Against Circumcision

Edit: Based on recent revelations that the Norwegian study observed men who were circumcised in adulthood, rather than as children, and on a number of referred articles (1, 2, 3, 4), I've changed my stance to neutral on the subject of infant circumcision since originally writing this post.

Why is crystal meth so bad?

It isn't as though Walter White's product is the equivalent of pot or alcohol with more legal restrictions. Alcohol ups your brain's levels of the neurotransmitter and "pleasure chemical" dopamine by about 2.5 times (above normal), while THC, the active chemical of cannabis, increases it by around 3 times. This is less than sex, as a point of reference. But methamphetamine floods your brain with up to 20,000 times your baseline levels of dopamine. The saturation and marination of a thirty-something-year-old's brain in dopamine that high resets your body's dopamine baseline, and a healthy, sober level is suddenly far below the new norm. The result is a condition called anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure, even from highly pleasurable past-times like eating, sex, and old hobbies. Crystal meth semi-permanently rewires the brain for the worse.

There is another natural body chemical called cortisol that has a tremendous impact on our brains. Released in response to stress, cortisol changes the body's natural metabolism and suppresses the immune system, an ordinary and healthy response for an adult in a fight-or-flight situation, but otherwise detrimental to our overall health.

Our crystal meth example of the chemical rewiring of the brain is true even of people who are cognitively fully-developed. Imagine the effects of chemical saturation--even comparatively milder saturation--on the mind of an infant within the first days or even hours outside the womb. At some level, everybody understands this concept: we encourage pregnant mothers-to-be not to drink or smoke for precisely this reason. But cortisol is a powerful chemical as well. A family-member of mine severely broke their elbow in their early teens, and subsequently had seven surgeries and an extensive physical therapy program in order to regain some degree of movement. But more interestingly, and importantly for this discussion, their pain-tolerance shrank to near-oblivion. The sensation of touch on any part of their arm was excruciating, as were minor pains on other parts of the body; stubbed toes and the like.

Is it possible that subjecting newborn boys to lacerating the most sensitive part of their body and dousing their sponge-like, developing brains with a hefty dose of cortisol may produce permanent, adverse effects? The jury is still out, as the subject has (strangely) not been very well studied. But circumcision is excrutiating without proper anesthetic, which is usually not used, and the data that has come out [example 1, example 2], does strongly support this hypothesis. The more we learn about the brain, the more obviously important those developing years appear to be. From sociopathy in Romanian orphans from childhood neglect to language development, the early years, and especially the early months, of a child's mental development are crucial to their character later in life. Whether or not circumcision makes people more or less sensitive to pain than they should be--or otherwise affects their brain more generally--will have to be a subject for further investigation, as we simply don't have enough data to make conclusive pronouncements.

Whether or not circumcision negatively effects sensation in the penis, however, is already an academically agreed-upon fact. [Second study].

"But wait!" says the post-hoc apologist, "doesn't decreased sensitivity mean guys will last longer in bed? See, it was a good idea after all!"

Not only is this unwitting defense of barbaric religious prudery completely dismissive of men's pleasure and focusing oddly on women's, when the subject is the removal of half the nerves on the penis (a male organ, in case that wasn't clear before), but happens to be false as well. Actually, it isn't just false: it's backwards. A 2011 study found that circumcision was associated with premature ejaculation.

And speaking of sexual dysfunction, another 2011 study from Denmark found that "Circumcision was associated with frequent orgasm difficulties in Danish men and with a range of frequent sexual difficulties in women, notably orgasm difficulties, dyspareunia and a sense of incomplete sexual needs fulfilment[sic]." The following chart was created from their compiled results.

Hardly a ringing endorsement for the benefits of destroying part of the penis, unless you happen to be a believer in the ancient and original purpose of the practice: to curb sexual desires and habits. In that regard, it is indeed a modestly but reliably effective operation.

In the face of all of these downsides, any petty health benefit like a slightly decreased chance of male UTIs--easily treated with antibiotics, which I would like to point out are slightly less invasive than partial removal of a body-part--shouldn't even be discussed, but nevertheless, circumcision still has its defenders. "It helps prevent AIDS," they say. Penile cancer too.

While the dangers of AIDS and penile cancer can be preemptively tackled without resorting to a knife, that misses the deeper psychological problem here. Do you think these people would suggest or support the idea that women, after having their last child, should have their breasts surgically removed? Breast cancer is FAR more common than penile cancer (the AIDS-deterring effect of circumcision is marginal), and yet no such suggestion has been seriously brought to the table. The difference in attitudes over the health question--regarding the efficacy of removing body-parts willie-nilly, so to speak--suggests that these justifications have less to do with the actual medical benefits, and more to do with how people want to think about themselves. This is especially true of two groups of people in particular: parents who have circumcised their children, and men who have themselves been circumcised, because it is painful and difficult to imagine yourself as a cause or a victim of senseless mutilation. The implications are uncomfortable to contemplate for both group. But comfort is a poor guide to truth (to put it mildly), and the validity of that discomfort that should be a stronger reason for solidarity in being done with this atavistic and barbaric carry-over from the bloody superstitions of the pre-scientific ages, rather than a tranquilizing excuse for the continuation of this ritual cut.

How the Crucifixion of Brendan Eich killed my support for the LGBTQ movement

In the last two years I've been writing, and in all of my life prior to that, I've been a staunch supporter of equality for gay couples. Not just for gay people, as some more religiously-inclined conservatives cleverly argue, as though one's sexual preference were merely a lifestyle choice, but for the affirmation that, as Hitchens so eloquently put it in his defense of homosexual relations before a jeering Catholic crowd, "it isn't just a form of sex, but a form of love." Not merely in culture, but in law.

But for all of that to matter, the law has to be respected, and culture, if it is to be changed, rather than simply destroyed, must be respected as well. While it began as a movement for that kind of humble, rational change, the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and queer) bloc has found itself in a position of political power and influence, and has turned into the very oppressive bully it once fought so rightfully against.

The boycott of Mozilla Firefox led by OKCupid and subsequent firing of its new CEO, Brendan Eich--the inventor of JavaScript--for the crime of donating a measly $1,000 to the California campaign for proposition 8 is only the latest of these exertions of new-found might. The campaigns against Chic-Fil-A, Hobby-Lobby, and various other groups with different political opinions about the definition of marriage were prominent forerunners, but I myself had an experience with the intolerance of the community that expects it the most.

While at Bellevue College, I wrote a number of articles praising the college's rendition of the anti-Proposition 8 play "8," supporting Referendum 74, and was a participating though inactive member of our campus's LGBTQ resource-center. But when someone snuck in to the resource-center and wrote "fags and homos" across the calendar, I proposed that the incident, while reprehensible, was largely overblown, and certainty not a felony, as the school was purporting it to be. Little did I know that I was defending the bisexual head of the resource center, who school officials later revealed was the only person to have used the door-code to enter the offices between the last administrator checked and left the room (with a slur-free calendar), and its opening the next day, when the anti-gay epithets were found. It was a cut-and-dry case of false-flag offensiveness, and the school found itself in an awkward position.

When I questioned the director herself and the director (who had repeatedly requested I be fired from the Watchdog for my absolutist position on free expression) sent an email to the faculty adviser over the conversation. For that investigation of the subject, along with the editor-in-chief's attempt to interview the head of security, the paper was accused by security of interfering with an investigation-in-progress. Within the fray, I received an email informing me I was being formally reviewed for having possibly "detrimentally affected the Watchdog staff," thus "undermining the educational experience." When the meeting eventually did come around, none of the original charges were actually used, but a new set, in response to a written preview of what my defense to the original allegations was to be, resulted in my termination.

It was a long case, and many parties were at fault for the confusion and hard feelings (my own probably not being the least of them), but the censorial nature of leading members of the LGBTQ movement shine bright through the smog.

These are not one-off cases, nor are they small details curling the edges of a larger, more important, and still morally righteous issue. Suppressing and harassing dissidents is the issue being decided, and the LGBTQ movement has transformed itself from the victim to the victimizer. By destroying people's lives through bully-tactics and demonizing whole businesses over the politics of its executives, they are cutting down the scaffolding that supports not only their ideological opponents, but themselves as well. Needless to say, this by no means implies that all individual members of the LGBTQ community are little inquisitors looking to squelch opposition, but the effect of the movement as a whole is moving that way, as Jonathan Rauch predicted and alluded to in his appropriately titled 1993 book, "Kindly Inquisitors." Indeed, Rauch himself is gay--a gay Jew, no less--and more recently, the gay Andrew Sullivan has been the most prominent critic of the Eich affair.

The gay movement is perfectly within its legal rights to do what it is doing; no one, to my knowledge, is suggesting anything contrary. But for a movement based on broad public support, the threat that at any moment the gang may descend upon you with verbal acid over twitter, facebook, Salon.com, or the Huffington Post if one does not walk with sufficient caution upon the field of eggshells cast out before you, exerting its power like this has costs, and the lost support of people who don't like your bullying tactics is as perfectly legal--and probably more justified--than the illiberal hounding of the religious conservatives that have now found themselves in the minority. I will continue to vote for bills that give equal marriage rights to gay and trans citizens, but the LGBTQ movement has lost my vocal support. I won't show my solidarity with you on social media, and I will go out of my way to buy products from the companies you try to destroy for failing to conform to your ideology. Such a populist method of asserting your group's power is precisely the criticism of raw democracy and its' demagogic tendencies argued since ancient Greece and Rome, and it's nasty side is no less apparent now than it was then.

The Case for Intervening in Crimea

Business Insider

It is curious how, in all matters of international affairs, a reasonably large and influential portion of our population reflexively chooses to defend the position of America's enemies while ruthlessly criticizing America's own policies. They reach back in the the long-lost depths and annals of time to find historical ammunition with which to vindicate their default defiance with self-righteous certainty, or sometimes they know enough about current affairs to overgeneralize a more recent failure of our government, always infinitely more complex than the simplified theories of intentions imply, and thus prove that the war-hawks running our government are basically a group of psychopaths, gleefully lining their pockets as, with equal glee, they watch the havoc and carnage their plans affect.

The most irksome thing about this group is that I very recently would have counted myself among its number, a symbiotic combination of progressive, libertarian, anti-war sentiments enmeshed in the political psyche of some of our generation. No doubt, there is a romantic attraction to the position of the dissident and the rebel, but notions of civic aesthetics have little to do with the nature of the problem so impulsively opposed, let alone the rightness or wrongness of any proposed action. In this case, the problem is Crimea.

I say the vehement reaction is impulsive and reflexive because the first argument that comes up in casual conversation, without fail, has nothing specific to do with the issue itself. The argument has many names, but equivocation is the most generally accurate one. Sometimes it reaches back to Vietnam, or the Phillipines, or even as far back as the Native Americans. Sometimes the argument is made that Iraq or Afghanistan are essentially Imperialist wars (an untrue statement), which is bad (also untrue, were they correct on the nature of the war), and that therefore we're essentially no better than Russia (granting Russia's guilt on the allegations leveled at America, falsely), and that therefore, we have no right to throw the first stone (pure idealistic nonsense). A straw man this may be to the more sophisticated anti-war intellectuals, but this is roughly the level of dialogue making the rounds on social media in meme form, and actually making a substantial impact. Even if the fatuous premise of equivocation--that only the sinless may throw the first stones--were granted, I don't think America has much to compare with killing off 20 million citizens in a mere few decades, so the anti-war equivocator loses either way. I'm not sure when they stopped teaching the difference between bullying and self-defense to children, but they ought to start again.

The most astonishing argument is the notion that since Crimea voted on who their government ought to be, and 95.5% of the population voted they preferred Russia to be their sovereign owner, we would, in fact, be infringing on democracy in action by intervening on behalf of Ukraine.

Let us be clear here: we do not live in a classical democracy--little more than mob-rule--and we do not support raw democracy in the United States. We live in a particular kind of Republic, a blend of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, with the intent of maintaining as many of the benefits of these three different forms of government while minimizing the detriments. This is a very old concept, first put into practice by Lycurgus of Sparta and expounded upon by Cicero at greater length. Ukraine is a Republic too; specifically, a "unitary, semi-presidential Republic," and defending pure democracy as a stand-alone value against the most effective precedent for nations and their society--which happens to include sovereign maintenance of borders, beyond reach of the flimsy and susceptible whims of popular sentiment--is hogwash.

But there's a more telling side of the story: when Crimea voted for the change in leadership, Russia won by 95.5%. No one legitimately wins a 95.5% majority in politics. Sure, Crimea's government is imperfect, and suffers from corruption and mismanagement, but turning administration over to Russia hardly constitutes a step-up on those issues. Such an absurd landslide victory would hardly be more suspicious if the vote was absolutely unanimous.

In a private moment, Vladimir Putin once asked George W. Bush why he doesn't run for office a third time. Bush was, understandably, momentarily speechless at the abject disregard for political ethics and respect for precedent, but more importantly than Bush's lack of speaking (which we all probably wish we had experienced a bit more of in previous years) is the former KGB agent's revealed attitude towards notions of sovereignty, law, and national precedent.

A significant reason why the world is as peaceful as it is right now--arguably among the most peaceful times in history, according to Steven Pinker--is that the United States looms like... well, a hawk, over the world, willing to cut down aggressors who infringe on the sovereign rights of other nations. It would be wonderful if other countries helped us out in this because contrary to the oil-theft hype and speculative garbage half-articulated by some, it's really an enormous economic drain to maintain the largest, most advanced, and most deployed military in the world. But they don't, so we continue because it isn't in anybody's best interest to see a return to pre-Cold War methods of resolving international disputes. Deterrence works, because not everyone else out there has the same libertarian notions of love and peace that you and I do. In fact, many enemies (most recently Bin Laden) are all too happy to take advantage of our magnanimous inclinations and leverage it to attempt to destroy us.

In his writings, Bin Laden told his followers and the world that fighting the Russians had been hard. Fighting the Americans, he said, would be easy, because we didn't have the will to resist. Hitler made the same prediction of France in WWII and won an easy victory because he was correct, in spite of superior French numbers and the advise of all of his own generals not to engage on such a suicidal goal. Unlike France, however, we proved our own bearded Hitler wrong. But it's taken a toll, and our will to fight is diminishing. We have to remember that our security and the relatively peaceful state of the world is very much contingent on our willingness to fight, and when the time arises, we have to demonstrate our willingness by fighting. It is paradoxical, to be sure; to achieve peace by amassing arms. It's easy to see how hippies could conclude that it is roughly analogous to "fucking for virginity," however shortsighted their vision. And there are latent dangers if we do not sufficiently check the military itself. But these claims are not true because they "make sense," but because history has demonstrated that they work.

Vladimir Putin's assertion in the Crimea is not a particularly bold move, but neither is it timid. Imagine a child, carefully and watchfully putting a toe over the line he was told not to cross. Whether we should have gone into Syria or not, we failed to act when we claimed we would, and now our bluff is being called once more. Will we step in and protect little countries from big neighbors? If, in the future, we want our word to be taken seriously, and thus hold violent combat off at superior arm's length, we have to regain the credibility we've lost and reassert our willingness to fight. And our willingness to fight doesn't begin in Congress, but in the people. It's a hard-sell to convince enough of a nation that the willingness to go to war has a pacific effect on the international community, but the alternative is a lot more murderous and bold toe-crossing in the future, when it becomes more certain the the lesser parts of humanity that, no matter the illicit and murderous nature of their actions, no one will stop them because no country has the stomach any longer to do what is necessary to preserve peace.

A Theory on Liberals and Conservatives

In the American court of law, a criminal prosecution is conducted with both a prosecuting and defending lawyer. The reason both of these are guaranteed is that the guilt or innocence of the accused cannot be presumed by fiat, though we do hold people to be innocent until proven guilty as a measure against vindictive accusations and false imprisonment. An objective advocate taking the side of the client and throwing up the best possible legal defense, regardless of his guilt or innocence, is the basis for our ability to claim that the defendant is, in fact, guilty, as Alan Dershowitz acknowledges is almost always the case. Nevertheless, sometimes the defendant is innocent, and the defense attorney's importance is more obvious still.

So too in politics, we can roughly think of the Democratic and Republican parties as analogous to defense and prosecutorial attorneys, respectively. As the axiomatic proponents of change, it is almost always the progressives who have come up with the ideas and defend them in the name of the advancement of society and the human condition. Conservatives conversely defend the status quo, and generally look to the potential threats and dangers of the new ideas being proposed by liberals.

Now, it would seem from this perspective that conservatives are merely holding back the engines of progress, except that just as the vast majority of the accused are, in fact, guilty, the vast majority of liberal-progressive ideas are wrong. Some of them are dangerously wrong. This does not mean that liberals are evil, are stupid, or are obstinate beyond hope. Many of them are brilliant. They merely suffer from the same problem that afflicts inventors, theorists, and creative individuals of all kinds: limited knowledge. Our narrow scope of experience and understanding makes stumbling upon genuinely good ideas an extremely difficult undertaking, and one where success is more often a factor of luck and the best measure of success is not whether it "sounds like a good idea" or "makes sense," but by the test of trial and error.

But even in this allegation--that liberals are usually wrong--lies a latent praise for sometimes being right, and for throwing out all these ideas in the first place. Indeed, all of the principles and policies Conservatives defend today, most of them being or having been "good ideas," were the one-time product of liberal minds. The men who forged the United States were, by all accounts, among the most radical progressives of their day. The fact that they are now defended by conservatives against the ideological attacks of liberals like Howard Zinn is not a betrayal of ideology, but conformity to the important role of that mindset in our system.

It therefore makes perfect sense that freedom of speech was largely a creation of the left, and is now primarily under attack from the left. It makes sense that the conservative mindset historically defended monarchy and now defends limited government. Liberals create and destroy, while Conservatives block and defend. It was a good thing that Liberals succeeded in creating our modern understanding of freedom of speech in the United States (by conservative surrogate, Oliver Wendell Holmes) in 1919. It was also a good thing that liberals succeeded in destroying the institution of slavery. So too was it a good thing that Conservatives successfully blocked the spread of communism in the 20th century, and successfully defended the same policy of free speech when it has come under attack from the same liberal party that redefined it a century before.

There is much confusion about who was where and which party said what, when, but the foundational attitudes are timeless. Conservatives are skeptics, cautious and mindful of the lessons of history. Liberals are dreamers, the inventors of the future. As a conservative myself, I tend to be skeptical of new solutions, as most have a tendency to make the problem worse and often come with horrendous unexpected side-effects, but I simultaneously recognize that we have these same liberals and their ideological ancestors to thank for the principles and values that we hold now. Sometimes--more rarely than they like to admit, but sometimes--they are right.

But liberals need to understand that the role conservatives play is not merely a matter of something as petty as "social justice," (an as-yet undefined or definitionally flexible term), but can be as serious as life-and-death. Take a moment to imagine what America might be like today were Communism to have successfully spread as it was beginning to, and had not been shut down as it was. There's no reason to assume it would have been as lethal as Russia or China or North Korea, leaving tens of millions dead from starvation and secret prison camps, but the threat wasn't a historical hallucination. The sexual and religious minorities they defend so vigorously now could have easily been the targets of populist hatred, as they were in those parts of the world they most vocally admonished the West to emulate, including that subject of liberal adoration (of the time), the socialist nation of Germany in the 1930's. Talk about a bad idea with consequences.

Multiculturalism and deconstructive theories today are close relatives of communism. Both are philosophically Marxist and aim at setting fire to the traditional order. Communism was economic, while the new radical left theories are largely social and cultural, but both result in the rejection of the principles that made the west so successful: the notions of limited government, individual rather than collective sovereignty, property rights, and an understanding of human behavior that stresses personal responsibility. More specific to modern times, multicultural doctrines of tolerance also open the gates for a theocratic Trojan Horse from the middle east in the form of militant Islam. Muslims advocating war against the West have been guest-speakers at university since long-before 9/11, and left-leaning academics at these universities have since claimed that it was the despair of economic poverty, not Islamic Jihad (as explicitly stated by the bombers themselves), that was the root cause of these attacks. If you don't believe that there is a civilizational threat lurking here, than you probably do not understand the nature of this particular brand of Islam.

It isn't a bad thing when the left fails to acknowledge that they're wrong, or even a threat to civilization, because if they were to stop coming up with ideas to push civilization forward, it would stagnate. The suppression of bad and dangerous ideas--through argumentation and refutation--is what conservatives are there for, and a good thing they do it too. The real threat is in liberals bypassing conservatives in their ideas. Imagine, by comparison, the institution of trial by one-sided litigation. The search for truth is over.

It was with this threat in mind that I chose the picture for this particular post: Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the first and greatest orators and rhetoricians, and conservative defender of the Roman system (along with Cato the Younger, the indirect namesake of the Cato institute) from Julius Caesar. Their failure eventually culminated in failure to prevent the civic and subsequently more literal collapse of the entire civilization. Historians disagree over exactly how many centuries it took for Europe, North Africa, Western Asia and the Mediterranean to return to standards of living similar to those under Roman times, but 1,000 years is a reasonably conservative estimate. Some areas still haven't quite returned to their level of success attained under Roman rule, most notably in regions of what is now Tunisia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

These are the stakes, and while liberals pave the path towards a better and brighter future, they also carry the latent ability to completely destroy America (a country they themselves created in a previous life, to be fair). Their largely pure motives don't lessen that danger; destruction by malice or by ignorance are still both destruction. If conservatives can learn to understand that liberals created everything that they cherish, and that liberals will continue to give their children hope for an even better future, and if liberals can learn to appreciate that the vast majority of their ideas are wrong and that conservatives are often times the only thing between themselves and unintentional societal and cultural suicide, much more serious politics and discussions might be possible on the merits of policies, rather than on baseless allegations of evil intentions and narrow, one-sided definitions of what America is all about.

The Wild World of Truck Law

I was driving through the heart of southern Texas, traveling--over the course of two days--from El Paso, Texas to Mobile, Alabama. I had a family reunion to attend in Gulf Shores, and the traffic around San Antonio and Houston was jeopardizing my already tenuous time table. Ultimately, I realized I wouldn't make it all the way to Mobile by the coordinated evening, and I called my family to inform them and possibly come up with a solution as that reality become more apparent.

The personal problem for me here was hours. Professional commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers are only allowed to drive a maximum of 11 hours a day, out of a total of 14 consecutive hours maximum of work. This itself must be punctuated by a break of no less than 30 minutes before the 8th hour of that 14, and all of this is contingent on you having available hours in the first place. A CMV driver is not to exceed 70 hours of time on duty in an 8-day rolling week... unless your company closes on weekends or travels in Canada, where you're limited to 60 hours in a 7-day rolling week. Either of these periods can be reset to the full time by taking a 34-hour break, including at least two 1 am - 5 am periods. Welcome to the DOT's world.

One option that I had considered was using what's called personal conveyance, or "PC," to park my trailer, unhook, and drive the truck as a commuting vehicle to the gathering and back the following day. But even this was shrouded in hazy and ominous regulations. After calling my trainer, my uncle (a former driver), and briefly consulting Google, it appeared that I could, in fact, legally go over my hours through PC, but only if I was traveling a "short distance" to lodgings, restaurants, etc, or if I was using it to commute to or from my "home terminal." Neither of which seemed to be precisely true in my case; I needed to drive about 80 miles from a yard more than a thousand miles from my home terminal, and 80 miles is a "short distance" only by the most generous of comparative interpretations. And here too, a driver cannot operate a CMV period if they have been "placed out of service for exceeding the requirements of the hours of service  regulations." This strange and ambiguous phrase was not made any clearer when I asked about the specifics on PC rules from the safety officer at my company's yard in Texas, who essentially said "it's just a liability thing so that if you get in an accident, and you're over hours..."

Ultimately, my mom and uncle drove out the 80 miles to collect me.

What I've briefly summarized and described here is a problem related only to the hours of service regulations. I'm not expecting you, reader, to absorb and remember all of this, since most truck drivers only have a rudimentary and functional understanding of these laws, which seem to change yearly anyhow (for instance, the "two consecutive 1 am - 5 am periods" clause is currently being debated by congress; far more important than the national deficit). DOT has established specific and particular rules on inspection reports, the paper and e-logs, weight and bridge law, road restrictions and driving regulations, load securement, and the myriad of complications that arise from hauling hazardous material. They've even expanded into personal health, which must be maintained like any other piece of equipment on the rig. In 2010, the DOT created a scoring system for all of these codes and restrictions called the Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) program. Under the CSA program, drivers and their companies accrue points for various violations, from minor speeding and warnings to lethal collisions. The more points you have, the more of a liability you are to the company, and the less hireable of a driver you are.

Now, the point of these laws is to make trucks safer on the road. The premise, of course, is that semi trucks are the biggest safety hazard on the road. In reality, however, trucks are simply the most restrictable, giving the appearance of improved safety by government regulation policy. Both car and truck accidents have been in steady decline over the last several decades. What's more, trucks are, largely, safer than cars on the road. In 2009, for instance, the overall rate of police-reported crashes for trucks was one third that of "four-wheelers." While accidents involving CMV's are more likely to result in a fatality, CMV's are significantly underrepresented in the total number of accidents, and while they're usually held financially liable for accidents, collisions between CMV's and cars are the exclusive legal fault of the latter 71% of the time. This makes sense at a very basic economic level; companies lose a lot of money when they lose time, loads, and drivers in accidents.

But regardless, DOT has made it it's mission to make the roads safer from 18-wheelers and their kin. How have their policies performed? It's difficult to say, because "[i]n 2012, the Federal Highway Administration implemented an enhanced methodology for estimating registered vehicles and vehicle miles traveled by vehicle type[...]applied to data from 2007 through 2012." The suspiciously large decline in accident rates at that time looks more politically self-serving than reflective of real road-safety. Aside from that leap, the rate of declining collisions is more or less the same as we've had since the 1970's.

Henry Hazlitt described the problems of policy tunnel-vision in terms of economics. "While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also[...]interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently." It seems reasonable to hypothesize (I won't say "conclude" just yet) by the relationship between data and that law that it was public opinion and the appearance of increased safety, not safety itself, that lawmakers and the Department of Transportation have been after in the recent expansion of trucking law. The cost of this increased perception of road safety just so happens to be the increased stress and demands of following these laws by the drivers of these big rigs. "It's not the same anymore," said one old veteran trucker, describing how the job is more aggravating than it used to be. It lacks the freedom.

But stress and pressure to make economic use of the limited time drivers have during the day (one can easily imagine how this could encourage drivers to move when they might otherwise want to stay still?) is not the only danger of compliance. According to Mike Rowe, the hidden costs of compliance are "staggering," both in economic terms and in terms of safety. According to Rowe, the motto "safety first!"--a mainstay in the trucking world--is not only silly, but even a little counterproductive. "I value my safety on these dirty jobs as much as the people I'm working with," he told the audience at his TED talk. "But the ones who really get it done, they're not out there talking about 'safety first.' They know that other things come first." He went on to decry "the idea that we create this sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else's responsibility as though it's our own and vice versa."

These dubious policies that seem so straightforward and well-intentioned come with hidden costs. Whether those costs outweigh the benefit--which may or may not exist--is a calculation that could feasibly come out in favor of either side, but it's a question we can't address when those costs remain hidden. They could be as important as death statistics in the thousands, or as trivial as making it to a family reunion in time, but they exist and they matter. When the benefits of these policies are elusive or underwhelming, we should take the time to ask whether the costs are worth it, especially when those costs are hoisted onto the shoulders of others.

Thanks.

It's Just BC!: A Rebuttal

A number of my friends (who are my best critics) have variously suggested in my criticisms of higher education that my view is too narrow, that the complaints I have are really only about Bellevue College, and that things really aren't that bad in other schools. It's an argument that my points are only anecdotal, which, of course, their responses are as well, but it also misses the way in which I came to the conclusions about higher education that I did. Allow me to clarify that here.

My concern with freedom of speech, particularly on college campuses, began after hearing Christopher Hitchens' defense of hate speech at the University of Toronto in 2006--my closer friends will have probably gotten sick of hearing references to this by now--and it was at that point, at the beginning of a class on the techniques and technology of propaganda I was involved in, that I took the issue seriously and began to research the threats to freedom of speech in the United States and in higher education generally. It became clear to me, in researching, that this was not a problem of the past or a latent problem, but a problem in American schools, now, today, and this was primarily the result of my discovery of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). From that understanding, and from various books I read--by Alan Kors and Harvey Silvergate, the co-founders of FIRE, by Greg Lukianoff, the current president of FIRE, by "Kindly Inquisitors" by Jonathan Rauch, and another book called "Let the Students Speak!," a legal history of the freedom of speech struggles in American schools--from this, I saw freedom of speech as something that was important to examine at Bellevue College, but it wasn't something I believed was a problem at the moment. My line of thinking was: "Look, here's something that's problematic in other schools. Let's try to preempt that so it doesn't become a problem at Bellevue College." I didn't think it was a problem at Bellevue College at the time. It was entirely because of the instances of the chilling effect and the fear of these inscrutable and often incoherent policies at other schools that I began to look into Bellevue College's own policies.

It was then that, after I had assumed that Bellevue College was actually doing okay because I hadn't noticed anything myself prior to this, that I began to notice that Bellevue College was, in fact, a very, very, very poor defender of freedom of speech, and was even a strong opponent of it. This, by the speech of the now president of the college itself, Dr. David Rule, in response to my question at his student forum discussion, and by my interviews with the Vice President of Equity and Pluralism, Yoshiko Harden, and by the school's policy itself, and the way that school rules and beuracratic systems were used systematically to keep quiet opinions that ran contrary to its own political agenda, and to simultaneously promote its own agenda, and claim to be a defender of free speech while oppressing it in a quiet, surreptitious manner. All of that came after the discovery of these effects going on in other schools, and it was this discovery in other schools that fueled my discovery of it in Bellevue College.

Now, because it's been widely acknowledged by these same critics that my criticisms are for the most part true, (though the opinion differs greatly on what we should do about it), I hope it won't be alleged post-hoc that I'm tilting at windmills here. This was a problem I first discovered at other schools, and it's not just a thing at BC. Whether it's true at this or that or the other particular school is, of course, open to discussion. I haven't been to every single school; I haven't experienced the college life at these other schools. But when people who haven't taken quite as active of an interest in the subject as me--for entirely understandable reasons--come to me and say, "but my school's not like that!," I have no way of knowing whether that's true or not because I would have said the same thing about Bellevue College to my current self, were I talking from two year's ago's experience.

In short, this isn't just a problem at Bellevue College. It's a problem all over the country, and in more schools than not. FIRE rates schools on a red, yellow and green light system. Green doesn't even mean the school is constitutionally sound, but it's close enough. It's "about right," it for the most part does a good job of protecting student's rights and you'll be safe holding a dissenting opinion about a major political subject. The yellow-light school's policies are problematic. These are not abiding by the constitution, and there's an issue that needs to be addressed in the name of the school's Amendment XIV section I obligation to uphold student's constitutional rights, perhaps to an even greater degree than those of other, non-student citizens. Red-light schools are "laughably unconstitutional," as Greg Lukianoff described them, and of the schools surveyed by FIRE's team of extremely competent first amendment law team, they found that of the hundreds of schools surveyed, nearly 60% of them fell into the red-light category.

This is not a Bellevue College-exclusive issue we have here.

Bellevue College is one of those red-light schools, or was last year; they've since been removed from that list even though their policies have gotten worse with time and not better. And these are only the schools surveyed, which are the major and larger schools in the United States. So with that in mind, I think the burden is on those who say this is a one-school, Bellevue College issue, and not a greater, larger trend, to investigate their schools before exonerating them off the cuff, and to show that the resources, time and experience organizations like FIRE that have spent to evaluate these schools in dedication to this sole cause are don't prove that these school policies are a threat to the classical liberal society and American values that FIRE believes them to be.

BC Presidential Student-Forum with Candidate Dr. David Rule

(From October 13, 2012)

Robertson: “Sort of a specific question […].  In 2001, Kincaid v. Gibson, the courts ruled that the University environment is, and I’m quoting them, “the quintessential ‘marketplace of ideas’ which merits full, or indeed heightened first amendment protection,” so freedom of speech.  There’s unfortunately been some conflict between the push against bullying and intolerance and that sort of thing, and freedom of speech.  This has happened in Illinois, particularly on the East Coast. Where do you see the line between first amendment protections and, sort of the intolerance-bullying issue?”

Rule: “First amendment rights are not absolute. And we need to start—none of our rights, when you look through the Bill of Rights, none of our rights are absolute rights. I mean, the issue with first amendment rights is that we all say “you’re not allowed to stand up in a theatre and yell ‘fire!’” alright? Unless there is one, ok.  Well the basic principle underlying that concept is freedom of speech can be controlled.  Particularly in areas where harm can be done.  Yelling ‘fire’ in a theatre could result in a stampede where people could be hurt, so that is not protected speech.

“One of the things I love about working in the public sector—and I served in three Catholic Universities, and freedom of speech was very simple: you spoke to the president and he or she would tell you what you are allowed to say. It’s a private college.  One of the things I love about public colleges is that you do have the marketplace of ideas, but even here at Bellevue – I remember when I was taking the tour – we dictate time, place, manner, right.  Time, place, manner, and I forget the statutes that support all of that.  The idea that, for example, people cannot wander around on campus unless the campus says so, and say whatever they want, in the hallways and in the rooms, and things of that nature.  You have a ‘free-speech’ area out here, which is honored.

“Free speech stops when individuals are being hurt, in my mind, so that’s where that line is with bullying.  You know, it’s the same way we talk about, for example, sexual harassment.  It doesn’t matter if I didn’t mean a comment in a way that is a sexual advance, let’s say.  In my mind, what I thought, doesn’t matter; it’s what the victim feels.  If you feel I have made sexual advances or made sexual comments that are inappropriate, it’s your opinion that counts, not mine.  And it’s the same way in the bullying aspect.

“You know, I’m from the East Coast, so I’m told I have a relatively thick skin.  So people can say things to me, particularly after being a president for eight going on nine years – I can take it.  Does it hurt sometimes? Yes, but I have a particularly thick skin.  Other people, hearing the very same comments that I might take as ‘ok, they’re upset, or they’re…” could be very damaging to them.  So, there is a line there, and to some extent it varies at the institution, but when it comes to bullying and things like sexual harassment and hate-speech, it really flips up the other side and a lot of it has to do with how it’s perceived on the other end.  And so it becomes more of a case-by-case scenario. What hurts me may not hurt you, and vice versa.”

What's Wrong with the Wealth Inequality Conversation

This is a power-law distribution graph. I first became familiar with the phenomenon of power-law distribution graphs from Clay Shirky's TED talk comparing institutional models of organization and collaborative models of organization.

Now, suppose you're a photo-blogger. You invest several hundred dollars and a few months on photography lessons, another couple hundred on decent quality photography equipment, and spend a few hours a week, every week taking photos and posting them to your page. As an amateur, you do quite well; your photos are of good, nearly professional quality, and you make calendars out of them over Christmas for your relatives. Your photo-blog receives, on average, around 50,000 hits per month.

Your father, on the other hand, lives in retirement and has opted, of all possible hobbies out there, to devote the majority of his free money, time, and energy into the same one you chose. After thousands of dollars on courses, seminars, workshops, equipment, and trips to exotic places, and after thousands of hours of practice time taking meticulous photos, he's finally started his own photo-blog, and his superior photos bring him in close to 1,000,000 page-views per month, with thousands of them shares.

And just as one final counter-point, let's look at your teenage daughter, a social-media tycoon and queen bee, a selfie-taking, smart-phone-wielding Facebook junkie with more tech skills than she probably deserves or knows how to productively apply. As it happens, she takes a tremendous number of photos, which she uploads to facebook via instagram. Her photos get a fare number of views, but only from close friends and family members. At your request, she reluctantly put some of her better photos into an online photo-blog. The blog gets less traffic than the Gravina Island Bridge.

I want you to keep two things in mind. First, that even the possibility of a teenager taking photographs as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world--which, in many ways, it is--would not have been thinkable a mere hundred years ago, and is now possible thanks primarily to a non-redistributive market. Secondly, in a world where websites are profitable only with the aid of people actually going to them, I want you to allegorically think of page-views as a kind of currency, to be distributed and redistributed.

Notice too that, in the greater population, photographers like your daughter are ubiquitous; like yourself are uncommon; like your father are exceptional and rare. As if by some celestial law, the page views associated with each blog correlate to quality of content, not as a matter of moral obligation or of making the internet run better, but as a function of human nature, incentive structures, and simple cause-and effect.

It is from this allegorical angle that I look at the arguments for redistributing wealth. Power-law distributions are not just about contribution of content and effort, but also describe the expected distribution of rewards, be they page-views or dollars.

In my macro-economics class, the only non-textbook article we were told to read was Joseph Stiglitz's now famous "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%," which lambasted the growing wealth inequality in the United States, and in some way spurred on and gave credence to the Occupy movement (the parts that weren't a political carry-over from Code Pink and the rest of the Anti-War movement, as Bernadine Dohrn mentioned to conservative writer and journalist Andrew Breitbart). Stiglitz actually preempted my own argument, saying:

"Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year--an economy like America's--is not likely to do well in the long haul. There are several reasons for this."

His given reasons are the following: first, wealth inequality is a result of decreasing opportunity, which is bad; second, distortions and manipulations that lead to inequality undermine the economy; third, America needs infrastructure, which is the result of 'collective action,' which inequality threatens by dividing people based on needs, desires and incentives.

As I recently wrote in a post about unemployment, there are no shortages of opportunities for work, even for lucrative work. If there is a problem of unemployment, the problem appears to be more cultural and social than it is economic in nature. Stiglitz's second point is largely correct, but is a function caused by government intervention and meddling, not solved by it.

As for the third point, the argument that "[t]he United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on..." is misleading on two fronts. First, it ignores all of the bad things government has done with the money we give it (most recently, denying the privacy-rights and presumption of innocence of its' taxpayers). As Christopher Hitchens once observed, it is true that Hezbollah gives money to charity, and that HAMAS helps feed the poor. Not to compare our own government's actions to those of theocratic-fascist organizations, but it would be equally unjust to equivocate the threat to society posed by large corporations, which often fund philanthropic infrastructure projects, with the threat posed by the government presumed to be the sole provider of such infrastructure.

Secondly, Stiglitz's point ignores the opportunity cost when money is put into "collective" goals through government. There are various reasons why the private market is a more efficient and more effective innovator, builder, and business-conductor than the government, which I won't go into here for the sake of brevity.

Stiglitz also references a common fallacy in social theorizing: the idea that those at the top stay in the top, and that money doesn't move around. We're stagnating, and money won't redistribute, so the wealthy, while outwardly complaining, are really quite happy with the status quo. Thomas Sowell thoroughly destroys this myth in his more careful study of the issue:

For the more progressively-inclined, loath to trust a conservative (a black conservative!!1!) like Thomas Sowell, Malcolm Gladwell also attacked this fundamental misunderstanding of social and economic mobility in his most recent book "David and Goliath."

Ultimately, however, none of these address the most important issues, which is not intellectual or economic or anything so high as that. The real concern at work here is a more gut-level, emotional argument: they have something I don't have. How did they get it? They're no better than me...

Well, actually, if you want to use money as your measure, yes, the 1% are better than you, and they care more about money than you do. For the same reason that your dad has more page-views on his photo-blog, because he put in time and effort to get those page views, the way Bruce Lee put in time and effort to achieve his martial arts expertise (though I'd totally get behind a "redistribution of martial arts expertise" movement), the wealthiest in America have, by and large, achieved it through a combination of luck and really, really hard work. My 8th grade math teacher was one of the founding members of Amazon, retiring in his mid-30's. How did he do it? By putting in consecutive 18-hour days, for months, on top of a finely honed expertise with computers and logistics. I will never be a member of the 1%, because I spend my time writing about stuff like this instead. As a consequence, I may one-day aspire to be among the top 1% of writers in the world though. Imagine the injustice: 1% of all writers owning 40% of all the writing talent! How terrible! When we look at money the way we look at any other kind of currency, be it respect, page-views, books, knowledge, sleep, or whatever, the lunacy of class warfare rhetoric becomes transparent.

We shouldn't be shocked or upset when we see power-law distributions at work in society. We shouldn't feel upset when your basement-dwelling cousin has a better World of Warcraft character than we do, despite his putting in roughly 1,000% more time into the game than you. We shouldn't feel upset when, after our reclusive sibling spends hours reading and studying in their room while we were out partying, they end up smarter than us. Nor should we feel we've been cheated or wronged when someone makes more money than we do. The increasing wealth-inequality is not a function of some kind of systemic injustice, but is in fact the natural product of justice--giving to each their due--and a growing population. In many ways, it is in fact a sign of freedom and equality of treatment, in that only in a free economy can real differences between individuals in goals, aspirations, drives, and the sweat of honest effort be allowed to shine openly.

Are Schools Enclaves of Totalitarianism?

One of my favorite of all Supreme Court opinions was delivered by Justice Robert Jackson in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, in which he claims that under the fourteenth amendment, all citizens are protected from the state itself "and all its creatures," including schools, and that while the needs of education necessitate special considerations, none are so demanding as to deny students their Constitutional freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. "That they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes." In Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), arguably the most famous and often-cited case related to American schools, Justice Abe Fortas famously wrote that "schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism."

But totalitarianism's face has changed, from the vicious and open brutality of George Orwell to a confused, bureaucratic labyrinth out of a Kafka novel. William Dobson has variously explained this phenomenon on the international scale in his book, "The Dictator's Learning Curve:"

To summarize, the old methods don't work anymore. They're too transparent. The new, more slippery and more effective way to maintain power is to use more subtle tactics: the allowance of free speech, but only in places and manners in which it is certain to have no effect; no blatantly oppressive laws, but vague laws that, when taken literally, are breathtakingly broad in scope but can be applied like a scalpel against political opponents. In short, the new totalitarians do their best to play the part of defenders of freedom, while still quietly suppressing its effects.

I used to think it was an overstatement and exaggeration to refer to school policies as "totalitarian" in nature, but I'm increasingly believing that it was Fortas, not myself, who was correct in naming the problem.

Consider, as just one example of this, the phenomenon that is FERPA law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Two years ago, Issaquah High School expelled Cameron Gardener (name changed to protect privacy). It appears that two other students who had been caught with illegal drugs had opted to turn in Cameron as a kind of plea bargain, though the details are a bit sketchy there. Cameron was brought into the principle's office from class and told that they already knew what he had done and that there was no use lying. The administration forced him to sign a confession that he had violated the school's drug policy, and then proceeded to search his person and backpack and administered a drug test. Cameron was not allowed to call a lawyer or even his parents.

Now, what's interesting in this case is that Issaquah High School didn't find any drugs on Cameron, and his drug test came out negative. Oh well, says the school. It makes no difference. He signed the confession, therefore he broke the school's drug policy. In the school's findings on the case, they audaciously congratulated themselves on respecting all of the student in question's rights during the investigation. Apparently they forgot the IV, V, VI, and VII Amendment rights; I'm no lawyer, but if those words have any communicative value, the school's actions clearly violate them. Issaquah High School turned the emergency expulsion into a 10-day suspension and never apologized to Cameron or the Gardener family.

Here's where FERPA law plays it's part. When I called to confirm these facts with the school, after the ordinary passing off from secretary to administrator to secretary, the school claimed that they could not release the information to protect the student's privacy. It wasn't particularly important, apparently, that it was the student himself who had told me about this information and given me the paperwork that had been given to him. Whose privacy is this law defending?

A much milder but similar incident occurred at Bellevue College where, in attempting to confirm facts, English professor Elizabeth Harazim (no name change, in this case), refused to provide information about a student who she had permanently removed from her class for "question[ing] a student's contributions based on ethnicity," not because she didn't want to--so she said--but because FERPA didn't allow it. The student in question's comment was actually that everyone with American citizenship is an American, no matter what their ethnicity, or at least so they said. Instead of having to overtly deny the claim, Bellevue College could simply fall back on "the student's privacy" in order to protect their own decisions, proceedings, rulings and treatment of the student.

Oops...

In mirroring the secret courts of classical authoritarian governments, schools now run on de facto secret courts, where a preponderance of evidence--rather than the "beyond reasonable doubt," or even the more lowly civil court standard of "clear and convincing evidence--as their standard burden of proof.

FERPA law is just one example of these kinds of infringements on public law that Fortas, Jackson and others warned against in attempting to teach students how to live in a free society. Free expression, free assembly, free exchange, and various other freedoms are being attacked in other, similarly sly ways, all the while paying lip service to the same rights and freedoms that our education system is systematically eroding. It's true that the schools aren't directly responsible for these laws, legal dangers and monetary incentives, but they openly and enthusiasticaly embrace of them without even a hint of a challenge or fight to retain the values they proclaim with their other face--free inquiry, freedom of speech, innocent until proven guilty, and fair, public trials. We're beyond the point where we should accept as legitimate our government school's tired old excuse that "this wasn't our fault." If they weren't taking advantage of these laws for their own sake, or at the very least being cowardly and two-faced, they would be actively working to oppose FERPA, free speech zones, oppressive speech codes and the like. But they're not, so we shouldn't be afraid of calling them by their proper descriptor: totalitarian.

On Unemployment

I recently finished Garret Garret's novel "The Driver," which opens with a surreal procession of various people, from lawyers to farmers to beggars, marching behind two men who, jointly, constitute the modern reincarnation of Christ on earth. Their mission: to solve the problem of joblessness by marching their army to Washington and demanding that congress pass a law granting unlimited prosperity to everyone. Surprisingly, the novel wasn't published in 2008, but in 1922, and set in 1893. Oh the times, they are a changin'.

"There aren't enough jobs" was the crux of the argument made by sympathizers with Coxey's army, as the odd procession came to be called. It is strikingly similar to the complaints made today, particularly of college students who emerge from their academic institutions armed with a fiercesome intellectual resume and the force of will to take on the world... only to find that no one seems to need their job-skills, or at least far fewer than expected. Economists, politicians, and lay people lazily pontificating about the world's problems will say "well, the job-market's tough out there."

But is it really? I don't think so. Nor, as it happens, does Mike Rowe, whose recent interview with Reason.TV is an insightful view into the untapped job-market that the people complaining about the lack of jobs are inexplicably ignoring.

Ignoring these jobs isn't exactly inexplicable though. In fact, it has a perfectly legitimate explanation: as we've gotten more successful as a nation, we've been told over and over again that "college is a path to success." For a while, this was true; as we got more things we needed, like food, housing, and clothes, at affordable prices, we could afford to do research, and come up with theories about society and pay people to do that. Pay them very well, in fact. It was all very new and very interesting, and such people were intellectual giants of their time. Many still are.

But we overcompensated, and the corollary of aspiring to be great doctors, lawyers, professors or politicians, by no means bad or irrational careers (except maybe that last one), was to begin looking down on the more traditional kinds of work as "beneath us." On a more personal note, as a professional truck-driver who left academia for the blue-collar world--I was previously set on becoming a teacher, then a journalist--people from various different walks of life ask when I'm going to wake up and get a "real job." Never mind that the average driving salary is $48,000 a year, ignoring benefits. My second company trainer was an owner-operator, and grossed over $150,000 last year. What do people mean by "real job?"

There is no shortage of jobs. Welders, plumbers, drivers, various tech-industry jobs (it's this easy to learn to code), are all relatively easy to get into, and provide a reasonably good income to people claiming to have no employment. In education, a field that requires upwards of 5 years of school, depending on your state, tens of thousands of dollars, thousands of hours of time that could have been spent doing something else productive, all of that will give you the opportunity to fight tooth and nail against your erstwhile classmates for a job as an intern. Maybe. I'm only slightly exaggerating. My driving-training, which with any effort will easily out-pay teachers in the long run, took one month. Not six months, not three, but one. One month. That's thirty days, to clarify, and four thousand dollars instead of eighty thousand, or more. Before I had even graduated, I had been pre-hired with three separate companies.

There is a town in North Dakota called Williston, where an oil-boom has left the city struggling to catch its infrastructure up to the incredible wealth pouring out of that region, and the subsequent flow of people pouring in. An inexperienced worker can move there and make $16 an hour as a McDonalds employee, with guaranteed overtime, or upwards of $80,000 a year as an oil-field worker. Due to the lack of housing and hotels, construction in that region is in demand, and it doesn't take much to get paid very well to pound nails.

Of course, the reason the pay is so good is that there's a cost. There's a cost--in time, energy, stress, and even danger--in every job, but in Williston, the cost is very high. Temperatures in the winter can drop into the -60F range (even excluding this year's polar vortex), the hours are long, and the whole city is essentially a sausage-fest; romantic prospects are slim even if you aren't wrapped in oil and mud-soaked Carhartts. But people who are willing to work and are resourceful enough to find housing, even just a trailer, can get it there.

I mention Williston to make a point about people's choices. In a recent episode of Joe Rogan's podcast, Stefan Molyneux pointed out that Americans under the poverty line worked an average of 16 hours a week... as a family. That's husband and wife combined, and these numbers precede the 2008 housing crisis. To be fair, there are certainly people out there who work very hard and still live in poverty, but the fact that the average sits at 16 hours a week per family, even if we grant that many people in poverty don't work at all, gives us good reason to guess that number to be much smaller than many particularly leftist politicians would have you believe. These people are, to a great extent, unemployed by choice.

This is not to say that they don't want to be employed; far from it. All I'm saying is that people who are unemployed are, by and large not willing to make the sacrifices or put in the creativity to find or make work for themselves. There is this mindset of externalization at work, which has been fostered in large part by polarized political finger-pointing and the mainstream media, that it is someone else's responsibility to make work for me. Nothing could be more damaging to employment numbers though. The jobs are out there, and it's not anybody else's responsibility to give you one. You cannot parade your way to Washington and legislate a job for yourself (though many people today do seem to be under that impression), and even if you could, you don't need to, because it's far more efficient and effective to go out, figure out what people need, and help provide that for them, and right now, like South Korea, we don't need more college educated graduates; we need linemen, and fishermen, and drivers. The problem of unemployment is social and cultural, not economic.

This article by David Wong gives eloquent (albeit vulgar) advice on how to think about this on a more personal level.