extortion license

But master plumber Robert Mengler mentioned another disturbing wrinkle.

"Master plumbers are also allowed to self-certify their work," he wrote. "There are certain licensed plumbers that have made lots of money by renting out their licenses. . . . The chances of this work being inspected is very, very, very low." -Article Link

Obviously the solution to this problem is to remove the need for licensing altogether, that system which erects trade barriers for the sake of protecting the profits of plumbers, electricians and other contractors from excessive competition in a medieval guild-like fashion.

Unfortunately, the NY Daily News takes the irrational populist view that developers are out to destroy neighborhoods, kill little old ladies, and ruin our lives. How pathetic.

the housing that education built

Last week while exploring some city neighborhoods to gauge the current trends in rental and sales numbers, I was shocked into the realization of how much of a factor that free public education plays into the price of city housing.

Obviously, there is the well known rule that housing in districts known to have "good" public education is in higher demand relative to housing located in districts known to have inferior schools.

While that is certainly an important component of what "adds" value to housing, I was actually focusing more on the counterfactual speculation if public education in general leads to increases in the price of housing solely due to the effect that subsidized education leaving over increased funds available to bid up housing prices.

I find this train of thought interesting to one such as myself, living in a micro-neighborhood where a relatively higher number of students attend yeshiva, a form of private schooling. Looking forward at the prospect of shelling out 10K to send my son to kindergarten is a bit daunting in light that I would like to have a few more kids and not live in debt slavery.

What I realized that day while doing my market homework, when I saw lousy apartments in run-down neighborhoods were paying rents in the ballpark of what I'm paying in this more affluent manicured-front-lawn neighborhood made me think of the factors keeping prices lower around me and higher in those "good" public school neighborhoods are greatly affected in that the average joe around me share higher education expenditures and can't afford to spend as much for housing.

If effect this means that to some extent, the existence of free tuition is benefitting a class of building owners who reap the largess of the taxpayers who subsidize public education to their indirect benefit of increased housing prices.

The people who stand to lose from this proposition are the young professionals just out of school who have yet any substantial cash savings to speak of, nor any [grand-]children which could possibly benefit from this arrangement.

In a way, this also serves to keep the religious, private-school attending crowd living separate from those districts in which it is more common to utilize the public school system making adherence to the religious ghetto more rigid than it would be otherwise.

adage

The fantastic GrimReader expatiates tongue-in-cheek:

"Well, I don't like all that Trust and rebate business, so I tell my representative to regulate the hell out of those railroad guys. And I started supporting my local Wheelmen's Association. We are trying to get my representative to support public road building. In fact, this is great: let's build roads everywhere so it makes it cheap and easy to drive my new car. You have to have government build roads - a private road would have to charge fees, and everyone knows there's no way to feasibly operate a road that way!"

Actually, in the internet age its not difficult to imagine what private roads could possibly resemble. Popular websites such as Salon.com and the NY Times have long offered both subscriber and ad-sponsored models to price-ration their articles. Many national broadcasters routinely offer costly bandwidth-saturating TV programs free of charge to end-users, sponsored with only regular commercial breaks.

With that model, its not far-fetched to envision the provision of private roads sponsored by roadside billboard advertisers. Private road builders would then compete to capture the eyeball and vehicle traffic and would be incentivized to be focused on providing the most satisfying experience to the commuter to ensure his repeat visit to this particular soap-freeway.

The mind boggles at what might evolve from this--

• vehicle transponders which communicate with road identification systems to announce your presence, perhaps relate some personal preferences and vehicle info
  
• "Google" roads with minimal, relevant text-only advertisements based on your prefs
  
• Greasemonkey extensions which free-loading Firefox junkies would use to screen out obnoxious, "PUNCH THE MONKEY AND WIN!!!" -type advertisements by overlaying the windshield with blank spaces along the drivers line of sight
  
• freeways operators offering discount coupons enticing you to choose their road over a competitors
• express lanes exclusively offered to purchasers of advertisers products
• advertisement rates fluctuating based on traffic volume and speed conditions

This can even be realized today with the de-socialization and genuine privatization of government roads, both toll and the nominally "free" variants, although I'm sure that most people would be horrified of the prospect of having "our" roads being "commercialized".

government for children, by children

We all heard the terms before--

• "have your cake and eat it too"
• TANSTAAFL ("there ain't no such thing as a free lunch")
• "putting the cart before the horse" (the ability to consume without having to first produce)
  

In Human Action, Mises aptly describes this child-like behaviour of blindly holding an irrational belief that the wholism of government is godlike in the aspect that it can produce goods ex nihilo.

At the bottom of the interventionist argument there is always the idea that the government or the state is an entity outside and above the social process of production, that it owns something which is not derived from taxing its subjects, and that it can spend this mythical something for definite purposes. This is the Santa Claus fable raised by Lord Keynes to the dignity of an economic doctrine and enthusiastically endorsed by all those who expect personal advantage from government spending. As against these popular fallacies there is need to emphasize the truism that a government can spend or invest only what it takes away from its citizens and that its additional spending and investment curtails the citizens' spending and investment to the full extent of its quantity.

practical etymology

Just over this past weekend, I checked into the biblical etymology for the words k'fitzat haderech to try to understand the essence of the concept of underlying these miraculous trips. I now believe that I have come up with a biblical proof supporting the notion that teleportation requires no miracle and perhaps may be be thus reproducible to us, non-divine hominids.

Unlike modern Hebrew, in the biblical Lashon Hakodesh, "the holy tongue", KaFaTZ, which is the root for the words k'fitza/k'fitzat does not actually mean "to jump" as I first thought it did-- it very precisely translates to "to shut quickly" or "to collapse". Both KaFaZ and KiFaTZ mean to leap, but that meaning stems from the etymological root literally describing the compression of ones' legs prior to springing forward.

Furthermore, the phonetic cognates of KaFaTZ express related concepts:

KaVeTZ - to gather
KaMaTZ - to close one's hand
GaVaSH - to condense

Let's move on to the second word: HaDerech, the root for this is DeReCH, both a verb meaning "to lead the way", and a noun meaning "path."

Now, going back to the main subject, try to imagine for a moment, a sheet of paper with two dots spaced far apart. According to the rules of Euclidean geometry, the shortest distance between those two points is a straight line.

But if we now look at the expression k'fitzat haderech, we can begin to understand the mechanism of the teleportation feat-- it involved the kefitza, or collapse of the space-time fabric of the derech, or path delineated between Points A and B. This would be analogous to taking the sheet of paper and folding it along the symmetrical axis, so that the two dots are now touching and adjoined in the space-time continuum.

There are a few other instances in which the Lord admits to messing around with the non-euclidean geometric model. The very first implication is in Noah's ark, 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high, if I remember correctly. The biblical commentators (and detractors too) point out that if two of each animal from every single specie (excluding sea life) were to be loaded in the ark, they could never physically fit into something of that size, and they conclude that the rules of space-time were bent in this instance to accommodate the entire terrestrial zoo.

The next instance occurs when Jacob goes to sleep one evening during his travel from home to Charan. Unknowingly, he sleeps on the location of the future temple mount, Har Habayit. When he lays down to sleep, the commentators mention that the Lord took the entire land of Israel, and compressed it into the space underneath him, whatever that means.

Much later on, during the time of temples, all Jews who could physically make the pilgrimage, would do so three times a year to the temple to celebrate the holidays of Pesach, Shevu'ot, and Succot. It was said that all the Jews gathered into the temple courtyard, and somehow they all fit. Furthermore, when they bowed down during prayers, each person was somehow accorded a clearance of a four-pace radius.

And for my final example, according to the lore, when the Messiah arrives, the Lord will unfold the land of Israel so that it becomes much larger than it is today.

So why did I get excited?

Its because of a well-known rule that the Lord does not operate outright miracles of the supernatural sort once he finished the creation, although this doesn't preclude cases where his direct influence can be plausibly explained away as a coincidence of natural contrivances.

Yet there is a Mishna in Pirke Avot (Chapter 5, Mishna 8) which reads:

"Ten things were created on the eve of Shabbat, at twilight. They are: The mouth of the earth; the mouth of the well; the mouth of the donkey; the rainbow; the Manna; the staff; the Shamir; the alphabet; the inscription; and the Tablets."

Those are the ten exceptions to the rule, and they were set aside from the time of creation until the later time they would be needed for supernatural divine intervention, the biblical deus ex machina.

Now since k'fizat haderech is not listed above as one of the supernatural miracles, we can thus assume that it is not a supernatural device, but one subject to a common natural mechanism, one that hopefully be realized with the help of the etymological insight into its workings.

pulp peeves

Lo and behold, a local politico wants to ban unwanted circulars from being littered unto homeowners properties.

"A Brooklyn councilman has proposed legislation that would make it illegal to distribute menus, fliers and other circulars to homes and apartment buildings that display a sign indicating promotional material is unwanted. The councilman, Simcha Felder, a Democrat, has proposed a fine of at least $50 for distributors who leave the materials anyway. Mr. Felder said his constituents had complained about the number of fliers left at their doors. His mother, he said, received a $100 fine from the Sanitation Department for circulars left on her stoop. “You shouldn’t be responsible for cleaning up someone else’s garbage,” he said."

I've long despised those advertisement companies which make it their business to defecate on your front lawn/stoop, and their hapless bottom-of-the-economic ladder stooges who in an effort to finish their route sooner, often throw multiple copies of the unwanted newspaper circulars or other assorted crap.

The best part is when precipitation melts it into a runny pulp that comes apart in your hands as you reach for them to toss them in the trash.

But I heartily disagree with Felder.

Its not my responsibility to post a sign instructing others not to litter, or to otherwise disturb my quiet enjoyment of my home. Those who want to invoke an appeal to "implied consent" in this case must show both:
a) a reasonable expectation that the advertisers truly believe that I, Joe Individual, am really interested and delighted to be a recipient of your crap
b) a viable framework which allows me to withdraw from and opt-out of your indiscriminate neighborhood blanketing

But this is certainly not the case. I cannot recall ever sharing a drink or even a dirty joke with an advertisement publisher insider, who then might have some reasonable expectation that I would like my home to be inundated with his marketing assault. There goes the case for "A".

The worse part is the lack of feedback mechanism to legitimately opt-out. You see, I tried the nice way. I followed some of the litterers back to their distribution van, and spoke to the drivers. I got the names and phone numbers of their bosses who handle distribution in our neighborhood. I begged them time and time again to skip my house, my street. But there is no master list for opt-outees. The driver who covers a neighborhood brings along no such list to instruct his poor, oft-time illiterate underlings where not to litter. And so on it goes. Irresponsible, criminal erosion of private property enjoyment with no way to withdraw your "implied consent".

And as BK Marcus once taught me about appeals to implied consent --

"But notice that in all of these cases [of genuine implied consent], there's a way to withdraw consent. In fact, the very existence of consent depends on the possibility of its absence!"

capitalism, misdefined

A couple of days ago, I commented on a post at lowercase liberty in regards to R.A.W. and his knowledge of economics as I understood from his writings.

I then realized that my initial comment was harshly imprecise; while R.A.W. could have been knowledgeable in economic theory (although I'm convinced he wasn't), he certainly was sloppy in confusing normative ethics prescriptions with economic systems.

Please witness this one egregious abuse:

"When Playboy fired him, Shea endured terrible anxiety about keeping his house, and dashed off a few novel outlines while looking for another job. He sold his first novel before finding a job and never stopped writing again. I still treasure his comment on why the Bunny Warren cast him out. "I worked hard and was loyal to the company for ten years," he wrote. "I guess that deserves some punishment." I treasure that as the best comment I have ever heard about capitalist ethics."

Erggh!!! I'm certainly not sympathetic to the "bosses are evil" definition of capitalism, and to say what social behaviors are prescribed by capitalism is bunkum.

As far as I know, capitalism is a description of economic system in which individual rights and ergo, property rights are respected, and while some may seem to have better bargaining power, at the end of the day, its the little guy, the consumer who is unforgiving, disloyal, tough to please and is always punishing those soon-to-be non-producers who aren't serving their desires adequately. So no hard feelings dude, its not personal.

Inigo Montoya's timeless words are thus suitable for this misdefintion of capitalism -- "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

the socialist tree calculation

(cross-posted to the Mises blog)

While the headline of a recent New York Times article employs a subjectivist notion of value, "Maybe Only God Can Make a Tree, but Only People Can Put a Price on It", the article makes it clear that the concept of price formation is something less well understood in the so-called paper of record.

Witness how the tree prices were derived:

"Step 1 was a tree census, a two-year process that sent more than 1,000 volunteers to count every tree on every street in the city. The census results were then fed into a computer program that spit out a dollar value for each of the 592,130 trees counted, a figure that does not include the roughly 4.5 million trees in parks and on private land...

It takes into account several factors, including a tree’s impact on local property values, its contribution to cleaning the air by absorbing carbon dioxide, and how much its shade helps reduce energy consumption.

Factoring in the costs associated with planting and upkeep, New York City’s street trees provide an annual benefit of about $122 million, according to the Parks Department. The study concludes that New York receives $5.60 in benefits for every dollar spent on trees."

But wait just a second-- how does a computer program determine the price for the trees? I'm reminded of Gary Galles's article "And Then a Miracle Occurs." Much like the cartoon professor who uses that phrase as a stage in a mathematical proof, the "price-calculating" black-box could only invoke some arbitrary determination based on of what the historical market demand has been for street-side trees.

Now although the city government presumingly pays market prices to private contractors for the planting and maintenance of these trees, the notion of these trees now having a determinable market value or price is quite meaningless without a market to set them. To further ascribe the role these trees play in property valuations is an empty consideration without the knowledge of what opportunities were forgone with their planting. Thus is the nature of the socialist beast.

The root of this problem :) was brought up by Mises over 80 years ago in a series of articles beginning in 1920, shortly thereafter culminated into his Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis in 1922, and later in his treatise Human Action.

Lacking both omniscience and a market to determine the value individuals place on trees, planners cannot determine the opportunity cost that the trees represent, making any monetary calculation of the benefits provided a worthless spectacle of ignorance on stilts.

aphasiac

Everyone knows what to call the lack of sight, hearing or speech. But I've long wondered what to call the lack of ability to either smell, taste, or to feel objects.

Thanks to OneLook, I now know that:
hyposmia is a "lessened sensitivity to odors."

anosmia is the "absence or loss of the sense of smell."

hypogeusia is a "decreased sensitivity to taste."

ageusia is the "loss or impairment of the sense of taste."

anaphia is the "total or partial absence of the sense of touch."

Now just to commit those words to my vernacular, so that they roll off my tongue with the same smoothness that I have for expressing blindness, deafness and muteness.

point of view

From Ayn Rand, I've learned that appeals to efficiency are not as important as liberty, and that even if methodological individualism and capitalism were to be more "costly" policies to society, we should still prefer liberty to interventions seeking to enhance efficiency and stability.

From Ludwig von Mises (and Murray Newton Rothbard) I've learned that appeals to efficiency are false because costs are subjective and hence unmeasurable. Furthermore, they demonstrate in so many ways how interventions is always a decrease in utility, and would probably cause more instability, not less.

From Robert Anton Wilson I've learned that all appeals to efficiency are essentially an appeal to an illusion, a fiction with no bearing on reality.

A simple example which demonstrates the difference between all three positions would be that of your typical environmental concerns.

Ayn Rand would insist that human life is the ultimate end, and that appeals that value biological and ecological diversity above human life is irrational and anti-life.

Mises or Rothbard would argue that environmental concerns are those problems which stem from the lack of rigid property rights, the classic tragedy of the, [because there are] commons. Once polluters have to internalize all aspects of their costs, the environmental problem stops being a societal concern and one for individuals to work out in a tort system to minimize specific, individual harms. Furthermore, they would point out that government, and not private concerns have been the greatest polluters simply because they have no incentive to be efficient, as all pollutions are essentially a form of inefficiency on part of the producer who have not captured the fullest usage of all their output.

I haven't seen Robert Anton Wilson's position on environmentalism, but if he were to be a consistent discordian, he would insist that the environmental bugaboo is to be biased towards certain chemical compounds, as if the earth or "mother nature" cares for a particular composition or molecular arrangement (which it obviously doesn't). It cares not if the entire surface is desert, water, ice, forested, denuded, or atomic wasteland. The homuncular inhabitants may have their neurological circuits prefer a specific scenario, but it wouldn't exceed a normative whim in importance.

we-know-whats-good-for-you

In an affront to individual sensibilities, NYC has now decided to usurp your right to live in an "unlivable" city just as I have thought would eventually happen.

(Heh, that's almost as funny as asking for animals to be treated "humanely".)

"Mr. Washburn, 44, is charged with making sure the parks get the right amount of sun, buildings aren't too bulky, and the skyline stays coherent. He will act as Ms. Burden's eyes for the incredible number of projects now under way in the city"...

"Senator Moynihan believed that good design is not just about aesthetics, but that the look of a city expresses the values of the people who live in it," he said.

Now where exactly do these folks get off dictating the "values" that the city-people want? And in any case, to what relevancy does it matter what some third-party pretends to want for everyone's values?

"It's really the citizen that will be the measure of our success," Mr. Washburn said. "How do you make sure New York doesn't become dull, but has the greatest streetscape with the greatest variety and the greatest texture? To keep everything vibrant and authentic with new projects is really tough. You have to calibrate everything very finely. Every time you change something in the city, you affect another constituency."

Which is exactly why central planners should be kept as far as possible from urban development. I mean just look at Brasilia, or ask yourself why Robert Moses is one of the most despised man in NYC urban development history.

But the sheer amount of haughtiness and conceit is astounding considering all the misplaced faith put into the past anointed guardian saints for urban aesthetics. This should be a fine example to those planners of how aesthetic expectations are valued both ex ante and ex post, thus making the goal of aesthetic perfection for posterity at best a Sisyphean task.

On a positive note, most people who are concerned with urban aesthetics usually prostrate to the altar of the Jane Jacobs goddess and her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Since Jacobs ideas were inspired in part by F.A. Hayek and his aversion to central planned economies, one has hope that they can transcend from the position of merely recognizing the beauty of unplanned, and 'chaotic' order, and to come to the realization that utilizing the violence of the state is the furthest thing from affecting the spontaneous communal life that they so very much desire.

pattern tyranny

Like a scene out of Stephan Kinsella's most horrid nightmare, I did a double-take after seeing this written on a bag of pretzels.



And for those of you who want to quickly get to the point:

ma gavte la nata

Although Andrew Berman is one most pompous busybodys around town as the organizer behind the GVSHP, I can still find the courage to commend him for acting in a civilized manner in regards to his latest bellyaching over aesthetic concerns to a billboard erected in what is known as the Meatpacking District.

Civilized, in the sense that he organized a boycott of local merchants to protest the erection of this unwanted advertising sign by having the participant shun and ostracize the party they feel offended by. This is largely in contrast to his usual tactics of complaining to the local goons and fabricating all sorts of wishy-washy nonsense on stilts which would supposedly justify their aggression against the despised party.

an apropos analogy

Tarran, a frequent and admired commenter on the Mises blog delivers this nugget (via Cafe Hayek) on his world view of the business world, one that I very closely share:

"comparing tax burdens is precisely the same act as a bunch of shop-keepers getting together to discuss the protection money they pay to the local Mafia family, and getting into an argument as to whether the more affluent shop-keeper is paying his "fair" share."

Of course, this is all said to the extent that the business we are talking about is a business qua business; a viable one that does not ultimately depend on a violent, criminal-class customer base (read: no-bid government contracts) for most their income, for in that case I would acquiesce to the left-lib side and call a spade a spade-- a net tax recipient which didn't take in much loot as it would have otherwise.

one bad bite deserves no other

Nothing spells CYA over-reaction like city government.


This brouhaha occured after a KFC-Taco Bell joint was found to be infested with rodents a day after they were green-lighted by the NYCzar's Health Inspectors, leading the Department of Health to react by shuttering a record 89 food establishments around the city.

As I've argued before, it's not always that anarcho-libertarians have a beef with the goals of government; it's that in the [racketeering] job that they purportedly serve to justify their monopolizing or market-crowding existence is one marked by corruption, inefficiencies, and incompetency; a sure recipe for failure under free market conditions.