Sunday, June 5, 2011

June 6th is Tax Freedom Day.....

Tax Freedom Day in Canada is Monday, June 6th, 2011, two days later than last year. Many libertarian bloggers, writers, and philosophers will tell you that taxes effectively make us slaves because your taxes are spent largely without your direct input, and often in ways you would not prefer. Slaves don't have much say in their lives either, but here in Canada we are only slaves for the first five months of the year. This gives us the illusion of freedom.
How many of you out there are in favour of continuing to bomb Libya with pricey "smart bombs" so that we may protect Libyans from Gaddafi? Not I! Of course that justification is a ruse, the primary reason NATO wants Gaddafi out of Libya is to ensure that oil continues to flow to our NATO partners in Southern Europe. Was their even a vote in Parliament about this issue? I don't recall, the point is your taxes are being used over there, on the shores of Tripoli as the song goes.
The Fraser Institute does a good job of reminding us each year of our impending freedom from slavery, here is where to find the latest reminder. They have even come up with a little song for this year:


Just so you don't feel you have no say at all, the National Post has a survey that you might try. Who knows it might influence the government in how they spend the taxes the stole took from you this year. The survey has its own ambiguities, especially if you have libertarian leanings, give it a try, here.   

Friday, June 3, 2011

Copyleft and right

Imagine if someone could copyright the idea of automobile, computer, or airplane. Those people would be wealthy beyond dreams, wouldn't they? Well, maybe they would, if they actually did a good job of producing and marketing, then sold their tangible idea (product) to willing customers. The good news is, none of those ideas were actually patented, these were just ideas that were "intellectual," in the mind, like the idea of soup or bread.
Ownership of intellectual property is a disputed issue amongst libertarians. When should someone be accused of theft of intellectual property? In fact is it possible to make such an accusation? Is it possible to own an idea to the exclusion of everyone else?
Do yourself a favour and follow this link to Sheldon Richman's short article called Slave Labour and Intellectual Property, then check the Freeman Online for this longer piece, and all will be revealed and you too can join in the discussion.  

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Another supposed ecological disaster averted

Can an environmental advocacy organization ever admit that it has made an error (or worse)? Apparently not.
The David Suzuki Foundation has claimed for the past 10 years that eating farmed salmon is dangerous and that just farming salmon adversely affects wild salmon by spreading sea lice to them, and decimating the wild salmon populations. Both claims are at best exaggerated, and at worst just plain false according to Vivian Krause, a Vancouver researcher, writer, and blogger. 

Ms. Krause's most recent article was in the Financial Post. I have written about this before here. Ms. Krause's column points out that The Suzuki Foundation has been quietly removing all references regarding their 10 year battle against farmed salmon. Why? Is it because its wrong, or worse is it because they have accepted funds from lobbying organizations to dissuade people from eating farmed salmon for the purposes of marketing?
Thanks to Ms. Krauses' investigative work, we can get a peek inside the environmentalists cabal, to see just how they get their money and realize that science can be just as shady as politics. Check out this video:  


Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Natural selection should guide economics

Look carefully at that picture. See the moth? There are actually two of them.
In the world of evolutionary biology, the story of the peppered moth has almost iconic status when it is used to explain natural selection might work. It's fairly easy to explain the selective advantage of camouflage, especially for something as helpless as a moth on tree bark.
In high school biology, illustrating the concept of natural selection can be this simple, or a bit more difficult using the Hardy-Weinberg Principle of shifting allele frequencies. Either way the concept of Natural Selection can be used to explain biological evolution. For those who understand this stuff it's fairly clear that it can be used to explain and predict events around evolution. Though many people might think that evolution is random , the truth is, if enough information is known the direction and even possible outcomes may be predicted.
I thought of evolution the instant I read an article by Steven Horwitz in this months issue of The Freeman: Free Markets Are Regulated: The myth of disorder. The article argues for the proposition that unregulated free markets, are in fact regulated by the rules of economics, creating order without design. This is an argument I wholeheartedly support.
Now I'm going to make a sweeping generalization. I suspect that there are many who believe that the Theory of Evolution is the best way yet devised to explain the diversity of life on Earth. Whether natural selection is the primary mechanism, or whether there are several other mechanisms, is not really important. What is important is, that there was no "guiding hand," no "intelligent designer" involved in directing the evolution of those species currently extant. Their very existence was regulated by a complex interaction between environmental conditions, species variability, reproductive rates, and chance. I'm willing to bet that many who believe these ideas about evolution, also believe that governments should regulate the economies of countries, and not leave them to the supposed vagaries of the free market. In other words, many who read the blogs associated with Planet Atheism (which I am happy to be part of), who support the teachings and the truth about evolution, many of you are collectivists, statists, socialists etc. etc.
You believe that somehow science is not involved in economics. I believe economics is a science as much as evolution, and as such, there are rules that can be understood and used to make predictions. Furthermore, to interfere in a free market to my mind, is a bit like believing that a god, or an intelligent designer, somehow can make a few tweaks to improve the process of evolution. While that is not going to happen, governments do interfere in free markets, and Steven Horwitz's article explains that when they do they create disorder and randomness. By "regulating things" the state destroys order.