Rails and Liberty

Once upon a time, America had an efficient, cost effective transportation system technology that adequately served the needs of virtually all citizens. This transportation system utilized cutting edge high technology and didn’t run on imported energy sources like oil. Best of all this transportation was almost entirely owned and operated by private enterprise and developed without government money.
The year was 1910 and the transportation system was electric powered rail. Back in 1910 residents of most American urban areas could take an electric powered trolley car to work for about five cents. Private developers were expanding what we would call light rail networks to suburban and rural areas. Plans were even afoot for high speed electric powered trains that connected major cities similar to the Japanese and French bullet trains.
So what happened to this transportation system? Government and politicians got to work that’s happened. The politicians didn’t like rail because it was an efficient privately owned and operated transportation system that they couldn’t control. So they looked around for an alternative and found one: the automobile.
If a committee of politicians designed their dream transportation system they would come up with the automobile. The automobile provides average people with the illusion of independence they have a personal vehicle, a vehicle that requires an expensive state owned and maintained support system: roads and highways, a system that gives them an excuse to raise taxes, create new bureaucracies, trash property rights and create lots of jobs.
Even with political favor there was no guarantee the automobile would win the transportation battle. If we got in a time machine and went back to 1910 and asked the average person on the street what he or she thought the vehicle of the future was they’d say “duh the trolley car.”
The politicians stacked the deck in favor of the car. Then for good measure they deliberately and systematically screwed electric rail.
First they taxed and regulated rail, railroads and trolley companies had to pay property and income taxes. City councils forced them to set artificially low prices for tickets. If railroads wanted to raise rates to pay for improvements they had to appeal to the Interstate Commerce Commission. In 1910, the ICC ruled that railroads couldn’t increase freight rates to pay for needed infrastructure because they could save money through “scientific management.” Naturally scientific management wasn’t explained it was just put forward as an argument. The genius behind this argument lawyer Louis Brandies was later appointed to the Supreme Court. There was no way these firms could turn an honest profit. Later on the ICC tried to keep railroads from hauling trailers on flatcars and building bigger cars because that would be unfair to their competition.
Second the federal treasury was put on the side of the car, the progressives the same wonderful people who gave us World War One, the FBI, Racial Segregation, Prohibition and the Income Tax began spending federal funds on highway construction. Since the highways were owned and operated by the same state and local political machines that elected most Congressmen and Senators back in 1916 the real purpose was obvious: to buy votes using road construction. No money was available for local or state governments that wanted to build rail lines, lots of cash was there for those who wanted to build roads.
Third, anti trust laws were employed electrical utilities were prohibited from owning electric rail lines and visa versa. Utilities were forced to sell rail lines which were quickly bought up by bus companies (many owned by General Motors) that immediately started ripping them up.
The result was that America went from the nation with the most advanced and extensive rail transportation network in the world to one with one of the worst. In 1910 the average American could purchase transportation around his or home city or town for a nickel. He or she didn’t need to buy an expensive vehicle for the privilege of getting around town. All they needed to do was flag down the street car or walk over to the subway and hand over a nickel. I might also add that in 1910 the only American military personnel in the Middle East were a few sailors on shore leave in Alexandria.
By 1950, the average American had to spend several hundred dollars on an automobile an expensive complex piece of machinery that required extensive maintenance for the same privilege. By 2000 the average American had to spend thousands of dollars to buy what his great grandfather had purchased for a nickel.
Our little tale is made worse by the final result, the politicians seeing their highway system in a shambles and oil fast disappearing are turning back to electric rail. Now that the urban freeways and rural Interstates are jammed by gridlock and falling to pieces to boot, and with $5 and $10 a gas an inevitability the politicians have a “solution:” electric powered rail. The same technology they tried so hard to kill for several generations.
Today the politicians knowing that more highways will create more gridlock mindlessly promote rail. To add insult to injury the politicians are now taxing Americans to fund the rebuilding of a system originally financed by private capital. The situation has gotten so bad that in my hometown of Denver our political leaders have a radical solution to our transportation “problem,” privately owned and operated electric rail lines.
The story of electric rail should be a cautionary one. Even good, successful technologies that benefit the average person can be throttled by government and the scum that profit from it.

A Visit to Santa Fe

Last week I finally did something I've been meaning to do for years, I visited Santa Fe the capital of New Mexico.
I've spent quite a bit of time in New Mexico, back when I was in the newspaper business I interviewed for reporting jobs in Hobbs (for my money the ugliest town in America, Gallup (drunken Indian capitol of the nation), Farmington and Clayton. I Thank God that I didn't get those jobs, which tells you something about those towns. So I wasn't really expecting much from Santa Fe despite its magical reputation.
Driving into Santa Fe from the North you pass through the "real" New Mexico, mobile homes, junk cars, speed traps and crummy convenience stores. Not to mention some of the most deserted country in the nations and highways that are in a poorer state of maintenance than Colorado's (I didn't think that was possible). Soon you start driving into Indian reservations the only difference you notice is the tax free cigarette stores and the speedtraps utilizing unmarked police cars.
As you get closer to Santa Fe, the mobile homes give way to Indian casinos and you finally find yourself driving on a nice modern four lane highway(which goes straight to the Indian Casinos). Traffic on the Veterans Memorial Highway is as bad as anything on an LA freeway.
Santa Fe is a nice old city but I can't see how it is any better than a dozen western cities I can think of. Pasadena, Riverside, Redlands, Boulder, CO, Salida, CO, La Junta, CO, Trinidad, CO, Roswell, NM. I suppose the history and the art scene get people.
Another possibility is that Santa Fe is the first true Western town a lot of Easterners and Europeans see. To somebody from Long Island, Santa Fe must some like a romantic adventure.
Santa Fe is a nice walkable town with some very attractive features. There are tourists but not the hordes you might imagine. A great feature is the lack of homeless people and beggers. I saw no sign of them, my guess is that Santa Fe's police force knows how to use a night stick and the nation's homeless know it. They know that the only way to get a handout in Santa Fe is to hop a freight train to Denver.
There are some embarassing shortcomings too, there's a terrible lack of parking downtown and no public restrooms. Most of the tourist attractions are too expensive and there's a lack of affordable food downtown.
Interestingly enough, the town's biggest and most successful operator of tourist attractions is the Catholic Church. The Cathedral and the chapel with the twisting staircase are big draws complete with gift shops in the lobby. I suppose that's to be expected the Church invented tourism didn't it?
Still there is plenty of affordable food and housing just a few miles from the Plaza. There also appears to be decent bus service.
After visiting Santa Fe I have to wonder what was all the hype about?

What these phrases mean

Liberals and other politicos like to throw around a few phrases that confuse and confound those who hear them? Two of the most popular phrases used are social conscious and political correctness.
Liberals talk about social conscious which I suppose means concern and compassion for the poor and downtrodden. What this really means is to show concern for whatever group of people it is fashionable to show concern and compassion for.
Social conscious, from what I have seen of it, seems to mean a complete ignorance of the political, social, cultural, economic and historical realities of modern society. Especially if the writings of self proclaimed liberals with social conscious are studied.
For example liberals with social conscious are concerned about the homeless but they claim the homeless are middle class people who are the victims of economic circumstances. Even though all the evidence indicates that the vast majority of homeless people are alcoholics, drug addicts and the mentally ill.
Having compassion for these unfortunates and their plight is a wonderful thing. Lying about them and the cause of their plight is the height of cruelty. Unless of course the self proclaimed champions of social conscious don’t really care about the homeless. What they really care about is finding evidence to support their discredited and outdated economic theories.
If those with social conscious really cared about the homeless they would be demanding drug treatment and mental health care for the unfortunates roaming our streets. They don’t because they need to see the homeless to justify their idiotic economic beliefs. These people would rather have their friends and neighbors begging and eating from dumpsters than change their world view. Therefore having a social conscious means having no compassion, understanding or common sense.
Political Correctness which seems to have taken over our educational system and entertainment industry is a bit harder to describe. Political Correctness involves the suppression of any speech or expression of opinion that its purveyors find offensive. The idea behind this is that suppressing offensive speech will somehow eliminate prejudice and discrimination.
On our universities political correctness involves the suppression of study or even thought about history, philosophy and civilization. The politically correct systematically suppress most scholarship because it is based upon the teachings of dead white males and demand the study of other cultures.
Now the Politically Correct could be excused if their crusade was to add the study of non European civilizations to the curriculums. Say if they were demanding that a chair of Arabic or Mandarin or Chinese history be set up at the university.
Sadly that is not the goal the politically correct have no real interest in any civilization their own or foreign. Instead they merely want to portray all non white and non European peoples as victims and whites and Europeans as devils.
The multiculturalism they promote is based upon manufactured subjects such as Native American studies or Asian American studies. The Asian American being of course a fiction manufactured by the purveyors of political correctness. No effort is made to study Chinese history or the Arab language.
Indeed as Ibn Wariq has ably documented Edward Said and other leftists have sought to suppress and silence those academics who truly study and understand Arab or Islamic culture. The politically correct have built a cult around the hack and fraud called Edward Said while trying to destroy a real scholar Bernard Lewis.
The reason is obvious the beliefs of the politically correct are so narrow minded and simplistic that they can not stand up to any sort of scrutiny so the scrutiny must be prevented. The true scholar must be silenced for she might expose the fraud, the hack celebrated because he will always toe the party line. That is why college professors rush to the defense of an obvious fraud like Ward Churchill.
The true meaning of these phrases are obvious they show us how ignorant and stupid our so-called leaders really are.

It's An Interesting Time To Be a Libertarian

It’s an interesting time to be a libertarian because libertarianism is fast becoming the dominant political and social philosophy out there.
Libertarianism has triumphed because all of its competitors: Marxism, racism, socialism, mercantilism, Communism, fascism, militarism, nationalism, progressivism and many others have failed and failed miserably. These philosophies have produced nothing but war, violence, poverty, tyranny and misery. Indeed many of the world’s formerly socialist and Marxist political parties, the US Democrats, the British Labor Party and the Chinese Communist Party have adopted watered down libertarianism as their philosophy.
The problem is that the politicians are embracing a selective libertarianism they want economic liberty but not political liberty. The Chinese Communist Party is a perfect example of this it allows almost complete economic freedom but locks anybody who says a bad word about the party in the concentration camp. Closer to home our Democratic Party wants to expand sexual freedoms and freedom of speech but restrict the right to bear arms. The Republican Party wants to restrict some behaviors such as drug use but expand economic freedoms.
The biggest frustration for me is that most politicians seem to get libertarianism they know that expanding freedom works. Yet the same politicians are afraid of freedom and empowering the average person.
My guess is that the politicians don’t want people to realize that they can get along without politicians and government. The politicos most of whom are lazy and useless people don’t want to see their gravy train ended.
The great thing today is that most people realize government is the problem, they know that government is corrupt and ineffective. They know that politicians are incompetent crooks and fools or worse. They know that most political ideologies are fraudulent nonsense cooked up by politicians and intellectuals to fool us into giving up our freedoms.
Average people also know that freedom is good and they want more of it. So most people are libertarians even most true believers in other political philosophies.
Libertarianism is the only truly effective political and economic system because it works. Unlike our competitors, libertarians can point to lots of success stories for our ideas.
The greatest frustration of our times is that discredited political philosophies don’t die, they become zombies. Like the living dead, these animated corpses roam the countryside fouling the air with the stench of their rotting flesh. Just like movie zombies these creatures attack the living and try to eat their brains.
The only defense against these zombies is libertarianism the one political philosophy that actually works. The only political philosophy based upon rational thought and the only political philosophy supported by empirical evidence.
The times are interesting because we are witnessing the triumph of libertarianism. A long, slow and painful process but an inevitable one that will vastly improve all of our lives.

Obese America

America faces a bleak and frightening future because many of its citizens are obese (the medical term for being too fat).
Some surveys even indicate that the majority of Americans could be obese within fifteen to twenty years. This is a potential nightmare because obesity leads to all sorts of health problems including heart disease, high blood pressure, type two diabetes and asthma to name just a few.
This means that millions of Americans will get really sick because of obesity in the years ahead. This will put incredible pressure on a medical system already overburdened by rising costs, a shortage of doctors and nurses and tens of millions of uninsured people.
The obesity epidemic could cause the entire health care system to crash in the near future. Millions of people, many of them uninsured, poor and poorly educated will descend upon medical facilities demanding treatment. Many of them thoroughly brainwashed by TV will think the doctors have an instant answer and find they don’t have it. Don’t be surprised when some obese diabetes patient walks into the hospital and starts shooting all the doctors and nurses in sight because they couldn’t offer him an instant cure.
The problem will be made worse by the shortage of health workers, millions of Americans will need treatment and care. The people to provide it won’t be there from bed pan changers to doctors. The solution to this will be a staunchly American one we’ll simply raid other countries for their doctors. Places like Russia, India and Pakistan with lots of doctors will be hit as will the socialist paradises of Europe and Canada. Don’t be at all surprised if European social democracies take drastic steps to keep doctors from moving to the US in search of the big bucks in the years ahead. Closer to home more and more illegal immigrants will be allowed in to change the bedpans.
The social and economic effects of the obesity economic will be profound. The national obsession with diets and weight loss will continue and grow to ridiculous proportions. Diets and ads for them will be everywhere as will quackery and charlatanism. Every newspaper and magazine will be filled with ads for miracle weight loss products. Aging and increasingly obese celebrities will be everywhere hawking these scams.
Skyrocketing healthcare costs will lead to increased taxes and higher insurance premiums because of obesity. More and more Americans will find health insurance unaffordable and cries for national health insurance will increase. Politicians will undoubtedly comply with them and then scramble to contain costs. Expect to see other areas of the budget cut to the bone and taxes raised to pay for all the insulin and bypass operations. Higher taxes of course will mean decreased economic growth and more tax evasion so the underground economy will grow. We’ll have to answer the question: can our economy function and grow with an increasing proportion of our national treasure being spent on healthcare rather than production?
Obese people will be less able to take care of themselves increasing the burden on the physically fit. More and more firefighters and rescue workers will have to risk their lives helping obese people get away from fires and disasters.
Many of the obese people will be homebound and car dependent. With rising gas prices many of these people won’t be able to go anywhere or do anything so they’ll just around and watch TV or play videogames.
The obese will demand that our tax dollars be spent upon home care and vans to haul them to the grocery store and the all you can eat buffet. Already in my home town of Denver the transit district has been forced to cut basic bus service and spend the money on federally mandated vans for the disabled.
The obese will undoubtedly require more police protection too because they will be less able to defend themselves. The crime of the future maybe aggressive physically fit people simply walking into obese people’s homes and terrorizing them. The human vegetables sitting in front of their TVs will make easy targets for such crimes.
Adding to the enormous cost will be the retrofitting of our nation for the obese, bigger chairs and seats, bigger doors, etc. This will made worse by legions of civil rights attorneys who will sue any business that doesn’t retrofit for the obese under the Americans With Disabilities Act.
The final outcome of the obesity epidemic will be a sharp increase in faith and religious devotion. When they discover that medicine’s ability to help them is limited the obese will turn to God and the churches. Especially when they find themselves helpless and facing death.
We’re going to see a massive interest in faith healing and miracles in the years ahead. Naturally this will lead to a floodtide of fraud and charlatanism. TV channels and churches will be filled with faith healers promising to heal diabetes as they pass the collection plate around. Sightings of the Virgin and the saints will become more common and the pilgrimage business will become a growth industry. Another strong possibility will be a massive revival of Christian Science or some new movement teaching denial of reality.
This is a bleak future indeed and a very sad one. It’s sad because we could have avoided it by using a little common sense and self control.

Libertarians and Iraq

What does the Iraq War mean to Libertarians and how should they respond to it and think about it?
That’s a difficult question and one to which there are no easy answers. The easiest response is to say “the Iraq War is wrong because it is unconstitutional and violates the sovereignty of a nation state.” That is a simplistic answer that ignores reality and the present course that history seems to be taking.
What is happening in Iraq is the inevitable march of history, the decline of the nation state and states in general and the collapse of socialist and Marxist economies. Let’s face it the Iraqi nation was in decline long before the first GI set foot over there, the American invasion only hastened the inevitable. Saddam’s arrogance and stupidity had undermined the Iraqi nation beyond repair if US forces hadn’t invaded Iraq would have simply fallen apart when Saddam died or was hit with some crisis.
The Iraqi dictatorship like all totalitarian and authoritarian states will collapse whether American forces are there or not. That is what history teaches us in the last forty years we’ve seen the collapse of numerous dictatorships Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile, the Admirals’ Argentina, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Yugoslavia, Salazar’s Portugal, Somoza’s Nicaragua and Mao’s Chinese Utopia to name just a few. We’ve also seen the collapse of the lesser kinds of authoritarian states, the Social Democracies in India and Western Europe, the Welfare State in Britain and the New Deal/Great Society in the United States.
What we see in Iraq is historical development the Iraqi nation state is being replaced by newer entities which are more responsive to modern political, economic and technological realities. This is happening all over the world even in the United States but in most places it is occurring peacefully. In Iraq it is occurring violently largely because those who profited from the state don’t want to see their cash cow killed so they’ll fight for it. In other words a lot of bullies who used to use weapons and uniforms to steal from their fellow citizens don’t want to go to work.
Indeed the American intervention in Iraq can be seen as an effort to protect the nation state and restore it. The US is trying to recreate the Iraqi Nation State (which was a fiction manufactured by British Imperialists) in order to demonstrate the power and efficiency of the nation state to the world. A similar effort (largely undertaken by Europeans) is underway in Afghanistan and is also doomed to failure. The American elite in the form of neoconservatives who have spent their lives profiting from the nation state are afraid that the nation state will disappear so they are trying to justify its existence like their Iraqi brethren because they’re too old to go to work.
The military industrial complex is heavily invested in this effort because large scale armies, air forces and fleets designed to fight enemy nation states are obsolete in today’s world so they are trying to justify their existence. Note that the army designed to fight and beat the Red Army and the Vietcong is useless in Iraq. The fleet designed to beat the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Air Force designed to blow Das Luftwaffe out of the sky are of even less use.
Libertarians should welcome the Iraq War because anything that weakens and discredits the state helps our cause. The excesses, weakness and failure of government are on display for all to see in Iraq. Socialism and fascism (Saddam was a fascist his state was a cheap imitation of the Third Reich) have failed miserably in Iraq and Islamic theocracy will fail there as well. The only place the Iraqi people and the people of the Middle East can turn will be to embrace libertarianism or even watered down libertarianism in the form of a market based dictatorship like that in China.
The Iraq War is also weakening the American state by showing how ineffective our government and the thinking behind it is. Big government is failing and failing miserably in Iraq and we should welcome that. The reason Democrats and self-proclaimed “moderate” Republicans want to pull out of Iraq is that they’re scared the continuation of this mess will further discredit government.
The decline of the nation state is also a good thing, the nation state has a long and bloody history of war and oppression. It was born in blood in the French Revolution and since then as slaughtered millions and enslaved millions more. The atrocities of Communism and Nazism were made possible by the nation state and the great slaughters of World War I and World War II and lesser conflicts were made possible by the total mobilization of resources by national government. The decline of the nation state will mean less war and oppression in the world
So what does the future hold and how should libertarians respond? Well we still have interests in Iraq and enemies over there (the Koran thumping fools who have decided that the only good American is a dead American). Indeed we should be very worried the Islamic statists and socialists will need a scapegoat for the failure of their states and their socialist economies and America is the perfect scapegoat (this is already happening in Iran). Some of them will undoubtedly conclude the solution to their problem is the destruction of America the source of those horrible ideas about freedom.
Well Libertarians can offer answers creative out of the box thinking like Ron Paul’s proposal for Letters of Marquee and entrepreneurial warfare. That is turn the war over to private companies that can adapt quickly and effectively and aren’t constrained by bureaucracy, politics, media scrutiny or public opinion. Or to local groups in the Middle East such as private militias and local individuals. For example private covert operators who don’t have to fight the war on drugs could make deals with Opium Growers in Afghanistan and get Bin Laden and other Al Qaeada fanatics (one of the reasons we’ve failed in Afghanistan is that our forces have antagonized the local people by trying to eradicate the one cash crop they can grow: opium) . Locally hired mercenaries would be familiar with the local culture and languages in ways Americans wouldn’t.
These groups could aid our friends in Iraq without getting US servicemen killed and not waste our tax money in the process because they would operate in exchange for cut of the oil profits. They would also be free to ignore the sorry farce that is the Iraqi government and cooperate with those who have the real power. Such efforts would also put the US in an excellent position to deal with future Iraq type situations which could develop in countries as diverse as France, Cuba and Mexico in the very near future.
Of course, Americans won’t be open to such radical thinking until the complete failure of the nation building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. So maybe this war is a good thing for libertarians.