Commie plots *everywhere*!

General Ripper knows the truth about flouridation, and now the Colorado Republican Party has identified the next Commie conspiracy against America: Bicycles.

Yes. Bicycles. Bet you didn't know you were riding a Commie plot to destroy America back when you were a kid riding your bicycle around your neighborhood, did you? That's why kids aren't allowed to ride bicycles nowdays without being swathed in so much gear that they can barely see and only if their parents are accompanying them -- the children! Oh the children! They must be protected from this vile and horrid Communist plot against America! And Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes says he's just the one to do it!

-- Badtux the Bicycling Penguin

The Rule of the Violent

One of the interesting things that hard-core Glibertarians will say to you, when you mention the public order / public safety / national defense justification for having government, is "I don't need government to protect me, I have my guns!"

Let's do a little thought experiment, why don't we? First of all, let's identify when a gun is useful:

1. You have the weapon upon your person (it's not in a closet, in another room, or something like that).
2. You are awake and aware of your surroundings
3. You have identified a target,
4. You have identified that you wish to kill this target and are capable of doing so, rather than having qualms or doubts.
5. You are able to kill this person before he kills you.

Okay, so let's look at the advantages that a bad guy who has cased your place has in, say, a home invasion situation at 3AM:

1. He has the weapon on his person. You don't (weapons make lumpy sleeping companions, it might be as close as the nightstand, but it still isn't on your person).
2. He is awake. You aren't.
3. He is shining a very bright light in your eyes so that you can't see him. He can see you clearly.
4. He knows he wants to kill you. You, on the other hand, can't see him, don't know who he is or whether he has evil intent towards you, have qualms about violence and the taking of life that cause hesitation, and so...
5. He thus kills you before you kill him.

In other words, because the criminal can choose the time and conditions under which he will take you out, you're dead. The criminal is violent, has no qualms, has identified you as someone he wishes to kill, does not hesitate, is not only comfortable with violence and the taking of life but enjoys it, and you ... are ... dead.

So why doesn't this happen more in real life, you say? Well, actually, it does -- every evening, around the country, there are thugs breaking into homes with the purpose of making the inhabitants of that home either dead or harmless. Except they're called "police officers", and they're arresting *other* thugs. We as a society hire a lot of the violent types and put them to work for us policing the rest of the violent types and protecting us from them. Second of all, the majority of the worst of the violent types, the most amoral killers, are either in prison or refrain from excessive violence because they don't wish to go to prison. In short, the deterrent effect of having police officers and prisons is what keeps most of us safe at night despite the fact that if anybody really wanted to take us out, we'd be dead.

So what would happen if we did not have our own thugs and prisons to take care of other thugs? Well, then thugs would rule the world. They'd go anywhere they wanted to go, kill anybody they wanted to kill, take anything they wanted to take, and if you objected, you would be dead because they're amoral killers who identify *everybody* as someone they want to kill and thus will never hesitate, while you waste precious moments trying to figure out that this guy wants to kill you rather than being the harmless meter reader he's dressed as. Why do we know this is what happens? Because it's what has happened everywhere that government has failed -- Somalia, Afghanistan, the tribal areas of Pakistan, all of them are thugocracies where the majority are cowed and victimized by a vicious and violent minority. You, as an individual, have about as much chance of stopping The Taliban as a mosquito has of stopping an elephant.

But, you say, let's form some voluntary organizations to hire our own thugs! Well, okay. Let's say that everybody in my neighborhood joins together to hire some security guards to protect us from those OTHER thugs out there. So far, so good. But what if someone in my neighborhood doesn't want to pay his part of paying for those security guards? He's free-loading off of the rest of us -- he's getting security for his home, but WE are paying for it!

So what is the Libertarian answer here? Apparently, to say "can't happen! Never happens! yada yada yada!" But my dad was manager of a townhouse complex for a while, and I'll tell you this, it *does* happen, and is prevalent. Mr. Grouch says, "I don't think we need security guards so I'm not going to pay." Or, "I don't use the pool, so I'm not going to pay" -- even though having a pool in the complex makes his house more valuable. And you can't exactly move his house to *outside* the secured perimeter, so he's getting free security AND free benefit to his property values from having a pool in the complex!

In short, we've run into the fundamental problem with libertarianism: the FREELOADER problem. The other people in the complex will get tired of paying for freeloaders, and more and more of them will refuse to pay, until eventually the few still paying for the security guards give up because they can't afford it anymore, nobody pays, and the thugs just march right in and turn everybody into their own personal slaves. Only something that we can call GOVERNMENT that says, "No freeloaders, if you refuse to pay we'll seize your home at a tax auction and sell it to someone who WILL pay" handles the freeloader problem.

And what is the Libertarian answer to the freeloader problem? Apparently, from what I've encountered, to stick their hands over their ears, their second pair of hands over their eyes, and shout at the top of their lungs "I see nothing! I hear nothing! It doesn't exist, lalalalala!" Apparently the Libertarian answer to the freeloader problem is to move to some alternate universe where unicorns are real and cotton candy grows on trees and human beings are perfect. It's the same universe as the hardcore Marxists, in other words, a universe where human beings are perfect and do not behave the way real life humans in this universe behave.

In the end, Libertarians and Marxists are fellow travelers -- utopians whose philosophies have failed everywhere they've ever been tried because they do not take into account the actual nature of humanity: hairless apes, monkeys with delusions of grandeur, with all the vices you'd expect from monkeys such as a propensity to fling poo, selfishness, an inability to cooperate except insofar as led by an alpha male, and a willingness to follow that alpha male regardless of what he leads them into. Monkeys. That's all human beings are. Marxists and Libertarians pretend that humans somehow can transcend a million years of evolution and become perfect. That, in the end, is why Marxist and Libertarian theories have failed wherever tried -- reality simply is, and can't just be wished away by pretending.

- Badtux the Realist Penguin

The cost of empire

So now the newspapers are filled with triumphalist natterings about how Ronald Reagan was responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall (even though it happened during the presidency of George H.W. Bush) yada yada yada. To which I have only one word to say:

BULLSHIT.

The Soviet Empire fell because the cost of empire bankrupted the Soviets and their creaky command economy was incapable of dealing with the information age, not because of anything Reagan did or didn't do. The first cracks in the Soviet economy were visible as early as the late 1960's, when Soviet attempts to build a moon rocket failed because their creaky command economy was simply incapable of building big rocket engines or the complex computer systems needed to control large clusters of smaller engines. The basic problem was the intermediaries problem -- modern technology requires thousands of intermediate steps to create the final product, and arranging for the production of those intermediate products in order to get the final product is a huge task. Capitalism's solution to the intermediaries problem is to train economies via tokens ("money") to produce the intermediaries needed for the final product, i.e., it is a neural network type solution that "trains" the economy towards the desired goals. But the Soviets never managed that, meaning that their economy by nature was inherently inefficient and could achieve complex goals only with horrific overheads. Couple that with the huge costs of maintaining an empire -- oil deliveries to Cuba alone took up massive amounts of oil that could have been sold for hard cash on the open market to buy things the Soviets needed from the open market, for example -- and the outcome was certain.

Indeed, by the end entire sectors of the Soviet economy actually had *negative* outcomes -- they consumed more resources than they produced in outputs. As a result, the Soviet infrastructure started collapsing in the early to mid 1980's. The most important collapse was of their oil and gas delivery infrastructure, which suffered multiple explosions due to leaks caused by poor construction and maintenance during those years. In fact, the most direct cause of the collapse of the East German regime was nothing that anybody in the West did: rather, the cut-off of natural gas deliveries to East Germany in the aftermath of the Ufa gas pipeline explosion resulted in much suffering and misery to the point where even the secret police had finally had enough.

In short, all that Reagan managed to do was scare the bejeezus out of everybody who was concerned that "Ronnie Ray-Gun" was going to push that red button. In that Reagan was crazy like a fox -- he had no intention of starting a nuclear war, he just wanted to bluff the Soviets into thinking that he was willing to do so if the Soviets did something stupid like mount a conventional invasion of U.S. client states, i.e., he did exactly what the Soviet leaders were doing at the time -- but this didn't cause the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc economies, and eventually the collapse of the regimes that controlled those economies, is what caused the fall of the Berlin Wall. All the Reagan triumphalism aside, this should be an excellent lesson for those who believe that America can continue absorbing the huge cost of empire and ignoring its economy. The Soviets thought they could do that because they were, after all, Communists, and thus thought they could merely command things into existence. But reality doesn't work that way, and right now it looks an awful lot like the USA is going the same way as the USSR, as the costs of empire and leaders who refuse to understand fundamental economics principles drag us down...

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin

Faith, Communism, and Glibertarians

So the Glibertarian CATO Institute is still insisting that their free market health insurance scheme could actually work, even though I, and many, many other people, have pointed out that a free market health insurance scheme inherently only insures young and healthy people because insurers would swiftly cherry-pick out anybody unhealthy or older in order to reduce rates and gain more customers. Their solution -- insurance insurance? -- isn't a solution either. It's a derivative, and we all know now, I hope, that derivatives in a free market don't work because nobody can accurately value them (see: credit default swaps, financial disaster caused by thereof). The Glibertarians' response? "It WOULD work! We have faith, faith we say, that it would work!" They can't point out any single time in human history when their system for funding health care has worked, but that doesn't matter, because they have faith.

The Glibertarians remind me of the hard-core Communists. Their system has failed whenever put into practice, but still they insist that the reason for the failure was because the attempt wasn’t pure enough, not because their system is, inherently, idealistic utopian nonsense that disregards important facets of human nature in its attempt to reach some ideal that cannot be obtained with human beings as they currently exist. Pragmatic reality seems to be something that neither Glibertarians nor the Communists are familiar with. If it wasn’t for the fact that their nuttery was so bloody deadly when actually put into practice, it might be funny. The 22,000+ per year dead because of lack of health insurance, however, are not laughing. They can’t. They’re dead. And the Glibertarians would add to their number if they had their opportunity to do so, while claiming that it was not happening, because in the end that's what ideologues like Communists and Glibertarians do -- deny reality and pretend their their ideological nonsense actually works, when every stitch of evidence we have from the passage of history says it won't and can't because people just don't behave the way Communists and Glibertarians think they behave.

Reality. Sigh. It's just too bloody bad that so many people have no acquaintance with it, and still continue pushing toxic nonsense that could never work.

-- Badtux the Pragmatic Practical Penguin

The plot to bring socialism to America

I am going to tell you a very important and little-known fact: I am part of an Antarctic conspiracy to bring socialism to America.

Now, I hear you saying, "oh get out with it!". But consider. We penguins are amongst the most socialist creatures on this planet. We do everything in groups. We swim in groups. We fish in groups. We huddle together in groups while protecting our eggs from hungry critters. We are socialist from top to bottom. So we hatched this plot on August 4, 1961 to bring the benefits of socialism -- the raw herring, the huddling together in the cold, etc. -- to the rest of the planet.

Yes, Barack Obama is ours, in most cunning disguise. The reason why he doesn't have his original birth certificate, just the re-issue from the State of Hawaii Birth Registry? It's because he doesn't really have one. Because we penguins are cunning hackers (see: Linux), we hacked into the Birth Registry's computers and placed a fake birth record there. We also bankrolled his career, using the vast wealth of the Antarctic, until now... now he is where we engineered him to be. Bwahahaha!

So what next for America, you ask? Okay, first, we ban home heating oil, natural gas, and electricity. Nobody needs heat or light. If shivering in the dark and cold and eating raw food is good enough for penguins, it's good enough for you naked monkeys too. Next, we send our crack penguin goon squads to take away all your guns. No more guns. Then we round up all Republicans and place them into concentration camps where raw herring will be flung over the fences from time to time for the conservatives to fight over. And then when all you naked apes are shivering and freezing in the dark, puking on your raw beef or raw herring, then is when we shall dispatch our penguin armies to take over and impose a socialist paradise upon America under the leadership of our brave fellow penguin, President Barack Hussein Obama.

What, you thought the right-wingers were engaging in tin-foil-hattery when they whined that President Obama was a foreign tool who was here to impose socialism upon America? Hah! You didn't know the half of it! Your problem is that you simply did not have the imagination to realize how daring the real plot to bring socialism to America was. Prepare to meet your new penguin overlords. Bwhahahahahaha!

-- Badtux the Evil Penguin

Reinventing history, part 1532

Wow, you find out the coolest things on the Internet. Such as the fact that the failures of communism are due to the fact that communism has never been tried. And the failures of capitalism are due to the fact that pure capitalism has never been tried.

Now, as we all know, pure capitalism works only if everybody is honest. If you have loan brokers misrepresenting the properties that secure loans and misrepresenting the borrowers to the mortgage companies who are providing the funding, if you have mortgage companies misrepresenting the quality of the loans they're selling to mortgage-backed-security pools, if you have bonding agencies misrepresenting the quality of those mortgage backed securities, if everybody is lying in other words, things go to hell in a handbasket as a housing spiral starts up then inevitably collapses once the loans start foreclosing. The only losers are honest people -- the folks who bought those mortgage-backed securities for their retirement funds thinking they were prime grade debt.

So we don't have -- and can't have -- pure capitalism because it simply does not work. It ignores a central fact of human beings: that human beings lie, either deliberately or due to irrational exuberance. Pure capitalism could only work in a perfect world where all human beings tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

So now let's look at communism. For the sake of discussion, I'm going to break out the system of government used in, e.g., the old USSR (which was authoritarian dictatorship) from the method of economic organization (communism). Okay, first thing we find out is that the kulaks won't voluntarily join into communes. They're not living the best of lives, life is still hard for them, but they still don't want to join their meagre properties and possessions with that of others into a commune. So what you end up with is either a) a very small minority join into communes, which tend to be short-lived due to leadership and "deadbeat" issues except for the religious-oriented ones like the kibutzen or Amish/Mennonite communities (see James Eliot's notes below), or b) someone has to exert power to force the kulaks to join together into communes, which tends to result in both dictatorship and economic disaster since the kulaks would rather destroy their possessions rather than contribute them to the commune.

Okay, so let's do some hand-waving and imagine a society where there are no kulaks. There have been some of those, after all. For example, most Native American societies basically had no concept of "private property" prior to the intervention of Europeans. They basically were already organized into communes of a sort. The problem here is that economic activity is very low in such societies. The inevitable end result is that other societies end up competing for the same economic assets as populations rise and the collectivist societies get out-competed by more capitalist societies.

But, objects the modern communist, that's not what modern communism is about. Modern communism is about industrial societies. Like the United States used to be. In Karl Marx's time, a textile factory got some raw cotton cloth from a cloth factory, and created clothes out of it. The cloth factory got raw cotton fiber from a cotton plantation and created cloth out of it. So you had three sets of people involved -- the plantation, the cloth factory, and the clothing factory. It is fairly easy to collectivize each one of these and handle the movement of goods between them.

Well, thing is, we don't live in Karl Marx's time. I am a software engineer. I am in Sunnyvale, California. My engineering team is in Shanghai, China. The appliance that we sell is made in Taiwan. The CPU is made in Chandler, Arizona and the chipset is made in Leixlip, Ireland, with Ethernet chips made in Hudson, New York. The hard drive is made in Thailand, using media substrate made in Malaysia and with firmware designed in Orange County, CA. The actual main microchip on that circuit board is made in Taiwan, while the ancillary circuitry such as amplifiers and such are made in Costa Rica, Malaysia, Thailand, and China. The case that the appliance is installed into is made in South Korea. The power supply within that case is made in Taiwan from parts from multiple nations all over the world, including Japan, El Salvador, China, Malaysia, Costa Rica, South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan.

In short, for one of our appliances, there are thousands of parts from a dozen different nations. And we sell a dozen different types of appliances, each of which has a different mix of parts. Making sure all these parts all make it together requires some intermediary to govern the production and flow of parts. We call this intermediary "currency". And no, you can't do this all with computerized JIT (Just In Time) manufacturing and avoid all the intermediary stuff. Not yet, anyhow. At my last employer, where I set up the manufacturing system, our orders to the outsourced assembly facility were *faxed*. You'd be amazed at how uncomputerized actual manufacturing facilities are even today.

So this, then, explains why communism as an economic system has failed every time it has been tried. It assumes Karl Marx's world, where manufacturing had few inputs. This is why the Soviet Union was spending 60% of its GDP on its military as it approached collapse... as military weapons became more and more complex, mediating the inputs to those weapons became more and more inefficient. Similarly, this explains why every attempt at communism has been a dismal failure at providing things like medicines, medical equipment, and consumer goods to its people. As these items became more complicated to manufacture, the lack of effective mediation resulted in inefficient and slow manufacturing and distribution of these items. But it also explains why the things communism *has* succeeded in are those things which have few intermediaries. For example, communist nations have typically been very good at education and have produced large numbers of scientists, doctors, and engineers. Education is an example of an industry where there are few intermediaries.

Now: Please note that I am differentiating between communism as an economic system, and communism as a political system. The political system practiced in the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, etc. was authoritarian dictatorship. When communists say that "real communism has not been tried", what they're talking about is the political system called anarchic socialism (or "anarcho-socialism")s, where people are self-organized into worker communes or syndics that provide goods and services to other worker communes or syndics according to the others' needs and are provided goods and services according to their own needs, and governance takes place via consensus of the commune. That, then, is when we run into two problems:

1. No society is a hermetic bubble. There are other societies that compete for the same resources. This requires an organization (we might call it "government") to provide for national defense (at the very least) and which has the ability to requisition resources from everybody else in order to provide that service. I.e., has priority over civilian use of resources -- but only up to the amount needed for national defense. How to make this happen without capitalism (where taxes to support the military make it clear that it's the military sucking up too many resources) is thus far a problem that has not been solved -- in every large-scale attempt at communism, the military ended up sucking down the entire economy after a period of time.
2. Governance of syndics or communes is a serious problem. Thus far every attempt we've made to do this kind of thing has fallen apart within a matter of years due to infighting and schism -- the problem of power that I talk about below -- and eventually devolved to a leader-follower model where a charismatic leader is in charge and uses his subjects for his own enrichment. The main exception is in religious communities which are governed by a "higher power" (i.e., which push the problem of power to a "higher power").

And I had a point, but I think I lost it sometime ago. But the deal is: We've tried capitalism. It didn't work. We've tried communism (anarcho-socialism) on a small scale, and run into problems. Apologists for either form of economic organization who claim that these failures are just because our attempts weren't "pure" or "perfect" enough are ignoring the fact that human beings are incapable of perfection. They just are. If your system of economic organization depends upon being "pure" or "perfect" in order to work properly, then it is a failure by definition.

So what is the "perfect" way to organize an economy? Well... we'll have to discuss that some more, eh?

-- Badtux the Socioeconomics Penguin