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On the Crime Shortage

      On the Crime Shortage             I think that police brutality is caused by a crime shortage. Crime rates have been falling in America since the early 90s, despite wars, recessions, natural disasters and the W administration. I credit the banning of leaded gasoline 20 years earlier, in 1973. That stopped poisoning young brains, and twenty years later crime dropped, just as it did in every other country that banned leaded gas. In the 60s, conservatives blamed high crime on the ‘criminal element’, meaning blacks, the poor and dissidents; liberals blamed high crime on ‘root causes’, meaning insufficient nanny-state; and it turns out that both were right and both were wrong. The ‘root cause’ was indeed a ‘criminal element’, namely element 82, lead! Well, we tracked down that criminal element, and we’ve addressed the root cause, and we’re reaping the benefits; but the bloated police-and-prison state created in ...
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The Welfare Matrix; a modest proposal

The Welfare Matrix; a modest proposal             What becomes of society’s losers? Jared Diamond asked a similar question; what becomes of the losers of tribal warfare? He found three solutions. For sparcely-populated hunter-gatherer societies (politically-incorrectly called ‘savage’), the losers are driven off the land, to starvation or more marginal land or dispossessing someone else. For middling-density pre-state agricultural societies (‘barbarians’), the losers are exterminated, down to the last woman and child.   And for high-density state-dominated farming societies (‘empires’), the losers are enslaved.           These three solutions translate to the modern criminal code. The savage ‘Jacksonian’ solution is exile; the barbaric ‘Hitlerian’ solution is capital punishment; and the imperial ‘Pharaonic’ solution is imprisonment. But are these the only alternatives?  ...
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To The Next Mass Shooter - A Modest Proposal

           To The Next Mass Shooter      A Modest Proposal             Dear Sir:           I get where you’re coming from. They don’t, but I do. Life sucks, doesn’t it? You’ve got no friends, and you get no respect . Girls won’t date you, the asshole boss pays an insultingly low slave-wage, so your revenge arsenal cost you all of your money. You’re trapped, you’re dying inside, you hate everything and everybody, especially yourself, so you want to go out with a bang. I get it.           I write to offer a suggestion. You see, all of your predecessors did their massacres all wrong, and we’ve grown bored with them. We’re jaded. Somebody shoots up a movie theater? Ho-hum. A school? Yawn. A church? Whatever!   Then we do nothing, and a day later we forget all about it. So what’s the p...
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How Tyranny Won in Spirit

          How Tyranny Won in Spirit             I say that Hitler won World War Two, in spirit; for how else are we to describe nuclear deterrence? After Hitler, the threat of genocide was accepted as a political norm, indeed as the foundation of world order, even though it was a crime against humanity. We who survived that system called it, fittingly, MAD, meaning Mutual Assured Destruction. In what way was the Cold War not Hitlerian?           In this way only; the superpowers preferred to threaten all with the genocide that Hitler did to some . Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Communists and dissidents were the test subjects; the experiment was a success, and the program was updated and adopted by the nominal winners of the war. Those nominal winners added two reforms; to use atomic fission rather than poison gas for genocide; and to advertise...
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Political Information Dilemmas

             Political Information Dilemmas                American education poses a dilemma for those who run the political system, namely; shall the people learn or not? If the people do not learn, then they become unproductive and the economy collapses; but if the people do learn, then they become productive but out of control. Indeed, the more they learn, the more they want to take over!            Recent history gives vivid illustration of this dilemma. In the 60’s, we saw the post-Sputnik initiative. What was the result? By the end of the decade, Americans were walking on the moon, and rioting in the campuses! In 1980, an anti-intellectual was elected President, and a different attitude towards education took hold. The result? Much more political stability, but decades of stagnant median income.         ...
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On Virtuous Ingratitude

                 On Virtuous Ingratitude           Written in 2011 The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have, in common, a kind of virtuous ingratitude; rightfully biting the hand that feeds them. Consider the Tea Party; one of their complaints is government welfare. Many have pointed out that many of these people are explicitly government welfare recipients. The Tea Party is largely Southern and Western and rural; and Federal spending in those areas exceeds taxation; so in effect   those regions are net federal welfare recipients. This is not by accident; in fact it is a relic from the Progressive Era and the New Deal. The idea was for the federal government to offset the corporation’s natural tendency to extract wealth from farmers and ranchers, and move that wealth to the cities. Hence a cycle; corporations extract wealth from the country and move it to the cities; government t...
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The Self-Contradictory Second Amendment

          The Self-Contradictory Second Amendment   The Second Amendment contradicts itself. On the one hand, well-regulated militia; on the other hand, uninfringed bearing of arms. But to regulate is by definition to infringe. One can make a lawyerly distinction between infringement and regulation; but the difference is relative to the observer.           Shall guns be controlled? For instance shall they be kept out of the hands of children, criminals, traitors and the insane? If not then the militia is not well-regulated; if yes then arms-bearing may be infringed. Suppose that Mr. Discord, who constantly earns his name, wants a large stockpile of powerful weapons; may he buy it or not? If yes, then the militia is self-evidently ill-regulated; if no, then bearing arms is a privilege not a right; and if it’s a judgement call, then the Second Amendment has no legal force and in effect d...
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