DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Bludging MPs & enviro-scum

Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath ransacks the newspapers for headlines and stories on issues affecting our freedom.

This week: More bludging MPs, and enviro-scum

1. “We’re paying for MPs’ legal bills, but it’s a secret” – Yes, we are footing a large part of the bill for these clowns when they are taken to court. Green Party mole Nick Smith landed himself in hot water, accused of defamation by a timber preservative company, and we are paying for some of that. I wonder if we will be liable for any of the damages, said to run into the millions of dollars, should the Minister lose his case? 

Now it has been revealed that Gerry Brownlee tried to milk the public to the tune of nearly $50,000 for a court case in 1999. He now acknowledges his application for a handout was “not appropriate.”  (Sure wasn’t!) It appears that, since 2001, taxpayers can be forced to help pay the legal bills of MPs, and that non-ministerial MPs can thumb their nose when we ask how much it’s costing us because they are not subject to the Official Information Act.     

Kudos to Labour MP Trevor Mallard who has been man enough to pay several of his own legal bills himself. Why shouldn’t MPs be accountable for their own legal expenses?

2. “Pull head out of scrum and say sorry” – Herald columnist Chris Rattue joins the unedifying parade of apologists –- among them Tiger Woods and Krudd (Kevin Rudd) –- who feel the urge to say sorry for things they haven’t done, or to people they haven’t wronged. This time Mr Rattue says sorry on behalf of “whoever would like to join this movement,” to the Maori people and rugby players, for the NZ rugby union’s policy of selecting whites-only teams for tours to South Africa until 1960. Well, count me out, Chris, because I wasn’t born until after 1960.

But isn’t there a delicious irony in Mr Rattue’s description of the South African rugby union’s policies as “[a] crime against rational thinking and behaviour”? What about the existence of the NZ rugby union’s Maori Board, and the exclusion of non-Maori players from its Maori rugby teams?

Will we see Mr Rattue apologising for the selection policies that consign a large proportion of current rugby players to “second class citizenship” on the basis of skin colour? And would he have been happier if the rugby union had fielded a team called the White All Blacks in 1928, 1937, 1949 and 1960?

The Libertarianz Party stands for freedom of association. The rugby union should be able to send teams based on whatever selection criteria wherever they like, and be prepared to receive criticism from those who don’t agree with their decisions. But the government should not interfere unless the rights of others are being infringed. And there lies a whole new can of worms. Perhaps the rugby union should apologise for its race-based selection decisions of the past, but why is Mr Rattue not indignant about the existence of Maori rugby teams?

3. “Planner against new supermarket in Ilam” – Par for the course, really. A City Council planner opposes the construction of a new supermarket in Christchurch. Admitting that some local residents may benefit from more convenient access to a supermarket (fancy that!), Planner Clare Revell is concerned that an existing supermarket could lose $10 million in the first year. Lady, that’s called competition – you know, the thing that keeps downward pressure on prices and offers people choice (and, as patrons of the Glenfield Pak’n’Save on Auckland’s North Shore understand, something the Resource Management Act is able to squash for up to seventeen years).

Ms Revell’s job would cease to exist under a Libertarianz government. All council “planners” would be retired and their positions dissolved, making life just that little bit easier for developers and entrepreneurs. The resource consent industry would be a thing of the past –- making life a lot easier for those who want to develop the land they currently “own” in name only.

4. “Dam approval threat to all rivers” – Whinging bloody enviro-mentalists are snivelling about plans to construct an efficient and emissions-free source of power – a hydro-electric dam  on the South Island’s West Coast. The chickens are coming home to roost for the mentalists –- their no-carbon-emissions greenwash leaves very few affordable clean methods of generating electrical power –- namely, nuclear and hydro-electric. Wind and solar power are still not affordable after decades of development –- they are becoming cheaper, but very slowly. And not yet efficient enough to be real substitutes. And out of the two cheap options, hydro is the cheaper.

The Libertarianz Party says the electrical generation and supply industries should be fully privatized, with people able to generate and distribute electricity by whatever means they wished, subject to redress under common law if anyone is adversely affected by their actions.

 

When the people fear the government, there is tyranny - when the government fear the people, there is liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson  

Your chance to take the stage. . .

Since I’m away for the day lecturing on Froebel (Google it if you’ve got any questions), here’s your opportunity to take the stage with whatever you want to talk about.

Something to get off your chest? Something you just have to say?  Then now’s your chance to take over the comment to talk about anything you want.  This time, nothing is off-topic.

So talk away about whatever you like. Even if it’s just to ask me what the hell I’m doing lecturing on a nineteenth-century German pedagogue.  :-)

Quote of the day: Liberty or coercion

All men's impulses, when motivated by legitimate self-interest, fall into a harmonious social pattern... 
[It] will depend greatly upon whether men's interests are, in fact, harmonious or antagonistic to one another.
“If they are harmonious, the answer to our problem is to be found in liberty; if they are antagonistic, in coercion.”
        - Frederic Bastiat

‘Two Men Contemplating the Moon’ - Caspar David Friedrich, 1825–30

Friedrich’s Romantic paean to the fascination of the moon for poets, philosophers and musicians the world over.  And being a thorough-going Romanticist himself, Friedrich offers us his figures from behind, so we can join in their communion with Nature, “which the Romantics saw as a manifestation of the Sublime.”

Easter aftermath [update 2]

Now that Easter is over, it looks like there will be 38 people prosecuted by the Labour Department (15% up on last year) for the crime of selling things that people want at times the Labour Department didn’t want them to.

    The Department will consider the prosecution of 38 retailers after 19 were caught trading on Good Friday and another 19 on Easter Sunday.
    " ‘We still have to assess the information the inspectors come back with,’ Labour department communications adviser Colin Patterson said.”

That would be 50 inspectors who went out to work to make sure other people don’t.  In order to stop other people doing things that religionists don’t want them to, and unionists won’t allow them to.

Stupid? It sure is. Confused? Everyone certainly is.

But at least we now know that “nowhere in the Bible does Jesus have a sword fight.” [Hat tip Imperator Fish]

UPDATE 1:  PZ Myers spotted some strange Easterly goings on over the Tasman:

    First, they had their church leaders focus their Easter sermons on how yucky those atheists are. Then one fanatical group decided to show how wonderful Christianity is by staging a crucifixion in public, complete with blood and nails and moaning dying hippie.

    “I find this hilarious.”

Especially hilarious when good Christian folk start complaining the barbarity might frighten the children.  Haven’t they read their Bible?

UPDATE 2:  And always, in the Easter Aftermath, is the media’s statistically inept navel-gazing about The Road Toll . . .

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Tell your stories

Anne McElhinney tells an audience (in this video I’ve posted before) that the more-freedom side of the aisle have better stories to tell than the left, but for some reason they don’t tell them often enough.

And John Ansell reckons they also don’t use the heart-strings enough (although unfortunately he equates “more freedom” with “the Right”).

    Why should the Left have a mortgage on talking to the heart?
    “The big problem with the Right is that they don’t understand the emotional power of a few short words and pictures.
    “Especially pictures.
    “They think the force of their logic should be enough to persuade people to make sensible decisions. Logic laid out in longwinded articles, speeches and press statements.
    “Maybe it should be. But clearly it isn’t.
    “Our long history of socialist governments making short-sighted decisions (both Labour and National) shows that.
    “I’ve made the poster [below] to show how a punchy pictorial message can trump the most elegantly-crafted 1000-word article on the same subject. . . ”

He’s got a point, hasn’t he.

So often the 1000-word articles are talking to the already converted. Ansell reckons they’d be talking to far more if they recognised the power of “easily-digestible, posterised morsels that can be fed to the general public one bite at a time.”  In other words, good old-fashioned propaganda to teach the freedom message.

Read his plea for a “teach tank” here: Think tank + teach tank = sea change.

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In government, less is more

Great point this morning made by Lindsay Mitchell:

  “An AUT survey shows that,   

    ‘Feeling as though the Government is listening to them is one of the most important things to New Zealanders, but it is the area where the country scores the worst.’

   The best remedy for this [says Lindsay] is not more democracy, more participation, more consulting, more select committees, more representatives, more commissions of enquiry, etc.
  “It is LESS government. If government weren't so pervasive in all aspects of our lives its non-responsiveness would be less of a problem.”

Exactly right. 

And it shouldn’t take a moment on that basis to work out what the real problem is with “campaign finance reform” (if politicians weren't so pervasive in all aspects of our lives the origin of the money that elected them would be less of a problem) and with the super-bureaucracy Rodney Hide is building in Auckland (if local government weren't so pervasive in all aspects of our lives then the unresponsiveness and inapproachability of its super-bureaucrats would be less of a problem).

So you think we’re all out of the woods? [updated]

Every drinking orgy has its hangover.  Every spending orgy has its credit card bill.  Every stimulus season has its winter.

It’s now winter. The leaves are already brown and the debt sky is very grey indeed.  The Economist charts the increase  in governments’ debt since stimulus season started, projected out to 2014. (The little boxes on the right give you the absolute percentage as compared to GDP).

Interesting that Japan still tops the list.  Interesting, because Japan has been trying to stimulate its economy with government debt now for two decades—which has now been the longest “lost decade” in history. Front and centre evidence that stimulus doesn’t work—that you can’t avoid the pain; the only choice you have is whether it’s short and sharp, or extends out over many years.

From the size of those bars on the bar chart, you can see the choices your governments have made on your behalf.

It’s winter.  We’re still not out of the woods. And it’s suddenly cold.

Here’s Greg Johnson (or it should be if this song appeared on YouTube, which it doesn’t.  So head here instead and click on “Suddenly Cold,” and enjoy an excerpt.)

UPDATE 1: Oh and  what do you do when you have a record budget deficit?

Answer: You go to an election promising to EXPAND the welfare state, of course.

UPDATE 2:  The Huffington Post, yes folks, the Huffington Post, figures out that the only ones to win out of the TARP & Stimulus were the crony phony capitalists. [Hat tip Willie S.]

Orren Boyle wins again.  And while you lose, you still keep right on paying for him.

MACHINE OF THE DAY: The household robot

Yes, it’s a specially designed machine just for one simple household task; yes, this video is sped up fifty times to make viewing easier; yes, it would cost more than a simple servant to do the same job; yes to all of that . . . but for a machine in 2010 to accomplish this task with objects of different dimension it hasn’t seen before, and which flap around so, suggests that machines not so many years from now will be performing all sorts of labour-saving tasks we’d rather not be doing ourselves.

Which promises to transform life in the Twenty-First Century.

And that’s pretty cool.

So thank the nice people at the UC Berkeley Robotics Lab who designed and built it. [Hat tip Willy S.]

Some advice for the “powerful” Rick Giles

Here’s some advice from Ayn Rand to ACT’s “powerful” Rick Giles :

   “Today, most people are acutely aware of our cultural-ideological vacuum; they are anxious, confused, and groping for answers. Are you able to enlighten them? Can you answer their questions? Can you offer them a consistent case? Do you know how to correct their errors? . . .
    “If you want to influence a country's intellectual trend, the first step is to bring order to your own ideas and integrate them into a consistent case, to the best of your knowledge and ability…
    “When or if your convictions are in your conscious, orderly control, you will be able to communicate them to others.
    “If you like condensations…I will say: when you ask ‘What can one do?’—the answer is ‘SPEAK’ (provided you know what you are saying).
             - Ayn Rand, from ‘What Can One Do?’ in Philosophy: Who Needs It

It’s advice not just for Master Giles. Yes, with some exceptions the interviewers whom you will encounter will mostly be execrable (a function of what Lindsay Perigo calls “the demise of the art of interviewing”), but if you want to influence this country’s intellectual trend, then SPEAK UP for sure—but, to repeat, make sure when you do that you’ve first brought some order to your ideas.

In other words, make sure you know what you’re talking about.

Otherwise, you require your erstwhile allies to always be checking their own feet for bullet holes.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Mark Twain on creation and ‘consensus’

    “[I]n the drift of years I by and by found that a Consensus examines a new thing by its feelings rather oftener than with its mind. You know, yourself, that this is so.…
    “Do you know of a case where a Consensus won a game? You can go back as far as you want to and you will find history furnishing you this (until now) unwritten maxim for your guidance and profit: Whatever new thing a Consensus [bets against], bet your money on that very card and do not be afraid.    
    “There was that primitive steam engine— ages back, in Greek times: a consensus made fun of it. There was the Marquis of Worcester’s steam engine, 250 years ago: a Consensus made fun of it. There was Fulton’s steamboat of a century ago: a French Consensus, including the Great Napoleon, made fun of it. There was Priestly, with his oxygen: a consensus scoffed at him, mobbed him, burned him out, banished him. While a Consensus was proving, by statistics and things, that a steamship could not cross the Atlantic, a steamship did it.
    “A Consensus consisting of all the medical experts in Great Britain made fun of Jenner and inoculation. A Consensus consisting of all the medical experts in France made fun of the stethoscope. A Consensus of all the medical experts in Germany made fun of that young doctor (his name? forgotten by all but doctors, now, revered by doctors alone) who discovered and abolished the cause of that awful disease, puerperal fever; made fun of him, reviled him, hunted him, persecuted him, broke his heart, killed him.
    “Electric telegraph, Atlantic cable, telephone, all ‘toys,’ of no practical value-verdict of the Consensuses. Geology, paleontology, evolution—all brushed into space by a Consensus of theological experts, comprising all the preachers in Christendom, assisted by the Duke of Argyle and (at first) the other scientists
    “And do look at Pasteur and his majestic honor rolll of prodigious benefactions! Damned—each and every one of them in its turn—by frenzied and ferocious consensuses of medical and chemical experts comprising, for years, every member of the tribe in Europe; damned without even a casual look at what he was doing—and he pathetically imploring them to come and take at least one little look before making the damnation eternal.
    “They shortened his life by their malignities and persecution; and thus robbed the world of the further and priceless services of a man who—along certain lines and within certain limits—had done more for the human race than any other one man in all its long history; a man whom it had taken the Expert brotherhood ten thousand years to produce, and whose mate and match the brotherhood may possibly not be able to bring forth and assassinate in another ten thousand.
    “The preacher has an old and tough reputation for bullheaded and unreasoning hostility to new light; why, he is not ‘in it’ with the doctor! Nor, perhaps, with some of the other breeds of experts that sit around and get up the consensuses and squelch the new things as fast as they come from the hands of the plodders, the searchers, the inspired dreamers, the Pasteurs that come bearing pearls to scatter in the Consensus sty.
    “These sorrows have made me suspicious of Consensuses. Do you know, I tremble and the gose flesh rises on my skin every time I encounter one, now.”
            - Mark Twain, On the Damned Human Race

As they say, you can always tell a pioneer by the arrows in his back.

It's Easter, which means ... [update 3]

IT'S EASTER. GOOD FRIDAY. A day off. A day out. A day to sing hymns, sit in traffic and eat hot cross buns and Easter eggs, and--whatever else you do--a day not to go out shopping. Because today is one day the religionists still have control over us. A day when flunkies carrying clipboards fan out around the country hoping to fine someone for the crime of selling someone else a pot plant, or a pint of milk. Seeking to sacrifice shop-owners to the God of zealotry.

Meanwhile, the Christians who still insist on this sacrifice of shop-owners to the gods of unionism and bureaucracy celebrate the sacrifice of their ideal man two-thousand years ago.

Any way you look at it, as a story to celebrate it’s hardly a happy one.

Every religion has its own myths that go to the very heart of their beliefs. The pagan Greeks told stories of their gods consuming Ambrosia and gambolling on Olympus.  The Norse heroes told stories of gods carousing lustily on Valhalla while waiting for Ragnarok.  The Christians? They tell about the time when the head God sent his son down to be nailed up to a piece of wood.

As a myth, it’s hardly something to celebrate.

The Easter Myth is central to Christianity, and all too revealing of the ethic at Christianity's heart.  And art reveals their core.

Look at that painting above, by Salvador Dali. A great, powerful, awe-inspiring, revealing piece of art.  What does it represent? It represents man-worship -- the presentation of an ideal.  Note how the main figure is larger than life and seemingly immune to pain or destruction; a figure, incongruously in this context, that appears without pain or fear or guilt. The figure at left is Dali's wife Gala, who looks up at the Christ figure with a look of literal man-worship. If we have a question here, it should be this: "How can you worship the torture and destruction of that which you revere above all?" Fair question.

Bach's St Matthew Passion musically and beautifully dramatises the same Myth, while revealing the very nature of it. The Passion’s thematic centre occurs when Jesus appears before Pilate and the mob.

    “When Pilate asks the crowd who should be freed, Barbaras or Jesus. The crowd replies, "Barabbas!" and Pilate asks, "When what should I do with Jesus, who is called the Christ?" The crowd shouts, "Let him be Crucified!" This final shout is musically rendered in such an awful way that the hearer is almost struck dumb. One can feel the terrible doom being called down. Pilate then asks (in Part 56), "Why, what has this man done?" His question is answered by what is probably the loneliest Soprano ever, who says, "He has done good to us all, He gave sight to the blind, The lame he made to walk; He told us his father's word, He drove the devils forth; The wretched he has raised up; He received and sheltered sinners, Nothing else has my Jesus done."
    “Following this is an even more poignant aria that begins, "Out of love my Savior is willing to die." After that the chorus repeats the sentence, which is made worse by what we have just heard.”

Just think, Christians revere Christ as their ideal, and Bach has his chorus and soloists praise him, worship him, and eulogise Him – this, above all, was their hero (Bach tells us), the man they believe their god sent to earth as an example of the highest possible on this earth -- and then they and that god went and had him killed. Tortured, Crucified.

That's the story. This, says Bach in the true honesty that great art reveals, is what Christians revere: The murder of their ideal man.  

It’s an astonishing ethic to celebrate, isn’t it: the sacrifice of the ideal man just to appease and placate the mob.

Hans Holbein’s ‘Christ After Crucifixion’ lays bare the reality of the sacrifice.

It’s not a pretty painting, as this detail makes plain:

 

A good subtitle for this 1521 painting might be ‘A Christian Confronts Reality.’  That, at least, was how the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky felt when confronted with this naturalistic depiction of the battered Christian corpse in 1867: confronted with the horrific reality of crucifixion and its results, Dostoyevsky was struck by the importance of this confrontation for his faith, and inspired to dramatise in his next novel what that confrontation meant. Said his wife, “The figure of Christ taken from the cross, whose body already showed signs of decomposition, haunted him like a horrible nightmare.  In his notes to [his novel] The Idiot and in the novel itself he returns again and again to his theme.”

Holbein confronts the Christian viewer with a powerful choice: One must either believe that God raised this ravaged body from the dead, and that the Christian myth, therefore, “offers hope for humanity beyond this life”; or else accept that the dead stay dead, that such an event did not and could not occur, that reality is what it is – with all that follows therefrom. As Dostoyevsky has a character in The Idiot explain it,

    His body on the cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature. In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, swollen, covered with terrible, swollen, and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinting; the large, open whites of the eyes have a sort of dead and glassy glint. . . .
   Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, as some huge engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up–impassively and unfeelingly–a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being!

Good art need not be a thing of beauty, but it must have something to say.  This certainly does that. If you believe the Creation myth and all that goes with it, the idea that all this was designed by something supernatural and omnipotent, then you must believe this torture too was designed. That it was intended.  That the God who once insisted that Abraham sacrifice his own son now makes the mob insist on the sacrifice of their ideal.

Let me ask you again, Don’t you think it astonishing to celebrate this barbarity?

IT WOULD BE EVEN MORE astonishing if that were what Easter really meant.  Thankfully, it’s not.

In Pagan times you see, Easter was the time in the Northern calendar when the coming of spring was celebrated -- the celebration of new life, of coming fecundity.  Hence the eggs and rabbits and celebrations of fertility. Indeed, the very word "Easter" comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter. 

But with the coming of Christianity, the celebration was hijacked to become this veneration of torture and sacrifice.

Such is the nature of the Christians’ Easter Myth which was supplanted over the pagan celebration--and of the ethic at the very heart of Christianity. Not peace, not love, not understanding, but sacrifice -- the murder and torture of tall poppies -- the sacrifice of the Christian's highest possible for the sake of the meanest most rotten 'sinner,' whose redemption Christ's murder was supposed to buy.

To put it bluntly, the Easter myth that Bach dramatises so well is one of suffering and sacrifice and murder, and the collusion of a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient god in the murder of his own son -- and if you subscribe to the whole sick fantasy then that is what you are required to believe—to believe in every rotten, blood-dripping detail. For in the name of religion Bach shows us that the good (by Christian standards) must be sacrificed to the rotten; the constant to the inconstant; the talented and inspirational to the lumpen dross -- the ideal to the worthless.

For Christians, then, Easter is a time to revere that sacrifice and to remind themselves (and us) of the centrality of sacrifice to their fantasy. Oh yes, there's a 'rebirth' of sorts in their fantasy, but not one on this earth realm, and not before a celebration of intense pain and suffering that supposedly bought redemption and virtue for those who possessed neither.  

As Robert Tracinski says so bluntly, "Easter's Mixture of the Benevolent and the Horrific Reveals Religion's Antagonism to Human Life." And so it does.

THERE IS ANOTHER STORY that stands in complete contrast to this one, that is in all senses its polar opposite. Unlike the anti-heroes of Bach's Passion--who murder their hero in a vain attempt to save their desiccated souls—or Dostoyevsky’s—who torture themselves with thoughts of a “malevolent universe” in which they are “trapped”--the heroes of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead shun sacrifice and venerate their own human powers on this earth. 

The hero of that novel, Howard Roark, appears in court in a similar position dramatically in which Bach has his own hero. Thrown to the mob and fighting for his life in court, rather than acquiesce as Bach’s hero does, Roark states instead—as clearly and categorically as he knows how—his own terms.

    “I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
    "I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
    "It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
    "I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man's creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who're destroying the world.
    "I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.
    "I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.”

This time, the hero says, the sacrifice demanded by the mob is rejected.

The contrast to the other story is stark,wouldn’t you say?

The ethic of The Fountainhead, one for which each of the leading characters fights in their own way, is one in which genius has the right to live for its own sake.  The contrast with the demand of Christianity that The Good inheres in the act of suffering and dying for the expiation of others could not be stronger, or the question more important!  Rather than demanding and worshipping the sacrifice of the highest to the lowest -- or as Nietzsche did, retaining the ethic but reversing the beneficiary of the sacrifice by demanding the sacrifice of the lowest to the highest -- the ethic of The Fountainhead insists that The Good is not to suffer and to die, but to enjoy yourself and live -- without any sacrifice at all of anyone to anyone else.

In my book, that really is an ethic worthy of reverence.

NOW, I'M ALL TOO aware that if you believe the Easter Myth, then anything I say here is going to pass right by you.  So if you do insist on venerating sacrifice this weekend, and especially if you're intending a bit of crucifixion yourself, or even just a bit of mildly flogging or self-torture, then here are a few simple Easter Safety Tips for you from the Church, which are not unfortunately intended as satire.

And now, for all the bureaucrats who are working today while they insist that others don’t, here's that Nick Kim cartoon again ...

Have a happy holiday!

UPDATE 1:  PZ Myers takes aim at the Easter Story at Pharyngula:

    “It's Easter. Once again, the masses will gawp in awe at a bizarre and unbelievable story…because it is such a good example of how religion will piggy-back on our cognitive biases.
    “You all know the Easter story: a god turns into a man, gets tortured and killed, rises from the dead, and somehow this act makes us all better. It's a tale best left unexamined, because it makes no sense. We are supposed to wallow in an emotional thrill that taps deep into our social consciousness, not think about what the story actually says.
    “The part of the story that works for us is the idea of self-sacrifice.”

See, that’s the part that doesn’t work for me.  Doesn’t work at all, because the nobility of sacrifice is something I utterly reject.

    “ ‘Sacrifice’ [says Rand] does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.

That’s why of itself it is barbaric. It is, to quote Nietzsche, a revolt of everything that crawls against everything that’s high.  That’s why the barbarity of the Christian sacrifice is so stark.

If it were true.

And if it were, there’s a few other beefs a rational individual might have with the god who set it up. 

“Because, unfortunately [points out Myers], Jesus isn't saving us from anything real, and he made no change in the world with his death.”

Read Sunday Sacrilege: The silliest story ever told.

UPDATE 2:   Said Thomas Paine “Outrageous claims require outrageous proof.”  And there are few claims more outrageous than the one on which the Christian church rests.

Former Pastor Dan Barker offers An Easter Challenge For Christians.  Who’s up for it?

UPDATE 3: By the way, did you know that Jesus was God's 111th Killing?

    “It's hard to imagine something worse than a father planning to kill his own son. Except maybe a father killing his son in order to keep himself from torturing billions of others forever.
    " ‘He that spared not his own son’ shouldn't be trusted by anyone.”

Unsure foreshore solutions

AFTER MUCH BEHIND-DOORS backing and filling and log-rolling, the government and its apartheid party coalition partner have finally come up with solutions to the foreshore and seabed dilemma that still simmers as a result of Labour’s nationalisation.

In 2004, if you recall, Helen Clark unilaterally extinguished Maori rights to claim ownership in foreshore and seabed under common law and gave effect to the nationalisation in a hastily passed law, the Foreshore & Seabed Act.  And at the time National talked about amendments to the Act that would virtually cement it in place for all time. This was considered to be opposition.

But things have moved on. Helen Clark’s “haters and wreckers” are now ministers in a National cabinet.  And their blancmange Prime Minister has come up with the perfect blancmange solution--- a semantic one.

Make it all crown land, said Labour’s law; no, no, says National’s kick for touch, let’s call it “public domain.” And get the Maoris on side by calling this new legal concept of non-ownership "takiwā iwi whānui"—and get the lawyers onside by making the “roles and responsibilities” of the non-owners sufficiently vague that only decades of court case will be able to define precisely what it means.

But you don’t like that solution? Don’t worry, they’ve got others.

That’s right. Unable and unwilling to make a firm or principled decision themselves, they’ve put out a “discussion document” containing four proposed “solutions’ to see which get people worked up least. You don’t like “public domain”? Why, sire, why not try these three other flavours, including Crown ownership of everything, Maori ownership of everything other than the minerals- or the status quo, if too many people throw too many toys out of their cots.

Observe that in all four “solutions” the government retains all the mineral rights to foreshore and seabed.  That “iwi authorities“ will have “roles and responsibilities” akin to those of regional councils, and veto rights that (as Shane Jones points out) will invites "brownmail," where tribes receive cash from developers in return for their support. That the likes of non-Maori aquaculture operations have essentially just been told to take a long walk off a small pier. And that the well-recognised tragedy-of-the-commons continues to hover over all the areas over which no clear ownership rights and ownership interests are established like an unwelcome elephant at an otherwise elegant cocktail party.

And observe too that while in some of the four options there’s talk of “allowing” access to courts to prove rights to foreshore or seabed under common law (a right all citizens enjoyed under British law for centuries, until extinguished here by Helen Clark) it really is only talk.  Even the option of granting Maori “absolute title” is not granting title by right, but by fiat--and the “absolute title” to be granted under this solution is not to specific portions of foreshore and seabed to which specific owners my lay claim, but to all the foreshore and seabed not presently under private title, meaning that non-Maori lose whatever rights in common law they may have once been able to assert.

And since the ownership “rights” in any of these proffered solutions will be neither transferrable nor divisible, this means that any “ownership” granted is largely notional in any case.

So not so much just kicking for touch as taking away the ball under cover of turning on the lights.

It’s a series of Clayton’s “solution” by an Attorney General obviously well versed in semantic tricks—a solution that retains the body of nationalisation of foreshore and seabed, while transferring the shadow of ownership to the government and whichever Browntable groups are making the most noise.

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, my own view on the foreshore and seabed issue has been consistent now for at least six years, and is based on the common law principle that everyone, no matter their colour, has a right to claim ownership rights to un-owned property if the requisite common law tests are met. 

I see no reason to change that view now.

Nanny Joyce on camera [update 2]

The self-appointed nation’s nanny, Steven Joyce, today got his way forcing taxi drivers to install cameras in their cabs to, somehow, protect themselves against attack--and to increase by the cost of a cab ride, and the cost of entry to new cab-drivers.

Quite how a camera in a cab will protect tax-drivers against attack by numb nuts like the dangerous loon who killed Hiren Mohini in what seemed a spur-of-the moment attack—why a dangerous psychotic would pause in his frenzied attack for “fear” that it might be filmed--is a secret known only to Mr Joyce. 

But there was something he could have done which would have avoided intruding upon other’s business and at the same time actually done something to deter crime and protect drivers.  It’s a simple enough threesome:

1. Remove whatever privacy restrictions exist that bar cab-owners from installing their own cameras voluntarily.
2. Have police on the beat to deter the initiation of violence, and require prosecution of criminals for even minor crimes before they get on to bigger ones.  Broken windows, if you like.
3. Allow cab-drivers (and the owners of dairies and bottle stores) to defend themselves, and to possess, carry and use the means whereby they can.

This last is the most important. It is outrageous that people who provide these essential public services have to place themselves at risk of their lives to serve us. And even the most foolish lunatic is going to think twice if he knows his intended victim has the ability--and the legal backing—to end his attacker’s sorry life  instead of having his own terminated.

But I guess defending hard-working new New Zealanders (which describes most of the owners of cabs, dairies and bottle stores) is less important to Steven Joyce than another nannying headline.

UPDATE 1:  Looks like I’m not the only one saying this:

    Requiring all city cabs to have cameras, regardless of their circumstances, smacks of Nanny State."
    "Like many regulations, the scheme is 'one-size-fits-nobody'.  For example, cameras will be a pointless expense for drivers who only work during the day.  Where is a Treasury cost-benefit analysis when we need one?"
    "There is also the undiscussed issue of who is going to police the taxi drivers to ensure they have these compulsory cameras, check that they work correctly, and, of course, punish drivers who choose not to install them.  Will there be a list of approved cameras which have been vetted for reliability, image quality and carbon footprint?  All this bureaucratic nonsense is totally objectionable."
    "Libertarianz believes taxi drivers and taxi companies should be free to install cameras - or not - as they see fit.  This government decree is offensive to freedom and common sense."
Libertarianz spokesman Mr Howison also noted that taxi drivers, like dairy owners, should be free to defend themselves from attackers with reasonable force.”

As they should be.  The day they’re allowed to is the day attacks on them will either stop, or at least be rewarded with the appropriate response.

UPDATE 2: And there’s more. 

Paul Walker, Eric Crampton and Matt Nolan all attack the measure in different ways—Paul asking “why does Joyce think the government has to mandate anything? If taxi drivers want extra safety equipment do they not have all the incentive they need to install it?”; Matt saying “regulating for them to put cameras in is either pointless, or forces taxi drivers to do something where the cost exceeds the benefit – and so is suboptimal”; and Eric Crampton arguing it’s just an anti-competition measure whose real cost is hidden:

    The real cost of the soon-to-be-mandatory taxicab cameras won't be the 30-odd cents it adds to the cost of the typical cab ride.  Rather, it's the loss of surplus that will come when the World Cup hits in 2011 and jitney cabs will fail to come into the market because of the increased fixed cost of shifting your private car into taxi service.”

Make sure to read their various comments sections where they and their readers debate the real costs of Joyce’s intrusion.

On this day in history . . . [updated]

To supplement Home Paddock’s usual “this day in history” series, here’s a few of the more unusual events that have happened today in history  . . .

• On this day in 1957 the BBC announced that “as the result of a mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil,” Swiss farmers enjoying what is still a record crop of spaghetti.”
• In 1962 Kjell Stenson, Swedish television's technical expert, told Swedes that, “thanks to a new technology, it would be possible for viewers to convert their TV sets for colour reception. All they need do was pull a nylon stocking over the screen…”  Amazing.
• In 1995 negotiations between Disney and the Russian government concluded in the purchase of the embalmed body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, which had been on display in Red Square since his death, and its removal to Euro Disney, it said, where it was given the "full Disney treatment", including stroboscopic lights to tone up his pallid face, Lenin T-shirts for sale and excerpts from Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" speech played in quadrophonic sound. Liberal groups lobbied thereafter to keep the mausoleum empty "to symbolise the emptiness of the Communist system."
• In 1992 Belgium was split in half, with the north, Dutch-speaking part joining the Netherlands and the French-speaking south joining France.
• In 1996, the Taco Bell Corporation announced it had bought the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell.  And the White House announced that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold and would now be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.
• In 1977 the colon-shaped islands of San Serriffe, in the Indian Ocean, launched as a holiday destination.
• In 1993 the Chinese government announced its decision to make PhD holders exempt from the country's policy of allowing only one child per couple, “the better to create a brainy population.”
• In a surprise move in 1992, Richard Nixon announced he was running for President again. His new campaign slogan was, "I didn't do anything wrong, and I won't do it again.”
• In 1973 the London School of Pathological and Environmental Medicine discovered that exposure to Dutch elm disease immunised people against the common cold. Unfortunately there was also a side effect: it made the hair of gingas turn yellow and fall out…
• In 1993 the Alabama state legislature voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0.
• In 1998 Burger King introduced the revolutionary "Left-Handed Whopper" specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. The whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers.
• In 2007 it was discovered that global warming had been caused by the decline of New Zealand's sheep population. “Sheep are white, you see, and collectively they increase the planet's albedo, which is the amount of sunlight reflected back into space.”
• In 1976 “a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event” occurred in Britain when the planet Pluto passed behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that counteracted and lessened the Earth's own gravity.
• In 1965 the Danish government passed a new law requiring all dogs to be painted white to “increase road safety by allowing dogs to be seen more easily.”

UPDATE:  And in related news today,

• Jeanette Fitzsimons has been appointed to the role of Secretary General of the United Nations, making her Helen Clark’s boss.
•  The Green Party today called for horse lanes to be introduced in New Zealand towns and cities. “We need to look for carbon neutral transport options to fight climate change…”
• David Farrar is introducing a new pay-to-comment system at his blog.  For each comment there will be a small “micro-charge.”
• Home Paddock blogs on “Baaccoli, a new breed of sheep which combines the nutritional properties of broccoli with those of meat.” Apparently it will help encourage children who don’t like vegetables …
• Tim Watkin points out there’s nothing like 300,000 New Zealanders on welfare. It’s all a myth.
• In Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced “a Pauline conversion,” admitting that “the Government had strayed too far from a sensible economic course, and has no business in our bedrooms”—and promising to “embrace libertarian economic principles in the formulation of future economic policy.”
  •     “Announcing a change in direction by the Government, the Prime Minister said that the size and reach of government had grown too far and must be reduced. He committed to returning the Budget to balance by 2012 through a mixture of substantial cuts in public spending and promised further income tax cuts. He promised to cut the size of the public service by 25 per cent within three years and abolish several departments with immediate effect, including the Department of Climate Change.
• And here at home the National Party has finally announced plans to privatise TVNZ, NZ Post, the four electricity generators and to abolish the Ministries of Women’s and Maori Affairs.  And Rodney Hide has revealed plans to sell off the Ports of Auckland . . .

NB: Some of these things are true.  Or not.

A lesson in profit

Guest post by Marsha Enright and Gen LaGreca

Addressing a joint session of Congress on health care, President Barack Obama reiterated his often-expressed aversion to the profit motive:

    [B]y avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private [health insurance] companies by profits and excessive costs and executive salaries, [the public insurance option] could provide a good deal for consumers, and would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better . . .”

    Is this true? Is profit wasteful, as Obama implies? Does it lead to higher prices and lower value to consumers? Can the government, unburdened by profit, do the same job as a private company, only cheaper and better?
    To answer, let’s consider one business, one product, and one profit-seeking man who lived at a time when the market operated largely free of government subsidies, bailouts, regulations, taxation, and other “progressive” intrusions.
    Henry Ford, at age 13, saw a steam-driven land vehicle, a “road locomotive,” which filled his imagination with the vision of a horseless carriage and fueled a passion to create one. As a young man, he worked day jobs, while trying to build a car in his free time. Realizing a viable car could not run on steam, he sought to develop a new kind of engine.
    On Christmas Eve 1893, the 30-year-old inventor clamped his first gasoline engine to his wife Clara’s kitchen sink. With the home’s electricity providing ignition, the motor roared into action, sending the sink vibrating and exhaust flames flying while Clara prepared the holiday dinner.
    In pursuit of his dream, Ford and Clara moved eight times in their first nine years of marriage. He quit a secure job at the Edison Illuminating Company, banking everything on his vision. He co-founded the Detroit Automobile Company—a venture that failed. Jobless, Ford moved his wife and child into his father’s home. But he kept working on his car. “It is always too soon to quit,” he said.
    Ten years passed from the roar of the little engine on Clara’s sink to the launch of the Ford Motor Company. It took five more years to produce his big success, the Model T, and additional years to master its mass production.
    Why did Ford persist through years of hardship and uncertainty? How much would his love for the work have sustained him without the hope of eventual profit? Imagine if he had lived in a system where politicians could, at the stroke of a pen, seize his profits or decide how much he could keep. Would he have risked so much or worked so ferociously to bring a world-changing invention to market?
    Would an Amtrak [or KiwiRail] employee devote a decade of free time inventing a new train, only to rise a notch on a civil-servant’s pay scale? Dream big, work hard, create something earth shaking, but be paid small is the antithesis of the American dream.
    The pursuit of profit not only motivated Ford, but also his bold investors who had the foresight to realize the horse was doomed.
    In 1903, a school teacher invested $100—half her life savings—in the Ford Motor Company. Sixteen years later, she sold her stock for a total gain of $355,000. Why would she and others place their money on a highly experimental venture, were it not for the hope of tremendous gain should the enterprise succeed? What kind of person would deny her the reward for recognizing Ford’s vision and risking her own money?
    The pursuit of profit also impacted every aspect of Ford’s business operations.
Ford didn’t need a politician’s scolding to lower prices—only the desire to make huge profits by reaching mass markets. Because early cars were expensive, people viewed them as mere playthings of the rich. But Ford sought to “build a motor car for the multitude.” This led him to develop his moving assembly line, significantly reducing manufacturing costs and, consequently, prices. The original $825 price of the Model T finally bottomed at $260. That price-lowering strategy brought him the millions of customers that made him rich.
    Similarly, Ford’s pursuit of profit didn’t result in bare-subsistence wages for employees, but in phenomenal pay increases. He shocked the world by introducing the $5 workday, more than doubling the era’s prevailing wage. Why? To attract the best workers, whose talents increased product quality and company efficiency. High pay also decreased employee turnover and training costs, again increasing Ford’s profits.
    Ford typifies the successful capitalist, whose profit-driven innovations lower prices, while raising wages and living standards for all.
    Even today’s Ford Motor Company, a much-fettered child of our mixed economy, demonstrates the superiority of private- over government-run companies. Ford refused TARP bailout money, choosing to operate without government strings. The result? Ford’s profits are up 43 percent, while bailed-out GM and Chrysler lag behind.
    In Henry Ford—a thin man who was the fattest of fat cats—we see an embodied refutation of President Obama’s worldview. Ford developed a new form of transportation vastly cheaper, faster, more convenient, and superior to the old mode. He continually lowered prices so that everyone, rich and poor, would have access to his product. He created thousands of jobs. He raised employee wages. He did all this good without government grants, bailouts, stimuli, subsidies, or coercion, but simply as a result of the honest pursuit of personal gain.
    This achievement was possible only because a private individual had the freedom to pursue his own self-interest, in cooperation with others who supported his vision and shared in the rewards, unencumbered by government.
    By eliminating profit, Obama implies that everything else about an enterprise would remain the same, only the product would be cheaper and better. Actually, by removing profit, nothing at all would remain the same.
Contrary to Obama’s notions, profit is not an overhead cost, but a vital gain sought over and above costs in order to reward a company’s risk-takers. According to economist Ludwig von Mises,

    Profit is the pay-off of successful action.” And “The elimination of profit . . . would create poverty for all.”

    Eliminate the hope of profit, and you extinguish that spark which ignites the human engine and powers it to explore uncharted roads: the creative mind. Profit is the proud product of the creative mind, and the creative mind is an attribute of the individual. Obama’s attack on profit is an attack on human creativity and innovation, which is an attack on the individual.
    Obama’s antipathy for the self-interested individual is explicit.

    In America, we have this strong bias toward individual action [he said in an interview in the Chicago Reader.]  But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”

    It was Henry Ford’s individual actions and individual dreams that brought motorized, personal transportation within reach of everyone in the world.
    America is rooted in the “pursuit of happiness”—which means the right of each of us to create, to produce, to rise, to succeed, and to profit from the fruits of our labor. Contrast this worldview with that of a president who disparages the individual and seeks to limit or expropriate his profits on behalf of a faceless “collective.” Obama’s war on profit is a war against the individualist heart and soul of America.
    Profits are a badge of honor earned by someone who offers others something they value enough to buy. The first buyer of the first car of the Ford Motor Company was a doctor. He was tired of hitching up his horse and buggy for night-time emergencies. Ford’s product enhanced his life, as it later enhanced the lives of millions. Profit is the medal Ford received from his customers for a job well done.
    If our nation is to cultivate productive geniuses like Henry Ford, it must proclaim that the quest for profit is moral and noble.

POSTSCRIPT: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently announced “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.” This means that the federal government, with its vast powers to fund highway projects, “liveability” initiatives, and other aid programs, as well as to tax gasoline, now intends, in LaHood’s stunningly brazen words, “to coerce people out of their cars,” in favor of walking or cycling. A century ago, Henry Ford, through capitalism and the profit motive, brought motorized transportation to the world. Now, an alarmingly anti-capitalist government is reversing that historic achievement and pulling us back to the pre-industrial age.

Gen LaGreca is author of “Noble Vision,” an award-winning novel about the struggle
for liberty in health care today. Marsha Familaro Enright is president of the
Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute, the Foundation for the College of the United States. Incidents from the book “Young Henry Ford,” by Sidney Olson appear in this article.

Handle with Care - Pauline Adair

Adair, Handle With Care
Charcoal & Pastel on Paper
62 x 48cm

Michael Newberry just posted this stunning charcoal & pastel drawing by Australian artist Pauline Adair, which won ‘The Human Figure’ award at the 2009 Kenilworth Art Show. 

Love those hands.

Oh, and it’s still for sale, if you’re quick.

• Pauline Adair's blog
• Pauline Adair’s website