I just realized that I've been doing an anti-state blog and have yet to have a good post about the American warfare state. I'm sorry. I should've done one sooner, but at least I can say this is still a fairly new blog.
The reason this is such an important topic is because war is the very lifeblood of the state. I'm sure you've heard that phrase before if you're familiar with the anarcho-capitalist/radical libertarian movement. I've actually had a lot of contact with the American military as a former Air Force brat. You don't realize the utter stupidity of the ONGOING Korean conflict until your dad has to deploy to the dreaded place for an entire year. He made multiple trips to the Persian Gulf but none of them were individually as long as the trip to S. Korea.
Even as a young child I could sense that there was at least something a little strange about American foreign policy. At one point I was told that the Gulf War was finished; that we won. I asked if Saddam Hussein had been defeated since he was, after all, the "bad guy." He wasn't, but I did not realize until years later that the reason he was not defeated was because the U.S. does not fight traditional wars for the purpose of "winning." No, instead the goal is to a) show off our military might and intimidate international deviants, b) turn a huge profit for the military-industrial complex, c) use it as an excuse to destroy civil liberties, and d) all of the above.
Also, as a former military brat, I can attest to the occupied-country's sense of indignation toward Americans who hog their land for military purposes. It was always a rather big thing in Okinawa, a 60-mile long island over-run by about a dozen or so U.S. military bases, including Kadena, the largest in the Pacific theater. Every once in a while, I would hear about the locals wanting to have sound-proof walls to muffle the jet blast. There were always a few Okinawan politicians who used "getting rid of the bases" as part of their platforms. The various Vietnam War movies have it correct when they illustrate the relationship between GIs and sex workers. On Kadena, it was pretty common knowledge that Gate 2 Street, leading off the base, was a complete red light district by nightfall. Wanton, underground sex goes well with the military lifestyle.
People tend to forget that there are not only a handful of bases left in S. Korea, but also in Germany and Japan as well. The occupation of Germany, thought to have ended in 1949, has never entirely rescinded, not as long as four installations remain. This just corroborates another point about how much land is wasted for military adventures. So much of our debt could be paid off if we simply sold the land that is possessed by the state yet hardly used (military and civilian alike).
Oddly enough, I don't know that I have as many clever insights to contribute to the libertarian anti-war school of thought. It's been so well covered already (see Murray Rothbard, Karen Kwiatkowski, Lew Rockwell, Butler Shaffer, and a whole lot more for a good dose). I'll admit it's rather difficult to convince the same lay people who don't have a clue about the number of countries in the world that the 700-some-odd U.S. military bases are absurd. I try to imbue people with Facebook statuses that put things into perspective. How well that works is anybody's guess.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Friday, September 10, 2010
ECU Raises Tuition; No Recession for Professors
A lot of people have been completely insulated from the recession and have enjoyed "business as usual" with but a few distractions or pitfalls. Bankers, for example, have had it better than ever financially. What about college professors?
At eastern North Carolina's largest school, East Carolina University, tuition is going up and no cuts are to be made to academics. Check out the Chancellor's take on the budget and tuition increases. This is going on everywhere in the country and is not limited to public universities (although, those may be the first to fail if this situation continues). At ECU, the raising of tuition is nothing new. It happens every year as a result of unlimited student lending (see the parallels to the housing bubble) and the fact that the state legislature gets pressured more and more to reduce funding. The university knows it can get away with raising tuition as long as people can take out more loans with impunity and without risk. What's new? Now, you will see even deeper cuts to administrative staff (meaning longer lines and lower service), but NOT any reductions to pay and benefits of professors.
I no longer have access to ECU's faculty salary information (you have to have a school user name), but unless things have changed, the average faculty member makes well north of $50,000 per year and much higher in certain departments. What happened to Americans having to cut back and take lighter paychecks? This has not been the case at ECU or hardly any other universities. The burden is always absorbed by the customers. God forbid ANY university abolish the tenure system and kick some of the six-figured, leftist blow-hards out and balance the university's budget.
In effect, the tenure system is a form of unionization that allows senior members to hold the rest of the world hostage. As long as there's a mis-informed demand for college and an academic cartel allowing the tenure system, this problem will not go away and costs will sore even worse than health care prices. The other irony of all of this is that there is an enormous market of unemployed or underemployed PhDs out there who would gladly take a job at a university for less than the cost it takes to pay tenured-for-life losers who cannot even be troubled to publish in the irrelevant journals their younger peers do. It's time to ditch the dead weight.
Peter Schiff was right once again. Education has been something I've followed closely for years now and I knew there was a bubble for some time. I was happy to see that Schiff joined in the criticism of the student-loan induced bubble. The costs of education are spiraling because of these awful no-risk loans that were designed to make things more affordable for the poor. ECU has made it clear that academics is the LAST area that will be touched by any kind of financial hardship. They would like you to believe this is because of a commitment to excellence. Unfortunately, it has more to do with a commitment to the very powerful, shadowy union of the professors, who will never take a pay cut even as their universities desperately need to streamline.
At eastern North Carolina's largest school, East Carolina University, tuition is going up and no cuts are to be made to academics. Check out the Chancellor's take on the budget and tuition increases. This is going on everywhere in the country and is not limited to public universities (although, those may be the first to fail if this situation continues). At ECU, the raising of tuition is nothing new. It happens every year as a result of unlimited student lending (see the parallels to the housing bubble) and the fact that the state legislature gets pressured more and more to reduce funding. The university knows it can get away with raising tuition as long as people can take out more loans with impunity and without risk. What's new? Now, you will see even deeper cuts to administrative staff (meaning longer lines and lower service), but NOT any reductions to pay and benefits of professors.
I no longer have access to ECU's faculty salary information (you have to have a school user name), but unless things have changed, the average faculty member makes well north of $50,000 per year and much higher in certain departments. What happened to Americans having to cut back and take lighter paychecks? This has not been the case at ECU or hardly any other universities. The burden is always absorbed by the customers. God forbid ANY university abolish the tenure system and kick some of the six-figured, leftist blow-hards out and balance the university's budget.
In effect, the tenure system is a form of unionization that allows senior members to hold the rest of the world hostage. As long as there's a mis-informed demand for college and an academic cartel allowing the tenure system, this problem will not go away and costs will sore even worse than health care prices. The other irony of all of this is that there is an enormous market of unemployed or underemployed PhDs out there who would gladly take a job at a university for less than the cost it takes to pay tenured-for-life losers who cannot even be troubled to publish in the irrelevant journals their younger peers do. It's time to ditch the dead weight.
Peter Schiff was right once again. Education has been something I've followed closely for years now and I knew there was a bubble for some time. I was happy to see that Schiff joined in the criticism of the student-loan induced bubble. The costs of education are spiraling because of these awful no-risk loans that were designed to make things more affordable for the poor. ECU has made it clear that academics is the LAST area that will be touched by any kind of financial hardship. They would like you to believe this is because of a commitment to excellence. Unfortunately, it has more to do with a commitment to the very powerful, shadowy union of the professors, who will never take a pay cut even as their universities desperately need to streamline.
Friday, September 3, 2010
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in America
Everyone likes that movie - or at least almost everyone. Many have tried to diagnose societal ills and use that movie's title as a framework for doing so. I'm no exception.
I can think of three types of people in America: normal/well-intentioned folks, authority sluts, and entitlement sluts. They comprise the good, bad, and ugly respectively. Fortunately, the "good" is the largest category demographically, even during the evil mood of times likes these. They definitely do not have power though. You could think of them as a very silent majority. Most normal people may not have the most sophisticated understanding of our world's problems and may be prone to falling for the traps set by the other types of folk (sub-prime mortgages, credit cards like crazy, global warming), but they are good at heart. Deep down, most have a respect for private property and believe that everyone should work for what they get.
Then there are the authority sluts, the ones who either think they have a divine right to boss people around or are just sociopaths. This refers to lots of people in power and particularly police officers. Granted, not all people in power are authority sluts (some are just opportunists). You can tell the individual who has an authority trip by the way they treat others. They operate in accordance to very loose rules and quite often don't bother to find any justification for their ruthlessness at all. A great example of this is the officer who takes you down to the station for "insulting an officer" or "disturbing the peace." It seems like hardly anyone gets in trouble for real crimes these days. One's only hope is that these types encounter someone who is more powerful than they are and busts them down a notch.
The entitlement sluts are irritating in many obvious ways. It's one thing to prefer making an honest living by oneself, self-employed. It's quite another to think that everyone else owes you this regardless of how well your business does. I always think of the farmers who whine for subsidies (although most subsidies go to bigger companies) because they feel entitled to be farmers just like their fathers and grandfathers. It matters not whether anyone wants to buy their crops. Then, of course, there are the Americans who are part of an entire class of entitlement insanity, the Americans who draw from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. I don't refer to those who receive these "services" reluctantly yet disagree with them. Here I criticize those who think it's a god-right even though it's predicated on stolen wealth. This is the second-largest category. Entitlement sluts think that their standards of living cannot slip any lower than their recent plights, and, if it so much as appears to do so, then the rest of the world has hell to pay. If there's not hell to pay, they'll at least cry about it for a while.
These are in a way ideal types. It is easy to think of examples of overlap between authority and entitlement sluts. Nevertheless, as a psychological framework, I think this breaks people down into neat categories as well as anything else. It would be nice to think of everyone as INDIVIDUALS. Regrettably, this current social order has been thrust onto us by the way society has been shaped through years of American fascism. In a free market society, people would be more identified by what they do to contribute (baker, shoemaker, car salesman, dentist). The status quo is not the way I want it. It is just how I'm calling it based on what I've seen. The American population is fairly neatly situated into three categories: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
I can think of three types of people in America: normal/well-intentioned folks, authority sluts, and entitlement sluts. They comprise the good, bad, and ugly respectively. Fortunately, the "good" is the largest category demographically, even during the evil mood of times likes these. They definitely do not have power though. You could think of them as a very silent majority. Most normal people may not have the most sophisticated understanding of our world's problems and may be prone to falling for the traps set by the other types of folk (sub-prime mortgages, credit cards like crazy, global warming), but they are good at heart. Deep down, most have a respect for private property and believe that everyone should work for what they get.
Then there are the authority sluts, the ones who either think they have a divine right to boss people around or are just sociopaths. This refers to lots of people in power and particularly police officers. Granted, not all people in power are authority sluts (some are just opportunists). You can tell the individual who has an authority trip by the way they treat others. They operate in accordance to very loose rules and quite often don't bother to find any justification for their ruthlessness at all. A great example of this is the officer who takes you down to the station for "insulting an officer" or "disturbing the peace." It seems like hardly anyone gets in trouble for real crimes these days. One's only hope is that these types encounter someone who is more powerful than they are and busts them down a notch.
The entitlement sluts are irritating in many obvious ways. It's one thing to prefer making an honest living by oneself, self-employed. It's quite another to think that everyone else owes you this regardless of how well your business does. I always think of the farmers who whine for subsidies (although most subsidies go to bigger companies) because they feel entitled to be farmers just like their fathers and grandfathers. It matters not whether anyone wants to buy their crops. Then, of course, there are the Americans who are part of an entire class of entitlement insanity, the Americans who draw from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. I don't refer to those who receive these "services" reluctantly yet disagree with them. Here I criticize those who think it's a god-right even though it's predicated on stolen wealth. This is the second-largest category. Entitlement sluts think that their standards of living cannot slip any lower than their recent plights, and, if it so much as appears to do so, then the rest of the world has hell to pay. If there's not hell to pay, they'll at least cry about it for a while.
These are in a way ideal types. It is easy to think of examples of overlap between authority and entitlement sluts. Nevertheless, as a psychological framework, I think this breaks people down into neat categories as well as anything else. It would be nice to think of everyone as INDIVIDUALS. Regrettably, this current social order has been thrust onto us by the way society has been shaped through years of American fascism. In a free market society, people would be more identified by what they do to contribute (baker, shoemaker, car salesman, dentist). The status quo is not the way I want it. It is just how I'm calling it based on what I've seen. The American population is fairly neatly situated into three categories: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
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