Escape From Pianosa

Good news and bad. The good news is that I won my fantasy baseball league (finally!) and there are sweet sweet prizes involved.

Congratulations! Your outstanding performance in this season’s Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball PLUS competition has made you the potential recipient of one of our League Winner Prizes — a championship bobblehead or t-shirt commemorating your achievement.

The bad news is that Maryland state law prevents me from claiming my prize…

As stated in the Official Contest Rules, to be eligible to receive a prize in this contest you must be…a U.S. resident NOT living in a jurisdiction where the contest is void (Arizona, Florida, Maryland, Vermont, Montana, Louisiana, New Jersey, Arkansas, Tennessee, overseas U.S. territories, possessions, commonwealths and military installations, and where otherwise prohibited by law…

If I wasn’t a libertarian before, this would’ve convinced me. I want my bobblehead!

Thank you Nora, you said some very nice things about me. My run as a freelancer (which included a lot of real estate and some dabbling in writing among other things) has come to an end, at least for the foreseeable future. My first job is at a small online marketing firm in Baltimore and I’ll be working on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is something I enjoy immensely–although I didn’t really realize it until about a month ago.

I’d fallen into the habit of taking my friends’ websites and finding a dozen or so things that they could be doing better. Like, hey you need to have a blog so you can interact with your customers and you need to be building links to your site and you need to improve your layout so it’s more user friendly, and all sorts of other ideas for building up traffic–things that I’ve learned and implemented with my various web properties over the last few years. Well lo and behold, you can get paid to do that! It’s a natural fit for me.

My other job is more of an internship with a nonprofit in the DC area, where I’ll be working part-time for the next few months. That allows me to pursue one of my other passions in life, which is spreading the message of freedom; a brand evangelist for liberty if you will.

And don’t worry Nora, I plan to keep my entrepreneurial approach to life and work.

Socialist medicine takes a beating by Don Boudreaux and commenters at Cafe Hayek.

Then Kurt Loder has a go at Michael Moore’s Sicko on MTV.com. This is my favorite part, and Loder really gets the economics right:

“When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they’re inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country’s National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts. Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they “would not be happy” to be patients in their own hospitals.”

In summary, you get a massive tax increase for declining quality in health care and you may have to wait a year or two to get it. And you might die while you’re waiting. Why anyone, let alone everyone would want to be forced into such a system is beyond me.

You know, governments wouldn’t be able to segregate schools if governments didn’t have control over schools. Just sayin’.

Listening to Bryan Caplan talk about his new book The Myth of the Rational Voter, I realized that I’ve been too hard on politicians. Yes, they do awful and stupid things all the time but that’s what they have to do to stay employed.

As spineless as they may be, they move in the direction of the voters, and often the voters demand ridiculous policies. So just as I don’t fault a business for responding to the market and producing silly products, I shouldn’t fault politicians for responding to voters who demand (literally) poor policy.*

The funny thing is that voters demand bad economic policies and then punish politicians for poor economic results. For example, they demand higher tariffs but get angry when less trade leads to less growth and less wealth and less employment. Not that they connect the dots. Anyway, it’s a tough life being a politician.

*Caveat: people who demand bad products waste their own money. People who demand bad policies invariably waste my money, so I feel that I have the right to thumb my nose at their ‘inferior preferences.’

I wonder at the motives of people who say that setting a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq will embolden our enemies. I admit that they have a point; leaving now would seem to validate the strategy of the terrorists in Iraq. Certainly the terrorists would perceive it and market it that way.

But what are the alternatives? We could sneak out in the middle of the night, leaving millions of vehicles and weapons. They’d never know what hit them! When questioned, we could play dumb.

“What’s that? Oh yeah, I mean, we just didn’t feel like being there anymore. The hot desert sun and all. No no! Don’t think…oh no, we don’t want you to think we left because of you! Oh gosh no. You terrorists are taking this all wrong! No, we left cus we felt like it. I mean, the soldiers dying every day in Iraq–that was annoying to be sure. But don’t get all full of yourself thinking it was just cus of that. There were lots of other totally non-terrorist reasons.”

Alas, they’d probably see through that–and then they’d have all of our tanks and stuff. So we could just stay “until we win.” And we win when nobody wants to kill Americans. But every day we’re there, more people want to kill Americans. Are you trying to tell me that you never want to leave?

The nice thing about waging war on inanimate objects like drugs or poverties, is that nobody gets hurt. Sometimes when I think about The War on Drugs, I imagine DEA agents surrounding a house, barging through the door, and pointing their assault rifles on little baggies of marijuana or vials of cocaine.

Ridiculous right? Of course it’s ridiculous. The war on drugs isn’t a war on drugs at all; it’s a war on people. People who often find often themselves dead or in jail for the supposed crime of voluntary exchange.

And so language is twisted until it loses its meaning. I wonder how long it is before the anti-immigration movement cooks up some dehumanizing term for immigration. Will it be the war on illegality? How about the the war on border violation? The war on cheap labor? As you can see, I’m no good at this game.

And in this way we can begin another unwinnable war against our fellow humans–in this case Mexicans, Salvadorans, and others who have the extraordinarily bad luck of being born next to, but not within, the most prosperous nation in the history of the world.

I saw one of those big utility signs parked along the road this week. The message in big green dots said “water ban this weekend. Friday 6pm until Midnight Sunday.” And I thought to myself ever so smugly that a free market in water would never have this problem. When the supply gets thin, the price goes up. And people decide that maybe watering their lawn isn’t the best use of their hard earned dollars. Water ban averted.

And then I imagine the day that I drive by the hospital and there’s a sign that says “No medical care this weekend, due to overuse.”

Because I’ve heard the argument that medicine is far too important to leave to “the free market.” I agree in one respect; that medicine is important. Far too important not to leave to the free market. When the government runs out of “free” health care, where will you go? They don’t sell it in bottles at Safeway.

This post by Don Boudreaux over at Cafe Hayek echoes my own thoughts on the post office. I can’t imagine why on Earth we still have this waste of an agency. What exactly about delivering little pieces of paper is too delicate to leave to the private sector?

One thing that I hated about living in Baltimore was that you couldn’t get packages delivered to your door. You had to go to the post office to pick them up, because the neighborhood ne’er-do-wells would inevitably scavenge anything of value lying on your doorstop. That’s city life and you get over it, but I never got over having to go to the Post Office to get my damn packages.

The word Kafkaesque comes to mind. Dingy atmosphere. Hot. Long lines that seemed to drag on forever. Often there was only one person at the counter, while you could see and hear several people chatting away in the back room. I always felt bad for the people working there; it felt like such an utterly hopeless existence, even though as far as jobs go, it probably wasn’t so bad. I mean, why does something as simple as picking up a package have to take so damn long!?

Brian Doherty’s book, Radicals for Capitalism, was an utter joy to read–all 619 pages. In fact, I would’ve enjoyed a few hundred more of his “freewheeling history” of the libertarian movement in the U.S. This masterpiece gives a great deal of context and history to everything I’ve been reading about for the past few years.

Doherty’s well-crafted narrative navigates the thoughts, ideas, conflicts, and lives of the five figures central to the libertarian movement in the 20th century: Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Frederich Hayek, while saying a great deal about the myriad other characters (and some were really characters) that have played a role in the advancement of liberty in the United States.

I particularly enjoyed this quote from the epilogue because I think (or hope?) that it sums up the general spirit of liberty that will be so prevalent among members of my generation.:

“Look at it this way: You’re young, you’re intelligent, you have a rough sense that people ought to be free to do whatever the hell they want, mostly, as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else-a simple, honest, live-and-let-live moral sense…You have a basic appreciation for free markets, an idea associated win American politics with the GOP.
“But you are young, and you don’t want to order people around regarding things you know are their business, and theirs alone. You certainly don’t want to be on any team that’s obsessed with locking people up for what they smoke, or treating people differently under the law because they’re gay…
So what are you? You might start thinking of yourself as libertarian.”