It’s fairly clear from the lyrics that the writer of the song believes that Fauci is far more than a sad little man.

Some feel safe, and some feel healed
But they’ll all hold his hand as he makes the kill

When the truth comes out, he’s gonna burn in hell

And, of course, the line from the refrain:

You better run now while you know you can

There’s no reason to say something like that to someone who is merely sad and little.

Or is there? Is evil all devil horns and mustache twirling? Or is a fair amount of evil banal, as Hannah Arendt noted: people doing what they think is right, or “just following orders”?

How many evildoers wake up, look at their reflection, and say, “Oh, you devilishly handsome monster—are we going to do evil things today, or what?”

Fauci’s diary entries certainly read like the thoughts of a sad little person. Then again, what he did to orphaned children in one experiment, and beagles in another, was true evil.

I think I know what you guys will say, and I think you know what I will say. But I will just let you have at it in the comments!

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A little bee landed on my knee.

Okay, that’s cool. He can land on my knee. I’m sure he’ll be off and about his business soon enough.

But he wasn’t. He just hung out.

He walked all around my leg.

He wasn’t really doing much. His antennae were moving a little, but he didn’t appear to be trying to find anything or eat anything.

He was just chilling.

He stayed for about 20 minutes!

Then I coaxed him onto my thumb.

So he just walked around on my thumb for a while.

He flew off once, but then he came right back and stayed for ten more minutes!

I am not a bee-ologist…

I don’t even know if the bee was really a baby or just a small species.

I assume “he” is okay and I am not misgendering him. ;-)

Do any bee experts know what was going on here? Half an hour seems like a long time for a bee to just hang out on a human’s leg, even on a warm July night.

Was he looking for something? Exploring just for the heck of it?

Was he trying to get my help? (Maybe his friend Timmy was trapped down in a well?)

Or did he just love me?

Help me out here.

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I got up early (as I always do) and immediately started making this post. (I won’t actually make it live for a few hours, since not everyone is awake yet.)

Making a meme post straight out of bed reminded me of the “Time to Make the Donuts” Dunkin’ Donuts commercials. I was going to finish that sentence with “from the 80s,” but when I looked it up, I learned that they ran until 1997!

And do you know why they stopped? Not because the commercials or their iconic mustachioed character had gotten stale, but because that’s the year Dunkin’ Donuts stopped making their donuts fresh at the store. Their business model changed to centralized baking, so continuing those commercials would have been dishonest.

Now, their donuts are delivered by truck, either “fresh” or par-cooked, to be reheated in a small on-site oven. No wonder they’re so terrible. (If you want real donuts, go to Paula’s in Buffalo, NY. Trust me.)

In fact, Dunkin’ Donuts isn’t even Dunkin’ Donuts anymore. Now, they’re just Dunkin’. (Did I know that? I don’t think I knew that.) They make most of their money on coffees and breakfast sandwiches, and the donuts are an afterthought or impulse buy.

Oh, and their coffee is pretty lame too. I can make an iced latte ten times better at home. And yet Dunkin’ is crowded with people every day. Why?

Oh well.

Time to make the meme post.

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Big to small, urban to semi-rural, loud to quiet, sunny all year to cloudy and cold for more than half.

One of the smaller changes we encountered was private trash pickup. I just took for granted that garbage collection was one of the many things that governments monopolized. The cities of Phoenix and LA certainly did.

We moved into our house, started getting utilities switched into our name, and, wait … we actually get to choose from among competing trash services? We can compare prices? Read reviews? Ask our new neighbors which they prefer? Amazing!

And we won’t get taxed an indeterminate and ever-increasing amount for unreliable monopoly trash service? Something for which we have no recourse, except to “vote the bums out” … in favor of new bums who won’t change a thing?

What sort of magical place had I moved to?

Okay, so I don’t want to overstate my case. The county in which we live monopolizes just about everything else, and it has one of the highest effective property tax rates in the country. And I also know that trash service is one of the easier services to move from government to competing private firms. (Easier than, say, the sewers.)

But hey—let’s take the win.

Anyway…

We checked the prices, and the guys with the blue bins were way cheaper than the guys with the green bins. We looked around—more houses had blue bins than green. Sold! We went with the blue-bin guys.

For the first fourteen years—oh goodness, has it been that long?—we had no cause to regret the choice. Their prices have gone up, but no more so than the green-bin guys. They continue to be cool about the occasional extra bag or object that doesn’t quite fit in the bin. They would’ve only charged us ten bucks to take away our dead washing machine, but a scrapper got to it first.

But then, over the last year, something changed. The trucks started showing up later and later. Calls are frequently routed to an answering machine. Special pickups are delayed—sometimes by weeks.

“We’re backed up,“ they say.

This is a really clean neighborhood. There’s no HOA—everyone just behaves themselves. Everyone’s yard is nice. People plant pretty flowers. There are many beautiful trees. So, an old couch at the end of a driveway for three weeks sticks out like a sore thumb.

The homeowners—who take pride in keeping things nice—are embarrassed. One took to our neighborhood Facebook group to apologize. We were all understanding. Everyone knows what’s happening.

Then someone said, “Hey, there’s a new trash service.”

Enter the orange-bin guys.

I don’t know much about them. Our next-door neighbors (the same ones from the tree incident) just switched. Apparently, these new folks are offering a great introductory rate.

Will they be as good? Will they be better? Will they keep their prices low? I don’t know.

Will we switch? Will we wait and see how others in the neighborhood like them? We haven’t decided yet.

Private is always better.

That’s the beauty of the market—we get to choose.

Private firms are subject to market forces, which produce far better results than those achieved by any imposed monopoly government.

Private companies have to deal with competition. Everyone is trying to offer the best service at the lowest price.

Government officials have the opposite incentive. They want job security. They want more revenue. They could try to increase their efficiency, but the incentives to do so are weak, because it’s easier to raise taxes, and you cannot really stop them from doing so.

If your reply is “that is what elections are for,” you haven’t really been paying attention. Incumbent re-election rates are sky-high. Local taxes rarely go down. In our town, if we vote NO on the school budget, they’ll just keep holding the vote again and again until we vote YES. The budget never goes down, and it always gets approved. The house always wins.

(When I was doing research, one resource I found cited “democratic accountability” as a point in favor of government trash collection. Comedy gold!)

Private firms, by contrast, have the incentive to innovate. If they fail to do so, or if their quality drops … well, there are always some orange-bin guys waiting to fill the void.

Private firms are also less likely to charge you for something you don’t need. They can’t force you to buy their services, and they offer customers different levels of service depending on what they want.

Governments don’t adjust the taxes you pay for trash service, even if you use less of it, or produce virtually no trash at all. Everyone is forced to be a ‘customer.’ Everyone pays.

One objection to private trash collection is the phenomenon of “truck congestion”—multiple trucks driving through the same neighborhood. That has really never felt like a problem here. The blue-bin guys drive past the houses with green bins, and vice versa. Garbage trucks are always noisy, but they’re never here for long. Bada bing bada boom.

Noooo thanks.

Now, let’s compare our efficient, friendly, and self-correcting free market in trash pickup with something stupid my local government does: leaf pickup.

This is the northeast—there are lots of deciduous trees. A single mature maple might drop 100,000 leaves in the autumn. That’s great in the woods. On a lawn, not so much. The leaves have to go somewhere.

So, the town ‘offers’ (read: forces you to pay for) a leaf pickup service. Twice in the fall, they send around a big truck that looks like Noo-noo, the vacuum cleaner from Teletubbies. If your leaves are in a nice row at the end of your grass, parallel with the street, it hoovers them up. If not, it passes you by.

In order to get your leaves into that row, you have to rake or blow them there.

But what if you don’t have any trees in the front yard? What if they’re all in the back? It’s way too much work to move all those leaves to the front. At that point, it’s easier just to bag them.

What if you don’t have any trees at all? Why should you have to pay for a leaf service?

What if you do have leaves, but you like to put them into orange bags with jack o’lantern faces on them as an extra Halloween decoration? Why should you have to pay for the big Noo-noo vacuum if you don’t need it?

What if you have trees that don’t drop their leaves on schedule? Our neighbor has one weird tree that clings onto its leaves until December … long after the leaf pickup dates. (I should know—most of its leaves fall in my yard.)

Central planning doesn’t work.

Government planners simply cannot think of all the different permutations. They lack local knowledge. They’re never as smart as they think they are. They come up with ideas that suit some people okay and others not at all, and make everyone pay for it. Then they pat themselves on the back and keep their jobs whether they’re good at them or not. And when they retire in their late 50s, they collect a pension that their neighbors have to keep working into their late 60s (or later) to pay for.

If leaf collection were privatized, we would find out whether people really want it. What services would they pay for? What signals would they send to the market?

Maybe some would pay for a service similar to that which this town offers. Maybe some would pay extra to have a mini Noo-Noo deal with the leaves in the backyard. I guarantee some would just keep their money and deal with their leaves in their own creative ways.

It’s just leaf pickup. It’s just trash pickup. These are minor things in the grand scheme. Still, they are examples of a much bigger problem. Government isn’t better at anything. Government is a thief.

Let’s stop mincing words. Leaf pickup is stupid. It’s also theft and extortion, whether you have leaves or not.

At least garbage pickup is private here in my small neighborhood. I guess I should be grateful for that.

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Keep on keeping on!

The reason is reasonable, however. I have been writing (almost) all day, (almost) every day, for months. I am trying to do more than just post articles—I am laying the groundwork for some big things. (Or at least things that at least have the potential to be big.) And this time, I got so engrossed that I completely forgot what day it was.

I will spend the rest of today (and next week, and the next few months!) working on those things, but it’s #FreedomMusicFriday, which means we have to listen to some music!

For today, let’s listen to songs from a couple of Substacker musicians.

and are both freedom-loving humans, and that love comes out in every one of their songs, in one way or another. As such, my job today is easy: all we need to do is pick their most recent music posts, and we will find good music with themes of freedom, individuality, resistance to oppression, and all the other feelings and impulses we share.

’s approach—if I may be so bold as to attempt to summarize it—is to build individual strength and focus on the good rather than on the horrors of the world. As we know, happiness is contagious, and it makes the world a better place when we try to spread goodness rather than gloom.

And so, Jacqueline is asking you to do that. To “Be That Light.”

Every song on ’s album Ghost in the Machine has a freedom-related message of one sort or another. If you want to be free … if you hate oppression … if you’re trying to be a real human in the real world … her lyrics are for you. (Her music is on most streaming platforms, so it’s easy to add it to your playlists.)

Here is the title track from that album.

I know you will appreciate Jac’s and Tess’s messages, and I hope you dig their music as well.

Rock on, freedom humans!

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It is patently obvious, for example, that criminals ignore laws; thus, more gun laws will have little impact on criminals. Similarly, very few of the murders that take place in the US are committed with semi-automatic rifles, yet this class of weapon is the left's current obsession.

Robotic, virtue-signaling rank-and-filers may miss the obvious logical flaws at work here, but the cognoscenti do not. The leaders of the left—its ideological programmers, mouthpieces, and policy-makers—have a plan. Disarming law-abiding citizens isn't just a casualty of their push to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Disarming law-abiding citizens is the goal.

There are numerous reasons for this; three perhaps chief among them.

First, 99 percent of leftism is statist: holding that governments should be large, powerful, and exercise control over a large scope of human life. The state is a jealous god, and nothing opposes the power of the state quite like a well-armed citizenry. Widespread gun ownership among the law-abiding thus represents a fundamental threat to the left’s conception of how societies ought to be constructed.

Second, and related, leftism is primarily a collectivist phenomenon, and well-armed individuals taking charge of their own security flies in the face of collectivism. Rugged self-reliance is the first enemy of collectivism. Collectivists will more likely see police response as the proper solution, not individual response.

Third, widespread gun ownership is the biggest impediment to imposing the more complete version of leftism/socialism that the left’s cognoscenti truly want. People will naturally resist totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and higher levels of control and redistribution, but that resistance is nearly impossible if the people are disarmed.

(Note: When faced with the question of whether the leaders of a movement are being stupid or intentional, pick the latter. Many of the rank-and-file may have sincere motives or have merely failed to think everything through properly, but the leaders know exactly what they are doing.)

Yet there is another motivation that may possibly be at work here—a personality-driven or even biologically instantiated fear of armed, independent people. I am a layman when it comes to psychology, and the science for this is still in its early stages, so this currently counts as speculation. But as a philosopher, speculation about why things may be the way they are is part of my job.

There is a growing body of data indicating that personality, neurological differences, and other innate factors may cause people to incline to the left or right…

There are studies indicating the people on the right are higher in strength and sexual dimorphism. Certain areas of the brain are more active on people on the right and other areas more active for people on the left. (There is a chicken-egg question there, obviously, but the differences are striking.) Big-five personality-trait studies indicate that people on the left are higher in creativity, openness, and neuroticism and people on the right are higher in conscientiousness and disagreeableness.

It does not take a study to show what we can all see—that, in the aggregate, people on the right are more independent and people on the left are more focused on the tribe.

Similarly, classical liberals are less likely to care how you live (so long as you keep it away from their kids), whereas modern liberals are more likely to engage in social activism, with a view to changing everyone's behavior (what you drive, the size of your soda, whether you eat meat, the kind of house you live in, where you live [some leftists want suburbs quite literally abolished], the kind of school you go to, the kind of car you drive, whether you'd be willing to sleep with a transexual, etc.). Libertarians are obviously more tolerant of, and unconcerned by, individual choices than conservatives. But even conservatives are pikers in comparison to the busybody left.

Think about how stark the difference is. Why is it that calls for “gun control” come almost exclusively from the political left? People on the right do not want innocent people to be shot any more than people on the left do.

What drives one person to say, I do not want the ability to defend myself; I would rather leave that in the hands of authorities and another to insist that he absolutely must have the independent ability to defend himself, his family, his property, and his freedom? Such a fundamental difference seems to stray beyond ideology and into the territory of personality traits.

Gun control efforts mostly target the ability of law-abiding people to own guns. Gun rights advocates tend to treat that as stupidity, but what if it isn’t? What if there is a personality type, which inclines to the left, that is subconsciously more afraid of strong, independent, armed people than of actual criminals?

That seems hard to believe until you realize that they seem perfectly content to allow government officials to be the only ones in possession of weapons (as if that’s never gone horribly wrong in history). So … they’re not threatened by an armed government, but they are threatened by armed but otherwise law-abiding people?

Two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson certainly felt that he had observed such differences:

The division into Whig and Tory is founded in the nature of man; the weakly and nerveless, the rich and the corrupt, seeing more safety and accessibility in a strong executive; the healthy, firm, and virtuous, feeling confidence in their physical and moral resources, and willing to part with only so much power as is necessary for their good government; and, therefore, to retain the rest in the hands of the many, the division will substantially be into Whig and Tory.

and

Wherever there are men, there will be parties; and wherever there are free men they will make themselves heard. Those of firm health and spirits are unwilling to cede more of their liberty than is necessary to preserve order; those of feeble constitutions will wish to see one strong arm able to protect them from the many. These are the Whigs and Tories of nature.

At the end of this post is a 40-minute video by Bill Whittle talking about r/K selection theory and the possibility that it may play into political inclinations. The video is amusing because it is Whittle’s initial public exploration of the theory (he’s done a lot on it since) and his excitement is palpable and endearing.

Of course, such inquires are controversial and sure to irritate people. But what if there’s something to it? What if an independent, K-type strategy leads people to be more likely to want to own weapons, and a more collectivist r-type personality leads people to be afraid of the K types who own weapons?

It should be obvious even to the left that gun laws are not going to stop criminals any more than the war on drugs ended drug use. How could it not be?

It has to be obvious, then, that gun crime is inevitable, and gun laws will primarily impact law-abiding people whose guns are in a gun cabinet not bothering anybody. Except they are bothering the left, just by sitting there in the cabinet.

Why? Why are they so eager to disarm the law-abiding?

Perhaps the same stew of personality traits that leads a person leftwards is at work here too. (It's taking all my strength not to type the words, “Like frightened rabbits, they want to declaw the lions.” Oops!)

What do you think? Is it crime that lefties are afraid of? Or something else…?

1. Leftists and elite globalist types tend to have much lower birth rates.

2. In order to “reproduce,” they must claim your children through indoctrination in schools and elsewhere.

3. If we outbreed them AND don’t let them steal your children, we win.

It doesn’t solve all our problems, but it solves a lot. Thus, this meme is my favorite of all I saw this week:

And here are 19 more, because it’s #MemeMonday!

Fiction has power. Stories have had a deep impact on my own ideas. And DUST is always good for some freedom-oriented themes.

They also make some really moving stories. How many of you remember this one?

I found a good one for us to watch: Decksdark. It is solid work, and rather touching.

I don’t need to point out the freedom-oriented messages. They’re obvious. However, I will have an exit question after.

(16:00; language warning)

Focus in on one line, from the radio broadcast near the beginning:

“We all know that it is unacceptable for people to be living outside the program.”

Outside of voluntaryists and anarchists, most people in the freedom movement hear that and think, They shouldn’t be able to do THAT to people.

In other words, that is government going way too far.

I am sorry to be blunt, but that viewpoint is morally unsupportable. The correct statement is

No one should be able to impose ANYTHING upon others without their consent.

If you trespass the person, property, or liberty of another, you are rightly subject to a defensive response proportional to your act. That is different. That is not what is going on here. This is one group of people deciding what shall be done to another group of people who have NOT trespassed anyone else.

Why should anyone be able to do anything to such people—to peaceful people—without their consent?

If you support any involuntary governance whatsoever—any taxes, any laws, any system to which people did not give valid consent—you are supporting something that cannot morally be justified.

And until humans start to realize that, situations like that in Decksdark are inevitable, especially as technology continues to advance.

So, if you believe that kings, officials, or voting majorities ought to have the ability to subject peaceful people to any transaction, agreement, authority, or encroachment upon their person, property, or liberty, please tell me why. Please tell me how you support that morally.

CODA:

I also screened another Dust short this morning. It was decent, but not great, so I kept looking and found Decksdark. However, the same message and question can be applied to Nano, below. So, if you are in the mood to watch another, here it is.

(14:31; violence, sexual situations {no nudity})

Not too long ago, I read a post in which someone was taking Boomers and Gen Xers to task for not giving our children more chores. As a father myself—the kind who reflects deeply on his own performance as a parent—I was forced to admit that my wife and I are guilty of this. Did we give our child some chores to do? Of course. Did we give him enough? Probably not. And I know we’re not alone.

How did this happen?

Once upon a time, children were an economic asset. One more child meant one more person to work the farm, prepare food, and help raise the younger children. Human labor was essential to survival.

Things are very different today. The Industrial Revolution gave us better tools. Electricity and the internal combustion engine dramatically increased our productivity. With each advance, more could be accomplished by machines, reducing the need for human-powered production.

We complain about the economic situation today (and there is plenty to complain about), but the truth is, our living standards are at historic highs. We have more labor-saving devices than ever before. The costs of these devices continue to fall. Indeed, notwithstanding the recent inflation, the cost of nearly everything has continued to fall for the last century or more. As a result, we have more time to do things other than work from dawn till well after dusk.

All of this has trickled down to children. They are no longer essential to a family’s basic economic survival. They too have more free time (and with the advent of computers and social media, they have extremely diverting ways to spend it).

Schools are continually adding options for sports and other extracurricular activities with which children can occupy their time. Private entities add more choices: Dance. Cheer. Martial arts. Travel teams. There are more diversions than ever before.

Some of this is fine, but too much and children’s time becomes over-allocated and pathologically structured. Some children choose this; others are goaded into it by their parents (for psychological reasons that deserve separate treatment). Add in school and homework, and modern children still end up being pretty busy. It’s a lot to manage.

Meanwhile, we parents have already learned how to be productive. We know how to take on one more task and get it done. What’s one more load of dishes or laundry? Little Johnny or Janie is upstairs doing homework, or unwinding after a day of school, sports, and whatever else. It’s almost as much work to get complaining kids to do chores as it is to just do it ourselves. Sometimes, doing it ourselves feels like the path of least resistance.

Moreover, because of continued increases in human affluence, we have more disposable income than in decades and centuries past. As a result, we have lawn services, housekeepers, and daycare. (My family doesn’t, but lots of people do.) As a result, we have less need to get our own children to babysit or mow the lawn, or to pay a neighborhood kid a few bucks to do it. (Increased affluence has also changed children’s attitude towards such work: they are no longer satisfied by the pittance we were willing to accept in the 70s and 80s. Neighborhood babysitters today ask for real money!)

There are other reasons too, and there is plenty more to say about this, but that’s enough for now. Diagnosing why this has happened is less important than examining the effect it may have on our children.

Doing the Right Thing

In simplest terms, there are two main types of morality:

Enforceable morality: acts for which one may rightly be held accountable by means of protective force or restorative action. Typical examples include assault, theft, property damage, and failure to discharge duties for which one is directly responsible.

Doing-the-right-thing morality (a.k.a. prosocial behavior): all the things we do to be good people and get along with others. Failure to do these things will not produce any sort of protective response (no one may rightly force you to be polite), but they do help you be a likable person and a welcomed member of a community.

Here, our focus is on the latter. Helping out, pitching in, and doing one’s share are part of doing the right thing.

But are children born with that knowledge? I have recently come to believe that when it comes to pitching in and doing one’s share, there are two modes: child and adult.

Child mode

I was thinking about all this while cleaning our house last week in preparation for our annual Independence Day party. The kids—as will come as a shock to no one who has raised any—were nowhere to be seen. In fact, they were sound asleep, as is frequently the case at 11 AM on a Saturday morning.

It’s hard for me to be too judgmental about that. I can recall the same thing from my own youth—waking up to the sounds of weekend cleaning only to pass out for another three hours and avoid all of it. I’m sure I was terribly broken up by the fact that I missed out on hours of scrubbing and dusting and vacuuming!

And that, in part, is the point here. Kids need to be socialized to understand why it is important to help out, and a brief look at the normal cycle of childhood development may help explain why.

The helpless baby

When our children are first born, we parents do everything for them. This is how it must be … and it sets the stage for what is to come.

The helpful tot

For a period of time, little children want to do chores. They aren’t thinking that they ought to pitch in and do their fair share, however. They just want to be doing whatever mommy or daddy is doing at that moment. They want to be with you, and to learn from you.

It is cute and sweet … and it doesn’t last.

Aw man, do I have to?

Sooner or later, children begin to complain when given chores to do.

In a sense, they can hardly be blamed for this. During their first few years of brain development, everything has been done for them. We feed and clothe and bathe them. The house, the food, the electricity, the toys, the HVAC, the hot water … these things just appear. It’s magic.

We have quite literally infantilized them. Is it any wonder, then, that they are shocked when asked to pitch in?

Only when asked

In the next advancement, the child no longer gripes at every chore, but they also only do what is asked. They do not yet offer to help. And looking independently for things that just need to be done is even further off. (For some, this doesn’t happen until they get their own places and find out the hard way!)

As an adult, it is easy to lose perspective about this. Offering to help is the right thing to do. I know how to do the right thing. Why don’t they?

Here too, I have come to believe that if we expect our children simply to know this, we may be underestimating the degree to which they are conditioned by a childhood in which things just magically appeared.

Throughout their formative years, they watched you go off to work each day, but they didn’t actually experience the labor and long hours themselves. Until they become adults and get their first jobs, such toil exists only in the abstract. You do the work of making ends meet. They only experience its effects. The fridge is full. The lights are on.

When they open presents on Christmas morning, we tell them that Santa brought them. We do not tell them about the 150 hours of shopping, wrapping, cooking, cleaning, and planning that go into creating a magical Christmas. We don’t tell them about the stress; we shield them from it.

In fact, we intentionally work to protect them from most of the harsh realities of adulthood. We try to preserve their innocence and allow them to be children for that preciously short time during which childhood is possible.

Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, when they stay in child mode a little longer than they should.

Adult mode

As adults, most of us know to do the right thing.

When we go over to a friend’s house for dinner or a party, we offer to help. We ask what we can bring. When we are overnight guests, we try to do even more to earn our keep. Our hosts may refuse and tell us to relax, but we at least offer.

Sometimes, when appropriate, we don’t even ask. We just do the dishes or clear the table because it is the right thing to do. We don’t make our hosts wait on us hand and foot, just as we wouldn’t let them be the only ones who pay every time we all go out to a restaurant.

Chores and self-governance

As properly formed adults, we would never dream of living in someone else’s house for weeks, months, or years without doing our share. An able-bodied adult guest who doesn’t pitch in on rent, food, utilities, and chores is a mooch.

A baby who doesn’t pitch in on rent, food, utilities, and chores is just a baby. The interesting part is the transition. When—and how—does a child learn to be a proper adult?

If we do not teach them as children, they will still learn eventually, though it may involve a few gradual realizations (or rude awakenings) as young adults.

Either way, it is important that they learn. A self-governing society requires self-governing adults:

(In)dependence

In 1848, Frederic Bastiat defined the state as that “great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

He was right. The state takes money by force and distributes it as it sees fit. In a democracy, people can attempt to vote themselves a share of the loot, and it is economically rational to vote to receive more than one pays in taxes. The result is a grasping scrum that resembles Bastiat’s definition well enough.

What does the world look like without a system that allows some to live—by force of law and the power of a government gun—at the expense of others? Who does well in such a world, and who does not?

We know the answer. Productive, self-directed people thrive.

People will continue to help the truly needy, of course, but moochers become pariahs. That certainly isn’t anything we would want for our children.

Cooperation

Productive people seek each other out for further collaboration. This is how businesses form and work with other businesses to create innovation and productivity. Cooperation is the human superpower.

Such cooperation is obviously happening now, but it becomes dramatically more important in a world in which governments are not doling out subsidies or granting special treatment to businesses. Zombie corporations, cronyism, and bailout queens cannot survive in such a world.

Children who have been raised to do their part will go on to form healthy businesses that can survive and thrive in a self-governing world.

Community and reputation

Throughout history, social norms have been a highly effective mechanism for regulating behavior. Stigma and ostracism can go too far, of course, but they play an important role in moderating disruptive behavior. In any human society, one’s reputation is often one’s most important possession.

Governments tend to atomize communities and impersonalize these forces. Today, it is not the disapproval of one’s fellows that one primarily fears, but the punitive hand of the state. Remove that hand, and reputation once again rises dramatically in importance.

This removal is precisely what advocates for a self-governing world seek. We wish to end the use of preemptive violence in human interactions and restore individual consent to its rightful place as the fundamental unit of moral concern.

Such a world requires self-governing individuals. Contributors. People who pull their own weight. People who understand the importance of having a good reputation and work hard to maintain their own.

Teach your children well

Teaching your children to contribute when they are young sets them up for success in life, whether we live in a self-governing world or not. I have come to realize my own mixed record in that regard, both as a parent and as a (former) child.

As a parent, it is tempting to get frustrated with the children in my life for not pitching in. For not offering to pitch in. For not seeking out ways to pitch in without me having to point out obvious tasks and project-manage all of it!

But if I want to be a self-governing person, I must also ask myself how much responsibility I bear for that situation. Yes, I became a parent during a time when the parenting zeitgeist and economic incentives have changed. Nonetheless, it is still ultimately on me to teach my children well, rather than blaming them for not knowing things.

Rabbit parents don’t do much to teach their babies. Go forth and eat grass, my son. Watch out for foxes. That’s pretty much the extent of it. Human children need to be taught—all the more so if we expect them to be true self-governors.

And yes, that starts with telling them to do their chores.

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Here is the description that came with the video, provided by Barlow Herbal Specialties:

This 1977 interview is from a documentary about Rene Caisse, a Canadian nurse who developed an herbal formula in the 1920s while caring for people with the c-word. 👩‍⚕️

She became known for tea 🫖 called Essiac (her last name spelled backwards) that she used to treat 300 to 600 cancer patients a week.

Rene’s clinic was so busy that some patients waited in ambulances to be treated by her. 🚑

One woman with cancer of the bowel was told by doctors in January that she’d “be gone when the snow melted.”

But after being 3 years of Essiac treatment, her cancer was gone and never returned.

Essiac is a blend of herbs passed to Rene from traditional Indigenous knowledge and refined through decades of hands-on use and observation.

The original formula is a specific combination of herbs traditionally prepared and taken together that includes:

🌿 Burdock root — long used to support the body’s natural cleansing pathways
🌿 Sheep sorrel — traditionally used to support cellular health
🌿 Slippery elm bark — known for its soothing, nutritive properties
🌿 Turkish rhubarb root — historically used to support elimination

My father Max Barlow, founder of Barlow Herbal, worked with Rene during the late 1960’s.

After their work together, he added watercress and blood root to her original four-herb formula and named it Essiac-20.

And it’s been one of our best-selling blends for 50 years.

Here’s a link to purchase our Essiac-20: https://barlowherbal.com/products/essiac-20

Today, a century after her work started, Essiac isn’t a trend. It’s part of a long lineage of traditional herbal knowledge passed down that once existed alongside modern medicine.

Some herbal formulas don’t disappear because they stop working. They disappear because they don’t fit the modern story.

Modern (Western, allopathic, mainstream) medicine has made many amazing breakthroughs. It has also given us many reasons not to trust it, as most of you well know.

So-called “alternative” medicine absolutely includes real cures and treatments with benefits. But there are also plenty of self-interested parties with a vested interest in convincing you that their (often overpriced) treatments work…

Some merely exaggerate the benefits, either out of genuine belief themselves, or wishful thinking coupled with financial interest.

Some are selling snake oil, and they know it.

And some have something real.

How can you tell the difference?

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• Paying rapt attention to the news cycle…

• Gnashing your teeth at every latest outrage…

• Spending every ‘spare’ moment airborne, tumbling down a conspiracy rabbit hole with no bottom…

All of those activities are understandable. All of them are, in a sense, worthy. There is technically nothing wrong with staying informed. Any outrage you feel is entirely justified. And most of the conspiracies are likely true and deserve to be exposed.

But here’s the thing…

Your outrage and attention aren’t likely to change much. The psychopaths will still be in power. Seventy-five percent of the population will still be highly programmable, and thus of no help to us. The outrages will still occur. And you will never be sure that you’ve found the bottom of the rabbit hole.

So why keep doing it?

Note that I am speaking here to the Remnant, not the masses. Plenty of others will keep living in that world. To whatever extent it serves a valuable purpose to keep paying attention, keep spreading the word, keep exposing the truth … there will still be plenty of people doing it.

Here’s what I am saying: Those efforts can spare YOU.

YOU can try something new.

You can criticize by creating, as says.

You can focus on exit-and-build, as people like Lujan and others are doing.

Or you can just try to build a beautiful life, as does and advocates.

And why shouldn’t you try to live a beautiful life? It’s your life. It’s the only one you get (at least in this particular body and form).

Your anger isn’t going to change what is going on. So why feel it all the time? We’ve been forced to give so much, against our will, to our psychotic overlords. Why give them that too? Why surrender our peace?

As Viktor Frankl said (drawing on experiences far more horrifying than anything we are currently going through), “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Why give that away too?

I end up back in that place myself sometimes. The outrages creep past the walls I have put up to keep them out, and I feel my blood begin to boil. But the boiling blood does nothing to stop the outrages. So then I remind myself not to give that to the psychotic weirdos who think we are their cattle to be corralled, controlled, and culled at their whim.

There are other ways to fight back.

I am struck, for example, by the way the Amish do it: buying land and having babies. They were 50,000 or so back in 1970. Now they are close to 500,000 and growing every day. And they are really nice and friendly, even to us “English” folks.

All of this in spite of the outrages. Outrages they pay little attention to. And given that lefties and effete globalists tend not to breed—relying instead on indoctrination and psychological capture to grow their ranks—the Amish plan may work out very well for them in another 50 years.

You don’t have to be Amish, obviously. There are lots of different ways to “fight back.” And some of the best ones don’t involve fighting at all. They involve building.

This morning, while thinking about all this, I ran across a recommendation from for a #FreedomMusicFriday artist.

Grant Ellman is a young, talented musician. He plays multiple instruments, composes and arranges his music, and shoots his own videos. His lyrics are entirely freedom-oriented and voluntaryist. His style is heavily reggae- and funk-influenced.

Whether you like that style of music or not, you cannot deny that his lyrics are pretty spot on. (Language warning):

Freedom is ours for the taking yea-a-a
History now in the making, say

Fuck the government, el gobierno
They only exist to take your money and your dinero
(You scared tho?)
I ain’t scared of nothing, I ain’t moving I ain’t budging
Lotta population trusting but thru the bullshit we be cutting
Assess the situation if you want liberation
No disinformation pollute your clear mind
Some be caught up in the lies
Must be all that fluoride, nighty night!
Keepin ‘em mindless, spineless, fine wit it
I got no time for this!
Takin’ a trip into the future
No master no slave
Gonna be living without rulers
By any measure we maneuver
No jab and no booster
Cuz we rasta man recruiters
And we villain prosecutors ay!

Read the rest on the YouTube page and watch/listen here. Freedom really is yours for the taking. It won’t be all the freedom we want and deserve, but it’s a start.

Here’s how it went down…

I was overdue for an oil change, so I took the car to a local shop. I prefer the outdoors, so I avoided the waiting room and instead sat under a tree with my iPad to get some work done.

An ant kept walking around on my jeans. I would gently blow him off, but he kept coming back again and again, as if he wanted to be my friend. Or maybe each was a different ant—I suppose I am not particularly good at telling them apart. (Why am I telling you about ants? I don’t know. I think they call it “establishing mood.”)

The Tire

Sitting there alone with my iPad and the ants, I happily assumed that the oil change would be done soon, so I could get on with my day. Then, the manager of the auto shop came over to my tree to deliver me and my new ant friends some “bad news.” In addition to discovering that the car’s air filters are filthy (I kind of expected that), they also found a bulge in one of the tires. (I went and checked for myself—it was big.)

Regular readers will recall that my family has had a lot of tire problems recently. A bulged tire and bent rim on a trip to Florida was followed in short order by a lost battle with a massive pothole. You know—a pothole that wasn’t fixed on roads that we are told only governments can possibly provide.

Annoying, yes, but a new tire won’t break the bank. Also annoying is the extra time the job will now take. I have a ton of things to do today—including putting the finishing touches on a landscaping project I have been doing as a surprise for my wife’s birthday. (I have been slaving away for two days, and I have to finish before she gets back from her trip!)

Since it will be two hours before the tire arrives from the warehouse, I decided to go to the Mexican restaurant across the street. (I am writing this there, as I eat my burrito.)

So there’s silver lining #1: I get to justify a lunch out at a really yummy place.

Silver lining #2: I found a ten-dollar bill floating in a pothole in the parking lot as I was walking here. So my lunch is (almost) free! (Wait, is the fact that it was in a pothole irony?)

But there is something better than either my chicken-and-chorizo burrito or the cash I found to pay for it…

We are going on a long drive this weekend, and we discovered the bulging tire before that trip. Before something bad happened. I would call that more than a silver lining. The term blessing in disguise seems more apropos.

Would we definitely have had a blowout on the freeway at 70 mph? Of course not. But a bulged tire makes the likelihood go up.

My wife has a way of approaching these things: She tries to foresee a bad thing that might happen in the future and act in the present so that it does not happen. I suppose that’s called prudence, though she is pretty darned deliberate about it. Like she’s doing alternative-timeline planning or something.

There are problems with being too careful and risk-averse, of course, but in general, the practice is sound. Which brings me to my second story.

The Tree

Once again, it begins with me sitting and writing on my iPad (I do a lot of that, as you might imagine). This time, I was in a big comfy chair in my living room, listening to a gale blowing outside.

Bam!

The noise wasn’t deafening, but it was … different. Different enough that I needed to go check. Even before I made it outside, however, I got a good look through the window: part of our large elm tree had fallen into our neighbor’s yard. I called up to my wife as I was heading outside.

“A branch from our tree just fell into Mike and Becky’s yard! A BIG branch.”

“Branch” doesn’t quite capture it, but in that moment, I couldn’t think of a better word. A third of the tree had sheared off at the trunk and come crashing down. All I could think of, as I was running outside, was,

Please, please, please … I hope no one was back there!

I came around the fence praying not to find our friends, or their teen daughter or two-year-old son, underneath the massive fallen limb.

Their pool fence was toast, and some outdoor furniture got crunched, but mercifully, no one was there. (As it turned out, they had already left for a vacation.)

Here are some pics for your amusement.

Neighbors from the other side, and from across the street, came to look and commiserate, but with the gale still blowing strong (and a newly unbalanced American elm towering above us), we didn’t stay long. We talked a bit about insurance, but all I could really say was, “Thank God no one got hurt.”

Our neighbors’ insurance will cover the damage to their property. We will cover their deductible. (We love our neighbors, and we don’t want them to be out of pocket for anything. And it’s the right thing to do, even though we technically don’t have to. More on that later.)

We, however, will not be so lucky. Insurance would cover us if the tree had hit our house or shed, but there’s no coverage for removing a damaged tree. The first estimate we got for said removal was ridiculously expensive, but the tree does have to go. Sadly, the damage is too extensive. It’s not going to make it.

But even if the tree were salvageable, we’d be fools not to learn a lesson from this.

Whatever it costs, this was a blessing in disguise. A danger was revealed in such a way that no one got hurt. Now, we have the knowledge to take action to ensure nothing bad happens in the future. This incident has allowed us to do some alternative-timeline planning. An ounce of prudence against a lifetime of regret. (What’s that fable about the Ants and the Grasshopper?)

So what does all this have to do with self-governance?

Freedom is not a top-down phenomenon, bestowed from on high. Freedom exists as a natural condition; governments can only interfere with freedom to one degree or another. (Even when the stated purpose of a government policy is rights-protective in nature, it still necessitates some other diminution of rights: taxation and restrictions applied, ex ante, on everyone, whether they’ve harmed others or not.)

The locus of freedom is the individual. Only the individual experiences freedom or diminutions thereof. But this also means that the individual must manifest freedom. If we’d like to remain free, each of us must behave in such a way that we do not interfere with the person, property, or liberty of others. That way, they will not be compelled to defend themselves in a way that reduces our freedom.

We must govern ourselves from within, lest someone else decide that we must be governed from without.

Self-governance, in other words, is about more than just heady discussion of private protection agencies and whether we call them “aggression-insurance agencies” or “rights enforcement firms.” (Wait … Rights Enforcement Firms: REFs, like referees in sports. Hey, I kind of like that! Anyway…)

Self-governance begins with each of us—with how we behave, the vibe we project, and whether or not we meet our responsibilities to others. It is, first and foremost, an individual phenomenon.

One very crucial aspect of self-governance, then, is figuring out how to solve problems (whenever possible) without involving third parties. So here, in no particular order, are a few pertinent takeaways from tires and trees.

Be neighborly.

We are blessed to have really good neighbors on both sides. We party together in the summer, break bread every now and then, and collaborate on yard projects of mutual interest.

I fully acknowledge that not everyone is so lucky. Some people end up living next to Bob McCrankypants, Sketchy Joe, or Gladys Kravitz, and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

But most of the time, it’s not that bad, and it is amazing what the occasional kind word or plate of cookies will do. Having good relations with your neighbors is the first line of defense against the meddling of a government overlord. The more problems we can solve in our own backyards, the better.

Have insurance.

Not every problem can be solved with a simple handshake, however. Sometimes, big, bad things happen. That is what insurance is for.

In a way, insurance is people helping people. It spreads risk among large groups so that no one person is ruined by a disastrous event. It is one of the most important private solutions for life’s big problems. (Just make sure to get policies from a reputable agency. Cut-rate agencies are not the bargain they seem, once it comes time to make an actual claim. Also, insurance in general would be far better without government regulations and cronyism, but that’s another article.)

Don’t make your problems into other people’s problems.

One of the best ways to preserve freedom is to live in such a way that you do not become a burden, hassle, or danger to others.

• This might be physical:
  Fix bad tires before you have a blowout and crash into someone. Don’t leave boards with rusty nails sticking up. (Accidents happen, but try to keep your things in good order.)

• It might be financial:
  Have good insurance. Pay your own way. (We all need help once in a while, but try not to make it a habit.)

• It might be emotional:
  Don’t subject the people around you to emotional turmoil. Try to find silver linings rather than dark clouds. (We all need a little grace once in a while, and we should seek help when we need it, of course. But others don’t need to swim endlessly in the pool of your personal turbulence!)

A little prudence (alternative-timeline planning) and a little work on ourselves are crucial elements of a self-governing life.

Life matters above all.

A philosophy of freedom begins with the importance of life. Life is the reason why anything matters at all.

A pool fence, a tire, an insurance deductible … these are just things. What matters is people. Relationships. Happiness. Love and friendship.

The means of living are important, but they aren’t the reason for living. People are irreplaceable, precious, and sacred. We should treat them as such.

The bottom line

Happy, healthy, self-reliant, prudent people with respect for one another are far more likely to be able to self-govern. We’re all works in progress, of course. But a focus on doing the right thing goes a long way.

Governments are terrible at everything. Building a better, freer life doesn’t begin with yet another government program. It begins with us doing our best.

If you’ve already seen this—Fauci’s newly released COVID diaries reveal bizarre fixation on fame as pandemic deaths mounted—then you will get it right away!

Here are some of the fuller quotes. Just sick!

“Press still hot and heavy about me. Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me.”
— April 7, 2020

“The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable.”
— May 21, 2020

“It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person[s] in the world.” (reported with original spelling/grammar preserved in some reproductions)

“Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written about me since I am so busy … seriously.”

“POTUS seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him. We are developing a very unique and interesting relationship.”

Curses to this wicked little man, and to the government that foisted his wickedness upon us.

(Language warning)

Happy #MemeMonday

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Here is their description:

“The Philosophy of Liberty” is an animated short film by Liberty International and Live and Let Live Movement. The film is based on the essay by Ken Schoolland which explores how the absence of violence and free and voluntary cooperation between individuals, or groups of individuals, are the key ingredients for a truly prosperous society. The film makes the abstract concrete by portraying these principles in action, using the aesthetics of the classic frontier town from the old American West to strip society back to its bare essentials. The visuals hearken back to a genre that’s been part of our collective imagination for generations. The role of authority in relation to the individual is portrayed here with a clarity that reveals how easily power can go astray when unchecked or unquestioned.

It is just five minutes long. Different people will feel differently about the animation (I think it’s okay, but not amazing), but the message is spot on.

In fact, it is so spot on that I have little to add (and nothing to correct), but I do have a question: why don’t more people just know this? Why didn’t I, once upon a time?

We go through life acting according to these principles. We defend our property and our lives. We feel the moral indignation when someone encroaches upon our person, property, or liberty without our consent. We know it’s wrong, deep down in our bones.

Why don’t we know it explicitly? Why can’t we recite these things from memory? It should have been a catechism taught to us from the time we could talk!

In fact … I am going to write such a catechism. (I’ll have to add it to my already insanely long list of things to do!)

Our schools, our culture, our parents have failed us by not making these lessons the most important thing we are ever taught. Just as we have failed our children. Maybe we can correct that in the generations to come.

This stuff is core knowledge, and ought to be treated as such.

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In “The Fallacy of ‘Argument from the Brochure’,’” we discussed the fact that not only does government do a poor job of protecting us from social ills, it is also frequently the worst source of those ills.

In this piece, we will look at a few examples in the area of pollution.

I. Government as Direct Polluter

State-run enterprises

Governments frequently own productive enterprises. This is more likely to be the case in socialist economies, but it is by no means limited to them.

Here are a few examples:

• oil and gas companies

• mining operations and steel mills

• factories and heavy industry

• rail, shipping, aviation, and other transportation systems

• agriculture and forestry

Typical harms include water and air pollution, spills, toxic waste, deforestation, soil degradation, and tailings contamination.

One can argue that these are productive and necessary functions—tasks that the private sector would likely perform if the government did not. And there is truth to that. However, as we will touch on later in this piece,

1. Governments are far less likely to be held accountable for environmental damage, and

2. The bigger the government, the dumber their ideas and the less they care about the damage done.

The massive industrial pollution in the Eastern Bloc is a representative example of utter disregard for environmental standards. The East Germans burned lignite coal and contaminated rivers. Some of the environmental ruin of Cold War-era Central Europe could be seen from space.

And speaking of the Cold War … The Chornobyl disaster was made possible by substandard technology (a pervasive problem in the USSR), perverse political incentives, and secrecy. The aftermath was compounded by political delays, more technological problems, and more secrecy. Totalitarian regimes are excellent at secrecy, incompetence, and perverse political incentives. Caring for the environment … not so much.

I was in the USSR for a month in 1991. There were no toilet seats in the men’s bathrooms in Kalinin (Tver) University—they had all been taken home by students to burn for heat. When people are poor—and in socialism, everyone is poor except party leaders—they don’t think about the environment. They think about survival. We would do the very same. (And anyone who thinks they’d somehow be nobler than that is a peculiar combination of ignorant and arrogant.)

Government’s operational footprint

The state, as an institution, has a massive environmental impact simply as a result of its normal operations.

Examples include

• government offices

• schools

• courthouses, law enforcement, prisons

• travel fleets

• procurement chains

Governments have multiple divisions (central, state, regional, local, etc.), each with its own footprint. Government facilities, personnel, and transportation use energy, emit air pollution, consume water, generate waste, encroach on habitat, and more.

If you believe that government is a necessary evil, then the issue will be one of scale: how can we ensure that governments cause as little environmental damage as possible?

If you believe that private agencies and smaller polities can provide all the legitimate services of government (security, justice, and roads) and do so far more efficiently and accountably, then government is just a giant rights-violating, consent-violating, environmental-destruction machine.

Military and national security

This one’s a doozy.

Let us set aside, for the time being, the environmental destruction caused by actual fighting. The environmental footprint of the world’s standing military forces, even in so-called peacetime, is enormous:

• fuel consumption

• overseas travel and operations

• development of WMDs

• infrastructure

• air and naval operations

• training, war games, and weapons testing

• munitions contamination

• burn pits

• land mines

• unexploded ordnance

• contaminated bases

• abandoned equipment

Nuclear weapons testing requires separate treatment, as it produces a broad range of environmental harms far beyond the immediate blast zones:

• radioactive contamination (air, soil, groundwater, and oceans);

• long-lived radionuclides (cesium-137, strontium-90, plutonium, and iodine-131) entering the environment and food chains;

• radioactive fallout dispersed globally;

• lasting human and animal health risks linked to contaminated environments (e.g., increases in thyroid cancers)

• contamination associated with mining, processing, refining, and storage of nuclear materials;

• and much more.

And then there’s the devastation of war and conflict:

• WMD

  • chemical

  • nuclear

  • biological

• battlefield damage

  • fire

  • trenching

  • bombing

  • habitat damage

  • scorched earth

• chemical pollution

  • fuel spills

  • spent ammunition

  • explosives residues

  • heavy metals

  • depleted uranium

  • solvents

  • industrial toxins

• defoliation

• sabotage

• ecological manipulation

• destruction of infrastructure (including secondary effects)

• water issues

  • naval warfare

  • sunken ships

  • oil spills

  • mines and explosives

  • harbor destruction

  • dam destruction/intentional flooding

This list could easily continue. One item that deserves special mention is biological weapons. Who but governments have the resources and perverse incentives required to research, test, store, and deploy biological agents that could kill … everyone on the planet?

Remind me again what government is protecting us from?

Public infrastructure

Governments tax (directly or through inflation) and then provide certain infrastructural systems, such as

• waste management

  • sewers and wastewater systems

  • landfills

  • incinerators

• roads, highways, and travel infrastructure

• public power generation

• etc.

Typical damage includes sewage discharges, chemical releases, leaks from aging infrastructure, leachate, air pollution, and more. Government is always described as the necessary solution to externalities (a.k.a. neighborhood effects, e.g., pollution, noise, etc.), but in all these cases, government is the externality.

As above, though some of these are necessary infrastructure services, private companies would provide them more efficiently and cheaply, and would be far easier to hold accountable for damage. And they would do it without the consent-violating coercive force of government.

Mega-projects and land transformation

Big government—with their unlimited supply of taxpayer and printed money—loves big projects:

• dams

• canals

• reservoirs

• irrigation systems

• eminent-domain development

• wetlands draining

• flood-control projects

Typical damage:

• habitat destruction

• river disruption

• species collapse

• sediment changes

• population displacement

• salinization

• subsidence

Here too, while some of these mega-projects can be helpful, central planners lack knowledge, price feedback, and normal incentives. Governments have captive populations whom they can tax at will. Governments are run by ambitious bureaucrats, myopic ideologues, and politically motivated operatives. And because they are playing with other people’s money, there is no end to the foolish projects they can undertake or the harm they can cause.

In the 1960s, the Soviet government diverted the rivers feeding the Aral Sea to support centrally planned cotton production. The result was one of the greatest ecological catastrophes in recorded history. The sea lost 90 percent of its volume. An entire ecosystem (and all the human activity that depended upon it) was wiped out. Dust from the exposed seabed created the toxic Aralkum desert.

This was not caused by market incentives; it was caused by government agricultural quotas enforced from the top down. The hubris is staggering.

Not to be outdone, the Chinese communists diverted rivers (causing them to dry up completely); attacked birds (creating plagues of insects); and tried to farm rice on hillsides instead of in paddies—all of which caused tens of millions to starve to death. Their brilliant idea to put a steel furnace in every backyard caused massive deforestation.

Again, being a government, they had only political incentives and no price signals. Being a psychotic communist government, they had plenty of fear. As a result, no one dared speak up to let them know that they were devastating the environment. Because no one dared speak up.

II. Government as Indirect Polluter

The brochure fallacy asks, “Without government, who will protect us from pollution?” with the underlying assumption that governments are actually doing that. This fallacious premise not only ignores the fact that government is the biggest polluter, it also ignores the fact that it abets pollution by others.

Crony Capitalism

Defenders of the state argue that we have government bureaus and accountable elected officials whose role is to protect the public. This argument from the brochure ignores the reality of the iron triangle: the incestuous, mutually reinforcing relationship among government agencies, politicians, and private industries.

In a phenomenon known as regulatory capture, the committees and agencies that are supposed to be keeping tabs on private interests end up being captured by those same interests.

In the brochure version, industries lobby the government. In the actual version, private industries end up writing the rules by which they will be governed.

In the process, they gain

• exemptions, selective enforcement, or delayed intervention

• weakened permitting standards

• liability shields or indemnification

• suppression or minimization of evidence

• favoritism in contracting

• special grants, loans, or status

The politicians, for their part, gain campaign support, the goodwill of powerful private players, and pork for their constituents.

The bureaucrats in the oversight agencies never solve anything, so they gain a permanent raison d’être, ongoing funding, and the job security that follows.

A revolving door also forms whereby all these players rotate from private to public and back again, writing their own rules and scratching each other’s backs along the way. Naturally, the taxpayers have no real seat at the table.

The end result is that the government is more responsive to entrenched private interests than to the general public or to the living things of planet Earth. It does not punish polluters nearly as often as it protects and assists them.

Bad policies and incentives

Nearly all politicians have a disease. It is called the do-something disease.

Constituents clamor that “There oughta be a law.” Special interests lobby for favors and preferential treatment. And there is nothing stopping politicians from giving them what they want.

The laws they pass do not need to comport with common sense or natural law. They just need to get out of committee and onto the floor for a favorable vote.

In the real world, there are market signals. Prices. Competitive pressure. Bottom lines. Politicians have none of this. The result is an endless stream of legislation that doesn’t actually need to work in the real world—it just needs to satisfy the political incentives of the moment.

Subsidies. Tax policy designed to steer activities. Mandates that sound good in a campaign speech. Production targets or limits.

The result is a market distorted by politics. One mode of transportation, one crop, one industry is favored over another. Private players—who cannot simply tax their way to prosperity—must adjust accordingly. And sometimes, these adjustments prove worse for the environment than if politicians had simply left things alone.

But they won’t ever leave things alone, because the system is set up to reward them for doing something, even if that something is bad.

The tragedy of the commons

Here is a quick example to serve as an explanation for the phenomenon known as the tragedy of the commons:

If no one owns a plot of pasture land (if it is considered the commons or ‘owned’ by everyone), then the incentive is for all the farmers to try to graze their animals there before the other guy does. If one farmer owns it, his incentive is to use the land wisely, to preserve its capital stock for the future.

In fact, public land is frequently overgrazed for this very reason, just as fishing grounds are overfished.

Socialist countries have been a study in the tragedy of the commons, but even in the mixed-market economies of the West, the problem is still the same; there is just somewhat less of it.

Governments can manage resources well, but they face greater obstacles, including short time horizons, misallocation of funds driven by political or budgetary considerations, and unclear accountability.

By way of example, public forest lands in the United States frequently fall victim to a peculiar set of tragedies:

1. Laws are in place that allow environmental organizations to sue the government on the taxpayers’ dime.

2. Because certain lands are “public,” these organizations feel they have the right to have a say in how they are managed.

3. They sue the government to prevent the needed thinning of smaller trees.

4. Fire loads become so large that wildfires become catastrophic crown fires (rather than merely burning the grass while leaving the larger trees mostly untouched).

5. Thus, forests that are supposedly ‘yours’—you’re paying for them, after all—are turned into ashen wastes, all at your expense.

Bottom line:

Private ownership works better than public ownership. Always.

Market incentives work better than political incentives. Always.

III. Governments are not accountable

The government causes pollution. The pollution harms people in a way that is (or ought to be) actionable.

Now what do we do?

We sue the government.

Where?

In government courts, staffed by people paid by the government.

Held accountable by whom?

Other government agencies, staffed by other people paid by the government.

Do such lawsuits work? Sometimes. But the hurdles are high. Statistically, private businesses are far more likely to be held accountable than governments are.

None of these people have market or ownership incentives. They all have political incentives. And there are other obstacles to holding governments accountable for pollution.

• Government officials may have sovereign immunity.

• Officials can hide behind bureaucracies; specific individuals are rarely accountable.

• Governments can statutorily grant themselves exemptions or reduced liability.

• Governments can put any activity they like behind a shield of “national security” or “emergency.”

Governments are a monopoly. They lack the pressures of competition. This means they don’t have to perform well, since they have no peers who can hold them accountable.

You are a captive of your government. They can pollute all they want and continue to tax you. You cannot opt out. Thus, they have no pressure of losing ‘customers.’

Oh, and they can externalize the costs of all of this to you. The damage. The cleanup. The court costs (whether they win or lose). The economic dislocations.

You pay for all of it. Government officials have zero skin in the game. They are playing with the house’s money, and the house is YOU.

We are being played.

We are being polluted.

We are being gaslit into believing that the world’s biggest polluters are protecting us from pollution.

Please don’t do them any favors by making their arguments for them.