ALS: thoughts on freedom

Australian Libertarian Society Blog

Interpreting and translating

Whilst our system of government is a conservative enterprise, limited as it is by the rule of law and by a mostly static constitution, it is none the less an open system. There is a clear process by which the constitution, in light of new understanding or changed values, can be altered. It does not happen often but it does happen. This is the case with most modern democratic systems. Even the constitution of an oppressive nation like Iran has encoded within it the means for constitutional amendment. Although in the case of the Iranian constitution certain fundamentals, such as the state religion, can not be altered.

Much of religion has often struck me as a somewhat closed system of thought.  Judaism, Christianity and Islam and are each centered on a set of scriptures (the Torah, the Gospel and the Koran) that is closed to amendment and revision. They are not intended to be amended or updated. Although clearly the Gospel and the Koran are presented as extensions of the Torah.  Not being terribly religious I wouldn’t much care about any of this except for the fact that a large quantity of people on this planet are religious, some of them deeply so. It concerns me that people should wed themselves to a system of thought that is closed. In some regards it actually offends me. We should be open to new ideas and if the new ideas are superior we should abandon old ideas.

Over the last decade, whilst remaining an atheist, I have acquired a more nuanced understanding of the Christian faith. One thing that has become apparent is that whilst the written Bible is a closed text, the Christian faith relies on more than this written doctrine. It has a substantial oral tradition that evolves and supplements the closed text. The text of the Bible has an openness called “open to interpretation”. In fact a great amount of effort is expended trying to sell one form of interpretation over another. For instance whilst the Bible says that woman should not speak in Church (1 Corinthians 14:33,34) alternate interpretations based on the context of this passage allow contemporary churches to rationalize their way around the decree. Stories that if taken literally would represent quite a dire conflict with contemporary values are taken as allegoric or limited to a specific context and any such crisis is averted. To me it seems a strange system but who can question the enduring nature of something that has stood for over 2000 years. In one sense it creates a necessary illusion of consensus amongst people who in fact have quite a lot of disagreement. Read more »

April 29, 2011 Posted by | International, Literature, Religion | 22 Comments

Gold in Vietnam

Apparently people in Vietnam were using gold as a secure store of wealth and an alternate form of payment or some such thing. The government has cracked down on this immoral activity with new laws.

http://www.goldmoney.com/gold-research/vietnam-to-ban-gold-as-legal-tender.html

April 26, 2011 Posted by | International | 1 Comment

BitCoin – a monetary revolution

E-gold was an exciting development in the world of money. E-Gold is a kind of private currency, although to be strictly correct it is an electronic account keeping and payment system that monetises gold. E-Gold provides an electronic means of making payment in units of value called gold grams. Every electronic gold gram is backed by a real gram of gold. If you had enough electronic gold you could trade it in for real gold. I thought the system was brilliant. At it’s peak the annual value of transactions in E-Gold was worth the equivalent of billions of US dollars even though most transactions were very small. And this volume was growing at about 50% per annum. However a few years ago the velocity of the E-Gold currency plummeted to zero following US government action against the operator of the system. I regard the treatment dished out by the government as malicious but that’s another story. The point is that what looked for a short while to be a revolutionary new form of private currency, divorced from direct government control, and on a rapid growth trajectory, was quickly cut down by a hostile government. There are alternative digital gold currencies that still operate such as GoldMoney, but they don’t seem to have the same momentum as a payment system that E-Gold once offered.

Governments will always be able to shut down any serious alternate money schemes. Or at least that’s what I thought until I recently discovered BitCoin.

BitCoin is a cryptocurrency. It entails using encryption techniques to trade and verify electronic tokens between computer users. It is essentially anonyomous like cash. I had looked at such systems in the past but all seemed to rely on the need for a central clearing house during any exchange of the tokens to avoid fraud such as double spending of the same electronic token. And any private currency based on a central clearing house is vulnerable to shutdown by hostile government authorities. BitCoin has a clearing house but BitCoin get’s around the clearing house problem in a really neat way. The clearing house is a distributed peer to peer system. There is a clearing house but it does not live anywhere and is not controlled by anybody. It is a community based system tied into a set of open source algorithms that can’t be changed unless the majority of the community agrees to change them by replacing their individual implementation. And the larger the community the harder it becomes to change the core algorithm. A hostile government authority can’t kill the system by going after a person, a company or a particular datacentre. In a way the BitCoin clearing house is like the BitTorant network that people use for sharing pirated movies and music. Even if they make it illegal nobody can police it. In essence BitTorant looks on the face of it like a private online currency that is unstoppable. The future of online commerce will be a BitCoin cash economy.

There is a lot more to say about BitCoin. About how the unique BitCoin creation process will soon lead to BitCoin deflation (BitCoins are currently exchanging at about US$0.90). However none of this really matters because the technique is now available to create BitCoin competitors if it turns out that there are economic limitations that impact the practicallity of the original. The code is open source. Anybody with the right programing skills can create BitCoin2, expound it’s superior benefits, create an anonymous peer to peer community based clearing house and compete with the original.

One other cool thing about BitCoin. Nobody knows the real name of the BitCoin inventor. It is just “out there”.

http://www.e-gold.com

http://www.bitcoinme.com/

April 8, 2011 Posted by | Economics | 11 Comments

Is the US constitution dead?

Both presidential candidates George W Bush and Barack Obama said that the USA should not be the worlds policeman or engage in foreign nation building. In doing so they paid lip service to the US constitution. Here another potential presidential candidate, Rand Paul, says the words that must be popular (why else would they keep saying it). However I doubt he will use his senate position to argue that the current president be impeached. That would hurt his popularity. It is however the only way for congress to assert that it has ultimate authority in such matters.

My view on the Libyan no fly zone is layered. In the first instance it is nothing to do with Australia so we should in essence ignore it. From a US constitutional perspective it seems clear that the UN is seen by many as having more moral and practical authority than congress. From a military perspective it seems mad to enforce a stalemate and if your going to make yourself an enemy of the Libyan government you should make the destruction of the Libyan government a core military objective. I don’t see any shining lights in this fiasco.

March 30, 2011 Posted by | General | 5 Comments

A carbon tax makes no sense

For every policy initiative proposed by a government we the people have a right to know what is the best estimate of what it will cost us, and what is the best estimate of what it will benefit us. And this applies also to the proposed carbon tax.

I know many people of a green inclination hate Andrew Bolt and Lord Monckton. So the motivation to correct any error in the answer Monckton gave to Bolt on this matter should be quite high.

Bolt: On our own, cutting our emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, what will that lower the world’s temperatures by?

…

Monckton: So the warming forestalled by cutting Australia’s emissions would be 57% of 4.7 times the logarithm of 0.99997998: that is – wait for it, wait for it – a dizzying 0.00005 Celsius, or around one-twenty-thousandth of a Celsius degree. Your estimate of a thousandth of a degree was a 20-fold exaggeration – not that Flannery was ever going to tell you that, of course.

…

A cautionary note: the warming forestalled will only be this big if the IPCC’s central estimate of the rate at which adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes warming is correct. However, it’s at least a twofold exaggeration and probably more like fourfold. So divide both the above answers by, say, 3 to get what will still probably be an overestimate of the warming forestalled.

He also does the calculation for the whole world cutting emissions by this amount and concludes that the difference in temperature will be “four one-thousandths of a Celsius degree“.

On the face of it the answer seems better than the one that Tim Flannery gave to the same question asked again by Andrew Bolt in an interview the other day.

Flannery: Look, it will be a very, very small increment.

The extended version of both answers are on Bolts blog. Lord Monckton’s full answer includes the math and reasoning.

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/

And the actual recorded interview with Tim Flannery here:-

http://www.mtr1377.com.au/index2.php?option=com_newsmanager&task=view&id=8274

Of course whilst the benefit of a carbon tax is immeasurably small I’ll also concede that the cost of a carbon tax is pretty modest. There are in my view two obvious counter points to the Bolt question and answers.

Counter Point 1 – Bolt is asking the wrong question. We should be interested in what happens by 2100 or some other date further into the future.

Counter Point 2 – This cut to emissions is only the first step. We will innovate in response to the tax or else we will take other measures such as increasing the tax to further reduce emissions.

Both of these counter points are in my view fair enough. However properly framed any such alternative scenarios should also be able to yield numbers regarding estimated cost and benefit. I have difficulty envisaging a CO2 mitigation policy based on a carbon tax that makes much sense. I think the case for any ETS is even worse.

Maybe climate change is one of those problems that should be accommodated not solved. Chris Berg thinks so:-

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/climate-change-cant-be-stopped-but-we-will-adapt-20110326-1cazx.html

March 29, 2011 Posted by | Economics, Politics | 11 Comments

Who to vote for in NSW?

I would not presume that I can tell anybody, let alone a libertarian, who they should vote for. None the less here is my recommendation for the NSW election.

The “Outdoor Recreation Party” is the NSW arm of the “Liberal Democratic Party“, Australia’s only registered libertarian party. The lead candidate for the Legislative Council (upper house) is David Leyonhjelm. David has been involved with the LDP for many years as a member of the federal executive and is a rock sold libertarian. All libertarians should be voting one for the “Outdoor Recreation Party” in the Legislative council.

In the Legislative Assembly (lower house) the options are less compelling. However in Penrith, Ku-ring-gai and Wollondilly there are Outdoor Recreation Party candidates. Please offer them your support if you live in those areas.  If you live in Port Macquarie I’d suggest you vote for the Nationals candidate Leslie Williams. Two reasons. One is that she has put lower taxes for NSW as her number one priority. And secondly unlike the sitting MP she isn’t Rob Oakeshott’s protege.

Please offer tips and suggestions for other seats in comments.

 

March 23, 2011 Posted by | Politics | 15 Comments

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