fear of free markets

It is ironic that the people who speak in praise of freedom are often the ones most afraid of it. Two news stories illustrate this. They come from the US, but similar stories come from all powerful countries every day. And they reflect the hypocrisy and fear of the ordinary man and woman in the street - we can't just blame the politicians.

In one story, immigrants are sent away, as they are every day. These people work hard for low wages - so they benefit the rest of the nation. But we fear free market in people, so we erect great barriers at our borders. We just hate competition.

In another story, Central America is forced to accept whatever the US wants to sell, while the US has subsidies and barriers that make a free market impossible. Plainly we hate competition.

It's not just hypocritical, it causes death and suffering on a massive scale for them, anger toward us (hence "terrorism"), and reduces our collective wealth (because fair competition benefits both sides). We love freedom? Yeah, right.

kittens (continued)

Using the computer lately has become very difficult. Molly, our other kitten, has learned how to climb on the computer desk, and they both like to sit on my tablet, hand, etc. How can I be expected to update a blog with one kitten sitting on the keyboard, licking my arm, and the other sitting in front of the monitor? Life is hard.

Molly is far more interested in the mouse than Jess was, but won't stay still long enough for me to take a good picture.

more reasons why we need land rent

Today's news gives more examples of why we need a land rent based society:

Land rent is based on an absolute respect for property. Without that respect, there is no private property at all: "The Supreme Court ruled that governments could take one person's property and give it to another in the name of public interest."

Land rent implies that individuals can choose their own government. In contrast, majority-democracy often leads to corruption, and there is nothing that individuals can do about it.

Without land rent, most people in the world are trapped in failing nations, and only a few can escape. Land rent gives everyone the right to escape, and only allows nations to survive if their people want it.

And so on. Whatever the problem, land rent can solve it.

Krugman

Just a note to say that Paul Krugman's latest piece in the New York Times ("French Family Values") is excellent. But they are all excellent. I will try to resist the temptation of linking to every single one as soon as it comes out.

how to stop terrorism (continued)

This blog is about land rent, but I can't help posting stuff on other topics too. Yesterday the IRA announced a final end to violence and destruction of their weapons. Note that more people died in IRA violence than died in 9/11. 3637 people as far as can be told.

Of course, 9/11 will probably always hold the record for violent deaths in a single peacetime attack on western soil. But if we need to add so many qualifiers ("violent," "single event," "peacetime," "western") then maybe we should look at the bigger picture to see all the other tragedies we ignore.

My point is that this "terrorist" threat has ended. Why? Because of the soldiers on the streets? No, that just made it worse. Because of imprisonment without trial? No, that just made it worse. Because of invasion? No, that would have just been stupid. This terrorist threat ended because we quietly negotiated. Will this encourage other "terrorists"? No, because the negotiations were based on an understanding of conditions in the breeding ground, Northern Ireland. And individual bombers went to jail. Northern Ireland people are now tired of fighting, and have better, peaceful ways to address their grievances.

Patient negotiation and understanding ends terrorism. Force does not.

ten ways to implement land rent

One reason for making this blog (and why I am not too bothered if nobody reads it) is to find real-world ways to implement land rent. Based on the stuff I've noticed in the first few weeks of blogging, I have expanded the "proposals" part of the main web site.

At first I had only one concrete proposal: a Citizen's Dividend. After the first week of blogging, I added another four or five proposals. Today I've increased the tally to ten. To see them, just go to the the main site and click on 'proposals.'

I hope that, by paying attention to the news, I can get a better and better idea of how justice could work in the real world. Maybe in a year or so the main site will be totally different from today, but much more practical. I want people to see the site and think "yeah, that would work." I am still a long way from that point, but working on it.

mini-states as champions

Interesting radio discussion yesterday (BBC Radio 4, Thinking Allowed) on conflict resolution. The conflict I am interested in is, how do you persuade wealthy and powerful people to allow land rent and alternative mini-governments? What's in it for them? Consider some other things that nations support:

• Nations compete to host the Olympics, and support world class sports, even though world class sports are expensive and elitist.
• Nations encourage and fund elite universities, even though those professors often challenge cherished beliefs.
• Nations rely on their busy cities, even though these cities are hotspots for crime and dissent.
• Nations try to attract giant multinational companies, even though those multinational companies have no natural loyalty to the nation.

My point is that nations like winners. They will put up with all kinds of inconvenience in order to have their champions. Now imagine if a nation allowed mini-nations to grow up within its borders. A land rent rule would ensure that the parent nation did not lose anything financially, even if the mini state failed. And some mini-nations would succeed. Successful ministates would compete on the global market, just as sports teams compete, just as all businesses compete. Everyone loves high profile success.
France benefits from Monte Carlo. Italy benefits from the Vatican. New York benefits from the United Nations compound. We could all benefit from high profile, successful mini-states within our borders.

micronations and other heroes

This week, the British government is trying to increase the time they can legally hold you without telling you why - Kafka style. All they need to do is think you are dangerous. Like they thought that Brazilian guy was dangerous. When they finally decide to charge you, you can be held indefinitely until the trial. Then if they decide to use a military court, they won't have all the checks and balances to ensure that the innocent go free. And when they find you guilty they can either torture you (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, without any trial) or send you to another nation with a history of using torture.

It can't happen here? Why not? Ask the experts. Listen to the experts. What can be done? One answer is to create alternative societies with better laws than ours. Sounds like a very good idea to me.

How To Start Your Own Country

Coming soon on the BBC, every Wednesday night in the UK on BBC2 at 10pm, from August 3rd. It's hosted by a comedian, so is probably light hearted, but promises to cover some serious points.

"How to Start Your Own Country:" "Danny Wallace has a dream. In 2005, he plans to start his own country. This series follows the intrepid Wallace - famous for starting the Random Acts of Kindness collective - on his unlikely odyssey. He must find a territory, write a constitution, create a government, plan economic survival, implement law and order, expand his population and, last but not least, establish international relations. From the corridors of power at Whitehall to a war fort in the North Sea, Danny meets a host of extraordinary individuals who've already achieved this incredible feat. With his unique brand of humour, he documents their struggles, heeds their advice and, inspired by their spirit, sets about creating the world's youngest nation."

kittens

No politics or economics this time - just one of our kittens, Jess. Chasing a mouse.

a strange way to fight terrorism

All the major "terrorist" groups have one objective: get the enemy out of their country. (Yes their country. If we can claim to own a country we did not create, so can they.) Just read anything by Bin Laden, or the Provisional IRA, ETA, etc. Al Qaeda is particularly clear: it wants American military bases out of Muslim countries. When we follow the American Founding Fathers position and get out of other countries, terrorism stops. They don't bomb Norway and Sweden, and they stopped bombing Spain once Spain changed policy. I am not saying this to advocate retreat, but to point out the major cause of terrorism: military bases in other countries.

So how is the American government planning to combat terrorism? By expanding military bases in areas with high Moslem populations. D'oh.

who creates the terror (continued)

At the time of the bombs, the media reported how people were going about their business as normal. Compared with other horrible deaths (cancer, road accidents, etc.) bombing is a very low risk. But governments need to feel important, and newspapers need to make sales, so we are continually blasted with the words "terror!" "terror!" "terror!"

This may become a self fulfilling prophecy. According to the right wing British "Daily Telegraph," some people ARE starting to get nervous. And the story has been picked up by the New York Times. No doubt others will follow. The bombers create a small number of tragic deaths, but government and media create the terror.

I have been trying to use mainstream media for all my news, but I may start looking elsewhere - I don't want manufactured news and I don't want to support the terrorists.

how to stop terrorism (continued)

Recent news items have included CCTV footage of alleged bombers. It goes without saying that if we had many more CCTV cameras, crime would be easy to solve and prevent. If a crime happens, you just rewind all the cameras, and find out exactly what happened, who was involved, etc. Problem solved.

Of course, a massive increase in surveillance can only happen if either (a) we have a Stalinist totalitarian society, or (b) we totally trust our society - which implies that we can change it if we don't trust it.

So if we want to end crime and terrorism, we have two simple choices. uber-Stalinism or land rent. I know which one I'd choose.

competition creates kindness

In today's New York Times, Paul Krugman notes how Toyota rejected low-tax Alabama for high-tax Ontario. This illustrates how competition between different governments rewards good behavior.

I believe in competition between nations. (The present system reduces that competition, because bad governments are protected by fixed borders.) One argument against competition is that the meanest, most ruthless nation wins, which benefits multinational corporations but hurts the poor. But the Toyota example shows otherwise. Providing better education and health care gives a nation a competitive advantage.

the simple solution to social problems

In today's New York Times: To Reduce the Cost of Teenage Temptation, Why Not Just Raise the Price of Sin? The article makes the point that "just say no" and scary advertising does not change kids' minds regarding tobacco and excessive drinking. But raising prices works.

Tobacco and excessive drinking has measurable costs for society. So charge the smokers and drinkers that cost. Result: better behavior, and more money to spend on clean up. The principle of land rent at work: people pay for (or are rewarded for) their actions. It works.

"I told you so"

A couple of days ago I said that the real danger to life and liberty comes from excessive policing. The police are not as reckless as the bombers, but they outnumber bombers by thousands to one, so a small change in police tactics and priorities can be equally damaging.

Sure enough, to prove my point, the police yesterday killed an innocent Brazilian. He had a foreign appearance, carried a back pack, was at a tube station, and looked confused and agitated when the police chased him, so he must have been guilty, right? The worst part was the mass market newspaper reaction. Headlines like "one down, four to go" and praise the police for "at last" taking "tough action." The newspapers, like the bombers, do not care about the finer points of justice. Like the bombers, they will no doubt regret that innocent blood was shed, but say it is unavoidable in the wider conflict.

On a positive note, as noted in an earlier post, nobody ever dies in vain. This Brazilian guy should (I hope) provide a shock to the British authorities. And remind them that mistakes will always happen. If this reduces our move toward a police state, his death will have saved many innocent lives.

AIDS, virgins, and tuition fees

Heard this on the radio yesterday: a member of the Ugandan parliament offered to pay the tuition fees of any girl in his district who is still a virgin when she starts university. The aim is to prevent AIDS. The method is rather odd, and I don't know if it would work, but the underlying principle - financial rewards for responsible behavior - is a good one.

AIDS destroys lives and so has a measurable cost - raising a child costs a certain amount, and if the child dies, that effort is wasted. Plus their place of work loses a trained employee. Plus everyone they know works less efficiently because they are miserable or scared. ,So the cost is measurable. Sorry to be so cold and calculating, but I want to show that calculating costs is good: if we can prove the cost, then we can prove the benefit of good behavior, and pay people the market rate.

The point is that we don't need charity, we need good auditing. With good auditing (did anyone say "land rent?"), good behavior is automatically rewarded. So there is no need for strange offers from wealthy men, and no need for westerners to wring their hands in despair. Everyone would behave well because it was in their interest to do so. In doing so they create more and more wealth for society, and everybody wins.

why land rent is inevitable

In today's news, China has backed off a violent land grab, after video was shown all over the world. Information makes all the difference. Remember the American home video of cops beating up a black man? Or the pictures of napalmed children from Vietnam? Or the pictures of Nazi death camps, or tanks in Czechoslovakia, or hooded prisoners in Abu Ghraib? We don't accept stuff that we used to accept. Information makes a real difference, and available information is increasing. The world is moving in the right direction:

“The Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (Sipri.org) and Canada’s Project Ploughshares both annually track
the number of armed conflicts taking place worldwide. ... In short, there
are fewer wars, fewer arms sales and fewer people dying, each year, than at any
time since the second world war." (source)

Up until a hundred years ago, genocide was considered acceptable to most military folks in the west, the class system was rigidly in place, women had few rights, and everyone thought that was normal. But as people get more information they see the benefits of behaving better. And that is why, even though it might take generations, I am confident that justice will increase until it is applies to everything.

the real danger from terrorism

I live in Britain, and what scares me about the recent bombings is that it helps the government gain more power over the people.

There are hundreds of millions of people in western Europe and north America. Tens of thousand, probably millions, have been in trouble with the police at some time. Unless the police are perfect, a percentage will be falsely imprisoned, falsely beaten up, or even wrongly executed. Given the number involved, a small percentage change in police powers will hurt far more innocent people than bombers could ever reach.

the bombers have got the message

For the past two weeks the media has been blasting any would-be bomber with a very clear message: "If you want to get our attention, just set off an explosion! Even a small one will do. We don't care about arguments, we don't care about other forms of death or suffering, we only care about explosions." Looks like the bombers got the message. Today they didn't even need to kill anyone - just a few detonators, and it's all over the news.

What is really scary is the danger that our country will be turned into a police state. The odds that a bomber will inconvenience you are almost zero. But in a police state, the odds that the police will inconvenience you are about a hundred percent.

I will leave the last word to a lady who was interviewed on the radio this afternoon. She was attending a hospital in London. Apparently, the police thought a suspect might be in the hospital. The lady said she had never seen so many police before. And they were rushing through the hospital carrying guns (in Britain, the police seldom carry guns). She said it was scary. Very scary indeed.

the Internet as model government

In today's news, eBay makes another ton of money. Notice that billions of dollars depend on the Internet, yet there is no central authority. The whole purpose of the Internet is to be decentralized (and thus it could survive a war that took out key centers).

Actually the Internet does have a central authority: the Internet Society (ISOC). A small group of people control the Internet. So what stops them turning into a tyranny? Because business understands the benefits of information flowing freely. If some parts of ISOC step out of line, they are replaced. If there is the slightest hint of ISOC becoming corrupt, some other organization will appear, and business will migrate to that instead. There is no need for a powerful president backed up by an army.

A world land rent authority could run in the same way. ISOC provides an efficient market in information. A land rent authority would provide an efficient market in everything else. For example, if I wanted to set up a new nation, then a land rent authority would find the shortest route by connecting stock exchanges, lawyers and security firms, just as ISOC connects computers, energy companies and cables.

Freedom is possible, without relying on particular nation states. The Internet provides a model.

is democracy really democratic?

In today's news, politicians in America are choosing the judges who will decide right and wrong for the next few years. And the Iraqi government is proposing a constitution that will limit women's rights. We call it democracy, but what the people want is severely controlled at every stage by what the leaders want. Anyone who tries to make real progress has a very long and difficult struggle, and will usually fail.

It would be so much better if individuals could just choose their own government and Constitution and legal system, just as they choose their food and their friends. We would soon see which ideas were the best. And for the first time we would have genuine freedom (you get the government you want), responsibility (you pay the real price), and transparency (we can see which ideas really work).

brewers and governments

Some business news for a change: a big US brewer is buying a Columbian brewer. A rival from the Netherlands almost got there first. Earlier, another US company bought a Chinese brewer. This is just normal business, and it illustrates an important point: powerful, stable businesses do not depend on any particular nation.

Another point to note is that business rewards stability. If a nation looks stable, business will invest there, If not, business looks elsewhere.

Another point is that when a business does badly, there is no bloodshed, it is simply bought out by another business, and work continues as normal. And in a healthy economy, if the business behaves badly, workers and consumers can go elsewhere.

Government is a form of business. We need it just like we need food or insurance or doctors. Good business does not rely on fixed national boundaries. Business works better when boundaries are not fixed. If we allow nations to start and expand and contract and end, then business will reward stability, and good governments will replace bad governments. The world would be a much better place.

Afghan warlord

I was listening to some interviews about the Afghan warlord found guilty in a British court. Some important points did not come across in the online article.

First, it was relatively easy for the BBC to find this guy. They had reporters who knew a lot of people in Afghanistan. so they knew the suspect had come to London. And there was a fair sized Afghan community in London, so they knew where this guy was living. It was not as hard as you might think (according to an interview with John Simpson).

Second, the police do not normally investigate this kind of thing. Sure, if somebody else does the work, they will follow up, but they have to prioritize British villains.

Which brings us to land rent (you knew it would, wouldn't you?) The principle behind land rent is you own the results of your actions. The BBC spent a modest amount of money, and created a much greater amount of wealth (by making everyone feel safer, and discouraging future warlords). The BBC created wealth. But they won't be able to benefit from it, apart from having one more news story. So they probably won't do it again.

Now imagine a world where anyone who knew the location of a villain could claim the full value of handing him in. Not just some token reward, but the full market rate. What a great incentive! A lot more bad guys would be caught and the world would be a safer place.

medicaid fraud

Medicaid fraud, in New York alone, is costing billions of dollars. This is just one of endless examples of areas where good government makes a difference. Some governments have more fraud, some have less. Some help their people more, some don't. Some create a beautiful environment, some don't. Some are efficient, some aren't. We simply need competition to see who works the best.

The current system - everyone has to choose just one government for everybody - seems designed for inertia and frustration. Imagine if other services worked that way. Imagine if everyone had to choose one store to shop from, and that store got all the sales for the next four years. Westerners would call it crazy, and grumble about the inefficiencies of communism. Yet that is exactly how we run our governments! I say give people a choice, let them start their own rival government agencies (whether for welfare, detective work, or whatever) and we will soon find a hundred better ways to run things.

blog name change

I just noticed that someone else already uses the title "How to save the world." I was thinking of changing this title, to something more specific. So welcome to my new blog: "land rent will save the world."

conservatives and liberals

Since I have rambled on about libertarians, anarchists, Georgists, and property, I may as well look at the mainstream views.

Most people are not philosophers and take no interest in philosophy. Life is short, and evolution favors survivors, not thinkers. Most people's ideas are simply not thought out. For example, they oppose theft, but support living in a country that was stolen from others. They say they support justice, but spend almost zero time examining whether their political and economic decisions are consistent with that view.

This is taken from a review of “Winning Elections: Political Campaign Management, Strategy & Tactics” (M. Evans; $49.95). (The review was "The Unpolitical Animal" by Louis Menand). Read it and weep.

Converse [the grandaddy of political experts, who began his studies in the 1960s
but the results still hold true] claimed that only around ten per cent of the
public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He
named these people “ideologues,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics
but that they have a reasonable grasp of “what goes with what”—of how a set of
opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy. Non-ideologues may use
terms like “liberal” and “conservative,” but Converse thought that they
basically don’t know what they’re talking about, and that their beliefs are
characterized by what he termed a lack of “constraint”: they can’t see how one
opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out
other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government
programs).

...after analyzing the results of surveys conducted over time, in
which people tended to give different and randomly inconsistent answers to the
same questions, Converse concluded that “very substantial portions of the
public” hold opinions that are essentially meaningless—off-the-top-of-the-head
responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying
set of principles.

...Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people
don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on.

...These people might as well base their political choices on the weather.
And, in fact, many of them do.

...In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton
political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that “2.8
million people voted against Al Gore in states were too dry or too wet” as a
consequence of that year’s weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that in
2000 these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him
the election.

...The most widely known fact about George H. W. Bush in the
1992 election was that he hated broccoli. Eighty-six per cent of likely voters
in that election knew that the Bushes’ dog’s name was Millie; only fifteen per
cent knew that Bush and Clinton both favored the death penalty.

...“The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field,” the economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter wrote, in
1942. “He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as
infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.
His thinking is associative and affective.” And Fiorina quotes a passage from
the political scientist Robert Putnam: “Most men are not political animals. The
world of public affairs is not their world. It is alien to them..."

Georgists and property

I am a Georgist - that is, I believe in the ideas of Henry George. The main idea of land rent, anyway. But I disagree with other Georgists on philosophical foundations. Since the last two posts were about property, it might be useful to clarify these things again. As usual, see the land rent web site for details.

• Georgism assumes that all humans have equal rights to land. It sounds like a good idea, but there is no rational foundation for this. It can even be dangerous. Any system that distributes wealth that is unearned, must steal that wealth from those who really earned it..
• Georgism treats land and man-made capital as fundamentally different. I disagree. All value comes from human preferences, regardless of whether that value is expressed in land, ideas, or whatever.

These two errors lead to unnecessarily complicated ideas. The idea of land rent is really very simple. If you cause something valuable, you own it. It's as simple as that.

anarchists and property

More comments on the mutualist blog. I believe that everyone should have the freedom to choose their own government. And cooperatives are excellent models for how businesses can run. So I have a lot of sympathy for anarchists. But we disagree on the issue of property.

Every anarchist I have read says that we should own the land we work. I don't see any philosophically sound reason for that. And there are serious practical objections as well. Suppose we all owned what we worked:

• What if I decided to work our neighbor's lands? Would I then own his?
• What if my land is more fertile than my neighbors? So I work an hour a day and get fat, while he works 18 hours a day and starves. Is this fair?
• What if I invent a tractor. Does that count as working? What if I remote control my tractor from a hut at the side of the field? What if my hut is a hundred miles away, with a giant TV and I control a hundred tractors? Who draws the line?

Plainly an anarchist system would need some kind of government that would make decisions that people did not like. But these decisions would also be fundamentally inefficient.

Let's imagine that I am a lousy farmer but a fantastic organizer. I could organize people to be wealthier, happier, and so on. This would be hard work, perhaps unpopular, and highly risky, so why should I bother? I create vast profits tied to the land, but cannot benefit from my work, beyond what little I could persuade the owners/workers to pay in advance. So nobody takes risks with new ideas.

So even if we did create our anarchist utopia, it could not survive even in competition with capitalism, let alone a better system. In summary, I like anarchists, but I don't agree with their views on land ownership. I prefer the idea that property equals causality - see the web site for details.

libertarians and property

I've been reading the excellent mutualist blog. In "Rothbard on Feudalism and Land Reform," the author highlights the key problem with libertarianism.

I agree with libertarians that all the world's problems can be solved if we start from an absolute belief in property, but I disagree with them over their definition of property. I find their definition to be irrational (it has no philosophical basis) and corrupt (it rewards thieves). Rothbard's story show the corruption: if someone obtains land by violence, or the person they bought it from obtained it by violence, most libertarians would say the person can keep their ill-gotten gains After all, isn't that how America got its lands originally?

That is why I cannot be a libertarian, even though my views are libertarian in so many other ways.

Iran, Iraq, and Europe

Iran and Iraq are getting closer. This is part of a global process: Nations want more power. So they make alliances with other nations. But in doing so, they have to cope with groups that have traditionally had different views. So they must compromise and be flexible. So far from making a giant, iron clad super-state, we see more and more freedom at the local level.

For example, I live in Scotland. The Scottish Nationalist Party wants independence from England, but England will never allow it. However, England is now part of Europe, and Europe is more confident and more used to compromise. So the SNP has the policy goal of "Independence Within Europe." Large superstates make local independence more likely, not less.

This is just one way that "choose your own government" could evolve. There are several other routes - see the land rent site for details.

Hawaiian sovereignty

Hawaiians are likely to be given more freedom. This illustrates one of the ways that "choose your own government" could come about.

Choosing your own government is a key part of the land rent site. But how do you persuade governments to give people freedom? Hawaii shows one solution. If a government is sufficiently powerful (like America), it may feel safe in giving a tiny bit of freedom to some distant part (like Hawaii), in return for popularity or convenience.

Each freedom is a very tiny step, but if it can be shown to be harmless, and to benefit the parent government, it will be followed by more tiny steps. Each tiny step may not give obvious benefits. But we need to keep our eye on the eventual goal: economic justice - and hence freedom.

"lies, damned lies, and statistics"

This morning we have another example of exaggerating the (very tiny) threat from bombers. Today's biggest Washington Post headline is Suicide Bombings Rise In Number, Global Span. Sounds big and scary, right? But look at the details:

"[the London bombings] marked the first time that suicide bombers had
successfully mounted an attack in Western Europe."

So the total death toll from suicide bombers, for the whole of western Europe, in all of history, is about 55. This is terrible for the families involved, as is any painful or unexpected death. But it does not figure on the list of "top one hundred unpleasant deaths." Probably not even in the top one thousand. Where are our priorities?

let the prisoner choose

Once more, justice is rejected in favor of convenience. Civilian courts have many checks and balances. Why? Because experience has shown that without those checks and balances, innocent people are condemned, and guilty people go free.

One day that innocent person might be you. Or the guilty person, wrongly freed, might come and get you. So what can we do? The simple answer is to let the accused choose their own court and judge. (The big answer is land rent, but here I am only looking at one narrow area.)

If we don't let prisoners choose their own judges, then we admit that judges will come to different conclusions. In other words, some will free guilty men, and some will condemn innocent men. If we let them choose, then we provide pressure to make our system truly fair. Until then, there is no pressure for fairness.

Of course, every decision has financial costs. the accused, by creating that cost, is liable for the cost. This would create a pressure to choose the most efficient (lowest cost) judge. So market forces drive down the price of justice.

Society gets a more just system. The accused gets a fairer trial. And the whole system costs less. Everybody wins.

Israel wins again

Israelis won't let Palestinians be the top killers.

Take this week for example. Palestinians killed six Israeli civilians. If we ignore all the prior history, we might conclude that the Palestinians are the bad guys here. But Israel cannot allow that!

If the Palestinians kill a certain number of innocents civilians, then Israel must kill three times that. Palestinians killed 6 Israeli civilians, so Israel must kill at more than 18 (this time, at least 12 Palestinian civilians, plus another 7 people that they call guilty without any kind of trial).

Similar numbers can be seen over any period of recent history. Israel seems obsessed with being "top killer."

trafficking in stolen goods

Bush Proposes Ceding Federal Land to District - but who gave him the land in the first place? Was it theirs to give? And who created its value? Was the land (or its value) created by Bush, or his government, or their predecessors? If not, it is stolen.

Why do we waste time chasing petty thieves when the biggest thieves are allowed to run the country? And this is not an attack on Bush in particular - theft is the basis of every modern economy, no matter who is in power.

madness at noon

Yesterday at 12 noon, at my place of work, we had a two minute silence to remember the dead of the London bombings. Apparently this was repeated not just through Britain, but throughout Europe. We have given the bombers exactly what they wanted - they brought the whole of Europe to a standstill. Note that we chose not to remember the dead of road accidents, murders, cancer, etc. And we chose not to do anything that would reduce publicity for the bombers.

We give the bombers exactly what they want - maximum publicity, maximum fear, maximum disruption. Yet we claim to oppose them. How can this be? Evolution provides an answer. Evolution does not care what we think. It only cares what we do.

Politicians who spread fear get elected. Politicians who spread comfortable good news do not get elected. (Statistically, the average western person is safer now than at any time in history, but that won't get you any votes.) So the successful politicians are the ones who hate terror, yet act in ways that the bombers love. Ironic, eh?

Indian lands

I try to comment only on the day's main headline, but the headlines are usually the same and I hate to be repetitive. So looking further down the page, what do we find? U.S. Berated Over Indians' Deal Just one quote from the judge in this case:

"the entire record in this case tells the dreary story of Interior's degenerate tenure as Trustee-Delegate for the Indian trust, a story shot through with bureaucratic blunders, flubs, goofs and foul-ups, and peppered with scandals, deception, dirty tricks and outright villainy, the end of which is nowhere in sight."

Indian lands. You can't get a better argument for why we need land rent. Land rent is the only sane way to allocate land. Without land rent, we get these insane and bloody land grabs, endless arguing over "natural" rights, people claiming ownership of land they did not create, and injustice piled on injustice forever after.

update on recent posts

Another news item illustrates our fixation with terrorism. Yesterday, at least 120 people were killed in a Pakistan rail accident.

"One witness told AFP news agency: "It's a painful scene. There are bodies
scattered all over. "People are crying, fathers are looking for children,
husbands for their wives and brothers for their sisters." "

This gets less attention than a bomb attack that killed 50. The bombers must be pleased.

On another topic, I almost did not post the "worst case scenario" message. Let me repeat that the most likely cause of the London bombing was the "crazy fanatic" scenario. I don't want to be labeled a conspiracy theorist. Which is strange, because most major business and government decisions are made in secret, and the most important decisions are kept on a "need to know" basis until such time as it doesn't matter who knows. In other words, the whole world runs on conspiracies.

Anyway, at the close of the item I referred to the Lavon affair, where Israeli agents created a "terrorist" incident to blame on the Arabs. Conspiracy sites can point to many other apparently fake terrorist events, but of course these claims are strongly denied by the governments in question. So it is difficult to point to cases where everyone agrees it happened. In the US, "Operation Northwoods" is the nearest thing to a smoking gun. That plan was never carried out. if it was, you can be sure that the papers would have never been released. So we can continue to tell ourselves it would never happen.

Let me repeat (again) I do not think it is likely that our governments (or their agencies) had any hand in these attacks. But the laws on secrecy mean we simply cannot know for sure.

brown trout and roads

The Washington Post's top story (on the web this morning) is a major road that threatens environmental damage. Major decisions like this require environmental assessments. That is a good thing. But under our present system, these assessments are highly flawed:

1. How do you compare highly complicated choices where every decision affects every other decision?
2. How do you measure value when someone can make a fortune by dumping waste or monopolizing land, but peace and harmony have no market value?

Land rent, if fully embraced, will fix those problems.

1. If we allow people to choose their own form of government, we create numerous real alternative communities with different strategies and different value systems. Each community has clearly defined borders, so it is easy to compare the results of one strategy with another.
2. The freedom to move between communities means we can calculate the market value of each decision by looking at property values.
3. Nobody can benefit from monopolizing land or dumping waste, so there are no market distortions.

So land rent lets us quickly judge the good from the bad. Imagine a world where good decisions were obvious - imagine the exponential improvement in all areas, year after year. That is what land rent offers.

the best way to find the truth

Today's top news story (in the Washington Post and New York Times) is about Karl Rove, and did he do something wrong? The story talks of the difficulty of finding the truth. The same issue arises in every news item in every newspaper every day. Why?

1. Everyone limits the amount of information they release.
2. Everyone spins the information to support their side.
3. The total amount of information is overwhelming and often contradictory.

This will always be true, so people will always disagree on the most important issues, even though we may agree on details. So we need a better approach. Let Rove's supporters get on with their work - stop bugging them. And let his critics run the government how THEY would like it run. We will soon see which side is smart, which side has thew right priorities, which side has the moral high ground.

But how do we split up government? Isn't splitting up government a very, very bad idea? What if some people have crazy ideas? How do we avoid chaos? You know my answer to that. But I will wait for a more suitable news item to show how it will work in practice.

Srebrenica war criminals

Today marks ten years since the massacre at Srebrenica. Most of the suspects are still at large. Many of the local people consider them as heroes. This illustrates the problem with forcing different people together instead of letting them have their own form of government.

If each group could have its own government, it would soon be apparent which groups cooperate and which groups do not. Cooperation leads to trade which leads to wealth. Those who distrust the west would find that no westerners wanted to invest - it is either difficult to trade with them or just bad PR. Hence the market would provide a real cash price to hiding a suspect. It would also make the suspect easier to find as they would have fewer places to hide.

So support dries up (the hero is a liability), suspects are caught (fewer places to hide), wealth increases (the value of cooperation becomes obvious), and everybody wins.

lives we value, lives we don't

Just a quick state-the-obvious post. Last week, 30 British people were killed by bombs (the figure has since been revised to around 50, but the first figure was 33). Four days later, all the main news services are still covering it prominently. Yesterday, a similar number were killed in a Baghdad bombing (initial reports say 30). Only the Washington Post bothered to report it with any prominence. When a wealthy person is killed, web sites all over the world have prominent messages of condolence. But when an Iraqi gets killed, its gets barely a mention. No web sites showed solidarity in their hour of grief. And of course no mention at all of the thirty to fifty thousand people who starved to death yesterday.

Just stating the obvious.

making deals with the enemy

In today's news, North Korea is entering nuclear talks with the west. North Korea, remember, probably ranks number one in the west's list of evil nations. Yet they are willing to talk. Let's talk about evil groups for a while.

For any group to be successful, they need to cooperate and compromise. I'm not talking about individuals - a serial killer can do a great deal of evil without any help. But for organizations, by definition they need to compromise and cooperate to survive. Ironically, their words may say the precise opposite, because strong leaders need a simple message that everyone understands. So the words may say "no compromise!" but the actions say something different.

I have found this to be the case with every "evil" group I have ever seen. From the Nazis to suicide cults to Stalinist Russia - all of them. The more they compromise (usually in secret), the longer they survive. The less they compromise, the quicker they destroy themselves. It's called realpolitik. Which leads to the conclusion that, no matter how bad things may seem, if the enemy is organized, we can talk with them. I try to keep these blogs as short as possible, so let's just look at North Korea. Maybe another day we can talk about other "evil" groups.

North Korea's economy is in a real mess and has been for years. So why hasn't it collapsed? For the answer, visit http://www.policyreview.org/oct04/eberstadt_print.html Here is a summary. North Korea has not collapsed because... (drum roll please) George W. Bush's government has been supporting it. In public, we are mortal enemies. In private, we (wisely) cooperate where we can. Here are the key points:

The USSR stopped subsidies in 1991. The already bad NK economy got worse - leading to famine in the mid 1990s (this was the only industrialized nation ever to have a famine). The terrible trade levels with the west - even before 1991 - were the result of a deliberate policy to avoid CocaColanisation. But since then things have got a little better:

• There has been a small improvement in exports
• China sells NK goods that will never be paid for
• South Korea secretly sends money (lots of family connections)
• Illegal trade - counterfeiting, arms, drugs
• Following America's lead, other nations have transferred money in various forms (e.g. high fees for tourism, inspection, plus humanitarian aid, etc.). - including significant amounts since GWB got his job.

Why has the west done this? Uniquely among all nations, NK treats its military as a revenue generator and key to economic success: partly this is through illegal arms sales, but partly, the threat of nuclear weapons is what keeps the aid coming! This might be a good idea, it might not - certainly if it avoids nuclear war and allows secret diplomacy, it is a very small price to pay.

Finally, there is evidence of small but real economic reforms: markets and billboards are appearing, and money is becoming important (most people probably survived by barter during the famine). So in ten years time, NK might be like China is now, and things will slowly, very slowly, get better for everyone.

In public we talk tough. But in private we cooperate where we can, and this should slowly remove the threat of global nuclear war. Yes, you can cooperate with your enemies, and yes it does work.

Kenya's all-female village

I've been trying out different news services, and am very impressed with the Washington Post (thanks for the recommendation, Randy). This morning's top story is about Kenya's all-female village of Umjoa.

Two days after the London Bombing, this is a more important story. Nothing much has changed with the London story, but this Kenyan story gives hope for how we can fix this crazy world. To summarize, the Kenyan women wanted a different kind of society. So they found some unwanted land and started one. The local men tried to start a competing village next door, but in a fair competition the women did better. This illustrates what I mean about "choose your own government" - let everyone chose their own way of living and see which one does best on the open market!

Of course, the Kenyans relied on having unwanted land (or very low cost land). This kind of land is not available in most modern countries. And that is why we need land rent, to provide a healthy low cost market in land. Then we can have real freedom and real choice, just as in the Kenyan example.

who creates the terror?

Terror and danger are not the same thing.

Bombs can kill us suddenly and unexpectedly, and are terrifying to those directly involved. The same can be said for car crashes. And natural disasters. And new virulent illnesses. And many other dangers. So why are bombs uniquely terrifying?

Global terror is not natural. Curiosity is. When something bad happens, those directly involved are terrified, but bystanders - after getting to relative safety - either watch or help. But everyone else just goes on with their business. Look at London on Thursday: most people just got back to work, more or less as usual.

So why do we talk about bomb attacks as if they are sources of global terror? The answer is pretty clear from any newspaper or TV report: the idea is encouraged by our leaders. They repeat the words "terrorist" and "terror" at every opportunity. News headlines ask if the bombing will change everything. Politicians line up to say that the terrorists will not destroy our culture and values. The idea of extraordinary terror and extraordinary significance originates with, and is promoted by, our leaders.

Life creates the dangers. But the politicians create the terror.

how to end terrorism

This blog is called "how to save the world" and the news (here in Britain) is still dominated by the London bombing. So it might be helpful to point out that we don't have to have any terrorism if we don't want it.

Most authorities try to prevent terrorism by gaining more information about citizens. This can only work if they have a LOT of information. There are two ways to achieve this. The Stalinist way (you use propaganda, backed by massive force), or the land rent way.

Land rent leads to people choosing their own government, at an individual level. This leads to a very high level of trust. High levels of trust makes crime of any kind almost impossible.

worst case scenario

I do not know who planted the bombs in London. Neither does anyone else (except the people who planted them). Even if we devote vast amounts of money to the topic, we may never know. Remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction fiasco? Intelligence can be wrong.

All we know for sure is that two groups will gain from the bombings. First, anyone who wants publicity. The media gives maximum publicity to anyone who can kill another person in a dramatic way. There is no doubt that crazy individuals have used bombs in the past, so this option needs no further comment. Given that there is an infinite supply of crazy individuals, this must be the most likely cause.

And the worst case scenario? The second group who benefits is any government that wants more power over its people. And freedom to invade other countries, spend less money on Africa, more money on defense, etc. Governments routinely spend billions creating weapons, and using those weapons to kill people in wars. They routinely calculate that killing certain people is in the long term interests of the country. Heck, every time they approve a budget for the health service, they gamble with lives - "if we did this, X people would die, but if we did that, then Y people would die." Like it or not, governments make decisions that result in the deaths of some of their own citizens, so that the biggest overall number can survive. It is a good thing they do.

Would a politician make a similar calculation regarding bombs? No - it is unthinkable. But there are secret parts of the system for whom the unthinkable is their daily work. But surely we can trust them, right? Well remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction (gulf war 2). And the babies thrown out of incubators (gulf war 1). And the Tripoli radio transmitter (that prompted the bombing of Libya). Etc., etc. The first casualty of war is truth. The second casualty is human lives.

Remember the Lavon affair.

London Bombing

Today, about fifty thousand people died of hunger in poor countries. And fifty people died in bomb attacks in London. Guess which one made the world news.

Bombing is unusual and dramatic. Naturally it features on the news. But I fear that it will influence policy. Even worse, it may give our leaders another excuse to bomb others. We always bomb others far more than others bomb us.

Death by bombing is horrific and distressing. So is death by cancer. Or death in a road accident. Or death in many ways. Every year, tens of thousands of people die in horrific and distressing ways. Bomb attacks barely register in the statistics. I wish we would base our priorities on human needs, instead of glorifying terrorists and giving them attention they do not deserve.

compare and contrast

Two news items today - compare and contrast. In the first story, President Bush says he cannot adopt Kyoto because it would cripple the nation's economy. Everyone agrees that America's economy would not be destroyed by Kyoto, but critics say it would not grow as much as people want. The headline: "President stands firm."

In the second story, two men are convicted of killing a family. This was not a crime of passion, but a simple business decision in order to increase illegal profits. The detective "said the crime was the worst he had ever dealt with, saying the family died purely because of financial greed".

The first story involves 160,000 deaths a year. The second story involved five deaths. Compare and contrast.

"increasingly..."

I've been checking out some different news sources, and saw my favorite junk news word: "increasingly." First rate journalists almost never use the word, but sloppy hacks increasingly use the word to turn an old topic into news.

Here is today's offender: "Africa Tackles Graft, With Billions in Aid in Play : Increasingly, donors to African nations have watched their aid vanish into a sinkhole of fraud and waste."

Increasingly? I thought it was decreasingly. Third World African officials have ALWAYS squandered aid, but charities increasingly find ways to control and audit the use of their funds. Yet we increasingly focus on the sins of the Africans, rather than our own sins. We could solve poverty by removing our own barriers to trade, but we increasingly reject that option.

the purpose of death

Saw Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" last week. My favorite part was the last line. It was something about how mankind has built up resistance to disease for billions of years. And so, "no death was ever in vain." I love that line. Forget about the silly plot, that line is profound. It is scientifically true. Every single death affects the species - either because that person dies to help others, or the others learn from those mistakes, or that person simply does not have any offspring. Every single death has made us what we are.

Death has given us a lot more than resistance to germs. It has given us evolution. It has given us reason. Without death, nothing would matter, there would be no good, no bad, and no reason for consciousness. Without death we would still be amoebas floating in the sea. No, worse than that, we would be random mixtures of atoms.

Death has given us everything we value. There is a time to live, and a time to die. And nobody ever dies in vain.

can you recommend a news site?

Every morning I check the BBC for the latest headlines. But I don't want to only rely on one news source, so I also check CNN. I try to avoid partisan services like Fox, or the smaller niche suppliers. But nearly every morning, CNN seems to ignore the big news (that is, news that affects the lives of millions of people). For example, this morning the top BBC story is the G8 summit (again) -a real opportunity to make a serious dent in world poverty. But CNN does not mention it anywhere on their front page. Instead, we have yet another human interest story - a great big photograph of an eight year old girl reunited with her parents. This is very nice for her, but what about the thousands of eight year old girls who are separated from their parents every day due to war, famine and disease?

Can anyone recommend a major US news channel that gives priority to the big topics? I am increasingly frustrated with CNN.

how can we call ourselves moral?

Tonight I am angry. Tonight on TV, Bob Geldof was telling us some of the horror stories from Africa. This site is one of many that reported the stuff he talked about:
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2004/10/child_soldiers.php Only read it if you have a strong stomach.

Look at that story, then look at our priorities. We invade Iraq for doing much less. Our news services talk about far less important things. At a personal level, we spend our time on jobs and friends and churches and entertainment. We just ignore the really bad stuff.

Those are the moral choices we all make, every day. To look away, to do something else. Please excuse me if I am a little cynical.

happy Dependence Day

It's July 4th, American Independence Day! So spare a thought for all those groups that are desperate to gain independence from America, but are denied that freedom.

All nations are hypocrites. They all want independence for themselves, but none will give it to others. Read Footnotes to History for examples of peoples who claimed independence and were immediately crushed.

PS July 4th is also my birthday! Hey, this is my blog, so yes, it is relevant. :)

CNN's priorities

I started this blog nine days ago, and every day I check the headlines from CNN and BBC websites. I find some curious priorities.

This week saw the build up to the G8 meeting, accompanied by large anti-poverty protests. Several times in the past 9 days, G8 was the top BBC story. It has never been the top CNN story (unless I just happened to click at the wrong time of the day?) Granted, the G8 meeting is taking place in the UK, but a quick check on other country news sites shows they give it a reasonably high priority. But not on CNN. It is there, but not a priority. CNN has one huge news item (usually human interest) and the rest are relatively small. The page is usually dominated by someone's face, often a child or a teenager.

If one billion people foreigners are hungry, and a single wealthy person got lost in the woods, guess which story would get top billing?

aid from Africa

This morning's main headline on the BBC is the first Live8 concert. And a couple of days ago, G.W.Bush announced that aid to Africa would "double." He promised to ringfence 1.2 billion dollars for African aid. So let's talk about aid, or more specifically, movements of wealth.

African nations, in general, do not do well financially. When any other business does badly, it shrinks, its customers go elsewhere one by one, and so the business is forced to either change or be bought by a competitor. Nobody dies. But our current system will not allow that. Failing nations just get worse and worse, the people are trapped inside their borders, and millions starve.

When a country is failing, it has less money to pay its people. Let us imagine that country A pays its people an average of five dollars an hour, and country B pays fifty cents per hour. For citizen B to earn a day of country A's production, he needs needs 50 dollars, so he needs to work for 100 hours. For citizen A to earn a day of country B's production, she only needs 5 dollars, so she needs to work one hour. So the pay difference of 10 to 1 produces a trade difference of 100 to one.

For poor countries to survive, they must trade with the rich countries. But the 100 to 1 disparity means that whenever they trade, the rich countries act like giant vacuum cleaners, sucking out anything of value from the poor country.

Let us look at President Bush's 1.2 billion pledge. Currently, a a typical African country (like Botswana) spends 50 million dollars a year in America . Nigeria spends around 10 billion. The whole of third world Africa probably spends maybe 30 billion. America spends much less in the other direction. These figures are measured in American dollars and American sweat. Measured in terms of African work and pay, multiply that by one hundred. This is like 3 THOUSAND billion dollars of blood and sweat being squeezed out of an already hungry continent every year.

So Bush's 1.2 billion is largely irrelevant. Measured in terms of blood and sweat, the wealth all flows in one direction. Even if we stick to global market prices, our financial power and their helplessness means we benefit in a hundred different ways - a topic for another time. The bottom line is, whichever way you measure it, they aid us. We don't aid them.

free markets? What free markets?

This morning the BBC's main headline is EU farm subsidies. (The US has farm subsidies as well, so it's relevant to both sides of the pond.) It just goes to remind us that we really do not have a free market where it matters most: in food and people. There is no free market in food (we have subsidies, import restrictions, etc.). And there is no free market in people (most people cannot choose their own country).

A partially free market is not a free market at all. How can someone compete when they are chained, or their competitor is subsidized?

It is a simple point but one that is worth remembering. The world has not yet tried free markets where it matters - with food and people. Whatever else we blame for poverty and inequality, we cannot blame the market.