Protests in The Middle East

"[The average man] is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies." ~ H.L. Mencken

A few weeks ago Tunisia erupted in protest. The people finally got fed up with their dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and he had to resign. Now the Egyptian people are fed up with their dictator Hosni Mubarak's 29 year rule.

These protests in Muslim countries are not about religion. They are about freedom and economics. The protesters are protesting against the tyrants that the U.S. has aided and abetted for decades. Will other tyrants, friends of the U.S., like the Saud family that has ruled and plundered Saudi Arabia for decades, be next to abdicate? Will the The House of Al Sabah in Kuwait no longer be able to collect billions in oil revenue that belong to the people?

I wrote this on October 23, 2006. “Time and technology will fight radical Islam better than the U.S. Military will. The radicals of Islam are not afraid of our army. They are afraid of the words in our Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights.”

The Internet and cell phones are making the flow of information easier in the Middle East and this technology is making it easier for Arabs all over the world to rebel against tyrannical rule, including rule by Caliphs and Imams.

Of course there have been revolutions in the past when the current technology was unavailable. Many of those revolutions were coup d’etats, one autocracy trying to overthrow another. It was not about a revolution of ideas on how government should operate, as was the American revolution of 1776. The current technology however has leaders around the world feeling very out of control because millions of people are exchanging ideas through the Internet. With the Internet the leaders no longer control the flow of information and therefore cannot control the ideas of the people. Egypt has shut down the Internet in Egypt, but how long can a country survive in the modern era without the Internet?

President Obama said with a straight face, "All governments must maintain power through consent, not coercion." I wonder if President Obama realizes how much coercion the U.S. government uses on its citizens. The U.S. government uses coercion on its citizens to collect taxes, some of which has been used to prop up despots in the Middle East. At least Obama said what all governments are about, which is POWER.

President Obama is/was reluctant to criticize one of his allies, even if the ally is a despot. It seems the U.S. foreign policy is hypocritical. It says it wants to democratize the Middle East, yet it supports dictators. I think the U.S. officials are hypocritical in words only. In their hearts the U.S. officials yearn, with envy, for the power dictators have.

I believe the people who are revolting against tyranny in the Middle East have withdrawn their consent. It was Etienne de la Boetie in his “The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude” in 1549 who said that people cannot be ruled by tyrants unless the people volunteer to be ruled. The people in the Middle East are no longer volunteering to be ruled by tyrants. What has happened in Tunisia and Egypt shows that there was no need for the invasion of Iraq and the use of force by the United States to overthrow a tyrant.

The Arabs serving under tyrants should take the advice of Etienne de la Boetie and carry out a passive resistance to their autocratic governments. The people should go on a passive withdrawal of enthusiasm, a WOE program. Without the people’s work and cooperation the autocrats will have to move aside, peacefully.

The people in the west who feared an Islamic takeover of the world were hysterical over nothing. Each younger generation of Muslims will want more freedom from the Imams as the younger generations exchange ideas over the Internet. These modern ideas are not just exchanged locally, they are ideas that cross geographical borders in seconds.

Once the Arabs in the Middle East develop a form of representative government will they be free? People will always vote to try and live at the expense of others. People will always vote to live with the most pleasure and the least pain. They prefer a life of excitement and violence over a life of peace and serenity. In a representative government there are powerful lobbies, as in the U.S., which looks out for their interest at the expense of others. Life is about power. So is government, whether it is a democratic republic or an autocratic government. Will the Internet be able to expose all of these restrictions to real and complete liberty? I believe it will be an important part, but human nature will never accept complete liberty because it requires too much individual responsibility. Maybe someday, when we are bio engineered to live without fear and desire, to live like a vegetable that does not want to kill its own kind instead of like the human animal that does, then, and only then will we know complete liberty.

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.” -Thomas Szasz, author, professor of psychiatry (b. 1920)

Charles Tolleson, Mr. Passive

Government Regulation, or Not

I wrote on April 12, 2010 about safety in the airline industry since deregulation. This article is about the economics of a regulated and deregulated industry.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote an article in Business Week on Jan 20, 2011, Airline Deregulation, Revisited.” Justice Breyer was an aide to Senator Ted Kennedy and helped pass the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Breyer wrote about the increase in passenger traffic since deregulation because of competition, more airlines, and how fares have come down, adjusted for inflation. “No one foresaw the industry's spectacular growth, with the number of air passengers increasing from 207.5 million in 1974 to 721.1 million last year.”

“In 1974 the cheapest round-trip New York-Los Angeles flight (in inflation-adjusted dollars) that regulators would allow: $1,442. Today one can fly that same route for $268. That is why the number of travelers has gone way up.”

Before deregulation the airline cartel was made up of a few airlines that were regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board, (CAB). If an airline wanted to start service on a new route it had to get permission from the CAB. If airlines wanted to change fares they had to get permission from the CAB. No new airline could just start new competitive service without the permission from the CAB.

If an airline was shut down by a labor strike, the airline’s competitors who flew on the routes of the struck airline had to share some of their revenue with the airline on strike. This was called the Mutual Aid Pact of airlines. During the 30 years before (1947-1977) the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 there were 117 labor strikes against U.S. airlines. During the 30 years after (1979-2009) airline deregulation there have been less than a third of the prior 30 years, about 35 labor strikes against U.S. airlines. This data shows that government regulating a market causes disruption and above market costs to the investors, employers, and most of all, the consumers.

The medical industry is heavily regulated. Though hospitals and staff are private, you would hardly know it because there are so many government rules and regulations the hospitals and staffs might as well be owned by the government. As soon as the airline industry was deregulated the industry saw spectacular growth. Can you imagine the growth in the health industry if it was deregulated; if Medicare and Medicaid were eliminated, and if the requirement that hospital emergency rooms treat all who enter, and if nurses and doctors did not have to be licensed. You would see prices for health care plummet and the number of persons employed in the health care industry triple. Unemployment would drop to five percent in the country. The advocates for licensing medial personnel would be surprised to know that almost one million people die each year from problems in the regulated medical industry. People tolerate these deaths in a regulated health industry but would become incensed and intolerant if the same deaths happened in an unregulated health industry.

A doctor will spend many years in non productive learning instead of practicing productive medicine that would lower the costs of health care. I read a story about a doctor in India who got in trouble for teaching and allowing his teen age son to perform surgery. As a teen my surgeon also watched his dad perform surgery. My surgeon knew how to perform an appendectomy before he graduated from high school. Yet he had to spend the next eight to ten years learning medicine before he could become productive. Ten years of lost productivity. If the doctor cartel was eliminated and anyone could practice health care there would be inexpensive clinics buying cadavers and training potential surgeons.

The education industry is not only regulated by the government, it is run and owned by the government, except a few private institutions. The government confiscates, by force, funds for its education operation. No wonder it is inefficient. The users have become attached to their community government owned schools, as ‘Our” team won their last game, and other tribalistic feelings. Mothers genuflect before the government priests as the mothers hope, a cheap form of happiness, the government priests will make their children socially acceptable and wise.

The barber schools have lobbied to pass regulations that require all future barbers to attend the barber schools. Without this regulation individual barbers would be training new barbers cheaper and more efficient. The barber schools would go out of business if individual barbers could teach how to cut hair. The increased supply of barbers would lower the cost of hair cuts and provide employment for many unsophisticated citizens.

This is the story of regulations. The regulators and those advocating for regulations always say the regulations are to protect the consumers. The sheep believe these lies. The regulations are actually used to protect the vendors from competition. The doctors’ cartel reduces the number of doctors so their fees go up. The barbers’ cartel reduces the number of barbers so their fees go up. The architects lobby to require you use them for an approved design before the city will approve your building permit, thus creating work for the architects and causing the cost of housing to increase more than in an unregulated free market.

How many people would have died if Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur had been working under the regulations in place in the United States of today? Clarence Darrow, the noted attorney in the famous Scopes Trial, never finished college. Henry Ford, a farmer and machinist, developed the Ford tractor for farming. This tractor, with insecticides from the early chemistry industry, provided enormous increases in food production that prevented millions from starving. These increases in food production were done before the monstrous bureaucratic U.S. Department of Agriculture reached its zenith in power.

In a NY Times article of January 23, 2011, the government plans to do drug research because the pharmaceutical industry has not brought enough new drugs to market. Regulators at the Food and Drug Administration have issued so many regulations for the pharmaceutical industry it now costs over a billion dollars and years of research before the FDA will approve a drug. Another department, the National Institute of Health, thinks they can do better than the pharmaceutical industry in finding new drugs. The NIH has started a Federal Research Center to compete with private industry in discovering new drugs. The government regulators create a problem, and another branch of the government mob tries to find the solution to the problem by increasing their budget and bureaucracy. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.” George Orwell

If deregulation is so beneficial to consumers and the economy, why is everything from garbage collection to hair cuts regulated? The sheep like these regulations because they believe regulation is in their best interest. They trust in the benevolence of mankind. They actually think the government employees are honest and will provide and protect the citizens. The sheep have the community belief, that they are safer in a community, even if the community is holding back the community by its inefficiency. The sheep believe government power can only be used for good and private power can only be used for evil. Cartels and the government gang exploit this sheep behavior.

Here is a good article by Aaron Everitt about how we are exposed daily to government regulations. http://mises.org/daily/4991

Regulations, whether they be for business and guilds to avoid competition, or just to empower the bureaucrats, or to alleviate the fears of the fearful, regulations have always been a part of social cultures. People have always been afraid of the prostitutes, discontents, and degenerates who want to live life unregulated. Government regulations are presented as rules to protect the proletariat and bourgeois when in fact government regulations are just a disguise for central planning. Government regulations lead the citizens into a false sense of security. The citizens become listless and enervated while the regulators become neurotically energized with their new powers.

Charles Tolleson, Regulated Degenerate

More Challenges for the Government Gang

“True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.” Antoine De Saint-Exupery

In President Obama’s weekly radio address on January 15, 2010, he said, “After all, this is still a time of great challenges for us to solve. We've got to grow jobs faster, and forge a stronger, more competitive economy. We've got to shore up our budget, and bring down our deficits. We've got to keep our people safe, and see to it that the American Dream remains vibrant and alive for our children and grandchildren.

These are challenges I believe we can meet. And I believe we can do it in a way worthy of those who sent us here to serve.”

If you go back in history you cannot find a president who said differently. No president has ever said, “We have no challenges to solve”. All politicians and hucksters want you to believe they are the ones, and the only ones, not you, who can solve these challenges.

Mr. President, it is not for the government to solve people's problems. Yet many people believe it IS the job of the government to solve their problems. You, Mr. President, are not the President of a company that can create jobs by producing products and services that people voluntarily purchase. You, Mr. President, are the president of a gang that operates on force and aggression. You extract by force a portion of the producer's output. It is not a voluntary transaction between two individuals. It is a forced transaction between the government mob and one individual.

You do have the challenge of solving the problems, self induced problems, of the government gang. The gang simply spends too much and is infatuated with power. The gang gets well paid to carry on unnecessary wars. The gang gets well paid to create and enforce thousands and thousands of pages of rules and regulations designed to fool the people into a delusional state that they are safe, and free, in your hands.

So, why can your gang not reduce their extravagant spending? Could it be because you took it by force instead of earning it? Could it be because the money you spend is not your money, but the money of the hard working producers? You should be ashamed of yourself for pretending to be someone who cares about the American worker when what you care most about is power, and your legacy.

You and your gang risk nothing in trying to solve my challenges. I on the other hand do take risks in attempting to better myself. If I am successful at improving my lot then you and your gang will confiscate a portion of my success and, with a straight face, you quickly claim credit for my success.

I must complement President Obama for his opinion column in the Wall Street Journal of January 18, 2011 where President Obama said he has ordered a review of government regulations that stifle innovation and job creation. Obama is simply doing a Bill Clinton and moving to the center in preparation for his 2012 election.

To facilitate this reduction in bureaucracy the president should decertify the federal employees union. No need to review the regulations of many agencies and departments. Just eliminate them. There is no reason to have a federal Department of Education. We should repeal the UNaffordable“Affordable Health Care for America Act”, which barely passed the House of Representatives, passing by only 50.57%!

But, good luck with the federal bureaucracy. It will not yield control easily. The President's action is propaganda deflection. Two steps forward and one step back, and the government will grow, and grow, until it collapses. It created 80,000 pages of rules and regulations in 2010, in just one year. For citizens to deal with these regulations is a real CHALLENGE!

Rose Wilder Lane said it well in her book, “The Discovery of Freedom, Man's Struggle Against Authority” when Lane talked about the human energy of each individual trying and trying to improve their existences.

“This is the human dilemma. Each individual is the source and control of human energy, but one individual can not generate enough energy. To live at all, and then to get the values that he wants in living, he must combine his energy with the energies of others. But in doing this, he always encounters an obstacle to the direct use of his energy to achieve his own desires. This obstacle is the problem of controlling the combined energies.”

So many, many people want to control others. They fear if they do not control others, those others will leave them behind. This is true, but, even if they are left behind, the output and energy of millions of humans will improve the lot of those left behind.

Mr. President, if you and your gang will get out of the way and stop trying to control the energies of millions of working people, and stop trying to build both a domestic and foreign empire, and just see to it that we have our natural rights protected, we will solve our own challenges. That is part of being human.

Charles Tolleson

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

The Wall Street Journal had a column on Jan 13, 2011 by Amy Chua on why Chinese mothers are superior to western mothers.

A better title to the column by Chua would have been "How Chinese Mothers Are Superior", not "Why". Amy Chua made some good points on "how" Chinese mothers raise their children but she failed to answer the question of "why".

I think the why is interesting. I believe Chinese mothers have a tradition in their culture of raising children to be productive instead of non productive. This is to provide for the elderly in their old age. This used to be how western mothers raised their children, to be productive, before Social Security and Medicare were created.

Another reason why Chinese mothers are superior is Chinese mothers have a lower divorce rate and single parenting than western mothers.

But make no mistake about the future of the current children of Chinese mothers. When they grow up and become producers they will become alarmed that the governments will take up to 50% of their production, by force! The producers will see the non producers getting a share of the production and will not raise their children that way the current generation of Chinese children are raised.

There are two ways to get something. You can produce it or take it from someone else. Humans try to get through life with more pleasure than pain. This is the basic cause of societies collapsing or remaining stagnant.

Charles Tolleson, The Happy Misanthrope