Right to Work

"Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests." - United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23.4.

Scott Walker signs the Right To Work law in Wisconsin.

Nobody's saying you can't form a trade union. They're just saying you can't force people to join it. If you can deliver on your promises to improve pay and working conditions in a serious way, you can probably get people to sign on. Unions did this for years. Yes, it's harder to do it this way than with a rule that requires workers to join your union; yes, it's harder to do it this way than with rules forbidding the company from hiring scabs. But you can still do it, if you devote yourself to providing returns for the workers who pay dues. You can still make your case to the people, too, who may refuse to cross a picket line if they agree you are being shabbily treated.

It was too easy for a long time. Many unions did badly by their members, and devoted themselves to power and corruption instead of helping their own loyally as the first priority. If you want to survive, you'll have to get back to what made unions strong in the first place.

Wikipedia says that "scabs" in this context dates to the Elizabethan era, by the way. I had no idea.

For Eric Blair

A Roman cavalry project along Hadrian's wall.

Pen and Phone

People are really mad about this letter to Iran.

But to directly communicate with a foreign power in order to undermine ongoing negotiations? That is appalling. And just imagine what those same Republicans would have said if Democratic senators had tried such a thing when George W. Bush was president.

Yeah, good thing nothing like that ever happened.

Bear in mind this was not an official trip to Europe and the Middle East. Kerry was not visiting as a representative of the United States Government. He was in no way commissioned by the executive branch to negotiate alliances with foreign countries. So what was he doing there?

What, never? Well, hardly ever.

[Senator] Obama has built much of his campaign for the Presidency on the fact that he has been against the war in Iraq from the very beginning and would demand an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq were he to be elected President. Yet, on his first trip to Iraq recently, he is alleged to have attempted to negotiate a delay in troop withdrawal from Iraq....

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari reports that Obama made his ‘demands’ the central focus of their talks while he was in Iraq.
“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops – and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its “state of weakness and political confusion.”

But that's just a tu quoque; to stand on it would be an informal fallacy. So let's give a positive argument.

Article I of the US Constitution gives Congress the following powers related to foreign policy, none of which are subject to checks and balances from Article II.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises...

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;

To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States...

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water[.]

In addition to that, Congress has the power to raise and order all the armed forces of the United States, checked by the President's commanding of those powers.

The President's powers to conduct foreign policy are all checked by the Congress. Treaties require the advice and consent of a supermajority of the Senate. Appointing ambassadors requires advice and consent. Commanding the armed forces at war, in theory if less in practice lately, requires Congressional consent to having a war.

I say 'in theory if less in practice lately' with Obama's Libyan adventure especially in mind. The President has frequently acted as if the Constitutional checks on his power did not exist. Similarly, he has ignored his oath to faithfully enforce the laws that Congress has enacted whenever he sees fit to do so, not just in the recent 'executive amnesty' but by directing those under his direct control not to enforce laws nor to defend certain laws in court when they came under challenge.

Why should he not expect the Congress to respond in kind, and to wield its 'pen and phone' authority with as little regard for him as he has shown for them?

If he wants a new atmosphere of comity and cooperation with the Congress, the ball is very much in his court.

Today's Quiz: Are You A Socialist?

It's the Socialist Worker's quiz, so they'd like to convince you that the answer is "yes." But they had to admit that, for me, the answer is "no."

There's a weird throwaway question about the US military being a force for good in the world, which of course it is -- but that's not really a socialism issue, is it? I wondered if it might be a trick question, since some people sometimes argue that the military is the most socialist part of the United States. (It's not a very good argument.)

Partly the problem is that the quiz runs things together that don't belong together. Do I think that schools, clean water, and hospitals should never be run for profit? Well, no; but I also think that there's a huge difference between "schools," "hospitals," and "clean water." To me, that's not a category of things that should be run for the common good instead of private interest; it's an ascending scale. I don't think I'd ever be annoyed at someone for starting a private school, even if they charged a fortune for attendance. We've just seen an argument from Tex that it can make really good sense to run a private hospital business alongside a public one. Even if we agree that we should provide some sort of public access to health care, that doesn't imply that every hospital should be nonprofit.

There are several things about water that make it a stronger case for a public approach. In a city, the infrastructure concerns are going to mean that you'll almost certainly get a monopoly, and monopolies are problematic. We often address them with public regulation. Too, even in rural areas where people have wells, the nature of water means that the water table under your house is the same one your neighbor is pulling from. Let's say that you had a neighbor who came in, dug a well, and began bottling and selling the water to such a degree that everyone began having trouble getting water. Your wells might even go dry, but he can dig a deeper one with the profits from the water he sold after sucking it out of the same water table you were using. When dealing with these kinds of issues, at least some democratic controls on the market activity often make good sense.

Embrace Economic "Degrowth"

Today's novel economic concept to come across my desk: "degrowth."

If you watch the video at the second link, you'll learn that "there's no set script" for degrowth, but there are a lot of really bad ideas he's prepared to spitball. The problem is that none of them work with the laws of economics as I understand them. The first link wants to turn things like Airbnb into a sharing service that provides "the benefits of traditional employment." Nobody's stopping you from setting up such a service now. It just won't go anywhere, because it will provide the same service to the customer as Airbnb but at a higher price. Why shouldn't they prefer to contract the service for less?

Maybe you can make them feel guilty about it, but I doubt it.

Price transparency in medicine

Guess what happens when a single-payer system is unsatisfactory enough to allow a vibrant cash-only market to spring up next to it.

Crowdsourcing

From Cafe Hayek:

Under such rules (along, of course, with basic laws of property, contract, and tort) – and in a culture that honors bourgeois virtues and applauds innovators – there will be lots of entrepreneurs striving to earn profit (and respect) by creating new goods and services. These entrepreneurs will compete with each other, as well as with producers of older, established goods and services. The goods and services that yield profits today for their producers will be the ones that consumers, spending their own money and only their own money, today choose above all others. No finer, more objective, or more accurate test is available for determining how scarce resources should be used.

Tomorrow, of course, entrepreneurs will introduce newer products and newer production processes. Some of these, tested by market competition, will succeed. Others will fail. Some older goods and services, once profitable to produce, will become unprofitable to produce. Resources, including human labor, will shift from these older to the newer lines of production.

And so it goes in a free, prosperous, and growing market economy, day-in and day-out; year-in, year-out; decade-in, decade-out. Such an economy is controlled or guided by no one, yet it serves everyone remarkable well – if, though, with the requirement that everyone abide by the rules of the game. These rules are those listed above. These rules imply that no one has a right to any one else’s property – a rule that, in turn, implies that no producer has a right either to prevent other producers (even those in foreign countries) from competing for the patronage of her customers, or to obstruct her customers from shifting their expenditures away from her product offerings.

No one guarantees that the choices won't be intensely annoying, of course. I often observe that rich people would spend their money much better if they consulted me about their choices. But on the whole, the choices made by free crowds vastly outperform those mandated by wise leaders. Why this should be so is a mystery to me, but I can't dispute it, and therefore discount all economic theories that depend on confidence in the unfettered choice of the single person who is advocating them.

Racist Republicans

The NYT cropped former President George W. Bush and Laura Bush out of a picture of the Selma march.  All that remains now is to photoshop Hillary Clinton in.

ISIS fraying?

If any of this is true, it seems a hopeful sign.  The article has two helpful maps.  One shows areas controlled by ISIS and others by some combination of "government and other rebels," which is an interesting way of having to put it.  The other shows the origins of foreign supporters traveling to ISIS.  Much of the article concerns tensions between locals and these new arrivals, some of whom don't particularly want to fight and all of whom, no matter how dreary a situation they left in their home countries, are accustomed to a higher standard of living than the locals.  Many apparently are drawn by the idea of a culture in which rabid Islam is in the ascendancy, but had little notion what that might look like close up, especially if their clique isn't in charge.

I have slowly been reading "In the Shadow of the Sword," about the roots of Islam.  I was skeptical of the author's thesis, that Islam developed in Syria, in a hotbed of conflict among Jewish and Christian sects over monotheism, and only later became associated with Mecca and Medina.  But he makes a good case.

If ISIS did collapse, of course, it's not as though sane people would take over; Iran, more likely.  Yesterday almost 50 Republican senators signed a letter helpfully explaining to Iran how treaties work in this country.  Which Republican senators refused to sign? Lamar Alexander, Susan Collins, Bob Corker, Dan Coats, Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski, and Rob Portman.

Defense

From a Gutenberg project about natural disasters, in the flood section, a story about a man-made flood:

Leyden [the Netherlands] was besieged [by Spanish forces in 1574]. The town was well fortified. The Spaniards endeavored to starve the city into surrender. They swarmed about the outworks and taunted the famished people as "beggars." The contest grew daily more hopeless for the besieged. Hundreds were dead of starvation. But the survivors hurled defiance at the Spaniards. They were digging up every green thing, devouring roots of grass, old leather, offal, anything that could in the least aid to sustain life. But "so long as a dog barked in the city, the Spaniards might know they held out." A few faint-hearted ones pleaded with the burgomaster to yield. But the brave Van der Werff, gaunt, pale, wearied with care and watching, told them they could only surrender when they had eaten him; so long as he lived, the city should not yield.

It was a terrible time. Scores crept into out-of-the-way places to die, that their misery might not be seen by their friends. The Dutch without wished to help their friends within--but the lines of the enemy were too strong. As the last resort, the "Silent Man" ordered the dykes cut. It was done. The country folk abandoned their homes. A fleet of two hundred vessels sailed in over the land fifteen miles. They reached the Landscheiding, a great dyke five miles from the city. Three quarters of a mile nearer the town was a second dyke, the Greenway; within that was the Kirkway.

The rising water frightened the Spaniards. But at ten inches, it stopped. The Spaniards renewed their taunts. Again it rose two feet; the vessels drew nearer: then they lay aground in sight of the famished citizens. Then arose a strong southwest wind--and after days of weary waiting, the fleet was close on the last line of fortifications. It was the first of October. In the morning the "beggars" of the sea would make a desperate attack upon the Spanish hordes.

In the night there came a terrible crash. The sea had undermined the wall. The citizens were filled with panic, fearing an immediate irruption of the enemy. They stood under arms through the weary night.

The morning came. Not a Spaniard was in sight. Fearing a sortie of the hunger-maddened people, they had fled in the darkness. The city was saved by the drowning of the land.

A story is told of Frederick the Great, illustrative of the same indomitable spirit. After establishing the supremacy of Prussia, he was suspected of designs upon the independence of the Netherlands. The Dutch envoy at his court, newly appointed, Frederick endeavored to overawe by a display of his power. A great military review was held; and Frederick, who took a peculiar delight in tall men, caused troop after troop of his gigantic grenadiers to file before the weazened little Dutchman, and asked his opinion. Of each one the envoy said: "Very good, but not tall enough." Frederick, much nettled at this oft repeated criticism, asked the ambassador what he meant by it. "I mean," he retorted, "that we can flood our country twelve feet deep!" Frederick left the Dutch in peace.

Entropy

The Belmont Club:

A striking aspect of this phenomenon of capture is its anonymity, at least as far as most commentary is concerned. PJMedia ran a series called Every Single One documenting the radical takeover of the Department of Justice, and describing the individual attorneys and their resumes, close connections between EPA and environmental groups have been documented, the names and faces of the IRS people have been publicized, and one can dig some names out of government notices and letters. But this information is largely ignored, and as far as the general media is concerned decisions are made by offices or bureaus, not by people....

Deference to agency interpretation of law becomes an invitation to the staff to play games with the language, finding and exploiting ambiguities where none should exist. Judicial reliance on agency expertise triggers skewed analyses; staff knows how things are supposed to come out, and knows that no judge will contradict it technical conclusions. To the informed, EPA science and risk assessments have been jokes for a generation.

“Every once in a while, the Supreme Court will rebel against fictions,” DeLong writes, but most of the time we just accept the diktat of the downloaded code — and accept the fictions. Administrative law is just one mechanism. The media, academy, the entertainment industry — everybody — is selling you their narrow agenda. Suppose the president says there are only “lone wolves”. Then by gum, there are only lone wolves. Shouldn’t we in rational ignorance trust the president of the United States?

People who wonder how marriage went from an institution involving men and women to almost any combination conceivable in the blink of an eye, wonder at record winters in an age of ”Global Warming”, who ask themselves why their “Affordable Care” is so expensive and why the “free and open internet” has 300 pages of secret regulations; who puzzle over the identity of the masked attackers who attack centers of population every day are basically watching the effects of industrial scale entropy. They are watching knowledge — indeed common sense — being erased or obfuscated; destroyed at a rate that would defy the understanding of few guys wielding hammers.

A Confluence of Posts About Women

A number of friends from outside the United States sent me women-oriented stuff this morning. I was surprised by the alignment until I came to understand that today is apparently "International Women's Day." Americans don't do "international" things, no more this than the metric system: in America the whole month of March is "Women's History Month," though we tend to forget that if we don't belong to institutions that remind us (as we do "Black History Month," which falls in February).

Nevertheless, there were some good pieces! Here are the three best.

A brief piece on Phillipa of Hainault (see also the sidebar, as she has a permanent reference here at the Hall).

On Marozia, the woman who was the power behind three Popes.

A paper on the ways in which women in the Medieval Islamic world wielded power and influence.

By the way, Ranger Up has a new Joan of Arc shirt that some of you might like for a brave woman in your life.

Happy International Women's Day! I think I'll go have lunch with my mother -- she lives on the other side of the state, but my sister is visiting from Wyoming, so it's a good day to catch them both.

UPDATE: Here's a good one: Betty McIntosh, one of the few women to work in the OSS during WWII, a pioneer in psychological warfare, turns 100 years old.

On Rare Expressions

A very nice piece on the use of unusual points of reference, ending in a great example from a piece on Wimbledon.

I do remember what Kretchmer eventually said. He said, “Maybe one reader in ten thousand would get that.”

I said, “Look: you have bought thirteen thousand words about Wimbledon with no other complaint. I beg you to keep it as it is for that one reader.”

He said, “Sold!"

Sprezzatura is a term of art in what are sometimes called "Historical European Martial Arts," or sometimes "Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe." That's because -- as the article points out -- it turns up in Castiglione’s “The Courtier" from 1528.

It's a wider ethic, though. The guy who first taught me to ride motorcycles put it this way: "Do you want to know what the Holy Grail is for motorcycle riding?" he asked. "It's to be smooth. Everything, smooth."

I Doubt The Validity Of This Premise

"This film points to ways in which we can say what's on our minds without being accused of being bigots," says Trevor Phillips, former chief of equality measures in the UK, of his new documentary "Things We Won't Say About Race That Are True."

Valley Forge & Palace Coups

Sarah Hoyt wants to urge Republicans to stick it out, in spite of the problems resulting from a bad elite that seems to be committed to service to corporate donors against the good of the nation.

This week has been a tough one. And the reason it’s been a tough one is not just the Republicans funding the Obama amnesty nor the “net neutrality” boondoggle where apparently even passing it won’t tell us what’s in it...

Our current administration has brought us far closer to nuclear war than we’ve been since the Soviet Union collapsed in on its corrupt self. And worse, it will be a multiparty war that will leave at best 1/3 of the world in ruins. And what they’re doing to the new generation, between indoctrination, unemployment and setting the sexes against each other doesn’t bear thinking too deeply about, lest the black pit yawns beneath our feet.

One way or another, we already have two more years of this. And that’s enough to make that snow-laden wind of despair howl around our flimsy tents.

If the world were just the US. If we didn’t have to factor on anything from outside, I’d still say “yeah, let it burn is an option.”

But is it?

Like it or not, the Pax Americana is AMERICANA. If we collapse, the world falls in on itself, and more importantly, we get truly overrun. Because we’re still relatively stable. The 7 million of Obama’s imperial amnesty won’t be but a drop in the bucket.

On the Left, though, the mood is not any better. They are also concerned that corporate mastery of their political class is so complete that there may simply be no hope at the national level -- perhaps in a few cities, a few states:

The devolution of the political system through the infusion of corporate money, the rewriting of laws and regulations to remove checks on corporate power, the seizure of the press, especially the electronic press, by a handful of corporations to silence dissent, and the rise of the wholesale security and surveillance state have led to “the death of the party system” and the emergence of what Ali called “an extreme center.”...

“This extreme center, it does not matter which party it is, effectively acts in collusion with the giant corporations, sorts out their interests and makes wars all over the world,” Ali said. “This extreme center extends throughout the Western world. This is why more and more young people are washing their hands of the democratic system as it exists....”

Ali said he was “shocked and angry about all the hopes that were invested in Obama by the left.” He lambasted what he called the American “obsession with identity.” Barack Obama, he said, “is an imperial president and behaves like one, regardless of the color of his skin.” Ali despaired of the gender politics that are fueling a possible run for the White House by Hillary Clinton, who would be the first woman president.

“My reply is, ‘So bloody what?’ ” he said. “If she is going to bomb countries and put drones over whole continents, what difference does her gender make if her politics are the same? That is the key. The political has been devalued and debased under neoliberalism. People retreat into religion or identity. It’s disastrous. I wonder if it is even possible to create something on a national scale in the United States.”

I'm attentive enough to recognize that there's a common theme here, outside of the 'center' (extreme or otherwise). There's a great deal of extra-national power that's come to dominate the governments of all major nations, our own included. Both the hard right and the hard left almost despair at its wealth and power.

Perhaps the real enemy isn't the left at all.

UPDATE: More on the mutiny.

Two History Quizzes

The first one prompts you to put historical events in order. I scored 98% as I got Catherine the Great wrong. I knew dates for the others, but I was just trying to guess based on her clothing where she fit into it.

The second one just asks you which of two things is older. The name of the quiz gives away the game, so it's really not hard at all. Kind of fun, though.

In Deference to Tex's Point

A conversation between a concealed carry instructor and a veteran police officer about how to handle a traffic stop.



He raises a good point about the rookie officer who is probably bracketing you, and who has been tasked with killing you if you prove dangerous. Frequently when a deer hunter accidentally kills another hunter in the forest, it's because he's there to shoot a deer, he's expecting a deer, he's thinking about a deer, and when there's sudden movement the first thing his brain says is: "DEER!"

You have to assume the same thing about the nervous rookie sweating it out back there. His brain is in a totally different place, and he may well kill you on the occasion of any stimulus that falls in on the internal monologue screaming through his head.

H/t: SOF.

Sensitivity Abounds

The US military's own court system has ordered the Army to be sensitive when it refers to an individual who admitted betraying his oaths towards the Army and the nation it defends.

The Army now must refer to incarcerated soldier Chelsea Manning as "she," or in gender-neutral terms, a military appeals court says.

The 27-year old Manning, a former intelligence analyst, is undergoing gender reassignment from male to female while serving a 35-year sentence in the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for leaking classified material to the website WikiLeaks. Previously known as Bradley Manning, the young private first class legally changed her name last April to Chelsea.

Apparently they must also issue "female undergarments" for "her" use in the male prison unit at Leavenworth. Special snowflakes must be handled with extreme care.

Mommies and states

Anna Mussmann on our culture's discomfort with the clash between moral relativism and the demands of motherhood:

To varying degrees, our ancestors tended to believe that correct beliefs and behavior should be enforced for the good of the group. Religious heresy should be curbed, political unrest removed, and destabilizing immorality punished. Nowadays, we value diversity and individual expression more than the strength and security of a monolithic culture. As long as no one is obviously hurting others with their beliefs, choices, or actions, we argue for live-and-let live morality in most spheres. It is not our job, we think, to judge the guy who dumped his wife, critique the “open marriage” of the couple down the street, or even to tell our transcendental brother-in-law that his potted plants don’t hear when he talks to them. We are not our brothers’ keepers.

However, as new parents quickly discover, children who do not experience parental judgment become intolerable, unhappy people. Mothers are forced to become authorities for the sake of their families. They must frequently overcome the will of a child (sometimes by force) and say things like, “No, you may not run into the street, no matter how devastatingly disappointing this is,” “No, you are not allowed to use the toothbrushes and toothpaste to create art on the walls,” “No, you may not attend that sleepover at your friend’s house while his parents are out-of-town.”

One way to resolve this conflict is to relieve mothers other their duties to keep their children perfectly safe 24 hours a day and to teach them right from wrong. The government is standing by to take over these obligations, and it is not troubled by any discomfort when it acts judgmental or punishes heresy.

No Privileges for Flags

UC Irvine votes to de-privilege the American flag, putting it on a par with flags in general, all of which are banned.

You might wonder how it helps freedom of expression to suppress the... ah, freedom... to express... um, political sentiments via flag displays.

But take heart! Now the flag of the nation that pays for the existence of this university shall enjoy no privilege over, say, Nazi or Soviet flags. We've become broad minded indeed out there in California. The nation that supports the greatest university system on earth is now on par with this:



No differences there worth... expressing.