Seven new tickets to eternal damnation

Seems that the Catholic Church has come out with a new set of reasons for their infinitely-loving god to subject you to unending pain and suffering.

• Fewer confessions and new sins (The Beeb)

Pot, meet kettle. Kettle? This is pot.

Here they are, in all their dubious glory:

• Environmental pollution
• Genetic manipulation
• Accumulating excessive wealth
• Inflicting poverty
• Drug trafficking and consumption
• Morally debatable experiments
• Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

So, uh… unless you have a very literal take on transubstantiation, drug consumption is part of Communion. (Only some of the Protestants drink grape juice that hasn’t yet fermented.)

Does demanding a tithe count as “inflicting poverty”? Does the rather grandiose nature of the Vatican itself count as “accumulating excessive wealth”? Does raping children and hiding the evidence count as “violating the fundamental rights of human nature”? Sure… provided you’re not the ones making the rules.

I think I’ll be able to check off all of these but the last in the next five or ten years. Hell, I’m nearly there already! I pollute the environment every time I take out the trash (or exhale). I engage in genetic manipulation every time I select a potential mate (or for that matter, every time I buy groceries — though in that case I do it less directly). I’ve already accumulated “excessive” wealth: even though I’m comfortably within Canada’s lowest income-tax bracket, I’ve made room for a 22″ LCD monitor and a luxurious library. I’ve inflicted poverty by accepting government-issued scholarships (this is the only one of the list that makes me in any way uncomfortable). I’m drinking a beer as I write, and if trafficking is strictly required I’ll buy one for a friend.

I have yet to engage in any morally debatable experiments (leaving aside the easy way out that any experiment is debatable in some sense, even if the debate revolves around nonsense), but since my research is quite applicable to the evil awful violent video game industry (and for those of you who insist upon my arguments making sense, has quite a few potential military applications as well), I’m sure that’s achievable. The only problem is the paperwork.

I cannot, however, violate the “fundamental rights of human nature” — which I understand to be implicit in the Principle of Nonaggression — with a straight face and a clean conscience. I’ll leave that to the Catholic Church, which has an impeccable history of just those violations.

The unintended consequences of laws

Totalrecoil writes about B.C.’s ever-stricter anti-smoking laws:

• We always need another law…

One law, intended to solve a problem (in this case, smokers in workplaces irritating non-smokers), creates another problem (crowds of smokers congregating around entrances and bus shelters, irritating non-smokers), which requires another law (ban smoking near doors and windows). This new law will create its own problems (where will the smokers go now?), which will in turn prompt yet another law, and so on ad infinitum.

People don’t seem able to see this coming.

To me, the most glaring example of this sort of escalation is Prohibition — the Volstead Act of 1919 banning the sale and possession of booze in the United States. The Volstead Act was a failure as a tool of social control: people kept on drinking. It did, however, generate more and more laws to address (note: not “fix”) its unintended consequences, as organized crime flourished in the newly-created economic vacuum of boozeahol supply. The end result was a much stronger federal government. (The careful reader will understand that this outcome does not thrill me.)

Price controls are another excellent example, much in the news lately with their implementation in Zimbabwe and Venezuela. They are normally imposed to curb inflation, or to right some perceived economic injustice. Of course, they do no such thing: supermarkets soon sell out of price-controlled food (for example), and can’t afford to replace it. That food then becomes available only on the black market (which is by definition not subject to government regulation) at a much higher cost, leading to greater inflation (or injustice). This would seem to require even more laws — laws fixing the price of goods sold to supermarkets, laws forbidding black-market food, and so forth — which all come with their own unintended consequences. In Zimbabwe, for example, one American dollar (not the world’s strongest currency at the moment) buys twenty-five million Zimbabwe dollars.

Why do we persist in demanding (and then passing) dubious but well-intentioned laws with frightening and ill-advised consequences?  Simple: discovering those consequences requires thinking, and thinking is hard.  The “there oughta be a law” crowd doesn’t want to think and doesn’t like to think about how their favourite pieces of legislation would interact with the real world.  They simply want someone to wave a magic wand and make the bad thing go away.   The fact that there is no such magic wand does not dissuade them.

Government abuses its power; film at eleven

I’m shocked. Shocked is what I am.

• More FBI Privacy Violations Confirmed (Associated Press)

To wit:

The FBI acknowledged it improperly accessed Americans’ telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.

The breach occurred before the FBI enacted broad new reforms in March 2007 to prevent future lapses, FBI Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday. And it was caused, in part, by banks, telecommunication companies and other private businesses giving the FBI more personal client data than was requested.

(We’ll pause for a minute while the Left ignores the government-power angle and proceeds to blame the private sector for bending over in the metaphorical shower. Done? Good.)

I’ve written about this before (here and especially here). But I keep running into people who read my articles, who don’t dispute what I reference, and who nonetheless endorse greater and ever greater government powers “to keep us safe”. (This is usually accompanied by a pooh-poohing “Oh, that would never happen here!“) I feel rather like a Cassandra, though perhaps without the whole getting raped by Ajax thing. (On the other hand, who knows what my next encounter with Tasers On Horseback might bring?)

With that in mind, I won’t snark further against government excesses. (No-one listens to me anyway.)  I will instead point out Glenn Greenwald’s magnificent snark against government excesses, which inspired this post:

• Shocking new revelation: Unchecked government powers get abused (Salon.com)

Enjoy.

The War on Plastic Bags

Strange, but true. A short while ago, San Francisco banned the use of plastic shopping bags, as they’re non-biodegradable and made from oil and so forth:

• San Francisco bans traditional plastic grocery bags (CBC.ca)

Traffic in plastic bags is really none of the city’s business, but San Francisco (in particular) and California (in general) are notorious for this sort of thing. I’m sure that no-one stopped to wonder what damage this ruling would do as yet another precedent for popular hysteria trampling property rights, but in California I suspect the damage has long since become irreversible.

In case anyone’s wondering: I get by entirely without plastic grocery bags, largely because I’m generally opposed to disposable products of that sort. I do use the more robust BC Liquor bags for my kitchen trash. The careful reader will notice that I am not being coerced into this behaviour by my municipal, provincial, or federal government.

As it stands, this is strange and annoying but not particularly amusing. Chicago Councilcritter Robert Fioretti, however, has upped the silliness stakes in its local front on the Drug War:

• City may ban little baggies (Chicago Sun-Times)

(Hat tip: Reason magazine)

You may not be shocked, dear reader, to learn that some people sell drugs in those little bags. (I use them to organize small pieces of hardware. Maybe I’m being cheated.) How banning baggies — your pardon, banning small baggies — will reduce drug sales is somewhat obscure, but this Councilcritter Fioretti seems to have enough evidence to support his claim that he’s managed to convince Chicago’s Health Committee that it’s a good idea.

The West seems like a silly place, until one looks east.

If Chicago passes this abrogation of logic into law, one can only assume that Boston will take up the gauntlet and ban all forms of plastic entirely — because plastic is a major constituent of obviously harmless things that Bostonians mistake for bombs. Does municipal idiocy really increase with distance from the Rockies, or are these just misleading data?

Clinton endorses McCain?

According to the LA Times… yes, really:

• Hillary Clinton’s anti-Obama zinger of the day

“I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. Sen. John McCain has a lifetime of experience that he’d bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.”

(Hat tip: Donklephant)

I have nothing to add.

Factis non verbis

(“By deeds, not words.”)

I keep hearing complaints that Senator Obama is strong on rhetoric and weak on substance. This is, of course, true. So is Senator Clinton, and so is Senator McCain. They are campaigning politicians, which means (first of all) that they are lying about their beliefs to get your vote, and (second) that they have no intention of following through on any of their campaign promises that should prove inconvenient. Once one of them gets elected, we’re stuck with s/h/it for another four years.

We should view all of this bullshit bafflegab from the remaining contestants with utter contempt, and judge them by their acts.  Senator Clinton, for example, claims to have experience on her side.  She claims to be qualified to lead “from day one”.  Her most notable legislative accomplishments are her vote in favour of war with Iraq in 2002, her vote in favour of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001, and her vote in favour of the Act’s reauthorization in 2005.  I’m picking on Clinton because I like picking on Clinton, but I’m sure the other two Newspeak artists have plenty of skeletons in their closets to match.  That is, plenty of things they’ve done, rather than things they’ve merely said.

Laws that don’t work

I object to a great many laws on philosophical grounds. These are laws that attempt to govern my behaviour for my own good (and occasionally against my will), based upon the dubious notion that the State knows best. I don’t want a right-wing daddy state setting curfews and doling out punishments; nor do I want a left-wing mommy state swaddling me in protective legislation and bottle-feeding me a basic living stipend. I am an adult, and would like to be treated as such.

I object to most of these laws for another, simpler reason: they don’t work.

(If you must have an example, the War on Some Drugs provides an excellent one. This post is, however, more or less a theoretical exercise.)

I don’t understand how one can argue for one’s favourite piece of busybody legislation in the face of statistics. It’s particularly galling in the case of these sorts of laws, which are intended to curb a specific behaviour. If this behaviour hasn’t diminished after the law has been in place for some time, the law is a failure. It is, among other things, a waste of money that could otherwise be spent on useful things (repairing bridges, for example).

Some apologists have told me that, even if they don’t work, these laws are necessary — that their absence would imply approval of whatever vice they’re intended to prevent.  Law, however, is not morality; a thing may be legal but immoral (mass surveillance comes to mind), and another may be illegal but morally inoffensive (jaywalking, for example).  Using the law as a moral crutch is negligent and oafish.  Using the law to impose your own standards of behaviour upon others under the sanctimonious aegis of morality is despicable.