“From 1. Jan. 2011, every transaction above 1,500 euros between natural persons and businesses, or between businesses, will not be considered legal if it is done in cash. Transactions will have to be done through debit or credit cards”

via HIGHLIGHTS-Greek FinMin unveils tax reform, wage policy | Reuters.

Enjoy cash while you can. I think it’s already pretty common for cash transactions in the US to seem suspicious. At some point, the government will decide that cash is primarily used to avoid taxes and cash will be phased out. As usual, the logic of state economics is pretty easy to predict.

Only two things are infinite — the expanding universe and Democrats’ hostility to the District of Columbia’s school choice program. Killing this small program, which currently benefits 1,300 mostly poor and minority children, is odious and indicative. It is a small piece of something large — the Democrats’ dependency agenda, which aims to multiply the ways Americans are dependent on government.

via George F. Will – Progressives and the growing dependency agenda – washingtonpost.com.

John McCormack of the Weekly Standard fell Tuesday night as he tried to speak with the Democrat while simultaneously videotaping her and trying to pass a metal grate on a Washington sidewalk.

- Reporter takes stumble chasing Mass. candidate

Let’s see the video:

It’s hard to describe that as anything other than sheer abridgment of the freedom of the press. An unfriendly reporter was asking questions of a candidate and someone working for the candidate assaulted the reporter. I mean, what else is there? The Boston Globe is happy to edit history’s first draft in this case and YouTube is here to provide the second draft.

Ultimately, this incident isn’t about an election, or partisan politics. It’s about a fundamental American value that is being ignored by the Coakley Campaign (and the guy is definitely with the campaign). Americans want a free and functioning press. We want tabloid journalism and Pulitzer Prize journalism. We want to hear lies and we want to see journalists expose the truth. We don’t want to see some flack assault a journalist and we certainly don’t want to see other journalists covering it up. That is just as much against American values as police protecting themselves by arresting innocent cellphone videographers.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. – The Official Google Blog

Good for Google! As an American, I grew up with a pretty steady drumbeat of praise for free speech. It’s not easy for me to think of many values that resonate with me as strongly and as clearly as freedom of speech. And so I’m very happy to see Google withdrawing from their arrangement with the Chinese government. Freedom is the ultimate complementary good.

Fiasco is a history of the first year or so of the Iraq War, with a focus on the US military. Over and over, it shows how ineptly the Iraq occupation was planned and executed. I supported the war until some point after the 2004 elections, but that support was based in ignorance. If I had understood that the war could not possibly have possibly been liberating due to the complete incompetence of it, I would not have wanted it. I now doubt that any war could be one of liberation, but I am certain that the Republican party of today can not manage military affairs with any effectiveness.

The Dark Side is the story of what might be called a Bush shadow government, made up of mid-level appointees and bureaucrats, who undercut higher level government officials to create laws, regulations, and processes to increase executive power in particular, and state power in general, in almost every way. They systematically deceived other parts of government, and even other parts of the executive branch, in order to weaken traditional rights and privileges of American citizens and even non-Americans. While Bush campaigned as a conservative, he conserved almost nothing and had his underlings shred the fabric of American government. It’s not entirely clear who should be held responsible for all this (Bush or Cheney or Who Knows?), but one thing is certain: if the Republicans win in 2008, they will draw from the same groups of people to staff a new administration. McCain may diverge from some parts of the GOP, but the republican candidate for president can be only so independent from his party.

In my opinion, McCain would not fix the problems Bush caused. I’m not sure he knows what the problems are and I have a feeling he might not consider them problems at all. McCain seems like a centralizer at heart, a military-style command and control guy. But, at the same time, he also seems to frequently not bother to either command or control his own campaign, with which he frequently publicly disagrees. Which sounds like exactly the same leadership style that resulted in the problems discussed in the two books.

McCain, I think, is not a source of any hope. He would not improve anything as president. Obama, in my opinion, would probably not fix anything either. He would probably worsen many of America’s problems. But, at least Obama would be a slight repudiation of the Bush years, which I think we’ll rue for the rest of our lives.

While the very act of voting presents certain problems for liberty, I voted for Barr this year. I can’t think of any candidate or party for which a vote is a more complete repudiation of Bush. If there is anything that America needs, I think it is to put these last two presidential terms behind us.

In the case of egoism, the arguments against it typically try to imagine some sort of scenario where failing to follow non-egoist principles results in some sort of morally disgusting result. This type of argument is fairly common in ethical reasoning, as well as any other field where you’re prefer to not reason from first principles. But it’s a type of arguments that, by its design, fails to even notice that there may be some positive argument for the principle in question. In fact, the argument type I mention really just results in begging the question, as the “morally disgusting result” is typically evaluable as morally disgusting from non-egoist principles. One rarely comes across an anti-egoism argument that actually engages the egoist argument on egoist terms. Anti-egoists, like anti-Darwinian, prefer to stay within their own premises and then show that, by golly, you can’t be both a creationist and a Darwinian, so Darwinism must go (you can’t be both an anti-egoist and an egoist, so egoism must go).

As it turns out, there isn’t a coherent alternative to either neo-darwinism or ethical egoism. Additionally, neither evolution or ethical egoism result in morally disgusting situations. Evolution, so far, results in humanity, among other things. Ethical egoism, as I live it, is full of creativity, co-operation, compassion, and love.

I suppose that if it were true that ethical egoism required me to violently subjugate every person I encountered and that I could only feel true happiness when sunbathing by the side of a river of human blood…well, I would probably reconsider ethical egoism. In this vein, if everyone shit ice cream, then restrooms would be restaurants. But, as things actually stand, ethical egoism has made me a decent person and nobody is eating out of their toilet.

Over the last century, we’ve accumulated lots of data on the effect of economic freedom and a lack thereof. We’ve seen the utter ruination of economies in the cases of the Soviets and the Maoists. We’ve seen generally slower economic growth in more social democratic western European countries like Germany and France than in the more “economically conservative” US. We’ve seen some third world economies become first world nations through trade-friendly policies, as in South Korea. We’ve also seen regional leaders regress economically, like Cuba or Argentina, through poor property protection and corruption.

Basically, we’ve seen an awful lot of experiments run on what effects different kinds of economic policies have. The more prominent fact that emerges is that economic freedom is more productive. The more free the market, the better property is protected, the less corruption in the government, the lower the taxes (to a large extent), the richer the country. You can argue that some statistics come out better in less free countries (as in the perennial examples of health-care and literacy in Cuba). But you cannot argue that less free societies outproduce more free societies. Wealth matters to the quality of life of all citizens of a country, and freer countries are wealthier.

And that, basically, is the most reasonable case for what is sometimes called “economic conservatism” in US politics. The data supports staying pretty close to the traditional American economic system, or even becoming more free. Lots of countries did us a favor and showed how painful lack of economic freedom can be.

Now, that said, there is no such sad history of countries that legalize gay marriage. Nor is there a sad history of countries that legalize abortion. Nor is there a sad history of countries that fully embrace biomedical research. Nor is there a sad history of countries that become more accepting of human sexuality in all its variety. Nor is there a sad history of countries that adopt more humane laws regarding drug use and abuse (quite the opposite, even here in the US!).

“Conservative” opposition to social progress is generally entirely theoretical and is mostly made up of scary stories of what might happen. These scary stories, well, they don’t come true. The one exception that comes to mind is that conservatives are largely right about urban crime and the need for consistent enforcement as the way to preserve civil harmony. Here, though, they are able to point to real experience in the US from the 60′s through the 90′s to make the case. But when they move from real lessons derived from real experience, they always seem to go wrong.

None of those have a whole lot to do with animal welfare, so they’re not relevant here. But two subcultures, Objectivists and American Conservatives, are both proudly anti-animal welfare, at least in some sense. Neither embraces animal cruelty as most people would understand that phrase, but both could consider eating a steak to be a political act against hippies who think animals should have rights.

I don’t believe in animal rights. Animals are not political. I won’t go into this too deeply, but I will just say that Ayn Rand’s derivation of rights is the one I find most convincing, and it doesn’t apply to non-conceptual beings. And that’s where I’ve stood for a long time in relation to animal welfare.

But I am not much for politics in general and I certainly don’t care to use political ideas to make personal decisions. Rights are useful for constructing societies, but when I’m choosing among possible actions rights are under-determinative or irrelevant.

Simply, I have an animal in my family. We have a dog named Robot and I am unable to feel the way I do about him without also caring about the welfare of animals like him. That means when I eat, it matters to me that the cow that gave the milk in my food did not suffer in so giving. It matters that the meat I eat did not come from a sick animal, rotting in what is effectively a cell.
Further, it matters to me that I not eat meat or drink milk at all. But that isn’t the only thing that matters to me. I try to live a happy life and suddenly changing almost every dish in my diet is not likely to make me happy. I’ve spent the last 28 or so years learning the foods I like to eat and I doubt I could find vegan meals to replace all those dishes very quickly. Living a vegan life is a factor in my eating decisions, but it is not the only factor. These days I try to eat new vegan meals pretty regularly, but I almost never have only vegan meals for a whole day. I’m walking, not running, to veganism. I expect to get there, but I’m not in a rush. It’s hard for me to rush and be happy at the same time.

I’m an egoist, so animal suffering doesn’t count for everything. In fact, human suffering doesn’t count for everything, either. But they both count for something, at least to me.