Sex Education

"My Brother-in-law was the best. He took my Sisters two lads aside, “You know all that you hear in the play ground about men and women? Well it’s true, O.K, carry on...."

Haha! That's "Furor Teutonicus" over at Nick M's house of fun.

"A Calculated Act Of Retribution"

"Why doesn’t anyone ever mention the following facts in connection to the looting of the Summer Palace:

1) As opposed to wanton looting, it was actually a calculated act of retribution ordered by the British Commander, the Earl of Elgin, in response to the torture to death of diplomatic envoys. (And some other prisoners, including a Times journalist.)

This was ordered by the Qing emperor himself.

2) The looting of the Summer Palace could not possibly have been an insult to the “Zhongguoren” because the “Zhongguoren” just didn’t exist back then. For the British it was simply the enemy leader’s nest. The Qing emperor himself would have flayed alive any commoner who would have dared suggest that his summer home had anything to do with the “people”. That dude treated his “people” - meaning his slaves - with just as much disregard as the British - and possibly more cruelty. (The British weren’t very imaginative in their ways of killing people.)"

This, from commenter "The Resident Poet" was the best comment, by far, on a mildly interesting thread featuring a number of despicables ("merp" froze up stiff when I put my hand on his shoulder). I hadn't known the details of what had happened at the summer palace during the second opium war, but I have had experience of the politics of opium war history. Aside from his insinuation that the British were naive as to how their vandalism would be received throughout China - surely false - I have to say that this guy did everyone a favour; even if none of them will acknowledge it.

Critical Information

Direct action - but in this case violent - by women in India.

I'm making my bet now; as the unitary democratic nation state continues to discredit itself as the only game in town for the defense of broadly individualist values, direct action tactics will be increasingly brought to bear in the service of this defense. That is because - despite all cultural vicissitudes - human beings are individuals, not merely cells in a collective hive and, assuming possession of critical information, they therefore must defend themselves or take the terrible decision to allow themselves to be erased whilst knowing that that is exactly what is being done to them.

Later... Thomas Woods has an interesting take on disobedience with the various American States used as the locus of defense against the Feds - nullification.

Today's "Big" Story

"Take a look at the Defense Department's official, unclassified, 150-page report, dated April 2010 and titled "Report and Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan." Taken as a whole, it's much grimmer than the scattershot of documents in the WikiLeaks file. More to the point, the documents, which are given half of the Times' front page and five full pages inside, are nowhere nearly as grim—to say nothing of insightful, close-up, or comprehensive—as any number of reports from Afghanistan by the Times' own Dexter Filkins or Carlotta Gall."

Fred Kaplan kicks ass over at Slate, but he fails to draw attention to the gormless wonders' own admission here...

"The Guardian was allowed to investigate the logs for several weeks ahead of publication, along with the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel."

Ha! You've gotta laugh at that! Still, I can't help but think that the leaking of these "War Logs" might yet achieve something of the undoubted political end of destabilizing the Obama administration's efforts in Afghanistan.

Consequences Of Corruption

So much for democratic mechanisms; the KMT, with its apparent buying of the Central Election Commission, is laughing in the faces of those Taiwanese politicians and their supporters foolish enough to trust to the integrity of democratic checks and balances; democratic mechanisms don't work when lubricated with corruption. I put this argument, albeit in the context of his preferential voting system, to David Reid recently but he wouldn't listen to me.

This dogshit government will have to be stopped by something with a lot more moral backbone than a mere procedural request to the CEC.

Strictly Orwellian: Tseng Shu-Cheng

"Because land prices in Taiwan are not subject to any restrictions, the cost of the land is generally high..."

Tseng Shu-Cheng (apparently "dean of the College of Visual Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts") displaying a despicable degree of economic illiteracy in the Timid Times today.

No. The ultimate cause of high land prices in Taiwan is simply the naturally limited supply of useful land together with high market demand for it - whilst it is of course true to claim that government restrictions on land prices would make land cheaper and thus more affordable, such a claim can only be used to pass over in deliberate ignorance the anti-ethical who-eats-who implied by the question "more affordable for whom?".

"We never hear about those farmers who do not want the classification of their farmland changed, those who want to continue to till the land. These farmers, however, are in the minority and their values are out of step with mainstream opinion."

There you are - the farmers are in a minority, or "out of step with mainstream opinion" as Tseng would have them salt-and-peppered, so they get to watch their property and the work of their lives fished out of the democratic pot on the end of a privileged "expropriation" spoon and swallowed up by Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Ltd.

"Many countries with a free market economy have placed controls on the price of land. Germany is a good example of this... because the government has to acquire land at the market price, it is forced to implement policies to control prices."

Any country in which the government exercises price controls cannot logically be considered to enjoy a "free market" economy; the establishment of price controls is the essential anti-thesis to a market in which prices are set freely by fluctuations in the aggregate ratios of supply and demand. Tseng's assertion is strictly Orwellian (or should that now be called "a strict Turton-toggle"?) and anyone who would mouth that 2+2=5 logic while keeping a straight face is nothing less than dishonest and perhaps quite a bit more besides that.

The Timid Times Flip-Flops Over "Expropriation"

"It is in the nature of business to seek to maximize profits by minimizing overheads, including the cost of labor and land..."

"As the area covers farmland, wetlands and the habitats of rare bird species, locals are worried that it could lead to ecological destruction."

What's wrong with the first quote is the same thing that's wrong with the second quote. The writers of the editorials from which these quotes were taken are either so clueless or so gutless as to render the difference an indifferent and pathetic grey: I wouldn't trust these guys to peel a fucking orange.

Now sure, it is true that Hon Hai want to reduce their overheads, by in this case in Miaoli for example, obtaining the surrounding farm land at a cheaper rate, but ask yourself this question: cheaper than what?

Consider the second quote: does "ecological destruction" refer also, even if secondarily so, to the lives and economic interests of the farmers?

Both of these quotations illustrate a single, flip-coin point: on the one hand, it is the democratically sanctioned power of government which is being brought to task for the purpose of Hon Hai's overhead reductions whilst on the other hand, it is precisely due to their inability to correctly distill the mixed premises of "freedomanddemocracy" (uttered in semi-automatic prosody) that Chiu Yan-ling, Loa Iok and Lo Hsien-hsiu cower before this blatant theft of property with wimpy protestations about what may happen to "rare birds". What will happen to the birds is that they will move elsewhere. What will happen to the farmers is that years of their hard work and accumulated value will be destroyed by one fell act of "expropriation" whose false justification rests solely upon the democratic premise. If the property developers cannot raise sufficient capital to purchase the land from farmers at prices both parties can freely agree to, then they have no business continuing to operate in the real-estate market.

It is a disgrace that such slovenly drivel can be published in the Timid Times and it is doubly disgraceful that these writers still pick up a monthly salary for doing so. I would have terminated their contracts the moment I read those editorials.

She Will Have Her Way

That's me and my girlfriend up on the 308 ridge at Longci out in Tainan county this morning. We were originally going to look at something else, but she insisted on 308 so by the time I had driven up there, it was immediately obvious that she was totally right to have insisted. The views are terrific - mountains to the east, and Tainan city way below us to the west. Looking through a telescopic lens at that height... I'm sure if she'd seen those predator drones behind us she'd have torn them out of the sky...

"Literature Is Pre-Disciplinary"

I quite agree with Charles Hill in this interview with Peter Robinson. There is great import to the integration of a wide horizon of data into conceptual understanding to anyone who would attempt to act on such large scales of institutional command as say, General Patraeus, or indeed President Obama. Modern universities everywhere are hopeless at this precisely because of the disciplinary segregation. The Internet is the obvious tool with which to put them out of business - except for that minor problem wherein State mandated licensing for such things as medicine is hooked up to, among other things, the acquisition of university certificates.

Later... watching the rest of that interview I decided that although Hill may be correct that President Obama doesn't understand America, I'm not entirely sure he does either; certainly that bit about preserving liberties whilst allowing for more lobbyists - strung together in tandem - that was chalk and cheese.

Later still... Martin McPhillips predicts that Obama will start a war if things keep going not his way. I'm off out to pay some bills and order a copy of Martin's counter-terrorism thriller.

Final Response On The Turton Thread

This is my comment, which had to be split into three parts (due to Blogger's restriction on the number of characters which can be posted on a comment thread) and which I've left over at Turton's place. I repost it here just in case it doesn't go through for some reason or if I messed it up somehow...

OK then as a preliminary, let me say now that I expect nothing less than at the end of this discussion I be told I’m an evil zombie slave of Reagan and I should go fuck myself – really, you’d be letting yourselves down to actually allow this to end on anything resembling a pleasant note. I realize political vocabulary among westerners in Taiwan doesn’t usually include the word “freedom” without it being chained to its’ phrasal overlord “democracy” – in Uzi 9mm cadences – so of course I’ll be disappointed not to receive the “zombie-Regan-slave”, “Thatcher-muncher”, high-brow low blow treatment. Really, it’d be like nobody cared if that didn’t happen.

Right then, you can slur all you like about how the morality from which private property rights are derived is so “asocial”, “ahistorical” and “atomized” etc but it is actually little more than the basic algebra of human cognition – the ability to handle abstract concepts. Now you might like to have the derivation illustrated for you with sociohistorical apples and oranges, Jacks and Jills ad absurdum, but I’m far too easily bored for that, so I’m gonna atomize my way through here some more…

The political right to private property is a consequence of morality – a morality arising from the ontological recognition that human beings are individuals first, with membership of society not denied, but located in a way distant second place. That’s the chief alternator at work here which has allowed for the terrific acceleration of technological progress – and with it vast improvements to our individual chances of survival – over the last few centuries since the Enlightenment, despite the hindrances of the State.

Now, let’s get our hands dirty and open up that “alternator” metaphor:

A human being’s exercise of both complete authority and commensurate responsibility over her actions in a social context (i.e. one containing other people) – that is a political right. Its’ recognition as such turns on the more basic understanding that human beings do not have wings, fangs, claws or spin webs out of their nostrils with which to catch insects. As human beings, the form and method for our survival bestowed upon us by Nature is our capacity for reason – which, since we are biologically segregated into individual bodies – can only therefore be a capacity of particular individuals with the consequence that some individuals apply this capacity to the problem of staying alive quite well while others do so less well. This fact alone however does not permit the arrogation of force by some individuals (government, or if you prefer – big business in collusion with government) in order to constrain and direct the actions of others. Such a move is a direct violation of the natural endowment of a human being – her reason and the capacity it gives her for directing her own life on her own two feet.

There are two caveats to be recognized however: the first is that this capacity for reason is simply that – it offers no guarantee of success for it is fallible. The second is that it doesn’t work automatically – each human being must deliberately try to think if they are to survive.

Now when the moral sanction to bear full authority over one’s property is recognized (primarily by other people both within and even without the community, and secondarily by the State) there then arises a potent possibility for exchange limited only by the interests, appetites and requirements of those other individuals. This limitation may act as a spur either for the production of new values – principally technologies, but also other goods and artifacts (foods, medicines etc) – or it may act as a spur to the imposition of force by some people over others in order to satiate values (principally the power of predation over other people’s lives) which may otherwise have gone unsated. This is the perpetual choice of human civilization; do we take our individualism straight or do we allow others to dilute it for us with little frozen blocks of what used to be somebody else’s values?

To the extent that the individual nature of political rights and the social institutions (chiefly, the market) implied by these rights is both recognized and respected by the State and not routinely violated day-in-day-out, we should expect to see a progressive easing of the task of survival and a multiplication of the possibilities for human advancement as the effects of free market activity by myriad individuals first accumulate (e.g. saving and investment in capital) and then filter back down into generalized conditions of material and social improvement (increased productivity). At least that is how my “alternator metaphor” works when it is fitted to the fully functioning engine of a predominantly individualist culture. Conversely, to the extent that the individual nature of rights is routinely abused by the State and violated day-in-day-out, then we should expect to see the opposite effect – of the increasing difficulty of the task of survival for many people (e.g. higher prices driven up by inflation necessitated by State spending and thus lower savings and capital investment) and the multiplication of crime and other social problems (higher unemployment and greater welfare-warfare dependency). That is how my alternator metaphor looks when it is hooked up to a commie engine that barely functions at all. In empirical reality of course, our current modern economies lie at various points on that vast expanse of grey between the binary poles of libertarian nirvana and totalitarian hell; ours are societies of mixed premises, and therefore mixed results.

That’s the basics behind my “atomized” morality of private property. Now to a couple of specifics I was challenged on:

When Turton speaks of “massive government efficiencies” he necessarily takes the perspective either of government itself, the big business bastards who benefit or of the archimedean economist content to consider mere aggregate numbers whilst conveniently ignoring who got fucked over in some “expropriation” stunt (unless perhaps it involves him or his mother or his best mate of course). It may be more efficient for everyone else (but always according to somebody’s point of view elevated above being merely a point of view – that’s your “national interest/collective good” jazz kids) for the government to bypass the necessary respect to your right to property and simply “expropriate” your land out of your ass to build a railway, a road, or a science park. I submit however, that such an understanding of “efficiency” is simply a collectivist sop intended to rob the people of their conceptual apprehension of what should properly be considered a crime.

I was also asked about externalities (pollution and so forth – sometimes referred to as 3rd party damages) but it seems to me that the answer is obvious; a more thoroughly and impartially applied recognition of individual property rights in tort law which would require potential developers to consider the possible external costs of whatever business they are interested to set up. The classic Mises reference for that is Human Action, Chapter 23, section 6 p 654 – I have my own copy open before me right now, but anyone interested can find an online version here. There are lots of other good discussions of the externality problem easily found elsewhere (Rothbard is usually pretty good on this).

The chief dangers to human progress have always come from the State – aside from the obvious examples of Communist China, the USSR and two World Wars – even the examples of colonial exploitation to which Turton refers in his outrageous contention that they somehow refute the moral nature of private property – even those injustices were largely made possible by the use/abuse of State power with the British Raj imposing horribly unjust taxes on the Indian population during a time of famine, and the American Democratic Party (oh yes!) organizing to prevent black people having the freedom to own firearms – arms which would have gone a long way to discouraging the predations of racist lynch mobs. It is the actions of the people in his historical examples, not their lying words, that are important – and I would ask that you, Turton, disown the insinuation that a person who argues for the moral defence of property rights is probably therefore a rootless colonial exploiter looking to obtain the power of the State for his own nefarious purposes. It is an insinuation that because I argue for X, I must therefore be a liar and secretly be lusting after Y, or that if I say “up”, I really mean “down” or when I say “Orwellian” I really meant to tag it as a “Turton-boggle”.

The social democratic position held by Turton and friends is to take that alternator metaphor I described earlier and to connect it up to an engine in which the opposed forces of individualist rights and the force of the State are forced into in an unstable, and I would add unsustainable, balance inadequately lubricated by the mechanisms of democracy. I realize my position may seem “extreme” but that is increasingly becoming a word for the conceptually retarded. Turton’s position has of course the appearance of the “golden mean” – somewhere “sensible” between two insane poles, but this is a mirage sustained only by your, dear readers, reluctance to think your way through these matters. Please do so.

Now, I think I’ve said enough – let the trashing commence. I won’t be back whatever else may be said (I have far better things to do than explain shit like this that should be more or less already appreciated by most people). Anyone who wants to continue the discussion – civilly – may do so over at my blog.

A Glimpse Up The Assembly Line...

This is what the U.S. has finally become - a factory for the production of totalitarian scaffolding in order to protect and carry out repairs on their precioussss democracy. Freedom left that country a long time ago - the tea party people should learn from the methods of Martin Luther King Jr.

My Turton Thread Coda

Update: another round of sparring:

"A point by point rebuttal is unnecessary. You toss out terms like "property" "rights" "market" "state" "violence" etc as if they were totally unproblematic. But these things are all historically contingent, codified and defined by by a very messy combination of state action, state violence, social norms, our cognitive history, etc. The market and property rights cannot be an antidote to intrusions of the state on "liberty" because they are productions of state action..."

Unless Turton and friends significantly raise their game in the dimension of sincerity at least, then this will have been my final comment:

"I shall reiterate one last time: the principle that property be privately owned (and therefore subject only to voluntary trade, not the threat of overwhelming State violence implied by an “expropriation”) is not only the foremost ethical implication of the premise that each individual human being owns his or her person (and may not therefore, be a slave), it is also the chief necessity of individual human survival in a political context.

The contrary position advocated by Turton – from the premise of social democracy – can offer no rational principle upon which infractions against private property can be defended from the predations of big business enabled by government. The best his position can offer is an uncertain degree of legal, and extremely fallible, oversight. When I consider that we in Taiwan are on a slippery sloap toward unification with a totalitarian State, it seems to me that this form of defence is not only morally weak but that it is also politically weak and should therefore be rejected by anyone who wants a chance (or who wants their children to have a chance) of getting through whatever the next few decades might bring."

YES! / NO!

Did I just wear out my welcome over at Michael Turton's blog in a single comment thread? The last time I tried that degree of explication was in a pub in Kaohsiung at two in the morning with some asshole who tried to hit me over the head with a pint glass out of frustration. Reminds me of this...



Update: The thread falls into disrepute after Turton thanks me for the discussion with some "Anonymous" crawling over it and Turton trashing my "Randite nonsense" as something he outgrew when he was 17, which is funny. I posted another comment, in response to Turton's praise of my "Randite nonsense" although I am not expecting him to let it through (he deleted an earlier response I made to commenter M about the morality of property rights) so I reproduce it here for anyone who may be interested:

Well if that's true Turton, then, as magnificent a rhetorical device as the ad hominem undoubtedly is, surely a point by point rebuttal of my argument ought not to have given you too much trouble, no? I can certainly imagine one or two good responses to my defense of property rights and I would hold you in some esteem if you were to take what I imagine for you would only be a requisite 10 mins or so to accurately compose one of these - if only for the value of further underscoring for your other readers why my position is so much untenable nonsense. I'm sure they would thank you for the service.

Oh and for the record, although I do have a copy of Atlas Shrugged I have yet to read it. The only other book by Rand that I have (and have actually read) is her "Introduction To Objectivist Epistemology" - which is why I chuckled when Turton said he outgrew it when he was 17. I really should get her "Virtue Of Selfishness" and maybe one or two others, but Martin McPhillips wants to me read his counter-terrorism thriller first.

Learning To Say "NO!"

Sirs

Among the many things good parents in Taiwan teach their children is that stealing - i.e. taking what you want from others by force - is wrong. Whenever children want something from somebody else, they must ask permission nicely or try to agree terms for a trade, but they must also learn to accept that other children will sometimes refuse them.

Now, what kind of a dogshit government thinks it can break this most basic rule of society and get away with it?

The Miaoli County government's attempted "expropriation" of farmer's land is THEFT. Just because the people committing this wanton outrage are members of local government is no excuse. The legal basis for their actions is contrary to the most basic and universally recognized predicate of individual freedom - the exclusive right for a man or woman to decide what to do with his or her own stuff.

The basic ethical rules of civilization do not somehow magically cease to function when one enters the government - these dogshit "leaders" can get away with such outright THEFT only to the extent that they are correct in believing we the people will allow ourselves to be cowed and frightened by their insolent claims to "democratic authority".

We must learn to say "NO!" to the government, and the government must learn to accept this immediately and without condition.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent Tuesday 20th July 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

And If You Do Not Help... Then To Hell With You

“When [Ma] visited farming villages during his presidential campaign, he was given a warm welcome and he received farmers’ votes,” Taiwan Rural Front spokeswoman Tsai Pei-hui (蔡培慧) said. “Now that the farmers have come knocking on his door to voice their opposition to the government forcibly taking their land, the president refuses to see them.”

Naturally. The farmers are going about their protest in entirely the wrong way, on the misunderstanding that a democratically elected government exists to serve the people. Reality however, has that relationship arranged quite the other way around. Those farmers have no business at all appealing to the President to "care" about them - only contemptible serfs talk like that. They should take a leaf out of this guy's book.

Sting Like A 蚊子

"It certainly can’t be for the reasons he claims, that the “pan-blue side have failed to live up to the standards expected in a democracy.” On the contrary, Taiwan is a perfect example of what routinely happens when a democratically elected majority party from the same political party as the head of government or state collude to pass legislation in what they deem to be in the national interest."

Paul Deacon takes a somewhat alternate tack to me in taking a kick at David Reid's proposed democratic reforms. I'll say that not only is Deacon correct, but that when I raised a broadly similar point to Reid, he was content to answer as if I had argued the precise opposite.

Pulling The Rug Beneath Our Feet

"The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) in February last year reported that the National Security Council may have ordered the National Security Bureau to cease recruitment of agents to work inside China."

I have my differences with J. Michael Cole, but this is an important story. Intelligence on the internal military and political dynamics inside China is vital to the security of anyone who values his or her freedom in Taiwan. That the current KMT government may be standing down Taiwanese intelligence agents inside China is, whilst not completely shocking, certainly outrageous enough to be a front page story. In consideration of how governments generally operate, I'd have thought that any government at least sincerely claiming to serve the nation (however misguided that may be as an ethical conclusion) would be able to count on sufficiently serendipitous accidents to ensure not only that stories like this failed to appear in the press, but that the espionage perpetrator would never know what came of his actions.

Anything From Anyone, Anytime

Sirs

Contrary to your front-page report today (Sunday July 18th), the recent land "expropriation" case would be more commonly recognized for what it actually is if it was described as theft of private property by the Miaoli County Government. This is not a "land issue", and its implications are not specific to farmers. It is a violation of the supposed universal right to property described in Article 15 of the R.O.C constitution, and it therefore ought to be regarded as having much broader implications far beyond "farming communities". Pick your skirts up, stop being a bunch of socialist sallys moaning about "lack of oversight" and so on, and start telling it like it is. The government is not the citizen's friend and it will steal anything from anyone anytime it believes this necessary.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Sunday 18th July 2010. Published by the Taipei Times Wednesday 21st July 2010)

Government Theft Of Farmland In Miaoli County

This is absolutely outrageous. Not on account of the stated grounds of the Miaoli County Government allegedly neglecting to complete the "expropriation process" (i.e. theft) in full accordance with the letter of the law, but that such a provision even exists in the first place. The invention of the word "expropriation" to replace the commonly accepted word "theft" was a necessary disguise for the conceptual referent of applying overwhelming violence (or the threat of such) to deprive someone of his or her property (and what is property - and the moral right to it, if not an important technology by which someone may further his or her survival?). That R.O.C law provides for such theft of private property by government organs is in direct trespass of the supposed right of individuals to property under Article 15 of this circus-tent constitution.

Again, however, this is, and it will be proven to be, just a single example of where democratic mechanisms fail to prevent the abuse of government power. Such abject violations of private property arise, not because the democratic form within which government power sits has been too roughly sculpted, but because the political culture which shapes modern politics continues to try to weave together two incompatible ideological premises - the individualism predicated upon the principle that property be privately owned, and the violent subjugation of some individuals to the interests of particular others which will be falsely proclaimed as collective interests - this is the essence of government power, democratic or not. Ain't no third way.

Weapons-Grade Arseholery

Meanwhile, Nick M is back to his best lampooning that idiot Prince Charles. Choice sample:

“It has been profoundly depressing to witness the way the so-called climate sceptics are, apparently, able to intimidate all sorts of people from adopting the precautionary measures necessary to avert environmental collapse,” he [Prince Charles] said.

"Re-read [that]. It’s weapons-grade arseholery."

Failure To Communicate

"I commented on Michael Fagan's response to my Taipei Times letter. Not sure if the debate will lead anywhere useful."

Tweeted David Reid - which would not refute my criticism of his democratic reforms, but merely confirm that even if he is wrong, he doesn't care and is going to continue to recommend democratic reforms anyway because that is more "useful" than re-thinking or at least defending his premises. It is precisely in this way that the machine that Charles Sanders Pierce built just keeps winnowing out the philosophy from the politics:

"Pragmatism is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood."

The old beardy weirdy himself explains the ending to "Cool Hand Luke" thirty six years before the film was made.

Response To David Reid

David Reid writes:

Actually a preferential voting system would result in little change to the actual make up of the legislature. What it would change would be the number of candidates competing in elections. These candidates would need to engage with other and negotiate for preference deals. There are of course risks that this could encourage corruption, but I don’t think this is a good reason for rejecting the idea.

Many Taiwanese people are already disengaged from the political process because they believe most politicians are corrupt. A preferential voting system would allow more candidates to participate and some of these candidates may run on the basis of their integrity and honesty.

In Australia two of the most influential minor parties that developed as a result of preferential voting, the Greens and the now defunct Democrats, are both recognised as having much greater integrity than the two major parties. Of course different factors are at play in Taiwan and the risk of corruption is real, but this should not be used as an excuse for not seeking to improve the democratic system. Taiwan can have a fairer electoral system and reduce corruption. It shouldn’t be a choice between the two.

With regard to referendums the experience in other countries shows that people usually vote conservatively and resist change. In Taiwan most people tend to support the status quo rather than major change. There is no reason to assume that removing the threshold for a referendum vote would suddenly allow a small minority to push through major changes. People would be equally as motivated to vote against a proposal they don’t like as they would be to vote for a proposal they support. Again encouraging more people to get involved in the political process would boost democracy.

I don’t see a risk of “populist totalarianism.” A foundation of democracy is recognition of basic rights that are non-negotiable. Referendums should not be held on issues which go against these basic rights. These rights are enshrined in Chapter Two of the ROC Constitution and also supported by the ICCPR that Taiwan has now ratified. Ensuring that the judicial system functions effectively to protect these rights is the key.

I agree with your addendum. I could have phrased that sentence a little better.

To which I reply:

David,

We are in near complete 180 degree disagreement, and this will be a rather long comment but I will begin with some concessions. In respect of your defense of the preferential voting system, you make several points, two of which I am prepared to grant.

First, it may indeed be true that the introduction of a preferential voting system would not much alter the overall party composition of the legislature - I certainly wouldn't bet on how the Taiwanese electorate would vote under such circumstances. Second, it might well be true that some minority candidates would run on the basis of their advertised integrity in contrast to an incumbent accused of corruption.

Yet it seems to me that neither of these possibilities refutes my claim that a preferential voting system would dilute the moral opposition to government power through the "higher" and "lower" forms of corruption (decide for yourself which one is which). You write that the risk of corruption ought not to be “used as an excuse for not seeking to improve the democratic system”… which is a point to which I will return. Suffice it to say at this point though, that I believe popular, vocal and morally clear opposition to government power is the most effective tactic to use against both Taipei and Beijing.

Now with respect to your defense that the referendum reform would carry little risk of a minority forcing its will upon a majority, I must protest that this is precisely contrary to the argument I put to you, that a lower referendum vote threshold would make it easier for a political majority to impose its will upon political minorities. Whilst I appreciate that you do not seem to regard this as an “abuse” of government power – since as you say, referendums may not be held on the “basic rights” described in the ROC constitution – I submit that such a populist exercise of government power is no different from the representative kind in its transgression of the principles upon which individual freedom is predicated. Rather than provide a limit to the exercise of government power, your referendum reform amounts to a sort of limited franchising out of this exercise to the electorate, and is in this sense thus an extension of government power rather than a limitation.

Perhaps I could further clarify and embolden this claim by returning to your point that the risk of corruption is no reason to oppose a supposed improvement to the democratic system. First, I would ask you to recall your stated purpose of checking the abuse of government power. Quite aside from the matter of whether corruption is or is not an “abuse” of government power, your identification of “boosting democracy” as providing a check on government power is of limited value. I believe that it is more accurate to say that whilst democratic mechanisms may exert a narrowing, bottle-neck effect on the direct exercise of some aspects of government power, they - or rather the underlying democratic impulse - surreptitiously broadens the range of application of government power throughout more and more areas of society and the economy.

Consider in the U.S. for example, that it was only via the promises delivered again and again at election podiums, that popular demand for such things as employment, housing, education, healthcare and retirement benefits morphed into a “right of the people” to be fulfilled if necessary by government power despite none of these things being mentioned in the consitution or any of its amendments. Spending on social security, medicare and medicaid and other safety net programs now accounts for approximately 50% of the Federal government’s budget! So on the contrary, democracy has not proved to be a great limitation on government power, at least in the case of the U.S., rather it has become the great enabler of governemnt power.

Do similar demands for further government power not exist in Taiwan? There is already government control over large swathes of the education and healthcare markets. Civil servants and teachers already receive taxpayer funded benefits that would make even a Greek blush, and on top of that there are the howling screams from “traditional” industries on the one hand, for government to protect them from competition from China, and piercing shrieks from “modern” industries on the other hand, for the government to both allow and support them in investing in China.

This demand for more and more government power by more and more special interests in society is unsustainable and dangerous, and it has become so largely because of the opening up of the State apparatus by the application of democratic mechanisms. To prevent further abuse of government power (and remember David, one man’s “abuse” is another man’s “legitimate application”), it is necessary to find mechanisms of first reducing and thereafter of limiting the size and the scope of government power. The democratic mechanisms tend toward achieiving the opposite effect.

Contra Reid's Voting Reforms

David Reid has another letter published in the Taipei Times in which he this time argues for further democratic reforms to the government in Taipei. I can share his tactical aim of further checking the abuse of power by the government in Taipei (and thereby the one in Beijing also to a certain extent), however I believe the methods he proposes for doing so - the introduction of a preferential electoral voting system and the lowering of the vote threshold for referendums - would be as likely to achieve the opposite result as to that intended.

I should preface my criticisms with a certain clarification of premises. I take the term "government power" to its conceptual root in referring to the presumption of one man to presume a rule of force over another, which in the democratic context, occurs for no other reason than that he happens to belong to a political majority. Therefore, my criticisms are to be taken as arising from a much broader premise than mere reference to the current KMT administration or even exclusively to the bureaucratic apparatus of state coercion over which Taiwan's two chief parties fight. So with that preface in mind, allow me to proceed to my criticisms of David Reid's suggestions...

A preferential voting system may indeed allow for greater representation of minor parties in the legislature, but why could these not instantly be bought off by a determined, majority holding government - either through the transparent bribery of political compromise, or through what me might refer to as more opaque forms of compromise? The clear moral opposition that a minority party (such as the TSU) might have been able to voice when highly unlikely of attaining political power themselves would be far more difficult to maintain with any credibility and thus such a minority party would likely become a mere filter, diluting but still furthering the spill of government power throughout Taiwanese society.

Regarding Reid's proposed lowering of the referendum vote threshold on the grounds that such an act would discourage non-voting and boycotting tactics, it strikes me as a pertinent question whether Reid has forgotten the very purpose of setting a high threshold. A lower vote threshold would represent a much lesser restriction on the power presumed by a political majority - whether in government or not (recall my prefacing remarks). A lower vote threshold for national referendums would cut both ways, sometimes serving the powers of a political majority against the government, and sometimes serving the power of a different majority in government. Such a move strikes me as a deceptively small but actually very dangerous step toward the possibilities of populist totalitarianism, which is quite contrary to the end of inhibiting the spill of government power throughout Taiwanese society.

Addendum:

At one point in his letter, Reid remarks:

"A thorough review of the ECFA by the legislature may have done much to allay the fears of Taiwanese about the content of the agreement. "

My reading of the government's decision not to publish the details of the ECFA was that doing so would bring a significant number of KMT legislators under political pressure from their financial sponsors and local electorates to reject the ECFA or resign. I don't think that publication of the details of the ECFA itself would have "allayed fears" about its' content, rather it would have stoked such fears and prompted political action.

Taipei's Request For New F-16 C/Ds

“Why does the administration continue a fiction that Taiwan has not formally requested more F-16[C/D] fighters? Why do mid and junior-level officials within the Obama administration allude to instructions from ‘senior leadership’ to hold congressional notifications on Taiwan arms sales and not to expect another major sale in 2010?”

Asks Randy Schriver in today's Taipei Times.

As a preliminary to having my say on this subject, I should state that although I hold to my libertarian premise that the government in Taipei has no moral right to purchase weapons on behalf of the people of Taiwan, I personally would be happy to contribute to this purchase at least ten times as much cash as what the government in Taipei expects from me in annual income tax - if only I could be certain that money was going towards the cost of purchasing new F-16s.

Now, my ethical demands met, I can discuss the reality behind the question: there are at least two major vectors in play here. First, I would imagine that from the perspective of the Obama administration, the foreign policy priority with regards to China is to keep the government in Beijing buying Treasury bonds to help provide part of the funding for the growth in Federal spending. Treasury bonds, together with higher taxes and the monetization of government debt are the ingredients Obama has decided upon for brewing the Amsoc oxymoron. So, to keep that project bubbling away it'd be better not to give the Chinese any excuse to sell and thus force the Treasury into increasing the rate of return on its bonds. For now, the Feds will not be able to find an alternative source of revenue to replace the Chinese - and until either the people of Taiwan, or the government that stands over them, can offer the Amsoc project anything of serious political value (they certainly could not offer serious financial value), they will not get much of a hearing in the current White House.

*Note to all those "Americans" in Taiwan who voted Democrat in 2008 - fuck you.*

Second, those who staff the higher echelons of the government in Beijing are simply trying to survive in power; that is a very large and dangerous tiger they are riding. Whether they would actually begin to sell their T-bonds might well be a decision taken in sensitivity to acute political crisis rather than long-term interest and so the internal politics of Beijing, and of China more broadly, are likely to be of far more importance to that government's decision-making than long term economic forecasts.

A third thing of course is the general malaise of utter moral bankruptcy in the U.S. Congress with transparent shills for Beijing like Dianne Feinstein chairing the Senate Intelligence Committee. Even assuming the Obama administration had any remaining vestige of American ethics to see the value in selling the updated F-16s to the government in Taipei, any attempt to do so would necessitate buying off or otherwise neutralizing Feinstein and certain other powerful figures in Congress.

I would, of course, be delighted to be proved wrong, but I don't think Taiwan's airforce will be receiving any new F-16s at least until after the Obama administration's first term has expired.

Formosa Betrayed

Opens in Taiwan in August, but was released on DVD in the U.S. yesterday. I'll go to see it, but I expect to be disappointed. A film about a minority political interest is never likely to gather much attention outside of Taiwan-fanatics like me and that being the probable case, I would prefer there to be no dumbing-down or over-portrayal at all. Still, for those unfamiliar with the political history of Taiwan and who do not understand precisely why ECFA, for example, is not at all about free trade, this film may well have some educational value. Michael Turton has a review as does J.Michael Cole.

Never Choose China Airlines

Whenever I fly out of Taiwan (almost always to Hong Kong), I insist on either EVA or Dragonair because I do not trust China Airlines one iota - and why would I with at least eight fatal crashes from 1970 to 2002 and three dangerous incidents between 1985 and 2007 all attributable to either poor leadership, sloppy maintenance or pilot error? By comparison, neither EVA airlines since its' launch in 1988, nor Dragonair since its' launch in 1985 have had a single fatal accident - moreover, between these two airlines there have only been three dangerous incidents; two involving turbulence and one involving a burst tire. China Airlines has had the same number of non-fatal incidents all by itself - including most recently a 737 having one of its' engines explode and the aircraft itself actually catching fire upon landing in Okinawa.

So against that background, China Airlines' denial, reported in the Taipei Times today, that in 2008 one of its' captains flew a 737 back to Taiwan from Bali whilst aware that the right wing fuel tank was leaking oil... it just astounds me that the execs at this company - even assuming they are telling the truth - why do they bother denying such a story? Nobody in their right mind would trust them with an accident record like that. If China Airlines wasn't indirectly owned and funded by the government, surely they'd have went out of business years ago and a good several hundred people might still be alive today?

Aside from their financial protection from the government, my opinion as to why China Airlines has such a poor record comes from uncounted daily observations of how badly Taiwanese people tend to drive and maintain their cars, motorcycles, taxis and buses - it is just an endless horror show. I recall talking to two pilots in Kaohsiung in 2007 just after the Okinawa incident - one British and the other Australian (both were living in Hong Kong and regularly piloted flights between Hong Kong and Taiwan) - and one of them told me in words almost exactly to this effect:

"You see how people here drive their cars and scooters? That's exactly how they fly airplanes."

Janus Words

I don't read the Daily Kos (neither do I read Little Green Footballs), but this pro-2nd Amendment argument by one Kaili Joy Gray was, whatever its' flaws, interesting primarily on account of it appearing on the Daily Kos of all places. Thanks to Ed Rasimus for doing my reading for me. The Daily Kos is, I have often read, a hive of left-wing Democratic activist types - exactly the sort of people who consistently advocate more and more government restrictions on the legal ability of Americans to own firearms. Yet it wasn't just the placing of the argument at Daily Kos that was interesting... I also found its' tone intriguing. Money-quote:

"In no other country, at no other time, has such a right existed. It is not the right to hunt. It is not the right to shoot at soda cans in an empty field. It is not even the right to shoot at a home invader in the middle of the night. It is the right of revolution. Let me say that again: It is the right of revolution."

I read several possible interpretations of that, but that elevated sense of the United States above other countries implied by the opening gambit is very clear, and certainly the revolutionary implications of owning firearms are correct. Yes this could yet be an artifice - a perfidious defense of a good cause by a contrived-to-fail-argument - but it just might be an honest appeal.

In any case I much prefer to insist upon natural rights - those based on the recognition that each person owns his or her own person. The Bill Of Rights is an artifact of the theory that good and bad have no existence aside from the opinions of a particular society, which is a position I reject.

There was also an interesting piece in National Review by Victor Davis Hanson in which he insists that "American decline is a state of mind". Hanson has an interesting score-card in that he frequently offers his readers glimpses of individualism through a collectivist telescope. Here he is:

"In the midst of our current malaise, we feel overwhelmed by largely short-term problems and our current inability to address them — without appreciating our long-term strengths and present bounty, or learning from past recoveries. We are soon to revert to the Clinton income-tax rates last used in 2000, when we ran budget surpluses. If likewise we were to cut the budget, or just hold federal spending to the rate of inflation, America would soon run surpluses as it did a decade ago. For all our problems, the United States is still the largest economy in the world, its 300 million residents producing more goods and services than the more than 1 billion in either China or India."

Distance affords perspective of course, but it may also obliterate crucial details from view - in this case the real-life pain of tax increases for small business owners especially when coupled with the hoovering up of the private loan market. What will be the cultural and political consequences of that years down the line from now? His choice of blurring a foreground of such wanton destruction of productive enterprise to instead focus on a background of greater relative productivity would seem to reflect wishful thinking since there is little sign that President Obama will in fact cut the Federal Budget - indeed it seems he wants to expand it. Perhaps Hanson may have been encouraged by his reading of President Obama as saying one thing, but doing another.

Yet American Decline is not merely a state of mind, which any good person can afford to ignore by adjusting the focus on his lens, it is the very real, ongoing and tragic vandalism of the image of human beings as self-owning, self-directing and self-responsible individuals. Such freely acting individuals conscious of their own freedom are the true basis of an individualist society - not the presumptive declarations of privilege issued by governments or constitutional conventions.

There are two kinds of honesty that may be in play when either liberals or conservatives try to buy my trust. What I want to see in their hands is the silver of accuracy and not merely the copper of sincerity and until I see that, then I will maintain my assertion that the use of the word "liberal" in the United States is a contronym and the conservatives are guilty as hell for sanctifying it.

A Leap Of Concept...

....In which I attempt to determine how J. Michael Cole - a contributing editor (I believe) for the Taipei Times - responds to civilly put criticism. The democratic premise to which he holds must always exist in tension to the value of individual freedom as predicated on the right to private property. Will he see what I am trying to show to him?

Banking The U.S.S.A

Cash is King for a very good reason. The vacuuming up of the private loan market in the United States is a direct consequence of the Federal Reserve's tactic of inflating the money supply whilst postponing monetary inflation by paying interest to commercial banks such as BOA to hold abnormally large reserves. This may or may not have been deliberately intended to enable an overt politicization of the lending market, but surely there can be little doubt that that is now a distinctly possible result. Either there will be significant inflation at some point in the longer term future, or there will be politicization of the private loan market. It seems this interpretation is not too far away from the views of Hoover economists Michael Boskin and Edward Lazear.

That real life financial horror story was brought to you via Beck.

"Kenneth McCauley"

Sirs

I was disgusted with your decision to print Kenneth McCauley's letter, Wednesday 7th July.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, particularly when it is patriotism not to any universal ethical principle but to such arbitrary things as one's place of birth or the colour of one's skin. Such a conceptually primitive patriotism is ethically empty, barely even worthy of contempt.

So this "MC Hot Dog" feels "sick" when he sees Taiwanese girls dating westerners? Well perhaps he ought to be reminded that not only do Taiwanese girls not belong to him, but that neither are they the collective "property" of Taiwan or of that organ which purports to speak on behalf of a coerced population, the government. A woman's choices are her own and a woman's life is her own - who she may or may not choose to date is none of his damn business, for she belongs to herself.

The reverse snobbery of xenophobia is no answer to perceived slights and criticism - and there is much criticism to be offered to Taiwanese people if they are to secure and advance their freedom in the future. The hallmark of western culture and the scientific and technological progress it has offered the world has always been rational criticism; the irrational dismissal of all such criticism is, and has always been, the hallmark of despots, racists and those so sick of mind as to accept either one.

Yours contemptuously,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Wednesday 7th July 2010. Published by the Taipei Times Friday 9th July 2010)

Post script: The editorial alteration of "conceptually primitive patriotism" at the end of the first paragraph to "tribalism" was a poor choice since the gist of my letter was to identify McCauley's sentiments as erroneous, hence the value of "conceptually primitive". A greater economy of words could have been achieved by altering "The reverse snobbery of xenophobia" at the beginning of the third paragraph to simply "Xenophobia..."

The 6th Of July

Thought must be given, again and again, to the future and how best to initiate and carry out tactics intended to preserve some future possibility of freedom for our children.

"We are reduced to the alternative of chusing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritated ministers, or resistance by force. -- The latter is our choice. -- We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery. -- Honour, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them, if we basely entail hereditary bondage upon them."

Thomas Jefferson, 1775.

Michael Scanlon vs Zheng Lizhong (鄭立中)

"At the conference on Tuesday, Zheng is also reported to have said: “The ECFA is an economic issue. No individual or group should manipulate it for political gain.”

Here, Zheng is lying. As George Orwell wrote in 1984: “In our age, there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

That's the conclusion to a Michael Scanlon letter published in today's Timid Times. Scanlon is entirely right to rip into Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Vice Chairman Zheng Lizhong (鄭立中) in that way. Yet there is something missing in that Orwell quotation - what he should have added is that most issues should not be political issues.

Pith & Pips

There is a revolting little thing going on at Slate in which readers are invited to tweet their own precis of the Declaration Of Independence in time for this Sunday. I say "revolting" because both Slate readers and columnists regularly discuss further infractions to, and violations of, the integrity of the chief principle on which human freedom is predicated - that property must be private and not public.

Christopher Hitchens for instance almost makes me want to weep. How stupid it is that such an intelligent man can be so schizophrenic as to rightfully jeer and ridicule religion for its' latent totalitarian impulse and totalitarian premises and yet be blind to these glaringly obvious features of the democratic socialism he himself supports! Hitchens is overrated, but not for the reasons many conservatives will complain about and least of all those that misnamed "liberals" will complain about.

It seems utterly improbable that my letters to the Taipei Times will achieve anything other than their secondary values (my business, no-one else's). My best ones often go unpublished while my clumsy ones are seized upon and occasionally twisted. Writing them in Mandarin and sending them to the Liberty Times is something I have to start, and I'm probably just about good enough to do it now (with a little help from my friends). Yet it occurred to me the other day when I was out with the camera in Yujing and Nanhua that I could probably do a good job with the combination of pithy photographic backgrounds and Nietzsche-like libertarian aphorisms in Mandarin and English. Printed and distributed. Plastered across posters. Scattered anonymously and planted where there might be soil.

It's an idea...

The Importance Of Epistemology

"They think nothing can be good unless it's demonstrated to you that in the particular case it achieves a good object... I think in most instances it's a deeply ingrained intellectual attitude which forces them to disapprove of something which seems to them [un]intelligible and to prefer something which is visibly directed to a good purpose."

F.A. Hayek in conversation with Robert Bork on whether resistance to economic freedom is due to intellectual error or in Bork's words "something more sinister", November 4th 1978.

"But common sense is not enough where theoretical knowledge is required: it can make simple, concrete-bound connections -- it cannot integrate complex issues, or deal with wide abstractions, or forecast the future."

Ayn Rand in her essay "Don't Let It Go", from the anthology, "Philosophy: Who Needs It", but which I found at this post by Billy Beck.

When Government Creates Lawlessness

"When the government began rescuing it from collapse in the fall of 2008 with what has become a $182 billion lifeline, A.I.G. was required to forfeit its right to sue several banks — including Goldman, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch — over any irregularities with most of the mortgage securities it insured in the precrisis years."

A New York Times article linked up via Karl Denninger who comments:

"...it says in plain English that if you're a bank there are no laws."

Thought Control

Sirs

If it is true that the Department of Military Training Education either has, or until very recently had, a plan to install "military training officers" in senior high schools, junior high schools and elementary schools, then this surely ought to be lit up on front page headlines as often as possible.

Such a policy would of course be a backward step toward totalitarianism and must be resisted.

Not only should such a plan be withdrawn, but its' proponents should be made to suffer its' very public and embarrassing withdrawal.

Yet why not go further and remove the possibility of such a thing being introduced on the quiet at some point in the future? Why not go further and dare to remove the very presumption itself that government has any right to decide what your children can learn (or unlearn) or think (or unthink)? Completing the privatization of the market for education services would not only be a great blow struck for human freedom but it would also enable a massive reduction in debt assumed by national and local governments.

In brief sirs, why not advocate - now - a policy of dismantling this entire pretense of an "education system" behind which the state-enforced mutilation of children's minds will always hide?

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Thursday 1st July 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)