Reason Video Nails Problems of FCC Regulating Internet

When I grow up, I want to be as cool as Reason magazine's Nick Gillespie. In the video below he gives succinct summaries of the problems of this most recent and allegedly "light-touch" power grab by the Federal Communications Commission.

(By the way, all meaningless metaphors used by government officials such as the current FCC chairman are unenforceable for future generations of officials.)


Which is why Reason's third "reason" here, "Mission Creep" as a danger to FCC regulation of the Internet is a huge problem, and something the public rarely understands about government: its growth is almost inevitable.

I admire the pluckiness of libertarians in fighting the growth of the state, but in recent years I have become more dour about the prospects for our government and society to avoid decline. Despite even the empowering magic of things like the Internet.


Bureaucrats, however well intentioned, believe they can "help" with almost anything and relentlessly seek to insert themselves into private decisions. Those less well intentioned also see numerous opportunities to expand their power.

One reason the public doesn't understand this is because in essence the problem is highly philosophical. More specifically, epistemological. Government officials trying to help in a way allegedly free from self-interest (not true) concentrate more power in the hands of those with less knowledge than the entirety of the marketplace.

Freedom is a way of crowd-sourcing our problems; with more individuals handling smaller pieces of the logistics of delivering products and services.  In a bureaucrat's way of seeing things, that means they have a less "comprehensive" view of the market, which requires a handful of nobles to facilitate (to their own benefit) greater "global coordination" and other such nonsense.

Political Over-promising and Under-delivering?

Very good article today by the Washington Examiner on the continuation of the "blame game" campaign by President Obama regarding the Gulf Oil spill, and the backlash it's causing him politically. Basically, after years of "blaming Bush" the expectations of the executive have been raised so high, they are sure to disappoint when the increasingly human Barack Obama flails about.

Which raises a larger point. Remember the old adage: "Under-promise and over-deliver?" Doesn't that kind of sum up the entire political problem of modern liberalism (other than it's squishy "third-way" variant)? It's all over-promise and under-deliver.

Did we end the War on Poverty? Or create a Great Society? Did liberalism really bring about a New Deal where the so-called "little guy" was liberated from the corruption of government power by the very industries it claimed it would control? (Or, to put it in today's lingo "asses it would kick?")

The answer is No.  Today we see the Obama presidency is rife with corporatism (BP, Goldman Sachs, General Motors, etc.)

So much of modern liberalism is grandiose and utopian, so full of over-promising. How can it lead to anything but disappointment? And yet, the faith lives on . . .

Sex Ed Movie Has Me Thinking (About Thinking)

My ten-year-old son and I finally watched "the movie" this week at school about changes in the body. Fostering talks between us.

Since, as he learned this week, hormones play such a role in emotional and psychological changes, it seems that when he observes adult psychology at work and comments to me on it, we end up having similar discussions.

This week, for example, after discussing cigarette smoking, we have talked more than once about how adults deal with psychological and emotional stress, quite often resorting to some kind of drug or other addictive/compulsive behavior.

The curious thing for me is how much this little movie provoked my own thinking about adult problems. I find myself in many of these discussions feeling some pity for adults, whose minds seem both heightened and benighted by their hormones.

On the downside resulting not just in addictions, but sometimes even more serious pathologies.

Indeed, from what little I know about those suffering from mental illness, very bright minds that began at birth often face great challenges to their proper functioning when a mixture of traumatic childhood recollections meet with the earliest flood of procreational hormones.

(It makes me seriously wonder what Schopenhauer would say about his and others' adolescence. Is it the "Will's" nightmarish wake-up call?)

I don't have a remedy -- beyond the belief that warm embraces, kisses and saying "I love you" to children are forms of fighting mental illness. Only a certain melancholic puzzlement.

Article on The Higher Education Bubble

As an adjunct professor, I have long thought the educational system is seriously dysfunctional. Students have little incentive to perform because they are insulated by the true cost of their education by their parents, the government and the taxpayers.

I say as much to the students, a number of whom are doing "do-overs" of their failed (drunken) first try at college some years ago.

The unintended consequence of all this helping in cheap credit and "free financial aid" by the government is out of control tuition inflation. Yet another distortion of the market in the name of creating opportunity.

Glenn Reynolds makes the case more eloquently than I could hope to in this piece today about the effects of cheap credit and mounting educational debt.

Problems of Belief

1) The Problem of Evil

2) The Mushrooming of Belief Propositions (Or, the Zeno's Paradox of Belief) - To evangelize the faith means to take responsibility for a collection of propositions. But those are not a closed set, Through all of history. Leading to interminable debate for those who choose to participate.

3) Inability to find a "core" set of beliefs free from the centuries of accretions.

Mainstream Media Begin to Challenge Obama's "Reformer" Image in Wake of Sestak Job Offer Scandal

Finally, the mainstream media pipes up on the Sestak "job-gate" scandal.

Washington Post: Lack of Sunlight Over Mr. Sestak's Claims

"This response would hardly have satisfied those who were upset during the previous administration about the firing of U.S. attorneys. If there was nothing improper, why not all that sunlight Mr. Obama promised?"


NY Times: For Sestak Matter, a 'Trust Us' from the White House

"Even if the conversations were perfectly legal, as the White House claims, the situation challenges President Obama’s efforts to present himself as a reformer who will fix a town of dirty politics. And the refusal to even discuss what was discussed does not advance the White House’s well-worn claim to being “the most transparent” in history."

Now people other than conservatives can respectably discuss it at their cocktail parties. What I humbly call "Carolan's Law of Liberal Credence": "No liberal shall believe anything a conservative says until it is repeated six months later by their favorite liberal pundit or publication."

"Philosophers Shouldn't Run for Office," Except Obama

I can understand why people are upset with Rand Paul. I think they are misunderstanding his intentions, which are not racist. But I can understand how they could have that reaction.

From what I have read in the Twittersphere and in blogs, etc. people angry with Paul quite often show that they misunderstand the very nature of the crisis of southern segregation, which was not a spontaneous exercise in free dis-association, but a government mandated and enforced reality, under Jim Crow, etc. (Separate public facilities, anti-miscegenation laws, etc.) Laws which violated basic rights under the constitution, which were helping to integrate the races. Laws which were supported by a band of vigilantes in a secret society. So, why did this require laws, and "secret" enforcers?

I still think it is possible to have a reasonable discussion about what actually happened during that crisis and learn lessons from it. About lawmaking. The same way people still watch D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" to understand the reality of political propaganda, and how the Klan flourished.

If a senatorial candidate can't "philosophize" on the job, what is he or she doing running for the United States Senate anyway, which is supposed to be an aristocratic, deliberative body?

Which is why I don't understand someone like Chris Matthews going on the Jay Leno show and saying "philosophers shouldn't run for office."

Matthews, it seems to me, thinks politics should be basically for the enjoyment of him and his beer-drinking buddies. Like sports; to watch the instant replays, talk about tactics and tell colorful stories about old Irish pols like his former boss, Thomas "Tip" O'Neill.

I used to enjoy Hardball, but I am finding Matthews' approach to politics growing shallower by the day. Perhaps he's been hanging around Keith Olbermann a little too long.

Anyway, who then was this guy (see below), who gave Matthews that thrill up his leg? You know, the guy who wants to "transform" America by eliminating the Founders' paradigm of negative rights?

I guess you can only "philosophize" about America if you're going in one direction -- which is away from the philosophy of the highly-philosophical Founders.