Dancing Giant Sales

When I fled California in pursuit of relative freedom, one of the factors that brought me to Washington was the Evergreen State’s more reasonable set of gun-control laws. Therefore, you can imagine my chagrin when, just a few months later, the people elected to surrender their legal rights to privacy and property and to subject themselves to “universal” background checks even more stringent than California’s own regime. Admittedly, the voters were probably duped into passing Initiative 594 through propaganda financed by Michael Bloomberg and other plutocratic prohibitionists. No surprise that one-percenters would prefer to see the 99 percent armed with nothing more than torches and pitchforks!

In any case, though I voted against it, the measure became law, and essentially all legal firearm transfers in Washington are now subject to criminal background checks and thus require the agency of a licensed dealer. Rather than just grumbling about this development, I decided to turn the situation to my financial advantage by becoming a firearms dealer myself. So shortly after the November election, I began the long process of obtaining the various necessary licenses. After all, if I can somehow profit from the law, then it will surely be defeated in court or at least be blunted by corrective legislation. Meanwhile, I can earn some economic rent while making it incrementally easier for would-be gun owners to legally acquire their firearms from the most affordable sources.

Today, after eight months, four licenses, two inspections, various background investigations, several hundred dollars in fees, and numerous fingerprints and photographs, Dancing Giant Sales is officially open for business.

The Windup Girl

“[H]ow little anyone cares to separate wheat from chaff, when all anyone wants to do is burn a field.”

Science fiction has become so political, or at least I keep selecting works that have political implications. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is another such example. Set after a global-warming catastrophe, the novel uses that context to explain its essentially steampunk background. As a result, environmental politics play a central role in the plot, culminating in a literal battle for supremacy between the trade and environment factions in a future Thailand.

Bacigalupi weaves his plot with threads from five viewpoint characters: a rising capitalist, a fallen capitalist, the incorruptible champion of the environment faction, his somewhat less noble second-in-command, and the eponymous windup girl, the illegal, genetically engineered “new person” whose actions trigger the novel’s climactic turn of events. His tapestry is richly colored by the sights, sounds, and smells of latter-day Bangkok. Street markets, urban filth, and sweltering heat all come to vivid life—but then something will jar the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief.

Part of this problem is technological and part political, though these aspects are obviously related. Bacigalupi uses environmentalist conceits to justify his steampunk setting, but he struggles in the attempt. The world is so far beyond peak oil—or petroleum usage is so strictly regulated—that human and animal power is commonly needed to generate electricity, and draconian carbon-dioxide limits are still enforced long after the damage has been done. Scarcely a solar panel or wind turbine is to be seen, while advanced genetic engineering is widespread.

The cast of character is well rendered in shades of gray, but the so-called capitalists and their allies are the obvious villains by default. Their behavior inevitably borders on crime or even acts of war, and that is somehow treated as normal business practice. The heavy-handed states presumably required to enforce the overbearing environmental regulations of Bacigalupi’s windup world would never tolerate such behavior unless they were sponsoring it, but the foreign corporations that threaten the Thai kingdom seem to be free agents.

Whether the author was writing from his political heart or simply playing with a fictitious fancy, there is a glimmer of rational hope in the novel’s closing acts. Hock Seng, the Chinese refugee who has seen his entire family murdered in previous pogroms, arms himself as Bangkok dissolves into civil war, learning at last that it “is possible to prepare for chaos.” Notably, though, in a story haunted by the environmental evils committed by humans upon the “natural world,” the definitive declaration that humanity is itself natural is put in the mouth of the archvillain Gibbons, a man possibly responsible for creating the worst of the genetically engineered plagues.

Almost everything is political these days, so we probably shouldn’t expect our fiction to be any different. The Windup Girl is a good example of the trend. Though Bacigalupi reaches too far with his political conceits, he does so with delightfully pungent, if awkwardly immediate prose and a good deal of baroque charm. His novel is hard not to enjoy, even if you occasionally have to put it down and shake your head.

Rehearing for Peruta and Richards

As suspected from the outset, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has voted to rehear both Peruta v. San Diego and Richards v. Prieto, which had established that California’s handgun-licensing regime was unconstitutional as applied. The earlier victory in these lawsuits came as something of a surprise but was really just the result of a lucky draw for the original three-judge panel. The full court is heavily populated by Democratic appointees, so in all likelihood, the initial ruling will be reversed by this “rare” en banc review.

Civil-rights proponents on the court may have delayed this moment for as long as possible. Many thousands of licenses have been issued for the good cause of self-defense since the original decision, including within the jurisdiction of my former home, Orange County. The jurisprudence from Peruta has also been incorporated into other important right-to-arms cases, most notably Palmer v. D.C., which overturned the capital district’s no-issue law. Nevertheless, the end result was predictable.

When Peruta is reversed and transformed into a copy of the Kachalsky (USCA2), Woollard (USCA4), and Drake (USCA3) rulings, one question will remain. Will the U.S. Supreme Court take up the case and settle the matter constructively? Thus far, the high court has declined to review all of the right-to-carry cases that have come before it, so there is little reason to believe that the same dereliction won’t be visited here.

The boundary of the present inflection point may be growing near, and I can almost see the threads of historical probability coiling just beyond its veil. I’ve said before that we can’t return to that polite middle ground where the disparate factions pretend to ignore each other’s intentions. Outside the inflection point, linear progression becomes hyperbolic change. What that will do to the American nation remains unclear.

The Myth of Peak Oil

More accurately, perhaps, this post could be titled “The Myth of Steady-State Technology” or “The Myth of Zero Marginal Utility.” In short, though, the concept of peak oil is that petroleum production will reach a maximum point and then decline as global reserves are rapidly depleted, leading to a shock in the energy economy and an overall contraction in the general economy. For the alarmist, this idea can have dire implications, while the optimist may see little more than some minor inconvenience.

However, at either extreme, the idea is still seriously flawed. There is certainly a limit to the terrestrial supply of petroleum, but peak-oil alarmism often, if not almost always ignores the technological innovations that overcome various extraction problems and the economic forces that spur those innovations. Techniques such as hydraulic fracturing have made the extremely large ancient deposits easier and less expensive to access. Simply stated, as long as “fossil fuels” remain economically desirable, technological development will continue to open previously unobtainable reserves for centuries to come.

Of course, none of this is without controversy. Concerns about environmental pollution have moved to the forefront of public discourse, even as geopolitical problems have begun to retreat. Luckily, cleaner fuels and more efficient mechanisms have been steadily mitigating pollution problems for several decades now—unless, as many today do, we consider carbon dioxide to be a pollutant. In the developed world, particulates and toxic byproducts have been drastically reduced, and the air quality has noticeably improved.

Human health and prosperity have reached unparallelled heights in our petroleum-fueled modern age This situation is historically exceptional, so it’s impossible to say whether our current population is sustainable or whether any potential correction would be catastrophic and painful or gradual and painless. What we can say is that the lack of access to oil won’t be the cause of any contraction in the near future. The only barriers that we face are political, not technological or economic.

Affordable Medical Insurance

Now that the Affordable [sic] Care Act has been revealed as a legislative scam and may shortly be facing its legal and political comeuppance, let’s think about what real reform might look like. Once again, I claim no special expertise, nor do I think that I have all the answers, but there has to be a better solution than another legalistic monstrosity like the ACA or some bureaucratic nationalized monopoly. Here are a few ideas that I’ve gleaned from my observations.

Provide a tax credit for medical insurance and divorce said insurance from employment. The income tax isn’t going away anytime soon, but we can protect the employees while ending the dysfunctional relationship between employment and medical insurance and bring the ultimate consumers back into the decision-making role. (Using my present employer as an example, that would mean a $5,000 to $10,000 raise per year for every employee.) The market will provide a range of options from costly, comprehensive health-management plans to inexpensive, catastrophic insurance policies.

Eliminate statutory barriers in the interstate insurance marketplace. Laws and regulations that hinder insurance providers from operating across state lines artificially reduce competition and drive up costs in disadvantaged markets. We sign onto international free-trade agreements, but we don’t even have free trade within our own country.

Establish a non-profit public insurance corporation as a moral equalizer. If an agency operating at cost can provide better service at lower prices than can “greedy,” profit-driven insurance companies, then the market will force down overall prices. A public option can also guarantee access to insurance for customers with pre-existing conditions and for other uninsurable individuals.

Finally, you’ll notice that I’ve been talking about medical insurance. Health care is a more holistic concept and can’t be properly insured, because insurance is a means of mitigating unpredictable financial risk. Health care involves routine, predictable expenses, so trying to allay such costs through third-party agency is less efficient and thus more costly overall. That, of course, is exactly what we have been doing, which explains why health insurance is so ridiculously expensive.

A Right-to-Carry Victory in the District of Columbia

Nearly five years ago, the case of Palmer v. D.C. was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Following the landmark victory in D.C. v. Heller, which overturned D.C.’s ban on handguns in the home, this matter challenged the District’s total prohibition on carrying firearms for self-defense outside the home. Various motions were submitted over the course of the next year, but then the case languished, waiting for a decision on summary judgment. Meanwhile, a variety of other right-to-carry challenges made their way through the courts to their ultimate, conflicting resolutions.

Peruta v. San Diego and its brethren in the Ninth Circuit were the only other major right-to-carry cases that hadn’t been fully resolved, but even they were simply waiting for the final judicial shenanigans to be completed at the appellate level. Palmer was still pending at district court, seemingly consigned to eternal judicial delay. Until today … that is.

Ruling that “the District of Columbia’s complete ban on the carrying of handguns in public is unconstitutional” under any level of judicial scrutiny, the court struck down that ban and enjoined the enforcement of the applicable sections of D.C.’s penal code. The right to bear arms in our nation’s capital has been secured. For today … that is.

Monday may bring appeals and/or new legislation, so the struggle is still far from over.

Decision and Order: Palmer v. D.C.

On the Unequal Distribution of Wealth

 
Lately, economic discussions (and arguments) have often focused on the inequality in the distribution of wealth. While much of the concern is directed at the extreme ends of the distribution range—the desperately poor contrasted against the tremendously wealthy—there is also a vocal set who decry any unequal distribution of the economic pie. To them, any economic inequality is an artificial construct of nefarious human intentions and therefore unfair and unjust.

While I would argue that wealth and income inequality isn’t as much of a social problem as some make it out to be, I won’t dispute that some of the unequal distribution is the result of ongoing political corruption and cronyism or of historical exploitation and other injustices. However, the assertion that any unequal distribution of wealth is necessarily bad and should be eliminated is patently false.

Industry and trade are the engines that create and distribute wealth. However, like all dynamic systems, an economy is fundamentally about the organization and flow of energy. These forces are driven by differences in potential, moving and consolidating energy here and there about the system. Of course, some energy is also lost to entropy—and we see economic waste as well.

To describe a situation where there is no unequal distribution would require an appeal for total consolidation or for total entropy. Neither scenario is physically possible within a dynamic system nor desirable for human economies. The artificial controls and constraints that we impose on economic activities often do little more than introduce more inefficiency into the system, especially when such are built upon previous flawed attempts at interference. In other words, instead of applying a few careful drops of lubrication to our economic engine, we tend to throw random handfuls of sand into its moving parts. When that fails to produce the desired results, we throw in more sand.

On top of this legislative and regulatory blundering—and here I’ll set my usual cynicism aside—the mistake that too many “liberals” make is to equate all industry with exploitation and all trade with theft. While problems do exist, they are confined to a small segment of economic actors. Our response should be appropriately narrow and measured. Instead, as always, the impulse is to punish everyone for the crimes of a few. That impulse is as foolish in the statehouse as it was in middle school.