I walk by the TV at work and on CNN Warner Wolf from Imus in the morning is speaking about the Plaxico Burress case. The host mentions how this has ballooned into more then just a sports star and gun case since you have a doctor who may have tried to cover things up and another player who held the gun along with other aspects. Then he brings up how Bloomberg came out so strongly against Burress and asks Wolf it he was surprised. Wolf replies in a very excited pitch something to the effect:

No I’m not surprised. They passed that law two years ago. You got to follow the law. If we didn’t follow the law there would be chaos.

Chaos? A guy apparently accidentally shot himself. No one else was harmed. There is no victim. It’s not a crime and there certainly would not be chaos if people stopped obeying the stupid, and unconstitutional,  registration laws of NYC. You can’t even purchase ammo without a FID. People can not only purchase ammo freely but purchase handguns freely and carry them on their person both concealed and open in many parts of the nation and there is no chaos. In fact in many places with the strictest gun laws are the highest crime rates. The last story I posted was of a man complaining of chaos and asking for private individuals to pick up arms. These statist positivists appear incapable of seeing even a glimpse of reality.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/…

In the November issue of Liberty magazine I write about one factor that I think reduces the political impact of libertarian-leaning voters: the fact that they’re all over the map about which party or faction represents the lesser of the evils:

One reason why libertarians underperform politically is that they are politically split, not just between radicals and incrementalists, as can happen in any political movement, but also among various political movements — while being too small to influence any of them very much.

It seems to me that libertarians come in several political groupings:

(1) Those who care primarily about free markets and thus support conservative Republicans. Given the candidates on offer, that means helping to move the GOP to the right on social issues (and war and civil liberties) as well as on economic issues. This group would include the Club for Growth, Republican “Leave Us Alone” activist Grover Norquist, many donors to free-market thinktanks, and probably most libertarian-leaning politically active people.

(2) Those who want to make the GOP more socially tolerant and thus support moderate Republicans, which effectively means Republicans who aren’t very free-market. This would include Log Cabin Republicans, pro-choice Republicans, and lots of Wall Street and Silicon Valley businesspeople.

(3) Those who think the GOP is irredeemably bad on social issues and civil liberties and thus support Democrats. This would again include some Silicon Valley businessmen who are pro-entrepreneurship and fiscally conservative but just can’t support a party that is opposed to abortion rights and gay rights. A dramatic example is Tim Gill, the founder of Quark, who calls himself a libertarian but has contributed millions of dollars to Democrats because of Republican opposition to gay rights. There are also broadly libertarian people involved in the ACLU, the drug-reform movement, and other civil libertarian causes.

(4) Those who support the Libertarian Party. They don’t get many votes, but they include a large percentage of libertarian activists.

If only some candidate or movement could bring them all together.

There was/is one. His name is Ron Paul and the movement is now called the Campaign for Liberty. Too bad Cato and Reason and many other libertarians bashed the most libertarian candidate ever to have a real possibility of being nominated to a major party. Making a deal breaker things which happened decades ago and while not always thoroughly explained away for some should have been no more harmful to the campaign than anyone else’s skeletons.

At Paul’s rallies you’d find Democrats and Greens, independents, Republicans and Constitutionalists, voluntarists and anarchists. He has/had broad support. While the support of those described above may not have won Paul the nomination it would have put him far closer. Boaz has only those nitpickers to blame.

http://arstechnica.com/…

Traffic jams are something nearly everyone can relate to. While driving is ideally a communal activity, where people pay attention to each other and follow the rules of the road, most people seem to follow their whims, only occasionally within the confines of common sense. This urge to do what is best for the individual leads to headaches for the group, increasing the total amount of time everyone has to spend on the road.

In a paper set to be published in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, physicists Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong, along with computer scientist Micheal Gastner, look at the result of self-interested drivers traveling on both hypothetical and real-world networks. The abstract describes what happens very clearly:

Uncoordinated individuals in human society pursuing their personally optimal strategies do not always achieve the social optimum, the most beneficial state to the society as a whole. Instead, strategies form Nash equilibria which are often socially suboptimal. Society, therefore, has to pay a price of anarchy for the lack of coordination among its members.

I find a couple major flaws in their analysis.

1. One can not quantify “the most beneficial state to the society as a whole.” The system is too complex. What usually occurs is people ignore or are ignorant of that which they are ignorant of. They ignore the unseen.

2. They mistakenly see the roads and those who drive on them as anarchistic. They are in no such way. The State has forced the road system onto the drivers. They force the licenses, the ‘public transportation’ methods, the HOV lanes, the one ways, even the design of cars through money and energy cost manipulations. The users are being directed. Just because X can take route 1, 2 or 3 does not mean they are free and surely doesn’t indicate any definition of anarchy.

As a result of this coercion the society, the market, is unable to work toward an optimal condition. State civil engineers decide what’s optimal based on their own beliefs without real responsibility. The entrepreneur road owner with a private civil engineer, with their business on the line and competition would find more efficient ways to provide their service incrementally and as a result of customer demand. Such as the analysis done by Youn, Jeong and Gastner.

Of course, issolated, lacking greater knowledge and an inability to change the structure of things will lead to less efficient systems. However, you will always have at least the first two… unless we become assimilated by the Borg. Individuals can only act on the information they have at any one time. Blaiming road congestion on the drivers because they are looking to optimize their route is missing the bigger picture completely. Forcing everyone into some computer calculated and controlled route will lead to (obviously) less freedom and all the ‘unseen’ resulting from that. Culling useless troublesome roads is a good idea but those who are in need of this fix are the problem in the first place. No matter how many of these discoveries they come across, government will always perform them inefficiently when compared to the natural flow of the market.

http://rawstory.com/…

If you thought protests outside 2008’s Democratic National Convention were loud and proud, you ain’t seen nothing yet. So say organizers preparing for the 2008 Republican National Convention, set to take place in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Organizers estimate 50,000 protesters are getting ready to demonstrate outside the RNC, in the largest anti-war protest planned so far this year.

“We have word that people are coming on busses and carpools, people are flying in from all over the country,” said Katrina Plotz, an organizer for an RNC protest group. “We are expecting the police to uphold our right to demonstrate, to speak out against the war.”

AP Correspondent Haven Daley said in a Wednesday news video that it may be difficult keeping the protests peaceful, attributing his ominous prediction to “anarchist groups” which were not named.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

More negative usage of the word anarchist. Those people are generally violent, confused communists. I’d bet that more then half the time the ‘anarchists’ are in fact plants by the police.