Why Homeschooling?

This is adapted from an email I recently sent to a friend, who asked, “Why do you plan to homeschool your child?”

Education is informed by parenting and values

When we think about the purpose of parenting, we take a page out of Maria Montessori’s handbook and assume that our Little Lion basically has everything he needs already inside of him to be who he is going to be. It is not our job to give him personality, values or direction in life. Since we brought him into the world through no choice of his own and in a helpless state, it is our job to care for him and aid him in his own natural development so he can achieve independence and be whoever it is he will be. We hope to provide positive models and examples of what kind of person he can be and believe we will inevitably teach him the only thing we can teach him — who we are — by simply being authentic around him, but we don’t see it as our job to select values for him and teach him that he should value them.

We think this is different from a “traditional” parenting model which is built around the idea of the parents instructing the child in a particular set of values so they can become a “good” instance of that kind of person. For example, a Catholic parent might hope to raise a “good Catholic” and make religious values part of the child’s upbringing and instruction. A sports enthusiast might hope to see his child become a “good golfer”, and so instruct the child on the techniques and discipline necessary to excel at the sport. Thinking culturally, a Chinese person might see it as important to raise a “good Chinese child” with all the cultural implications that entails in terms of diet, attitudes toward life, behaviors and interests.. A materialist might think it important to raise a child who is a “good moneymaker”. And so on. We don’t see “goodness” as a goal of our efforts as parents, necessarily.

Our value framework

That being said, we are people and we do have values. We operate within a paradigm of what we see as desirable behavior, values and goals and what we see as opposed or detrimental to those things. This can’t seem to be avoided as thinking, acting beings– every moment we are faced with choices and the act of choosing implies moving toward some things and away from other alternatives. If one’s life has any consistency, these values and choices add up and create some coherence. Our coherence forms around interdependence and voluntaryism. We prefer a paradigm where people interact with one another on a peaceful basis, out of mutual desire and aimed at mutual benefit. This stands opposed to the narrative of “zero sum” and “dog eat dog”, where some must be slaves and some must be masters. We don’t see value in “using” people, which is one reason why we don’t plan to “use” our son to fulfill our own desires to create a good X.

By not pursuing “traditional” parenting, we have to use some other system of values to guide our choices and this is it. It inevitably informs our education decisions.

Education is socialization

Our theory of education is that education inevitably involves two concepts: grasping cause-effect relationships existent in reality and the pattern of facts that occurs as a result, and transmitting a system of values explicitly and implicitly about the role of individuals in society (what people refer to as socialization). Far from naively believing that education should only be about teaching cause-effect and facts, we embrace the reality that it is the very selection of which cause-effect relationships and which facts to focus on in a system of education that is itself a form of meta-socialization, before even formal social instruction is reached.

The intersection of parenting, values and education

Now I will try to put these three pieces together– our desire to give our child sufficient degrees of freedom to realize his inherent potential free of interference or intervention from us or others, our own system of values which idealizes free exchange, and our belief that education accomplishes two things in instructing a student about the nature of reality and also about their social role.

There seems to be an appropriate educational means to each set of values or goals in life. If you want a religious society, you need an education system focused on religious instruction. If you want a democratic society, you need an education system open to all and controlled by the government. If you want a free society, you need an education system (or lack of one!) that acknowledges individual differences and caters to them.

When I think about some of the alternatives we can consider when educating our child, they seem to fall short in various meaningful ways. Public or private, our child’s education will largely be guided by dictates of minimum standards and required instructional curricula handed down by people we don’t know from hundreds of miles away. We are socializing our child to understand that parents don’t have an important role to play in developing and implementing an educational program in their child’s life, this is something that can be given to “society” and its representatives, therefore, the child is to serve society because it is being instructed in things society deems it important for it to learn.

We will be telling our child that what it thinks is interesting, exciting, or important to learn is not germane to the process of education. We will be telling our child that education is something that happens in a prescribed place for a prescribed amount of time under tutelage of people who are “approved to teach.”

This seems like an overly regimented way to approach learning that denies the diversity of learning opportunities we believe actually exist. Our child won’t be able to listen to their own mind and body in knowing when to focus on studying something and when to take a break. And they will be inculcated into a pattern of hoop-jumping and test-taking that will push their sense of self outward, to what other people think about their competencies and capabilities, rather than inward in terms of what they think of these things relative to their values and goals.

It’s possible specific, market-based institutions can serve an educational role in our child’s life at various times and for various reasons, but it’s unlikely our educational habits will ever involve the kind of structure where we say goodbye to our child in the morning and hello in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. Homeschooling seems to meet our needs better.

How we plan to homeschool

So what does our homeschool curriculum look like? There are really only three “subjects” we think it is important we instruct our child in, at his own pace and based on his own developing interest– reading, writing and arithmetic. If our child learns to read, he will be able to follow his own interests by studying texts and other written resources imparting knowledge to any degree he would like. If he can write, he can communicate his ideas in another way besides verbally and improve his ability to connect and exchange with others. And if he can do basic math, he can think about personal circumstances (finance, time-keeping, etc.) and the nature of reality (“science”) in more sophisticated ways. These three disciplines are the fundamental building blocks of all other subjects of human knowledge he might like to instruct himself in. We would encourage him to consider learning these things and make every effort to provide him excellent instruction whenever he desires it until he has competency or mastery over them.

From there, the world is his oyster. He can be a self-guided learner and follow his passions, instincts and curiosities wherever they might lead. And we believe that by creating a paradigm for him from the get go that moves at his pace, he will maintain more innate enthusiasm for learning and growing than if he is faced with a “mandatory curriculum” and told he has to learn things he isn’t interested in and doesn’t care about, which don’t help him solve real problems he is facing. And we believe that by observing us, he will come to see the desirability of reading, writing and arithmetic because it will allow him to have more meaningful interactions with us.

Acknowledging our limits, embracing a child’s potential

Beyond that, we just don’t think we’re competent, as parents, people or anything else, to successfully predict what his life will be like and what knowledge he’ll need to be “successful” at it. As a result, our plan is to put a lot of trust and faith in him to figure it out with limited initial guidance. We’re excited to see who he will become and we hope this approach will be less stressful and more loving for all involved when we let go of the standard parent temptation to fight a child’s nature and try to shape them into something more “desirable” or good, from the parent’s point of view.

And this is why we’re interested in RIE, by the way, we feel it is laying the groundwork for the type of relationship we’re planning to build with our Little Lion, and we think it dovetails with our belief in trusting him to be who he is and giving him the framework and structure to thrive as such.

Another Story About The ER

The following is an email sent by a friend who reads the blog in response to the recent posts about my visit to the ER. It is about an experience he had with his infant daughter and I got his permission to share it as it is illustrative of many of the principles touched upon in my earlier posts:

When [my baby] was 9 days old she presented with what appeared to be an infection in her right eye (eye lid swelling, puss coming out the side, dark skin around the eye [picture attachment omitted]).

I think we waited overnight (details are a little fuzzy now that it’s been over 2 years) before doing anything because we were hoping it would resolve itself without having to go to a doctor, who might urge us to go to the ER, which we wanted to avoid if at all possible.

The next day it didn’t look better so we took her to the pediatrician, who was particularly concerned and brought another doctor into the room to examine her, we expressed our concern that we really didn’t want to go to the ER if at all possible, both doctors said we should go. They were concerned “because she’s so young” and “because the infection is so close to the brain.”

We got to the ER and it took for fucking ever to even get a room, of course you’re shoved into a massive environment of sick people dying to infect you with god knows what disease they have from living a terrible unhealthy life. It was literally like 6 hours before we finally got a room. At this point it was late at night and I kept thinking, “man, her eye looks better, if it looked like this 6 hours ago I don’t think we would’ve been sent to the ER.”

But the doctors kept saying shit like, “yeah we’ve seen things look better but actually be getting worse.”

The doctors wanted to do a blood test to see what the infection was and start her immediately on IV antibiotics. Additionally, they wanted to do a spinal tap (some advanced way of determining what the infection might be). I wanted to push the IV antibiotics back until we knew what the infection might be (as the results of a blood test might indicate), but they kept pushing and saying, “these things can move fast, we really think you should get IV antibiotics ASAP.”

Eventually we caved and agreed to the IV antibiotics (which was an awful experience in their own right because [my baby] was so small, and her veins were difficult to find, took literally 4 practitioners before they could finally access her vein — [my baby] was screaming like crazy and we were saying, “can’t you find someone else to do it?” And the girl said, “don’t feel bad, she won’t remember it.” Who says that?!) As a side note, god forbid you have to go through something like this, but if you do immediately ask for a practitioner from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to insert any IV into your child, they can find a needle in a haystack.

At this point they were still pushing for a spinal tap and I said, “If the blood results come back negative, is there ANY reason to do a spinal tap?” The doctor said typically no. I said, “Well let’s see what the blood results say then.” The results came back negative, so I said I’m not doing the spinal tap. The doctor kept saying, “well, sometimes things can slip by the blood tests.” But I refused. I left to go home and get changes of clothes for me and [my wife] since we didn’t realize we’d be at the hospital for 2 days, and while I was gone [my wife] said that they sent in some other doctor (female this time) to pull at her emotions to try and get her to agree to a spinal tap, but she refused, we didn’t do it — the infection just looked so much better already (even before the god damned antibiotics).

We stayed with [my baby] in the hospital like 36 hours, during that time we were regaled with fantastical tales of babies contracting Hep B and why we should really give her the Hep B vaccine. I kept asking the doctor to give me a realistic example of how [my baby] would contract Hep B at this age. His examples were literally so absurd they’re not even worth typing them, one involved a syringe with Hep B on it being mistakenly inserted into [my baby] by someone in the hospital, it was so ridiculous I could barely listen to it. We didn’t get her a Hep B vaccine, and still haven’t, and she’s miraculously Hep B free! I also mentioned to the doctor, “even if we agreed that [my baby] should get a Hep B vaccine soon, wouldn’t this be a BAD time to give it to her given that she’s obviously fighting off some infection?” The doctor wasn’t fazed by this logic, they’re total vaccine zealots, they’d vaccinate a cadaver given the opportunity.

In any case, in thinking back on the whole situation and what I would do differently, I think I would just wait an extra few hours before going to see the doctor, and when it looked better pre-IV antibiotics, I would’ve said, “let’s wait another few hours and see how she’s doing.” I just don’t buy their insane logic that something is visibly getting better but somehow actually getting worse. I’m sure there’s some textbook case of this happening to 1 in 1,000,000 babies, but doesn’t seem worth the known risks of IV antibiotics at such a young age.

It’s so sad and frustrating that you can’t simply take a doctor’s advice and trust that he’s already thoroughly immersed himself in the risks and benefits of the trade-offs between treatment / non-treatment. All they know is how to limit their own legal liability.

Hopefully you can avoid such a mess from happening to you!

He adds in an addendum:

Since doctors in large hospitals work in shifts, you naturally see the same doctor for awhile, and then see a new doctor for awhile. When it was time for [my baby] to be released, we were given an older doctor (maybe late 50s, early 60s). Not only was he WAY more respectful than pretty much every previous doctor we had, but he literally said something to the effect of, “if you’d gotten an older doctor, you may never have been admitted to the hospital, probably would’ve suggested you wait and see how the infection progressed.”

It seems that the doctors being minted today are inculcated with one-off horror stories starting on day 1 of their education.

My Recent Trip To The ER

Three days ago I critically reflected on the idea of preventative medicine in a post where I talked about a troublesome health condition that I had developed and my experience of having it examined at a local doctor’s office. Today, I went to the ER for that same condition.

What happened?

Between Tuesday, when I first noticed discomfort in my leg, and Wednesday, when I decided to go get a doctor’s opinion before spending some family time out of town, the swelling and redness increased, but I did not develop any other symptoms. On Thursday, the swelling and redness had encircled my entire lower leg, down to my ankle (but strangely not affecting my foot) and up to my knee joint, but not beyond. On Friday, no one who had a look (and there were many prying family eyes beside mine) could tell a difference between Friday’s swelling and Thursday’s– it didn’t seem better, but it also wasn’t clear it was worse. On Saturday morning (today) we packed up and made for home, and the swelling seemed unchanged.

Some family members tried to look up bug bite sites to help guess at what caused my reaction. Others just expressed shock and concern that I wasn’t doing something, anything, to address the obvious symptoms. Suggestions were made that I visit the ER in town at our vacation spot, or at least do it when I got back.

Here is how I was thinking about this decision: the fact that the swelling wasn’t getting obviously worse seemed like a good sign, the way the body fights its fight against invaders and injuries is going on below the surface, and without some kind of evidence (increased pain, swelling, etc.) that it is slowly losing the fight, I assume it is winning it. The discoloration was more extreme and enveloping, but no increase in pain with it seemed less than frightening. I did not develop any other symptoms which suggested a spread of the condition to other vital organs– no dizziness, nausea, vomiting, confusion, etc. And as ever, I am an otherwise healthy individual who rarely experiences illnesses and generally makes speedy, fully recoveries on my own. I felt like I had a lot on my side in terms of weighing the wait.

When we got to town, I had lunch with a friend from high school who was in the area visiting relatives. His father is a doctor, and he mentioned my leg to him, to which his response was the predictable “He should get it checked out.” His dad is a good doctor and a thoughtful person in general, so I asked if he’d take a look at it to see if it was at all obvious from a visual inspection what was going on. He agreed and was surprised that I did not have tenderness or problems moving my toes up toward my shins, indicators for possible blood clot. Still, my leg looked “nasty” in his very medical opinion and he suggested I go to the ER and have them take a look. It could be a blood clot or cellulitis, an under the skin infection, both of which generally require medical intervention to treat.

The blood clot thing did concern me. I was exhibiting some of the symptoms (swelling, redness, soreness) but not all of them, and based upon my diet and exercise I assumed it’d have to be freak luck or a weird immunological response (say, to a bite?) to develop a blood clot in my leg. It seemed a really low probability, but the way to diagnose it is an ultrasound, which I’d rather not do if I don’t have to, but I don’t see as a health disaster for me for attempting.

A trip to the ER brings with it some risks– contracting an infection you didn’t come in with, incompetence in conducting routine medical exam techniques (blood draw, IV), “intervention spiral” where the medical professionals push you to treatments for diseases you don’t even have that just make your health worse, false positives. So I don’t want to go to the ER if I can avoid it. And I still think I could’ve avoided it. Aside from the swelling and redness, nothing else about my condition seemed to be getting worse and I wasn’t exhibiting any other symptoms, it seemed like it was worth taking a punt.

I decided to go to the ER based on the following:

• second opinion of a non-specialist MD was that my reaction/condition was not “normal” and may be symptomatic of conditions that are potentially tissue-damaging or fatal
• family was getting worried and doesn’t have the same mental and emotional framework for thinking about this as I do, so they’re going to increasingly see my approach as needlessly risky and stubbornly defiant over what could admittedly be a long self-recovery period
• so far, no one including myself is able to diagnose what’s likely going on with any certainty
• because I believe I am an otherwise healthy individual with a strong immune system, I think the specific risks of being exposed to an ER are pretty low for me, so I am willing to trade the potential cost of exposure to risks for gaining more certainty about my condition; my suspicion is that my condition is nothing to be worried about, but I am not prepared to take a gamble on it as we near the delivery date for our first child (best part about this, my wife was pretty skeptical and kept sending sarcastic texts to me as I explained what was going on along the lines of “What did you expect at an ER?”)

Getting admitted was even easier than going to the GP’s office on Wednesday! I filled out a half sheet of paper with my name, birth date, phone number and reason for coming to the ER. It was raining today and there were all of 2 people in the waiting room when I arrived, I got pre-screened in about 3 minutes and then walked to my private room in another 2 minutes and was seen by a nurse attendant in another couple of minutes. The doctor came in and talked to me while a scribe annotated the conversation about 5 minutes later. In total, I was at the ER from about 3pm to 6:30pm.

Before I go further, I want to make something clear: I don’t see myself as anti-Western medicine or anti-medicine in a general sense, and my observations are not supposed to be read as some unbridled skepticism or lowbrow guffawing at the “scam” of the system. I felt I was treated with concern and respect by everyone who I interacted with at the ER, and whoever is the equivalent of the General Manager of that operation is doing a great job because it runs smoothly and its clear customer service is something they’re trying to deliver. This ER is in the hospital I was born in, and which we may have to turn to in the event of a complication with our home birth plans in the coming weeks. I don’t think it’s necessary or reasonable to try to scandalize the people or the process. I simply want to illustrate my thinking about the interventionist mindset and how I experienced it at the ER.

And I knew exactly what kind of a jungle I was walking into. I made the decision when I went to the ER to also go along with (but question first) any routine intervention they’d attempt to administer unless I could get them to talk themselves out of it, or I seriously feared it posed an undue risk to my health. I’ll provide more explanation about this in a bit, but for example, they put me on an antibiotic IV– that wipes out my carefully cultivated gut bacteria and potentially exposes me to direct bacterial infection through intravenous contact, but I believe my full immunity and health profile make it statistically unlikely I will be unduly harmed by this specific intervention.

With that out of the way, I will say this: life is an uncertain enterprise.

Perfect knowledge and omniscience is not something any individual can obtain, nor need they try. We are always grasping at a little bit more illumination in our lives, more clarity when there was less focus, more understanding when before there was ignorance, and this goes for the practice of medicine as well. The contributions to the improvement of human life on this planet by innovations in medicine and physics over the last 200 years are truly astounding, so astounding that some people have concluded that we know most of what we can know about these subjects or that, at least, we need not question their conclusions. I just don’t share this conviction. I look at all actions in life as being about tradeoffs, and I see these tradeoffs being motivated by perception of uncertainty and a desire to gain more certainty. So I look at medicine as offering many answers, but not everything, and certainly not any answers that shouldn’t be questioned. Everything should be questioned, if you’ve stopped asking questions you’ve probably started to experience the knowledge dishonestly.

I went to the ER to try to relieve some uncertainty.

The nurse informed me that they planned to run a blood panel on me, which meant they needed to draw some blood. The reason for the blood panel was to see if there was any distress markers in my blood, particularly an indication of acute infection. The two theories that the doctor who saw me had were that I either had a blood clot, or an infection. Because they were going to put an IV into me to draw the blood, they decided they’d just hit me with an antibiotic drip right away as well. This was puzzling to me, because they planned to do this before confirming the results of the blood panel. The response I got from the doctor was (summarized) as follows:

MD: It’s better to be safe than sorry, don’t you think?
ME: Let’s say I have an infection, what are the chances my body could fight this on its own?
MD: (pauses for a few seconds) …mmm, 50/50. But if your wrong, and your body loses, you could lose your leg. I don’t want to scare you, but I’ve seen these things go fast, like if that’s what it is, you could be fine and then an hour later you’ve lost and it’s too late.
ME: I generally try to avoid antibiotics.
MD: Me too! I never give my kids antibiotics. Like, I won’t give them antibiotics unless they’re dying. Trust me, I wouldn’t suggest this unless I thought it was absolutely necessary, okay?

Of course, if I don’t have an infection, but a blood clot, then what good were the antibiotics? And if I have neither, what good are the antibiotics?

The nurse also informed me I’d get an ultrasound of my leg done to check for the possibility of blood clots. The doctor and the nurse worked together with a doppler to check my pulse in my legs and feet, which they were able to confirm, but their concerns about the heat emanating from my swollen leg led them to the “safe vs. sorry” compromise of ordering another test.

As the nurse walked me through the test regime I was about to run, I asked, “Any idea what this will cost me?” Of course he didn’t know, and up to this point, no one bothered checking with me about the cost of services. It ended up being $250 for the co-pay and I don’t know yet what it was for the tests. I also don’t know if the IV antibiotics costs more than an oral treatment. I asked the nurse about this and he went into a rationalization about not taking chances, etc.

The nurse was very good at drawing my blood. The injection was almost undetectable. The ultrasound technician was also efficient. We talked about her automobile purchase history and she had me all checked out in about 15 minutes. An orderly wheeled me around from room to room in my gurney bed, which enhanced my feeling that something was really wrong with me and at any moment I could crater. I noticed passing through the hall that the other patients at the ER were all males, either very elderly males probably near the end of the road who had had a fall, or gotten sick, or very young males who had just made a very poor judgment call and were now paying the price.

I couldn’t help but thinking, “What is wrong with this picture?” as my seemingly-healthy, 30-year-old trim frame was being shuttled from room to room. Two ideas came to mind: either nothing was wrong with me, and that’s why I shouldn’t be in the ER with these people, or something was REALLY wrong with me, and that is why I was suddenly in the ER with these people.

I waited another 45 minutes by myself on my bed gurney before learning of the test results. A financial admin came in and out to run my insurance and have me initial some boilerplate. I started initialing without reading it and got halfway down the list and saw something saying I agreed to have my medical history inserted in a state database. “Do I need to do this?” “No. I know, next thing you know you’re going to be getting called by a telemarketer…” (not really what I was worried about on that one). So I didn’t initial it, went back over the ones I did, finished the others and wondered what law or series of events had conspired to have a financial admin highlight for initialing the sharing of private medical data in a public database without comment or concern?

Ultrasound: no blood clot found.
Blood panel: no acute infection indicated, blood work looked very good including liver and kidney function (I made sure to ask my nurse for a copy of my blood panel so I could interpret it more fully later, since a blood panel costs $$$ and I planned to do one eventually anyway, this helped me recoup some of the cost on this unnecessary intervention visit)

So, what was wrong with me? The doctor admitted she really didn’t know. Her suspicion was that I was bit by something and it either had some bacteria on its fangs, or it triggered a strange reaction. She told me she wanted me on an antibiotic regimen “just to be sure”, and to come back immediately if my leg felt tingly or numb. She said I could take some Benadryl to try to treat the inflammation as well.

I asked the nurse to help me interpret my blood panel. How did it look? “It looks great, really good panel, no indication of acute infection…” “So then why am I being administered an oral regimen of antibiotics if there is no infection indicated?” “Well, the body is funny, it COULD be infected and it just hasn’t shown yet in the panel, but anyway, we’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff, better safe than sorry right? I mean it can’t do any harm to get the antibiotics, it can only make it better.”

He grabbed my checkout paperwork and had me look over it and sign. The paperwork says that I acknowledge the diagnosis and the treatment being recommended. The nurse says, “We don’t know what you have, but we’re calling it ‘cellulitis’.”

I gained some additional certainty that I don’t have a life-threatening blood clot and that I am not at risk, as of this very moment, of losing my leg to a bad infection as one doesn’t seem to exist. My experience led me to conclude that allergy and immunology medicine are perhaps younger, frontier sciences within the practice of medicine with higher levels of uncertainty than the practice itself. Everyone’s still uncertain about what actually happened to my leg!

Why I Try To Avoid Visits To The Doctor’s Office

I don’t go to the doctor much. I think that’s a good thing, but people who believe “an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure” might be horrified to know that I don’t even do my so-called oil changes and other regularly scheduled maintenances with regards to my body– false positives, risk of complications from the cure that are worse than the disease, etc.

Generally, if I’m not in pain, I’m not going to see a doctor. And even sometimes when I am, I think, “This too shall pass” and carry on. I pay attention to my body, I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing when I’m in trouble versus experiencing discomfort that will resolve itself over time. I have a pretty high pain threshold I think, I won’t even mention I have a headache until I’m somewhere around a migraine for someone else.

And I do believe in prevention! That’s why I eat a nutrient rich diet, exercise (weight lifting) weekly and walk my dog daily. That’s why I work hard to keep a reasonable bed time and get as much sleep as I can. That’s why I try to think happy thoughts and help others do the same. And that’s why I listen to my body and take it easy when it tells me “No!”, rather than flailing myself before the altar of No Pain, No Gain and reveling in masochistic torture.

So I do my darnedest to avoid visiting a doctor. That’s why I’m bummed I decided to go in today, and that’s why I think this decision was yet again illustrative of my principles!

You see, where I live, medicine is practiced a bit oddly– legal liability dictates that the doctor does anything he can to avoid taking responsibility for your treatments and it’s consequences, as they don’t want to be sued for malpractice. But their medical school instruction plus their ever closer relationship with the State leads them to an aggravated mindset anytime you insist on thinking for yourself and following your own judgment. Think about that, they don’t want you to make your own choice, but they don’t want to be responsible for the choice you make.

I had some kind of strange reaction to an insect bite on the back of my calf last night. I don’t know how it happened or what bit me, I’ve never seen anything like this on my leg, nor felt this kind of pain, which is severe but within my tolerance levels. Normally, I’d just keep walking around and unless it seemed to worsen or I showed other symptoms, I’d just let time work it’s magic on healing it. Painful, yes, but nothing my body can’t handle.

Unfortunately, my plan was to travel out of town for the holiday this week to spend time with family. If my condition worsened, I might end up in an ER in a strange place. I don’t want to end up in an ER, and certainly not in a strange place. As a result, I decided to visit the GP at the last minute to see if they thought it looked dangerous. If it was going to kill me or save my tissue, I’d want to intervene, but anything short of that I’d just make do.

I should’ve just kept on going and took my chances.

The doctor squeezed me in, which I’m very grateful for. But because I hadn’t seen them in over ten years, they subjected me to a battery of questions about my health, my family’s health, and so on. I spent 20 minutes talking about everything but my bite and about one minute actually discussing the course of action about the bite.

I got lectured about the need to do regular check ups. I got lectured about treatments available for some historical conditions, as if I was unaware, hadn’t tried them and was suffering needlessly (because the assumption is I don’t take care of my health). I witnessed the doctor exhibit some unhealthy conditions of her own and then was told not to worry, wasn’t contagious, etc.

The worst mistake I made was mentioning that my wife is pregnant and nearing her due date.

“When did you last get your tetanus shot?”

This is a terrifying question. Something innocuous like this, ostensibly asked our of concern for my health and the health of my family, could lead to a spiral where either the baby snatchers come for my kid, or I submit to vaccinations and other invasive treatments I don’t have any interest in.

She continued, “I don’t mean to alarm you, but EIGHT babies in the whole state died last year because of whooping cough connected to tetanus, likely contracted from a parent or relative who didn’t get their shots. I wouldn’t want you to be one of them!”

When she said 8 in the whole state, I wanted to laugh. Are you kidding? I probably have more risk driving my baby around in its car seat (don’t worry, she lectured me about that, too). And its probably not PC to say, but I doubt those babies had my socioeconomic background (ie, I’m wealthier and I don’t have relatives traveling back and forth to third world countries or other impoverished areas). It’s simply not reasonable to be worried about this risk, measured against the potential complications.

“It’s really quick and out nurse is great with shots, can I go ahead and get that taken care of for you?”

No, thanks, I’m traveling and don’t want to deal with it right now.

“Okay no problem, I’ll put a note in your file that you’re going to come back in two weeks and take care of it. Due to state mandate, they won’t let you go near your baby if you don’t have an up to date tetanus shot.”

I sure hope I don’t get that call.

We’ve Always Been At War With Eastasia: Trump & Putin Edition

I’ve noticed a trend in the media during this election cycle wherein Trump is attacked anytime he says anything kind or even less-than-hostile about Russia’s Vladimir Putin. As an Enemy of Democracy(tm) and Registered Strongman Dictator(tm), saying anything other than a poorly veiled threat to commit nuclear genocide in the Russian Federation via NATO is apparently a slanderous and indeed, traitorous, thing to say. After all, the Russian state is clearly bent on world domination, much like Hitler, as evidenced by its involvement in Syria, the Ukraine and the EU gas pricing fiasco. This interventionist approach to foreign policy is totally different from the US’s interventions in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, and the EU gas pricing fiasco because… well, nevermind, we’ve always been at war with Eastasia and that’s really all one needs to know about these complicated matters.

Is this not the most transparently stupid journalistic approach to American diplomacy there is? The logical end goal of some conflict with an enemy is to defeat them, by force or by fraud, and thereby to convert them into a friend, or at least someone who is no longer hostile. Surely, military dominance and intelligence stratagems are the American state’s preferred means of obtaining this goal over the last 70+ years of history, but do they have to be? If Trump can disarm Putin through charisma, wouldn’t that be just as good so long as a stable peace and a non-hostile footing can be achieved going forward?

Must Putin be the enemy of the United States of America from here until eternity? Why can’t the US state solve its problems without bloodshed, and why do the media jump all over a leading candidate’s overtures with cries of “Treason! Treason!!” if he adopts a tone less bellicose?

Why, to ask is to answer it, dear readers. We know where (and why!) the real traitors lie.

Skeptical Remarks About Dog Ownership

I own a working breed dog, but I do not have a working purpose for the animal as I live in a suburban community that is at least a one hour drive away from the kind of terrain and property arrangements where one might actually be able to put a dog to work. Currently, I also live in a smaller-sized apartment with my wife, the Wolf, which meets our space needs in large part without being wasteful, but which is not ideal for the dog who would do better with a yard to run free in. I have several friends who think our dog ownership decision is something of a lifestyle mistake– they see only costs and are unclear on the benefits.

In the interest of trying to think objectively about my life choices, I want to explore their skepticism as if it were my own. Why do I own a dog? What am I getting out of this seemingly parasitical arrangement?

In many ways, owning a dog is like having a child who never grows up:

• the dog is dependent upon you for its feeding and care
• the dog imposes additional costs in terms of food, occasional medical attention, dog equipment (leash, collar, dog toys, etc.)
• the dog has limited communication capabilities and often leaves its owners guessing as to what its needs are and how they might best be resolved
• the dog has a penchant for behaving in unpredictable and undesirable ways (barking at strangers, pacing about the bedroom late at night, distracting visitors)
• the dog puts severe constraints on your ability to travel and come and go as you please, requiring special arrangements anytime you’re out of town for extended periods of time
• the dog thrives on routine and predictability, which means your life becomes more routine-based and therefore monotonous to the extent you decide to cater to your dog’s needs
• the dog represents a commitment and the responsibility which entails can not be shed at a whim

These shortcomings and limitations of dog ownership are very real. I have counseled many a friend and young family member to think twice before taking on the responsibility of a dog while single and resource-light. The demands of letting the dog out throughout the day and giving the dog substantial exercise can be extremely stressful to a young professional or amateur careerist operating on their own, not to mention the hindering effect dog ownership has on the attempt to have a nightlife and with it, a sex life! Taking on a dog before you take on a full time partner is like turning on a homing beacon for the irresponsible and imbalanced that simultaneously sets off an ear-piercing frequency that can only be sensed by the collected, cool-headed types you’d ideally want to attract but are instead unwittingly driving away.

And while the ongoing costs of dog ownership are fairly minimal (dog food is the gag fate of impoverished elderly people everywhere for a reason), dogs seem to have a nasty habit of swallowing things, breaking things or otherwise becoming near-fatally ill in the most costly and inconvenient manner possible for those least able to bear the financial strain, and such situations can be an impressive financial setback for those just starting out in life. How would you like to shell out $2,500 cash for surgery on a recently discovered tumor your poor old dog has developed? Or spend multiples of that treating an animal who is congenitally predisposed to the painful and debilitating disease known as degenerative myelopathy?

One of the supposed joys of dog ownership is taking your dog out in public as you traipse about town. But in doing so you take two major risks. The first is that you will attract a crazy person with an obsessive compulsion to pet or otherwise inappropriately interact with your dog. The second is that your dog will become frightened or alarmed by another animal, ideally a small child, and bite, at which point you will now have a dead dog (put down by the authorities) and a costly lawsuit to defend yourself against from the animal’s owners (parents, other dog-owner, etc.) which you will undoubtedly lose.

To avoid such troubles, you might think of taking your dog to the park, where it can roam and run and chase a ball to its heart’s content with little risk of an upsetting interaction with a stranger. But if you live in a town like I do, with strongly enforced leash laws and bans on dog activity on school grounds, which constitute a majority of the open public spaces nearby, you’re kind of out of luck on this draw. You can’t let your dog, legally, off its 6-foot leash which doesn’t make for a fun game of fetch, and you can’t, legally, even go to most of the places otherwise suitable for playing with a dog unless you’re interested in attracting a dog catcher and paying a fine and/or losing your “privilege” to own a dog (said privilege operating on two levels of irony given the tenor of this post so far, and the views of this author on the role of governments in society).

In that case, you might go to a dog park. These are specially designated areas where a variety of dogs of differing size, temperament, training discipline and owner profile all congregate and go nuts on one another, rolling in fleas, transferring diseases to one another, pissing and shitting all over the place and more than occasionally getting into fights. Many of the owners are the same caliber of insane as the standard weirdos who might try to approach you when you’re out about town walking your dog, which is also enjoyable. And you can still get sued if something goes wrong. (You could also be mauled yourself!) A dog park is actually a good case in miniature for a broad policy of social segregation, of dogkind and mankind alike.

It’s actually difficult for me to think of anything I enjoy about owning a dog that I could not enjoy without the dog itself. I could say that owning a dog is a good excuse to get some exercise and walk the neighborhood, but I could surely do that without the dog and in fact many people do, some jog instead of walk but nonetheless they get it done without a four-legged friend. I could say that a dog is a good home security system, but it’s probably inferior to today’s WiFi and app-connected DIY home monitoring system technology in both cost and effectiveness, and unfortunately this “security system” goes on vacation whenever you do, needing to be boarded at additional expense away from home when you’re away. I could say that a dog provides one with warmth and companionship, but that’d be an indication of an imbalanced, emotionally needy mind that could probably get that relationship more authentically from another human being after some workouts with a qualified therapist. And I could say that a dog adds a playful spirit of spontaneity to one’s life, but I’ve never been fond of jumping out of airplanes and I imagine you could accomplish much the same thing that way if you really wanted to do so. Besides, as I said before, where I live there’s no place to play with my dog and it’s hard to be too spontaneous in the living room in the small hours of the evening.

What value, then, is there in owning a dog? For someone with a working purpose connected to their lifestyle (shepherding, farming, mountain rescue, police/security work), dogs probably make sense. In fact, anthropologists and evolutionary theorists posit that dogs were domesticated thousands of years ago precisely because of the important functional relationships they could establish with hunter-gatherer societies.

But we don’t live in those societies anymore, at least, I don’t, and for the modern, non-rural person such as myself a dog doesn’t seem to have much of a purpose.

And since we all live in interventionist welfare societies now, maybe it doesn’t make any sense to have children, either.

Review – Restrepo

I watched a NatGeo documentary last night called “Restrepo.” It’s about the conditions and objectives of a small US Army platoon in the mountainous wilderness of Afghanistan.

Very little happens in this movie over its 1.5hr runtime. There is a lot of buildup and talk about how often the base is attacked, and this is depicted several times, but overall nothing happens. I don’t know if this was an intentional part of the plot (“the futility of the Restrepo mission”) or if it’s bad editing or belies a fraud about the claims being made in the film about what it is like for these troops, but it is not entertaining. And by that I don’t mean, “Gee, I wish there were more poor, dumb soldiers getting wasted in this real life documentary” but rather, “Gee, what am I getting out of watching this film?”

That being said, this is not good propaganda for the US government’s desire to nation-build overseas. Why does the military allow journalists and documentarians to embed with their troops? Restrepo is an offshoot of a slightly larger but still insignificant base tasked with enlarging the “security bubble” in the area so that a road can be safely built connecting two hapless economic regions into one, which is supposed to bring jobs, incomes and peace and happiness to the land. Every bit of tactical maneuver in war seems really stupid when studied by itself — “50 men gave their lives for a bridge that was ultimately destroyed by the enemy anyway, why did 50 men die for a bridge?” — but the Restrepo mission seems especially stupid not because these men are fighting and dying and accidentally murdering local civilians for an unbuilt road, but because the premise behind building the road is itself very stupid. Do the local Afghans even WANT this road? If they did, why didn’t they build it before the US Army showed up?

Is military Keynesianism a viable structure for developing foreign economies? Keynesianism doesn’t seem to work to develop domestic economies. And the military, professional murderers and demolishers, don’t seem to be the right people to task with building things, let alone people’s economies. Wouldn’t it make more sense to send overwhelming military force through the area, wipe out/expel the organized Taliban elements and then let civilian diplomats and construction contractors come through and negotiate new power structures and infrastructure plans?

The Korengal Valley itself, where the drama unfolds, is truly magnificent geography. It reminds me of the valleys I hiked on the Inca Trail in Peru on my way up to Macchu Picchu. In fact, the remoteness, the terraced cultivation and the “primitive” lifestyle and social organization of the Afghans looked nearly identical to what I saw in Peru. It seems like a perfectly nice place for the locals to live and you get the insane idea watching the movie that they never asked for the US Army to invade their territory and murder their wives and children in helicopter gunship assaults, and they’re not all that thankful for their service now that they’ve shown up. Would it be unpatriotic, dare I say even treasonous, to suggest that the Afghans are getting a raw deal here and it’s hard to wonder why they wouldn’t want to overtly or covertly support the Taliban in these circumstances?

That old quip about “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you” runs hard through the film’s narrative. We see again and again the way the local commander makes big promises and doesn’t follow through– he murders a guy’s cow and offers no agreeable compensation, he disappears a local who he suspects of being an accomplice of the Taliban and then offers the vague assurance that he’s being treated nicely and will soon return though he doesn’t, and he responds to an attack by calling in a fire mission on a neighboring village that kills and maims several women and small children. I don’t care who someone is fighting for, if I had to hold the charred body of my innocent two year old in my arms and watch a bunch of crude monkeys rifle through the smoking remains of my home looking for contraband after such an incident, I think I’d lose my shit.

And what IS the best solution to murdering someone’s cow, anyway? If you could get your higher-ups to release the $400-500 cash to pay the guy back (I think the village elders took the US Army for a ride on that request, by the way, there is no way a cow is worth half a grand in the mountains of Afghanistan) doesn’t that incentivize them to let more of their cattle wander into your concertina wire whenever they lack liquidity? And if you can’t get that cash released, aren’t you guaranteed to keep pissing off the locals while insisting you’re there to win hearts and minds?

The long and the short of it is that imperialism is a terrible idea in the first place, but the United States government isn’t even good at imperialism. It is very half-hearted and half-assed in its attempts to brutalize and control foreign peoples and spends more time apologizing and groveling about its numerous mistakes than making any meaningful progress in terms of rapine and pillage. It makes you wonder the whole time how such a pointless and ineffectual system can sustain itself, until you realize that the people who are really getting mulcted in this process are the guileless American people “back home.”

And the poor, dumb US foot soldier is the tool used to tug at those people’s heart strings while picking their pockets clean. “Thank you for your service,” indeed.

The Open, Free Intellectual Environment Of The American University

A fellow investor friend of mine sent me an e-mail and suggested I read “What’s the point?” by UK fund manager Terry Smith. We were originally talking about Michael Burry’s commencement speech at UCLA [PDF] and the idea that one of the things that was so extraordinary about it is the way he unmasked the villains and the corruption and spoke the truth unapologetically in such a public forum. I had also, in an earlier e-mail, complained about my lack of interest in blogging, feeling frustrated lately at the nearly overwhelming volume of fallacious bullshit floating around the net that seems to deserve a response yet leaves me tired and bored out of my mind every time I attempt another mud wrestling fiasco.

I don’t know if my frustration inspired the link to Terry Smith or if it was simply the next step in the theme of telling it like it is or what, but that blog post got me thinking. I’ve long thought about giving it one last hurrah and then hanging up my hat. Because, seriously, what is the point? You can tell the truth a million times but if your opponent is bent on lies and deceit, nothing can be done. (Of course, Mises adopted the slogan, from Virgil, of “Tu ne cede malis”, but he’s a smarter man than I, with more energy, apparently.)

In light of this, I wanted to share three critical experiences I had in college during my sophomore, junior and senior years, respectively, which have stuck with me to this day and serve, subtlety and fundamentally, to color my view of the intellectual Opposition. I believe my experiences are not unique, although few people besides me may have had the required awareness to realize it, and as such where I went to school back then is not important to the story. This is not about an institution but rather the institution of the American academic system and its culture as it exists today, and likely has existed for awhile before now and probably longer still in the future.

I want to give some insight into why I find it hard not to be dismissive of many people who claim to think differently than me on various philosophical subjects.

I first became suspicious of my academic curriculum when I learned that microeconomics was not a prerequisite for macroeconomics. Rather than being treated as fundamental knowledge built upon and reexamined from a more global standpoint in macroeconomics, microeconomics was treated as a separate discipline entirely, which could be studied before, during, or after macroeconomics or even not at all (at least, if you weren’t concerned about getting an economics degree). Of course, numerous macroeconomic theories contradicted accepted wisdom taught in the microeconomics course, but no explanation was given as to the nature and source of these apparent contradictions, nor where it was in the economic causal chain that things stopped making micro-sense and started making macro-sense. There was simply a dichotomy in place and you were expected to accept it and move on.

In my second year I was excited to take a class with a professor teaching “international trade” (you know, the separate set of economic principles and rules that apply when two people exchange goods across imaginary political boundaries). Everyone I knew who had taken the class spoke highly of this professor as a competent and entertaining lecturer and said the material itself was quite fun. We spent a lot of time in that class studying the roles of quotas, tariffs and other government interference in the economy. It was really about political economy, not economics, because economics doesn’t change when you move stuff over imaginary lines.

But what rubbed me kind of raw in the class was when this beloved professor spoke quite approvingly of the idea, built into his theoretical examples in class, of providing “transfer payments” (read: violent redistributive extortion for special interest groups carried out by the government) to currently privileged groups who would be “hurt” by “free trade”. This professor advocated that paying these highwaymen off and reaping the benefits of freer trade was a good idea in the long run.

“Uh, question, professor– wouldn’t it be best to just have free trade, without a complicated system of quotas, tariffs and transfer payments to interest groups? Isn’t that most economically efficient? Why don’t we learn about that?” This question got a knowing smirk and a request to meet the good professor privately during office hours to discuss, as there simply wasn’t enough time in lecture to discuss such twaddle.

Dutifully, I scheduled some office hours time to meet with the beloved professor and discuss. Again, I posed the question to him, why are we paying these people off? Isn’t it better to let them figure out their own way to survive a competitive market place without getting welfare from everyone else? After all, they have no right to a certain income or position within the market place. Again, a knowing smirk as the professor launched into a short anecdote about how he once was full of piss and vinegar like I about these subjects. But the truth of the matter, he told me, was more complicated.

And then he, in so many words, spilled the beans– if “we” don’t bribe these special interest groups with redistributive social justice, they’ll get their pitchforks and their torches and elect another Hitler. That was it. That was why he doesn’t teach actual free trade economics in his course. That’s why he thinks transfer payments are good. That’s why he was for FDR’s New Deal and the Social Security scam. He saw it as the only thing standing between us, and Hitler.

I tried to make the point that if you fear totalitarianism, transfer payments are actually a step toward totalitarianism, not a step away. He responded by suggesting that granting these dictator-electors-in-the-wings a little welfare would create some kind of social anchor where we’d go no further toward socialism past that point, having bought the evildoers off. Never mind people tried to buy Hitler off and he just asked for more until he went to war. And never mind that the US government has had to move far, far beyond the New Deal since then to keep neo-Hitler at bay, according to his logic.

At this point, having no response to my observation of yet another contradiction, I was informed that office hours had suddenly come to an end (I’d only been there for thirty minutes and had scheduled an hour and I didn’t see anyone waiting in the hall for an audience) and that although he really enjoyed our conversation, he was going to have to ask me to come visit with him during the summer to continue the conversation. Of course he knew I was an out of state student who would be returning home during the summer so he was actually dodging his responsibility to make sense of his intellectual positions.

I left his office reeling in confusion and frustration. Here is a guy that my peers think is one of the best instructors the university has to offer, he is considered to be a thoughtful and intellectual person, etc. Yet, I come to find out he is teaching disingenuously. He is guilty of the “smuggled premise”, that is, his economic values taught in his class have nothing to do with sound economic reasoning but rather a personal, political belief that is never named nor mentioned which is thereby “smuggled” into the lessons. Instead of being honest and telling his students “I am teaching you a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make economic sense, because I think it makes political sense”, he carries out his pedagogical mission in such a way that he exploits his students ignorance and credulity.

Why can’t this professor just tell everyone what he really believes? Are we not old enough for the truth? Did we not pay for the truth? Do we not expect the truth?

To say I was disappointed by this experience would be an understatement. But I tried to put it behind me as I continued my economic studies.

During my third year, I had another run in with an economics professor, this time one teaching a “money and banking” course who had done some consulting for the Fed and who used as a textbook in his class the work of the notorious intellectual bungler, Frederic Mishkin. I raised a lot of challenges to the material which were poorly handled by the professor, but there is one in particular that will always stand out to me because of its zaniness. We were discussing the “money multiplier” of fractional reserve banking and how with a tiny base of reserves banks could pyramid large amounts of credit on top and lever up their balance sheets. I raised my hand and asked, “Doesn’t levering the balance sheet increase the risk of crisis for the bank and for the banking system?”

The professor acknowledged that, well, yes, it does, but it’s all done within the proscription of the FDIC guaranteeing everyone’s deposits and the Fed serving as lender of last resort to prevent a total collapse. Then I asked, “Well isn’t that crisis kind of inevitable when you create duration mismatch between funds that are borrowed short and lent long like this?” And the professor acknowledged, well, yes, it does, but again it’s all done under the keen watch of the overseer regulatory bodies, this time a little bit more apprehensive. And then I went for the F-word. I raised my hand, “But professor, isn’t it fraud to lend out people’s money that they think is being held for safe-keeping at the bank? Why not have the bank separate the two activities, safe-keeping and loan-brokering?”

There was a pause and he looked kind of startled. His skin color rose and his face contorted into a mixture of anger and glee, because now he had “figured me out” and knew my true motive. He exploded: “So I guess if it were up to you the banks wouldn’t make any money, huh?!”

A little shocked at his outburst, I stammered, “Well, no, of course not, I don’t really see what their profitability has to do with my question…” but he cut me off. “Yeah, I see what you’re trying to do. You don’t want the banks to make any money, do ya?! Well, it’s a nice ideal but it doesn’t work in the real world and if banks didn’t make any money, we wouldn’t have any banks and you wouldn’t want to live in a world without banks!” he growled, signaling that question time was over and it was time to get back to his brilliant lecture on fraud-based banking economics.

The episode was so instructive for me. So THAT’S what he’s about– shilling for fraudulent reserve banking, not trying to explore the truth of the matter. He neatly dodged my very simple, very honest inquiry of how we might live in a world without systemic banking risk, a world which would still allow profit opportunities for banking operations. Instead, he constructed a false dichotomy — systemic risk due to fraud, and profit; or no profit and no banks — and then browbeat me and anyone else in the class who was listening to avoid serious discussion of the principle. It suddenly put things into perspective for me. He wasn’t there to impart any real knowledge about the economy to me, he was there to be a hatchet man and paid minion for the banking establishment as it stands today. Wouldn’t want any bright-eyed college kids getting uppity and questioning the scam now, would we?

I really thought that would be the tops. But then I got to my Labor Economics class in my fourth year.

You might be wondering at this point, “Labor economics? Are you mad? Why did you take that course as an elective?” It would be a reasonable question, but the truth is that it was the least horrible option amongst what I had to choose from at the time. To say I went into it with low expectations is an understatement.

Those low expectations were met admirably on two separate occasions, which were not the only examples to choose from but simply the most illustrative.

My professorista had spent her entire life after high school in academia and government bureaucracies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I would be surprised if she ever held a part time job as a youngster in the private sector. She demonstrated zero familiarity with the reality of markets. One day she provided the class her argument for government intervention in the economy, which was based on the “paradox of capitalism”, this being that capitalism is SO efficient and SO productive, that it drives things down to the cost of “near 0” (not actually zero, because that’d obviously imply superabundance and the end of scarcity for that good or service) and therefore these things become “uneconomic” to produce and won’t be provided for under the profit system, which means if we want them government must provide them as a public good.

One example she gave of this was childcare services. Now, let’s ignore the “empirical” fact that there are numerous for-profit childcare services out there, right here and now, which would seem to undermine her argument completely. Let’s just think about this logically for a second.

So long as a given good does not have a cost of 0, it is not superabundant and it is an economizable resource. For example, air is not an economic good because it is superabundant. You can breathe as much air as you need and don’t have to think about what you’d give up to ensure your supply of air, it’s just there. It has a cost of 0. But if it has a cost above 0, it must be economized, something must be given up to get it. And if at a particular point in time firms are so numerous and efficient at supplying a good, such as childcare services, that they can’t make a profit, what will happen is that the least efficient firms of the bunch will consume their capital (by earning losses over and over again) and exit the marketplace. And when they do this, the level of profitability for remaining firms will rise because the lowered supply will result in the ability to charge higher prices.

And this dynamic will play out forever over the life of the industry so long as people value childcare services. There will be a constant competitive dynamic tending toward the “right” supply of childcare services because the least efficient providers will exit with losses. And this is “good” from the standpoint of anyone interested in participating in the economy because it means that those extraneous resources will flood into other, underserved industries where profitability is much higher, indicating a relatively more important use for the resources versus childcare. At no point will the market stop providing childcare services entirely, requiring a timely government intervention and provision of this service to correct a “market failure.”

Well, recognizing that as the hogwash it was, I raised my hand and began disputing the logic just as I did above. She was so dumbfounded that I had the temerity to question her transparently flawed reasoning that she began what could best be called “sputtering”, rolling her eyes and trying to form even one word in response as if she were having a seizure. Finally, she gave up and said, “Would anyone like to respond to that and explain why he is wrong?” About ten different hands shot up, eagerly, and she called on a young man who halfway turned around in his chair to straddle his view between me in the back and her approving glances in the front. He began, “Governments can and should correct market failures, which happen frequently. For example, while I was studying abroad in Ghana, the government provided public bus service to the village I was staying at because it wasn’t profitable for private businessmen…”

I stopped him right there and pointed out that the lack of profitability is part of the phenomenon I just described, and it suggests the wastefulness of bus service to a small African village. The class erupted with anger and indignation. This was so not politically correct to suggest some poor villagers in Africa didn’t merit a dedicated bus service just because it wasn’t profitable to provide it! This lecture hall had about one hundred students in it. Suddenly, they were a-chatter, half of them noisily discussing how outrageous my view was amongst themselves, the other half turned and shouting/arguing with me simultaneously while the young man with the bus service anecdote continued droning on. This went on for several minutes before the professorista tried to get control back over the class and insisted we finish up the lesson, but by then it was too late as class was over and everyone made for the exits.

It was at this point that as people filtered out a guy sitting a little in front and to the right of me turned around and said, “For what it’s worth, I agree with you,” and then grabbed his bag and walked out. I guess it was better than thinking the entire class was ready to lynch me, but he certainly didn’t feel the need to come to my rescue in the heat of the argument!

The other memorable moment from that class came right near the end of the semester. The Wall Street investment banks were beginning their meltdown and that particular morning Bear Stearns had failed, which was all over the news and which had greatly agitated the students as several had received offers of employment there at the conclusion of the semester which were now in jeopardy. The professorista sought to calm everyone’s nerves by saying that this was a limited event, contained to a specific firm with poor risk controls and the Fed and the regulatory agencies were all over it.

I raised my hand and pointed out that this was indicative of a systematic impending crisis, that the authorities were NOT in control as evidenced by the fact that it had happened, and that it would get a lot worse before it got any better. I suggested that this was the first of many failures to come.

“Would you like to bet on that?” she said, mischievously, expecting me to back down with the bravado.

“I already have!” I exclaimed, as I had taken a few minor positions in my brokerage account at the time (don’t worry, I didn’t make out like John Paulson).

“Well, we’ll see…” she said, trying to quiet me down.

Yes, we did, didn’t we? I never followed up with her to see what she thought of giving me a hard time about my prediction in class, or whether she was willing to confess she had had it all wrong, but I think it demonstrates again a clear blind spot in the mindset of mainstream academics who are responsible for instructing this country’s (and the world’s) future leaders and productive people about intellectual curiosity, academic honesty and the nature of reality.

How many parents are aware of this when they insist their children must go to college? How many have audited the value of their kid’s higher education and determined that the small fortune it takes to get them through a “better” private institution is worth it in the face of antics like what I’ve described above?

Why Do Former Presidents And Politicians Need “Jobs”? And How Do They Manage To Find Them In Silicon Valley?

I got a good chuckle out of this today, “Obama hints at a future in VC“:

“had I not gone into politics, I’d probably be starting some kind of business,” said Obama. “The skill set of starting my presidential campaigns—and building the kinds of teams that we did and marketing ideas—I think would be the same kinds of skills that I would enjoy exercising in the private sector. … The conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.”

The rest of the article contains quotes from VCs good-humoredly sniffing Obama’s jock strap and suggesting candidly that he would make an excellent high risk capital allocator. I don’t even need to provide examples of why these disclosures are a bunch of bald-faced lies. You can make up your own punchlines.

Instead, I am pondering the following: does something like this represent a sign of how crony Silicon Valley is and how dependent upon government privilege it is for the profit it generates? Or does it represent how pragmatic this community of businessmen is in co-opting the enemy that is continually placing new obstacles on its road to riches?

I am not sure I am comfortable with either reality but the latter has merit in that one could at least argue one is acting in self-defense, and that’s more noble than getting behind the guns and pointing them at competitors and customers as in the case of the former.

 

Who Is YCombinator Trying To Fool With Their New Cities Research Project?

Two friends independently linked me to YCombinator’s “New Cities” blog post and it interested me enough that I thought to write about it in brief. The idea of a new city started “from scratch” excites me as an advocate of the private property society. I have a hard time imagining how my preferred values and ideas for peaceful, voluntary social arrangements will come to be implemented incrementally within the existing coercive institutions we call “city governments”. Starting with a bare plot of land, wholly-owned by one or more sympathetic parties and going from there seems like the only viable option for realizing this ideal and building a working model.

I was excited, then, to see that some well-known and resourceful people in the Silicon Valley VC community seem to be on to the same idea. But then I started reading their short post and I ended up with a lot of questions, the primary one being “What are they really trying to accomplish with this?”

I’m having trouble trusting their motives as sincere because of this: if they’re trying to build new cities, and they think they need to conduct “research” to figure out things like…

• How can we make and keep housing affordable? This is critical to us; the cost of housing affects everything else in a city.
• How can we lay out the public and private spaces (and roads) to make a great place to live? Can we figure out better zoning laws?
• What is the right role for vehicles in a city?  Should we have human-driven cars at all?
• How can we have affordable high-speed transit to and from other cities?
• How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable? Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text?
• What effects will the new city have on the surrounding community?

…they could prop open a free copy of Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State, Scholar’s Edition (with Power and Market) and start reading the basic economic theory underlying these questions, with special emphasis on the sections about “The Economics of Violent Intervention in the Market” which specifically deal with the problems they mention which relate to artificial scarcity of housing, zoning laws, street use permitting, mass transit policies and legislative efficiency. All the brainwork has been done for them, there is no need to reinvent the wheel and “discover” these effects independently if only they will consider what Rothbard has to say on the matter.

In fact, anyone who has read such material would immediately look at the “high-level questions” the YC Research project hopes to think through and notice the flawed premises evident in asking them. For example, asking “What should a city optimize for?” implies a city has some kind of monolithic identity and singular purpose, rather than being an unplanned, spontaneous outcome of the individual plans and values of the multitude of people who compose it. In asking the wrong questions, this project is doomed to arrive at arbitrary answers that are worse than wrong– they will be unknowledge which will set people back in believing it to be true and acting on it.

I don’t expect anyone at YCombinator or the research project to take a concern like this seriously, because I don’t believe their stated motivation is authentic. If it was, I would expect them to study the conclusions of 350+ years of economic pondering on these very unoriginal curiosities before proceeding with their experiment, which will never happen.

So my question remains. What are they really trying to accomplish with this? (And their Basic Income research project, which almost seems like expertly engineered trolling for the same reason I question the motivation of this New Cities project.)