Recruiting Government Informants

It seems that the White House is now looking for Soviet-style informants to report on their neighbors if they hear anything negative about government plans for health care. Here is a blog post from whitehouse.gov:

TUESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 2009 AT 6:55 AM
Facts Are Stubborn Things
Posted by Macon Phillips

Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things."

Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.

In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to "eliminate" private coverage, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

For the record, the President has consistently said that if you like your insurance plan, your doctor, or both, you will be able to keep them. He has even proposed eight consumer protections relating specifically to the health insurance industry.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. [underlining in original, bold added]

I hear that people are sending protest emails to this address, so my guess is that it will be shut down soon.

As crazy as this all seems, this fear of rumors is exactly the kind of thing that Obama and Cass Sunstein hold as a basic guiding premise. Sunstein has been fighting "extremism" and rumor for well over a decade by making vague statements or even writing entire books insinuating that such things are a dire threat to "deliberative democracy."

In Sunstein's book, Why Groups Go To Extremes, he presents the following non-arguments and insinuations about the Internet and extremism, a line of pseudo-reasoning that applies just as well to his fear of rumors (p. 15-16):

Many people have expressed concern about processes of social influence on the mass media and the Internet. ...

If certain people are deliberating with many like-minded others, views will not be reinforced but instead shifted to more extreme points. This cannot be said to be bad by itself—perhaps the increased extremism is good—but it is certainly troublesome if diverse social groups are led, through predictable mechanisms, toward increasingly opposing and ever more extreme views. [emphasis added]

When is "increased extremism" good, in his view? He cites the abolitionist movement as a prime example. When is it... troublesome? Perhaps when people criticize the government's attempt to nationalize the health care market?

I shouldn't be surprised by anything that comes out of the Obama administration, but I honestly didn't expect that they would ask citizens to rat each other out to the secret police. As Myrhaf has said,

Once again, Obama’s radical ideology puts him at odds with reality. It’s uncanny how he gets everything exactly wrong. Barack Obama is Bizarro #1 from the Silver Age Superman comics. Bizarros live on Htrae instead of Earth and get everything backward. They do the opposite of what rational humans would do. [bold added]

It's hard to do, but if you'd like to predict the next absurd move the administration will make, try to think of what should be done, then flip it upside down in the most irrational way you possibly can, and then assume that whatever you come up with will still pale in comparison to what actually happens. Just don't write down or speak any of your predictions, because nosy neighbors good citizens might be listening.

---------
Update:

Gus Van Horn has a good commentary on this issue, and also addresses Obama's fascination with rumor, but from a more fundamental angle. He quotes Ayn Rand on the nature of second-handers and ties that back to Obama's views and goals:

They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They're concerned only with people. They don't ask: "Is this true?" They ask: "Is this what others think is true?" Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull.

Does that last paragraph not sound familiar? And does it not almost perfectly characterize the form which Obama hopes political "debate" will take? Obama does not really have a self, and he hates those of us who do. [emphasis in original, links dropped]

The concern with rumors, "extreme" views, and the anti-concept of polarization can be understood through the lens of second-handedness. "Is this what others think is true?" is the only question worth asking to them.

By the way, it is fascinating to read Ayn Rand's characterization of "polarization" from the early 1970's because it perfectly describes nearly everything that Cass Sunstein has written in the past 10 years.

One of today’s fashionable anti-concepts is “polarization.” Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad—undesirable, socially destructive, evil—something that would split the country into irreconcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of “argument from intimidation”: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would “polarize” the country—which is supposed to make one’s opponents retreat, protesting that they didn’t mean it. Mean—what?

Obama's Dream Team, Our Nightmare

In "How Obama Is Using The Science of Change" at Time.com, Michael Grunwald exposes something which shouldn't surprise, and yet it does. We know that Obama has appointed Cass Sunstein as "regulatory czar," and I have long observed the interplay between Sunstein's "libertarian paternalism" (Nudge) and the work of behavioral economist Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), but Grunwald today tells us something we didn't know (as far as I'm aware, anyway):

Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama's campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. "BUT, BUT, BUT," deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama's GOTV operatives nationwide, "What if I told you a world-famous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scripting?!?! Would you be interested in at least taking a look? Of course you would!!"

Moffo then passed along guidelines and a sample script from the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation's leading behaviorists. ...

The existence of this behavioral dream team — which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals — among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama — came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. "It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it," Moffo tells TIME. "These guys really know what makes people tick." [bold added]

I have previously addressed some of Cass Sunstein's and Dan Ariely's ideas, and upon reflection, it isn't a shock to see that they worked together in the Obama campaign's Consortium of Behavioral Scientists. In a perverse way, it's reassuring to see such terrible ideas coalesce like this, because it reinforces that ideas have great importance, and that there is a definite right and wrong. It reasserts the primacy of existence and the law of identity. These fellows belong together.

The threat, however, is that the bad ideas are the ones whispered in the ear of power, and power is eager to listen.

To revisit briefly, Sunstein's idea of nudging is to set up "choice architecture" to default to the way the government wants things to go, but to toss a bone to freedom by allowing people to opt-out. I suppose that doesn't sound too terrible on the face of it, so let's continue with Grunwald:

The first sign of the behavioralist takeover surfaced on April 1, when Americans began receiving $116 billion worth of payroll-tax cuts from the stimulus package. Obama isn't sending us one-time rebate checks. Reason: his goal is to jump-start consumer spending, and research has shown we're more likely to save money rather than spend it when we get it in a big chunk. Instead, Obama made sure the tax cuts will be paid out through decreased withholding, so our regular paychecks will grow a bit and we'll be less likely to notice the windfall. The idea, an aide explains, is to manipulate us into spending the extra cash.

Obama's efforts to change us carry a clear political risk. Republicans already portray him as a nanny-state scold, an élitist Big Brother lecturing us about inflating our tires and reading to our kids. We elected a President, not a life coach, and we might not like elected officials' challenging our right to be couch potatoes. Obama's aides seem to favor nudges that preserve free choice over heavy-handed regulation, an approach Thaler and Sunstein, the co-authors of Nudge, call "libertarian paternalism." But it's still paternalism, and Sunstein will have the power to put it into action. The idea of public officials, even well-meaning ones, trying to engineer our private behavior to produce change can seem a bit creepy.

But face it: Obama is right. Our emissions are boiling the planet, and most of our energy use is unnecessary. Our health expenditures are bankrupting the Treasury, and most of our visits to the doctor can be traced to unhealthy behavior. We do need to change, and we know it.

So why don't we? And how can we? The behaviorists have ideas, and the Administration is listening. [bold added]

Grunwald's ideas are clear: he agrees with Ariely that people are irrevocably irrational and need to be led to the "right" decisions by a supposedly benevolent government. And yet, he still gets something right... this is creepy. And not just creepy, but Orwellian and profoundly disturbing.

If I were prone to believing in conspiracies, I would think that Kant and Marx set the philosophical and economic ideas in motion, transmitted special coded tea leaf signals to Keynes to continue the work to attack the free market, and to Dewey to destroy classical education, and then watched the dominoes fall throughout the 20th century as American students were bathed in nihilism and pragmatism to a point where they really are predictably irrational, by design.

But I don't believe in conspiracies like this. I do, however, respect the power of ideas, and know that while there were no grand plans in place, the transmission of the terrible ideas of the historical figures above led to the situation we're in now—where a group of "behavioral economists" (I use quotes on purpose) are positioned to experiment on the citizens of America—while citizens like Grunwald seem to revel in it. Grunwald acknowledges as much, though likely without realizing it, when he writes:

Obama has pledged that his bank-regulation overhaul would be based "not on abstract models ... but on actual data on how actual people make financial decisions." That's a plain-English way of saying it will be guided by behavioral economics, not neoclassical economics.

Neoclassical economics—another University of Chicago specialty—has ruled our world for decades. It's the doctrine that markets know best: when government keeps its hands off free enterprise, capital migrates to its most productive uses and society prospers. But its elegant models rely on a bold assumption: rational decisions by self-interested individuals create efficient markets. Behavioral economics challenged this assumption, and the financial meltdown has just about shattered it; even former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan confessed his Chicago School worldview has been shaken. [bold added]

Behavioral economics, relying on the pragmatism and altruism that the sad majority of Americans hold as an unquestioned guide to life, is replacing the last vestiges of Enlightenment thought that, only because of its veracity and the American sense-of-life, still lingers in America to this day. In reference to the "opportunity" afforded by the financial crisis, Grunwald quotes Ariely, in what seems the disgusting relish of a cannibal looking up from its meal:

"We couldn't have planned a better marketing campaign for behavioral economics," MIT's Ariely quips.

Prepare to be nudged, America.

Guite Speaks Out On Vermont Property Rights Case

In July, I wrote about what I saw as a case of the state meddling with the property rights of a citizen who simply wanted to build a nice house on his own property. The conflict came in because he needed to move -- respectfully, of course -- a small 200-year old family cemetery to do it. After being taken to court over it, the owner of the land, Michel Guite, won.

A month later, Michel, who is also the President of the Vermont Telephone Company, kindly left some comments on my blog, and promised to respond with more detail later. He did so last week, and agreed to let me repost his comments here. You might want to read my original post first to get a sense of what the issues were and how the Boston Globe reported it.

Some months ago I promised to reply to your interesting comments in support of moving a little cemetery on my farm in Hartland Four Corners, VT.

Because this topic sparked substantial outside-of-Vermont interest, including a Boston Globe page one headline, a Yahoo News 'Top-10 Stories of the Week' ranking (with an accompanying story of man asking to be buried in a beer can), and was featured in dozens of newspapers across the country, I have wondered how to reply.

The following might help.

Hartland Four Corners, VT, is a community of kind and welcoming people, and Vermonters, and Hartland residents, are tolerant of situations much more peculiar than moving a small cemetery. For these reasons, it seemed to me the Globe article was a bit patronizing about Vermont and Vermonters. Vermonters in my region, for example, have had the highest Internet usage in North America, year after year, for over a decade. Vermonters are informed, practical, with some of the best high school rankings in the U.S., and a tradition of integrity and fairness.

So here are a couple of facts the Globe overlooked you might find of interest.

The Globe story began by reporting that many local Vermonters were outraged because the grave of a Noah Aldrich, who died on the farm in 1856, was being moved, after Noah so bravely served as a veteran of the War of 1812! I suppose it isn't terribly important, but Noah Aldrich of Hartland, VT, was never a veteran of any war, and few people allege that he was. A Hartland resident who gained notoriety for being part of an astounding 10 years of environmental lawsuits against the local Unified Buddhist Church who formerly used my farm as a meditation retreat, apparently found the Globe reporter, or they found each other, and agreed together Noah was a veteran. However, veteran's names are easily confirmed via the Internet. Most hard-working Vermonters don't have time to get outraged over this sort of silly allegation.

Similarly the Globe photo of a white-picket-fenced cemetery is a fun, and gossipy, tall tale not supported by facts. The US government publishes aerial photos of most U.S. farmland, and has done since about 1938. This data, too, is on the Internet, and makes clear what most Hartland residents already know. The picturesque white picket fence, and charming cemetery sign, and stately trees in the Globe's photograph, were installed in 1983 by a nice lady from Beverly Hills, CA, named Stacey Sevano, whose husband was a TV producer and former manager for Frank Sinatra. Stacey rarely visited the farm, sold after two years, and according to local lore first came to the farm driving a 1955 T-Bird. Her T-Bird has more historical significance than anything so many millions of Globe and Yahoo viewers saw on the Globe's front-page photo. I don't under-estimate the importance of Stacey Sevano's contributions to history. I would love to hear some of her memories about Frank Sinatra. However the stage set she built in Hartland, VT, in 1983, is simply not the same as 1770 history.

Yes, I am moving some Aldrich graves from 1770-1853. These graves were placed on an open and tilled farm field, according to local custom. Then, before the family departed in 1853, they placed three headstones. Now, after 150 years of weather, and more recent acid rain and vandalism, these are all badly damaged. One stone is a 5% fragment, and was found buried with 95% gone. One is a 55% fragment, with 45% gone. All three are being restored in Boston, and the graves relocated to a new and protected site several hundred feet distant. The Aldrich family supports this move. Most people in Hartland do too, and take the reasonable view that -- with 700 or 800 such tiny private family cemeteries in Vermont -- family members and property owners have the sole right to make decisions about how these should be treated.

Anyway that's the summary. No Aldrich veteran of 1812. The ancient cemetery is mostly a Hollywood stage set. The graves were in an open field and are being moved to a more protected site, with Aldrich family support.

I admired that you -- more than many other outside-Vermont sources -- brought some welcome humor and skepticism to this gossipy Boston Globe report. Come up and visit. We have some 800 lb bales of hay for sale.

Best regards,


Michel Guite
South Meadow Farm

I just might have to make a visit! Though I'm not sure what I'd do with 800lbs of hay... Now, if we were talking about fresh maple syrup, that would be another story.

All in all, this is a perfect case study reinforcing the need to question virtually every word written in the newspaper. My thanks go to Michel for giving us this behind-the-scenes view.

America Urges Government to 'Do Something!'

I have previously argued that gridlock in Washington is one of the last (short-term) lines of defense against rampaging attacks on individual rights in day-to-day politics. It turns out that this isn't a popular view among a majority of Americans.

From today's Boston Globe, we find the following:

While half of Americans disapprove of how Democratic leaders in Congress are doing their job, a majority believes that one-party control of Capitol Hill and the White House will be good for the country, according to a new survey.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released yesterday found that 47 percent approve of the job Democratic congressional leaders are doing and 50 percent disapprove.

But 59 percent say that Democratic control of the House, Senate, and presidency will be good for the country, while only 38 percent say it will be bad for the nation.

Although 50% of Americans think that the Democrats in Congress are performing poorly, 59% think that finally having them control both the Legislative and Executive branches will be a good thing. I scratched my head about that one for a bit, until I realized that those 59% of Americans may not necessarily care what the government does, as long as it does something.

This is a perfect example of the pragmatic, nanny state mentality that so many people have today. They may recognize that the actions of the current leadership are bad, but in the same breath state that maybe things will be better if they can do more, with less resistance.

It turns out that Gus Van Horn saw a similar case today, but drawing from a different set of facts. Commenting on a story of a recent crackdown on free speech by Burma's dictator, and one reader's view that it isn't socialism but instead the selfishness of the dictator that is the cause of the trouble, Gus says:

I have often spoken of a "dictator fantasy" in which people like this apologist for socialism (or Obama's more fanatical supporters) seem to think that the despot they want in power will rule as he, personally, sees fit. This is clear evidence of a lack of principled thought, and the proliferation of people with this fantasy is a direct result of the prevalence of the philosophical approach of pragmatism.

Perhaps the ineffectual (and, in fact, damaging) Democratic Congress is benefiting from the honeymoon glow of Obama's election, or that people are assuming that Congress will simply follow the lead of The One, because he has the Change We Need. But those of us who value our liberty can see that a desire for single-party rule under the banner of "Do something! Anything!" is recipe for disaster.

If things go as badly under an Obama administration as they could--if he gets all of his horrendous policies implemented and leads us into The Great Depression II--will those who suffered from the "dictator fantasy" wake up and find that "this isn't the despot we wanted!!"? Or will their pragmatism lead them to accept that, just like FDR, Obama did all he could, and he should be lauded as a hero?

Massachusetts Rejects Second Tea Party

With the three statewide ballot questions yesterday, MA voters were presented with variations on a theme. That theme was "Individual rights... essential or expendable?"

1. Should the state income tax be abolished? (Do individuals have the right to keep the money they earn, or is the government justified in seizing it?)
2. Should possession of small amounts of marijuana be made a civil fine rather than a crime? (Do individuals have the right to do what they will with their own bodies?)
3. Should greyhound racing be abolished? (Do property owners have the right to use their property however they see fit as long as they don't violate another person's rights, or do dogs have rights that trump a man's rights?)
   

In this land that was a seat of the Revolution, with great men like John and Samuel Adams proudly fighting for liberty, the voters answered with a confused, weak, conflicted muddle that amounted to "hunh?"

The proposal to abolish the income tax was defeated overwhelmingly, and greyhound racing was banned. On the other side, holding small amounts of marijuana will now only be grounds for a civil penalty.

Overall, this is disappointing, but not at all surprising. It simply shows the extent to which people no longer think in principle. What they do respond to, however, is base emotionalism and arguments from fear.

Question 1
Unions--especially the teacher's union--raised significant amounts of money to oppose Question 1 and incessantly ran TV and radio spots playing on irrational fears that ending the income tax would bring with it the end of life as we know it. They described school closings, layoffs of firemen and police, crumbling roads, etc. In essence, they said "Think of the children!", and "Imagine your house burning down with no firemen to save you!"

This appeal worked both because people use pragmatism and emotion as decision-making tools, and also because there was no principled defense of property rights given by Question 1 proponents.

The initiative, spearheaded by the Committee for Small Government, has Libertarian Carla Howell as its leader. True to those Libertarian roots, they never bothered to present a reasoned argument for why the state income tax is wrong. They stated that "government is too big" as if that was all that needed to be said. They spoke of government waste, how voting against the measure would send the "please give us more of the same" message, and how the average resident would retain nearly $4000.00 of their own money each year. Those are all true statements; true but insufficient.

But when confronting an opponent that plays to base fears and relies on the ingrained reliance of the populace on the nanny state, a principled repudiation of taxation is needed, founded on the fundamental right to property. Howell and the CSG failed to do that.

Questions 2 and 3
The other two questions were not as obviously fundamental, but nevertheless, dealt with individual rights.

Massachusetts voters chose to reduce the prohibition of marijuana. Though it doesn't go far enough, this is a positive sign that people still respect the fact of another person's right to their own body. That Question 2 passed likely says more about the evolving cultural acceptance of the drug than it does of the public's grasp of the individual rights issue. But in this election year, we must take what small glimmer of a silver lining we can get.

On the other hand, responding to the emotional appeal to protect cute little doggies, the voters chose to revoke the right of businessmen to choose dog racing as their business. Some voters explicitly think that dogs somehow have individual rights that compete with a man's, and thus it is moral and just to ban the practice in the name of dog safety. But the majority of voters simply didn't consider that a dog track owner has a fundamental right to run his business, and that dogs are property. As such, no one has the right to outlaw that or any other business.

Just as the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech, even if it is speech that is abominable or disgusting, property rights guarantee that one is free to dispose of his property as he wishes, even if it's in a way that others find reprehensible, as long as he does not violate any other person's rights.

The Bottom Line
Massachusetts voters missed a golden opportunity to stand up and fight, in principle, for their property rights, both in keeping the money they earn and operating a business of their choosing. Nearly 235 years ago, Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty protested the Crown's interference in the economy of the Colonies by dumping 45 tons of tea into Boston Harbor. Yesterday, the citizens of Massachusetts were handed the chance to throw off one of the many yolks of tyranny anround our necks, and we responded by saying we like it just fine where it is.

Obama: Healthcare is a Right

In the debate tonight, Obama just told us that health care is a right. Not a good to be purchased, but a right. This means that those who provide it have a duty to provide it. Who pays? He didn't say. But who do you think pays?

Sure, it wasn't the most offensive thing said by either candidate -- though it was up there -- but for some reason I was still shocked that he came out and openly stated his Physician Enslavement Policy like that.

If you happen to be curious why such a policy is both impractical and immoral, take a look here.

Failure of the Free Market for Philly Schools? Hardly.

In a June 29th article in the Washington Post, Keith Richburg reports:

Six years ago, the Philadelphia School District embarked on what was considered the country's boldest education privatization experiment, putting 38 schools under private management to see if the free market could educate children more efficiently than the government....

[The plan] was vehemently opposed by many in the community who feared that their schools were being used essentially to test an unproven theory: that using market principles, the private sector could manage schools and make more progress at lower expense than the government.

This sounds pretty good and readers of this blog would agree that it's clear that a fully free market in education would do a better job all around. Of course the reason this is now a story is because the effort has apparently been a major failure:

This month, the experiment suffered a severe setback, as the state commission overseeing Philadelphia's schools voted to take back control of six of the privatized schools, while warning 20 others that they had a year to show progress or they, too, would revert to district control.

"They had an unprecedented opportunity to turn things around in Philadelphia . . . and they failed miserably overall," added ... a former public school teacher. "If you're really trying to turn around public schools in your city and do it right, you should not even spend a minute looking at privatization."

Wow. That sounds pretty cut and dried. They tried the free market and it failed. But did it? Did the government essentially sell off the schools to fully private interests and relinquish all control, allowing market forces to govern curriculum, tuition, budget, hiring and firing of teachers and administrative staff?

The answer is an unequivocal no. There was absolutely nothing like the free market at work here. The government awarded contracts to private entities like Edison Schools to take over the day-to-day management of certain schools. Edison was apparently able to set budgets, but the money came from the government coffers. The students were still "public school" students, paying no tuition. I haven't been able to find any reports on this aspect, but I'm assuming that the unionized teacher contracts were not touched. The curriculum was still government-approved.

Does any of this sound like the free market? Is turning over a government bureaucracy to be run by contractors in any way an example of capitalism, of free competition? No, of course it isn't. It's a straw man that's as doomed to failure as the government-run schools themselves, but with the convenient scapegoat of a "greedy corporation" to attack when things go bad.

Still, what's nearly as bad as this -- and is perhaps a glaring condemnation of the public school system itself -- is that none of the reporting in the mainstream media questions the use of the words "privatization" or "free market" in this context. How anyone could look at the situation, and the group of bureaucratic temps playing with taxpayer Monopoly money, as an example of the failure of the free market in education is simply unfathomable. And yet, so profound is the absence in popular culture of reason or any real understanding of property rights and economics, that well-respected newspapers can print this garbage, and the public willingly eats it up without question.

In regards to the attempt at privatization of some public schools in the first place, one of the main reasons it was a half-assed failure is because it was done out of sheer pragmatism. No discussion of the principles of individual rights or property rights was had, and no fundamental questions were raised about the immorality of forced redistribution of wealth to fund education. No one asked "What is the proper role of government, if any, in education?" The level of thought that was given can be summed up thusly: "This capitalism thing seems to work sometimes, so maybe we should try it here." And because all involved had such a pitiful understanding of what true laissez-faire capitalism is, they thought that awarding a taxpayer-funded government contract to a group of parasitic pseudo-bureaucrats was capitalism.

No wonder the entire adventure has been a failure.

Institutionalized Snooping in Sweden

A very interesting article was posted at USA Today, How much do you make? It'd be no secret in Scandinavia.

Every year, Sweden publishes everyone's income tax returns. So do Finland and Norway. And nobody really cares.

Magnus Graner, state secretary for Sweden's Justice Ministry, says people's tax returns are available for viewing in a series of "tax calendars," or books, each year.

"If it's what you want to do, you can see what your brother-in-law made, your neighbor made," Graner says. "Not everybody does it, although we joke about it and say, 'Have you checked on your future in-laws?' No one in my family has done it — I don't think."

Sweden's policy of making tax returns public — as in Finland and Norway — stems from a tradition of open records and transparency in government, except in cases of national security and some aspects of criminal investigations.

"The right of public access to documents is laid down in the constitution," Graner says of Sweden's practice since the 18th century.

On the surface, this seems to be a severe invasion of privacy, and a perversion of an otherwise good idea, namely transparency in government. What is obviously missing in their formula is that while the government has the records, it is data about individuals that they are publicizing. It's certain that the overt socialism of that region makes such a policy not only possible but expected:

Making the data public demonstrates the Scandinavian tradition of jantelag, which translates roughly as nobody is better than anyone else, says Veera Heinonen, spokeswoman for the Finish Embassy in London.

"Finland is a very egalitarian country, and it's a very high-tax society, so it provides checks and balances," Heinonen says.

She says people's earnings can be a good source of gossip. Is anybody embarrassed? "Well, maybe some chief executives," she says. [bold added]

I truly can't penetrate how egalitarianism and high taxes constitute checks and balances. Is the check being provided the societal disincentive from making money? Is redistribution of wealth the "balance"? I don't understand. That's a tangential issue, though.

The article correctly points out that US law forbids such disclosures, as well as the outrage that would result if such a policy was implemented here.

By contrast, U.S. law prohibits releasing anybody's tax information. Imagine the howl if the IRS put tax returns online, so co-workers, neighbors and mothers-in-law could see what someone earns.

But what is the fundamental reason why we would reject such a policy here? Is there a principle at work in the desire for tax records privacy, or is it simply an embarrassed knee-jerk reaction?

There is a fundamental issue at work here, but it isn't being applied consistently or explicitly. As individuals, we do have a right to keep things private. Whether our government recognizes it or not, we have a right to our private property. All of it.

This means that we have a right to keep all of our income, to not have it taxed, and certainly to not be required under threat of guns and imprisonment to report said income to the government and surrender significant portions of it. If our government was proper--one of objective laws and not of men--this issue would not only be non-existent, it would be inconceivable.

But in our mixed economy, we have already conceded the basic principle--our right to property-- that would protect us from such governmental invasions. We already allow the seizure of our assets every April 15th, and insidious and destructive interventions into our lives every other day of the year. In terms of releasing income data specifically, SEC rules require that corporate executives and boards already publicly release all salary, bonus and stock profits.

In principle, it is just a small extra step for the IRS to publish all the information they already collect. The only thing stopping it is a half-remembered shred of dignity that America tenuously clings to.

With full protection of property rights, the "right to privacy" would be redundant, and likely would never even be considered; certainly not to the extent it is today, and if it was, courts and laws would treat it as an application of property rights.

Only in the face of intrusive government meddling and appropriation of our property do we start to be concerned with privacy rights. Until we realize that we have willfully given away the one core right that would protect us, our quibbling about which bit of personal information the government can make public and which it can't is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Boston City Hall Takes on.... Fat?

No, not childhood obesity or anything like that. The city of Boston has finally gone and done what we have all been clamoring for, hoping for... they have banned trans fats.

Well, Praise Jeebus!

Honestly, I haven't really looked into this except to know that it's yet another example of nanny state buffoonery. I have heard that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is not far behind, of course. I'm honestly curious what the next Fad Ban of the Moment will be.

High fructose corn syrup? Nah... I think the thing has to have direct health consequences, not just a link to fatness.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the next Fad Ban in Boston (or MA) will be something environmental. Something that has to do with a carbon footprint, or something else equally absurd.

The Smoking Ban: Protecting Us from Ourselves, Since 2004

I live in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a place where the government goes above and beyond the call of duty in trying to protect us from ourselves.

A few years ago, Boston enacted a smoking ban in all bars and restaurants, and a bit later, the whole state followed suit. As an Objectivist, I ranted against this absurdity to anyone who would listen. I don't smoke, but I fully support the right of business owners to run their establishments as they see fit, for patrons to frequent those establishments according to their own likes and dislikes, and for employees of those establishments to work there or not based on their own values and judgments.

Supporters of the ban really didn't have a leg to stand on when they tried to defend customers from second-hand smoke -- the argument of "well, just don't eat/drink there if you don't want to smell smoke" was too obvious and rational to fight against successfully.

The argument that got the most traction was in defending the poor service-industry workers who had to put up with the smoke. This was all based on them having a "right to work" as well as a "right to work in a safe environment", taken to mean their right to work was translated into a duty by a bar owner to make things "safe".

For some reason, raising the point that those workers didn't have to work in a bar that allows smoking was met with cries of outrage. I distinctly remember peoples' voices getting high-pitched and frantic, with whines of "but EVERY bar allows smoking! What is a waitress going to do if she doesn't want to work with second-hand smoke? She'll starve!"

So the law passed, and smoking was banned.

Then, as a father nearing middle age who rarely goes out to bars anymore, I saw what a difference it makes in my going-out experience. I meet up with old friends in Boston maybe once a month at most. Going into an old Irish bar or dive that we used to frequent when I was in my mid-20's (oh soooo long ago...) is an entirely different thing now. I don't have to immediately throw my toxic jeans and shirt into the laundry when I get home, and take a 45 minute shower just to get the burned-in smoke smell out. My eyes don't burn when I'm at the bar. My voice doesn't get hoarse. It's awesome.

Would I change the law now, even though I love the small impact it has had in my life?

Yes, in a heartbeat.

If there was a market for non-smoking bars, it would have been established as an alternative before. If the market has since shifted and there is greater demand for it now that people have seen the change, repealing the law now may actually allow both smoking and non-smoking bars to flourish.

But even if it goes back to the old way, where most good bars -- the ones where the food/drink/people are the best, the popular ones that people want to go to -- are smoke filled and make my eyes water, I'd still rather have that than knowing that my momentary enjoyment of clean air is at the expense of the individual rights of businessmen, employees and customers alike.

So as much as I hate smelling like I rolled around in an ashtray upon leaving a bar, I say repeal the smoking ban!