Your papers, sir

I’m wary of and against just about every bill that Washington manages to legislate. There are many reasons to object to the way in which our government functions, but this piece highlighted for me one practical aspect of the upcoming heightened requirements that we’ll all have to adhere to:

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. . .[T]he bill would make it illegal to hire anyone for any work in the US for paid wages, unless both the worker and employer complete the new registration requirements, including providing the employee’s work history for the past five years even if they are American citizens each time they apply for a job.

“It is unlawful for an employer…to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an individual unless such employer meets the requirements of subsections (c) and (d),” says the bill referring to the new document rules and “electronic verification” systems.

As it stands, the new bill would require all employers to “register” with the federal government and report the data for new employees to the government within three days of hiring them.

As such, the bill would fill in one of the last gaps in the government’s tracking of wages, by making it a potential criminal or civil offense not to inform the government that a worker is receiving compensation of some sort, under the rubric of national security.

According to Section 274A of the version of the bill passed by the Senate in 2006, no employer would be exempt from having to register with the government and also having to verify the status of each of their new employees.

“The Secretary shall require all employers in the United States to participate in the System,” says the text of the bill.

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If that isn’t practical enough as a description for you, the article follows with this example:

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. . .[E]ven hiring your neighbor’s kid Johnny to mow your lawn could become a long and detailed process and if you didn’t follow the rules, you could get a knock at your door from Homeland Security.
First, you would have to register as a employer under the program and then call a 1-800 number with several items of information about the potential new employee (even if they have proper ID or an American passport).

Each time an employer hires someone, they would have to phone in (1) their own EIN or social security number if they are an individual (2) the social security number of the new employee (3) the state of birth of the new employee (4) the EIN number or social security number of every single place the new employee has worked in the last five years (5) and the date of birth and address for the potential new employee.

Then you’ll need to wait up to 10 days to receive an answer about whether or not Johnny is approved for work in the US.

Be sure to save the authorization codes given to you by the government if he is approved and also save all of the paperwork for three years or you could have to pay a large fine.

Even if you hired him for only one day’s worth of work, you’ll need to save his application forms and approval codes for at least one year, says the bill.

And don’t forget, under the new proposals, be prepared to give Johnny your own social security number so that he can use it the next time he applies for a job — he’ll need it under the new law for the next five years each time he applies for a job.

That provision will certainly help the government in making sure that they know not only where he worked this year, but everywhere else he has worked too.

Hopefully, no one that you hire will steal your identity in the process even though they have your social security number.

All of the information is to be housed in a database created by the Social Security Administration that will be shared with the Department of Homeland Security, which has the authority to initiate investigations into all employers who don’t participate in the system, including those who pay Johnny to mow their lawn.

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“Your papers, sir.” We are increasingly becoming a society where the government fears its people, and not vice versa.

Aquinas’ four ways

From an e-mail to a colleague:

Sorry to bombard you with e-mails in the last 24 hours, but I thought I’d take 5 minutes to copy and paste the relevant section of Aquinas that you and I have been referencing (and from which I’ve quoted sections). It comes from his commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. I’ll put the text from the Ethics first, followed by Aquinas’ commentary, with my gloss in the form of [bracketed] clarifications and a little bit of text formatting. For the ambitious student I’ve included links where Aquinas references Aristotle’s Metaphysics, although you’ll have to scroll down the page to find the relevant chapter of the book that is cited.

Ethics, Bk. 1, Ch. 1:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. But a certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the [end] products to be better than the activities [in themselves].

Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity- as bridle-making and the other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding, and this and every military action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall under yet others- in all of these the ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued.

COMMENTARY OF ST. THOMAS

1. As the Philosopher says in the beginning of the Metaphysics (Bk. 1, Ch. 2, 982 a 18), it is the business of the wise man to order. The reason for this is that wisdom is the most powerful perfection of reason, whose characteristic it is to know order. Even if the sensitive [sensing, such as eyesight and touch] powers know some things absolutely, nevertheless to know the order of [or relationship of] one thing to another is exclusively the work of the intellect or reason.

Now a twofold order is found in things. One kind is that of parts of a totality, that is, a group, among themselves, as the parts of a house are mutually ordered to each other. The second order is that of things to an end. This order is of greater importance than the first. For, as the Philosopher says in the eleventh book* of the Metaphysics (Bk. XII, Ch. 10, 1075 a 15), the order of the parts of an army among themselves exists because of the order of the whole army to the commander. Now order is related to reason in a fourfold way:

1. There is one order that reason does not establish but only beholds, such is the order of things in nature.
2. There is a second order that reason establishes in its own act of consideration, for example, when it arranges its concepts among themselves, and the signs of concept as well, because words express the meanings of the concepts.
3. There is a third order that reason in deliberating establishes in the operations of the will.
4. There is a fourth order that reason in planning establishes in the external things which it causes, such as a chest and a house.

 

2. Because the operation of reason is perfected by habit [i.e., through habituation], according to the different modes of order that reason considers in particular, a differentiation of sciences arises. The function of natural philosophy is to consider the order of things that human reason considers but does not establish-understand that with natural philosophy here we also include metaphysics. The order that reason makes in its own act of consideration pertains to rational philosophy (logic), which properly considers the order of the parts of verbal expression with one another and the order of principles to one another and to their conclusions. The order of voluntary actions pertains to the consideration of moral philosophy. The order that reason in planning establishes in external things arranged by human reason pertains to the mechanical arts.

 

Accordingly it is proper to moral philosophy, to which our attention is at present directed, to consider human operations insofar as they are ordered one another and to an end.

* [really the 12th book, as the medieval ordering was mistaken]

Democracy, the god that failed

I am, of course, borrowing for my blog-post title the name of a book by the venerable Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

A recent interview with Barrack Obama concerning his new book highlights a contemporary puzzle:

“Q: If readers are to come away from The Audacity of Hope with one action item (a New Year’s Resolution for 2007, perhaps?), what should it be?

A: Get involved in an issue that you’re passionate about. It almost doesn’t matter what it is–improving the school system, developing strategies to wean ourselves off foreign oil, expanding health care for kids. We give too much of our power away, to the professional politicians, to the lobbyists, to cynicism. And our democracy suffers as a result.” (emphasis mine)

I see a couple of options for interpreting Mr. Obama here. Perhaps it is the case that we should have full trust in democracy as a system that works — that is, when we put things to the populace to work out within a state apparatus, and if everything goes well, justice will tend to prevail and citizens’ needs will largely be taken care of.

My problem with Mr. Obama’s approach is twofold. First, his audacity of hope is for a system where everyone may try their darndest to control the lives of everyone else. The key is for everyone to at least have their say, so that they can at least have the honor of participating (even if nothing that they say changes policy). Therefore, it makes sense to give a general exhortation toward doing something, even if this entails everyone doing all kinds of contrary things, including vying for laws to control one another’s lives. The big idea is to let the marketplace of democratic power sort out the good from the bad.

Secondly, there happens to be one position that Obama can’t encourage, and that is the activist that does their work by doing nothing. The one intolerable disposition is that of the man or woman who cares not what their neighbor does, either in their personal life or in their business. If all that you ask is that you be left alone to your devices in the same way that you will tolerate the existence and rights of others, it is impossible to get involved in precisely the way that Obama thinks is necessary for the healthy survival and flourishing of political economy.

On a side note, some libertarian thinkers such as Professor Roderick Long have argued that democracy implies self-rule, and self-rule implies a libertarian / anarcho-capitalist society, if it is taken seriously. Therefore, working towards democracy is, in principle, not opposed to the goal of liberty.  At first glance, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he is in this camp — seeking a transfer of power from lobbyists and professional politicians to ‘the people.’  Nevertheless, beneath the notion that it should be up to the people to decide things lurks the dreadful corollary that ‘the people’ should have the power to decide what they plus everyone else should do.

This is why other philosophers of liberty, such as Dr. Hoppe, are through with the idea of democracy altogether.

Emperor Claudius and monopolies

From Robert Graves’ second book that poses as an autobiography of Emperor Claudius (or, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus; or Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus), Claudius the God:

In my self-confident ignorance I did one particularly stupid thing: I listened to Messalina’s [his wife] advice on the subject of monopolies. (. . .) She said to me one day: ‘Claudius, I have been thinking about something; and that is, that the nation would be much more prosperous if competition between rival merchants were to be supressed by law.’

“‘What do you mean, my dear?’ I asked.

‘Let me explain by analogy. Suppose that in our governmental system we had no departments. Suppose that every secretary in this place were free to move from job to job just as he thought fit. Suppose that Callistus were to come rushing into your study one morning and say: “I got here first and I want to do Narcissus’s secretarial work this morning,” and then Narcissus, arriving a moment later and finding his stool occupied by Callistus, were to dash into Felix’s room, just in time to anticipate Felix, and begin work on some foreign affairs document (. . .) That would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?’

‘Very ridiculous. But I don’t see what this has to do with merchants.’

‘I’ll show you. The trouble with merchants is that they won’t stick to a single task or let their rivals stick to one. None of them is interested in serving the community, but merely in finding the easiest way of making money. (. . .) Trade is constant fighting, and the mass of the population suffers from it, just like non-combatants in a war.’

‘Do you really think so? Often they get things surprisingly cheap when one merchant is underselling another merchant or when he goes bankrupt.’

‘You might as well say that sometimes non-combatants can get quite good pickings from a battle-field — scrap metal, the hides and shoes of dead horses (. . .) Those windfalls aren’t to be reckoned against the burning of their farms and the trampling down of their crops.’

‘Are merchants as bad as all that? They never struck me as anything but useful servants of the State.’

‘They could be and ought to be useful. But they do great harm by their lack of co-operation and their insane jealous competition. The word goes round, for example, that there’s to be a demand for coloured marble from Phrygia, or Syrian silk (. . .) and for fear of missing a chance they scramble for the market like mad dogs. Instead of persisting with their ordinary lines of commerce, they rush their ships to the new center of excitement, with orders to their captains to bring as much marble, pepper, silk, or ivory as possible at whatever cost, and then of course foreigners raise the prices. Two hundred ship-loads of pepper or silk are brought home at great expense when there is really only demand for twenty, and the hundred and eighty ships could have been far better employed in importing other things for which there would have been a demand and for which a fair price could have been got. Obviously trade ought to be centrally controlled in the same way as armies and law-courts and religion and everything else is controlled.’

The result, of course, was a combination of high prices, shortages (causing famine), and several merchants putting huge sums into the pockets of Messalina.  It takes Claudius a year or two to reverse his monopoly laws, and even longer for a general economic order to restore itself in Rome.

books

For a New Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard. I gave this book another read-through about a month ago. Both “readings” have been an audiobook (acquired for free!) that I listened to while driving the daily commute. I think this might be the perfect book to recommend to friends who are mostly convinced of many libertarian ideas, but for whatever reason feel uncomfortable saying things like “the free market would provide a far more effective and moral legal system,” or “the national road system suffers greatly in the hands of our government; making the roads private would benefit the common good like no other highway reform.” Rothbard, as usual, is relentless in his logic, clarity, and persuasiveness in this classic text.

Some Desperate Glory by Edwin Campion Vaughan. This gem of a diary, written by a young (not yet 20 years old) British officer during his front-line experience in the Great War, was discovered in a family cupboard only three decades ago. Though not as polished as other WWI literature in this genre, Vaughan’s account details both the monotonous boredom and the sheer horror of war. Vaughan witnesses and survives one of the worst battles in the war at Ypres: he sees a cat eating the face of a German corpse, he bears the sound of his own wounded men screaming and moaning in pain while they drown in the mucky shell-holes of no-man’s-land, he watches in horror as a soldier cowering on the ground is motivated by Vaughan’s screaming and gathers the courage to run into battle — only to be shot dead 3 paces later, and he recoils in shock when a solider being prodded by Vaughan replies “I’m blind, sir” and turns to reveal half of a face ripped off by shrapnel. These moments are weighty but come interspersed between long periods of boredom, frustration, and the discomfort that Vaughan experiences when he lives in the French mud for 7 straight months.

St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox by G. K. Chesterton. I picked up this book based on its reputation, and I wasn’t disappointed. Chesterton, who also wrote a much-acclaimed volume on St. Francis, tackles here one of the most monstrously-large figures in all of philosophy, and does so while keeping his project at about a couple hundred pages. Chesterton’s touch is poetic and delicate as he urges the reader to understand the fundamental love Aquinas had for reality, liberty, practical life, and everything that the scholastics are accused of dismissing. Chesterton, a firm Catholic, also makes a (persuasive) argument that, in many ways, Aquinas and Francis — an odd pair indeed — were very much the reformation before the Reformation. Compared to these thinkers, he writes, Calvin and Luther were reacitonaries. Not the typical line of reasoning about the relationship between the church and the reformers.

The Ultimate Foundations of Economic Science

I’m starting to work through Ludwig von Mises’ book, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, which is — luckily for me! — available on the Mises Institute’s website, along with about 500 other full-text books. (A breath of fresh air: an Institute that talks the talk of education and awareness about its ideals, and then follows through with action. How many conservative think tanks charge high prices for short journals and other publications? How many offer full text books online for free?)

The description of the book in the Mises store reads thus:

“This volume was Mises’ “ultimate” book in more than one sense. Not only did it deal with the most fundamental, elemental, and primary sources of economic science; it is “ultimate” also in being Mises’ own last book. Appearing when Mises was well past his eightieth birthday, this work brought to conclusion a sustained flow of scholarly output that had spanned exactly half a century (since the appearance in 1912 of his first book, the first German edition of the celebrated Theory of Money and Credit).

“It should not, therefore, be a matter for surprise that this is a book that was clearly written with enormous passion. Although many of the themes dealt with were themes on which Mises had dwelt in earlier works, here we find them drawn together in a manifesto passionately proclaiming the true character of economics. He dauntlessly defended its epistemological foundations from the attacks of its detractors, disdainfully dismissing the pretensions of philosophies of science built solidly on abysmal ignorance of the teachings of economics.

“For decades Mises had patiently and tirelessly developed his system of social thought. He did this during an age in which the tide of philosophical fashion was, to say the least, not running in his favor. Despite the ascendancy of epistemological views that rendered Mises’ science of human action grossly unacceptable to the philosophers of his time, despite fashionable methodological innovations in economics that made Mises’own economics appear to his critics as an obscurantist obstacle to scientific advance, despite ideological currents that led to Mises’ policy conclusions being set down as both benighted and reactionary — despite all this discouragement and disparagement, Mises never faltered. The passion that suffuses the present work provides an insight into what it was that kept Mises writing and teaching during those bitter decades of intellectual isolation.”

Mises’ struggle against contemporary philosophy is a fascinating piece of history, especially in light of the world events through which Mises lived. Socialism was in its prime for most of Mises’ life, and upon earning a PhD in the early 20th century he entered an academic world that was exploring and acclaiming the viability of managed economies, eugenics, fascism, socialism, and many other violent ideas. He could not find a job with a university because of his ideas, both in Europe and in America, with anti-semitism putting the nail in the coffin for the already suspicious capitalist. A great article on the intellectual struggles of Ludwig von Mises can be found here, written by his greatest student: Murray Rothbard.

The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science is a romp through the epistemology of economics (or, as Mises prefered calling it, praxeology). As such, it is a work in philosophy and not of economics itself — it is the justification rather than the explanation, if you will.  Here again Mises stood against the popular general thought of his peers; one such paragraph embodies his philosophical attacks on several schools of thought:

“No thinking and no acting would be possible to man if the universe were chaotic, i.e., if there were no regularity whatever in the succession and concatenation of events. In such a world of unlimited contingency nothing could be perceived but ceaseless kaleidoscopic change. There would be no possibility for man to expect anything. All experience would be merely historical, the record of what has happened in the past. No inference from past events to what might happen in the future would be permissible. Therefore man could not act. He could at best be a passive spectator and would not be able to make any arrangements for the future, be it only for the future of the impending instant. The first and basic achievement of thinking is the awareness of constant relations among the external phenomena that affect our senses. A bundle of events that are regularly related in a definite way to other events is called a specific thing and as such distinguished from other specific things…. Whatever philosophers may say about causality, the fact remains that no action could be performed by men not guided by it. Neither can we imagine a mind not aware of the nexus of cause and effect. In this sense we may speak of causality as a category or an a priori of thinking and acting.”

Makes sense to me. . .

C.S. Lewis on punishment

Via Murray Rothbard in his book, The Ethics of Liberty (which I’m reading right now).  Don’t mind the overkill of “quoted” words, a bad habit that I’m coincidentally trying to purge from myself at the moment:

     Never has the tyranny and gross injustice of the “humanitarian” theory of punishment-as-reform been revealed in more scintillating fashion than by C.S. Lewis. Noting that the “reformers” call their proposed actions “healing” or “therapy” rather than “punishment,” Lewis adds:

But do not let us be deceived by a name. To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver . . . to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success—who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared—shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust-is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard.

     Lewis goes on to demonstrate the particularly harsh tyranny that is likely to be levied by “humanitarians” out to inflict their “reforms” and “cures” on the populace:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we “ought to have known better,” is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.

     Furthermore, Lewis points out, the rulers can use the concept of “disease” as a means for terming any actions that they dislike as “crimes” and then to inflict a totalitarian rule in the name of Therapy.

For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call “disease” can be treated as crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. For our masters will not be using concepts of Desert and Punishment but those of disease and cure. . . . It will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. Even in ordinary medicine there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are “treatment,” not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice.[18]

     Thus, we see that the fashionable reform approach to punishment can be at least as grotesque and far more uncertain and arbitrary than the deterrence principle. Retribution remains as our only just and viable theory of punishment and equal treatment for equal crime is fundamental to such retributive punishment. The barbaric turns out to be the just while the “modern” and the “humanitarian” turn out to be grotesque parodies of justice.

I’m not doing your dirty work for you

Well, we had speakeasies, and I suppose that this only makes sense:

I’m smoking in a bar in Philadelphia and nobody says, “Boo!”

There are 20 other people, smokers and nonsmokers, hanging out, enjoying themselves, not doing any harm to anyone (except maybe themselves). The bar is spacious, the NCAA is on the TV screens, beer pennants hang from the ceiling, and through the large windows I see rain falling.

The owner is sitting at the bar chewing nicotine gum. He’s a former smoker.

Also a former cop.

“I’m an irresponsible bar-owner,” he says with a smile.

Despite the smoking ban – because of it, actually – Philadelphia now has “smoke-easies,” a play on “speakeasies” that came to us with the Prohibition of alcohol. Prohibition was enacted in 1920, repealed in 1933 and largely ignored in between. I’m surprised at how many Americans meekly obey smoking bans.

“It’s my bar, it’s my four walls, cigarettes are legal,” he says. “Why can’t I allow my customers to smoke?”

Six months before he opened, “a beautiful-looking restaurant, [he names it, I won't], opened a few blocks from here. They never allowed smoking. That is their right,” he says, leaving unspoken his belief that it’s his right to permit it.

A Health Department inspector dropped in not long ago. No one was smoking, but he asked why Friday had ashtrays on the bar. Friday told him they were heirlooms, something like that.

The law requires bar managers to enforce the ban by telling patrons they can’t smoke, but they are cautioned not to take any action other than to call the Health Department to report smokers.

The Health Department has a hotline to report smoking in bars. (If you want the number, look it up yourself, snitch.)

Friday says no patron ever complained to him, “but we did have a complaint to a barmaid.”

He tells his employees to say, “We don’t condone it,” but tells me: “We can’t enforce [the ban]. It’s not our job.”

It’s that kind of a place.

Unlike Friday, he’s been written up by Health.

Who ratted him out?

Health inspectors won’t ever say, but Seamus says, “It’s either a neighbor, a competitor or sometimes a customer, but it’s usually your competitors.”

Seamus tries “to adhere to the letter of the law” and tells customers, “You cannot smoke in here.” If they do, “there’s nothing within my legal authority to tell you not to smoke,” he says.

Seamus’ father was a cop for 35 years, but “I’m not in that business. I’m in the entertainment business,” he says.

“I have military men come in here, they’re just back from Iraq. If anyone, they have the right to smoke, you know,” Seamus says.

He wouldn’t stop them, even if he could.

Joe bar-owner walks the fine line between obeying the law but rebelling against its purpose. Be tyranical if you must, but don’t expect me to do your dirty work for you. I’m still thinking over all of the ethical implications at play.

Lord Acton, meet Plotinus

Said Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

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Says Plotinus in this tractate: “Matter tends to corrupt, and absolute matter corrupts absolutely.”

. . . ba – dum dum.

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But seriously, folks. . .

Actually, Lord Acton has some nice one-liners on, among other things, the nature of thought, dialogue, and writing:

• “There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.”
• “Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the table of eternity.”
• “Learn as much by writing as by reading.”
• “Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it’s when you’ve had everything to do, and you’ve done it.”
• “Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.”
• “A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times.”
• “Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being.”

Where does security come from?

Are liberty and security the daughters of order, or are order and security the daughters of liberty?

An excellent blog on liberty, security, and property rights here. Guess what you didn’t know about many of the recent shooting sprees (and who knew but wasn’t telling you)?

The troubling thing is that both mainstream parties look to restrict liberty in some way for the sake of security. Some want our privacy stripped so that they can see who are the potential terrorists; others want us to depend on socialized defense. Both parties think that liberty, in some way, opposes security and peace.

Edit / Followup: There is another good, if a little gruesome at times, article on the issue at Lew Rockwell.