Power, legitimacy, and Orly Taitz

So Orly Taitz is throwing a conniption fit after the ruling against her. The problem is, there simply won't be a ruling in her favor, *ever*, because a judicial coup of that magnitude would utterly destroy the legitimacy of the court system in the eyes of the majority of Americans -- and that aura of legitimacy is the only thing that allows courts to have power, since they possess neither armies nor police forces, the only other possible source of power (i.e., *guns*). Without legitimacy, courts can issue rulings, but who will enforce their ruling? They would be in the position of Gorbachev after the coup against him, rattling around in their vacant halls issuing proclamations and orders to the waitstaff, proclamations and orders utterly ignored as the Soviet Union crumbled around him.

To understand what I am talking about, you must understand the fundamental nature of power. There are two sources of power: The will of the majority, or the will of a significant armed minority with guns. Laws -- whether we are talking about the Constitution or laws in general -- have power only because either the majority agree that they should have power, or because a minority with guns force the majority to accept them at gunpoint.

This reality has been responsible for a number of unpleasant incidents over the years where extremely popular actions that pretty much violated the Constitution were papered over by the courts because if they'd issued rulings, the rulings would have been ignored and thus destroyed the aura of invincibility that motivates many people to comply with laws that they don't agree with. Plessy V. Ferguson, the "Separate but Equal" ruling that justified Jim Crow, *had* to be ruled the way it was. The only other alternative would have been to force desegregation upon the majority of Americans at gunpoint, and courts don't have the guns to do so, the President does. And the President is going to deploy those guns only if the majority of voters support him doing so, because otherwise he's going to get impeached or at the very least not re-elected. The majority of Americans supported and demanded Jim Crow in 1896, and the President would never have deployed the Army to enforce the overturn of Jim Crow laws. So if the Supreme Court had ruled any other way in 1896, they would have destroyed their legitimacy. It was not until attitudes changed after WW2 and the majority of Americans realized that legally-mandated racial segregation was an atrocity that the courts could overturn that ruling.

And that is why, even if the election of President Obama did violate the Constitution as the birthers claim (BTW the birthers' claims are nonsense, but just pretend for a moment), there will be no judicial coup done by our courts. The majority of voters elected Obama. Attempting to overturn the election of a sitting President via judicial decree after it's already a done deal would result in a Constitutional crisis that likely would end the authority of any Supreme Court that tried to do so -- they would issue their order, but who would enforce it? The FBI under the command of the President? The Secret Service under the command of the President? The U.S. Army under the command of the President?

It's not happening. Period. Anybody who ever lived under a dictatorship, like Orly Taitz did, should understand that much about power -- a judicial coup without majority support and without guns is about as likely to happen as flying pigs. Well, other than flying pigs at a Pink Floyd concert. If Pink Floyd held concerts anymore, now that they're all 90 years old or something. So it goes.

-- Badtux the Power Penguin

The cult

Regarding the black bloc and throwing bricks through plate glass windows: I’ve read the anarchist tracts. I’ve listened to the black bloc types try to explain why their tactics are useful. None of it makes any sense at all in the real world, where the majority have no problem with the violence inherent in the system as long as it's directed against people who do things like, well, throw bricks through plate glass windows. It’s like a cobbled up philosophy thrown together to attract alienated kids who want to feel powerful, sort of a cult now that I think about it, a cult that’s amazingly similar to Ayn Rand’s cult of perfect freedom without responsibility. And as with the Rand cult, it has absolutely nothing to do with leftists or left-wing causes, and black bloc in the midst of a protest should be treated the same as teabaggers in the midst of a protest — i.e., as a hostile force with a philosophy and goals completely incompatible with our own.

-- Badtux the Left-wing Penguin

Why are so many engineers anarcho-capitalists?

I supposed I'm supposed to be talking about Herman Cain's sexual harassment problem right now, but c'mon. Everybody knows that white women throw themselves at black men 'cause they're curious to see whether black men's, err, instrument, is as big as reputed, and if the black man doesn't reciprocate then they file these bogus sexual harassment charges in retaliation, right? (Note: Sarcasm intended).

So anyhow, back to something more interesting to me. Anarcho-capitalism makes no rational sense if you know anything about human psychology and human history. Anarcho-capitalism is extremely inefficient -- for example, anarcho-capitalism requires that all roads be turned into toll roads, but collecting tolls is far more expensive than simply collecting taxes at the gas pump -- and does not deal with the freeloader problem of externalities. That is, if I pay a security company to catch the burglar who burglarized my house, and pay them to put this burglar in jail, I'm not the only person benefiting. Every other person that this burglar would have burglarized in the future is also benefiting. Unless they're paying part of the cost of catching and imprisoning him, they're free-loading off of me. Anarcho-capitalism has no solution to that free-loading problem, whereas democracy does -- in democracy, everybody who benefits pays (which is pretty much everybody to some extent, since a burglar in jail is no longer a threat to your own home and thus putting him in jail at least provides a mental benefit to you). I.e., *taxes* are the solution democracy has to the free-loader problem.

So, why do so many engineers, who are supposedly logical thinkers, fall prey to supporting anarcho-capitalism ("libertarianism")? In my opinion it's because they fall prey to the fact that the society that engineers live in, by and large, is a very circumscribed one filled only with like-minded people who behave in a way that ordinary people simply don't behave, and they then extrapolate from that to believe that society at large behaves that same way.

First things first. Engineers are a very special people. First of all, by and large engineering operates on anarchist principles. That is, engineering teams operate via consensus and engineers who are not capable of operating in that environment don't last, they leave or get fired. So engineers soon fall into the trap of believing that *everything* can operate via consensus that way. After all, if designing a huge software system can operate via consensus, why not society as a whole?

Secondly, there are very few Wallys out there -- Wally being the free-loading engineer from Dilbert. Engineers who don't enjoy their work don't last. They move into sales or marketing, or they move into management, or they end up in customer support somewhere, or they end up delivering pizzas or working as a "sandwich artist", but they don't stay in engineering. So the average engineer has very little experience with freeloaders in the workplace, the only society he really knows.

Finally, engineers generally are not... how should I put this? Engineers are typically not social creatures. They don't have many hobbies outside of the workplace, they don't socialize with non-engineers very often.

The end result is that engineers operate in a bubble, a bubble filled with like-minded people all of whom are devoted to creating good product, a bubble that has no freeloaders and where everybody is able to reach consensus on major issues and where everybody operates in good faith. And in this bubble anarcho-capitalism would work just fine, because there would be no freeloaders and everybody would agree on the final solution to the problems faced by the society and there would be nobody gaming the system for their own benefit at the expense of everybody else.

The problem is that real society -- the society outside the bubble -- just doesn't work like that. In real society, there are people who will never agree on anything. There are people who will game the system for their own benefit. There are violent people who will use violence to get their way. There are externalities that almost guarantee freeloaders unless you have taxes, which anarcho-capitalists declare is "slavery" and thus evil, thus meaning that society collapses under the weight of the freeloader problem. Anarcho-capitalism ("libertarianism") simply doesn't work when faced with actual reality, which is why there are no examples of anarcho-capitalism on the face of this planet right now (unless you count the warlordism of Somalia as anarcho-capitalism, which I don't). Anarcho-capitalism in the face of reality simply doesn't work. End of story.

Yet engineers insist upon believing that it does work, because it does, in the little bubble universe of their engineering departments... and so it goes, when people observe a small bit of human behavior then think that applies to all humans, everywhere, the end result is generally stupid. Like anarcho-capitalism.

-- Badtux the Democracy Penguin

The free loader problem

The biggest problem that neither anarcho-socialists (what we traditionally mean by the word "anarchists") or anarcho-capitalists (a.k.a. "Libertarians", "glibertarians", "libertards") have an answer to is the free loader problem. And without an answer to the freeloader problem, they are condemning their white pasty flabby asses to become some sociopath's bitch if they ever got their anarchist's paradise that they wish for.

So how does this happen? Well, consider the problem of sociopaths in general. There are two kinds of people -- regular people, who hesitate at the taking of life, and sociopaths, who enjoy taking lives. In a gunfight between a sociopath and a regular person, the sociopath wins, because he who hesitates loses in a gunfight. So in a no-government Libertopia, sociopaths will swiftly kill the most courageous of the regular people, those who try to take them on, and the rest of the regular people will get the message that they're the sociopath's bitches and quit trying. See: Somalia, Afghanistan, the inner city of most U.S. cities, the state prison system of most U.S. states...

Now I hear you saying, but in Libertopia we'll have private cops to take the sociopaths off and put them away! But: Who is going to pay for these private cops? If Bill Gates pays for the private cops, everybody else is freeloading off of Bill Gates! Unless *everybody* pays for getting Jeffrey Dahmer off the streets, the end result is that NOBODY pays, because Bill Gates isn't going to pay when it's just going to benefit the families of the people actually killed by Jeffrey Dahmer! Instead, he's going to retreat behind his own fences and go out with his own armed guards, and leave Jeffrey Dahmer out there to meet other Jeffrey Dahmers at which point you now have an army of Jeffrey Dahmers who are raping, pillaging, and cannibalizing at will because ordinary people who dare try to take a shot at them get killed because, well, they hesitate.

The reality is that the only way to keep this army of Jeffrey Dahmers from forming is for everybody to pay for the trained cops and prison system to keep them off the streets (or at least on the payroll so that they're going after other Jeffrey Dahmers rather than cannibalizing the people as a whole). I.e., taxes, enforced by government. Which the glibertarians and anarchists don't believe in, in their heart of hearts, chanting "taxation is theft!" and shit like that.

But for some reason the glibertarians and anarchists don't see it that way, the glibertarians claiming that ordinary people with ordinary weapons have any chance at all against sociopaths (they don't, he who hesitates loses in a gunfight and ordinary people simply do not like violence and killing and thus aren't good at it unless they get a lot of training paid for by, err, government), and the anarchists simply handwaving the problem away and claiming that their voluntary syndics will work sufficiently well for self defense and sociopaths won't be able to take them over and force the members to their bitches (hah!). It is to laugh, really, at just how divorced from reality these people are. Mao had it right: Power flows from the barrel of a gun. And sociopaths are damned good at using guns due to their complete lack of morals and scruples... giving them much more power than their numbers would indicate they should have. Without a solution to the freeloader problem, there's simply no way to pay for the large number of ordinary people needed to keep sociopaths down -- and the glibertarians and anarchists (and the rest of us, alas) end up as the sociopaths' bitches.

-- Badtux the non-freeloader Penguin

Power dynamics, the free market, and inflation

Spencer over at Angry Bear notes that inflationary pressures were driving prices higher in Asia and correctly pointed out that it was showing up in US import prices. Yet, he notes in a puzzled voice, U.S. retail prices are not rising. What's the deal with that, he asks.

One of the interesting areas in which anarchy theorists have been operating is that of power dynamics. Basically, when you have a huge monolith which dominates your sales, like Wal-Mart, it has a higher place on the power spectrum compared to, say, the individual owner-operator delivering a widget to Wal-Mart Store 101 or an individual wholesaler importing a widget to sell to Wal-Mart. Thus things like fuel price increases or source widget price increases will tend to get pushed down upon that individual owner-operator or importer until he is bleeding red ink and eventually either forced to cease operation or Wal-Mart notices that having him cease operation is not in their best interests and beneficiently gives him a pay raise just large enough to keep him in thrall to them. In anarchy theory, the most powerful entity in any economic relationship will be the last to feel any economic distress. All economic distress will be forced down upon those lower in the power hierarchy first.

Now, the solution the anarchists recommend is of course the abolition of hierarchical systems that give rise to power inequalities. Given that monkeys are hierarchical animals and humans are monkeys with bad hair and delusions of grandeur, that seems as sensible as prohibiting fish from swimming. It does give lie to the traditional neoliberal conception of economic passthrough though, the same misconception that is also used against things like, e.g., mandating that employers provide health insurance to their employees, minimum wages, etc. Said misconception being that wages and prices are set by supply and demand. That utterly ignores the power relationships involved, which would argue that a multi-billion dollar corporation which controls a quarter of the retail sales in America has the ability to dictate terms to individually powerless employees because it also has the power to pretty much dictate terms to the rest of retailers (the other retailers can't raise their wages or provide insurance because then they can't compete with Wal-mart anymore). In other words, the most powerful entity in a sector has the ability to set wages and benefits in a way independent of the market for labor if it controls a sufficiently large amount of the sector, assuming a sufficient supply of workers in the sector (in areas where workers are scarce -- such as, say, competent computer geeks -- this is not as feasible). This is not something that traditional supply-and-demand theorists want to consider, because it throws a monkey wrench into their pie-in-the-sky silliness and, like all theorists, they prefer their theory to reality. So it goes...

-- Badtux the not-anarchist Penguin
(But always good to examine everybody's intellectual backing to see how it stands)

Cross-posted at the Medley

What an asshole

Stupid asshole kiddies advocate inconveniencing millions to get back at "The Man".

Sigh. While accurate in some respects (specifically, about the fact that the U.S. Government is the most powerful entity that has ever existed during the history of this planet, and fighting it is like fighting a mountain, the reason the U.S. government isn't particularly oppressive is because it's so powerful that it doesn't have to be), the rest... bah.

Slow down traffic? What an asshole. All you do is make me waste gas, or if I'm riding my motorcycle to work like I did this morning, make me pass between you (lane splitting is legal here in California). Besides, I don't need to be physically at the office to work. If somehow you managed to bring the entire SF Bay area to a standstill, I'd just telecommute from home. Crap, I don't even have an "office telephone", I have a company-issued cell phone so that my "office" can be anywhere.

Keep your kid from doing homework? Bah. As a former teacher, I can tell you that it wouldn't make a hill of beans of difference to me. As long as your attitude-problem child does not interfere with the learning of other students in the class I would have been happy to allow your kid to be as stupid as his parents want him to be.

Cover up surveillance cameras? Good luck with that one. Most of ours live over intersections and are used to set signal timing and issue congestion warnings. My employer has cameras all over the place pointed at areas we want to be safe, but all that spray-painting them does is cause us to spend money to replace them that we'd really want to use to take on the behemoth corporations that tiny little us is competing with.

As for the other stuff that anarchist idiots often advocate, such as, e.g., a national strike... err, most folks work for small businesses. My employer has a total of 30 employees on American soil, and none of us are rich, and thanks to employee stock options we own a significant part of the company. Why would we want to go on strike against ourselves? I can see it if you work for some big faceless corporation owned by our slave master elites, but really, if you're hostile to our powerful elite, why are you working for them in the first place? And how, exactly, would our going on strike hurt our elites anyhow?

As for the bombing and crap like Baghdad... well, violence scares people. People do violence only if they see no real alternative. Otherwise they'll put up with a lot of shit before they'll do anything violent. Saddam's Iraq, for example, was quite peaceful despite Saddam's viciousness, because while Iraqis had the ability to rise up in violence against the regime, they didn't have the will -- they viewed Saddam's viciousness as preferable to violence. Folks who recommend violence as a method of overthrowing the most powerful government ever to exist on this planet are advocating madness. As Gov. Earl Long of Louisiana was reputed to have told the Legislature when urged to fight a desegregation order, "Are you kidding? We're talking about the government of the U S of A here, they got the goddamned ATOMIC BOMB!".

In the end, people are going to wake up and make things change only when things get so bad that there's no alternative, and even then, the sheeple will merely shift power from one elite power group to another. We are, after all, talking about monkeys. Monkeys are genetically wired to follow an alpha male. That aspect of monkeys will change about the same time that penguins can flap their flippers and fly. We are all, in the end, prisoners of our biology.

-- Badtux the Flightless Penguin