Tag: Starchild

  • Confucius, Sprint & The State

    Confucius, Sprint & The State

    The philosopher Confucius was reportedly once asked what he would do if he were a governor. He responded that he would first “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality, for “If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish.”

        I’m not precisely sure what the ancient Chinese sage meant by that, or what examples he may have had in mind, but I’ve thought one possible interpretation of this quote is that language must not be allowed to be abused in such ways that speech grows full of dishonesty and contradictions, or else there won’t be a basis for efficient human action. Perhaps a kind of social equivalent to how free market economists talk about State central planners not being able to efficiently run an economy because they do not have access to accurate price signals.

        These thoughts were provoked by an ad for Sprint cellphone service that I heard earlier this evening. In the ad, a man comes on and says something along the lines of, “Oh great, another wireless ad. You’re probably sick of all these phone ads with all their confusing terms about their networks and offers and blah blah blah. But Sprint is going to do something different.” Then he quotes a monthly price and basically says if you don’t like it after a month you can have 100% of your money back, guaranteed. A few more details are conveyed in a similarly reassuring tone.

    (more…)

  • Where Good Ideas Go To Die

    Where Good Ideas Go To Die

    It’s common knowledge that San Francisco has thousands of homeless people living on the streets and a shortage of not just housing, but even temporary shelter space. San Francisco also has a government-run school system that includes over a hundred schools occupying public space, each with multiple buildings that are vacant and unused at night.

    At some point, someone – probably multiple someones, perhaps even including yourself – may have thought, “Instead of having people without homes out on the streets, at risk of illness or death from exposure, crime, etc, and without places to practice proper sanitation and hygiene, or spending a bunch of taxpayer funds building new shelter facilities, why not let some of the homeless in these unused existing public facilities, where they will be safe and can have access to restrooms and showers?”

    As you may or may not be aware, this is not a hypothetical. Not only was this idea contemplated, it has actually been put into effect as a government program – well, sort of. So how is that working out for us?

    To begin with, the idea was pared way back, limiting the number of people likely to be helped by it. Rather than making space available after hours at government schools in different neighborhoods across the city, the program was limited to a single school, Buena Vista Horace Mann (BVHM), a Mission district kindergarten through 8th grade school located at 3351 23rd Street.

    Then the program was further limited to serving families with children attending that particular school, with assurances to this effect presumably intended to pacify neighborhood and school community xenophobes.

    Did I say xenophobes? Sadly, yes.

    Fear and hostility toward outsiders, people who aren’t here now, aren’t part of the “in group” isn’t just a thing with Donald Trump and his supporters – it’s also a local thing here in SF. Especially (at both the national and the local level) if those outsiders happen to be poor.

    City officials may be regretting those assurances however, because now – after reportedly sinking money into startup costs such as putting in new showers (did the school previously lack showers for students using the gym? were those showers not good enough for homeless people?) – they say they can’t continue the program unless they expand it, because not enough homeless families with students at Buena Vista Horace Mann are applying.

    Did I say applying? Sadly, yes.

    You might think that something like making BVHM’s gymnasium available after hours to homeless families needing a place to stay for the night would be pretty straightforward: Somebody shows up with kids needing a place to sleep for the night, you let them in. Hardly even worthy of being called a “program”. When I let friends or others crash at my place, I don’t call it a program, and there is no application process – people just ask me. But when it comes to government, nothing’s ever so simple. Government is where good ideas go to die.

    Here’s how the “program” is actually working (or not working):

    “Interested families usually begin the conversation by saying they are running out of housing options and they were told the school has a shelter,” writes reporter David Mamaril Horowitz in the bilingual Mission-area newspaper El Tecolote. “They first speak to Chandler”.

    That would be Nick Chandler, the schools’s social worker. According to El Tecolote, he then “vets” these families and “forwards them to Dolores Street Community Services” (DSCS). Why DSCS? Because they are the non-profit organization managing the “shelter”. You might think the school itself should be capable of managing the task of allowing students from its own student body, and their families, to use its own gymnasium, but you are not thinking like a government bureaucrat.

    DSCS’s Mayra Medel-Sanchez is the project’s program manager. You might assume that title means she’s in charge of designing and planning the program. You would be wrong again. They have a separate person for that, one Saul Hidalgo.

    Both Hidalgo and Medel-Sanchez defended the program to El Tecolote (surprise, surprise). But then again, who are they not to have an opinion, when on any given day they may comprise a double digit percentage of the program’s direct beneficiaries?

    That’s right – since it was opened as a shelter in November, according to a critical March 1 story by Jill Tucker and Trisha Thadani in the San Francisco Chronicle, the gym at BVHM has had “an average occupancy of less than two people per night”.

    Tucker and Thadani didn’t get that information from the program’s managers, according to the story, but from yet another individual being supported by tax dollars to “help” the homeless – Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing director Jeff Kositsky. (Kositsky’s salary of $205,000 a year is presumably not factored into the reported cost of the program – more on which shortly.)

    Although the facility fails to attract any homeless individuals several nights a month, Kositsky said that doesn’t mean it’s completely empty at these times. “Shelter workers are on-site seven nights a week and through holidays, whether anyone shows up or not,” he told the Chronicle. Must be a tough gig!

    The total number of families who’ve used the “shelter” since it’s been open? Five, according to the Chronicle. Seven, according to Nuala Sawyer in SF Weekly, who took the daily paper to task for “implying it’s a failure”. “What may need to happen is a reframing of the program,” Sawyer opined.

    Meanwhile, according to the Chronicle, the city government is paying Dolores Street Community Services $40,000 a month to manage the program (wrong, it’s only $37,000 a month, says SF Weekly). Either way, this doesn’t include any program-related outlays or other costs incurred by Buena Vista Horace Mann school or the city government, such as the aforementioned startup costs. (I couldn’t find an estimate of those costs; Sawyer reports the new showers were “donated with pro bono work”, although by whom, or why, and whether there were any other costs involved, she doesn’t say.)

    This means that for the three-month period of December through February, taxpayers have shelled out a bare minimum of $111,000, and probably significantly more, so that between five and seven families have been able to spend some time sleeping on the floor of a gymnasium.

    Perhaps in future months administrators could instead consider putting homeless families up at the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons, where they could have full access to the hotel’s concierge service to connect them to local resources? With monthly rates at these hotels, they might be able to save some money.

    But in government it’s all about perceptions, so Sawyer’s proposed “reframing” is a more likely outcome for what responsible (or irresponsible, depending on your point of view) parties are calling the “Stay Over Program”. What would this involve? Essentially “keeping people out of the gym’s shelter” rather than getting them into it. If that sounds odd, it is not without precedent – government has long been paying farmers not to grow food, and there is the famous, if possibly apocryphal, story of the U.S. general in Vietnam who explained how they had to bomb a village in order to save it.

    In seeking to continue the program, BVHM principal Claudia DeLarios Morán, program manager Medel-Sanchez, Sawyer, and others, claim the number of families who’ve been sleeping in the gym doesn’t tell the real story. The real benefit, they assert in so many words, has been getting people into other government programs.

    “All participants in the program register with the the city’s Mission Access Point, which enters them into the city’s homelessness response system and makes them eligible for its services. They are also able to meet with a case manager who provides counseling and guides them to resources,” program manager Medel-Sanchez told El Tecolote.

    The paper reported that 59 Horace Mann families (out of an initial 64 that SF Weekly says were identified as “housing insecure”) have spoken with Chandler, and at least 26 have “received case management”.

    Once families show up at the shelter, they “receive support and services from trained professionals who have the connections to get them help,” DeLarios Morán told SF Weekly. That wasn’t happening previously, she said. “This is a level of coherence we’ve never really had before.”

    Since the families had already been identified, you might think that much could have happened without the need to pay a non-profit group tens of thousands of dollars a month to run a shelter that few of them apparently wanted to use. But again, you would not be thinking like a bureaucrat – remember, these are “trained professionals”.

    Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who initially championed the idea in Spring 2018 along with DeLarios Morán and in whose district this is all taking place, said the program won’t be continued unless it can be made more cost-effective. For the number of families involved, it “doesn’t make any financial sense,” she admitted to SF Weekly. “We might as well buy a condo for that amount of money,” she said. Yup, or failing that, give the Ritz-Carlton a call.

    Along with pretty much everyone else quoted by the media with the exception of the NIMBYs, Ronen favored expanding the program to allow the families of students attending other schools in the district to participate. On March 12, members of the SF Unified School District’s Board of Education, aka the school board, agreed, unanimously voting to do what common sense suggests should have been done in the first place. At a minimum, that is – I’ve seen no explanation for why homeless people not related to SFUSD students, whose taxes after all help pay for those government schools, shouldn’t also be allowed to participate. In any case, the “Stay Over Program”, rather than being slated for shutdown on June 30, got a new lease on life.

    The NIMBYs aren’t without some wisdom of their own, however, even if their motives may be less than pure. “This is not to me a success,” BVHM parent Johanna Lopez Miyaki told the Chronicle. “Why didn’t they ask those 60 families what they needed? Why didn’t they ask the 60 families if they wanted to sleep on the gym floor?”

    An estimated 2,200 students in the SFUSD “cope with homelessness or housing insecurity”, according to the El Tecolote article. But how many of their families will be willing and able to deal with the bureaucracy around the program in exchange for the dubious priviliege of accessing a mattress on the floor of a school gym when needed? That remains to be seen.

    But let there be no confusion on this point: Letting homeless people sleep in a government school at night, which school board member Mark Sanchez noted is probably a first in the country, is not the problem, just as the problem with California’s Proposition 64 was never the idea of legalizing cannabis – as with Prop. 64, the problem is all the government BS that has come with it.

    Now that it has been expanded, if not yet reframed, will this comi-tragic effort manage to morph into something both useful and reasonable, as those who conceived it presumably intended, or will their good intentions be once again defeated by the nature of government, its non-profit patronage system, and the Lennon Rule* as the program matures into an even larger and more wasteful boondoggle?

    Stay tuned…

    *”Everything the government touches turns to shit.”
    – John Lennon

  • Our Defender, Jeff Adachi

    Our Defender, Jeff Adachi

    Last month San Francisco lost one of its best leaders, perhaps the only elected official in the city truly worthy of that description.

    “Prosecutors, with near unlimited resources and the full backing of the government, are trying to take away a citizen’s freedom. That’s a big deal and something we want to get right,” he wrote in a 2014 op-ed piece in the Sacramento Bee.

    Jeff Adachi, the 59-year-old elected Public Defender, had held the position since first winning election in 2002 after working as an attorney in the office for several years prior, and was subsequently reelected four times, most recently last year. But on the evening of February 22, he was found unresponsive at an apartment in North Beach after suffering a heart attack, and efforts to revive him were sadly unsuccessful.

    Police officers were soon on the scene, and before long someone in the SFPD – whose misdeeds have often been exposed by the Public Defenders Office under Adachi’s leadership – leaked, in violation of department protocol, details of the police report to the press: The late Public Defender had been in the company of a woman who wasn’t his wife, and they had reportedly consumed several drugs that day including wine, cocaine, and marijuana edibles.

    Some of his detractors were quick to jump on these embarassing (at least to the anti-hedonism set) details. Most notably Gary Delagnes, the former head of the Police Officers Association union who rarely if ever sees a case of police abuse that he doesn’t see fit to excuse (when the Board of Supervisors acted in 2016 to memorialize Mario Woods, victim of an SFPD firing-squad-style execution, he called board members “idiots” who “honored a street thug”), railed on Facebook not long after Adachi’s death that he had been “a serial adulterer who drove his wife to a suicide attempt,” and groused that, “Only in San Francisco is Jeff Adachi a hero.”

    If you’re not pissing some people off as a politician you’re probably not doing it right, as the saying goes!

    To their credit, this tone deaf jab at the recently deceased was the last straw for Delagnes’s colleagues at the POA, who apparently recognized that despite the success of his hardball methods in getting police pay sharply boosted during his tenure heading the union from 2004 to 2013 his big mouth had become too much of a political liability, and politely expelled him from the organization where he had remained on the board earning nearly $100,000 a year as a consultant.

    But as the civil-liberties-hating Delagnes was grudgingly forced to acknowledge, Adachi is a hero in San Francisco, and won’t be soon forgotten. Despite the circumstances of his death, there was an outpouring of grief and mourning from not only his colleagues but many ordinary members of the public. Over 1,000 people reportedly joined a candlelit vigil and march from the Public Defenders Office to City Hall before Adachi’s body lay in state under the grand old building’s dome.

    When a well-known elected official dies, there are almost always the obligatory accolades from other political figures. But in this case the praise that poured in may have been a bit more accurate than usual. “Everything he said or did came from the heart,” State Senator Scott Wiener told the San Francisco Chronicle. “He was someone who, it didn’t matter to him what people thought about him or if people were mad at him. He was there to fight for the most marginalized people in society.” Eric Quandt, a deputy public defender, said of his former boss that, “I’ve never seen a defense lawyer more tenacious or courageous.” He described himself as “devastated” and said he was sure he spoke for many of his colleagues. “I didn’t always agree with him,” said former supervisor and current BART Board member Bevan Dufty, “but I always appreciated that he made this job so much bigger than what the charter called for.” Congresswoman Jackie Speier called Adachi “the real deal… a righteous public servant who believed passionately in the Constitution, due process and the rights of the accused to be ably represented by counsel. He did not shrink from public debate or tough political decisions.” Perhaps referring to the all-too-often correct perception of public defenders being incompetent and providing poor quality representation, Alameda County Public Defender Brendon Woods said that Adachi “crashed and reshaped all of the negative stereotypes” and “elevated what it meant to be a public defender.” 

    In the city’s traditionally black Bayview and Fillmore neighborhoods, where Adachi was a frequent presence, there was widespread sadness at his passing. “Jeff was the only official in this city we could trust to fight for us, the black and brown and poor San Franciscans,” wrote Dr. Willie and Mary Radcliff in the San Francisco Bayview newspaper. The “MAGIC” (Mobilization for Adolescent Growth In our Communities) programs his office started, “BMAGIC” for the Bayview and “Mo’ MAGIC” for the Fillmore, helps integrate struggling teens into the community with gardening programs, field trips, and other activities. Another group started by the SF Public Defender’s Office provides help to the children of incarcerated parents. Adachi himself was often out in the community in connection with these programs as well as legal work. San Francisco mayor London Breed recalled him coming around to visit clients when she was growing up in the Fillmore and living in public housing projects.

    This history may have contributed to Breed, a “moderate” who although African-American herself has not always been relible when it comes to reforming an SFPD and criminal justice system that have had a disproportionately negative impact on blacks (57 percent of local inmates are black, despite blacks accounting for less than 5% of the city’s population, according to the Bayvew newspaper), doing the right thing by quickly appointing Manohar Raju as Adachi’s successor. Raju was previously a deputy public defender and respected member of the office Adachi had built. Prior to the appointment, it was speculated that she might appoint another deputy PD, Chesa Boudin, a reform-oriented candidate for district attorney, in order to get him out of that race and clear the field for her own more law-and-order oriented pick for DA, but she didn’t end up doing that.

    Unlike most politicians, Jeff Adachi rarely inspired such suspicions that his decisions might be politically driven. For him, it was clearly about doing what he thought was right. He was consistently bold and fearless in holding law enforcement accountable. When his office found video camera footage that showed police officers barging into the rooms of poor residents living in SRO hotels without warrants or permission and even stealing from them, he put the videos on YouTube. Again when his office learned through a whistleblower of sheriffs deputies staging fights among inmates at an SF jail, he took the information straight to the media and the public. And the Public Defender’s Office under his leadership is also responsible for the texting scandal among members of the SFPD who exchanged numerous racist and homophobic text messages on the job being uncovered.

    Adachi’s courage went beyond standing up to the politically powerful police and sheriffs departments. He point-blank refused mayor Gavin Newsom’s request to cut his office’s budget along with those of other departments, explaining to the man now in the governor’s office that the legal services provided by the Public Defender’s offices are legally required, and that it would actually cost taxpayers more to outsource them to private attorneys. In 2010, he took on virtually the entire city establishment by championing Proposition B, a pension reform measure he got on the ballot that actually took the burgeoning problem of out-of-control city pension costs seriously and proposed a responsible solution to rein in spending.

    Adachi was politically progressive, but honest in his approach, and not one for feeding the “city family” – for him, good government seemed to mean spending discretionary funds in ways that would promote social justice and equality without breaking the bank. He understood that the soaring costs of “defined benefit” pensions being paid out to well-compensated city government employees would mean fewer and fewer dollars available for everything else, and unlike other local Democrats, was determined to do something about it. Even after Proposition B was overwhelmingly defeated, Adachi brought a revised version of the legislation back the following year as Proposition D. (That measure too was defeated by the votes of the self-serving and the ignorant, an outcome that most San Franciscans will at some point likely come to regret. According to a 2010 SF Weekly article, SF’s city employee pension costs had grown by over 66,000% during the past decade – and they continue to rapidly grow today.)

    When he went to City Hall to lobby for more funding to defend undocumented immigrants against Trump-era deportation proceedings, Adachi brought a cameraman with him to record the encounters. This sort of behavior grated on his politician colleagues, but nevertheless he got $1.9 milllion appropriated for his immigrant-protection efforts. “The theatricality that marked Adachi’s courtroom demeanor did not stop outside the Hall of Justice”, local journalist Joe Eskenazi observed. Just as Jeff Adachi made his office so much more than the usual public defender’s office, in life he was more than just a lawyer. While actively representing clients – as department head, he didn’t limit himself to administrative matters, but argued over 100 cases before juries himself – he also managed to find time to turn his theatrical flair and passion for social justice into becoming an award-winning filmmaker, writing and directing several documentaries about race and criminal justice issues.

    Although Adachi was not a Libertarian, the LPSF has long appreciated both his criminal justice reform and his pension reform efforts, inviting him to come speak to us and recommending our supporters vote for him.

    Some community members have suggested renaming for Adachi a street in the SOMA neighborhood which the late public defender walked almost daily on his “commute” between the Public Defenders Office at 555 Seventh Street to the Hall of (In)Justice at 850 Bryant Street, and we certainly appreciate the sentiment.

    But while Adachi and his work deserve to be remembered, is this the right way to do it? Politicians are always naming things after other politicians, symbolically plundering the landscape for the aggrandizement of their own profession even as they plunder the public’s pocketbooks via taxes and fees in order to fund their political agendas (as well as their generous salaries, benefits and pensions). If a moratorium on such namings were adopted, in favor of attaching more evocative and inspirational names to places and infrastructure, it would be a public blessing.

    At least in this case the renaming would supplant another politician: Gilbert Street is currently named after Edward Gilbert, a 19th century congressman who was killed in a duel with James Denver, the future namesake of the capitol city of Colorado (himself also a politician).

    One nevertheless suspects that Adachi himself, being the man he was, would rather members of the Board of Supervisors remember him by introducing some meaningful criminal justice reform legislation, than by slapping his name on something.

    Regardless, Jeff Adachi’s legacy will live on in other ways. By all appearances, he has built a strong and efficient Public Defenders Office, filled with competent, passionate attorneys and staff who truly believe in the office’s mission of providing quality legal defense to the indigent. The myriad awards he earned, ampong them the American Bar Association’s national award for excellence in public defense, the Managerial Excellence Award of the Mayor’s Fiscal Advisory Committee, and the Elected Official Award for transparency of the Society of Professional Journalists’ northern California chapter, are testimony to this. Just a month before Adachi’s death, the SF Public Defender’s Office as a whole was recognized by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers with its Champion of Public Defense Award.

    One of the last people to spend time with Jeff Adachi was another deputy public defender, the aforementioned Chesa Boudin, who at a recent neighborhood meeting recalled their eating lunch together on the day Adachi died. Boudin, like most of his colleagues, was hit hard by the untimely death. Like his boss, he has a passion for defending the marginalized and upholding civil liberties, and is now running a strong campaign for San Francisco district attorney. The current DA, George Gascon, is not seeking another term. Although reform oriented in some respects – e.g. working with the Public Defender’s Office to work on expunging the records of non-violent marijuana offenders – Gascon has during his term failed to prosecute a single unjustified SFPD shooting.

    As Boudin points out, this will be the first time there’s been an open race for that office in over 100 years. It is a rare opportunity to hopefully elect someone as the city’s top prosecutor who respects civil liberties and believes in holding police accountable when they commit abuses as much as SF’s late Public Defender did. It’s no less than Jeff Adachi would have wanted.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    “A hail of bullets is not an appropriate police response to people suffering mental health crises.”

    – Jeff Adachi

  • How Millions of Voters Delude Themselves and Undermine Democracy

    How Millions of Voters Delude Themselves and Undermine Democracy

        It’s kind of amazing that something so central to many of the issues we see and read and hear about in the news every day, something on which billions of dollars and countless hours of scheming by political “professionals” are expended every year, continues to be so widely misunderstood. Yes, that description can be applied to government itself, but here I’m simply talking about voting. If you’re a Libertarian, or even just a free-thinking person who’s ever confessed to somebody else that you plan to vote for a candidate who isn’t among the perceived front-runners or those declared viable by mainstream media outlets in a particular race, you’ve probably heard some version of a response like, “Why are you wasting your vote? They can’t win. Be realistic. If we don’t vote for Tweedledee, we’re going to get Tweedledum.”

        The truth that’s overlooked in such thinking is this: When you vote in any election in which many thousands of people or more are voting, you can be virtually certain that your individual vote will NOT change the outcome. Changing the outcome of such an election requires the votes of many other people whose behavior at the ballot box you can’t control. Voting on the wishful premise that your vote might change the outcome of an election is LESS realistic than voting on the basis of thinking a Libertarian might get elected! Libertarians actually do get elected far more often than a single vote changes the outcome of any major election (there are hundreds of Libertarians holding public office around the United States right now). In the very rare instances when a major election is anywhere close to being decided by a single vote, there’s almost certain to be a recount in which the vote totals will change anyway.

         So in terms of how you choose to vote, it really doesn’t matter whether your chosen candidate has a good chance of winning or not, because whether they are likely to win or not, you won’t be changing that outcome with your vote. The popular idea that you’re “throwing away your vote” by voting for a candidate who “can’t win”, as opposed to supposedly “making your vote count” by voting for one who “can win”, has no basis in reality. In fact, mathematically speaking, the fewer votes a candidate receives, the greater the proportional impact that your vote for them will have! To take a simple example, if someone receives only 10 other votes in an election, then your vote for them increases their vote total by 10%. But casting your ballot for someone who receives 1,000 other votes in an election increases their vote total by only a tenth of a percent.

        Nor do you get any special credit, or benefit, for picking the response option that turns out to be most popular among your fellow poll-takers; at best you’ll get the psychological satisfaction of having voted for the winner (if that’s the sort of thing that makes you feel good). The resulting warm fuzzy feeling might typically last you a few days after Election Day. However once the candidate takes office and starts doing stuff you don’t like (which, admit it, happens way more often than not), you’ll be stuck with the embarrassment, shame, and feeling of having been suckered into supporting a bad politician for the rest of their term or beyond.

         So if it’s all but guaranteed your votes won’t change any election outcomes (except maybe at the local level if you live in a very small town), and there’s generally no personal well-being to be gained by voting for candidates who end up getting elected, does this mean voting is a waste of time? Not at all. Imagine you’re part of a crowd of hundreds of people who are trying to roll a huge, heavy fallen log out of the road. When you put your hands on the log and add your energy in pushing, or stop to take a breather, you can’t see any effect – whether you push or slack off seems to make no difference whatsoever in terms of whether the log rolls forward or it doesn’t. Nevertheless you know that at some point when enough people are pushing hard enough, the log will start moving, because you’ve already seen it happen. All you can do is your part. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “What you do may seem insignificant, but it is vitally important that you do it.”

         Voting can be seen as akin to taking an opinion poll and adding your mark next to one of the response options. If most of the people taking the poll happen to choose the same response option as you do, then the poll results (if it’s a fair poll) will show this option as being the most popular, but that part is beyond your control. When taking public opinion polls, most people seem to recognize that they are simply giving their opinions, not measurably changing the poll results, and consequently give their honest opinions rather than attempting to answer based on how they think others will respond. But for some reason when it comes to elections, a lot of people apparently think they can “game the system” and change the outcome by voting “strategically” based on how they expect others will vote. This imagined “strategic voting” is in reality rank nonsense. Those who believe in it have not properly understood the math or the probabilities involved. Furthermore it is actually undermining democracy, because to the extent that voters cast their ballots based on how they think others will vote rather than voting their own actual preferences, election outcomes will not reflect the true preferences of voters. And when election outcomes don’t reflect the true preferences of the electorate, that means democracy is broken.

          Bottom line: The smart and responsible way to vote in any major election is to vote for the candidates you would most like to see do well, regardless of what you think their chances are of being elected. For me, this almost always means voting Libertarian when that option is on the ballot. Even when our candidates don’t win, adding to Libertarian vote totals helps the party and advances the cause of freedom. Above and beyond this, voting is an act of solidarity with others who believe as you do. Together we can roll the dead log of statism out of the path of human and universal progress. It is always true (assuming the election isn’t rigged) that if enough people vote for a candidate, that person WILL win. Essentially, each of us has a choice: To vote in a manner which may superficially feel clever but actually hurts our own franchise both individually and collectively, or to be part of the solution – a solution which is always possible, and will manifest itself in reality as soon as enough people choose to be part of it.

  • Selective Anger At “Freeloaders”

    Selective Anger At “Freeloaders”

        In my dialogues with defenders of statism, online and off, I routinely encounter people – usually though not always on the political right – who express feelings of anger, disgust, contempt, etc., toward those whom they characterize with terms like “lazy”, “bums”, “freeloaders”, “parasites”, “anti-social”, “welfare queens”, “druggies”, “illegals”, “junkies”, “leeches”, “the homeless”, “non-productive members of society”, etc. Most of the criticisms seem to boil down to resentment that the people who are the objects of their ire are in some way being assisted or provided for by government at the expense of others.

        Are such feelings a step on the path toward libertarian enlightenment, or just narrow-minded self-justification? I’d like to think the former, and in some cases that may be the case, but I often have my doubts. Because from where I sit as a long-time observer of San Francisco politics and local political attitudes, the sad truth is that not just the folks who are often criticized in such terms, but the vast majority of the local population, appear, both from their voting habits and from their own comments, to want to be taken care of by the nanny-state in one way or another.

        It is bitterly ironic, and hypocritical as hell, for anyone who wants government to provide them with “free” elementary schools, “free” libraries, “free” fire protection services, a “free” regulatory bureaucracy of immense scale and complexity that intrudes into everything from air travel to household pets, “free” enforcement of border controls and persecution of people who reside in or attempt to enter the U.S. without government permission, a “free” military whose budget is inching toward $1 trillion with hundreds of bases in other countries, “free” enforcement against people lying on sidewalks or sleeping in tents in the commons, etc., to look down their noses at somebody who wants “free” food stamps, “free” SSI, or “free” housing vouchers as being necessarily a much worse leech or parasite than themselves or their friends.

        Let’s be crystal clear about this:  ALL of these things and more are forms of nanny-state welfare designed to take money stolen from taxpayers to fund services desired by particular constituencies, which members of those constituencies are unwilling to pay for themselves, whether or not the “free” service in question is called “welfare” or not.

        For anyone tempted to feel disgusted, contemptuous, or resentful toward those whom you characterize as wanting to be taken care of by the “nanny-state”, please examine what “free” things you yourself want government to provide at the expense of others. Those who want more welfare than you do when it comes to food stamps or SSI or housing vouchers may in many cases want LESS welfare than you do when it comes to the military-industrial complex, or border controls, or home loans, or government education, etc., and may even want less welfare and a less controlling, less authoritarian government overall!

        Before we judge anyone else too harshly, here’s an illuminating pair of questions for each of us to ask ourselves:

    1) How much theft, and how much coercion, would be required for government to do the things that I want it to do?
    2) How can I reduce the amounts of theft and coercion that I am effectively demanding?

  • Republicans Provide Crutch To Lessen Pain of Taxes on Poor – Democrats Add Armpads

    Republicans Provide Crutch To Lessen Pain of Taxes on Poor – Democrats Add Armpads

    Usually it’s the other way around – heartless Republicans trying to screw the poor, and Democrats trying to “help” them (but without addressing the actual source of the problem, and often making it worse).

    But yesterday’s Examiner (March 4) had a kind of “man bites dog” story – Assembly Bill 503, authored by Republican Assemblyman Tom Lackey of Palmdale and signed into law last year, requires local agencies to offer payment plans to poor people burdened by government fines they cannot afford.

    To give local Democrats their barely-deserved slice of credit, once this GOP-originated crutch became law, SF’s Democrat city Treasurer, Jose Cisneros, added extra padding to make the crutch a little easier to use by implementing a plan that goes further in some respects than what the law requires. Which his spokesperson was not too modest to tell the Examiner:

    As implemented locally by Cisneros, the plan goes “far beyond what was legally mandated”

    (more…)