency, consider auto insurance. Where I live, there is one auto-insurance monopoly, owned by the the government. When I moved here I was shocked at how low the insurance premiums are. The key is that insurance companies waste millions fighting with each other in court. When you only have one insurance company, and two people have an accident, they just send an investigator to figure out who’s at fault and act accordingly. You can contest it in court, but most people don’t, and piles of cash aren’t wasted on lawyers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have identified three classes of industries or services where Government should either regulate heavily or take over entirely: national defense, critical infrastructure, and industries that, left to themselves, will produce unacceptable consequences from a moral or efficiency perspective. In the third and most complex case, the extent of government control should not exceed that required to eliminate immoral or inefficient consequences.

Maybe those of you not living in caves have heard that there’s been quite a bit of questioning of presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama’s patriotism. That’s right: Americans just aren’t sure Barack Obama is patriotic enough. This all started with the matter of an American flag lapel pin which Obama refused to wear, saying it was “a substitute for true patriotism.” You can check out his response here.

Obama’s definition of patriotism aside, I don’t care to hear politicians talk about how patriotic they are because it’s a terrible trait in a nation’s leadership. You don’t have to agree, but you’re wrong. Here’s a few reasons why:

5. Patriotism and Nationalism are the same damn thing.

First off, let’s take a look at how Webster defines a few terms regarding love of one’s country.

patriotism, n. devoted love, support, and defense of one’s country; national loyalty.

nationalism, n. 1. devotion and loyalty to one’s own nation; patriotism. 2. excessive patriotism; chauvinism . . . .

So why the negative connotation placed on the word “nationalist,” while we in America spend so much time wondering if our elected officials are patriotic enough? What is the difference between these two concepts? The answer is: nothing. There is no difference. It is the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist. They are a nationalist if they are foreigners; they are a patriot if we share the same nationality. The difference between patriotism and nationalism is one of perception, so let’s call a spade a spade. What the Patriot Patrol are looking for is a nationalist President.

4. Nazism Nationalism Patriotism blinds leadership to the faults in their own country.

You’re probably asking, “what’s your point, Riley? We’re not here to read about semantics.” The point is: nationalism makes leaders blind. Nationalism blinds citizens to the problems in their country. It is patriotism that makes the Constitution virtually a holy text, to remain unquestioned and untainted 220 years later. Oh, sure, it’s a living document, right? We’ve got amendments. If your kid brought home a science book from school that was written in 1787, would you really give a rat’s ass how many editions the book has had? Yet we hold the Constitution to a different standard than our children’s education - because it’s unpatriotic not to.

3. Patriotism is often used as a political red herring.

Much like the discussions of Obama’s lack of patriotism in the media, a candidate’s patriotism is often used to distract the American public from meaningful discussion about issues that face the country. Ask most Americans if they’re familiar with what Obama’s stance is on the issues; it’s far more likely they’ll tell you they know all about how unpatriotic he is. Bush’s entire regime is based on his cowboy patriotism. Rather than accept questioning and criticism of his presidency, he urges Americans to wave the flag blindly, and labels his critics as unpatriotic.

2. Patriotism leads to bigotry, isolationism, and xenophobia.

All one must do is look around America to see the paranoia, bigotry, and fear spread by an increase in patriotism. As our President urged the nation to be more patriotic, we also learned not to trust anyone who wears a turban or burqa. As we waved our flags, we learned to hate anything from the Middle East (except maybe their gasoline). We even renamed French fries because of our patriotism. We’re taught early on to despise anything stemming from socialist ideology because derivatives of Marxism are unpatriotic and downright un-American.

1. Perhaps most important of all… Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin were patriots of the highest degree.

I really have nothing more to add to this. Hitler’s propoganda machine was one of the best in the history of the world, and it was eerily similar to Bush’s ‘wave the flag’ mentality. Think about it.

Conclusion: America Doesn’t Need a Patriot

America does not need a patriot in the White House. We’ve seen in George W. Bush what patriotism gets you: a leader with blinders on, who thinks his nation has some moral authority over the rest of the world. America needs a leader with the ability to question and critique the policies of our nation, who can bring together the right minds to guide our nation, and who can look at what others in the world do better than us and learn. The last thing we need is someone who already thinks we’re better at everything. Now, whether Barack Obama is the man that can do that is up for debate. But that is what the debate should be.

However, if we are going to be so concerned with the patriotism of our leaders, I’d like to recommend a new symbol of nationalism for our politicians to wear in place of the American flag lapel pins…

How’s this for patriotic, Faux News?