Is one obliged to be prepared?

Shit happens. That’s well-established. So here’s the question: is one morally obliged to prepare for shit to happen, in order to mitigate the shit? I’m not thrilled by the notion of moral obligations, but a lot of people are — and I think that generally held morals do indicate an obligation to prepare for the shit to hit the fan.

Let’s take, as an example, last year’s Vancouver windstorms. A lot of people lost power and (municipal) water for up to a week. So here’s the example questions: First, can you survive for a week without power or water, in the middle of winter? Second, should you be expected to be able to do so?

I submit that the answer to the second question is “yes”.

I’ll start with fundamental social bonds. I’ll presume that each of my readers loves, and is loved, by someone, be it friends, family, pets, or s/h/itself. If you die, you hurt your loved ones. (I surely don’t want any of my friends or family to die, and I presume they feel the same way.) It’s not reasonable to expect to be able to live without water for a week. Do the math. If you love people who love you, I think you’re obliged to take at least basic, reasonable steps to make sure that you don’t die a stupid, preventable death. Steps like storing a few days’ worth of food, water, heat, and light.

That, in itself, ought to be enough for the vast majority of people (and by construction, no-one gives a shit about the people it doesn’t cover). There are, however, more reasons to take a few small steps to prepare for disaster.

One of the things that “can’t happen here”, but did nevertheless, last year was widespread panic-buying (mostly of bottled water) and the inevitable violence over who gets the last flat of Evian. Here’s the problem: n people need water, but the stores only have enough water for m < n people. (Violence ensues.) The government tells people “Oh, you can drink tap water, you just need to boil it first” — but the power’s out, so people without (for example) camping stoves can’t actually boil water.

Now, every person who has stockpiled a week’s worth of water can use it to support themselves and their loved ones (see above). But more than that, every person with a stockpile of water is one fewer person fighting for that last flat of bottled water. Once m = n in our (admittedly simplified) scenario above, nobody has to fight over water: everyone who hasn’t prepared ahead of time can get the stuff they need. (Therefore, fewer fistfights, fewer people going home empty-handed.)

The more people prepare for the shit to hit the fan, the fewer people come home empty-handed if and when the shit does hit the fan. On a more personal level, if you, dear reader, stock up on “beans, batteries, and band-aids” ahead of time, you’ll leave enough inventory on store shelves for some other needy person to buy what they need in a panic at the last minute. If you think you have an obligation to help J. Random Unprepared Asshole out there… well, that translates into an immediate obligation to prepare for disaster ahead of time. (If not, you’re probably self-interested — enlightened or otherwise — in which case see “don’t get yourself dead”, above.)

Note that by buying your supplies before the shit hits the fan, you aren’t taking food out of the mouths of those who aren’t as prepared as you are: the inventory you buy will be replaced (supply and demand: it works, bitches). In fact, if enoug people keep buying staples (by which I mean necessary goods, like pork and rice, not little metal brackets), it may convince the inventory mavens to supply more staples, and there will be more staples for people who need them when the SHTF.

So now we have a purely self-interested reason to prepare for the shit to hit the fan (not getting dead/not hurting loved ones by getting dead) and a more broadly social reason to prepare (leaving more last-minute emergency supplies for others). But let’s suppose you’re a Che Guevara tee-shirt-wearing asshole socialist, and you only care about other people in the most abstract possible way. (We’ll suppose that, despite your tee-shirt, you aren’t actually a Stalinist or a Maoist, and you do actually care about other people, even if you do so only in the abstract.) Well, that’s also easy to accommodate.

Basically, the more staples you have, the more staples you can afford to give away. (Charity; remember that? Charity is like taxes, only no-one’s forcing you to pay up at gunpoint.) If you’re a good socialist of not entirely negligible means (and that encompasses every socialist I’ve ever met, including — and especially — myself eight years ago) you have an obligation to your fellow huddled masses to buy some extra beans, batteries, and band-aids, and give to each according to his needs.

Let’s go further. Suppose you don’t have quite enough income to buy extra stuff (and let’s forget the Lexus in your driveway for the moment — that’s, like, totally different!). By stocking up just enough to take care of yourself and your immediate family, you leave more charity for others. This is basically the same argument as “buy your goods before the shit hits the fan” above, only without relying upon that filthy mechanism of (shudder!) free-market capitalism.

With these three principles in mind:

1. Not hurting your loved ones by getting stupidly dead
2. Leaving supply for others by stocking up ahead of time
3. Stocking sufficient goods to give some away in charity

I can’t quite see how anyone who has thought about the issue and consciously refuses to prepare for the shit to hit the fan ahead of time is not an asshole.

All or nothing?

Scott Aaronson blew my mind again:

• Mistake of the Week: Explain Everything (or Don’t Bother Explaining Anything) (Shtetl-Optimized)

The point of view he attacks can best be exposed by (his) example:

How does a toaster work?

By converting electrical energy into heat.

But what is electricity?

The movement of electrons through a wire.

But what are electrons?

Fundamental particles with spin 1/2, negative charge, mass of 10^-27 grams…

But why do particles exist? Why does anything exist?

Well, those are excellent and profound questions, and you see…

Aha! Aha! So science doesn’t have all the answers! Ultimately, then, science is just another form of faith!

Dr. Aaronson goes on to throughly debunk the idea that science needs to have “all the answers” to be epistemologically valid. (It’s good stuff; you should read it.)

Of course, even if science doesn’t have all the answers, the answers (or approximations of answers) it has are pretty useful for things like curing diseases and building bridges.

It’s that time of year again

It snowed in Vancouver yesterday. Right on schedule, tens of thousands of Greater Vancouverites were caught completely by surprise, slipping and sliding around (and into each other) on their worn-out summer tires — just like last year, and the year before, and the year before that. Funny how we always seem to have these unexpected, freakish, catch-everyone-by-surprise storms at exactly the same time of year, every year.

In honour of my grass-eating fellow citizens, I’m compelled to post this:

The Pollyanna’s Mantra

I have always relied upon the complex interdependencies of society
They have never failed me in the past.
They will, therefore, never fail me in the future.
I do not need to prepare for any problems.

• Meat comes to me in shrink-wrapped packages.
• Vegetables have no dirt on them. They are always crisp and shiny.
• Fish is a food product that has no bones.
• Bread is neatly sliced and packaged. It Builds Strong Bodies Twelve Ways.
• Potatoes are long, rectangular cubes that have salt sprinkled on them. I drive my car past a window to obtain them.
• Light is provided to me 24 hours a day by glass bulbs. It is never dark.
• Power for my appliances lives in the wall. I plug into it whenever I want to.
• I have books. They are used for filling the empty space on my shelves.
• Entertainment comes to me in a large box. It has many channels.
• Sometimes I see wars in far away places on the box. Wars do not affect me personally. Wars are entertainment. Wars are not waged near where I live.
• Heat comes to me as I turn up a thermostat.
• Cool air comes to me as I turn down a thermostat.
• Clothing comes to me pre-sewn, in my size.
• When the county fair comes, I go to see the horses, cows, pigs and sheep. I do not know where they live after the county fair goes away.
• Factories are far away places. They make things for me. I buy them.
• I get to other places in marvelous vehicles that come to me in showrooms. I do not know how to build them, or to fix them.
• My children are educated by people smarter than me. I have forgotten all I learned in school.
• Peace is maintained in my neighborhood by good men in blue uniforms. They have guns. I do not. If I press 3 buttons on my phone, they will come and help me.
• Medical assistance can also be obtained instantly, via the same three buttons.
• My shit does not stink. It goes down a porcelain hole. It goes away.
• If anything goes wrong, I will look in the Yellow Pages and call someone to fix it.

(Hat tip: SurvivalBlog)

I wish I could find an attribution for that — brings a tear to my eye, it does.

In Greater Vancouver, we could add:

• Clean water lives in the wall. I turn one knob to get hot water, and one to get cold water. Fashionable water comes from a store, and costs more than gasoline (which also comes from a store).
• Sometimes I see snow in far-away places on the box. It doesn’t come here.

Baaaaaaaaaa!

Edit: On the subject of the unprepared:

• Observations on the Recent Missouri Ice Storm (SurvivalBlog)

Well, not that recent, any more — Feb. 2007.  The point stands.

There’s a War On everything these days

Yeah, apparently there’s a War On Thanksgiving:

• The war on Thanksgiving (Michelle Malkin)

(No, thanks very much, I don’t read Michelle Malkin. I got the link from Ryan McMaken’s post contra Thanksgiving. Still.)

I really hadn’t noticed. Honestly, I’d never noticed Thanksgiving in the first place, at least not the same Thanksgiving that Mme. Malkin apparently celebrates. (Admittedly, I’ve only ever celebrated Canadian thanksgiving, which is similarly bizarre but comes earlier; that’s not really the point.)

I don’t mean to be rude¹, but I can’t say this any more politely: Both sides of this pissy little slapfest can go fuck themselves.

I’m sick to fucking death of half-assed “progressives” who think that all they need to do to be tolerant is complain about tiny little overspecified issues. Being “sensitive” towards any particular group on one day of the year in the context of a so-called “holiday” endorsed by the government of a single country does not make you a nice guy — it makes you an attention whore. It makes you this guy:

So you’ve been to school for a year or two, and you know you’ve seen it all.

In daddy’s car, thinkin’ you’ll go far; Back East your type don’t crawl.

Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz on your five grand stereo;

Braggin’ that you know how the niggers feel cold, and the slums got so much soul.
– Dead Kennedys, Holiday In Cambodia

Most people spell that “h-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e”. Congratulations. If the extent of your social conscience is complaining about isolated issues on specific holidays, you’re doing far more harm than you are good; die in a fire.

As for Malkin and the perpetual-victim Christian types (you know the ones — these are the people who complain that America has become a godless nation because we allow two men to kiss each other in public, and things of that nature): you’re members of the dominant religion in the world’s only remaining superpower. What the blue-veined burning fuck do you have to complain about? Walk your fat privileged egos down to the nearest food bank and grab a double handful of some fucking perspective.

There’s enough passive-aggression in both of these manufactured-victimization² philosophies to devastate a small African nation. (Oh, sorry, was that insensitive? It was? Shut your face, hippie.) Let’s see if I have this right:

“Oh, woe is me! Those nasty (leftists|Christians) are hurting my feelings with their (anti|pro)-(holiday) rhetoric. They’re (trampling on|holding up) hundred-year-old manufactured traditions to push their narrow-minded God-(fearing|hating) ideologies. Won’t someone please think of the children and stop them?“

Yeah, that sounds about right. Passive-aggression disgusts me, particularly when both sides of an argument are trying their damndest to portray themselves as the bigger victim. There’s something fundamentally and pathologically wrong with that. I don’t want to be a victim, I want to be a victor. I want to win. And when I say that, I’m no different from either of these aggregations of shallow fuckwits except for the fact that I’m being honest about what I want.

When these sneaking little shitstreaks whinge about how horribly they’re being victimized, what they really mean is that someone — read government — ought to step in and Make Things Right. It’s a self-serving appeal to a higher authority; it’s an admission that they lack the sisu to fix their own fucking problems, and would really desperately like for someone else to do their dirty work. It’s cowardly, it’s reprehensible, and five’ll get you ten that your taxes and mine are being spent on one side or the other of this tempest-in-a-pisspot debate. Both sides want to win, they want to wipe out the other, but they lack the balls to come out and say it, or actually fight for what they believe in. They want someone else to fight for them. (Surprise, surprise.)

I respect precisely one thing about Fred Phelps and his church — he and his are willing to go out and propagate their hatred (well, unless they get scared off by bikers or some such) in the real world. Phelps and company actually put their meatbags on the line and carry signs in public. These fuckheads put out press releases and sulk in their goddamn bedrooms. Of course, if they had the sisu to do anything, they wouldn’t be posturing for the centerfold of Victim Monthly, now would they? They’d be off winning, rather than begging someone, anyone! to go out and win for them.

Fuck ‘em. Anyone who sets out to lose deserves to do so.

¹ Yeah, right.
² I’m referring to the self-absorbed progressive fuckheads, like the Seattle school board folks, who are trying to attach themselves to real tragedies by manufactured angst, not the tragedies themselves. It’s very much like the difference between fighting for your country and plastering a yellow-ribbon sticker on your Cadillac and screaming “Freedom isn’t free!” at everyone you see wearing tie-dye. I’m also referring to the desperation with which modern Christian majorities try to make themselves out to be, well, the Christians, rather than the lions. Sorry kids, you aren’t the underdogs any more.

This, Marko believes

I like this guy:

• This I believe (the munchkin wrangler)

Relevant to something I mentioned earlier:

I believe that taxation is equal to forced labor. I believe there is no moral or practical difference between taking the wages of a day or a week from a person to pay for a schoolhouse, and ordering them at gunpoint to spend a day or a week building that schoolhouse directly.

Read the whole thing; it’s enlightening.

Brit government misplaces personal data on half the country

Whoops.

• British PM Brown ‘profoundly’ regrets data security breach (CBC.ca)
• Brown orders data security checks (The Beeb)

Some time ago, I discussed the risks of ubiquitous surveillance — one of which was “misuse by unauthorized users”. Naively, I assumed that those unauthorized users would have to break into the surveillance system from outside (not that it would be terribly unusual for them to do so). I’d failed to account for standard-issue government incompetence.

Two computer discs that went missing while being sent from one government department to another contained names, addresses, birth dates, national insurance numbers and — in some cases — banking details for nearly half the country’s population.

So, that’s basically an identity theft kit for half the goddamn country. This is the sort of nightmarish scenario that would send most corporate types into a widening gyre of litigophobia, and rightly so. Of course, we’re talking about government here. As far as Brown’s concerned, the risk of some half-skilled goblin wrecking your financial life is “inconvenient”:

“I profoundly regret and apologize for the inconvenience and worries that have been caused to millions of families that receive child benefits,” Brown said. “We have a duty to do everything that we can to protect the public.”

That duty doesn’t extend to keeping track of their data, of course:

[Treasury chief Alistair Darling] said the delivery was not being tracked and was missing for three weeks before any alarm was raised.

Britain is the most surveilled country in the world. Its government is desperately trying to implement a national ID card and is expanding the scope of its DNA database just as fast as it possibly can. All of this in the name of “public safety”, of course.

I feel safe — because I live somewhere else.

“Put down the gun, then we’ll talk”

Yesterday, I quoted George Washington thus:

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

I’d like to elaborate.

Government is force. The fundamental characteristic that sets a government apart from any other organization is that governments can come after you and coerce you — at gunpoint, if need be — to do what they want… and if you don’t comply, they can shoot you. Other organizations can elect representatives, enact regulations (government calls their regulations “laws”), collect dues (“taxes”), and so on, but only government can give someone the legal authority to kill or confine you.

Most people like to pretend that laws are simply extensions of natural human rights (for instance, the law against murder is an extension of the natural human right to one’s life), and that governments use force only in defence of these rights. I might agree if laws really did reflect natural human rights, and if government force could defend those rights. Instead, the relationship between laws and rights is dubious at best, and governments usually use force to punish violations, not to prevent them.

For example, most car owners are required by law to register their cars with the province. It takes some doing to imagine a world in which the owner of an unregistered car violates anyone’s natural human rights. Even so, a police officer who sees you driving around in your unregistered car is empowered to pull you over and, if you don’t agree that by refusing to give the provincial government money you’re violating someone’s natural human rights, shoot you with a Taser.

Similarly, I have a difficult time imagining a world in which selling people small amounts of silver and gold infringes upon their natural human rights. That, as far as I can tell, is what Liberty Dollar does — they’re essentially trying to create their own asset-backed currency. It’s a strictly opt-in affair; I haven’t tried to opt in, and they haven’t tried to make me do so. Nonetheless, the FBI kicked in their doors and took their stuff, because creating your own currency might be illegal. (A lot of people call it counterfeiting — which to most of us means “making a copy of (something) with the intent to deceive”. The folks at Liberty Dollar seem quite insistent that their currency is not Federal currency.)

Stefan Molyneux addresses government force in his essay:

• The Gun in the Room (Lew Rockwell dot com)

He (accurately, I think) condenses Libertarianism to the single principle that no-one — not even the state — should be able to compel you by aggressive force:

In essence, then, all libertarian arguments come down to one single, simple statement:

“Put down the gun, then we’ll talk.”

This is the core morality of both libertarianism and civilization. Civilized people do not shoot each other when they disagree – decent people do not wave guns in each other’s faces and demand submission or blood. Political leaders know this very well – I would say better than many libertarians do – and so constantly obscure the violence of their actions and laws with mealy-mouthed and euphemistic weasel words. Soldiers aren’t murdered, they “fall.” Iraq wasn’t invaded, but “liberated.” Politicians aren’t our political masters, they are “civil servants,” and so on and on.

Although libertarianism is generally considered a radical doctrine, the primary task of the libertarian is to continually reinforce the basic reality that almost everyone already is a libertarian. If we simply keep asking people if they are willing to shoot others in order to get their way, we can very quickly convince them that libertarianism is not an abstract, radical or fringe philosophy, but rather a simple description of the principles by which they already live their lives. If you get fired, do you think that you should hold your manager hostage until he gives you back your job? No? Then you already hold a libertarian position on unions, tariffs, and corporate subsidies. If you find your teenage son in your basement smoking marijuana, would you shoot him? No? Then you already hold a libertarian position on the drug laws. Should those who oppose war be shot for their beliefs? No? Then you already hold a libertarian position with regards to taxation.

Like the scientific method, libertarianism’s greatest strength is its uncompromising simplicity. The enforcement of property rights leads to an immensely complex economy, but the morality of property rights is very simple – would you shoot a man in order to steal his property? The same complexity arises from the simple and universal application of the non-aggression principle. It’s so easy to get lost in the beguiling complexities and forget to keep enunciating the basic principles.

Damn right.

The Principle of Equality of Misery

I think I’ve identified one of the key philosophical underpinnings of mainstream political philosophy — any disparity in misery between (other) people is fundamentally unjust. If one person is less miserable than another, justice may only be obtained by making the first person just as unhappy as the second. The folks who — implicitly — endorse this philosophy never seem to end up in the less-miserable role; I presume they are so horribly angst-ridden about pervasive global injustice as to make Albert Camus’s protagonists seem Pollyanna-ish, so that including themselves in any inconvenience they support would be redundant.

The part that really puts my dick in a knot is that most attempts to equalize misery don’t work as intended.

This isn’t unique to modern statist assholes, either; depressingly, it’s probably part of human nature. For example, let’s take a look at First World War-era rationing and the villification of “hoarders”. Imagine a prudent German, circa 1910; let’s call him Manfred. Manfred is successful, but not affluent, and he’s a news junkie. He’s pleased that the German economy’s doing well enough for him to support his family with a bit of money left over, but he’s worried about the Kaiser’s antagonism of the Russians (and, of course, about the perpetually-worrying Balkans). Manfred’s read Alfred Thayer Mahan’s books (he’s a geopolitics junkie, too) and wonders where Germany’s going to get the imports its economy needs if Jackie Fisher’s redoutable British Navy closes the North Atlantic. Perceiving a threat to his family’s well-being, Manfred starts to stockpile staple foods just in case the Balkans blow up and that Schlieffen character’s plan doesn’t bring the troops home by Christmas.

Fast forward to May, 1918: Manfred and his family are (at the moment) in perfect health. This has not endeared them to their malnourished neighbours — among other things, Manfred’s unusual generosity at the local soup kitchen has aroused their suspicions — and several young men in feldgrau and jackboots are beating down his door. You see, by virtue of his preparedness, Manfred is a hoarder — and therefore lower than ratshit. He’s had the gall to be less miserable than his neighbours.

Meanwhile, half a city away, Johannes pulls the drapes across his dining-room window as his sister carves a lightly-garnished filet mignon. As you might imagine, neither Manfred nor his neighbours have had the opportunity to buy beef tenderloin in the past four years (whether or not they’d have been able to afford it). Johannes, however, has access to quite a bit more money than Manfred, and has spent the war feeding himself (and his family; Johannes is rich, not an asshole) from the black market.

Those conscripts kicking down Manfred’s door like to think they’re going after people like Johannes, but they’re not: their lieutenant wets his uniform trousers thinking about what his captain would do to him if he messed with Johannes. Manfred’s neighbours don’t even know about Johannes — he’s outside of their monkeysphere. All they know is that Manfred isn’t as hungry as they are, and they’re envious.

To the credit of Manfred’s neighbours and the conscripts who are about to introduce his teeth to the buttstock of a Mauser ‘98 — they’re all hungry. As you will see, this doesn’t apply to the modern interpretation of the Principle of Equality of Misery.

Let’s get back to the present. Since we-all — wait, I have a grammatical digression:

“Y’all” must be the second-person singular form of some personal pronoun. (“All y’all” is the second-person plural. This I am told by an unimpeachable authority.) I’m using “we-all” as the first-person plural of this unknown pronoun. Right; back to the present.

Since we-all’ve invaded Afghanistan and decided that Terrorism is a foe like Drugs and Poverty (that is, it merits a War On it), a great number of people have told me that what we really need is conscription — universal service. The theory is that if rich kids went to war shoulder-to-shoulder with poor kids, their parents (who are also rich, of course, and are by obscure reasoning somehow Influential) would never condone aggressive foreign intervention. It’s a nice theory.

Waitasec; haven’t we had draft-dodgers from rich families as Presidents for the past twelve fucking years? As the kids say in Arizona these days: que hablo bullshit? None of these people has cited a single war, conflict, police action, or even fistfight that has been averted because rich people’s kids might have been involved.

Once again, the problem isn’t that poor kids are dying — it’s that rich kids aren’t. Most of the recent noise about reinstating the draft comes from the Democrats. If one examines voting records, one might be forgiven for thinking that the Democrats are in fact the “moderate” wing of the Republican party, and that the mostly-mythical “second party” of American politics consists entirely of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. The Dems haven’t ever opposed the War on Terror in any meaningful fashion. (One is well-advised to stay well clear of voting records if one has even the slightest aversion to becoming a cynic.)

Funny how the people who tell me that universal service is “only fair, because the rich ought to suffer the horrors of war alongside the poor” haven’t themselves enlisted. (I’ll give Charlie Rangel some credit in this regard: at least he served with distinction in Korea. That said, I’d rather pop my eyes out with my index fingers than ever give Rangel credit, ever again.)

Let’s go further, and look at “progressive” income taxation. I keep hearing people talk about how it’s “only fair” that rich people pay higher income taxes than poor people. Apparently, it’s horribly unfair for some people to be financially secure while others aren’t. (I’m not sure what “fair” means in political terms, but I’m quite certain that it has nothing to do with a “fair” coin or a “fair” die… or a “fair” complexion. But I digress.) I suppose that rich people can afford to pay higher taxes than poor people; whether it’s fair or deserved that rich people give the various governments more of their money than poor people is still somewhat obscure. If you believe that everyone ought to give as much as they possibly can to the federal and provincial governments, this might make sense.

But — that ain’t what goes on in these here parts.

• Buffett Slams Tax System Disparities (Washington Post)

Warren Buffett claims to be the third-richest person in the world in that WP article. He also claims to pay less (percentage-wise) in income taxes than his secretary. (Now, I think Mr. Buffett to be a pretty awesome individual. Of course, I don’t have anything against either Manfred or Johannes in my first example, either.) Here’s the kicker: Buffett’s not even trying to pay lower taxes:

Buffett said that was despite the fact that he was not trying to avoid paying higher taxes. “I don’t have a tax shelter,” he said.

Just think how little he’d pay if he used some of that forty-six million dollars-a-year to hire a properly-motivated tax attorney. “Progressive” income taxes, meant to “soak the rich“, don’t — they fuck over the upper echelons of the middle class (no big deal; who needs doctors, anyway? If God had wanted your compound fracture to heal, He’d have miracled it together) and have essentially no effect upon those with enough means to find the inevitable loopholes.

The real problem, if you haven’t already figured it out (you clever reader, you — by definition, all of my blog’s readers are fantastically clever, and I’m willing to swear to that in court) is that some people are (by virtue of a lifetime’s hard work, savvy investing, or plain boneheaded luck) less prone to financial distress than others. The solution is to try to make everyone prone to financial distress.

Here’s yet another example: the popular and local perception of public transit. I hear about this all the time, because I have the misfortune to live in bike hippie central, British Columbia. Apparently, privately-owned motor vehicles are evil incarnate (pollution and Hummers and Porsches, oh my!), and everyone ought to be obliged to take the bus. (In the interests of full disclosure: I spent a grand total of sixty-two minutes waiting for public transit in freezing rain — today. Tomorrow is, of course, another day. I’m probably biased at the moment.)

These people don’t take public transit. They hate waiting for the bus (particularly in the rain), and they’re scared of the subway. However, they insist that any problems I have with either the bus or the subway (the latter is far superior to the former: it’s fast, it runs frequently, it runs reliably, and its stations are sheltered) can be resolved by “taxing rich people” (er, see above). Never mind that Vancouver has perhaps the best public transit in North America — never mind that they’re not willing to take it unless forced to do so. Cars are the devil!

I find it entertainingly ironic that these particular fuckmeats claim that “the streets would be safer” without privately-owned motor vehicles. I’ve never been hit by a motor vehicle. I’ve been hit by two cyclists and one skateboarder. You know why? Cars stay on the fucking road. But I digress.

We haven’t actually managed to ban cars yet, but I’ll bet that if we ever do, the particularly affluent will find a way to keep theirs on the road. It’s not so much that they’re bad people for wanting to, you know, own private property — just that they have more options, by virtue of having more money.

Let’s have a few more quick examples:

• Drug laws. These are purportedly in place to reduce the rate of drug use and to reduce the rate of “drug-related crime” — and they’re demonstrably incapable of either. I suspect that this form of prohibition remains in place from the fears of a great number of ex-hippies that kids these days are having fun. (Unless you’re rich, of course: then you can snort coke and get elected President. Well, so I’ve heard.)
• Movie, television, music, and videogame ratings. See above. God forbid that kids these days have fun.
• Prohibitions against gay marriage. The idea is to make people more miserable, not less miserable! Note that most attacks on gay marriage are related to the “sanctity of the family” — at a time when divorce is more prevalent than ever. (I’d be interested to know whether there’s an inverse relationship between divorce rates and actual, rather than reported, domestic violence. But I digress, again.) Obviously, if straight marriages are splitting up at record rates, there’s no way we’re going to let a gay couple risk having a stable marriage!
• Here’s one that I’ve heard of anecdotally, but haven’t been able to substantiate: emissions standards. I’m told (by some people — the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”) that in my province, natural gas-fueled vehicles are held to a much higher standard than gasoline-fueled vehicles. Never mind that the former pollute (in general) far less than the latter. What matters is not how clean your engine burns, it’s how much you’ve had to suffer to make it burn that clean! (I get the feeling that I’ve written about this before.)

The perceptive reader will have noticed two common themes in these eight examples (I’m sure there are more):

1. All of these instances of misery-equalization rely upon government enforcement. That is, if your neighbours insist that you be as miserable as they and you resist too strongly, some branch of government is empowered to have (its) thugs with guns kick down your door and drag you off to (jail; the camps; wherever).”Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” Some guy called Washington said that once; I think he was involved with the Americans in the late 18th Century. (Probably an anarchist, eh?)
2. All of these principles of misery-equalization are fundamentally immoral. Voluntary charity is a wonderful thing; forcing someone to give “charity” is theft. Military service is (arguably) selfless gallantry; forcing one’s country’s young men and women to serve is state-mandated slavery. Taxation (tied to government services received) is fair payment; taxation tied to income is at best sour grapes. (See also “theft”, above.)

I respectfully submit that it’s healthier — and more ethical — not to worry about whether some of one’s neighbours are happier than others. It may in fact be better (morally speaking) to follow Manfred’s example and stock up on beans, batteries, and Band-Aids, so that one may provide for family (and neighbours) if and when the shit hits the fan.