(totally unedited sketched out recent thoughts…)

I’ve been introspecting what’s gotten me charged up about the need to not just sit back while the rights of those behind the Park 51 mosque plan are threatened.

It’s not because I have any special innate sympathy for any religious project, much less a Muslim one.

It’s not because I feel antagonistic to those who feel insulted and provoked by the presence of such a project near the former towers site.  On the contrary, whatever other motives the planners have, even I , a city-loathing suburb-dweller, feel the proposal as all but a slap in the face.

But two factors make we want to protect the rights of these people.

The first is well known and well understood.  It’s the same reason the ACLU defends neo-Nazis and the Klan (I’m not equating the Park 51 folks with either, just keep reading).  If rights were just for popular groups that everyone loved all the time, they wouldn’t need protecting at all.  Society must be kept safe for dissent and offense.

But there’s a second reason.  I believe all levels of government are trampling people’s rights all the time, so why would I be motivated to engage in a project to defend the rights of one group (with whom I share very few sympathies) against the potential thuggish behavior of another group of civilians?  Why not pick some government action to protest instead?

The answer is I trust in the bedrock civility of my fellow citizens in a way I don’t trust the government.  I trust in their capacity for shame and for reconciliation, their capacity to pull back from dehumanizing rhetoric and see their enemies as fellow humans.

But part of why I believe this is the simple fact that it’s much harder to ignore the reality of an action you have to tangibly confront the results of, as opposed to one you can order from afar.  Is it harder to kill a child with your bare hands, or to sign an order to bomb a village?

Vegetarians know this, and confront carnivores like me with the prospect of having to slaughter our own meat.

War protestors know this, and work to make sure images of destruction get broadcast for all to see and seared in our minds.

So why is it so hard to make people see how so many government actions trample rights?  Another pair of reasons:

First is the size of the number in the denominator.  The supporters of a given action are likely to be many, and as such, feel that their personal level of responsibility in any given action amounts to no more than a rounding error.  But that is not impossible to overcome.  Again referencing war protests, people can still be led to feel the importance of changing the direction of their support, even if it individually amounts to little.  People still want to be on the side of the right.

But the consequences of the action must be palpable to be motivating.  Thus the second reason why government action can be so hard to counter: its proximate effects are largely invisible.  And this is because the victims of the action are basically cowed into submission.

The victims have MADE themselves invisible.  Each thinks they have too much to lose, each expects no mercy (and by “mercy” here I mean a simple acknowledgment of the horrible injustice they face).  They know the force that can be brought to bear against them is overwhelming.  And they make themselves so easy to push around.

Again, a pair of reasons:

Many of us are disarmed, making resistance beyond token unlikely.

But far more important, is how much of our property (in the form of currency) is seizable with little more than a keystroke.  Liens and garnishments.  If the state needs to punish us, they merely need to reach out and take the sizable percentage of our livelihood that we’ve placed within their arms reach and tied with a bow and a note saying “Feel free to take this if you think we’ve stepped out of line, Love, Your Humble Subjects”.

No one sees the costs of this facilitated theft.  Hell, it’s just some numbers changing in a database to them.  Sterile, and cold.

What I want to do is to find how to make the victims more visible, less self-sacrificial.  That way, the victimizers, not evil people in their own right but deadly as a mass, can evaluate their actions in the full context of their consequences and choose appropriately.

Because when I think about it these two scenarios…

A) A relative of a Christian 9/11/01 victim relinquishes her hatred of Muslims and comes to embrace their right to live and worship alongside her, even near the site of an infamous crime committed in the name of Islam.

B) The IRS says “Okay, we’ll give you a pass” to someone who strenuously objects to money being spent on abstinence initiatives and purposely turns in ten cents (their computed individual share of such an initiative) less than their computed tax liability.

…the fact that the first seems much more likely, despite the stakes involved, really gives me pause.  In B, I’d say the highly probable outcome is that the person’s life would be destroyed if they attempted to keep those ten cents out of the hands of the tax man.

I have more faith in the potential humanity even of mobs than I do of the soulless machinery of gov’t.  But how to make ourselves in the role of the machine cogs aware of every life we grind up or carve off a slice of?

Liberals in particular are rightly aware of the US’s wanton projection of force internationally to compel others in distant lands to do things we want.  Why are they so sanguine about internal projections of force?  Does the faulty logic of “We gave you a chance to do this on your own, but you chose wrong, so now you’ve left us no choice but to make you.” somehow seem more compelling if you’ve formalized it in a vote?

Gotta work on this.

It’s not too complicated.  Michelle Obama is rich, as in really, really rich.  Richer than most of us will ever be.  I’d like to be that rich, and one of the nice things about being that rich would be to take beautiful vacations to exotic locations with the people I love. And if, heaven forbid, my wife should ever become president, that would not change my desire to have such vacations in the slightest.

There’s the extra wrinkle of the Secret Service requirements for such travel, but it’s not my requirement, and I don’t see how such a requirement should somehow bind my choices to the lowest common denominator.  What would be acceptable, to live under virtual house arrest for four to eight years?

If you have genuine political disagreement with someone, don’t try to score cheap points by focussing on hypocrisy.  You might someday find yourself facing an opponent who’s true to his or her beliefs.  If you’ve acted as though hypocrisy were the highest of sins, where will you be then?  Focus on the essentials.

In the wake of today’s ruling by a federal district court to let a challenge by the state of Virginia to the health care reform act proceed, the White House has released a response. While my sympathies regarding the constitutional questions involved lay pretty squarely with Virginia in this case, I’ll defer any discussion of such matters to people who traffic in constitutional law.

I only wish here to demonstrate the sloppy collectivist thinking revealed in the response’s language, in adjacent paragraphs:

This law came into being precisely because of the interconnectedness of our health care costs.   People who make an economic decision to forego health insurance do not opt out of the health care market, but instead shift their costs to others when they become ill or are involved in an accident and cannot pay.

We do not leave people to die at the emergency room door – whether they have insurance or not.

Note the logic used to attempt to explain why the voluntarily uninsured deserve to be forced into paying: “they” are shifting their costs to others.  But how?  Because “we” refuse to not take care of them.  But then, isn’t it clear that “we” are shifting the costs, not “they”?  Did “they” demand treatment at gunpoint?  No.  ”We” provided treatment and demanded payment for it at gunpoint.  ”We” are bullies, who, because “we” are squeamish about letting people bear the consequences of “their” own choices, will trample over “their” rights to make those choices for them.

I could say I couldn’t bear the thought of someone going through life without listening to Beethoven.  Should I have carte blanche to garnish people’s wages for the purposes of providing them (and their less fortunate fellow citizens) with recordings, and insist upon penalty of law that they listen to them?  Isn’t their choice to not listen something I should be reasonably expected to deal with on my own?

"You keep outta this, he doesn’t have to shoot you now."

The fact that an individual mandate to purchase health insurance — health insurance — is even up for a vote tonight means that the defenders of liberty have lost this battle.  Why we’ve lost is no mystery.  Those of us who should have known better have not only failed to respond to these ruffians the way ruffians should be responded to back when we had a chance of winning, but we have also continued to produce for them.

Knowing how we lost does not necessarily make it blindingly obvious how we can realistically win again.  I don’t want martyrs.  And if martyrs are required, I want as few as possible, or better yet, a way for the beneficiaries to absorb a small, manageable amount of martyrdom.  But I don’t know how yet.  I’ve been thinking about it for over a year now, and while I’ve had some important insights, I still don’t know the best way.  Everyone keep working on it.

This just caught my attention, given my post from a month and a half ago:

Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the “Foundation” series—”It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, ‘See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism’.”

I guess we’re all looking to save the world, all trying to plan our own First Foundation. Of course, Paul Krugman has some very different ideas about how to go about it (that, and a Nobel Prize [grumble, grumble, all just a big popularity contest, grumble, grumble...]). At least they’re not as bad as Shoka Asahara’s.

I’m thinking of making this a weekly feature, in honor of having grown up in Bergen County, NJ where all retail stores were closed on Sundays: I’ll just throw out a few questions and let the readers respond it they feel like it. (Considering I only post a few times a week anyway, the logic of this stunt is even more questionable then it would be under regular blogging conditions.)

1) Not surprisingly, some of the interest in this site and the concept of going John Galt is an expression of resistance to Democratic control of the executive and legislative branches of the US federal government. Understandable I suppose, but it was the October bailouts that spurred me to get this project underway, with a Republican in the White House, and supported by the Republican presidential candidate. So I’m wondering if people think we’d be better off, short-term or long-term, had McCain been elected? (I’ll give my answers later; it’s Blue Law Sunday today!)

2) The unconcealed joy some folks experience at informing us of the futility of our efforts shows a side of human nature I wish I could un-see.  But I think those people are overrepresented in political commentary.  What’s your gut estimate of the ratio of people who are actively rooting for us to fail vs. people who simply don’t think we can succeed?

I note with pleasure that the notion of “going John Galt” is being commented on by two of my absolute favorite bloggers, Megan McArdle and Will Wilkinson. While I disagree with each on some of their ethical and political positions, their deep intelligence and humor is evident in their thoughtful analyses of human psychology and economics.

While Megan posts on the worthwhile point that Ayn Rand partly knew what she was talking about because she had witnessed society collapse during her childhood, Will takes a look at the motives for “going galt” and whether or not they fit the likely outcomes. He endorses the notion as an expressive act, to a point, but cautions that we are certainly almost unanimously Eddie Willerss, not Galts.

True enough.  But I’d add a little more to the exploration of the concept. For starters, I think the personal dimension of “going Galt” is as important to most people who talk of scaling back as the, let’s call it, punitive dimension.  Most of us know that the larger society would hardy notice the absence of one of us, but that one person might still judge their personal strike to be a net benefit; I might rightly derive relative happiness from no longer contributing to society’s decline even if the decline continues unabated and unaffected by my lack of contribution.  

More significant to an analysis of the social consequences is the relationship between labor supply and tax rates. Leaving aside any consideration of whether or not a large impact could be achieved by a few key individuals striking, there remains the noticeable aggregate response of millions of ordinary people just feeling like that next hour of overtime (or that promotion, or that new job) is worth the effort. And of course the size of that response is not only a function of the tax rate alone, but culture and individual psychology. What I’m seeking to accomplish through being vocal and public and proud is to increase the size of the response, to encourage others to take more pride in the value they create, and to be less sanguine about the next dollar that gets expropriated.

Will echoes a point I’ve heard from other skeptics and detractors in his post:

But insofar as this is all about taxes on the wealthy (as the link to Malkin suggests) it’s a bit hard to see tax rates somewhat exceeding the Clinton era’s as a move over some inflection point from the tolerable to the completely outrageous.

He’s quite correct to say that the rates themselves do not justify the rhetoric we’re observing (and producing ) compared to our prior silence (speaking for myself). But the truth is that to my current mindset, the prior rates were also intolerable. For me personally, the October bailouts were the final straw, the moment I realized that things were not going to get better without a more extreme response. Some people had already realized it, and it appears that a few more realized it after the November elections, and a whole bunch more after the current stimulus package passed.  

The culture is changing; what’s happening here is both a symptom of the change, and an agent of it. None of us may be Atlas, but we might just be Archimedes, shifting the world toward the good with a fulcrum of individualism and a moment arm of pride.

Courtesy of my old employer: UPDATE 1-US governors seek $1 trillion federal assistance

And, keeping in mind my very recent “Fuck The South” revisited post, check out which governors:

PHILADELPHIA, Jan 2 (Reuters) – Governors of five U.S. states urged the federal government to provide $1 trillion in aid to the country’s 50 states to help pay for education, welfare and infrastructure as states struggle with steep budget deficits amid a deepening recession.

The governors of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin — all Democrats — said the initiative for the two-year aid package was backed by other governors and follows a meeting in December where governors called on President-elect Barack Obama to help them maintain services in the face of slumping revenues.

So let’s see, we’ve got the state in which I was born and currently live, the other state in which I’ve lived and went to college, and the only other state in which I’ve worked. Great! I’m so proud.  Continuing…

Gov. David Paterson of New York said 43 states now have budget deficits totaling some $100 billion as tax revenues plunge.

“It’s clear that the federal government needs to step in and jump-start the economy,” said Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts.

But given that there are only 50 states plus a handful of territories in all that the federal government can extract revenue from, it’s less clear how Governor Paterson thinks the federal government can pull it off.

Read it and weep. This wrist-slitting-inducing conclusion wraps it up:

[New Jersey Governor} Corzine said the money called for represents about 3 percent to 3.5 percent of the economy, equivalent to the amount that the economy is expected to contract by over the next two quarters.

In light of the $700 billion provided to bail out the financial industry, "It's not shockingly large," he said.

Now I have no intention of regularly resorting to profanity on this blog, but seeing as this guy is my governor, I’m hoping I’ll be excused if I feel the need to say this: Governor Corzine, calling you a worthless piece of shit is an undeserved insult to worthless pieces of shit everywhere. Go fuck yourself. “It’s not shockingly large.” Fuck you.

In the days following the 2004 presidential election, I remember the sophomoric rant “Fuck The South” getting wide circulation. There was nothing notable in it from a same-old same-old class war perspective, with one slight twist:

All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you’re the ones who built on a fucking swamp. “Let the Spanish keep it, it’s a shithole,” we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.

The next dickwad who says, “It’s your money, not the government’s money” is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least… can you guess? Go on, guess. That’s right, motherfucker, they’re red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It’s too easy, asshole, they’re blue states. It’s not your money, assholes, it’s fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes.

The analysis of the flow of federal dollars looks sound to me (see here — I didn’t know I was from the state ranked dead last in federal taxes received vs. collected!). And it’s humorous that the author would take the Republican party’s rhetoric of fiscal responsibility more seriously than the Republicans did themselves. But it’s the notion that “we pay more, so we deserve to rule you!” that strikes such an odd note. I mean, here we are, four years later, and which states are going to DC cap in hand? If Michigan and California (and New York and New Jersey and…) are bailed out, would this rant’s author read that as evidence of northern inferiority? Perhaps the northern industrial states would have done better to support policy where all states’ citizens kept a little more local control of their own destiny. Or is it more emotionally edifying (even if existentially worse) to have someone else to blame?

You could be forgiven for thinking a site called GoingJohnGalt.org helmed by an objectivist would be constantly drawing parallels between world events and the plot points of the novel Atlas Shrugged. Of course, in a highly general sense, I suppose that is what I do, but man, it would be so easy to just make this a Catalogue of the Apocalypse:

• Huge water main break traps commuters on Md. road
• Ice storm leaves a million without power in U.S. northeast
• State Controller says California could be broke in 2 months