Official reaction to the day’s events ranged from dismay to embarrassment to outright anger.
…
For ordinary Gazans, it was a day of joy and plenty.
…
“Freedom is good. We need no border after today,” said Mohammed Abu Ghazal, a 29-year-old out-of-work Gazan.
Of course the Gaza border is atypical in many ways and at least initially this breach will satisfy pent up demand for goods and travel rather than provide opportunity for labor, but the release of this demand paints the ongoing massive cost of borders in vivid fashion (if there were no cost the opening of a border would result in no border crossings).
I like to call this the “purpose-driven voluntary sector,” as distinct from (a) the profit-driven voluntary sector, i.e. the private sector, and (b) the purpose-driven coercive sector, i.e., the public sector.
The most exciting parts of the purpose-driven voluntary sector involve peer production.
Smith also used this terminology in an excellent comment on the nonprofit boom last October:
Some labor economists have distinguished the “intrinsic rewards” (love of the work itself) and the “extrinsic rewards” (money, benefits) from working.
By working for a non-profit, you may sacrifice some extrinsic rewards for some intrinsic rewards. As people get more and more affluent, it makes sense that more and more people will be willing to make that trade-off.
I think of non-profits as the “purpose-driven voluntary sector.” It’s distinct from the pure profit sector, officially dedicated to profits, and the government sector, which is ultimately financed through coercion. If more and more public goods can be provided through the purpose-driven voluntary sector, government can shrink.
I’ve been asked or told about Ron Paul many times over the last months, usually on the assumption that I’d respond positively. It always pained me to explain that while I broadly agree with Paul on policy (with some glaring exceptions like immigration and abortion), I could not work up significant enthusiasm for the campaign, nor even support it (apart from joining his Facebook group, which I’ve left).
First, Paul’s supporters wildly overestimate the chances of the campaign’s success, whether that be election, nomination, or even just effectively growing the constituency for freedom. He never had any chance of winning and I’m happy for the demonstration that merely speaking the truth on national TV doesn’t change anything. Of course many libertarians will ignore that truth and continue throwing money at false hopes.
And while there were bright spots, Paul was an extremely problematic messenger for freedom. He’s a marginal kook, he attracts hardcore kooks, and the fundamental basis of his argument — the U.S. constitution as holy writ — is about the least interesting and least convincing argument possible. In other words, Paul is an embarrassment. (Of course almost every politicianhuman spouts nonsense almost continuously, but more or less conventional nonsense that is not accorded the kookiness factor richly deserved.)
However, I had no idea how problematic and embarrassing Paul would be. While it is conceivable that Paul is not a racist and did not write any of the racist items in his newsletter and did not authorize or know about any of those items, I assign these probabilities ranging from medium to almost nil. Paul’s response is evasive and painful to watch, despite his attempt to redeem himself by focusing on the drug war.
If you really need to read more go here. I urge anyone who has supported Paul in public or private to reverse that support, immediately.
I’m fairly satisfied with the results of last night’s Iowa caucuses, though I wish the loathsome Edwards had done poorly enough to drop out. (By the way, although I stated my preference for Richardson and effectively for Obama a few days ago, I had forgotten that I already did the same back in March).
I was browsing for DVDs on a cold winter afternoon in one of Beijing’s finer bootleg shops when I came upon three boxed sets of DVDs critical of communism. One of the pirated sets, produced by Turkish presenter Harun Yahya, promised to detail the horrors of communism from an Islamic perspective, another by an American producer chronicled the uncomfortably bloody rise of modern China and the third contained Tiananmen footage from BBC TV News. Presumably the DVD pirates were in it for the money, but were they also unwittingly making China a freer place?
The underground network and commercial resourcefulness of the pirates makes it technically possible for startling and truthful images to be sold more or less in the open in a less-than-open-society. In that sense, lax enforcement of intellectual copyright may inadvertently engender a kind of information freedom and even allow for the infiltration of revolutionary ideas.
If so, then the copyright zealots, mostly big US companies, with profit first and foremost on the mind, come down firmly on the side of information control and in that sense side firmly with the Beijing authorities. Subversive access of the sort I had just tapped into would dry up if US anti-piracy efforts were successful.
I endorse Bill Richardson for temporary dictator of the U.S. jurisdiction. His positions on executive power seem acceptable, his overall domestic policies and record as governor of New Mexico are better than most politicians (i.e., not abominable), and his foreign policy is not insane. Regarding the last, Richardson outlines his principles in this video.
True, Ron Paul‘s more radical foreign (and general) policy is mostly closer to my preferences than Richardson’s. However, in spirit and delivery, Richardson’s foreign policy is a viable and positive alternative to interventionism, approximately the Wright thing, in contrast to Dr. No’s.
And Richardson is in theory electable, while Paul is not. Traders are probably correct in giving Richardson essentially zero chance of winning the Democratic nomination at this point, but they are certifiably insane to give Paul even a smidgen of a chance of winning the GOP nomination (currently about 7%), let alone the dictatorship (4%).
I also think that to the extent the Paul campaign gives some libertarians (entirely false) hope of revolutionary change for the better through electoral politics, the campaign and whatever success it has is a bad thing. It makes me sad to see libertarians impoverish themselves by sending a “moneybomb” to a hopeless electoral campaign.
However, I probably would not have bothered to tack on this anti-endorsement of Paul had I not seen this excrement from his campaign.
Paul is also a religious kook (but then so is every candidate, of one sort or another). At least Barack Obama admits doubt, which I’d challenge any other candidate to do. As Richardson doesn’t have any chance of nomination, this post is effectively an Obama endorsement.
Giuliani (R) did not answer any of the questions, but issued a statement that indicates he’d compete with Romney for low score. Thompson (R) and Huckabee (R) did not reply at all.
Based on the above, it seems civil libertarians ought to be rooting for an Obama vs. McCain general election. It’s ok to root for Paul or Biden, but they have near zero chances of winning their parties’ nominations. (My overall preference is for Richardson vs. Paul, but alas, neither willl be nominated. My hope is for Paul to do better than he’s polling — he will never meet the expectations of his supporters, and for Richardson to get the Democrat VP nomination.)
If guest worker programs are the most feasible weakening of international apartheid in the immediate future, they should be pursued with gusto. To the extent they appear exploitive or corrosive, the problem is not with the guest worker program, but the underlying birth-based system of restrictions on movement and ability to work and live. Toward the abolition of international apartheid!
The dispute between the U.S. and Antigua jurisdictions over the former’s stupid campaign against online gambling is one of the most interesting happenings of the past few years. I’ve been meaning to write about it for about that long but haven’t had much more to say than what you see in the post title. Antigua correctly sees the U.S. as restraining trade and has obtained favorable rulings at the World Trade Organization.
Antigua (actually the jurisdiction of Antigua and Barbuda) is seeking the right to suspend enforcement of U.S. copyrights as an alternative remedy. Unfortunately this sounds way more interesting than it is, except possibly for its precedent. The latest ruling only allows the suspension of US$21 million worth of intellectual protectionist obligations, a trivial amount that will itself be subject to radically different interpretations considering how difficult and arbitrary the valuation of nonrival goods can be (the RIAA’s ridiculous valuation of shared audio files is exactly a case in point). Even had Antigua’s request for US$3.44 billion not been cut down by about 99.4% the result would have been largely academic.
I have sub-golf level interest in horse racing, poker, or other gaming-oriented gambling activities. So why is this case so interesting? There is The Mouse That Roared or David vs. Goliath aspect, but mostly I really want to see U.S. gambling prohibitions go down in flames, both because they are a tool for arbitrary censorship and control in much the same way copyright is and because they are a barrier to use of prediction markets.
The world will route around this U.S. stupidity, but at great loss, not least to Americans.