Toward A New Opposition

Sirs

After the ECFA agreement is formally completed tomorrow, the DPP centered opposition must face up to the facts of their utter political failure. They have failed to stop the ECFA being signed. The protest in Taipei was made up of elderly DPP party members still wheeling out Lee Teng-hui as their hero; the man is eighty-seven years old!

Sirs, I submit that the social-democratic opposition movement in Taiwan is long past its' sell-by date. Part of the reason for this is that the movement has insufficient intellectual appeal to young people in Taiwan. It is founded on the same old, untrue and long-discredited idea that government has a "right" to dictate which so enrages us about the government in Beijing.

The only difference between the governments in Taipei and Beijing is democratic dilution.

It is high time for a new opposition movement in Taiwan - one opposed to government per se and not merely the extension of its' dictate beyond some arbitrarily contrived line of "national harmony" or "human rights".

Why is it the people of Taiwan "need" to have schools and universities controlled by the government? It is for thought control, the entrenchment of political power, and a bloated welfare scheme for "teachers". It can be replaced by the efforts of home-schooling cooperatives by free people in possession of their own property and their own minds.

Why is it the people of Taiwan "need" to have a central bank with a monopoly on the medium of trade? It is for issuing funny money for the government to lend to their compelled corporate friends, waste on nonsense promises, wreak havoc on daily market prices and undermine the value of working people's savings. It can be replaced by a system of competing currencies freely exchanged.

Why is it the people of Taiwan "need" to have a government sponsored healthcare system? It is for forcibly extracting cash without consent from young working people to line the pockets of rich doctors while doing untold injustice to the concept of "insurance".It can be replaced with the competitiveness of service and value to patients offered by a free market in healthcare and medicine without government distortion.

Why is it the people of Taiwan "need" to have the most effective and logical means of self defense taken away from them? It is for keeping the gangsters in power, criminals on the street and thus by extension that abominable welfare scheme otherwise known as a "police force". These laws can be abolished and Taiwanese people will have to learn to take responsibility for their own lives and moral choices.

Sirs, I put it to you that it is the government in Taipei that must be resisted now if there is to be any future resistance to the government in Beijing. And that day is coming. All of us in Taiwan must earn the right to be free or submit to eventual slavery beneath government jackboot.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Monday 28th June 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

Michael Turton Reports On The Anti-ECFA Rally

I can't stand the guy - he is so far invested in the social democratic premise of nation-state politics that he can't see the wood for the trees - but the Turd does do a sterling job of linking up reports on the anti-ECFA rally in Taipei. The figure of 32,000 given by the Taipei police is a lowball figure he says, but J. Michael Cole (of whom I am no fan either) reckons the turnout must have been quite low. Either way, I agree with Cole that the protests never had a chance of preventing the implementation of the ECFA.

My view, which I reiterate time and again in my letters to the Taipei Times, is that the current opposition movement in Taiwan centering around the social democratic outlook of the Democratic Progressive Party is as good as finished and must be overthrown and replaced with an anti-government movement. There are no Uni kids involved - it's just the same old 60 something year old grandpa mango farmers. They can sell me mangos any time I choose, but they ain't selling ideas to the kids anymore.

Only someone like me can do that.

Orwell's Childhood: No Surprises

"The small boy waiting outside [the headmaster's] study for a beating is only the youthful version of Winston Smith waiting to be summoned to Room 101. The deceitfulness of authority, the feeling that spies are everywhere, the harsh cross-examinations, the rote learning in an atmosphere of threat — these are all present in both essay and novel."

Via Jeff Riggenbach at Mises, that's Gordon Bowker in quotation on the similarity between George Orwell's novel "1984" and his essay in memory of compulsory schooling in England: "Such, Such Were The Joys".

Camera Obscura

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

That's Alexander Solzhenitsyn quoted in a comment by John Venlet on his own post "Running Out Of Options" in answer to the question "what would Solzhenitsyn say to us?".

Re: Opposition To ECFA

Sirs,

Although the ECFA, or rather its' first iteration, was concluded on thursday, popular opposition to it - especially here in the south - has not given up and nor should it. Every effort must be made to strengthen the voice of this opposition and the annoyance and embarrassment it causes that presumptuous cabal of a government in Taipei.

However, the continued ideological basis to this popular opposition promoted by the Democratic Progressive Party is, if one accounts for the democratic dilution, the very same thing which so angers us about the government in Beijing: the poison of national socialism.

Although the DPP is quite right to point out that the ECFA will bring apparent benefits to the larger companies in Taiwan while subjecting smaller companies to the difficulties of competition from Chinese firms, such inequities cannot be extinguished by government action but only reversed - putting the boot into Taiwan's larger employers, and by extension, their employees. Any form of company welfare - whether it be for the semi-condutor industry or the mango farmers - is despicable and unjustifiable. Yet successive governments in Taipei have long extended their national socialist ambitions with the erection of insane and crippling empires of education, health, and retirement welfare drawn directly from the "how-to-stagnate-in-perpetual-servitude-like-a-goddamn-european" textbook.

Sirs, the problem with the ECFA is not that it is about trade and economic competition, the problem is that it is about applying more of the dirty school eraser of government compulsion to the white chalk of freedom and creativity we still have. Until there is a change in the basis of the opposition to ECFA from opposition to trade, to opposition to more and more government - both in Beijing and in Taipei - then the opposition movement will not be able to stop the ongoing betrayal of freedom on this island.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent Friday 25th June 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

Edit: The above is a revised version of an earlier draft which I knocked up too hastily and in which the third paragraph was as follows:

The government in Beijing constantly spouts its nationalistic credentials with all its' nonsense about "one China" and "territorial integrity" whilst also dishing out corporate welfare like there's no tomorrow. Meanwhile the successive governments in Taipei have variously inflamed ethnic sentiments crossing the north-south divide whilst also erecting insane and crippling empires of education, health, and retirement welfare drawn directly from the "how-to-stagnate-in-perpetual-servitude-like-a-goddamn-european" textbook.

Raising Atlas

Via the superb Beth Haynes at "Wealth Is Not The Problem".

People Garbage

"In fact, the airport is the face of a country. Foreign tourists receive their first impression of a country at the airport. If our government cannot enforce its jurisdiction over illegal vendors in the international airport, how can the government convince the Taiwanese people and foreign visitors that Taiwan’s premier airport will be transformed into a first-class gateway to the Asia-Pacific any time soon?"

The thoroughly reprehensible concluding paragraph to a Taipei Times letter by Claire Wu. Ms Wu was writing in response to a news item about poor Taiwanese people successfully applying themselves to the problem of staying alive at Taoyuan International Airport.

How The Light Gets Through

"Those words ‘I don’t want to tell you this’ move me profoundly. Despite all the filth and slime by which he had been surrounded, at school and on TV, the boy had still preserved an essential modesty about things that he instinctively knew should remain private."

Peter Hitchens in his Mail On Sunday blog/column.

Tree Climbing Skills

Last night I had to perform minor acrobatics scrambling through the tiny loft hatch - sans stepladder - of my girlfriend's mom's house to switch off the main water valve after the tap for the downstairs shower finally snapped off and the valve jammed, leaving me unable to turn the damn thing off. The plumbing in that house looks like it hasn't been replaced since it was first put in - which must be something like thirty, forty years ago now.

Curious fact: loft access in Taiwan is very different from back home. In all the houses I have ever known in England, Scotland or Germany, the entrance to the loft was always fixed in the ceiling along the horizontal axis and would be approximately a two foot by two foot square block of wood which you could push up and out of the way from a standing position on your stepladder below. What I had to deal with last night - and quite without the aid of a stepladder - was a tiny little hinged wooden hatch just less than two feet wide and just over a foot high sited on the vertical axis - necessitating the use of skills I probably haven't used since I was ten or twelve years old. The floor of the loft was solid concrete rather than creaky wooden rafters, which is just as well because I had my full weight (about 185 lbs) dangling off the lip of that thing for a good minute or two while trying to wiggle my body through that tiny hatch.

And I'll get to do the whole thing again either tonight or tomorrow after the new valve and tap for the downstairs shower arrives.

Whoopdee-do, eh?

Response To Bruno: The Red Foe Of Tea Partiers

Sirs

I notice that Bruno Walther seems to think my name is "The Tea Party Movement", yet I am quite certain each of the three letters recently published by me were not undersigned so. Nevertheless I am delighted to have caused Mt Walther to erupt in gay hilarity - what with his oppressive global warming/cooling/fiddling-under-the-spread-sheet nightmares.

Although Mr Walther is quite correct to assert the simplicity of my equation that the free market is good and government is bad, it is almost as though, in his thrashing about the "necessities of civilized society", he didn't actually understand the derivation of these equations. Doubtless however, this is wrong since Mr Walther can trumpet himself as a "Visiting Associate Professor of Environmental Science at the College of Public Health and Nutrition, Taipei Medical University" and I ... well... I'm just a plain old banjo "Mr".

Yet astonishingly, this academic luminary seems to have missed my point. The free market is good and government is bad for several reasons, but most importantly it is that where action in a free market always takes the form of a voluntary exchange of values among equals, government action is always predicated upon the threat of overwhelming violence.

In the freedom of the market, a human being may make full use of her distinctive method for survival - her mind - in the production of economic value. Applying our human minds to the problem of survival is the distinctive mark of our species, and so, if we are to continue to survive as individuals among each other in society, then we must enjoy as much freedom as we can possibly obtain from the arbitrary violation of our nature as creatures with minds of our own.

Under the coercive violence of government however, such attempts to survive and take care of ourselves and our families are increasingly subject to the will of men arrogant enough to presume not only the ability, but the right itself, to dictate the terms of this survival. The mechanism of democratic elections disguises this presumption with some small illusion of "representative legitimacy", but this illusion fades the more control over our little exchanges in the market place the government inevitably seeks to assert.

Though such men and women of government - from all parties - may use soothing, caring language, enjoy widespread public sympathy and even have their names bedecked by the jewelled suffixes of academia, they are all nonetheless men and women whose sole operative political principle is the power of violence: a principle which has always run contrary to that of the free exchange of values, which alone is essential for civilized life.

Sirs, I would think that, if Mr Walther may, with impunity, cast his aspersions so low as to suggest Somalia as an example of my ideal society, then it is surely only fair to suggest that it can only be because he himself dreams of succeeding Kim Jong Il to the pleasures of dictatorship in North Korea.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent Monday June 21st 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

That Afghan Mirror

"The Western world figured out how to drive the German army out of Europe... if they can do that... there's something like ten or twenty thousand Taliban fighters essentially barefoot in the mountains with AKs... they can probably figure out how to win that fight. I think the problem isn't a military one in Afghanistan, I think it's a political problem in the countries of Europe and the United States."

- Sebastian Junger, in conversation with Peter Robinson.

A Visual Reminder Of The Essence Of All Government

Policeman in Seattle gets violent with a woman and her friend for jaywalking: that is, walking across the street without the help of the little green man sign.

Look at all those people standing around watching. If that policeman didn't have the full force of government behind him, one of those guys standing around would have just summarily dispatched him - I was chomping at the bit just watching that, any man with a decent right fist could have done him serious kidney damage several times over given the total mess he made of that situation. That cop was nothing more than a human robot doing what he was told in spite of the fact he presumably has a brain in his head. He deserved a right good kicking, and so do the government morons everywhere who institute jaywalking laws.

H/T: Radley Balko via Billy Beck.

The Education Ministry Is Not Romantic

Sirs,

Hwang Kwang-kuo 黃光國 criticizes the government in Taipei's education ministry for being too "romantic" and not "rational" enough. I would put it to him that it is actually he who is the romantic and the government which is rational.

He labours under the romantic delusion that the education ministry's primary function is to produce educated kids. Rather, the education ministry serves three purposes: the first is to allow politicians to bribe votes out of parents by making them promises about how they will improve their children's education and that the last guys in charge were fools; the second is to indoctrinate future adults to think that the solution to every social problem can potentially be found in the action of "authorities"; and the third is to transform the profession of teaching into a branch of welfare dependency, with teachers given tax breaks and unaffordable retirement benefits to ensure their spineless political complicity.

No, the education ministry is quite rational - they can do whatever the hell they like, so long as it gets them votes, adults unable to think outside the narrow little boxes of government "authority" drawn for them since childhood and gutless teachers who never stand up for themselves or the interests of the poor children submitted to their "care".

Hwang Kwang-kuo is the irrational romanticist, not the ministry of education.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent Friday 18th June 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

David Reid Is A Fool

"There is obviously only limited capacity for any major increase in the global supply of oil."

Mmm yes, "limited capacity"... it's obvious isn't it? Because clowns like you in the U.S. Congress have actually banned any such major increase. I wonder if you'd like my new spent engine oil cocktail David... I'm calling it the Oily Reid.

"It is, quite possibly, the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen..."

Charlotte Gore doesn't like the vuvzelas - neither do I, they make people sound like mosquitos. Thousands of six-foot tall mosquitos all buzzing at the same time.

H/T: Nick M.

The Real Opposition To President Obama

"In short you have no standing what so ever to imply that you can be some guide to the opposition to Barack Obama.

Your only case is based upon SNOBBERY - i.e. the fact you are wealthy and Oxbridge educated, and your foes are from poor backgrounds and did not go to elite universities (where Keynesian drivel is taught as holy writ).

On all the great matters of the subject of the struggle against Barack Obama and what he represents you have, as the above shows, been on the other side. The side of Obama and his Comrades - not of the foes of this collectivist movement."

Paul Marks sticks it to the pampered little Mammy's boys at the Economist.

On Foxconn

Sirs,

What will soon be required of Taiwanese students and teachers is the patience to clearly, publicly and repeatedly separate the mixed premises from which the indoctrinated political palette of incoming Chinese students has been formed. To do this, one must fish out hidden premises.

Yet such fishing applies with equal pertinence to the murky waters of Marxist editorial pieces by Taiwanese academics! An excellent example was published in Thursday's Taipei Times Lee Fa-hsien framed Foxconn and other companies as working in tangent with the government in Beijing to exploit "their" labour "resources" via neglected enforcement of labour contract law. The finished picture was tagged as the Chinese government having "a vested interest in the capitalist mode of production." Lee Fa-hsien's unstated premise is that government is entitled to run everybody's affairs all the time. Such nonsense is as outrageous as it is prosaic.

As Frederic Bastiat observed, government is in essence nothing but the conceit by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else; it is neither a practical possibility nor a moral one.

First, "worker's rights" are an abomination. They are part of a socialist dream which, as dawn approaches, quickly turns into nightmare. Labour laws distort both the supply and demand for labour by purportedly raising the economic incentives for one party to agree to a contract, while raising the costs of the other party. The inevitable result is the bureaucratic ingestion and expulsion of unemployed people.

Second, the people who freely contract to work at Foxconn are not "resources" and are in no sense "owned" by Foxconn. To suggest otherwise is nothing less than a charge of actual, non-metaphorical slavery for which its' author ought to be held to account. The charge itself is of course demonstrably false in that Foxconn employees can quit and leave if they so wish. Can they similarly divest themselves of those obligations imposed upon them from birth to the government in Beijing?

Third, the tremendous productive achievements in factories all over China and Taiwan for the past three decades are the result of the extent to which principles of economic exchange have been permitted to operate. The integrity with which these principles - private property, freedom of exchange and freedom of expression - operate is an essential requirement for human minds to apply themselves fearlessly to the problem of surviving and flourishing in a world of scarce resources. The operation of these principles in China is quickly being erased by political interference into that distinctive, people-stained blur of fascism.

Sirs, the Chinese workers in Foxconn, and the poor people in China more generally, suffer not because of capitalist production per se but because of the increasing usurpation of capitalist production by government. Foxconn is not to blame for their suffering, rather it is the government in Beijing, which enslaves the very people whose interests it lyingly purports to both know and to serve.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Friday 18th June 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

From China With Love...?

Sirs

Beyond some measure of academic competence and the awarding of a “high political awareness certificate”, there is a far more important qualification which I wonder whether those Rosa Klebbs in Beijing have considered...

How many of these students will be fit, teenage girls?

Were I an eighteen year old Taiwanese boy, looking over my classmates shoulders to see the new girls from China, I can think of several things I'd be more interested in than what scraps of stupid paper they happen to bring with them from Beijing...

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Tuesday 15th June 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

Girl found here on Imageshack. Teenage kicks, huh?! Unbeatable.

It's Not Foxconn Stupid, It's The Government...

Sirs

The petition initiated by Lin Thung-hong (林宗弘) and Daniel Yang (楊友仁) and publicized on Monday's front page left me stunned with an astonishing bout of WTF.

Thung-hong and Yang accuse Foxconn of exploiting its workers in China and, in the very same breath, condemn the government in Taipei for offering subsidies and "favourable policies" for them to relocate to Taiwan - along with all of the "associated social problems".

First, exploitation is exactly what every single company worth its' stock value ought to be doing to its workers, i.e. making efficient use of their freely contracted labour to produce goods highly prized - and freely so - by millions of people right across the entire planet. Such tremendous exploits are deserving of an exalted place in human history.

Second, Chinese workers are suffering because of the government in Beijing, not because of Foxconn:

Does Foxconn fiddle the currency thus wreaking havoc on market prices?

Does Foxconn forcibly prevent Chinese people from creating alternative, trustworthy currencies with which to conduct market exchange?

Does Foxconn apply the threat of imprisonment in order to extract income from the workers in a myriad forms of taxation?

Does Foxconn threaten to imprison them or even kill them and/or their families for expressing pro-freedom views?

Does Foxconn restrict their access to the World Wide Web on pain of imprisonment?

Does Foxconn try to steal their land and wrongfully evict them from their homes?

Third, although Thung-hong and Yang are right to criticize the Ma administration for offering subsidies to Foxconn to relocate back to Taiwan, they do so for entirely wrong-headed reasons. Perhaps they could ask around and find out from whence Foxconn obtained its tainted Chinese subsidies in the first place - and the manner in which these funds were themselves "obtained"...

Sirs, on reading such an astonishing example of moral and economic illiteracy from Thung-hong and Yang, I reflect on the desperate need to cut the number of Universities and Colleges in Taiwan. In waiting for this to happen I can only hope that their students will stand up and walk out of Thung-hong's and Yang's classes if only to save their souls from any further contamination with such obdurate WTF.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Monday 14th June 2010. Published in the Taipei Times Thursday 17th June 2010).

啊!

Two letters published in two weeks - am I the only one on the Kaoliang here?

2011...

Art Laffer spells out "double-dip recession" in the Wall Street Journal:

"...income this year has already been inflated above where it otherwise should be and next year, 2011, income will be lower than it otherwise should be... "

Another Opposition To ECFA

Sirs

Before the government in Taipei presents a modified version of the ECFA to its legislative body for review, there will be ample opportunity for the expression of opposition. Yet to whom should these expressions be made and of what sort should they be?

I submit that it will be next to useless to direct some "unified" ECFA opposition to KMT legislators. They won't listen to a largely southern, anti-mainlander, pan-green, democratic-socialist voice - and, hell, why should they? They already know what that voice will say, and they have known this for years.

Vociferous opposition to the ECFA may yet find its feet on quite different grounds - the rights of the individual.

The legal right of governments to exercise more or less control over trade have no moral basis; only sovereign individuals free from coercion have any moral right to decide whether, and on what terms, they will exchange value for value. A government merely presumes the power to arrogate this right of individuals to their own disposal simply because they believe themselves to have an effective monopoly over violence. That is, at the bottom, all there is to it.

It is wholly wrong to oppose the signing of the ECFA because it will have a "disastrous effect" on Taiwan's middle class. Why should the interests of the middle class trump those of other people? Are middle-class people the only ones whose lives, property and money matter? Are they the only ones whose children can legitimately expect any sort of future? Taiwan's poorer people may well see some value in an influx of cheaper goods from China - do their interests not count? Are their economic prospects unimportant? Are their desperate attempts to save money for their children's futures to be only futile gestures decorating the dinner tables of the middle-classes?

I put it to you - is this not cannibalism abstracted beyond the horror of its' immediately apprehensible form? A cannibalisation of other people's economic values?

The right thing to do is to stand against the ECFA on social individualist grounds that no government - neither the one in Taipei nor the one in Beijing - has any moral right to exercise control over the trade that people may or may not otherwise freely agree to.

As much as I detest the idea of aiding and abetting the fascist culture of government in China via trade, I would nevertheless seek to dissuade other people from engaging in such trade by the use of reason and appeals to enlightened self-interest, not by the arrogant presumption of brute force by the government in Taipei.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan

(Sent: Thursday 10th June 2010. Published by the Taipei Times Monday 14th June 2010)

Just Leave Your Autograph

I had the opportunity earlier tonight to mention Bernard Butler. I was asked about my taste in music.

That guy. Always.

On The ECFA

Sirs

The present government's desire to sign an ECFA with China on behalf of the people in Taiwan must be vigorously resisted by anyone who cares for their freedom. It is not simply that the Chinese government is run on a fraudulent and malicious modus operandi, but that where there ought to be a clear demarcation between the actions of the PRC government on the one hand, and the actions of so-called "private" Chinese companies on the other, there is instead, nothing but the quick blur of fascism. If a Chinese company defrauds you in your purchase of construction equipment for example, then you are no longer dealing with a company whom you may take to court for reparations, but the customs policy of the PRC government itself. In other words, you'll have been "shanghaied".

Yet is the identical accusation not increasingly true of Taiwan with its' blurry state-private empires in the healthcare and education markets? Is it not also increasingly true in the United States under the care of the present administration? Consider the extent of this fascist blur in U.S. commercial banking, energy, housing, insurance, automotive and healthcare industries.

Although the vigorousness of the TSU's stance against the ECFA is garnering applause on your pages, I yet cannot applaud their stance itself, and for all this fight they are showing, I am sure their private mood remains pessimistic. If they should fail in their attempts to force this government into offering a referendum on the ECFA, then where democracy fails, only the market will be left to stand against State predation. It will be up to the people of Taiwan to freely decide whether they will accept the costs of constraining their purchases of Chinese goods and services on the market wherever possible.

We must never surrender our freedom to the fascists in Beijing or those in Taipei. Each man and woman dies alone, and each always bears the responsibility for what he or she does between now and then. The issue, fundamentally, is very simple and it is always and will always be the same for all time: will you live by the power of the market, or will you try to live by the power of the government? Will you choose to live by freedom of association and freedom of exchange, or will you try to live by the threat of violence if you don't get what you want? Will you stand up in defiance to tyrants or will you grovel and whine on the floor, begging to be absolved of responsibility, like a fucking slave?

Yours in freedom as ever,
Michael Fagan

(Sent: Saturday 5th June 2010 - Published by the Taipei Times Tuesday 8th June 2010).

Note: The editorial changes made to my letter alter the meaning significantly and I'm not at all happy about it.

The Horrible, Sliding Return

"I believe it was a goal from the start to give control of bank lending to political apparatchiks."

Jesus fucking Christ. He's right and it has been so glaringly obvious now for so long. It will be copied over here soon enough.

It's got to be stopped somehow, but I don't know what to say to it yet.