21st Century Schizoid Boy

[In 1942,] after encouraging voluntary evacuation of the areas, the Western Defense Command began involuntary removal and detention of West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry. In the next 6 months, approximately 122,000 men, women, and children were moved to assembly centers. They were then evacuated to and confined in isolated, fenced, and guarded relocation centers, known as internment camps. The 10 relocation sites were in remote areas in 6 western states and Arkansas.

Nearly 70,000 of the evacuees were American citizens. The government made no charges against them, nor could they appeal their incarceration. All lost personal liberties; most lost homes and property as well. Although several Japanese Americans challenged the government’s actions in court cases, the Supreme Court upheld their legality. Nisei were nevertheless encouraged to serve in the armed forces, and some were also drafted. Altogether, more than 30,000 Japanese Americans served with distinction during World War II in segregated units.

The speed of the evacuation forced many homeowners and businessmen to sell out quickly; total property loss is estimated at $1.3 billion, and net income loss at $2.7 billion (calculated in 1983 dollars).

Executive Order 9066: Resulting in the Relocation of Japanese (1942), U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, http://www.ourdocuments.gov/print_friendly.php?flash=true&page=&doc=74&title=Executive+Order+9066%3A++Resulting+in+the+Relocation+of+Japanese+%281942%29.

Survey information found former internees had a 2.1 greater risk of cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular mortality, and premature death than did a non-interned counterpart.

Children of the Camps: Health, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/health.html.

All editorials and most letters to the editor published in seven West Coast newspapers and The New York Times in 1942 supported the… imprisonment of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans in 1942… Three-fourths of these Japanese were United States citizens. Some were naturalized. The majority were Nisei, meaning they were American born and raised citizens. Soldiers forced these people into 10 desolate, makeshift internment camps, quickly slapped together in the country’s interior.

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that allowed the United States military to evacuate all people of Japanese ancestry from sensitive military areas to internment facilities. On March 2,1942, the order took effect. All people of Japanese descent in California, Oregon and Washington and the southern one-third of Arizona were removed from their homes immediately.

The internment was a huge government undertaking – one that still evokes strong emotions in the 21st century. As a result, researchers might expect to find a large number of letters to the editor and editorials regarding the event. Yet, in an analysis of the eight newspapers studied here from March 1942 through June 1942, only a small number of letters and editorials about the Japanese were uncovered. A total of 91 letters to the editor of 3,764 published letters, or 2.4 percent, dealt with the internment, or discussed anything about Japanese-Americans and only 30 published editorials, of 6,109 or less than one half of 1 percent, discussed the internment or Japanese-Americans.

Most letters to the editor published on the editorial pages of the eight newspaper between March and June of 1942 strongly supported the Japanese internment. A total of 64 published letters, or 70 percent, said the internment was good, while only 27, or roughly 30 percent, opposed it.

Once Japanese internment started, no editorials in these newspapers ever questioned the military’s totally unsubstantiated claims that the Japanese posed a severe threat to national security.

But what is worse is that many West Coast newspapers’ editorials went beyond even what the military demanded. These editorial writers urged the government to imprison any and all Japanese west of the Mississippi River, regardless of whether they lived in areas of military importance.

One reader, Mrs. L. Watts, was representative of much of the Examiner’s published reader reaction to the internment when she wrote in a March 6 letter, “I think after the FBI has proved that many ‘Japanese-Americans’ have been betraying our country the less said by the Japanese the better.”

Heroic editors in short supply during Japanese internment, Brian Thornton, Newspaper Research Journal, 2002, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3677/is_200204/ai_n9037368/.

All this was done despite the fact that not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast.

The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, U.S. Government, 1980, http://www.archives.gov/research/japanese-americans/justice-denied/summary.pdf.

Despite decades of denials, government records confirm that the U.S. Census Bureau provided the U.S. Secret Service with names and addresses of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The Census Bureau surveys the population every decade with detailed questionnaires but is barred by law from revealing data that could be linked to specific individuals. The Second War Powers Act of 1942 temporarily repealed that protection to assist in the roundup of Japanese-Americans for imprisonment in internment camps in California and six other states during the war. The Bureau previously has acknowledged that it provided neighborhood information on Japanese-Americans for that purpose, but it has maintained that it never provided “microdata,” meaning names and specific information about them, to other agencies.

A new study of U.S. Department of Commerce documents now shows that the Census Bureau complied with an August 4, 1943, request by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau for the names and locations of all people of Japanese ancestry in the Washington, D.C., area.

Confirmed: The U.S. Census Bureau Gave Up Names of Japanese-Americans in WW II, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=confirmed-the-us-census-b&print=true.

As we see here, total expenditures per pupil are nearly two-and-a-half times higher today than in 1970, after adjusting for inflation, while student achievement toward the end of high school has been flat or has even declined slightly (in science).

President to Call for Big New Ed. Spending. Here’s a Look at How that’s Worked in the Past, Andrew J. Coulson, Cato Institute, January 27, 2010, http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/president-to-call-for-big-new-ed-spending-heres-a-look-at-how-thats-worked-in-the-past/.

The present paper [assesses] the results of 25 years of international research comparing market and government provision of education… In more than one hundred statistical comparisons covering eight different educational outcomes, the private sector outperforms the public sector in the overwhelming majority of cases. Moreover, that margin of superiority is greatest when the freest and most market-like private schools are compared to the least open and least competitive government systems (i.e., those resembling a typical U.S. public school system).

These findings, moreover, span some of the most diverse cultural and economic settings on Earth: from the United States to Colombia, from the urban slums of Hyderabad to the fishing villages of Ghana. The parents whose children benefit from market-like school systems range from some of the most privileged on the planet to some of the least literate and most destitute. Contrary to the expectations of many conservative and liberal education commentators in the United States, there is little evidence that government regulation improves the operation of the marketplace. It is actually the freest, most market-like education systems that demonstrate the greatest margin of superiority over state schooling.

Markets vs. Monopolies in Education: A Global Review of the Evidence, Andrew J. Coulson, September 10, 2008, http://www.cato.org/pubs/articles/coulson_comparing_public_private_market_schools_jsc.pdf.

http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=6504

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school#New_Orleans

The 2009 results — the most recent available — of the federal test that measures change in achievement levels over decades showed that the nation’s 17-year-olds were scoring no higher in reading and math than in 1973. SAT scores have dropped or flat-lined, too, since 2000.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/education/26inflate.html?pagewanted=1&hp

Some remarkable footage of a flying fish has been captured by a TV crew filming off the southern tip of Japan… The fish was completely airborne for 45 seconds. This beats one previous, impressive report from an American researcher in the 1920s of 42 seconds.

According to Junji Yonezawa, at the Center for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries on Outlying Islands, the animal’s flight-time of 45 seconds must be close to its physical limit, as brachial respiration is impossible while moving through the air.

There are some 40 species of “flying fish” in the family known as Exocoetidae. The animals are found worldwide in warmer waters.

Their flight ability comes from a glide rather than a powered flapping.

Fast flying fish glides by ferry, BBC, May 20, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7410421.stm.

According to Chinese media reports, officials in Puning City, Guangdong Province aim to sterilize 9,559 people, some against their will, by 26 April.

The authorities started the campaign to sterilize people who already have at least one child on 7 April.

Four days later, the authorities said they had already met 50 per cent of their target.

The Puning City authorities are also reported to have detained 1,377 relatives of couples targeted for sterilization in an apparent attempt to pressure them to consent to having the operation.

Local birth quotas, upheld by stiff penalties as well as rewards, play a prominent part in the policy. Reports of coerced abortions and sterilizations have continued and few officials are believed to have been brought to justice or punished for such abuses.

Children born outside the quota are not issued residency registration documents known as hukou. Without hukou, they have no access to health care, education or other social security provisions.

Thousands at risk of forced sterilization in China, Amnesty International, April 21, 2010, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/thousands-risk-forced-sterilization-china-2010-04-22.

Married people are pressured to sign “contracts” with the government in which they promise to comply with various aspects of the policy;

Married people are required to obtain permission from the government before they give birth;

Married women are pressured to undergo regular gynecological tests in order for the government to monitor their reproductive statuses;

Married women are urged to insert intrauterine devices (IUDs) or be sterilized when they have reached their birth quotas, thus depriving them of their choice over birth control methods;

Women who are pregnant out-of-quota—which includes premarital pregnancies—are often forced to abort the fetuses, even in advanced pregnancies;

Men and women who have violated the policy, as well as their families and relatives, have been punished with arbitrary detention, beatings, fines, and loss of property; others have been fired from their jobs and their out-of-quota children have been denied household registration permits (hukou);

Both parents and children face discrimination as a result of the policy, as education and employment opportunities, and even social services, are linked to compliance with the policy.

I Don’t Have a Choice over My Own Body, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, December 21, 2010, http://chrdnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/%E2%80%9CI-Don%E2%80%99t-Have-a-Choice-over-My-Own-Body%E2%80%9D.pdf.

Government officials said the [one-child] policy was a great success, preventing at least 250 million births since 1980.

China steps up ‘one child’ policy, BBC, September 25, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/941511.stm.

[In Sweden,] between 1934 and 1976, when the Sterilisation Act was finally repealed, 62,000 people, 90 percent of them women, were sterilised. 15-year-old teenagers were sterilised for “crimes” such as going to dance halls. One woman was sterilised in 1960 for being in a motorcycle gang. Orphans were sterilised as a condition of their release from children’s homes. Others were pinpointed on the basis of local neighbourhood gossip and personal grudges. Some were targeted because of their “low intelligence”, being of mixed race, being gypsies, or for physical defects.

Per head of population, however, only Nazi Germany sterilised more people than Sweden. How could such a programme be sustained in a country famed during the post-war epoch for its apparently enlightened social policy? The Sterilisation Act was passed in 1935, under the government of the Swedish social democratic party (SAP). The Act shortly preceded the founding of the so-called “Swedish model” of welfare capitalism, based on a vision of national unity between large corporations and workers.

People deemed likely to burden the state with the cost of child allowance payments were also targeted. When the new benefit was introduced in the 1950s, the rate of sterilisations doubled.

Social Democrats implemented measures to forcibly sterilise 62,000 people, Steve James, March 19, 1999, http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/mar1999/euge-19m.shtml.

All cancer rates going down…

The rapid increase in lung cancer… was caused by the increase in smoking, of course. Almost nobody now challenges that. But they did once. Indeed, one of the most vociferous opponents of the theory that smoking causes lung cancer was none other than Carson’s mentor, William Hueper. So obsessed was Hueper with his notion that pesticides and other synthetic chemicals were causing an epidemic of cancer and that industry was covering this up, that he bitterly opposed the suggestion that smoking take any blame – as an industry plot. So it is ironic to find that possibly the most iconic and original text of the entire environmental movement, Silent Spring, was built on the work of a fervent tobacco defender.

Females:

Males:

Cancer, chemicals, Carson and smoking, Matt Ridley, December 17, 2010, http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/cancer-chemicals-carson-and-smoking.

Thomas Malthus, the messiah of modern-day Malthusianism, argued in the early 1800s that food production wouldn’t be able to keep pace with human reproduction, and as a result there would be ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues’ that would sweep off millions of people. Yet in his era, there were only 980million people on Earth – today there are more than that in China alone and they all have food to eat. Malthus’s problem was that he also saw natural limits where in fact there were social limits. His fundamental pessimism meant he considered it impossible for mankind to develop beyond a certain, nature-enforced point. And yet, shortly after he made his population pronouncements, through the industrial revolution and various social revolutions, mankind did overcome many social limitations and found new ways to make food and deliver it to people around the globe.

In Ancient Rome, one of the main uses of coal was to make jewellery. Women liked the look of this glinting black rock hanging around their necks. No one could have imagined that thousands of years later, coal would be used to power massive steam engines and an entire Industrial Revolution, forever changing how we produce things and transport them around the world.

The exact same resource can do very, very different things, depending on social and technological development. It was social limits, not physical limits, which meant that Ancient Romans could not use coal to make things move and other ancient communities could only use uranium to make glass look yellow. And the main problem with resource-pessimists such as Malthusians is that they continually misinterpret social limits as physical limits. They naturalise social limits, reinterpreting and re-presenting problems of social development as problems of nature’s shrinking bounty. They make the fatal flaw of arguing that the main barrier to progress and human comfort is the barrier erected by nature’s limited resources, when in fact it is the barrier erected by crises of social imagination.

That is why they are wrong about absolutely everything, why every prediction made by every population scaremonger throughout history has failed to materialise. A very early resource panicker was the second-century Christian philosopher Tertullian. In 200AD, Tertullian said: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’

But back then, there were only 180million human beings on the entire planet – about the same number that currently lives in the eastern part of the United States. The problem for Tertullian was his understandably limited imagination. In his time, pretty much the only known resources were animals, plants and various metals and minerals. Tertullian had no way of conceiving of the enormous abundance of resources inside the Earth, which lay dormant because of social limitations not natural ones.

It seems very clear to me that today, still, the main problem we face is absolutely social rather than natural. We now live under a cult of sustainability, a social and political framework which says that we should never overhaul what exists and should instead make do with the world as it is. The idea of sustainability is anti-exploration, anti-experimentation, anti-risk – all the qualities we need if we are going to make the kind of breakthroughs that earlier generations made with coal and uranium and other resources. In contrast to the past, today human society is accommodating to social limitations, and accepting the idea that they are natural, rather than trying to break through them. The Malthusian mindset is winning, and that is a tragedy for all of us.

Think the Earth is finite? Think again, Brendan O’Neill, November 8, 2010, http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9867/.

Although there is no doubt that unions and the state played some role in generating the decline in hours, the traditional emphasis on both factors is probably misplaced. Except in a few states, such as Massachusetts, direct enforcement of maximum hours legislation was nonexistent, although some employers may have been prompted to obey the law out of civic duty. The length of the workday was not the major issue in the vast majority of strikes, even in the 1880s. For the most part, reductions in weekly hours in the nineteenth century appear to have been the outcome of bargains struck between workers and employers, in the context of a competitive labor market.

The Cambridge economic history of the United States: the colonial era, Volume 1, Stanley Lewis Engerma, Ph.D. in Economics from Johns Hopkins University, Pages 230 & 232, http://books.google.com/books?id=6sDXBGMbrWkC&lpg=PA224&ots=HgcA7BCIOO&pg=PA230#v=onepage&q&f=false.

It cannot be an exaggeration to state that historically the manufacturing production worker has not been a leading group among consumers in achieving enhancement of standard of living.

Two Centuries of Compensation for U.S. Production Workers in Manufacturing, Lawrence H. Officer, Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2009, Page 171, http://books.google.com/books?id=UHuW43F1i5QC&lpg=PA177&ots=Mraf7EHRBs&pg=PA171#v=onepage&q&f=false.

The Industrial Revolution was a series of events and improvements that led to an extraordinary change in the way people produced things. It started in Europe during the mid- to late- 1700s and spread to North America in the early 1790s with the opening of Slater Mill, a Rhode Island textile mill that used water-powered machinery to spin cotton into yarn in quantities unmatched by individual spinners working at home or in small workshops. But Slater Mill was only a first step. Most finished cloth still had to be woven on household hand looms — a painstaking process that yielded relatively little output.

The next major advance came in 1814 when a group of investors opened America’s first integrated textile mill in Waltham, Massachusetts — a mill that had the capacity to spin yarn and weave cloth. Seven years later, in 1821, another large-scale mill began operation in Lowell, Massachusetts, and by mid-century the New England textile industry was producing cloth in quantities that would have seemed unimaginable 50 years earlier. (See table: New England Cloth Production.)

Productivity soared, and prices fell… Productivity gains also had an effect on wages, but in a less straightforward way. During the second half of the 19th century, the average “money wage” for American workers actually fell. But in “real” terms, workers had more buying power. They were able to buy more with the money they earned — more food, more clothes, more consumer goods.

Why did real wages go up? In large part, because productivity increased. Labor-saving machinery, standardized parts, better organization, improved transportation, and more efficient capital markets all made it possible for factories and farms to reduce their per-unit costs. Farmers were able to produce more bushels of wheat per acre at a lower cost per bushel and more bales of cotton at a lower cost per bale. Mills and factories were able to produce more cloth at a lower cost per yard and more stockings and pants at a lower cost per pair.

By the end of the 20th century, Americans had reached the point where clothing accounted for less than five percent of personal consumption expenditures, yet the quantity and selection of clothes in most closets was greater than ever.

A Rags to Riches Tale: Thanks to Higher Productivity, You Don’t Have to Wear the Same Clothes All Week, The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 2004, http://www.bos.frb.org/education/ledger/ledger04/winter/rags.pdf.

Rather than accepting majority will, once the voting’s over, a minority is inclined to skulk off, plotting to get even next time. In a culture where taxation, conscription, self-defense, capital punishment, and private lifestyles are considered legitimate public issues… it’s even harder to view such a reaction as unreasonable.

Majoritarianism rests on two false assumptions and a cynical threat. It first assumes that two people are smarter than one person. Strength is additive, two people are stronger than one person, and this has been the primary source of tragedy throughout human history… People, in fact, do possess certain attributes which are additive, and many which are not at all. Decency, kindness, integrity are all individual characteristics. Time is additive only in a limited sense: two women can’t have a baby in four and a half months… Just as gravity arises from the nature of space and mass, rights arise from our inherent nature as individual human beings. Rights aren’t additive. Systems which assume that they are labor under the false and dangerous assumption that two people have more rights than one.

Some claim that majoritarianism, despite its faults, is an alternative preferable to physical conflict. They’re wrong: majoritarianism is physical conflict. Elections are a process of counting fists, rather than noses, and saying, “We outnumber you — we could beat you up and kill you — you might as well give in and save everyone a lot of trouble.” Majoritarianism, to put it straightforwardly, possesses the full measure of nobility manifested by any other form of extortion.

The free market… runs on Unanimous Consent. The canned pears “issue” gets solved every day without debate, without TV pundits, without elections. If you don’t like canned pears, you don’t buy them. If you do, your choice isn’t limited by political bosses in smoke-filled rooms. If your concern is cost, you buy generic. If you want savings and colorful pictures on the can, you buy housebrands. If you like a company because it has funny advertising or doesn’t make its workers take urine tests, you buy name products. If you consider yourself above the common herd, you buy specialties — canned pears in garlic sauce — at specialty prices which don’t penalize anybody else. Everyone, manufacturer, distributor, retailer, and consumer gets what he wants. Unanimous Consent. Hyperdemocracy. Even crippled by taxation and regulation, quality steadily increases, while prices, in terms of real wealth, continuously fall. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back…

The most important piece arrived (as puzzle pieces often do) in a colorful cardboard box — steaming hot on a thick crust, with black olives, mushrooms, onions, sausage, pepperoni, green peppers, and extra cheese. Sitting in a room full of friends, I noticed how such a group makes decisions by the process of Unanimous Consent. They were hungry. Something got done because that’s the way everybody wanted it. The idea of pizza met with unanimous approval, but the earth wouldn’t have stopped if it hadn’t. Whoever didn’t want pizza wouldn’t have to eat it. Or pay for it. Among libertarians, the individual is free, limited only by a non-aggression principle forbidding initiation of force, to do whatever he wishes, including going out for a hamburger. The crisis always centers on anchovies, but “pizzacracy”, as I began to call it, seemed to be up even to that. Pizza could be had with anchovies on half its surface, although anchovies do tend to make their influence more widely felt than their little bodies are distributed. Two pizzas could be ordered, with and without, common practice even among non-libertarians.

But something else was happening. An anchovy-lover might consider his friends more important than dead fish on toast. His friends, seeing how he’d been deprived of anchovies since the McKinley administration, might decide, just this once, to suffer for the pleasure of his company. Nobody was campaigning, voting, or skulking off to plot revenge. Instead — and entirely unlike the majoritarian process — individual feelings seemed genuinely important to everyone. The Ordering of the Pizza had become among the most festive of American rituals.

The one principle that makes all of this possible is that an individual may opt out of group activity at any time, without negative sanctions. Without having to pay for what the rest of the group wants. As I discovered later, if this principle is stringently observed, there are rewards. The remainder of the group, thus “reconstituted”, becomes unanimous all over again. The individual who opted out will likely rejoin for another, later reconstitution. Even if he doesn’t, everybody stays friends. The process is natural to human beings, if you wake them up in the middle of the night before they put on their majoritarian pretensions. It may resemble 60s-style consensus, it’s also a transfer of the ethical processes inherent in the free market system to all social endeavors. if it sounds simple, the best ideas are. How many moving parts are there in a lightbulb?

Some folks have an impression that, under Unanimous Consent, nobody does anything without everybody else’s permission. On the contrary, no group does anything without the Unanimous Consent of its members, which is a different thing, indeed. But, I pretend to hear you asking, what about the claim that nothing can ever get done? To be absolutely truthful, with respect to the government, I wish to hell it were true.

If history demonstrates anything, it’s that every lasting victory which the cause of liberty ever achieved was won for it by radicals. Every humiliation it ever suffered was inflicted, not by kings, dictators, or opposing parties, but by its own moderates and gradualists.

The Tyranny of Democracy, L. Neil Smith, Prepared for the Boulder County Libertarian Party, 1989, http://www.lneilsmith.org/tyrannyd.html.

WE, THE UNDERSIGNED Witnesses to the Lesson of History — that no Form of political Governance may be relied upon to secure the individual Rights of Life, Liberty, or Property — now therefore establish and provide certain fundamental Precepts measuring our Conduct toward one another, and toward others:

FIRST, that we shall henceforward recognize each individual to be the exclusive Proprietor of his or her own Existence and of all products of that Existence, holding no Obligation binding among Individuals excepting those to which they voluntarily and explicitly consent;

SECOND, that under no Circumstances shall we acknowledge any Liberty to initiate Force against another Person, and shall instead defend the inalienable Right of Individuals to resist Coercion employing whatever Means prove necessary in their Judgement;

THIRD, that we shall hold inviolable those Relationships among Individuals which are totally voluntary, but conversely, any Relationship not thus mutually agreeable shall be considered empty and invalid;

FOURTH, that we shall regard Rights to be neither collective nor additive in Character — two individuals shall have no more Rights than one, nor shall two million nor two thousand million — nor shall any Group possess Rights in Excess of those belonging to its individual members;

FIFTH, that we shall maintain these Principles without Respect to any person’s Race, Nationality, Gender, sexual Preference, Age, or System of Beliefs, and hold that any Entity or Association, however constituted, acting to contravene them by initiation of Force — or Threat of same — shall have forfeited its Right to exist.

http://www.lneilsmith.org/new-cov.html