Gecko was wrong: It isn’t about greed. It’s about values.

I brought basic economics up in my Deviance class today, on the topic of corporate deviance.

I talked about how organic milk is expensive up North because there is little demand for organic products. Demand comes before prices, not the other way around—demand is value-driven, not price-driven. That is to say, I ‘value’ my health over the monetary price differential between nonorganic and organic milk (whereas, if purchases were exclusively driven by price, as many people conceptualize it, markets would not emerge or dissolve or evolve—they’d stagnate and things like deodorant and tire pressure gauges wouldn’t exist). The argument for the ‘race to the bottom’ relies primarily on a 100% competitive economic model, with absolutely no differentiation, which doesn’t exist (we even have differentiation in the smartphone and car industries, which indicates pretty heavy differentiation, frankly). The FDA’s sanctioning of hormones in milk (with legally required labels indicating no significant difference between organic and nonorganic milk) has the effect of reducing differentiation, as differentiation relies primarily on information about the products being available to consumers; it doesn’t matter how different two products are if they are legally disallowed from informing the consumer about the relative advantages offered by their product.

So the chicken and egg question my peer asked, about whether a healthier diet needs to start with corporations supplying healthier food or the consumers themselves, is just that: a chicken and egg question. Just as anyone who understands basic economics can recognize that supply changes with demand, anyone who understands evolution can understand that the egg came first (excluding the possibility of unethical laboratory experiments resulting in severe genetic mutation).

The rhetoric of self-interest and greed needs to be thrown out in favour of a richer, more illustrative language of values and preference. Humans may be rational, but they aren’t robots.

Why abstention is a politically and morally void argument:

baseballlibertarian:

I’ve wrote about this before but I think it needs repeating. 

Libertarians, anti-statists, and anarchists should all have a common goal, the end the state.  Freedom can only be maximized when there is no government intervention, force, and coercion.  Until then freedom will always be limited. 

But the fact of the matter is the state isn’t very likely to end itself.  Governments are far too powerful, far too many powerful people rely on government, and far too many people rely on the government for handouts. 

Many of the people who want to see the end of the state see participating (voting) in the process as consent to be government.  To which I completely disagree with. 

Voting is no different then self defense.  Libertarians believe in a non-aggression policy.  Force should never be used against another private property and self ownership.  But if your private property and self ownership is being aggressed upon and attack you have all the rights to defend yourself with whatever means possible, even force.  So while we might detest violence it is acceptable to defend yourself with it.  Voting is no difference.  We might detest the state but it is no difference if you try and vote for less government, less taxes, and less coercion.  That isn’t consent in the slightest. 

As Murray Rothbard put it….

Let’s put it this way: Suppose we were slaves in the Old South, and that for some reason, each plantation had a system where the slaves were allowed to choose every four years between two alternative masters. Would it be evil, and sanctioning slavery, to participate in such a choice? Suppose one master was a monster who systematically tortured all the slaves, while the other one was kindly, enforced almost no work rules, freed one slave a year, or whatever. It would seem to me not only not aggression to vote for the kinder master but idiotic if we failed to do so. Of course, there might well be circumstances — say when both masters are similar — where the slaves would be better off not voting in order to make a visible protest — but this is a tactical not a moral consideration. Voting would not be evil but, in such a case, less effective than the protest.

But if it is morally licit and nonaggressive for slaves to vote for a choice of masters, in the same way it is licit for us to vote for what we believe the lesser of two or more evils, and still more beneficial to vote for an [sic] avowedly libertarian candidates.

This is basic economics: Minimize your damn costs.

omgfactsofficial: The US has the highest rate of illegal drug use in the world! America is famous for its stringent anti-drug policies, yet shockingly, we report the highest illegal drug use in the world. In fact, marijuana use in the United States is even higher than the Netherlands where… Clearly, the war on drug users is a success. The plutocrats shall celebrate by sacrificing a poor black man who couldn’t afford an attorney and would soon otherwise be exonerated by DNA evidence!

Anti-Government Extremist: The US has the highest rate of illegal drug use in the world!

good:

Free Jam: It’s Time to End California’s Law Against Selling Homemade Food

California is seen as the birthplace of the local food movement, but home-based food operations are prohibited. That may be about to change.

Read more on GOOD.is

Aw, yeah.

(Source: http://www.good.is/post/free-jam-it-s-time-to-end-california-s-law-against-selling-homemade-food/)

Differentiation: Not Just For Products

distractedbyshinyobjects:

I’m 28. My parents’ corporate employer covered me until I was 25 even without the mandate to do so. I went from that to my own employer-provided coverage, had a year of nothing when I left that job, and now I’m on my husband’s employer-provided insurance. All of those had no problem covering everything needed or that I can imagine needing. Not that they were perfect, but I’m healthy so I don’t have big complaints.

But I’m still in favor of Obamacare. Because not everyone is as lucky as I am, and I’m not heartless enough to want them to suffer as a result. We live in too wealthy of a country for people to die and go broke because of stupid health stuff.

I love Obamacare.

That’s called differentiation. You could also call it a perk. You don’t, however, call it ‘luck’.

Treating benevolence as ‘luck’ rather than individual agency is precisely the problem I have with the left. It’s as if no good deed could possibly be the product of choice; only the faceless entity of the government, with its numerous regulations can help people, because apparently there’s something evil lurking within the human soul—no bureaucracy—which makes us selfish to the exclusion of all others’ interests (except, apparently, in the context of the government).

squashed:

laliberty:

barticles:

Funniest Graph of the Day: In 2006, 73 percent of Democrats said President Bush could do something about gasoline prices. Now only 33 percent think President Obama can do anything about them.

Likewise, in 2006 only 47 percent of Republicans thought Bush could fix gas prices. Now 65 percent of them think Obama can fix them.

Both parties’ rank and file evidently view supply and demand through a partisan filter. Democrats do so more than twice as often (40-point swing vs. 18-point swing) as Republicans.

Obama Apologetics. 

Wait a second, Barticles. You’re right that this is an interesting chart—but let’s treat numbers fairly rather than trying to score cheap points. There was a 12% swing between 2006 and 2012 between whether the administration could reasonably reduce gas prices. So once you factor that in, there would be a 28% swing in the Democrats and a 30% swing in the Republicans. Essentially, it’s the same for either party.

That is the fuzziest math I have ever seen in my entire life. Seriously.

Secondly, why were Americans more likely to blame Bush for high gas prices? Was Bush bad at messaging? Did we learn something about economics? Or did somebody notice that the 2006 gas spike had a lot to do with refineries going offline post-Katrina? Or perhaps there’s a perception that Obama’s administration has already done a lot of the things that can be done to reduce gas demand such as raising fuel efficiency standards.

You’re implying that somehow 12% of the population became knowledgable about the economics of oil prices, but somehow still has no understanding of the unemployment situation. Bush messaged like an idiot (probably because he was), but it’s not the messaging itself that was flawed; it’s just a lot easier to scapegoat someone who sounds like they have no idea what they’re doing than to scapegoat a college professor who’s also a very convincing orator. I mean, people bought ‘hope’ and ‘change’; there are a lot of people who desperately want to believe that Obama is this great guy, so they’re going to be more likely to give him some slack on issues they don’t understand, like oil.

People can be dumb and partisan—but maybe there’s a bit more to the chart than that.

And maybe there isn’t a college bubble. But I’d have to feign a great deal of ignorance to make that claim.

Think about that: if you expose to the world previously unknown evidence of widespread wanton killing of civilians (as Manning allegedly did), then you will end up in the same place as someone who actually engages in the mass wanton killing of civilians (as Bales allegedly did), except that the one who committed atrocities will receive better treatment than the one who exposed them. That’s a nice reflection of our government’s value system (similar to the way that high government officials who commit egregious crimes are immunized, while those who expose them are aggressively prosecuted). If the chat logs are to be believed, Manning decided to leak those documents because they revealed heinous war crimes that he could no longer in good conscience allow to be concealed, and he will now find himself next to a soldier who is accused of committing heinous war crimes.

Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)

$21,000. It’s barely a living wage and would be a terrific salary for someone looking for a job that requires little to no labor or thought. But that’s not the job that my wife was offered. She was offered a position to teach French at one of the best private schools in the country and in…

Raison et liberte: For those who are angry that a hedge fund manager makes more than a teacher. Have you ever compare how much a private…

For their new study, published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers Nanette Gartrell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco (and a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles), and Henry Bos, a behavioral scientist at the University of Amsterdam, focused on what they call planned lesbian families — households in which the mothers identified themselves as lesbian at the time of artificial insemination. Data on such families are sparse, but they are important for establishing whether a child’s environment in a home with same-sex parents would be any more or less nurturing than one with a heterosexual couple. (See a gay-rights timeline.) The authors found that children raised by lesbian mothers — whether the mother was partnered or single — scored very similarly to children raised by heterosexual parents on measures of development and social behavior. These findings were expected, the authors said; however, they were surprised to discover that children in lesbian homes scored higher than kids in straight families on some psychological measures of self-esteem and confidence, did better academically and were less likely to have behavioral problems, such as rule-breaking and aggression. “We simply expected to find no difference in psychological adjustment between adolescents reared in lesbian families and the normative sample of age-matched controls,” says Gartrell. “I was surprised to find that on some measures we found higher levels of [psychological] competency and lower levels of behavioral problems. It wasn’t something I anticipated.” In addition, children in same-sex-parent families whose mothers ended up separating did as well as children in lesbian families in which the moms stayed together. The data that Gartrell and Bos analyzed came from the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), begun in 1986. The authors included 154 women in 84 families who underwent artificial insemination to start a family; the parents agreed to answer questions about their children’s social skills, academic performance and behavior at five follow-up times over the 17-year study period. Children in the families were interviewed by researchers at age 10 and were then asked at age 17 to complete an online questionnaire, which included queries about the teens’ activities, social lives, feelings of anxiety or depression, and behavior. Not surprisingly, the researchers found that 41% of children reported having endured some teasing, ostracism or discrimination related to their being raised by same-sex parents. But Gartrell and Bos could find no differences on psychological adjustment tests between the children and those in a group of matched controls. At age 10, children reporting discrimination did exhibit more signs of psychological stress than their peers, but by age 17, the feelings had dissipated. “Obviously there are some factors that may include family support and changes in education about appreciation for diversity that may be helping young people to come to a better place despite these experiences,” says Gartrell. It’s not clear exactly why children of lesbian mothers tend to do better than those in heterosexual families on certain measures. But after studying gay and lesbian families for 24 years, Gartrell has some theories. “They are very involved in their children’s lives,” she says of the lesbian parents. “And that is a great recipe for healthy outcomes for children. Being present, having good communication, being there in their schools, finding out what is going on in their schools and various aspects of the children’s lives is very, very important.” Although active involvement isn’t unique to lesbian households, Gartrell notes that same-sex mothers tend to make that kind of parenting more of a priority. Because their children are more likely to experience discrimination and stigmatization as a result of their family circumstances, these mothers can be more likely to broach complicated topics, such as sexuality and diversity and tolerance, with their children early on. Having such a foundation may help to give these children more confidence and maturity in dealing with social differences and prejudices as they get older. Because the research is ongoing, Gartrell hopes to test some of these theories with additional studies. She is also hoping to collect more data on gay-father households; gay fatherhood is less common than lesbian motherhood because of the high costs of surrogacy or adoption that gay couples face in order to start a family. (emphasis added) This is robust research. Any banal “WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!1?” battle cry about the sanctity of marriage as an institution solely for manufacturing humans in a ‘good environment’ is not an argument; it’s an opinion. It is something used to justify discrimination and statism in the private matters of parenting. Neocons, meet science.

Why I’m tired of people demanding government ‘protect’ traditional marriage ‘for the kids’.

logicallypositive:

Maybe calling the income tax slavery is a wee bit of a stretch…. but yeah

‘Price floor’ is a more precise/better term for ‘minimum prices’.

The income tax would much better be equated with pimping. Prostitutes get to keep some revenue from their services, but pimps forcibly extract an arbitrary portion for what they claim is ‘protection’ or ‘security’, even though they themselves often pose a serious threat to the prostitute’s well-being. Sound familiar?

International aid programs equate more to extortionate lending than anything else.