Notes on Costco vs Wal-Mart

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

A meme has been going around Facebook regarding one of the left’s favorite comparisons, Costco and Wal-Mart.  You see, Costco pays a “living wage” and offers generous benefits and its employees frolic in sunshine and fairy dust.  Evil Wal-Mart on the other hand engages in brutal union suppression, denies workers their basic rights, and engages in wage-slavery.  And yet, Costco remains profitable!  See!  If only Wal-Mart wasn’t so evil, it too could succeed…. also.

The argument falls apart under serious scrutiny, as provided by The Daily Beast’s Megan McArdle.  The two businesses are vastly different and there is little reason to expect them to have similar employment policies.  Also, their (former) CEO was a committed progressive.

This article does a good enough job on its own, but I would also like to add a couple major points it did not seem to touch on.  Most of the articles sympathetic to Costco (you can find them on common leftist sites such as HuffPo or Slate) emphasize Costco’s profits, inferring this translates into great shareholder returns.  Is that necessarily the case?  Over the last year, Wal-Mart stock has outperformed Costco stock on price appreciation alone.  Its dividend yield is currently more than double Costco’s, and its beta is lower, making it a less risky investment.

But perhaps the most important point, and this cannot be emphasized enough:  No business anywhere is a make-work program.  The purpose of business is not to provide jobs, or to provide a certain level of income or standard of living to employees.  Period.  A company exists to create value for shareholders.  It accomplishes this by pleasing its customers.  The notion that a company could “afford” to pay its employees more is absurd.  To pay employees more than their market value is to essentially steal from the shareholders, or from the customers.

Please understand that all of this nonsense comes from the “stakeholder model” that is now being taught in business and ethics classes as the preferred mode of thinking about how a business should operate.  Under the stakeholder model, every stakeholder is considered equal.  The needs of the employees are seen as just as important as the needs of the shareholders.  The needs of the community and the government are seen as just as important as the needs of the customers.  This, of course, is nonsense.  It is leftist propaganda masquerading as factual information on how things can and should work.  Reality does not work this way.  I may do a longer piece on the “stakeholder model” later, as it is growing in popularity and relatively unchallenged.

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In Defense Of PowerPoint

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

This one’s off-topic in the sense that it’s non-political.  Consider it a celebration of something that was created due to free markets and the division of labor, a la Jeffrey Tucker.

I’d like to take a moment to stick up for a much maligned piece of software.  A piece of software that undoubtedly provides great benefit to the vast majority of those reading this, yet gets absolutely no credit or praise.  In fact, it is almost universally maligned and spoken of as if it is has a negative effect on society at large.  I am speaking of Microsoft PowerPoint.

Ask the average person about PowerPoint and they will immediately recall boring presentations, uninteresting speakers, and ineffective training.  They might even go as far as to use phrases such as “death by PowerPoint” (a favorite in the military).  About half of Wikipedia’s entry on PowerPoint consists of such criticism (including blaming it for the space shuttle Columbia disaster!), with little praise to be found.

While we have all undoubtedly experienced many boring and uninspiring PowerPoint presentations, we must keep in mind that PowerPoint is not some sort of self-aware entity.  PowerPoint is a tool, like a hammer, or a gun.  It is a tool used by men for a specific purpose.  When used properly, it can be used to great effect.  It can dramatically increase the quality of a presentation or lecture, both in terms of entertainment value and holding the interest of the audience, and in terms of conveying critical information.  However, unlike a hammer or a gun, I maintain that PowerPoint absolutely does not ever result in making things worse.  With a hammer, you can accidentally squash your finger.  With a gun, you can accidentally shoot yourself, or someone you did not intend to shoot.  Using PowerPoint poorly may result in a boring presentation, but likely not any more boring than the presentation would have been if PowerPoint wasn’t used at all.

This is the key point to keep in mind.  PowerPoint was not created as a substitute for a compelling presentation by a dynamic speaker about an interesting topic.  Such a best-case scenario has little use for such a simple tool.  Rather, PowerPoint was created as a substitute for a shy or boring speaker standing at a lectern and looking down, reading from a series of note cards, while the audience struggles to hear, process, and retain the information.  Those who criticize boring PowerPoint presentations rarely seem to consider whether the session would have been better if there was no PowerPoint at all.  I suggest that it would not.

PowerPoint exists as an aide, both to the speaker, and to the audience.  It allows the speaker to have a ready reference while maintaining engagement with the audience.  It allows the audience to follow along, and process information visually as well as through sound.  It gives the audience ample time to take notes, and easily identifies the key points of the topic.

It is also a very well designed and easy to use piece of software.  Templates are provided so that even first-time users can construct a presentation that looks sharp and is clear, organized, and easy to understand in a manner of minutes.  No special training or advanced technical manuals are required.

It is true that great public speakers have little use for PowerPoint, but we should not compare any boring presentations we have seen in our lives to those given by great public speakers.  Rather, we should compare them to how effective the presentation would have been if given by a poor speaker with no visual aids whatsoever.  That is the proper comparison.

So the next time you hear someone complaining about having to sit through a boring PowerPoint presentation, ask them if they think the presentation would be more interesting if there was no PowerPoint at all.  The simple fact of the matter is that PowerPoint is a brilliant and imminently useful piece of software that greatly assists in the ability of the average person to effectively communicate ideas to a large audience.  It provides tremendous benefits to all of us.

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Statist Senators Cannot Follow Simple Logic

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

During the Senate hearing on the new (if you haven’t yet suffered under it, it’s new to you!) proposed “assault weapons” ban, Ted Cruz asks a simple question:  Why can the government arbitrarily exclude certain weapons from second amendment protection, but it cannot do that with any other amendment?

Of course, Diane Feinstein (whom you may remember declared publicly that her end-goal is complete and total gun confiscation in America) immediately started yelling and screaming and generally acting like a buffoon.  She was so busy freaking out about the gall of this man to ask such a question that she never really got around to answering it.

But it is in fact a legitimate question.  The gun-grabbers keep insisting that their “common sense solutions” and “safety measures” are perfectly constitutional, just don’t ask them to explain how or why.  Just take their word for it.  Or accept that “the Supreme Court said so.”  They’ve never been wrong.  The simple fact of the matter is that the constitution itself offers no exceptions.  It’s very clear:  shall not be infringed.  The onus should be on anyone who seeks to limit private ownership of firearms in any way to satisfactorily prove how such a law would be constitutional, and to do so with a much better argument than “Because I said so,” or “because of the suffering little children,” or any other such thing.

The only real hope the statists have in twisting the words of the second amendment is the claim that it only applies to militias.  Of course, to take on that argument, they themselves would have to reject the authority of the Supreme Court, which has already declared that the second amendment is fully incorporated and does in fact apply to private firearm ownership by individuals.

The second amendment does not contain any qualifiers.  It protects all private firearm ownership under all circumstances.  If we as a society don’t like this, then we should probably amend the constitution to add qualifiers such as “unless Diane Feinstein says so,” or, much better yet, simply reverse the incorporation doctrine and allow each state to decide such matters for itself.

A couple extra notes.  Between when I wrote this and when I posted it, Ann Coulter went on Hannity and pretty much made the exact same point.  Also, I think the highlight of the video may be at the end when Dick Durbin, referring to the bill of rights, says “None of these rights are absolute.”  It’s nice to finally have the progressive on the record with that.  All of your rights are subject to the whims of your rulers, got that?

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Soda: The Hard Way

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

It seems that in recent weeks, the news is full of items that appear to be great victories for lovers of freedom.  I previously discussed why Eric Holder’s letter to Rand Paul stating that the President does not have the authority to assassinate American citizens on U.S. soil is still quite troubling.  Two days ago, the New York Supreme Court threw out Bloomberg’s infamous ban on sodas of greater than 16 ounces on the grounds that it was arbitrary and would be difficult to enforce.  While many are celebrating this as a great victory for personal freedom, I am quite cautious to hitch my wagon to the whims of a judiciary whose principal objections have nothing to do with personal freedom at all.

The way I see it, this is another prime example of the difference between easy arguments and hard arguments; the difference between principles and practicality.  The judge in this case clearly did not object to the soda ban on principle, but merely on practicality.  Unfortunately, many Americans seem to agree with the nature of his objection.  By conceding that this legislation is well intentioned and that the “obesity epidemic” is in fact a problem that government should be attempting to solve, the public at large declares their willingness to surrender their personal freedom in favor of the orders and regulations of the nanny state.

Instead, it is once again critical that we engage the issue directly, even if the argument is more difficult to make to a statist audience.  The soda ban is wrong because it infringes on our natural rights and liberties.  We own our bodies; therefore we should be able to ingest whatever we want.  We have freedom of association, therefore we should be able to engage in voluntary trade for mutual benefit, regardless of what any legislator, judge or board of health has to say about it.  In order to make any headway on these issues, we must consistently and vigorously promote these ideas, and refuse to back down or compromise from them.  We should resist the temptation to celebrate this seeming victory, and instead recognize it for what it is:  one branch of the government overturning another branch of the government for absolutely the wrong reasons, while nearly everyone involved agrees that freedom is not a significant factor in the decision.

We must not only allow freedom to be a factor, we must insist that it be the only factor.

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Re: Drone Strikes

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

Victory!  Rand Paul has delivered us from evil and single-handedly persuaded Eric Holder to denounce his tyrannical ways, admitting that it would not be constitutional for the President to order a drone strike against “an American not engaged in combat on American soil.”  We’ve won!  Right?

Well, maybe not.  During the filibuster, it was repeatedly pointed out (both by Rand and his allies such as Ted Cruz, as well as dissenters such as Dick Durbin) that the President could order destruction to rain down from the heavens on someone if they were on a “battlefield” or if they presented an “imminent threat.”

And who gets to define the battlefield and choose whether a threat is imminent or not?  You guessed it, the commander-in-chief!  And good news, they’ve already defined the battlefield as everywhere.  They declared that Anwar Al-Awlaki was an imminent threat despite the fact that he was a propaganda director not known to have engaged in direct combat at any point.

Let’s keep in mind that the President’s kill list is still top-secret, and there is no due process involved in deciding who gets placed on it.  So basically, the current policy is that the President can kill Americans on American soil, so long as he claims they are an imminent threat.  If you’d like to dispute the fact that you were an imminent threat, you are free to file a complaint from beyond the grave.

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The Mainstream Media Shrugs At Rand

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

 

standwithrandAs I’m sure most of you are aware, on Wednesday night, Rand Paul delivered an epic 13-hour filibuster over the Obama administration’s horrifying drone policy.  The fact that the President claims the authority to kill whoever he wants, whenever he wants, wherever he wants, so long as he claims they are a terrorist and an imminent threat is a big deal, and should be big news.  Long filibusters of this nature are pretty rare, and should be big news in and of themselves.  I think it’s safe to say that this act by Rand was easily the biggest news of an otherwise uneventful Wednesday.

 

Surprise surprise, the mainstream media disagrees!  As Rand yielded the floor, ending his filibuster to a standing ovation by the Senators present (who were quickly informed by the President of the Senate that “expressions of approval or disapproval are NOT allowed!”), his unprecedented stand for freedom was front-page news on nearly all legitimate news aggregator websites, from the liberal Huffington Post, to the conservative The Blaze, and others such as the Drudge Report, Fox News, etc.  It was not a front-page story on ABC, NBC, CBS, or the New York Times.  Despite the fact that for most of yesterday, #standwithrand was the #1 trend worldwide on Twitter, the next morning, this rare and significant act was treated as just another ho-hum Washington occurrence.  When I logged into Google News, it was third among the “Top Stories” behind North Korean nuclear threats (gee, there’s a shocking new development) and the fact that Obama had dinner with some Republican members of Congress in an attempt to bribe them into voting for his unconstitutional gun-grabs.

 

And what was the story that Google News linked to when it got around to Rand’s filibuster in third place?  This disgraceful piece from the Washington Post, which is fairly typical of how the MSM has responded to this incident.  As usual, they tried their best to ignore it, but eventually, when forced to respond, instead they mock, denigrate, and insult.  Even his “colleagues” in the Senate couldn’t wait to lick Obama’s boots by attacking Rand, giving the MSM more ammunition to write him off as a crazy extremist.

 

While the jury is still out on whether Rand is a true friend of liberty or just a political opportunist, there is absolutely no doubt that his actions on Wednesday night were positive, both for the liberty movement and for society in general.  The fact that we are actually having a debate over whether Obama can kill anyone he wants at any time on his word alone is patently absurd.  By ignoring the story and denigrating his achievement, the media is simply proving once again how irrelevant it has become.

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The UN Refuses To Tolerate Self-Determination

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

UN: Colo., Wash. legal pot violates drug treaties

One of the stated goals of the United Nations at its founding was to encourage democracy and self-determination among the peoples of the world.  But oh how times change…  The UN is quite upset that two American states have decided to discontinue their participation in one minor front of the complete failure that is the drug war.  They are hereby demanding that the federal government use force against the people of Colorado and Washington to ensure that the global decree that marijuana is bad for you be upheld.  Fortunately, these statist goons are completely irrelevant and nobody really cares what they think.  While the feds will likely continue to harass these states for being disobedient to the President’s marching orders, it will certainly have nothing to do with a bunch of corrupt UN officials telling them to.

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How To Argue For Drug Legalization

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

Previously, in the discussion of why I prefer “hard” arguments to easy ones, drug legalization came up as the example of an easy argument.  Of course, many disagreed, claiming that we should first attempt to achieve gains that are plausibly within reach, and then, from there, hope to expand to tougher, more “divisive” issues.

My objective in this post is to point out that even within the framework of a single topic (in this case, drug legalization) there are easy and hard ways to go about making the case, and once again, I advocate going the hard route.  Just like in the macro sense, the easy arguments are the ones that everyone has seen before, and that they are prepared to deal with.  In this case, they are the practical arguments.  They include things like “marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol” or (even worse), “let’s legalize it so that we can tax and regulate it!”  I consider these to be fairly cowardly arguments as they do not address the core libertarian principles that underlie our demand for drug legalization – namely that we own our own bodies and therefore have the right to ingest whatever we wish.

That, of course, is the hard argument.  I own my body and can do whatever I want with it.  It doesn’t sound that hard at first, and if used solely to advocate the controlled, government-sanctioned usage of medicinal (or even recreational) marijuana it doesn’t really seem all that controversial at all.  However, using simple logical deduction, the argument of “You own your own body and can do what you want with it” also implies that all of the following must happen…

Immediate legalization of all illegal drugs.

The ability to buy and sell whatever substances you wish without a doctor’s permission (no more prescription, all drugs are OTC)

The ability to buy and sell whatever food you wish without the government’s official seal of approval (de facto removal and shutdown of the FDA)

Immediate repeal of the selective service act and a permanent ban on conscription

Immediate repeal of all laws regulating sexual conduct (prostitution, sodomy, obscenity)

Good luck getting any significant amount of Republicans OR Democrats to agree with those things.  If you’d like to take the logic one step further, you can even deduce that taxation is theft (you own your body, therefore you own the labor that your body produces, therefore you have the right to keep the fruits of your own labor).  All of these things would be required to produce a society where people can truly claim that they, and not the state, own their bodies.  Given that such a society is desirable from our perspective, we should therefore push the “you own your own body” ideology as the primary (and only) argument for drug legalization.  Settling for bogus compromises like “tax and regulate” or “just legalize this one substance but continue to outlaw everything else” is essentially appeasement to the statist forces.  It makes no attempt to fundamentally win over hearts and minds, and does in fact make libertarians look like a bunch of stoners who don’t really care about ideology and just want to get high.  Bad for the movement and bad for society.  Don’t take the coward’s way out.  Seek out the hard arguments and engage them directly.  That is the only way we can hope to truly overcome statism in the long run.

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Why I Oppose The “Violence Against Women Act”

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

Idiots, in their natural habitat.

For the past few weeks, the statist forces have been essentially dumbfounded by the incredibly meager opposition to the “Violence Against Women Act” by certain members of the GOP.  Response ranged from the typical “war on women” garbage to some “scattered showers of journalism” by the Atlantic, which offered a somewhat unbiased (the closest we’re going to get at least) review of the principal objections involved (mainly political minutiae regarding mandatory-arrest politics and issues of jurisdiction for crimes committed on Indian reservations).  The standard weak-sauce argument of “government is undoubtedly noble and of pure intentions, simply inefficient and counterproductive in this one particular matter.”

As you may have guessed, my objection to the “Violence Against Women Act” is of a different sort entirely.  You see, I oppose women’s’ rights.  I also oppose gay rights.  I oppose rights for minorities and rights for the poor.  I oppose worker’s rights, transgender rights, criminal’s rights, victim’s rights, veteran’s rights, and furry rights (especially furry rights).  There is only one type of rights I recognize, and that is individual rights.  The natural rights we all receive as a virtue of our humanity.  Rights which all people have, and which are the exact same for every individual, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religious preference, occupation, class, or whatever else.

At one point, I was naive enough to believe that this was a completely politically correct opinion to hold.  This is what we’re supposed to believe, right?  That everyone should be treated equal.  Except no, not really.  Government forces are constantly looking to erode individual rights.  By classifying us into groups and emphasizing the rights of various groups, power hungry statists in both parties are seeking to both divide us and collectivize us at the same time.

How is this possible, you ask?  Simple.  First of all, government pits various groupings against each other, presenting the issue of rights the same way mercantilists (and most socialists) present the issue of economics, as a zero-sum game.  Women’s rights are presented as in direct conflict with men’s rights.  Gay rights are presented as in direct conflict with religious rights.  For one group to gain, another must lose.  This of course, is a false choice, but it serves to rile us up and encourages us to take sides against each other, typically in the form of political parties (vote for the guy with the D if you’re gay, vote for the guy with the R if you’re Christian, because the other guys want to take away our rights!)

At the same time, this concept conditions us to think of ourselves not as individuals, but as members of a collective.  This point here is somewhat relevant to Austrian Economics, which points out that groups of people are ephemeral.  Only individuals truly matter, because ultimately, only individuals act.  A group is nothing more than a collection of individuals.  Wrongs (whether the perpetrator is the government, or other individuals) are not perpetrated against impossibly large groups of people, but against individuals.  As such, every individual deserves recourse for whatever wrongs may have been committed against them, regardless of their standing or membership in any particular group.  Blacks and whites and Asians all have the same rights, and are all entitled to the exact same protections of those rights and compensation for having those rights violated.

This, of course, is why any law that distinguishes among groups, and not individuals, is morally reprehensible.  This includes hate crime legislation, affirmative action and any type of racial quotas, and of course, the violence against women act.  Why should women have special recourse in the event of crimes committed against them that men do not have?  Why should they be assigned extra resources that men are denied?  All individuals should be treated equally under the law, period.  Any attempt to enshrine in the law different treatment of different individuals based on their standing within certain groups is an appeal to collectivism, and a cheap political stunt designed to pit us against each other and distract from the fact that the state is repressing all of us and violating the individual rights of everyone.  Such measures should be loudly and vocally protested, regardless of what the law is named and how unpopular such a stand may be.

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Ann Coulter Makes A Good Point

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

Take THAT, statism!

I know I’m a little late with this, but Ann Coulter was on Stossel last week where she faced a hostile audience of libertarian students.  Stossel brought her on the show to “defend conservatives” and she certainly did her best.

Although most are focusing on her rather dismissive critiques of libertarians, I’d actually like to give her some credit and suggest that she makes a good point in the midst of all this.  Specifically, when she says:

“And you want to suck up to your little liberal friends and say, ‘Oh, but we want to legalize pot.’ You know, if you’re a little more manly you would tell them what your position on employment discrimination is. How about that? But it’s always ‘We want to legalize pot.’”

When it comes to politics, I think generally there are “easy issues” and “hard issues.”  Easy issues are the issues that are commonly allowed to be debated in mainstream society:  drugs, abortion, gun control, drone strikes, etc.  Everyone is generally familiar with the arguments for and against, and libertarians are comfortable making convincing cases for a pro-freedom position.  But then, there are the hard issues.  Things that you are simply not allowed to suggest in polite company, or on CNN.  Equating taxation to theft is a hard issue.  Advocating for the abolition of public schooling is a hard issue.  Suggesting that people should be entirely responsible for their own medical care is a hard issue.  And, (as Ann Coulter correctly points out), challenging the government’s involvement in voluntary employment contracts is a hard issue.

Most libertarians, if you press them on it and if they believe they are among friends, would probably admit that they do not believe the government has any authority to prevent someone from engaging in discrimination, in terms of hiring or in terms of engaging in business.  Rand Paul stirred up controversy during his Senate campaign by daring to mention this on the Rachel Maddow show, and quickly backed away from it once he realized that the American people at large are nowhere near ready for this sort of discussion.  However, it was this moment that seemingly put him on the map with libertarians.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and a place for everything.  Sometimes, you want to emphasize the common ground for the sake of building bridges.  But there is also a time when you need to take a defiant stand for what is right, even if it is unpopular.  This will both show people that you are serious, and challenge them to think an issue through in a way they might not have before.  Don’t just argue that taxes should be lowered by five percentage points, argue that taxation is theft.  Don’t just argue that marijuana should be legal for a doctor to prescribe for specific medical conditions, argue that you should be able to ingest any substance into your body that you please.  Don’t just argue that government is inefficient, argue that it is evil.

I truly believe that challenging the mainstream on the hard issues is the true way to win.  Right now, we’re zipping around out there on the periphery of the Death Star, trying to take out a few blaster turrets, when we need to get down in that trench, turn off our targeting computers, and fire some damn proton torpedoes into the exhaust port of statism.

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