The Bandwagon

If you don’t get off your duff and do something, we can expect wealth special interests to own the executive branch for another four years, and the religious right to own the courts for the next twenty.

Of all of the forces that shape how a person will vote in a given election, the most potent force is you.

Let me spend a few words here applying theory to action and applying it to the question of who wins an election.

Many atheists and other rationalists claim that people should always, in all instances, base their beliefs on reason and nothing else. This is a moral imperative. A person who does not do this is worthy of our condemnation.

I argue that this is absurd. None of us have the time to base all of our beliefs on reason. Because of time constraints we have to use other systems for justifying our beliefs. Those systems are less reliable than reason. In fact, because of the fact they are unreliable, they are called ‘fallacies’. However, they have a higher ‘truth per unit effort’ quotient than reason, so they are practical.

One of these is the bandwagon fallacy – the fallacy whereby somebody believes something merely because a lot of other people seem to believe it. Of course, those other people could be wrong. However, one of the things that we can say about a widely held belief is that those who believe it are still here. The belief has not destroyed them. So, as a first guess, for a creature that does not have a lot of time to evaluate every possible set of beliefs in depth, it makes sense to use the rule, “Adopt those beliefs that seem to be the most common.”

Yes, it’s flawed. However, in terms of efficiency – in terms of “truth per unit of energy input” it works exceptionally well. “These are the beliefs of those who have made it this far, so these are the beliefs that I will adopt.”

This is why most people in this country are Christians – because this is the belief system that surrounds them, and this is the belief system that got us this far. In Muslim countries, they are Muslim because, at least, Muslims survive long enough to have children.

In light of the scarcity of resources with respect to holding ALL of our beliefs up to the light of reason, we must . . . we must (there is no way out of it) . . . perform belief tri-age. Before holding a belief up to the light of reason we need to make a quick cost-benefit analysis and determine if the expected cost in terms of time and effort exceeds the expected benefit. More importantly, benefits have to exceed the cost by more than with any other possible examination.

So, if holding Belief 1 up to the light of reason provides X units of benefit, but holding belief X2 up to the light of reason provides 2X units of benefit, the fact that holding Belief 1 up to the light of reason produces a benefit is not good enough. It has to be more beneficial than alternative uses of those same resources.

Now, let’s apply this theory to the election process.

There is a very little chance that a person’s vote is going to change an election. There is almost none. So, the payoff that one gets by devoting resources into discovering who is the best candidate is very low. There are other things that are more important. This is why most voters – almost all voters – know almost nothing about the candidates running for office.

What they do instead is they apply the bandwagon fallacy. They look around for the candidate who is making the most noise, who is getting the most favorable press, and they decide their vote on this basis. They’re going to take informal polls of their friends, neighbors, bridge club members, co-workers, people who forward spam email into their inbox, headlines (without reading the stories – because the cost-benefit analysis does not justify going beyond the headlines), and 30 seconds of “political education” in the form of a campaign advertisement somewhere in the middle of a football game.

Here is where you come in.

I used to think that lawn signs, bumper stickers, buttons, and T-shirts promoting a political candidate were nonsense. You can’t learn about a candidate from a bumper sticker or a yard sign.

But that sticker or sign does carry information. It says, “I support this candidate.” In a world where a great many people form their beliefs using the bandwagon fallacy (where it is efficient and rational to do so), the thing to do is to get as many people as possible to shout as loudly as possible, “I support this candidate!”

If you support Obama for President, but you are shy and nervous about letting your opinion be known, then you are doing exactly what the McCain campaign needs you to do, given your beliefs. They need you to be quiet so that when the vast majority of the American voters apply their bandwagon fallacy and cast their votes, their bandwagon fallacy will tell them that McCain is the better candidate.

We know that if McCain wins the election that we will have an administration with no love of truth – an administration with no moral objection to using lies and other forms of malicious deception as well as meaningless distraction to divert the attention of the American voter from what they are doing.

We know that if McCain wins the election we are at risk of having an arrogant and ignorant President who thinks that she can govern the most powerful country in the world by getting advice personally from God.

We know that if McCain wins the election that the religious right will control the Supreme Court and it will not matter what the Constitution says about the separation of church and state – the Supreme Court will simply interpret those restrictions out of existence and clear the road for an American theocracy. Once McCain becomes President, all of your Constitutional arguments for the separation of church and state will be nothing more than so much toilet paper for the religious right.

We know that McCain himself has a moral character that embraces lies and devious distractions, a character that does not care enough about America to keep it out of the hands of those people that McCain himself has selected as his successors.

Because of the events of the past two weeks in particular, I see so much harm and destruction coming to America as a result of a McCain victory, that I find it essential to state clearly and without equivocation that for the sake of the country, and for the sake of the world, that man must not become President.

The bandwagon fallacy is a fallacy in the sense that the truth of the premises (a lot of people believe X) does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion (X). However, as a matter of practical efficiency it is not stupid to use this line of reasoning – particularly for cases where the personal payoff for applying the light of reason is very low.

The most potent force that many of the people around you will have with respect to deciding who to vote for is the attitudes of those around them. If you want to influence their attitudes in a particular direction, then you need to let others know what it is you believe.

It’s time to make some noise.

It’s time to encourage as many people as you can to join in the noise.

McCain, Lies, and Malicious Distractions

John McCain’s moral values are harmful to America.

We show our moral values through our actions – through what we do, and through what we decide not to do. Our actions show what we value, what we are willing to promote, and what we think is not worth our effort.

On Wednesday, John McCain showed that he has no love of truth, that he supports a culture of lies and malicious distractions as acceptable methods of getting what one wants, and that he thinks it is morally permissible to distract the American people from the discussion of important topics with by diverting their attention with useless trivialities. These are John McCain’s moral values, and they are clearly harmful to America.

Whenever we act, we tell the world (or at least those who know of our action – which, for a presidential candidate is a lot of people) that they should have no aversion to doing the same thing themselves. When President Bush embraced torture (he changed the name, but he did not change the product), he told every two-bit tyrant in the world that torture was acceptable, and they, too, should not be ashamed to use it. When he embraced secret trials with secret evidence he said to the world that no leader should be concerned about doing the same thing, and no citizen in any country has a moral right to protest the possibility of being tried in such a court.

So on Wednesday, when John McCain embraced lies and senseless distractions as a way of gaining election as President, he told the people that there is no moral objection to lying, or to manipulating the American people with senseless distractions. He promoted these as things that all good Americans would and should do under similar circumstances.

However, these are not things that a virtuous person would do. If the people were to follow McCain’s moral lead on these matters, to the degree that they do so, America is made worse off. This is why a good leader . . . a moral leader . . . a leader who cares about what is good for America . . . would be leading America away from a culture of lies and senseless distractions. He would not lead America towards these things – and he particularly would not lead America further into a culture of lies and senseless destructions by his example.

There were two incidents on Wednesday that show how John McCain’s moral values are harmful to America.

Lipstick on a Pig

Barak Obama made the following statement:

John McCain says he's about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is, 'Watch out George Bush -- except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics -- we're really going to shake things up in Washington.' That's not change. That's just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it's still going to stink after eight years. We've had enough of the same old thing.

Obama was talking about the fact that John McCain’s policies are similar to President Bush’s policies. Where Bush’s policies are the pig, McCain’s policies represent putting lipstick on that pig.

However, John McCain and his campaign staff, showing an utter lack of decency or moral sense, decided to lie and claim that Obama was talking about Vice President Palin in making these comments. McCain is after the women’s vote, and to get it he thought it would be useful to lie to them and present Obama as somebody who does not respect women.

Sex Education

The second act concerns McCain’s claims about Obama’s support for a sex-education law. The law included provisions for teaching young children that if somebody tries to approach them in an inappropriate matter, that they might be in trouble and they should get away from such people. (See Factcheck.org Off Base on Sex Ed)

McCain created an advertisement that distorted this legislation by claiming that Obama favored teaching children about sex before they even knew how to read.

The moral crime here is particularly heinous, and a threat to children, because in the atmosphere that McCain decided to promote to get elected a person dares not support programs that will protect children from sexual predators, because doing so will put them at risk of this type of distortion. Apparently, protecting children from sexual predators is something that America needs to put aside, in favor of McCain finding an easier path to the White House.

The Importance of Character

Moral character is an extremely important quality to consider in a politician.

If you were to let somebody borrow your car, you know that you will not be there to look over his shoulder and see that he treats your car well. You need to know how that person – his dispositions and habits. Perhaps the most important quality to learn about a person in deciding to trust him with something of value is his moral character – his willingness to do what is right.

The more valuable the thing is that you put into somebody else’s care, the more important moral character becomes. If you want to trust somebody with your child, even for a day, issues of moral character are much more important than it is when deciding to trust somebody with your car. You want to take particular care to make sure that you are trusting your child to somebody who will protect him from harm, and would never cause harm to your child in pursuit of something that he finds personally gratifying.

However, on Wednesday, McCain showed us that he is willing to do harm to America in his pursuit of something that he finds personally gratifying. He contributed to and supported a culture of lies, malicious deception, and trivial distractions. These, according to McCain, are perfectly legitimate ways to get something that one wants – that is what McCain told us yesterday. These, however, are things that are harmful to America as a country, and to its individual citizens.

For a person concerned with helping America and protecting it from harm, liars and malicious manipulators are people that the responsible person would want to protect America from. They are not the type of people that the responsible person would teach Americans to become.

Persistence of Moral Values

A person’s moral character tends to persist over time. We can reasonably predict the type of person President McCain would be by looking at the type of person Candidate McCain has become.

What type of President would McCain be?

Judging from his actions recently, he will be a President that has absolutely no use for honesty or integrity. We can expect him to be just as willing to lies and distortions against those who criticize his policies as President as he has decided to use against his opponents as Candidate. Instead of a Presidency in which the country can expect open and honest debate about the issues that confront the country, we can expect personal attacks against anybody who dares to criticize his policies, and for him to blind, confuse, and distract the nation with misinformation and nonsense to keep us confused as he pursues his own interests.

Just as the Bush Administration has done over the past eight years.

I mentioned above how, if you were to trust your child to somebody’s care, you would want to know something about his moral character. If he has a long history of caring for children and protecting him, you would count that in his favor. However, if, in the last couple of years he has become malicious and abusive, this is far more important in knowing what his moral character is today.

When it comes to trusting our country to McCain, we need to pay far more attention to what he has done recently than to what he did several years ago. Today, McCain is somebody who will harm America by promoting lies and malicious deceptions as a way of getting what one wants. Today, McCain is somebody who would leave the country in the hands of an arrogant and ignorant leader who thinks that she can get her instructions straight from God in case of his death. Today, McCain is somebody who shows us over and over again that, instead of being somebody who is eager to protect America from harm, he is willing to be the author of that harm in order to obtain something that he finds personally gratifying.

Citizenship

A person who embraces lies and malicious manipulation is not only unqualified to be President. He does not even make a good citizen.

What type of neighbors and co-workers would you rather share your community with?

Do you want to live and work in a community surrounded by liars and malicious deceivers? If you do, then you will live in a community where you cannot trust what anybody says, and where nobody gives a second thought to distorting the truth or distracting you with made-up trivialities into doing what benefits them at your expense.

Or would you rather live in a community where you can trust your neighbor, and where they will deal with you with honesty, integrity, and respect?

When we act, we lead by example. When McCain acts, he leads by example. But where is he leading us? He is leading us further into a culture of lies, malicious manipulation, and distraction away from an intelligent discussion of real issues. He is promoting the type of community where these vices are accepted. And where a culture accepts these practices we can expect more and more people to engage in them.

Conclusion

Once upon a time an honorable McCain was willing to protect and care for America. Once upon a time, he was somebody that we could have trusted with our country. But that McCain is not running for office today. The McCain that is running or office is willing to do harm to America by promoting a culture of lies and malicious manipulation. We can add this to the fact that the McCain who is running for office today is willing to leave us in the hands of an arrogant and ignorant woman who thinks that she can get her instructions on how to lead the country from God.

These are McCain’s values today.

And they are harmful to America.

If you think that these arguments make sense, I would like to ask you share them with anybody you might know in the Obama campaign who might be able to put them to use. Or, if you know somebody in the McCain campaign who a person of good moral character, you might want to share this with her. Particularly if she is somebody who cares more about honesty, about moral character, and about America, than she cares about political party.

FFRF "Imagine a World Without Religion"

Here is a useful coincidence.

The day after I write a post discussing the difference between presenting ideas and presenting reasons for action, I get an email from American Humanist praising the Freedom from Religion Foundation for running an advertisement in the New York Times linking religion to the destruction of the World Trade Center.

The advertisement is an image of the World Trade Center when it still stood, accompanied by the text, "Imagine a world free from religion."

When the Connecticut Valley Atheists put a similar sign before the city center as a part of a Christmas display, I wrote a set of posts on the bigotry expressed by such a remark. Connecticut Valley Atheists - Imagine, Communication, Causation, and Condemnation, and Speech Proposal

Yet, here we are again, with a national organization flagrantly advertising in a major newspaper that Atheists are just as capable of being fear-mongering bigots as any religious person can be.

The Core Argument

There is a difference between saying that "religion" is responsible for the attacks on 9/11 and saying that "a religion" is responsible - just as there is a difference between saying that "a white person" is responsible for the murder of a black man and saying "white people" are responsible.

The first statement can be true – and is true – in some instances. Yet, to go from the former truth to the latter statement is an invalid inference of a type typically motivated by a bigot's desire to promote hatred without respect to either truth or reason.

A religion caused the destruction of 9/11. I would have no objection to an advertisement that pointed to that attack and said, "Imagine a world without THAT religion." But this is not what the advertisement said. It wants us to put the blame on all religion. It is as bigoted as an advertisement that put up a picture of Hitler and, instead of saying, "Imagine a world without THAT white man," it said, "Imagine a world without white men."

Or, accordingly, putting up a picture of a black person who has committed a heinous crime that everybody knows about and that generates strong emotions, and putting his image on a sign that says, "Imagine a world without blacks."

I can understand how the members of these organizations and their defenders might loathe to think of their actions in those terms. However, that does not prevent the comparison from being true. Remember, no bigot of any kind thinks of his prejudice as being bad.

Besides, how many times have religious bigots put up signs of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and others saying, in effect, "Imagine a world without atheists." For some reason, atheists, many of whom applaud the advertisement mentioned above, call those inferences bigoted and unfair.

Let's put the problem with this advertisement clearly in focus. The problem is with the inference, “A person with property X did Y; therefore, we should rid the world of all people with property X.” It is an unjustified inference from 'a religion’ to 'religion' – which is just as bigoted as an inference from ‘a black person' to 'black people' or 'an atheist' to 'atheists'.

"Because Of"

The standard response to this argument is to say that the analogy does not work. A person does not kill another person because he is white (or because he is black or because he is an atheist), but people do kill others because of their religious beliefs. That is why religion is necessarily bad, while none of these other things are not necessarily bad.

However, it does not defeat the argument. Nobody kills another person because of 'religion'. One person may kill another because of a religion, but not religion. The a religion - religion fallacy is still at play, it is still invalid, and it is still an expression of bigotry.

Ultimately, there is no sense of the phrase 'because of' that will make the statement 'A performed this horrible act because of religion' true. The statement, 'A performed this horrible act because of a religion' is sometimes true. However, what is true of a religion need not be true of religion, in the same way that what is true of a black person need not be true of all black people.

Let’s look at the most common sense of what it means to say that something happened because of something else. Imagine that a house burns down in a city. A fire inspector is sent in to discover the cause of the fire. In his report he write, "The house burned down because of . . . ." Because of what?

What the inspector is looking for is something that distinguishes the fact that this house burned down from all of the other houses that did not burn down. What, in this case, was different?

If we apply this sense of the term 'because of' to the World Trade Center, this means that we need to find out what makes the World Trade Center different from all of the other towers that did not burn on September 11th.

Religion? That's the answer?

Not hardly. Every other tower on the planet was surrounded by just as much religion as the World Trade Center. At best, coming back with the claim that the World Trade Center was brought down because of religion would be like the fire inspector telling us that the house burned down because of the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere. Even if it were true that without oxygen the house would not burn down, the house did not burn down because of the presence of oxygen. There are millions of houses in the same oxygen environment that are not burning down. And there are hundreds of skyscrapers in the presence of religion that are not collapsing.

However, we can't even get the sense that religion caused the World Trade Center to collapse that is even as strong as the claim that oxygen caused the house to burn. In the case of the house, the house cannot burn without oxygen.

Is it the case that towers cannot be attacked and brought down without religion?

I can give you an infinite number of scenarios in which somebody destroys a sky scraper that have nothing to do with religion. A disgruntled employee, a scam to collect insurance, foreigners upset about America’s alleged theft of their resources or support for a tyrannical leader that killed his parents, all of these can cause people to attack and destroy towers without the slightest input of religion.

In other words, religion is not a sufficient condition for the collapse of sky scrapers (many sky scrapers exist in the presence of religion). Nor is it a necessary condition for the collapse of sky scrapers (sky scrapers can be destroyed by people acting without religious motive).

So, again, there is no sense in which it is true that the World Trade Center collapsed because of religion.

I will belabor the point. The World Trade Center collapsed because of a religion that is true. However, there is no legitimate inference from what is true of a religion to a blanket conclusion that this statement is true of religion.

Theism, Atheism, and Terrorism

Let's look for a moment at the claim that nobody has ever killed another person in the name of areligion (or atheism).

In any sense in which this statement is true, it is also true that nobody has killed another person in the name of religion.

Clearly, we have to admit that there are atheists who have killed other people, and who have killed people because those people were religious and he thought religious people deserved to die. This happened on a grand scale during the French Revolution. It also happened in many communist revolutions. And there is nothing to prevent the lone anti-theist with a gun to decide that he is going to kill himself and as many theists as he can because theists are responsible for all of the trouble in the world and deserve to die.

But we are not willing to say that these are instances in which people killed others because of atheism. If somebody offers that interpretation, we are quick to answer that atheism does not imply communism and does not entail the destruction that these people performed. It is quite possible for a person to be an atheist and reject those actions. So, it is a mistake to say that these people committed their horrible crimes because of atheism.

Well, religion does not imply crusades or inquisitions or witch hunts either. Religion does not entail the destruction of the World Trade Center. It is quite possible for a person to be religion and reject crusades, inquisitions, and terrorist attacks. So, it is a mistake to say that these people committed their horrible crimes because of religion.

Find me a sense in which religion is responsible for the destruction if the World Trade Center in which it is also not the case that atheism is responsible for the gulags of the former Soviet Union. The rule is that you have to apply the same sense to both examples. You can’t use one standard to evaluate religion’s faults and a different standard when evaluating atheism. If you do that, then you are guilty of the moral crime of hypocrisy.

Analysis of the Advertisement

The FFRF advertisement uses a very popular and very powerful marketing ploy in which you show somebody an image that generates an emotional response, you include a reference to something else, and you engineer a change in emotions where the viewer transfers the emotional reaction of the image to the thing referenced. In short, this advertisement is engineered to generate an emotional response of fear and hatred using the World Trade Center, and presents a reference to religion, in order to cause viewers to transfer their emotional reaction to the image to the concept of 'religion'.

It is the same tactic as that used in creating a documentary where the narrator speaks of 'atheists' and 'evolution' while showing images of Hitler, Stalin, Nazi death camps, and nuclear explosions. Here, too, the effect was to use the images to generate an emotional response in the viewer and then to attach that emotional response to the concepts of 'atheism' and 'evolution'.

You cannot condemn the latter (as it certainly deserved to be condemned) without condemning the former. Doing so – applying a different standard to these two examples of hate-mongering – makes one a hypocrite. And a bigot.

Coddling Religion

I am not making this argument on the grounds that we must coddle or show and undeserved deference to religion. I have argued repeatedly that the right to freedom of religion is not a right to immunity from criticism or condemnation for one's beliefs. However, that condemnation still has to come with a measure of respect to the values of truth and reason. "Some people with quality X are guilty of N, so we should consider ridding the world of all people with quality X" is not consistent with that standard.

Conclusion

This blog is not about promoting atheism. This blog is about promoting virtue and demoting vice. It is true that one of the vices that I am particularly interested in demoting is anti-atheist bigotry. However, my opposition to this vice has much more to do with the fact that it is bigotry than that it is anti-atheist. A person cannot oppose bigotry by embracing it when it is useful in attacking a target that one loves to attack. One that has to oppose bigotry wherever it is found.

One of the places that it is found is in an advertisement that attempts to claim that all of religion caused the attacks of the World Trade Center when, in fact, only a subset of religious beliefs were responsible for those attacks.

I'm sending a copy of this post both to the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the American Humanist. I wish never to see that image again, or any image like it, except as an example of how people used to use emotional responses to images to promote unreasoned hatred of whole groups of people. I hope only to see it as an example of the type of bigoted rhetoric that humans have outgrown.

If you agree that, while promoting atheism is fine, promoting bigotry is not (and that my arguments above are sound), then please back me up.

Freedom from Religion Foundation

Fred Edwords: American Humanist Director of Communications

Opposing the Palin Presidency

As I mentioned yesterday, I am going to focus this blog more on relating moral theory to action. The first action that I would recommend is to oppose acts that lead to the possibility of a Palin presidency. A person with good desires and true and complete beliefs would be adamantly opposed to any action that would put Palin a heartbeat away from being President.

The moral issue in this case is not that of Palin becoming President. The moral issue is that of a culture filled with people whose beliefs and desires are such that they are willing to support having Palin as President. To the degree that such people exist in our culture, to that degree our culture is not as good as it could be. In fact, to that degree, our culture is prone to doing things harmful to itself, and harmful to others.

Having said that, I immediately need to assert a couple of caveats that will be familiar to regular readers. There is a right to freedom of speech, and there is a right to freedom of religion (belief). However, these rights are not rights to immunity from criticism for what one says or what one believes. It is a right to freedom from violence. It is a right that permits others to say, "You are wrong," or even, "I will not vote for you or even do business with you." It is a right that prohibits others from picking up weapons and using them against the speaker or believer.

So, in speaking about reducing the number of people who would support having somebody like Palin in line to be President, I am speaking solely about using words and private actions for that purpose – respecting the rights to freedom of speech and of religion.

However, I am saying not only that it is permissible to aim words and private actions against those who would support having somebody like Palin in line to be President. I am saying that a good person would have reason to use those words and private actions against those who would support having somebody like Palin in line to be President.

Why would a good person oppose a Palin presidency?

Let's answer that question in terms of some of the buzz words that are being used in this campaign.

Change

Change is not automatically good. It depends on what one is changing from, and what one is changing to. In this case, we are talking about changing from the leadership of George Bush. The idea is that we need to change to something better, rather than stay the same.

In this case, Governor Palin is George Bush's ideological twin sister. She is a substantially ignorant religious fundamentalist who believes that she don’t need no book-learning because all she has to do is pray to Jesus and Jesus will tell her what he wants her to do.

We have a couple of examples Palin's ignorance.

Example 1: In a statement on whether she supports having ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance she said

If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance

Yet, "Under God" it was not having a pledge of allegiance at all that was good enough for the founding fathers. The founding fathers created an oath of office for those who won federal office. However, their oath makes no mention of God. Even the tag line, "so help me God" is a voluntary addendum not found in the Constitution. "Under God" did not exist until 1950s – the McCarthy era.

Example 2: When asked about the mortgage crisis and the fate of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Palin said they had, "gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers." However, the fact is that these were both private companies. They were costing the taxpayer nothing. The federal takeover, on the other hand, was a move that will almost certainly cost the taxpayer several billion dollars. Palin, as President, would have to deal with the mortgage crisis. However, she does not even know the principle players or what they do.

Now, the McCain campaign team is working hard to coach Palin on what to say, and keeping her well protected from displaying her ignorance until then. Of course, they cannot make Palin smart in just a few days. They want to teach her to be a parrot, to memorize a few key phrases that she will utter whenever she hears certain key words spoken by a reporter or audience member.

Palin's moral failing in this case is her arrogance. Palin, more than anybody, should know how ignorant she is and that the office if President is no place for somebody with her level of ignorance. I know a lot of people who do not know the story of ‘under God’ in the Pledge or the nature of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Yet, they also do not consider themselves to be vice-Presidential material. They have a better sense of responsibility than that. They have a sense of moral responsibility to the country that Palin does not have.

"Put America First"

One of the Republican slogans on this election is "Put America First." It is a part of a campaign that paints anybody who does not vote Republican as un-American, as somebody who puts America second (or lower) relative to some other concern.

However, when the McCain campaign team selected Palin, they did not "Put America First." They put winning the election first.

A parent who puts his child first will demonstrate his concern for his child by putting himself at risk for the sake of giving the child an advantage. This is in contrast to the parent who puts himself first. You know this parent because he is willing to put his child at risk when doing so has a chance of buying him an advantage.

McCain decided to put America at risk of having an arrogant idiot serve as President, and did so for the sake of buying an advantage among female voters in this election.

Once upon a time, McCain would not have done such a thing. Once upon a time, McCain clearly did put his country first, and was willing to take risks in its defense. However, that McCain does not seem to be among us anymore. That McCain is gone, and in his place we see somebody who does not care about the risks he puts America in, as long as he can win the election.

Moral Action

The question of whether or not to vote for Palin is a political question. The question of whether or not to be the type of person who would vote for Palin (or put her in line to be President) is a moral question. The latter is a question of moral character, of the type of person one is.

People who would agree to put somebody as arrogant and ignorant as Palin in line to be President are not good for our country. They risk making our lives worse than those lives would otherwise be. We see the damage that the last Ignoramus in Chief has done – the desires that could have been fulfilled but which were thwarted instead because of the combination of his stupidity and his arrogance in believing that God or his gut will tell him all the right answers.

Avoiding another four years of similar (or worse) harms is reason enough to act to use our words and private actions to make sure the likes of Palin are not put in line to be President. Making America a better place gives us reason to use words and private actions to condemn anybody who would subject America and Americans to that type of risk.

That condemnation includes Presidential candidate John McCain and any private citizen who supports his choice.

Three Years Old

Greetings Readers:

I have now come to the end of three years of blogging. With that, it is time for some change

The reason that I started this blog was to get some ideas that I had in my head out into the public. In high school I began a personal project to understand the nature of value – to know what 'better' is. I had 12 years of college and several years after college pursuing that interest. I had some ideas. I wanted to throw those ideas out into the world and see what happened.

This was not, of course, an attempt to make the world the beneficiary of my wisdom. One of the things that ideas need is exposure to competing ideas. I needed people to present objections that I had not thought of, objections that I would not think of on my own. I very much believe that the growth of knowledge (including the knowledge of good and evil) is a community project that benefits from the participation of a lot of different minds, each with their own areas of expertise.

In this regard, I am deeply grateful to the people who have taken the time to comment on this blog from time to time – both here (in the comments section) and elsewhere with links back to this blog. I can honestly say that I have read at least 97% of the comments written to this site, and those which have come in through email, and read whatever links I have discovered.

Over the last 3 years, I have written over 1050 essays describing the basics of that view and applying it to specific moral case studies. So, my views are now 'out there' for others to see and to comment on.

In recent weeks (starting on July 27th, to be exact) traffic to this site changed significantly. The number of people who come to this site as a result of generic Google searches went up 500% on that day. It gradually rose from there and, last week, generic google searches were 800% above what they had been before July 27th.

And those hits are coming all along the length of this blog. They come from people who are searching for information on social contract theory, an account of the meaning of 'all men are created equal', subjective morality, on rule and act utilitarianism, on atheist conceptions of good and evil, on any number of topics.

I had once worried that, if I post an essay, that it would soon be lost in the huge warehouse that is the internet, never to be seen or heard from again. Under current circumstances, that is not the case. People interested in a range of topics and who are doing Google searches are finding this blog.

So, I have to say that I am pleased. My goal from 3 years ago is being met.

But have I made the world a better place?

As a result of my writing, is it the case that people have truer beliefs, and/or are acquiring desires that tend to fulfill other desires? Is society, at least a little bit, more moral than it would have been if I had (for example) accepted that management job I was offered after undergraduate school and made money instead?

Making the world a better place does involve more than just presenting ideas. It requires putting those ideas into practice.

Anybody with a computer can sit down and design a building. However, the real accomplishment comes when the building becomes more than just a set of blue prints rolled up in a tube someplace (or sitting on a computer hard drive). It's quite another thing to turn that roll of blueprints into a real building that real people can then use in whatever ways they desire to do so.

So, what have I actually accomplished? What real-world change has come from these ideas?

Nothing much, I must admit.

So, after 3 years, I have to ask whether the mere presenting of ideas that people read, comment on, and either agree with or disagree with, has been merely an academic exercise. The puzzle that has been rattling around in my brain recently has been the puzzle on how to turn this into something real.

There is an intimate relationship between morals and action. In desire utilitarian terms, to call something good is to say that people have reason to pursue it. In the case of moral goodness, calling something a moral obligation means that a person would do it if they had good desires and their relevant beliefs are complete and true.

So, if I am recommending actions, I am making claims about what a person with good desires and true and relevant beliefs will do. And if people do not do those things, I have only three possible options. Either (1) the agent does not have good desires, (2) the agent does not have true and complete beliefs, or (3) I am mistaken about what a person with good desires and true and relevant beliefs would do.

By the way, there is a cliche in morality that says, "to know the good is to do the good". Which means, if a person knows that he ought to do X, then he will do X.

I deny this view of morality. It takes more than true belief to motivate a right action. It takes good desires. Bad desires can motivate a person who knows what is good to do evil instead, merely because he wants to.

Either way, an essay that correctly reports a moral fact would motivate a person with good desires to act. And if an essay does motivate an agent (the reader) to act, and the writer's moral claim is not mistaken, this implies that the agent either (1) lacks good desires, or (2) lacks some relevant set of facts.

So, I take seriously any sign that something I have writen has motivated people to act. If I see nothing, it suggests that there might be something wrong with the claims I am defending, if they do not motivate action.

But that is going to be more of a focus in this blog - the focus on motivating action. The focus on actually making the world a better place, rather than just writing about what such a place would be like if it existed.

I hope that you continue to stick around.

Reality

This is the last of my series of posts on the most significant areas where the Democratic and Republican parties will fail us over the next four years – contributing to human misery rather than preventing it.

I have given three areas where the Democrats will fail us: school choice, health care, energy policy, and international trade. I have given three areas where the Republicans will fail us: economic justice, the rule of law, and President Palin.

The fourth and most significant failure in the Republican party is, of course, its decision to build its party on a foundation of myth and superstition – a base that is seriously disconnected from reality.

Unfortunately, reality is unconcerned with our beliefs and attitudes towards us. Think of reality as being like a bus that is speeding down the highway, and you are a pedestrian that wants to cross the street. If you want, you can deny that the bus exists because you have checked your sacred texts and they say nothing about a bus. You can rewrite the reports to say that the fact that you see a bus and hear a bus should not be interpreted as implying that there is a bus. You can pray for God to intervene and stop the bus. But, if you step out onto the street in front of the bus, the bus will not swerve. It will not even slow down. It will swat you out of the way and keep on going.

The Republican Party has, for the past several decades, whenever it has gained power at the federal level, has used that power to lead the nation time and time again into the path of the upcoming bus of reality. And even though we have been smashed up to the tune of trillions of dollars in expenses and countless lives, the Republicans continue to insist that there is no bus, and promises to step boldly out into the street to get to the other side.

Part of the Republican presidential campaign this year is that the Republicans are ready to lead. However, being ready to lead is only a part of the equation. Where are they going to lead us?

We are standing at the street corner with our Republican leadership telling us that he is ready to march across the street. When people point out the oncoming Reality bus, the Republicans continue to protest that real leaders are not intimidated by trivial little things like reality. Some Republicans have argued that true leaders make their own reality. So, here we go again, stepping out into the street, only to be splatted against the pavement again by yet another Reality bus.

What Republicans need to do to quit being a threat to the quality of life for the American people is to stop, look, and listen.

When peer-reviewed scientific reports come in that say that a particular course of action will lead to trillions of dollars in avoidable costs and claim tens of thousands of American lives, (and tens to hundreds of millions of lives around the world), it does no good to rewrite the report so as to deny these findings. The Reality bus will still hit us, taking those trillions of dollars and countless lives.

And while we stand among the economic and physical carnage, it does no good to whine, "But scripture did not mention that this result," or "God did not tell me through revelation and prophesy that we would suffer this way," or "But I prayed for God to clear the path and prevent these consequences." None of these things are going to prevent the loss of trillions of dollars, and countless lives.

These laws of nature are going to keep coming at us. They are going to keep hitting us. They are going to keep knocking us down. Our only recourse is to stop, look, listen, and learn how to predict and control these forces, so that we cross the street safely and actually make it to the other side.

Republicans need to admit that faith-based street crossings are orders of magnitude more dangerous than stop-look-listen street crossings. They need to abandon myth-based laws and social policies, and start building their platform on a foundation that is firmly attached to reality.

It needs to start rejecting the sophistry of the anti-reality crowd.

"Okay, I admit that it looks like there is a bus coming down the street. However, you have to admit that it is at least possible that the bus is a holographic projection created by a group of college students pulling a prank. Therefore, there is no bus, and it is perfectly safe to cross the street. Until we know with absolute certainty that there is a bus, we should not suffer the expense of waiting to cross the street. We should cross the street anyway – unless and until the scientists can prove beyond all possible doubt that a bus is coming."

We'll learn the 'absolute certainty' that the Reality Bus is coming in this case when we are splattered all over the pavement (again).

Or:

"Yes, there is a Reality Bus coming. I agree with it. However, just maybe when the Bus hits us, it will hit us in such a way that we will go flying to the other end of the street, landing unharmed in the grass, and ending up better off as a result. What you are doing in suggesting that we not step out in front of the Reality Bus is you are denying us this opportunity. So, I am going to lead us out in front of this Reality Bus, come what may."

Of course, "come what may" includes being splattered all over the pavement by a reality bus that we could have avoided.

Or (one of my personal favorites):

"Okay, the Reality Bus is going to splatter us all over the pavement. However, science can’t tell us everything. It says in scripture that our role in life is to be splattered all over the pavement. Being splattered all over the pavement allows us to demonstrate our virtues as we turn to each other for care. It strengthens us as we recover from our injuries. And those who die, well, God has decided that it is their time to leave us. We should not be playing God by deciding not to step in front of the Reality Bus and avoiding the carnage that results. We should be stepping out in front of the Reality Bus and letting God decide who lives and who dies – who is mangled and who escapes unscathed. We must not deny God the opportunity to express his mercy by saving some of us. We must not deny those few citizens the opportunity to proclaim, 'I thank God for his mercy because, while he decided to bless others with the opportunity to exhibit such great inner strength, 'He has decided to spare me any harm at all.'"

Ultimately, I would say that if any person wants to step in front of the Reality Bus and take his chances that books written by ignorant tribesmen 2000 years ago contain all of the truth about reality, or that they can stop the bus through prayer, or that being splattered by the reality bus is a good thing that gives God a chance to show his mercy and gives humans the chance to grow stronger through adversity, they can go ahead and do so.

The problem with the Republican Party is that they demand that the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, go with them. They demand (through legislation) that the whole nation step in front of the Reality Bus. There are no provisions for opting out. There is no option for saying, "No thank you. You go ahead. I’m not really into being splattered all over the pavement yet again by yet another reckless collision with reality."

Stop. Look. Listen.

The very model of evidence-based decision making that every child learns before he is allowed to walk to school on his own, is too heavily disregarded within huge sections of the Republican Party. It is not that those Republicans have forgotten this piece of wisdom. They hold it in contempt and express proudly that their form of decision making scoffs at the use of evidence. They use it as a point of ridicule that others actually pay attention to the evidence and try to discover the truth of a matter before acting – looking for the Reality Bus so that they will not end up in front of it.

Until the Republican Party learns to respect and use evidence in decision-making, it would be as unwise to vote them into office as it would be to blindfold your child and send him out to find his way to school.

It’s not a smart thing to do.

President Palin

In my continuing series on the things that I expect Democrats or Republicans to screw up over the next four years, the item that has just climbed to the top of the list is expressed by the phrase "President Palin."

Sarah Palin is Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain's pick for Vice President – his pick to lead the country in the case of his death or disability. (Note: For those who have focused only on death rates for men 72 years old and above, please note, death is not the only force that can render a person unfit to continue to serve as President of the United States.)

PZ Myers provided a video recently that allows us to get to know Palin a little better. (See: Palinanity .)

In this video, Palin is addressing a group of recently graduated Assembly of God missionaries. Here are a couple of quotes from that speech.

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country; that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out for a task that is from God. That is what we have to make sure that we are praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan.

This is what I want to pray over you guys, too. that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him. (Ephesians 1:17) And that spirit of revelation also including that spirit of prophesy, that God is going to tell you what is going on and what is going to go on and you guys are going to have that within you and its just going to bubble up and bubble over and it is just going to pour out throughout the state of Alaska.

In short, Palin tells us that our national leaders are to send our military out to do 'God's work'. Furthermore, those leaders can know what God wants them to do through revelation and prophesy. This will tell them everything they need to know about what is happening and what will happen. We may assume that such a person has no need for evidence, and has no reason to listen to the advice of experts. After all, she will get her information directly from God. If some advisor or consultant comes up to her expressing a different opinion, then he can be easily dismissed because, if the analyst is contradicting God, then the analyst must be wrong.

Isn’t this how Bush decided that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? God told him to attack Iraq, and anybody who dared to suggest that these conclusions were mistaken must be wrong?

In addition to her claim that the U.S. Military must do God's work, and she will know God's work through revelation and prophesy, we must add the doctrine the Republicans have advanced for the past eight years that when acting as Commander in Chief the President faces no checks or balances to her use of power. Congress has the power to declare war. However, Congress has already given the President the power to fight the nation's enemies. This authorization will not expire when Palin gets sworn in. It will still be in place, allowing her to send American troops to do God’s work, whatever she thinks that work to be.

One of the things she thinks fits into God's work is building $30 billion pipelines. Another claim she made in this speech was:

I can do my part in doing things like working really, really hard to get a natural gas pipeline, about a $30 billion project that's going to create a lot of jobs for Alaskans and get a lot of energy flowing through here. Pray about that also. I think that God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that pipeline built.

So, apparently, if you are opposed to this pipeline you are opposed to God. God has informed Sarah Palin that it is part of His plan to have a pipeline, which means that anybody who argues against the pipeline must be working for whatever forces stand opposed to God.

Next, we should consider Palin's possible state of mind if she should end up being President. We should consider the unlikely chain of events that would have made her Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces – a series of unlikely events that can only be described as a miracle.

There is no better evidence that God has personally selected her to be President and, if God has selected her, this can only mean that she is the one who knows God’s will. If anybody should dispute these conclusions with her, she has an instant response. "God made me President. God has revealed his plan to me. If you are advancing some other plan, then you are working against God. If God liked your plan instead of mine, then He would have made you President instead of me."

Of course there is no God. The 'will' that Palin will be pursuing is not God's will, it will be whatever she decides to assign to God based on her prejudices, upbringing, and her emotional state at the time. 'God's work' will be whatever idea comes to her, through the words of another person or some ‘brilliant’ revelation that occurs to her late at night, flavored with whatever tinge of human emotion that she will then take to be certain proof that the idea came to her from God himself. Whatever idea this is, Palin will make it America’s policy, and the goals that the military will pursue as she sends them out to do God’s Work.

With this way of thinking, I have little doubt that we will not be far into a Palin administration before we are longing for the good old days under President George Herbert Walker Bush – days of comparative intelligence and sanity. Even though Bush probably held many of the same ideas that Palin has expressed above, Bush at least had enough sanity (or had advisors with enough sanity) not to let too much of this out into the public. Yet, Bush has certainly paved the road for a new kind of American leader – one who gets her instructions straight from God, and one whose enemies can not only be branded as anti-American, but anti-God.

While we are drawing comparisons between Palin and Bush, we should add that both are/were governors of oil-rich states and who are/were strongly connected to the executives of several oil companies. In all honesty, Palen embodies so many of Bush's worst qualities that a Palin administration would not be a third Bush term. It would be much worse.

Finally, we must note that it was McCain's decision to put Palin in line to be Commander in Chief of the military. This means that we also have reason to question McCain's judgment, or his commitment to America. This means that we have reason to question his commitment to America’s soldiers, that he is willing to put them under the leader ship of such a person.

What type of person has McCain become that he thinks that this is a good idea?

At one time, McCain was an intelligent and honorable man. I had thought for this election he was playing up to fundamentalists in order to get the Republican base to support him in this election. I had entertained thoughts that he intended to be a one-term President who would say, after his inauguration, "Screw the Republican base. Now that I am President, I am going to do what is best for America," and he might make a decent President.

This pick of Sarah Palin as Vice-President has dashed all of those hopes. With this choice, McCain has proved that he either no longer knows what is good for America, or he no longer cares. Because no person who knows what is good for America and cares about what is good for America would put American soldiers under a Commander in Chief like Palin.

If he is willing to pick this type of person to be a potential Commander in Chief, we have to ask what type of person he is willing to pick to become a justice on the Supreme Court, or the type of person he would pick to fill vacancies in the Appeals Courts. What type of person is he willing to pick for Attorney General, or to head the Joint Chief of Staffs?

Either way . . . whether McCain no longer knows what is good for America, or no longer cares . . . he is not the person he used to be. That's a very sad thing to have happen, because the person he used to be is somebody that we have good reason to admire. The person he has become – the person who would put Palin in line to be Commander in Chief of the military – is not the type of person we need to have governing America at this time.

The Rule of Law

I have given four areas where I think that the Democrats are going to leave us worse off if they win the election (energy, international trade, health care). Now I am listing four areas where the Republicans will leave us worse off.

One of the key areas is in the area of the Rule of Law.

Torture, rendition, warrantless searches, arbitrary arrest, indefinite confinement without a trial, secret trials, secret evidence, the use of signing statements and executive orders to bypass the legislature and the courts, secret laws, there is not a single practice popular among tyrants that the Bush Administration, with the support of Republicans in the legislature and on the courts, has not put into practice or at least argued for the right to put into practice.

Overall, the Republican rule of governing has been, "Whatever Caesar wants, Caesar gets."

One of the principles of government that has been popular in America until recently is the idea that we cannot trust people to govern other people. People are corruptible, and will inevitably put their own interests above those of their subjects. Instead, we have sought to trust our freedom and well-being to institutions. Specifically, the goal was to set up a "rule of law" that even legislators and Presidents had to obey, and a system of checks and balances to enforce it. Collectively, this set of institutions is captured by the term, the Rule of Law.

The Republican Party over the past eight years have shown a great distaste for the Rule of Law. They have spent their time in power fighting to take down those institutions and to put their power, instead, into the hands of people. They have rejected the idea that people cannot be trusted to protect our interests and preserve our liberty. Instead, they argue, the rule of law must be torn down and replaced with the rule of man so that Caesar can then use this power to protect us in ways that the Rule of Law cannot.

If America were to succumb to tyranny, it is highly unlikely that it will be forced on us as an invasion from an outside force. Tyranny will rise in America the way that it has risen in other republics in history. The tyrant will rise from within the ranks, will take the reigns of power, and will use some element of internal or external strife to say, "Give all power to me, so that I can defend you from these forces of evil." Once he has that power, he will not relinquish it. He will continue to point the finger at supposed enemies (real or imagined( in order to preserve the sense of daner and anxiety, and in order to argue that he must continue to hold all of this power for the sake of the people.

So this is how liberty dies, to the sound of thunderous applause

This line comes from the third Star Wars movie. It comes from Senator Padme at the point where Palpatine has engineered such a threat to the Republic that the Senate grants him dictatorial powers, and enthusiastically applauds the decision. We have, in the Republican Party, a sufficiently large group of people giving thunderous applause to all of the elements of tyranny that the Bush Administration has advanced. In doing so, they have proven themselves to be the type of people in whose hands our personal liberties are least safe. They will eagerly hand those liberties over to the first tyrant who comes along who states, "You are in danger. I will protect you," and who asks for the sacrifice of those liberties as payment.

In spite of this concern, the Democrats have not proven themselves to be enthusiastic defenders of the Rule of Law either. They have had almost two years, since winning the Legislature from the Republicans in the elections of 2006, to stand up for the Rule of Law against the Tools of Tyranny that the Bush Administration has claimed the right to use. They have done little to do so.

Nor have they made much of a campaign issue out of these concerns.

Of course, it is easy to understand why they have selected this course. It is a part of the process – one of the core troths that can be found in the quote, "This is how liberty dies. To thunderous applause." Democrats want thunderous applause, too. They are not in these campaigns to lose. They are in these campaigns to win. Winning is far less likely when one's opponent is the one generating the thunderous applause – when defense for the Rule of Law earns only apathetic silence.

I have to confess, I am not overly optimistic when we get thunderous applause for the instruments of tyranny coming from Republicans, and apathetic indifference for the Rule of Law coming from Democrats. Yet, it is still the case that apathetic indifference to the Rule of Law is better than active hostility towards it. So, when it comes to protecting the Rule of Law, the Republicans are still the party to like the least – until they adopt a new set of values.

It is, in fact, both surprising and unsettling that the Republicans have been at all successful in branding themselves as America’s party – the 'patriotic' party – the party that best represents America. It is surprising, given the fact that the Republicans have done so much harm to the values that once defined America – particularly the value of the rule of law. It is unsettling because, to the degree that the Republicans are successful in this campaign, to that degree being an American will be associated with being an advocate and defender of torture, rendition, warrantless searches and seizures, warrantless arrest, indefinite imprisonment without a trial, secret trials, and secret evidence.

The Republicans, in effect, now have our children pledging allegiance to torture, arbitrary arrest, and unrestrained executive power with the power to nullify both the legislature and the courts. This is because the Republicans would have us believe being a true and loyal American means supporting these practices.

Is this really what it means to be an American?

To many in the Republican Party, the answer seems to be 'yes'.

Economic Justice

I have given four areas in which I think Americans (and people around the world) will be worse off under a Democratic administration. These areas are education, energy policy, world poverty, and health care.

Now, I want to balance the scales by giving four areas in which Republicans will make us worse off.

The first area in which the Republicans will make things worse off is in the realm of economic justice.

The Republicans are going to make things worse off generally for people substantially because people with a lot of money can bid resources away from people with little money but who, nonetheless, have a more highly valued (in terms of desire fulfillment) use for those resources.

Many Republicans speak as if $20 spent by somebody with $1 billion to spend is the same as $20 spent by somebody who has $21 to spend, and that is not the case.

Take a piece of paper (or a computer) and start writing. Assume that you had only $20. What would you spend it on? Now, assume that you were given a second $20. What would you spend that on? And a third $20. Continue making your list until you have a list that covers $1 billion (50 million items).

Now, please note that if you had $1 billion, then you could get everything on that list. However, if you had only $20, you could only get the first item.

So, the person with $20 who gets the first item has to give up everything else on the list. She cannot get even one of those items at the same time. Yet, the person with $1 billion can get what she wants and still get one less than 50 million other items on her list. It simply does not cost the person with $1 billion as much (in terms of opportunity costs) to spend $20 as it does the person who only has $20.

The idea that $20 has the same value to both people is simply false.

Many Republicans base a lot of policy decisions on this false assumption. They act as if it does not matter where any given $20 is. Twenty dollars is twenty dollars and it always has the same value. As such, these Republicans tend to support policies that have rich people spending a lot of money on objects of less value, while denying poor people the opportunity to spend that money on objects that have a great deal more desire-fulfillment value.

The result is that people, generally, as worse off. In fact, the more that wealth gets concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, the less well people generally become because of the diminishing marginal value of another $20 to those who have billions, compared to the value of that same $20 to those who have hundreds.

What is true about individuals is also true about nations. In the same way that rich people bid resources away from poor individuals who, nonetheless, have a more highly valued use for those resources, rich countries bid resources away from poor countries that have a more highly valued use for those resources.

Consider the price of oil. What are the effects of the price of a barrel of oil going up to $120 per barrel?

The classical economic interpretation is that where the value the use of oil is below $120, those uses will be replaced by conservation, leaving enough oil for those uses whose value is above $120. In other words, we stop using oil where it provides us with only $110 worth of benefit, so that we can continue to have oil available where it provides us with more than $120 in benefit.

In fact, one of the effects of increasing the price of oil is that it simply drives poor people out of the market. They’re not paying $120 per barrel for a price of oil because they do not have $120 to pay. The poor people are forced out of the market, so that the rich people can have enough oil to do what they want to do with it.

Think of a poker game. You have a huge pile of chips, whereas the person sitting across the table from you has a smaller stack of chips. You think that your opponent has a better hand than you do. However, assume that you are playing by rules where a player has to fold unless he has enough money to cover the bet on his turn. So, the person with all the chips raises to a point that is $1 more than the sum of the chips that the poorer player has on the table. So, by the rules of the game, the poorer player must fold. It does not matter how good his hand is. He cannot win unless he has enough money to sit at the table and cover the highest bet that any other player is willing to make.

A rich person, or a rich company, can bid away even what a poor person or country needs for human survival, simply by being willing to pay more than the poor person or country can afford. Yet, it does not follow from this, that the poor people value their lives less than whatever the rich person values doing with those same resources.

To the degree that we increase the gap between the rich and poor, to that degree resources will be taken away from higher-valued uses that the poor people would use them for, and be devoted instead to the lower valued uses that the people with money can afford. Republican policies tend to be those that are good at growing these types of differences.

Health Care

The next item on my list of things that I suspect the Democrats will make worse is in the area of health care. I fear that they have a program that will drive the overall social costs of medical care even higher, without providing additional benefits, digging an even greater financial hole for the country and the people who live here.

In the area of health care we have a situation in which the people who pay for the service, and the people who use the service, are not the same people. It is a bit like taking your credit card and handing it out to some random person. No matter what charges they put on the card, they will never see the bill. That bill is going to come to you. If you do not pay the bill voluntarily, your wages will be garnished to cover the expenses. But the person who has your card knows none of these things. All he knows is that whenever he uses the card to buy something, he gets what he wants, and he never has to pay for it.

The consequences of having this type of system is that we would all fairly quickly drive each other into poverty. We will find other people paying for all sorts of things without making any attempt to economize – no worries about cost, no need to substitute less expensive options for more expensive options, no need take preventative steps to avoid high future costs. Because the agent never has to pay the bill.

What this huge level of demand means is that overall medical costs go through the roof. People use it as if it is free, but it is not free. Other people do, in fact, get the bill, and that bill has to be paid. It gets paid in the form of higher taxes (equivalent to garnishing your wages to pay the credit card that somebody else is living off of.

So, the next step is to take action to keep costs down. The way to do this is to limit services – to come up with a long list of regulations and requirements that tell people what they may and may not purchase. Actually, it is a list of things that people may not purchase. It is a set of restrictions on the use of the health care system.

In other words, we get red tape.

Red tape also costs money. The hope is that the money we pay for red tape is less than the money we save in the form of medical care not used.

But here we introduce another complication. What we have is a feeding trough holding hundreds of billions of dollars. We have a country full of businesses who know full well the profitability of being able to dip into this feeding trough at will. This “red tape” is not going to be laid out by doctors with an eye to the care of their patients. It is going to be laid out by agreement between lobbyists and legislators.

The cornerstone of a profitable business, then, will not be the ability to provide the best medical care at the lowest price. The cornerstone of a successful business will be the manipulation of the government bureaucracy in order to manipulate the flow of public funds. Medical facilities can expect to put their greatest efforts in that which provides them with the greatest profits. Lawyers and lobbyists will become the primary income-generators for these businesses. Doctors and nurses will simply be cogs in the machine.

Furthermore, legislators, when they hand out public funds or manipulate the flow of money through regulation, have one overriding concern. That is to funnel the money to those people who will then support their re-election, and away from people who oppose their re-election (who support the re-election of somebody else). The service that medical facilities will sell to the people who pay their bills will not be “the ability to keep you healthier, longer, and at least overall costs,” but “the ability to get you votes in the next election, or the money you need to advertise for votes.”

To whatever degree legislators control the flow of funds, to that degree the “job” of the medical industry will be the job of helping legislators get votes. Treating illness and injuries will be a side show – the means by which the medical industry pursues its primary objective of providing legislators with votes and campaign contributions.

One of the facts that we have to recognize is that much of our high national medical costs are due to lifestyle choices. Drinking, smoking, unprotected sex, over-eating, under-exercising . . . these are the choices that people make. However, when they make these choices, they make them with the idea that somebody else gets to pay the bill.

What type of car would you buy if you knew that somebody else was going to pay for it?

We have to have a medical care system in which the people who make the choice to use certain services suffer the costs of their decisions – where they are limited in their ability to buy these services on somebody else’s dime. To the degree that we are not able to do this, to that degree we will inflate the overall social costs of medical care, and create an industry more attuned to hiring lobbyists to manipulate the flow of money through Washington or state governments instead of investing in doctors and nurses who provide the best medical care.

Having said this, I want to remind the reader that there is an argument to be made against having a pure free-market medical system. From a desire utilitarian perspective, markets have a significant problem. They are inefficient at fulfilling desires. A person with a great deal of money can bid goods and services away from those who have little money, even though the person with little money has a more highly valued use for those goods and services.

My classic example is the case of buying bottled water after a disaster. The rich person can afford to buy water at $20 per bottle for trivial uses, such as giving her pet poodle a shampoo. Whereas the poor person whose sick child is suffering from dehydration might not even have $20 to spend. Whereas value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires, this system has some negative value. It is allowing the fulfillment of weaker desires and fleeting interests, while allowing stronger and more stable desires go unfulfilled.

The medical industry is one industry where the rich have the power to bid up the prices of goods and services – far above what poor people can pay. They are able to bid medical skills away from the practice of treating illnesses and injuries, and instead direct it towards cosmetic surgery, personal trainers, dieticians, cooks, and ‘spare no expense’ medical care. Plus, they have an incentive to do so. Rich people do not want to be sick or die either.

The argument that I have given above is not an argument for going with a completely free-market medical care system. Such a system will leave the rich to bid the price of medical services well above what the poor can afford to pay. However, it does argue that there needs to be something built into the system whereby those who use medical services pay something for that use.

Most importantly, I think, people need to pay the costs of medical care when it comes from lifestyle choices. A great deal of the demand for medical services comes from people who smoke, drink to excess, use other illegal drugs, have unprotected sex, over-eat, under-exercise, and the like. When people make these kinds of choices, it is particularly important that they pay the social costs of their decisions, and not force those costs onto other people.

In effect, when we have policies that allow people to engage in these types of behaviors without suffering the costs of their own decisions, we are, in effect, subsidizing these behaviors. For all practical purposes, the situation is no different than if the government were to say, “We want you to smoke, drink heavily, use illegal drugs, have unprotected sex, over-eat, and under-exercise. And, in order to encourage you to do these things, we will give you a special incentive in that we will cover whatever medical costs come up.”

This is a sure-fire way to decrease overall public health and increase the overall social costs of medical care. These government subsidies to poor lifestyle choices already amount to billions of dollars per year, and are almost certainly going to rise under a Democratic health care plan.

Internatinal Trade and World Squalor

Today's topic in my list of areas where I expect a Democratic administration and legislature to fail us during the next 4 years is the area of international trade.

The term, in this case, sounds boring – ripe for a reader to shrug and say, "Nothing going on here" then clicking off to some other site. Yet, what I am talking about here is a policy that demands that half of the population live in squalor – a state of extreme poverty and disease with few options and even less hope.

While many Democrats complain about the Republican policy of refusing to teach family planning and promoting the use of condoms and other forms of birth control in the developing world, they are simultaneously putting just as much effort into making sure that nobody hands out jobs in those same parts of the world.

Companies are exporting American jobs overseas. Gasp! Horrors! Next thing you know they will be buying food! Obtaining medical care! Building an infrastructure to provide clean water and sanitation!

Of course, the policies that I am referring to are wrapped in a prettier package than I am presenting them here. “For the sake of the poor exploited people of the world, you must provide them with $10 per hour plus medical benefits, or you must give them nothing at all!” This would be great if people then got the $10 per hour plus medical benefits. However, the vast majority of the people end up with nothing at all. As I said, it is a policy that condemns the bulk of the Earth’s population to squalor.

And it does so for a reason. It does so for the sake of eliminating competition, so that those who do have access to jobs can charge something closer to a monopoly rate for their labor. The more people that we can condemn to poverty and disease, the more those of us who are available to be hired can charge for our services.

Of course, it is not the intention of those who complain about companies ‘exporting jobs overseas’ to have the rest of the world live in squalor. It is simply a known side effect – known in the sense that a person would have to be mentally incompetent not to at least ask the question, “If those people are not doing these jobs, then what are they doing?”

However, in this case, the benefits are an illusionary. In fact, these types of protectionist policies make American workers worse off. To somebody who merely glances at the surface of this issue, it appears that a company that closes a call center in the United States to open one in India is enriching Indians at a cost to Americans. This on-the-surface illusion is what Democratic leaders who complain about these policies are counting on – that they can generate a powerful enough impression that these policies do harm that they can get people to vote for Democrats.

Some times some Republicans attempt to point out that American workers benefit from these policies, but the boos and hisses of shallow-thinking individuals give the political points to the Democrats whenever Republicans speak the truth on this issue.

However, let us assume that you have a store. You manufacture widgets and you offer them for sale. So, tell me, are you better off trying to sell widgets to a population living in poverty and disease, or are you better off trying to sell widgets to a population that has money to spend?

Of course it is the latter.

Increased prosperity in other parts of the world does not harm America. It gives American business more markets that they can sell to. It increases the ability in other countries for them to purchase American goods.

Another benefit that comes from these policies is that the price of goods is cheaper. Americans who purchase these less-expensive goods and services then have money left over to buy other things as well, and in purchasing those other things generates the demand for job in those other industries.

A third benefit is that the bulk of the stockholders in these companies – to the degree that the move actually turns out profitable – are Americans. Much of the profits themselves flow back to America – flow back to the American economy.

A Republican is not socially permitted to say these things without being booed off of the stage. However, a boo is not an argument.

I want to provide you with another illustration of how we benefit from trade. I want you to become self-sufficient. You are going to grow your own food and process it. You will manufacture your own clothes after growing your own cotton or raising and sheering your own sheep. You are going to build your own house, which includes mining and smelting the copper to make the wiring for the electrical outlets. Of course, you will also build your own generator – from raw materials. If you want a computer, you will have to build that, too.

You are going to have a lot of work to do. In fact, I think it is quite fair to say that you have no hope of maintaining the standard of living that you enjoy today.

The smart thing for you to do is to start shipping some of those jobs ‘overseas’ as it were. You should ship the food-growing job to the farmer, and the cloth-making job to somebody who does textiles. You should ship the copper mining and smelting jobs over to people who do copper mining and smelting, and the generator manufacturing jobs over to the generator manufacturers.

Your prosperity actually depends on shipping huge amount of the labor that you would otherwise do over to other people to do the work for you. And you trade with them, doing for them (or, at least, some of them) some of the things that they cannot do for themselves.

See, in the same way that it pays you to ship some of your work over to them, it also pays them to shift some of their work over to you. They cannot prosper by doing all of their work themselves any more than you can.

It does not matter whether some of those people are on the other side of some arbitrary border. That is an irrelevant variable.

Let’s say that you are in a state of self-sufficiency (a fairly wretched state, I might add), and you have one more person to trade with. The two of you can be better off than either one of you by yourself.

Now, let’s increase this community to four people. Again, this will give all four of you the opportunity to be better off than you would be in a community of two people.

It would be absolutely absurd, in a community of two people, for you to say that you going to draw an arbitrary line in this community and say that you are going to limit your trade to only one other person – and he is going to trade only with you. If you take your community of four people, and turn it into two communities of two people each who do not interact with each other, all four people are going to suffer for it. The smart thing to do is to open up trade with the people on the other side of these artificial boundaries, to increase as much as possible the number of people in the trade community.

However, the policy that many Democrats are advancing is actually a policy of dividing the trade community into subgroups and blocking trade between members of different subgroups. It is advancing this proposal as if it has a chance of making our subgroup better off than it would otherwise have been.

In fact, reality is much different. It is a policy that promotes squalor in other parts of the world – that condemns billions of people to poverty, disease, and hopelessness. At the same time, it does harm to America on the whole as well, and American workers in particular. To see this, just imagine yourself all alone, with nobody to trade with, having to do everything yourself. Imagine what these Democrats are arguing for taken to their logical conclusion.

Energy Policy

This week, I am devoting some time writing about some of the areas where I expect the Democratic Party, if it should be in control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, will likely fail.

One of the areas in which I expect Democratic failure is in the area of energy policy.

Clearly, the Democratic failures in this area will not be as bad as we can expect from the Republicans. However, it would hardly even be possible for the Democrats to invent an energy policy that is as bad as that what we get from the Republicans, but I will get to that next week. The issue is not whether the Democrats can beat the Republicans in terms of energy policy. The question is whether the Democrats can advance a good energy policy.

I do not expect them to.

The main source of failure that we can expect from the Democrats will be their tendency to try to pick winners and losers – to come up with specific objectives and to legislate those objectives. The reason that this policy will fail is because (1) legislators do not have and can never have enough information to do this well, (2) the information changes over time and legislation cannot respond quickly enough to new information, and (3) legislators need to feed their supporters.

We can see this failure in the government programs involving ethanol production. Legislators decided that we need an alternative to fossil fuels and decided that this alternative must be ethanol. Therefore, they passed legislation mandating that a certain amount of our energy production be in the form of ethanol. Furthermore, this could not be foreign ethanol (e.g., that produced with sugar cane from Brazil), but domestic ethanol produced from corn.

Let us be clear as to why the government picked ethanol as one of the ‘winners’ of an alternative energy program. It is because corn farmers have a lobby, and that lobby coordinates political support for legislators who will pick corn ethanol as a “winner” and mandate its production as a part of our alternative energy program.

But what are the consequences?

Let us assume that there is a drought or a flood that damages a significant portion of the corn crop. We have legislation in place that still demands that a certain amount of corn be used in ethanol production. But we do not have as much corn as we used to. So, something has to be cut.

So, we have no option to cut anything but food. Food prices because there is simply not as much food corn to go around. In social terms, the legislature, spurred on by the farming lobby, created a program where the rich people almost literally take food off of the table of the poor and starving people of the world in order to produce energy that is ultimately used for the sake of entertaining those who are not so poor.

Please consider the consequences of this failure – consequences being felt around the world today. People are starving. People who live off of hundreds of dollars per year are finding it more difficult to find food because that food is going to producing alternatives to gasoline for people in a country where there is a significant problem with obesity.

This policy has, as a matter of fact, turned out to be an instance where people with money have used the power of government to make themselves better off by forcefully redistributing wealth from others who can barely afford to eat.

The energy policy that the Democrats should pursue is simple. We now know that the burning of fossil fuels produces some significant threats – the spread of tropical diseases into areas that did not used to be tropical, sea-level rise threatening coastal property, more severe storms, heat stress (causing death among the sick and elderly). The simplest plan for dealing with these problems is to simply tax the use of fossil fuels to raise the price, and then to use the money raised to help those who are being harmed by fossil fuel use.

The point is that the government is not picking winners and losers. It simply makes the price of using fossil fuels more closely match the cost of using fossil energy. And it puts the cost of using fossil fuels on the shoulders of those who use them, rather than allowing a person to use fossil fuels and to impose the costs on somebody else.

The people themselves decide how they are going to respond to these price differences. If they want to respond by switching to a car that burns ethanol, or an electric car, or by driving less, or by driving the same car and driving just as much but not spending money on other things, all of these options are open to them. They can pick the option that best suits their interests (that best fulfills their desires given their beliefs).

More importantly, businesses can decide how they want to respond to the higher prices of fossil fuels. They can decide which options to invest in, and any option that they might conceive of is on the table. Any new method of conservation, any new way of producing energy that reduces the cost of wind, electric, solar, or some other form of energy, immediately begins to influence market choices.

Unfortunately, this simplicity would come with political costs. There is the cost of increasing the price of energy, which many voters would not like. We would need to add some complications to deal efficiently with these effects.

More importantly, there is the cost of a group of politicians not using their political positions to channel money directly to their friends and campaign supporters. Such a tax still leaves those poor friends and campaign supporters at the whim of market forces. They still have to find some ways to provide customers with better options to higher priced fossil fuels than the other competitors.

This last point explains why I expect that the Democrats’ are going to fail us when it comes to devising an energy plan. Again, it would be difficult for the Democrats to come up with an energy plan as bad as the Republican plan. However, this does not imply that we should expect anything good to come from the Democrats over the next four years.

School Choice

Now that Obamafest is over and the Republicans have the spotlight for a few days, I would like to spend some time going over a few areas where I think the Democrats are going to fail us in the next four years.

Please understand, I will vote for Obama in November and consider him to be the better candidate. However, there is room for improvement. Most of my readers favor the Democratic Party and speaking ill of that which cannot be questioned may be considered blasphemous. However, I think that a better world is possible and would rather speak in defense of that world than commit myself to orthodoxy in matters of politics.

Plus, I will do the same to the Republicans when the Republican convention is over – showing why, even after acknowledging some significant Democratic Party failings, they are still better than the Republicans (for now). So, you’ll have something to look forward to.

I think that the most significant area in which the Democratic Party will fail us is in the area of education. They are committed to a form of education that has seen virtually no innovation over the past 200 years, where we seem to be spending more and more money to get less and less. The way out of this trap is a policy which Democrats tend to vehemently oppose . . . the policy of ‘school choice’.

The problems that we have had in public education are very much like the problems we had with respect to a public post office. The government set up the post office as a (virtual) government monopoly. One of the consequences of this was stagnation. The Post Office never came up with a single innovation in the realm of communication. The telegraph, telephone, radio, television, email, and the internet all came from elsewhere. All of them resulted in tremendous leaps in communication technology. And through it all, what we got from the Post Office was a continual set of demands that the government put up barriers wherever possible against whatever might threaten its existence.

Certainly, the Post Office adopted a few innovations. They moved from ponies to trucks, then to airplanes. They invented the ZIP Code, and adopted OCR technology and bar scanners as a way to help sort the mail. However, these were variations on a theme. None of these were new themes.

By now, I have almost entirely opted out of the “post office” system. I do not think that I have purchased a stamp in over 5 years, and almost everything that I pull out of my mailbox (when I check my mail) goes into the garbage. It’s a waste of time, energy, and paper.

What we see in the public education system is substantially the same problem. We see an institution that has not produced a single piece of innovation over the past 200 years, which still does things in substantially the same way as our great^8 grandparents, demanding that the government take measures to ensure that nothing happens that might threaten their viability Specifically, they demand that the government do what it can to deny potential customers a choice of whether to use their service, or to opt out.

We even hear the same arguments in these two cases.

The defenders of the Post Office would protest that if people had a choice as regarding methods of communication, that private industry would take away the most profitable options, leaving the Post Office with all of the inefficient and expensive jobs to do. Specifically, a private post office would lower the price of in-city mail (where economies of scale allow for economic efficiencies), but raise the price of rural mail, creating a rural stamp that would be many times more expensive than a city stamp.

To prevent this dreadful state of affairs from coming about, it was considered essential that we lock ourselves into a form of communication that would not change over 200 years, while the rest of the world sped by with new technologies. Until, finally, email and the web came along, and the Post Office could no longer hold back the tide.

However, innovation became possible simply because the Post Office could not eliminate all possible alternatives to its service. Email snuck in through the gaps in the Post Office conceptual radar, and was far too efficient for the Post Office to contain once it got out and started being used.

Similarly, in the area of school choice, we hear the argument that if people had school choice then the ‘best students’ would go elsewhere, leaving the public schools to take care of those who were particularly hard to educate for any number of reasons, from mental and physical handicaps to poor home environment.

Again, the result is that there has been as little innovation in the way we educate our children as there has been in the way we deliver mail. We are stuck using the same old systems.

The thing is, if we could restore innovation, some of that innovation would be put to work on the very “problem cases” that those who defend the status quo claim to be worried about. In communication, the innovations of the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and the internet have reached and have benefitted a substantial portion of the rural community. Methods of communication have been invented that can broadcast information to rural areas almost as cheaply as it can transmit information within a city.

In fact, helping those who are “problem cases” is one of the areas where we are most in need of innovation – for their sake. So, it would be ironic to use them as an excuse for policies that stifle innovation.

Similarly, there is no reason to believe why innovations in education will not include methods of innovation that we can then apply to “problem cases” – giving even them a much better education than they get from us pursuing the same methods decade after decade after decade.

The key to innovation is to give people a choice. The key is to let people take their portion of the education budget (the amount of money that would be spent to educate their child) and tell the parents, “Okay, you have the freedom to look at alternatives to the traditional brick-and-mortar method of education.”

Another concern with school choice is that some people will not choose wisely. They will choose to mis-educate their children in myths and fairy tales that have no relationship to reality. In the extreme case, we may worry about people setting up versions of the Pakistani ‘madras’ – a school where nothing is taught but holy scripture, and that is taught in a way that makes the student a threat to the well-being of others.

These are legitimate concerns, but the concern does not carry very far. In effect, this argument states, “If we give a person a choice between A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J, then some of them may choose J. J is a horrible choice. Therefore, we must compel everybody to choose A.”

Clearly the argument is not valid. It is possible to prohibit option J while still permitting options B through I. This type of argument is too often advanced by people who have strong reason to ban competition to option A, and they are using this piece of sophistry employing option J as a scapegoat.

Besides, among the community of non-believers, I think we are very much in need of schools where a child can go where they are not harmed by rituals that daily declare non-belief the patriotic equivalent of rebellion, tyranny, and injustice. They can benefit from a school that does not post signs that tell them, “If you do not trust in God, then we do not consider you one of us.” They can attend a biology class where the teacher is not the least bit nervous about saying, “Today, we will start discussing the theory of evolution.” A school where the history teacher is not trying to teach the literal truth of the Bible or that America is a ‘Christian Nation’. A school where the English teacher is not suspiciously keeping an eye on the atheist in the fourth row because, “We all know what kind of people those atheists are. They have no morals.” A school that teaches logic, where a Sophomore is expected to know the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning and can identify thirty informal fallacies.

There has to be a market for at least one school like this in every major city.

An argument for school choice will allow the possibility that these will be among the schools that a school choice initiative would support. If this type of school is truly a school of quality (as I expect it would be), the success of students who go to those schools would be a great inducement to others to seek the same type of education for their own children.

Anybody with a better idea should never be worried about a bit of competition.