washingtonpost.com: Woman Goes on Trial In Ambush Shooting - dunno how long the link will last - the heartwarming story of a "Million" Mom who, bent on revenge, shot the wrong man. The MMM org is standing behind her, and her four handguns.

Walter Williams describes the case against trade protectionism.

A Historical Perspective on Electric Utility Regulation - just what I've been looking for: a sweeping examination of the long run-up to today's electricity mess. Informative.

Positive Atheism's Big List of H. L. Mencken Quotations -- loads of fun.

Misdiagnosing Earth by Ronald Bailey, Reason Science Correspondent - how the UN and the Worldwatch Institute cherry-pick bad news and ignore good news on the world's economy, ecology, and trends.

On Energy, Markets Work - by Bruce Bartlett An excellent exploration of how energy efficiency goes hand-in-hand with market efficiency.

Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 18:52:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: tbcox23@yahoo.com | Block Address | Add to Address Book
Subject: Re: Fear and the use of force (was Re: China) (fwd)
To: paulcox@marlboro.edu, jim.cox@mindspring.com, johnfcox@aol.com
CC: rockers@med.stanford.edu

My Yahoo mail limits messages to 10k so I have
to take this in bites. Sorry.

--- Paul Adams Cox wrote:
> More importantly, FEAR AND THE THREAT OF FORCE -LEAD-
> TO COOPERATIVE BEHAVIOR. I didn't write this stuff.
> Ask any biologist, zoologist, or
> economist who is current in his field.

> But just because fear is necessary for
> cooperative behavior doesn't mean
> we all need nuclear warheads rammed up
> our nostrils to keep us in line.

No, here I disagree with Paul.

Cooperation can ALWAYS arise in a scenario
where neither person can initiate force
upon the other. It is not guaranteed
to arise, but it can.

However, one element MUST be present: the
ability of each party to stop playing
and go home when he wants to.

As long as the transaction is win-win,
is repeated over time, and each person
can detect cheating, then cooperation is
actually pretty common.

However, as soon as one person can FORCE
the other to play the game, that person
no longer needs to keep up his end -- he
can just take from the other.

David, your error lies in thinking that
if everybody is aggressive, we can get
bad outcomes. Quite the contrary -- it's
when only one or two are aggressive that
we get bad outcomes. Once all parties
are equally able to meet force with equal
force that the advantage goes away and
we are free to try to cooperate again.

So the next bit that Paul wrote is right:

> All it means is that peace and order is
> kept -- on some level -- through
> the threat of force.

Mostly true. The exception comes from
people who are powerless to harm each other,
and only have the choices of "cooperate",
"cheat", and "stop".

Once a single person gets the choice
to "aggress", he gets to take without
giving until the other people also get
the option to respond with force. Then
we can return to peace.

Keep trying, David. How long have you
been a Utopian Socialist?

-Tom

Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 18:40:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: tbcox23@yahoo.com | Block Address | Add to Address Book
Subject: Re: Fear and the use of force (was Re: China) (fwd)
To: paulcox@marlboro.edu, jim.cox@mindspring.com, johnfcox@aol.com
CC: rockers@med.stanford.edu

Forgive my late entry into this conversation. I have two brief
comments:

> On Wed, 23 May 2001, David J. Raynor wrote:
> > For every example you can come up with to make them seem worse
> (they
> > gassed the Kurds), I can come up with something just as bad on our
> > side (we nuked the Japanese). For every rationalization you can
> give
> > our actions (we had to win the war), I can come up with one for
> them
> > equally ridiculous (they had to put down the uprising). We can do
> that
> > for a year and a day, and it doesn't change the basic fact: it's a
> > stupid, horrific murderous system.

Why is nuking the Japanese the same as gassing Kurds? It's not.
1. The Japanese declared war on us, not the other way around.
2. They could have surrendered earlier. They didn't.
3. The Japanese military was starving civilians to feed soldiers.
Hundreds of thousands of Okinawan civilians died of hunger
before the Marines took the island. Without nukes to shorten
the war, we would have seen tens of millions of Japanese civilians
dead of starvation before the conventional-war invasion
would have stopped their deaths -- more than the six million
Jews that Hitler killed. That's separate from the over one
million US casualties expected.
4. The PURPOSE of the wars were different -- Iraq to suppress
and oppress a minority, the US to defend itself from aggression
and end a genocidal militaristic dictatorship.

Legitimacy of any government comes from the consent of the governed.
No act of force by a dictator against his own people is moral.
Only certain acts of force by a democracy against its own people
can be moral -- such acts must follow laws that are themselves
moral (i.e. they fit with the natural rights theory, i.e. only
the amount of force necessary to restrain one person from harming
another is okay).

> > It is perpetuated because y'all in
> > the "security" arena, whether here or in Iraq, China, wherever,
> think
> > that you are doing something high-minded, providing security,
> creating
> > peace....when you are really just doing exactly what you loathe in
> > your "enemies;" murdering, maiming, raping so that your country can
> be
> > "better" than the one with the towelheads or the chinks.
> >
> > And whenever someone suggests that that needs to stop and we need
> to
> > start behaving like civilized people, you have a flawed
> pseudo-science
> > called security studies to explain why people can't get along
> unless
> > we all have guns pointed at our heads, because we bond into groups
> out
> > of fear like the klu klux klan (your characterization, not mine).

> We bond into groups because it has been necessary for the propagation
> of
> the species. Why is that necessary? Because there is safety in
> numbers.
> Why do groups cooperate? Because they have a better chance of
> survival
> than by backstabbing each other all the time.
>
> But if you give any creature the chance to get away with something
> because
> you've taken away the fear of retribution, then you lose the
> cooperative
> behavior. Happens every time.
>
> More importantly, FEAR AND THE THREAT OF FORCE -LEAD- TO COOPERATIVE
> BEHAVIOR. I didn't write this stuff. Ask any biologist, zoologist,
> or
> economist who is current in his field.

Dave, you're saying that all the nasty violence will end
just as soon as we realize it can stop.

Paul is saying that it'll start again just as soon as
someone realizes he can start.

You think all we need to do is cooperate.

Paul is pointing out that cooperation requires the ability
to opt out if the other guy is screwing you, and the
ability to resist him if he initiates aggression.

Your beautiful utopian thinking cannot handle free
riders or defectors. Your vision only works when everyone
cooperates all the time. Since people have the ability
to be greedy, stupid, selfish, and hurtful, the only
way we can achieve your utopia is by having powerful
governments that FORCE everybody to cooperate.
At gunpoint.

Ooops! Governments are run by people, and people have
the ability to be greedy, stupid, selfish, and hurtful...
so your utopia becomes a Stalinist nightmare.
Congrats.

Find me a way to guarantee that everyone cooperates,
nobody defects, and nobody aggresses, WITHOUT having
an oppressive governmental force that prevents it
at gunpoint, and you win.

Fail to find that way, and Paul wins.

See also "The Origins of Virtue" by Matt Ridley
and "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior"
by von Neumann, J. and Morgenstern, O. (1953).

Cheers.
-Tom


=====
Thomas B. Cox
tbcox23@yahoo.com http://www.geocities.com/tbcox23/

"When the government fears the People, that is Liberty.
When the People fear the Government, that is tyranny."
-- Thomas Jefferson

Some scary stuff from Reason:

"Privacy laws allow high-risk insurees to lie about their health in order to get more money. This means that healthier customers will have to be charged more to pay for their high-risk counterparts. This situation can set off an adverse selection spiral in which low-risk clients flee the higher premiums and high-risk clients flock to buy the insurance. As premiums rise to cover the unhealthy clients, fewer and fewer people can afford insurance.

"Are purchasers of insurance really all that savvy? Absolutely. In 1992, New York State passed a "community rating" law in an effort to bring down insurance prices. The New York law forbade insurers from offering lower rates to companies with younger, healthier employees--the effect of which was to increase rates for those workers. Faced with higher rates, large numbers of younger workers simply dropped their coverage, leaving relatively unhealthy oldsters to fend for themselves. The result was higher rates and fewer people covered by health insurance. The same problem also plagued recent attempts to do the same with the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan and the California Public Employees Retirement System."

Before I forget: the Running with Scissors Relay was especially well received. People got excited, cheered the runners, the whole bit. Several people (maybe half) were really keen on waving signs at passing cars. I think we had a presence at the curb for maybe 90 minutes out of the two-hour event.

After we were done at 3, several people took signs and walked over to the Dalai Lama Greeting event over at Pioneer Square, which was truly huge -- 20,000 people was the claim, and certainly the streets were closed a block or two in every direction, and I could see a pretty good crowd spilling out of the Square. By MMom standards, that's gotta be 20 million people. (By their counting standard, we had 34,000 people at our event.)