I was a film and TV director. Frequently, daily, hourly, minute by minute, I told people what to do. The best directors perceive what others can do (or can't do). I negotiated, but just as often I challenged them to stretch a little. Everyone does this in grocery stores, or driving a car on a busy street, or dealing with your family. We navigate a parking lot, find a nice cut of meat, choose which brand of cereal to take home. Price matters. Sometimes it's negotiable, especially buying a used car or a house, deciding which job to take (or quit), how much to bid at an auction. I was delighted to get a pine day bed in perfect condition for $5 at a furniture auction, because no one else bid for it. Sometimes it's difficult to get what you want. Please eat your spinach, honey. It's full of iron for healthy red blood cells.
All of these transactions, on a film set or at the family dinner table, are practical aspects of private anarchy, absolutely no government involved. There are some principles of law in the background, most of them physical. Unless you're over six feet tall and nimble, forget about playing competitive basketball. No matter how angry you are, cursing a stalled truck with a dead battery won't start it. Employment can be frustrating at times, hamstrung by rules or a lazy coworker, a manager who's deaf to suggestions, a client who changes her mind halfway through a job. How we deal with adversity and fatigue is a measure of our fitness to live. I was considerably less fit than others. No man is perfectly suited to all situations, but we're free to say phooey! and concentrate on strengthening our strengths. The responsibility of anarchy impels men to study, dream, explore, dare, fail, try again, and succeed in ways that others don't. They're busy building themselves as separate souls, a basic human right.
Legislation forces everyone to conform. Or rebel, which tens of millions of Americans do all the time. Liberty is a tradition with thick deep roots, all the way back to Patrick Henry, who led the fight in Virginia to reject the new U.S. Constitution. He almost succeeded, lost by six votes, 79-89. His descendants recently rallied in defense of the 2nd Amendment, thousands of armed men surrounding the statehouse. It's not an exclusively American phenomenon. British skinhead patriots fought police to stop Black Lives Matter from defacing or toppling national monuments in Westminster.
Law enforcement is selective and weak. It's impossible to regulate road rage in Los Angeles, narcotics in Philadelphia, or homicide in Chicago. Police and National Guard couldn't control riots and looting in 1968 or 1992 or 2020. Law and order is mostly voluntary, something that people do by themselves. Half of the American electorate doesn't vote and don't care what happens in Albany or Sacramento, a bicoastal conspiracy of liars and dunces. They bought guns and ammo, and they're voting with their feet, because cities are no longer affordable, fun, safe, or economically necessary. Cops are quitting, and those on duty are making fewer arrests. Tens of thousands of families have fled New York City.
Anarchy is inextinguishable. No one can force you to love someone, or do the right thing, or do the wrong thing to appease LGBT attorneys. When Target allowed men to use women's rest rooms and changing rooms, thousands of women boycotted the chain. People vote with their feet. They risk their lives to escape Guatemala and enter the U.S. illegally.
Patriots are few, patrolling the world to deter China and Russia, manning missile silos and nuclear submarines. Money can't buy their loyalty. Every good on earth is voluntary. Some of it is fatal. All of it is difficult, like raising a family and protecting your innocent children from government indoctrination, predatory urban animals, seductive internet filth, and drugs.
The only antidote to peril is independence, personal choice.
Forget about racism, political machinations, media headlines, tragedy, and fancy ideas. The meaning of private anarchy is simple. You're free to pursue your own happiness, to thrive as an individual, to care for your family and provide for the future. Declare independence.
The forces arrayed against Donald Trump are extremely powerful, including swing votes in the Senate and distinguished military figures. The possibility of a coup is no longer remote or hypothetical. Crisis serves the interests of vultures like George Soros, who made his fortune betting against the Bank of England. If constitutional government is suspended, whether by military coup, or civil disorder, or a rigged election in November, it will not alter the truth of private anarchy and personal responsibility for the safety of your loved ones. Those who can think independently and sidestep mass hysteria are pioneer citizen heroes devoted to the principles of American life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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Showing posts with label liberty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liberty. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Friday, July 12, 2019
Monday, December 10, 2018
Liberty and force
I recently recorded a video and wrote a companion short story concerning the Executive, by which I mean a professional military compatible with anarchist theory, the rule of law, and competitive free market private enterprise.
In simple terms, the Executive is a traffic cop backed by nuclear weapons. Someone should possess the awesome power to deter aggression. I propose to make it a private firm owned by money center banks, insurance companies, pension funds, lunatic billionaires and other financial heavyweights, combined in a privately held consortium with periodic cash calls to fund national security in a fully free financial Wild West.
Ooooo! -- sounds dangerous all of a sudden. Free market capitalism, no regulators. Investors would probably go for it, let Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan direct the military and pay for it. I'll bet $100 to a donut that UBS and Deutsche Bank will want a piece of the action, too. There are numerous institutions who are hungry for freedom and prepared to pony up.
The price of civil liberty is small. A free society must have a judiciary to settle disputes and to control civilian police charged to investigate and deter street crime and murder. Matters like fraud are common law wrongs, often entailing class action and restraining orders to stop the looting and freeze funds. Money damages are the only remedy in common law jurisdictions. Shareholder suits are common. If our laissez faire judiciary is fair and objective, big financial institutions will be drawn irresistibly. Banks thrive in orderly, stable legal relationships. Every financial instrument, derivative, option, mortgage, share of stock, life insurance policy, and pension benefit is a contract. Why write bogus paper? Nothing but problems, wreck the firm and lose everything. Wall Street is loaded with lawyers to make sure that financial contracts are fair, valid, and enforceable. There are trillions of dollars backing those agreements.
Those trillions are thirsting for real security. A free society and its courts must be domiciled somewhere in the physical world. Court costs are pennies compared to national security. For instance, the Executive handles air traffic control, suppression of piracy and terrorism, armed defense of a geographic territory and sufficient clout to deter aggression by hostile foreign governments, of which there are many today and will be for the foreseeable future. Getting along with them financially involves project finance and all sorts of tax gymnastics that will remain worthwhile for traditional players like HSBC and sovereign wealth funds. Many states detest the idea of freedom, especially China, Russia, Britain, France, USA -- the permanent members of the Security Council and insatiable tax leeches. Not one of them is financially solvent or efficiently managed. Their idiotic plan for global progress is to "save the planet" and shuffle additional tens of millions of penniless migrants to Europe and America.
The Executive Branch handles immigration in a free society, requiring passports, a plausible purpose to enter the market, and enough money or sponsorship to find a place to work and reside. No special status for diplomats or divas. Common law means common law in all of the Executive activities at territorial borders, airports, seaports, etc.
Most the Executive's power is held in reserve to deal with the unexpected. There is an air force and a navy, a professional nucleus of army officers and troops, security men to guard the Commander-in-Chief and military sites. Not a penny more than essential facilities and trained personnel. That's the beauty of private funding by cheapskate bankers, who will try to trim every national defense line item, but provide enough dough to protect their golden goose, a free market without financial regulation. A good rule of thumb is 1% of GDP for national security expense including procurement and maintenance. That might translate in the financial sector to a 0.05% annual haircut, the highest "tax" rate on earth, but they get to vote as shareholders, choose directors, set policy, and control what the Executive does.
Civilian control of the military is a natural condition. Private enterprise is the engine of all value creation and free cash flow. Finance fuels the market and connects entrepreneurs to capital investors, lenders, and insurers. Successful enterprises pay the freight for national security. As old stodgy companies are displaced by new high tech market entrants, shares in the Executive might change hands. National security might grow or shrink, depending on the tenor of the times. It's impossible to predict how long freedom and security would exist, if young Turks refuse to fork over funds. No one can be compelled to support the Executive.
The one thing that threatens a free society most of all is NAP, the idea that military force is wrong, no matter what the mission or legal basis. The same complaint can be levied against law courts, police, private property, and a currency of paper bank notes. It doesn't matter what folks think or say about the use of force. War is hell. It destroys homes and factories, breaks things and kills people. No one really wants war, except the masses whipped into a frenzy by a charsimatic fool. I recommend using a weathervane. If the Commander-in-Chief starts making bizarre televised speeches about patriotism, that's the time to skeedaddle.
In modern America, we've been led by aristocrats, community organizers, schoolteachers, spooks, and jovial showmen who were democratically elected one man one vote. Every one of those plebeicites increased the size of government and waged wars. That's why I'm quits with voting. I'd rather give the job of control to a board of directors representing financial interests. No banker on earth would agree to war if he had to pay for it in cash, scarce capital squandered on destruction, markets monkeywrenched by fear.
Meanwhile, don't cross the Executive's red lines. No terrorism. No threats.
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Monday, October 29, 2018
Uh, immigration
With thousands marching toward the border, President Trump is prepared to deploy troops to (shoot them?) uh, do something by golly (put them on buses, to be fed, housed, educated, and doctored in humane detention centers? asylum claims filed? given transport home?)
Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Asians who came on student or tourist visas and forgot to leave. No one knows where they are. Ten or twelve million illegal aliens are loose in Los Angeles and San Francisco, swelling welfare rolls, working as casual day laborers with fake identity documents, concealing and enabling MS-13 gang members.
Since everyone else is talking about immigration, I suppose I'll have to say something, too. I'm supposed to be a sharp cookie, specialized in constitutional theory, right?
Let's begin with previous writing. Liberty trumps property. There have to be public roads to facilitate travel between Point A and Point B. That said, no one has a natural right to trespass on private property, except power lines, pipelines, and other sorts of community facilities like airport approaches that limit airspace and subsurface resources that extend underneath multiple properties and have to be unitized as a matter of equity.
Speaking of equity reminds me of another dozen ways that neighbors can limit what you do with private property. If you invite MS-13 to set up a base of operations on your land, there is nothing in law to stop neighbors from waging war via police or private action. The caravan of thousands marching toward private land on the border are likewise a "public nuisance" that could be ordered to scram, to cease and desist clogging up Border Patrol operations. If a court order is ignored, they could be imprisoned until they comply.
Unfortunately, court orders are appealable, so we'd end up detaining them pending review by a circuit court and conceivably the Supreme Court. If a cake shop dispute can go all the way to the Supreme Court, there's little doubt that thousands of asylum seekers could do it, too, claiming to be wrongfully detained, denied due process, racially profiled, ill-treated while in custody, and so on. It's a sort of No Win clusterfuck.
If it were up to me, I'd build a fenced highway from the border to the nearest Salvation Army soup kitchen, and let private charities deal with refugees, however many make it across the border. Border Patrol should identify and arrest evil men disfigured with MS-13 tatoos, turn them over to ICE for detention, interrogation, and prosecution. I am opposed to the death penalty and cruel punishments, but war powers could be invoked against drug dealing, with POW camps established at the border. MS-13 gang members arrested in Long Island or LA or Chicago can be sent to the POW camp. There's no Geneva Convention privilege to distribute heroin and phentanol, to intimidate and imperil U.S. citizens.
Can Congress declare war on MS-13? Sure. It's a cohesive foreign force.
Obviously, that's not going to happen. We can't rely on Congress to do anything logical or timely. Think about it. What should private actors do when confronted by evil? Turn a blind eye to women and children, help them to reach safety, far from the field of battle.
Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Asians who came on student or tourist visas and forgot to leave. No one knows where they are. Ten or twelve million illegal aliens are loose in Los Angeles and San Francisco, swelling welfare rolls, working as casual day laborers with fake identity documents, concealing and enabling MS-13 gang members.
Since everyone else is talking about immigration, I suppose I'll have to say something, too. I'm supposed to be a sharp cookie, specialized in constitutional theory, right?
Let's begin with previous writing. Liberty trumps property. There have to be public roads to facilitate travel between Point A and Point B. That said, no one has a natural right to trespass on private property, except power lines, pipelines, and other sorts of community facilities like airport approaches that limit airspace and subsurface resources that extend underneath multiple properties and have to be unitized as a matter of equity.
Speaking of equity reminds me of another dozen ways that neighbors can limit what you do with private property. If you invite MS-13 to set up a base of operations on your land, there is nothing in law to stop neighbors from waging war via police or private action. The caravan of thousands marching toward private land on the border are likewise a "public nuisance" that could be ordered to scram, to cease and desist clogging up Border Patrol operations. If a court order is ignored, they could be imprisoned until they comply.
Unfortunately, court orders are appealable, so we'd end up detaining them pending review by a circuit court and conceivably the Supreme Court. If a cake shop dispute can go all the way to the Supreme Court, there's little doubt that thousands of asylum seekers could do it, too, claiming to be wrongfully detained, denied due process, racially profiled, ill-treated while in custody, and so on. It's a sort of No Win clusterfuck.
If it were up to me, I'd build a fenced highway from the border to the nearest Salvation Army soup kitchen, and let private charities deal with refugees, however many make it across the border. Border Patrol should identify and arrest evil men disfigured with MS-13 tatoos, turn them over to ICE for detention, interrogation, and prosecution. I am opposed to the death penalty and cruel punishments, but war powers could be invoked against drug dealing, with POW camps established at the border. MS-13 gang members arrested in Long Island or LA or Chicago can be sent to the POW camp. There's no Geneva Convention privilege to distribute heroin and phentanol, to intimidate and imperil U.S. citizens.
Can Congress declare war on MS-13? Sure. It's a cohesive foreign force.
Obviously, that's not going to happen. We can't rely on Congress to do anything logical or timely. Think about it. What should private actors do when confronted by evil? Turn a blind eye to women and children, help them to reach safety, far from the field of battle.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
For the good of the nation
I forget -- oh! -- now I remember. Wilda's lede in her weekly gossip column suggested doing something for The Good Of The Nation, which seemed like common sense to heed. I told her I'd get right on it, patted her affectionately and came home to my writer's lair, if you can call a tin barn a writer's lair. It has a coffee pot, microwave, laptop, and a plywood bunk that needs a pillow. The old one became so filthy with mold that I had to toss it on a flaming brush pile, along with that week's trash bags. I generate a lot of garbage, not exactly good for the nation, but it's life on life's terms in rural living. A year ago when I still had a car, I drove trash bags to town and let the town garbage collectors bury or burn it. If I understand the national situation correctly, nearly every consumer in the United States produces tons of waste.
Nothing I can do about that. Voting won't fix it. Same intractable problem with 9,220 Veterans Administration buildings and 49,000 Dept. of Agriculture offices and inspection stations, plus 373,000 miles of road maintained by the Forest Service, a USDA subsidiary. The military? Hah. Defense occupies 696,470 buildings worldwide, plus 8 million square feet in Virginia. Roughly six million people are directly or indirectly employed by the Pentagon, not including allies. In the Old World, allies were called "auxilliaries," had to be fed and watered, disinclined to do much serious fighting, unless they were British Gherkas. Ancient history. War is a Raytheon inventory to be launched by stealth fighter or drone nowadays. There's not much that you or I or anyone else can do to enhance national security. It's already the third-largest budget item funded by government, after Social Security and Medicare. I'm not sure that anything can be done to assist the Corps of Engineers with 650 dams, 12,000 miles of channel, and 926 harbors to maintain. I guess we could vote to borrow more money from offshore tax havens.
I'm not big on voting. The last time I voted was in 2008, because Sarah Palin was on the ticket, a reasonably normal person, guileless and honest. Since then I spent quite a lot of time at my laptop, exercising my remaining wit as an author, hoping to contribute inspirational literature for The Good Of The Nation.
I should have stood in bed, as the expression goes. Jews, blacks, gays, and doe-eyed victims of Christianity have a lock on publishing and the 16x9 public square of televised squabbling. Frozen out, I self-published twenty books. Good joke on me. A decade of effort exiled my work to laughable obscurity. My latest and best novel was shunted to Amazon.mx, denied existence in English, deemed unfit for American readers. Mighty hard to leverage The Good Of The Nation when the nation in question forbids admission to the marketplace of ideas.
"Free speech has limits," they scold. "You can't shout fire! in a crowded theater."
Maybe that was my mistake, I should have shouted fire in a gay nightclub, won a customary fifteen minutes of fame as a patriotic pariah, a noodlemeyer paraded in an orange jumpsuit and leg irons. If I owned a car, I could have waved a tiki torch in Charlottesville, shaved what little hair I have left on my head. Unfortunately, I don't give a shit about Confederate statues or any other legacy writ in concrete. The focus of my work was liberty, an extinct species of civil rights, and embarrassingly frank cis-het adventure novels, an antique artform.
It seems strange that national progress should be left in the care of bartender Sean Hannity and butch Rachel Maddow, but they're certainly less boring than Andy Rooney was, a salutary binaural eclipse of monotone Sunday night CBS schtick. I give Fox and MSNBC a one finger digital salute and note in passing the fan-losing Negro Football League taking a suicidal knee for The Good Of The Autonomous Vehicle Gig Economy Queer Nation. Mom always said that I was an optimist. Liberty is the future for some of us, unwilling to bend over for modernity.
I find myself in agreement with Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York, on the occasion of Confederate secession from the Union. "Let the erring sisters go in peace," he pleaded. Why not? Separate yourself for the greater good of all. Boycott Nike.
Nothing I can do about that. Voting won't fix it. Same intractable problem with 9,220 Veterans Administration buildings and 49,000 Dept. of Agriculture offices and inspection stations, plus 373,000 miles of road maintained by the Forest Service, a USDA subsidiary. The military? Hah. Defense occupies 696,470 buildings worldwide, plus 8 million square feet in Virginia. Roughly six million people are directly or indirectly employed by the Pentagon, not including allies. In the Old World, allies were called "auxilliaries," had to be fed and watered, disinclined to do much serious fighting, unless they were British Gherkas. Ancient history. War is a Raytheon inventory to be launched by stealth fighter or drone nowadays. There's not much that you or I or anyone else can do to enhance national security. It's already the third-largest budget item funded by government, after Social Security and Medicare. I'm not sure that anything can be done to assist the Corps of Engineers with 650 dams, 12,000 miles of channel, and 926 harbors to maintain. I guess we could vote to borrow more money from offshore tax havens.
I'm not big on voting. The last time I voted was in 2008, because Sarah Palin was on the ticket, a reasonably normal person, guileless and honest. Since then I spent quite a lot of time at my laptop, exercising my remaining wit as an author, hoping to contribute inspirational literature for The Good Of The Nation.
I should have stood in bed, as the expression goes. Jews, blacks, gays, and doe-eyed victims of Christianity have a lock on publishing and the 16x9 public square of televised squabbling. Frozen out, I self-published twenty books. Good joke on me. A decade of effort exiled my work to laughable obscurity. My latest and best novel was shunted to Amazon.mx, denied existence in English, deemed unfit for American readers. Mighty hard to leverage The Good Of The Nation when the nation in question forbids admission to the marketplace of ideas.
"Free speech has limits," they scold. "You can't shout fire! in a crowded theater."
Maybe that was my mistake, I should have shouted fire in a gay nightclub, won a customary fifteen minutes of fame as a patriotic pariah, a noodlemeyer paraded in an orange jumpsuit and leg irons. If I owned a car, I could have waved a tiki torch in Charlottesville, shaved what little hair I have left on my head. Unfortunately, I don't give a shit about Confederate statues or any other legacy writ in concrete. The focus of my work was liberty, an extinct species of civil rights, and embarrassingly frank cis-het adventure novels, an antique artform.
It seems strange that national progress should be left in the care of bartender Sean Hannity and butch Rachel Maddow, but they're certainly less boring than Andy Rooney was, a salutary binaural eclipse of monotone Sunday night CBS schtick. I give Fox and MSNBC a one finger digital salute and note in passing the fan-losing Negro Football League taking a suicidal knee for The Good Of The Autonomous Vehicle Gig Economy Queer Nation. Mom always said that I was an optimist. Liberty is the future for some of us, unwilling to bend over for modernity.
I find myself in agreement with Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York, on the occasion of Confederate secession from the Union. "Let the erring sisters go in peace," he pleaded. Why not? Separate yourself for the greater good of all. Boycott Nike.
Monday, August 20, 2018
Greed
Why do I get stuck explaining things? Jeez.Michael Medved bungled again, couldn't explain capitalism. Pay attention, dipshit. Investors have to climb a wall of worry. Competition, hidden defects in the enterprise or management thereof, cost of money, foreign exchange rates, and two million other factors like deliberate market rigging by colocated robots and short sellers could wipe out investor gains in a blink. That why conservative investors strangle positions with puts, calls, and diversification.
Meanwhile, corporations are NOT eager to take on more debt, unless their market share is hopeless (like Sears). Bankruptcy and liquidation (Borders, Toys R Us) is better than sudden mark-down of asset value (Chesapeake). Investors in Venezuela were totally screwed. If a borrower can't pay and never made a profit, high yield lenders face financial disaster (Uber, Tesla). That's why retail investors prefer mutual funds and pension funds that spread bets across several asset classes: blue chip dividends, bonds, real estate, Treasurys, gold, and a dollop of high P/E multiple FANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google).
Profitable companies expand and produce new products (Google) with retained earnings after tax. R&D is a pre-tax deduction. They pay top wages to attract the best employees and put considerable effort into world class organizational development (Boeing, IBM).
"Greed" drives half of it. If they can't make a profit, publicly traded companies lose market value, pay higher interest rates, shrink and die (AT&T taken over by Southwest Bell for $1 and assumption of AT&T's debt, Enron liquidated without paying pensions). "Fear" is an equally harsh factor. Many companies are vulnerable to Chinese competitors and trade tariffs.
Households are no different. "Greed" encourages people to go to college, to butter up family and classmates. "Fear" makes them stick at a job they despise while they look for something better, and in the meantime smile at the boss, pretend to be a loyal servant. The ultimate greed is liberty, greatest fear a Blue Wave to impose higher taxes and job-killing regulation.
Pretty simple stuff. Liberty promotes greed, squashes risk. Capitalism is retained earnings, invested in new products, new hiring, better wages, business expansion -- and "creative destruction" of inefficient and unneeded stuff (steam locomotives, whale oil, telegraphy).
If you want to punish greed, engine of a wealthier society, enact laws limiting or abolishing civil liberty and private property -- multiplying fear and want (Venezeula, North Korea).
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