Producer regulation does not imply consumer restriction

The FDA is moving towards regulating salt. My first thought when I saw that was "wtf?" Then I started actually thinking and decided to see what they meant. Were they looking into salt types? Purity? Sources? Turns out I was entirely at the wrong end. The regulation would be on salt levels in manufactured foods.

As I finished the article I looked over the comments. In summary they expressed outrage at Obama telling them what to eat.

Let's start at the place where you would start if you were being logical. Or complete illogical. The Soviet Union and the Communist Party's regulation of industry. In this extreme example, regulation of the producers is a direct restriction of consumer choice. If there is one car design, one apartment layout, there is no choice beyond buy or not buy.

At the opposite extreme, no regulation at all, there is theoretically unlimited choice brought on by the wonderful productive nature of the free market. Until you introduce patents, copywrite laws, and all the other restrictions which are necessary to prevent intellectual property being ripped off, and all of which restrict consumer choice to some degree.

It appears inevitable that regulation would restrict choice. But that's at overly-general extremes.

Let's look at the specific example: salt. I go to buy my soup and that damn socialist has reduced the salt in it. What an outrage! I take it back home, heat it up, and grab my salt shaker. At this point Obama personally takes away my salt shaker and dumps it in the trash. Actually that second part doesn't happen. I have just as much control over what I eat as I did before. In fact, I potentially have more. If the soup starts with less salt, I have the choice of having less salt, or more salt, or the same salt as right now.

Just to review the facts: Obama has not killed my grandma and he has not stolen my salt shaker.

Day of Silence and Mass Murder

Not being in school I have no reminders of when Day of Silence is. It's today. People plan ahead of time to not speak for the day in order to spread awareness and protest or something like that. At college one group also held one to protest abortion. I didn't bother to point out that fetuses have no voices because they literally can't talk and have less mental capacity than a brain-damaged hamster; they knew they were putting on a good performance.

My Google news brought up this article. Students protest hate speech with ‘Day of Silence'
It ends with this:

In the past year, hate speech has also been highlighted in Massachusetts bullying cases which ultimately led to student suicides. Though he did not identify as gay, 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, a sixth-grader at New Leadership Charter School in Springfield was repeatedly taunted with anti-gay slurs and endured other forms of bullying. He hung himself at his home with an extension cord last April.

That got me thinking. Why commit suicide? That seems rather dumb. It's a surrender, a submission to those who are wronging them. If you're going to kill someone, kill someone more likely to be the problem: the other people. I'm not advocating killing every 6th grader who ever called someone gay, since then there would be no 7th grade the next year, and so on until humanity is gone. I am suggesting though, that if this were say, 10 years later and the people in question are in their 20s rather than 12; that by then people should have outgrown their "everyone is gay" phase. If you're going to commit suicide, don't, take down the people who are the problem instead.

Same as in those shitty oppressive culture where women are abused and neglected and sometimes kill themselves to get away, or do nothing and eventually are killed for some petty offense like "exposed eyelid in public." The world would be a better place if those women either refused to die and tried to escape or accepted death and made it useful, taking a queue from the suicide bombers, except fighting for something worthwhile. Or at least die for a useful crime like "cut off everyone's balls and eliminated the next generation."

Of course the ideal would be no suicide, no murder, and no defocused hatred:homophobia, racism, sexism, etc.

Dear President Ahmadinejad,

Do you need a hug? You seem angry. It's not that we hate you. I don't hate you, at least. But you've been acting crazy lately. By lately I mean since we first heard of you. We're not going to nuke you. We just say stuff like that because certain morons in our country think we should. But they're not in power and sensible people will do what they can to keep them out.

So here's a hug.
*hug*

Signed,
An American

P.S. Israel is not using mind-control devices to spread belief in the Holocaust. You're mixing up "Israeli mind-control devices" with "Hitler killing millions of Jews and Eastern Europeans". It's the second one that makes us think there was a Holocaust. Have a nice day.

The gold standard is pointless

The value of gold comes from two sources: commercial/industrial use and perception. The former would give it much less value than it has. The latter is well, perception.

Gold is a useful material commodity. It isn't a stable currency or a reserve. It's just a rare metal which we hype up and fool ourselves into believing it has innate value comparable to the market price.

Moving to a gold standard would fix absolutely nothing. Anyone who advocates a gold standard or investment in gold is either speculating on a bubble or deluding themselves. Gold isn't special or magical. It's a rare metal that makes shiny stuff. That's all.

Patriot or terrorist?

Is he a crazy terrorist who demonstrates the failure of the liberal Obama security policy?

Or is he a brave, if desperate patriot fighting back against Obama's socialist taxes?

The spin could go so many ways. But my prediction: right now he'll be called a man driven to insanity by big government. 6 months from now this will be listed as a security failure.

Who says you can't attack the President and change your stories too?

The efficiency of the market and Nazis

Godwin makes everything better.

It is often claimed the the free market produces the most efficient distribution of resources. There are many ways to criticize this, but I will choose two: Nazis and happiness.

Efficiency as an end in itself
There is something seductive about efficiency. It draws you in. It's almost like the thrill of an action movie, explosions and guns and no point at all. There's where the problem comes in: What is the point of efficiency? By itself it is nothing; a tool at most. Tools are useless without something to work on and are terrible is used for the wrong purpose.

Enter the Nazis. They were efficient in many tasks. Such as killing millions of people. Despite the hyping up of health care, Obama's death panels would have a hard time killing millions of people in less than a decade. No matter how many Hitler mustaches and swastikas you paint on him, he is not as efficient as the Nazis.

The Holocaust was efficient, but clearly, efficiency itself is not a noble cause. In contrast modern factories are very efficient and that let's us all (exclude those who are excluded) have a higher standard of living. That is good. But again, efficiency in itself is not good. Instead what matters is the purpose of the efficiency. What goal does the market have? That goal is the true measure of it, not its efficiency.

Efficient happiness
The market produces optimal distribution of goods by allowing us to maximize our happiness through rational exchanges of goods and products. Right? Well that depends on what you're measuring.

If we are looking for the total happiness in the world, then huge gains would be made if you were half as wealthy and that was divided up among the poor. This isn't due to some socialist enlightenment or freedom from materialism. It's simple diminishing returns. Having a car, house, refrigerator, and computer will yield a huge gain in happiness compared to not having those. Spend that amount again fora bigger house, better food in the fridge, and faster computer and you won't have double the happiness. In fact, you're likely to have less, due to additional stress from work and financial strains to afford the luxuries. In terms of arbitrary numbers, it's a case of 100+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5 being less than 90+10+10+10+10+10+10.

If we are looking for individual happiness, well then the free market works very well if you're on the 100 side of the addition, less so on the 5 side.

You are bad and should feel bad
Individual happiness and total happiness are different measures and are unlikely to be reconciled, unless one thing changes: tie individual happiness to total happiness. In other words, give rich people a huge guilt trip.

That's not likely to happen. If someone doesn't feel guilty about corporate policies that cause pandas to be killed by orphan child soldiers, what could possibly cause them to feel guilty?

Creationism will lead to witchcraft

Creationism is based largely on an inability or refusal to objectively evaluate evidence.
Creationism is based on active misinterpretation of a book of parables based on the unchallenged assertion that it is absolute literal truth.

Put these together and what do we arrive at? Active suppression of thought and objectivity. Suppression of experimentation, of controls, of science and knowledge. What will take its place?

Some would like it to be Christianity. That is the plan of the Creationists. And in all likelihood, it will happen. Partially.

But ignorance and stupidity are not innately drawn to any particular system of beliefs, or any system at all. They drift and fumble in the dark, grasping at whatever they stumble across.

Much of what the ignorant find will not be Christianity, but older religions, or even older still, spirit-worship, voodoo (which actually is somewhat new, but the ideas of it are old), and all manner of heretical beliefs and practices. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that should creationism drive science out of teaching, we will see a rise in witchcraft.

Prepare for unintended consequences.