Who Built That

It annoys me to no end when “conservatives” take Barack Obama (or Elizabeth Warren) out of context. When the President said “you didn’t build that,” he was clearly, if clumsily, talking about infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.). Indeed, most business owners didn’t directly finance the baseline infrastructure that services their businesses.

It annoys me just as much when “liberals” fail to recognize such remarks as the claptrap and political flimflam that they are. While even ardent libertarians acknowledge that government can and perhaps should have an important role in developing and coordinating infrastructure projects, the fact is that very little of our tax revenues go toward public infrastructure.

Even when stretching the imagination, no more than three to six percent of the federal budget was allocated to infrastructure in FY 2012. The numbers are a little more favorable when we combine state and federal spending, but infrastructure still accounts for only a small sliver of the pie. Most of the pie goes to welfare and “defense.”

When the people complain about taxes, they aren’t talking about infrastructure … and when the President talks about raising them, neither is he.

The Patient Protection and Affordable [sic] Care Act

Now that ObamaCare has won the day at the Supreme Court, we can talk about outcomes. Yes, you must gamble with your health. Don’t want to place a bet? Then pay the tax man. Oh, yeah, President Obama said that he wanted to raise taxes only on rich people. You know, just the ones who make over $250,000 per year? Well, guess again.

What I wanted was less expensive health insurance. What we got instead was “universal” coverage, delivered in such a ham-fisted manner that costs will almost certainly rise for the average consumer. As if the $15,000+ I gamble away each year weren’t enough, how can my rates not go up when I’ll have to help cover the bets for those with long odds and for those who don’t even want to play the game?

How do we solve a problem caused by taxation and government interference? With even more taxes and interference, of course! Brilliant.

Ending a Heated Debate

I must confess that the debate over anthropogenic global warming (climatic change for those of you who’ve shivered through recent summers) has been entertaining. The only thing more amusing than human arrogance is even more human arrogance. Be that as it may, I think the time has come to end the debate.

For the record, human activity obviously affects the global climate. Of course, everything affects the global climate, so that information is not terribly instructive. Where do human influences rank among the various factors? Only the arrogant can provide a definitive answer. However, we should still acknowledge that solar output and orbital dynamics generally have the greatest impact on climatic cycles—an important fact that I will return to shortly.

Since it’s the popular thing to do, I’ll go ahead and assume that anthropogenic climatic change is a bad thing and that we should probably do something about it. Now, though, I will buck the trend and dismiss the mainstream solutions as atmospheric alchemy. Arbitrarily reducing carbon-dioxide emissions over the short term will have a very small effect on global temperatures and will be prohibitively expensive.

Rather than spending hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars for minimal benefit, why not spend only tens of billions on mitigation efforts and on general economic development? As Bjørn Lomborg has cogently argued, focusing on these goals would have a much greater positive effect at only a fraction of the cost. (Dr. Lomborg is also rightly critical of proposed cap-and-trade schemes, which are ripe for corruption.) Yeah, that’s just wishful thinking.

So let’s spend a bunch of money on prevention, but let’s use science instead of alchemy. That brings me back to the sun, since controlling insolation would be the most cost-effective method of regulating global temperatures. Several “geoengineering” schemes have been proposed to accomplish this goal, but one stands above the rest.

A constellation of solar reflectors in orbit could shade the Earth and reduce global temperatures in a dynamic and very controllable manner. Such a system could probably be developed and deployed for the price of a low-budget manned Mars landing (around $50 billion). Ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure should cost significantly less than that. This would keep us within Dr. Lomborg’s suggestion of cost-effective solutions without the more politically difficult challenge of defeating the institutionalized corruption that stands in the way of his more noble goals.

An orbital sunshade may sound like science fiction, but it makes a lot more sense than mucking about blindly with complex atmospheric chemistry. Insolation could be decreased or increased as needed, allowing for long-term climatic regulation (and other potential benefits). Combined with ongoing pollution controls, a soletta program would provide an elegant and permanent solution to the problem of global warming.

So the debate is over. If you want to control the climate, control the amount of sunlight that reaches the planet’s surface. Doing so would cost a fraction of other less effective solutions.

Self-Defense, the Right to Arms, and the Concealed-Carry Revolution

The video I’ve shared is from a recent Cato Institute policy forum on self-defense and “stand your ground” laws. Though fairly long, it provides solid historical, political, and legal analysis, so I encourage everyone to watch. As you might suspect, I disagree in part with the last commentator,¹ but I still think he made valid points about the application of the law and the possible need for further guidance. After all, if “stand your ground” laws were a reaction to the misapplication of other statutes by prosecutors, are they not at risk for misapplication themselves? Absent political motives, the mere fact that relative experts disagree on the meaning of these laws suggests there is yet a degree of ambiguity, but that is a matter for legislators and judges to resolve.

As noted in the video, the adoption of such affirmative self-defense statutes has followed the proliferation of right-to-carry laws throughout the country. However, many if not most people are still largely unaware of this quiet revolution, both because the laws encourage or even require the concealed carry of firearms and because the mainstream media usually does their best to ignore the laws once they’ve been passed.² Naturally, there is a long and troubling history behind the right-to-carry movement, and I can touch on that only briefly here.

In A.D. 1986, only a handful of states would readily issue licenses to common citizens. In the rest of the country, the carrying of firearms was either broadly prohibited or the licensing authorities had almost unlimited discretion in issuance. This was the legacy of the two-pronged gun-control efforts³ of the 1920s and ’30s, which were ostensibly intended to combat the dramatic increase in violent crime that accompanied alcohol prohibition.

That began to change when Florida became the first state in recent decades to adopt a shall-issue statute, which required the licensing authority to issue licenses to all applicants who were not legally disqualified. Florida’s concealed-carry law became a model for reform, and by the mid-1990s, over half of the United States had enacted similar shall-issue statutes. The causes have not been widely explored, but I think that they will prove clear enough once this chapter of history is written.⁴

Opposition to the shall-issue movement has been and continues to be fierce, and in each case it has usually taken several years for liberalized concealed-carry legislation to make it through state legislatures and past gubernatorial vetoes. Without fail, opponents have warned of dire consequences should the reforms pass into law. Blood would run in the streets, they assured, as minor disputes and disagreements escalated into shootouts. Invariably, though, such grim outcomes have failed to materialize, and violent crime has continued to decline⁵ as right-to-carry laws have continued to expand.

Today, all but a handful of states enjoy shall-issue licensing or better. California, New York, and several other “liberal” states still maintain discretionary, may-issue regimes, while Illinois is the only state with no licensing system. Legislative reform is unlikely in these gun-control strongholds, so multiple constitutional challenges are now making their way through the federal courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court is widely expected to hear one or more of these cases within the next two years.

1. I am far, far more worried about misconduct by the police and prosecutors than I am about the potential that a criminal might “get away with it” here or there.


2. After vigorously campaigning against a right-to-carry reform, the news media seem to conveniently forget about the topic, except for occasional “investigative” pieces designed to expose or embarrass licensees. Here is a recent exception to that rule. “New Fashion Wrinkle: Stylishly Hiding the Gun.” The New York Times (2012).


3. These efforts resulted in the National Firearms Act of 1934, which sought to regulate firearms at the federal level via taxation (since the federal government was presumably bound from direct infringement on the right to keep and bear arms by the Second Amendment), and the “uniform acts,” which sought to control guns at the state level (since state governments were presumably not bound by the Second Amendment). In practice, though, the various prohibitions on concealed firearms found within the uniform acts were mostly used to disarm “undesirable” people (i.e., minorities and immigrants), and that was probably a large part of the true intent behind them. Otherwise law-abiding white citizens were generally unaffected for several decades, and the wealthy and influential could always count on getting licenses or at least special consideration in the event of any embarrassing incidents.


4. I contend that the right-to-carry revolution developed as a response both to the equalized enforcement practices reached in the 1970s and ’80s and to the political successes of the national gun-control movement from 1968 to 1994. Note that the number of shall-issue states had almost doubled within two years of the enactment of the federal ban on “assault weapons.”


5. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports show that homicides (gun related and otherwise) have continued to decline from 2006 to 2010. Firearms-related homicides specifically dropped from 10,225 to 8,775. More guns on the street simply do not correlate to—let alone cause—more violence.

Ever the Rush to Judgment

In all very numerous assemblies … passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason.

–James Madison

It has been a bitter few weeks in the struggle for human freedom, not so much because of actual setbacks or defeats—though we’ve had those too. Instead, we’ve seen the usual political opportunism that attends controversial events but this time in the ugly company of both popular disregard for the constitutional separation of powers and the emotionally expedient disrespect for fundamental American legal principles, such as due process of law and the presumption of innocence. For me, this is always a painful reminder of how little the people understand or value liberty.

My disappointment is the greater, because it is my own friends and colleagues whom I cannot sway in the face of salacious hearsay spread by the mainstream media. These are otherwise intelligent individuals who profess desire for “social justice” but have let their own emotions and prejudices blind them. Now, in fits of vengeful rage, they would forsake the social and legal barriers that preserve and defend actual justice in a rush to condemn people and events about which they are not properly informed.

It’s moments like this when my own resolve weakens. If reason will always face defeat at the hands of passion, why continue the pretense of debate? Why not abandon the polite, legalistic contest for ordered liberty and hoist the black flag of bloody revolution? Or somewhat more mildly, should I simply surrender to the unhappy idea that to live free means to live as an outlaw—or at least to live as an outsider within a society ruled by the mob’s caprice?

No. I am not ready to retire from the battle of ideas just yet. Important victories for civil rights are in the offing, even if they seem perpetually two years away at the moment.

Ideological Consistency

I have a series of philosophical posts that I’ve been typically lax in completing. While continuing to delay that work, I will explain another concept that informs my thinking. That is ideological consistency, a notion I have mentioned many times in passing elsewhere.

Ideological consistency should be a simple concept to understand. Very plainly, it means keeping one’s philosophical ideas consistent with each other, even when that requires accepting related aspects that one may dislike. For example, opposing censorship while personally disliking “offensive” content would be ideologically consistent.

Nevertheless, many people clearly struggle with this concept and cling to contradictory philosophical positions. Such people are ideologically inconsistent. This is one of the major problems within American politics—a problem exacerbated by the fact that all political discourse must be jammed through the constraints of our artificial two-party system.

Both Republicans and Democrats suffer from ideological inconsistency. Republicans who want a strong national defense but smaller government and lower taxes are not ideologically consistent. Democrats who support the right to privacy but want universal gun registration are not ideologically consistent. These are but two examples of many.

Ideological inconsistency creates internal instability that often makes a given political goal much more difficult, if not impossible to achieve.

“I can have my own life now.”

Last night, my seven-year-old daughter quietly wrote a letter attempting to declare her independence from her mother.

I am immensely proud of her for putting her thoughts into written words and for being partly correct in her judgment, but I also feel profoundly old.