Coyote Blog

Wow, was that a hassle.  I just finished moving my corporate office.  Hopefully, now that everything is hooked up again, blogging can resume.

Update: And per the comment, yes I did throw a bunch away, but it is still staggering how much waste paper we have to keep for the government for 3 to 5 to 7 years.  For example, I just got an audit from bureaucracy hell Mono County, California, which wants all my detailed customer campground check-in logs from three and a half years ago. 

Over the last month, blogging has been both light and of lower-quality than I would like because I have been consumed with some growth opportunities in my business.  Frequent readers will know that much of my effort has not been business per se, but completing all the government waste paper needed to start a new business in a new state or industry.  A partial list of some of these tasks are here and here.

I am thinking next summer I may go on campus and find the strongest big government supporter I can find and hire them to do all this government paperwork -- my attempt to create one new libertarian each year.  Not sure how I would find the right person, though approaching local PIRG chapter or Campus Progressives organization might be a good start.

PS- What I would really like to do is hire one Congressman a year into that summer job.

One of the advantages of not being a partisan of either the Democrats or Republicans is that I have more flexibility to actually say what I believe, without worrying that something I am saying might actually give aid and comfort to my political enemies.  I have always felt that it is really, really difficult and rare to become actively political without sacrificing consistency in your deeply held beliefs, particularly since both parties represent such an inconsistent hodge-podge of positions.  The irony of this has been, at least until the advent of blogging, that I could be smug about maintaining my philosophic virginity but I left myself no avenue to make any impact with my strongly held beliefs.

Given this, I was therefore struck by this, from Cathy Young at Reason, writing about Yale's future Taliban student:

One striking aspect of this controversy is the reaction from Yale's liberal
community. Della Sentilles, a Yale senior, recently
wrote a
piece
for the Yale Herald denouncing such manifestations of rampant
misogyny at Yale as the shortage of tenured female professors and poor
childcare options. On her blog, a reader asked Sentilles about the presence
at Yale of a former spokesman for one of the world's most misogynistic
regimes.
Her reply:
"As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements
or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one
culture is more sexist and repressive than another. American feminism is
often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own
imperialist ends."

It appears Ms. Sentilles, beyond having a lot of multi-cultural baggage, is terrified that if she actually criticizes Afghanistan in any way, she is somehow giving aid and comfort to the Bush administration, which feminists have declared enemy #1.  The politics of US presidential elections, in this case, trump criticizing a regime that treated women worse (by far) than the US has at any time in its history.  Which of course is one of the reasons* that women's groups in this country are sliding into irrelevance, putting their support of a broad range of leftish causes above speaking out on what is essentially apartheid-for-women in the Middle East  (I say essentially, because women are actually far worse off in much of the Middle East than blacks ever were in South Africa).  Whereas a decade ago the left was marching in the street to better the lot of blacks in South Africa, they are strangely mum on women in the Middle East. 

As a result, I can lament the condition of women in the Middle East, acknowledge that Saddam was a blight on humanity, but still oppose the war in Iraq as not worth the cost (when "cost" is defined broadly enough to include not must money and men but also opportunity cost).  I can adopt this position because I am not required to put on the Republican happy face or Democratic America-always-sucks face.

* Another reason is that it may be time for women to declare victory.

My father-in-law Steven Groves died today of injuries he suffered when his bicycle was hit by a car. 

Steve and I did not always agree politically, be we shared a lot of the same eclecticism in our interests.  I seldom found anything, no matter how arcane, that I found interesting that Steve did not as well (even if we might come to different conclusions about it). Steve had a scientist's passion for fact-based analysis, and was one of the very few people I have ever met truly willing to change his stance on an issue as he came to understand it better.  My enduring memory of Steve is of him listening and questioning.  He was always interested in learning more about... whatever it was that we were talking about.  I can't tell you how many of my best posts on this blog evolved from a discussion I had with Steve.

Of all the people I have ever know who were actively interested in political / economic / social issues, Steve was by far the most consistent in matching his behaviors to his beliefs.  A lifelong environmentalist, Steve was surely one of the few who eschewed dryers for clotheslines, power mowers for reel mowers, and cars for his bicycle.  Considering this last item, one could say he died for his beliefs.

Blogging will be light this week, as my wife is back home with her family and I am playing single parent.  I was working on a post last weekend in honor of my 44th birthday, to reflect on the fact that contrary to conventional wisdom that people's beliefs become pretty set with age, mine have migrated pretty far since I was 22.  I will still get to this post in time.

First, a little background as I understand workers comp:  Years ago, government, workers and employers effectively made a deal that has worked pretty well for everyone.  In that deal, workers gave up the right to sue for workplace injuries in exchange for a program where employers were required to contribute to a workers comp fund and employees are paid by a government bureaucracy for their health care and lost time.  The system is "no-fault" to the extent that it does not matter if the worker is hurt because the employer had unsafe conditions or if the worker is hurt because he did something boneheaded in violation of rules - either way he gets paid the same.  The system avoids moral hazard at least on the employers side by charging higher premiums to employers that have higher claims rates  (based on an experience mod system explained here).  Employee moral hazard (ie cheating) is supposed to be policed by the bureaucracy, and one can evaluate how much cheating is going on by how high the rates in the state are.  California used to have very high rates and lots of cheating, but has cracked down of late and things are better.  Florida is the king of workers comp fraud and employee cheating, so much so that many national insurers won't touch Florida and our rates are twice as high (or more) in Florida than in other states.

Already frustrated with Florida over the high amount of cheating and high rates, two things I have seen here of late make me doubly depressed.  First, in the last year or so we have started to see claims paid where in addition to, say, $20,000 in actual compensation to a worker, there is an equal amount paid to lawyers.  The first time, I was irate.  Why are my workers comp dollars going to lawyers?  The whole point of the workers comp system is to substitute an administrative no-fault claims system for expensive lawyers and trials.

So this week I get my second surprise about Florida workers comp.  I am down in Florida, doing some business as well as visiting the in-laws (which is why blogging has been light) when I start to hear radio commercials by law firms that say "If you have been hurt at work, call us first before you claim workers comp."  The message is not even, "call us if you think the administrative decision was unfair" but was "get us involved with every little claim."  Does this mean that I am going to start seeing a lawyer 'tax' on every workers comp claim in Florida?  If so, Floridians must have passed some pretty dumb legislation somewhere along the way.  Now, I might understand this if this was a worker backlash in some state that administratively is over-tough on workers in filing their claims, but Florida has historically been the most generous already.  I am sure most of the employers in this state have experienced the "debilitating injury the day before I was going to quit,"  a tried and true Florida technique for supplementing unemployment insurance for a bit of paid vacation. 

Maybe some of the readers can confirm if Florida did something new legislatively over the past few years that opened this up.  By the way, and I apologize in advance to all my hard-working readers in Florida, but I don't think there is any other state with a larger population of searching-for-something-for-nothing freeloaders than one can find in Florida.  Something culturally seems to be wrong here, and I wonder if Florida might not be the next California, with businesses heading for the exits.

Blogging has been light of late.  If you are confused about why, see here.  I am also working on the first annual Coyote Blog NCAA bracket challenge, so stay tuned.

Posting may be light this week as I am guest-blogging at Overlawyered.com.  Come visit me there!

In a recent post, I started to develop the theory that people who are positive to neutral about the regulatory state may be so in part because they don't encounter it - e.g. an employee tends to be sheltered from the mind-numbing body of labor law that regulates his relationship with his employer because more efficient HR departments and payroll companies shelter people from this mess.

By the way, let me digress just one second on the nature of my blogging.  When I said above that it was a theory I started to develop in a post, this does not mean that I sat around for days, came up with the idea, and started to flesh out my well-oiled thinking on the topic in that post.  It means it occurred to me literally while I was typing my post, somewhere between paragraphs 3 and 4.  I use the act of blogging as a way to test-drive my thinking on certain topics, which puts you the reader in the position of something between a intellectual sounding board and a psychotherapist.  I actually spend my time trying to keep my business running -- my college roommate is the only one I know who gets paid to sit around and think deep thoughts.

Anyway, with that out of the way, I can return to the actual point of this post which is to point out that the same attitude of "not to know it is to love it" may well apply to torts and litigation.  All romantic and heroic as portrayed in the media (e.g. Erin Bronkovitch), torts as practiced in real-life seldom so heroic, either in their details or their outcomes.  Here is Bookslut wondering about her opposition to tort reform now that she has witnessed some silly lawsuits in her area of familiarity.  Overlawyered has background on the case in question/

Every once in a while I post something off the cuff and find retroactively that I have tapped into a rich source of blogging material.  Such is the case with my post a couple of days ago about technocrats on the left regretting loss of control of the statist institutions they created.  In that article I cited examples of the left freaking out over a conservative-controlled FDA halting over-the-counter approval of the Plan B morning after pill and the injection of certain conservative dogmas (e.g. intelligent design) into public schools.  The moral was that the left is lamenting the loss of control, when they should be reevaluating the construction of the regulatory state in the first place.

David Bernstein at Volokh brings us another example with the Solomon Amendment, the legislation that requires universities that accept public funds to allow military recruiters on campus.  Folks on the left hate this act, many because they oppose the military at all junctures while others more narrowly oppose recruiting as a protest against the Clinton-era "don't ask, don't tell" policy law brainchild.  Eskridge and Polsby debate the pros and cons at the ACS Blog.  I tend to be sympathetic to the private universities, who rightly don't feel like acceptance of federal money or research grants should negate their control of their institution.

But my point is not the merits of the Solomon Amendment, but to point out the irony, very parallel with the FDA and public schools examples previously:  The Solomon Amendment is built sturdily on the precedent of Federal Title IX legislation, legislation that is a part of the bedrock of leftish politics in America.  Title IX first established the principal that the Federal government could legally override the policy-making and decision-making at private universities if they accepted any federal cash.  It was the left that fought for and celebrated this principal.  The left ruthlessly defended the state's right to meddle in private universities in substantial ways, and passed legislation to shore Title IX up when the Supreme Court weakened state control (from the Bernstein post):

The Court's attempt to preserve some institutional autonomy for universities
from anti-discrimination laws caused uproar among liberal anti-discrimination
activists. They persuaded Congress to pass the "Civil Rights Restoration Act."
This law ensured that if a university receives any federal funds at all,
including tuition payments from students who receive federal aid, as in Grove
City's case, all educational programs at that university are subject to Title
IX.

The Solomon Amendment is modeled after the Civil Rights Restoration Act's
interpretation of Title IX.

In fact, in the linked articles, Solomon is being attacked by the left precisely because it does not allow universities the freedom to set their own anti-discrimination policy (in this case, banning recruiters judged discriminatory to gays), when the whole issue of Title IX was precisely to override a university's chosen anti-discrimination policy (or lack thereof).  So again we have the case of the left building an government mechanism to control private decision-making, and then crying foul when their political enemies take control of the machinery.

In my naive youth, I would have assumed that this contradiction would quickly be recognized.  However, the left (and the right too, but that is for another post) has been able for years to maintain the cognitive dissonance necessary to support the FDA's meddling in every single decision about what medical procedures and compounds a person can have access to while at the same time arguing that abortion is untouchable by government and that a woman should make decisions for her own body.  In this case, it will be interesting to see if the left is able to simultaneously decry state control of discrimination policies at private universities in Solomon while continuing to support state control of private university discrimination policies as essential in Title IX.

Correction: You learn something every day.  I called don't-ask-don't-tell a "policy, as I had assumed that it was merely an internal military policy.  Apparently it is a law.

Yes, blogging has been so light of late as to be non-existent.  We have two large proposals due next week for the recreation business so I have been just swamped with other writing. 

The reference to the Stones is because my wife and I have tickets to see the Stones tonight in Glendale.  I remember in 1981 or 82, when I was in college, my roommate and I decided we had to drive to Philadelphia to see the Stones in concert.  After all, we thought, they are older than god and surely this was about their last tour.  LOL.  25 years later and I am seeing them again.  What odds would you have given in 1980 that Keith Richards would even be alive in 2005, much less touring?

I have my coyote blog email forwarded to my work email, which is where I read and respond to it.  I just found out I did a bonehead thing and had my settings for the email all wrong.  I had checked the "keep copy of email on server" in addition to the forward button, and apparently the mailbox on the server I never check filled up.  Sorry if you got an email box full message.  Also, apparently I had some sort of lame spam filter turned on because about half your emails were not getting forwarded to me.  Sorry again.  Hopefully all is fixed now.

Blogging is light this week because I am trying to get a couple of proposals out, and tomorrow I am taking my son to Palm Springs for a baseball tournament. 

Recently, I just finished a two-book archive of the first year of Coyote Blog.  Today, I got the books (or blooks) in the mail and they look great!

Why, one might ask, did I put my blog in a book, when everything is archived by pressing links right over there to the right of this page ------>

The first reason was for my dad.  My dad is 80-something and refuses to join the Internet age, but he would like to read my blog.  So, I produced a couple of volumes of my blog posts to give to him for Christmas.  (See, that's how confident I am that he is not reading this online -- I just published the contents of his present).

The second reason is based more on my having been a part of computers since getting an Apple II back in the late 70's.  Electronic media are not necessarily the greatest for archiving.  I wrote a lot of neat little games on my Apple II.  I wrote programs in college in pascal and assembly language on an S-100 bus C/PM computer.  I wrote programs in SNOBOL on cards for the mainframe at Princeton.  I received hundreds of emails on early CompuServe email.  Anyone know where all that stuff is today?  Neither do I.  Already I remember some cool web sites with content that seems to be gone from the Internet.   There is some kind of reverse-Moore's Law here that, if concocted, would say that the cost and complexity of reading and retrieving electronic files doubles every five years it ages.

So I decided to create a paper archive.  In the end, it cost me about 8 hours in formatting time and $30 in publishing costs to get the first year of Coyote Blog in book form.  For anyone who is interested, here is what I did:

First, I picked a printer.  It was important to do this first, since it determined what format and formatting I had to get the electronic files into.  I first considered BlogBinders.  The advantage of this service is that they can suck all of the content they need right off the web site, really making the process quick.  I decided not to go with them, because (at least 4 months ago) they did not retain any of the HTML formatting.  This means that the blockquotes I make heavy use of just became regular paragraphs.  As a result, a reader could not tell the difference any more between my writing and what I was quoting.  This caused me to look for another option, but you might still want to check it out -- I know their product is maturing so they may have more functionality today.  There is also a Beta going on right now at QOOP Blog Printing that might be a good option soon.

These were the only two direct print from blog options I found - if you know of others, please add them to the comments section.  So, I then turned to the print-on-demand self-publishing world.  CafePress has done a few things for me in the past, but I decided their print on demand was a bit too pricey for this.  Based on a few recommendations, I chose Lulu.com to publish.  I thought their pricing was reasonable, and I liked their royalty and pricing flexibility.  While I don't intend to sell the Coyote Blog archive, I am close to self-publishing a novel and I wanted to give Lulu a test spin.

Once I chose Lulu, I then needed to choose a format.  I knew I wanted a Perfect Bound book, and, scanning the pricing calculations, it was clear the cheapest option was to go for 8-1/2 by 11, since this reduced page count.  Having decided this, I downloaded their Microsoft word template, which made sure that I had all the margins and gutters and such right.

Now came the tedious part.  I wanted the posts to be in chronological order, but my blog displays in reverse date order.  I had to temporarily change the way the blog publishes.  Then, with the posts now in the right order, I just copied and pasted the text right off the site monthly archives into the word template.  I did some trial and error - cutting and pasting out of explorer gave different results than out of Firefox.  Pasting as HTML gave different results than pasting as rich text.  Eventually I got what I wanted.

Now came the really really tedious part.  I went through and did a few different edits, actually working in Open Office writer because I find it easier for this type work than Word:

• I changed the font from sans serif Arial to a more book friendly serif font (patalino)
• I deleted posts that had no value without the links (posts like "check this out") and some but not all my frivolous picture posts
• I added monthly chapter headings
• I played around with font size and line spacing for readability (remember, the first reader of this will be in his eighties)
• I added an index with the page numbers for the monthly chapter headings as well as page numbers for may favorite posts.  I did the latter by setting the titles of my favorite posts to "heading 2" rather than "heading 3" for the other posts.  Both had the same formatting, but I told the contents to only index down through heading 2, but not heading 3.
• I cleaned up a bit of spelling
• When it was clear the whole was too long for one book, I broke it into two books

(update:  Several people have misinterpretted the "tedious" and "a lot of work".  This was really just minor whining.  The time spent taking the electronic material and finishing it out into a book was about 0.1% of the time it took to actually write the articles the first time around on the blog or that it would take to write a 800 page two-volume tome from scratch.)

Since I was using Open Office, it was easy to just save the final file as a pdf and upload it to Lulu.  Lulu also provided templates for the covers (front and back) and I did some simple work on the covers, uploaded everything, and two days later the books were in the mail.

I have posted excerpts from the files with links below, both word and pdf, so anyone who is interested in trying blog printing themself can see what I did. 

• Download blog_print_example_doc.doc  (word format)

• Download blog_print_example_oo.odt  (Open Office format)

• Download blog_print_example_pdf.pdf   (PDF format)

You can see the book here in my Lulu storefront, which has both the electronic and paper versions available for sale.  I am NOT recommending anyone buy it - I just wanted to test Lulu for future projects (verdict:  I was very happy with the entire experience).  The only reason you might buy one is to see a sample if you are considering a similar project.  The cover looks great, and the paper quality is first rate.  The text printing is good but the non-cover graphics printing leaves something to be desired, but that was probably the fault of the source file having low-res graphics.  (update:  Welcome to Blooker Award readers!)

As a final note, in the extended post I have put the text of my forward for the volumes which explains some of the shortcomings of paper blog publishing:

Continue reading ‘Archiving Coyote Blog in Print Form’ »

Yes, I am still out in Hawaii for the week, so blogging continues to be light.  See you next week.

Here is a copy of the letter I sent to my representative John Shadegg as part of the PorkBusters campaign:

Representative
John Shadegg
Arizona
3^rd District

306
Cannon H. O. B.

Washington,
DC  20515

Congressman
Shadegg:

I
am a blogger who lives and runs a business in your district.  I know
that you were one of only 8 people in Congress to vote against the
recent pork-laden highway bill, something I congratulated you for on
my blog.  I now want to encourage you to continue fighting to reign
in government spending.  I am frankly flabbergasted to see the
current Republican leadership in Congress working so hard to resist
fiscal sanity, and am amazed that the Republican Party could have
drifted so far from its philosophical roots.

I
know that there are tremendous pressures on you to play the game with
everyone else in Congress, and bring home your share of pork to your
district.  Often those in your district will root for you to cut
other people's pork but not their own.  Let me say that I am totally
supportive of your cutting our 3^rd district pork first, as
a message that everyone needs to contribute to the spending cuts the
President has called for to pay for Katrina-related expenses.  You
are probably aware that many of us in the blogging world have banded
together in the "Porkbusters" effort to signal our desire to cut
pork by identifying our own local earmarks for cuts first.

Technorati tag:  porkbusters.

OK, an event has occurred that tells me that blogging is officially a trend.  My mom has actually trolled my blog with her first blog comment.

I am headed off to Paris this weekend, so blogging may be light the next few days.  I am going to try to blog from France, and try to get a sense for the issues being discussed there post-referendum.  In the mean time, I will leave you with this heartwarming scene from Team America: World Police.

I thought the movie was very funny, though if you don't like South Park-type humor, don't even bother.  I still can't get the Team America theme song out of my head, or at least the main refrain that goes

America... Fuck Yeah!

If I had a baseball team, I would play that at the 7th inning stretch.

I'm blogging here at about 300 baud so I will have to, for once, keep it brief.  There appears to be a fair amount of momentum building to do "something" about conditions in sub-Saharan Africa, which have sucked, still suck, and will probably continue to suck without some help. 

Unfortunately, many of the usual suspects are pushing the "US does not send enough aid" line as the main failure mode for Africa.  A full fisking of this will have to wait for a better connection, but suffice it to say that we have already dropped billions in direct aid and billions more in loans and loan forgiveness, without much benefit.

Who do you give the aid to?  The vast majority of sub-Saharan governments are full of corrupt looters, who will always find ways to put most of the aid money in their own pocket and those of their cronies.  Just look at what happened to oil for food money in Iraq, and that money had MUCH better oversight than the money that goes to Africa. 

Even when the aid does not come in easily looted currency, but rather in food or vaccines distributed by NGO's, the aid can help support totalitarianism and even genocide in disturbing ways.  The problem in Africa are the same that financial aid faces anywhere,
ie:  NGO's can only go where the dictator allows.  Dictators only allow
NGO's to go to towns or regions that support him, limiting access and
starving out other areas of the country.  Food aid also hurts local
farmers by depressing local prices.  To some extent, well-meaning NGO's
fulfill the role of Carmella Soprano, helping the brutal criminal she
is married to maintain a facade of stability and normality to the
outside world.

Zimbabwe is a classic example.  People are clearly suffering there, but it is just as clear that any aid given to the people there just give comfort and additional power to Robert Mugabe, who has single-handedly engineered the current disaster.

The first thing we need to do in Africa is drop our trade barriers with them.  More than ephemeral aid, they need the chance to build real businesses and real markets, and the US is the only real candidate (the EU certainly won't do it unilaterally).  Its insane to me that a few Carolina-based Senators are so terrified of competition from these nations, and have to date blocked this obvious move.

The second thing we need to do is to find a country and make an example of it.  Lets find a single country that has a reasonably freedom-oriented government with (for Africa) moderate levels of corruption and lets focus our aid and effort at them -- lowered tariffs, aid, pressure for more liberalization, loans, vaccines, the works.  African countries have had negative reinforcement for bad government for years - lets try positive reinforcement, making it clear that democracy and good government can provide an entre to prosperity and to participation in the world community.

In the spirit of Marginal Revolution's "markets in everything" series, I think I will start a "blogs for everything" series.  One of my favorite early on in this series was the Remote Blog, blogging on home theater remote control issues.

In this episode, we feature the Baby Names Blog, from the Baby Name Wizard.  It has pretty interesting features on names and why they go in and out of style.  And make sure to check out their name voyager, a cool java app on name popularity over the last century.

When we named our first child Nicholas, we soon found that we were on the front edge of a huge Nicholas revival.  For our second child, we wanted something less common, so we chose Amelia, which was way out of favor at the time but now appears to be in a revival as well.  The one thing that stands out from the chart is that 50 years ago, there were a few dominant names: John, Mary, etc.  Now, there are no dominant names.  I think this is signaling a change in parents attitude, from wanting their name to be safe and fit in, to wanting their kids' names to be unique and distinctive.  Certainly this was the case for us.

The Online Coalition, put together to fight FEC restrictions to free speech rights as they apply to bloggers, has posted their official response to the FEC.  (hat tip:  Captains Quarters)

This is one of those efforts that leave me torn.  In effect, the rulemaking process is considering whether the media exemption in campaing finance laws should be extended to bloggers.  My point of view is that the media exemption should be extended to everyone.  That, 1) limits to money spent are the equivalent to limits on speech and 2) it is particularly insidious to create multiple classes of citizen, where one class of citizen (exempt media) have more political speech rights than others.

So, while I agree with their comments on blogging narrowly, I disagree when they make broader statements, like this one:

Finally, your rules should be informed by the regulatory purpose of the Federal Election Campaign Act. Your rule should address corruption, the appearance of corruption, the involvement of foreign nationals, or the use of the corporate or labor forms of organization and their "aggregations of wealth" in ways that drown out the views of others.

What does that last part I bolded mean?  Why is the Republican Party or one of George Soros's organizations proper aggregations of wealth for the political process but corporations and labor unions improper?

Anyway, campaign finance reform is one big hypocritical unconstitutional mess.  Let anyone give whatever they want to whomever with the only proviso of full disclosure over the Internet of all sources of funds.

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of
leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off
my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of
my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these
posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to
just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of
getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of
Coyote...

Enough!  This series has slid well past the point of narcisism.   It has been fun setting this up, much like setting the light timers before I go away on a trip (for those that don't know, Typepad allows one to cue up posts with a series of future dates on which these posts appear.  I am actually typing this on Wednesday night.  The thought of light timers gets me thinking of home improvement, so in that spirit I will end with "Pocket Doors and My Manhood"

Our bathroom has a pocket door to save space - that's one of those doors that slide on a hidden rail in and out of the wall.
From time to time, usually because my kids go slamming into it, the
door comes off its rails and gets jammed, which is a problem as it can
bottleneck some very critical facilities.

The first time this happened, I tried to get it back on its track,
but I just could not.  The track is up in the wall and it is almost
impossible due to the lack of clearance to do anything with it.  I
checked in the Yellow Pages and saw there was actually a company that
specialized in pocket door repairs, so I called them out.  Well, Joe
(or whoever) shows up with his little tool kit, looks at the door for a
second, grabbed it in a certain way, and then gave it a quick jerk -
kabam - and it was back in its tracks.  It took him like 5 seconds. 

Well, there I stood, completely unmanned, right in front of my
laughing wife and family, by Joe the visible butt-crack guy.  Bummer.

Since that time, I have had the door come untracked two or three
times.  Thinking to save me further embarrassment, my wife tends to ask
any passing stranger to come in and fix it.  I can sit there for hours
fighting the thing, and then my wife brings in the guy painting the
house - kabam - fixed.  Next time she brought in the 60+ year old sales
guy who happened to be there - kabam - fixed.  I swear, if Paris Hilton
was dropping by for a visit she could probably fix that damn door.  It
is humiliating.

Well, this time I would not allow my wife get someone else to fix
it.  Every night, for about 10 minutes, I would take my innings with
the door, struggling to do what everyone else seemed to have learned at
birth.  I actually suggested to my wife that we should call out a
contractor and tear the thing out and install a real door.  She
suggested instead that she could have our 13-year-old baby sitter come
in from the other room to fix it.  Finally, tonight, when I was about
to give up, I tried holding it in a slightly different way and - Kabam
- fixed.  God I feel great.  My manhood is restored and I am at the top
of the world.

In case my plane is late and I can't blog on Monday - happy Memorial Day and many thanks to all those who have served in our country's military.

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of
leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off
my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of
my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these
posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to
just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of
getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of
Coyote...

This post from last November was my first real research project I set for myself.  Today, there are a couple of flaws I see in it, and I would like to update it, but the results are still interesting.  Here is French vs. Anglo-American 'Imperialism'"

For some reason, a portion of our country has adopted France as the
standard bearer of "anti-imperialism" (or at least anti-US
imperialism). France publicly positions itself similarly, trying to
make itself the leader and counterweight to US "Imperialism". I will
leave aside for now the argument as to whether the US's recent actions
constitute "imperialism". I will instead focus on the French as a role
model.

The first thing that struck me was how long the French tried
desperately to hold on to their colonial empire. Both the US and Great
Britain either liberated or came to an acceptable living arrangement
with their major colonies within a few years of the end of WWII. Both
seemed to come to terms with the fact that the colonial era was over.
The French, in contrast, were still involved in bloody conflicts in
Indochina and Algeria to retain their empire through the late 50's and
even into the early 60's.

So, I decided to do a little research to understand the relative
success of French and Anglo-American colonies. Of course, when judging
the success of a former colony, a lot of things come into play, and
certainly the freed colony must take a substantial amount of
responsibility for its own success and political freedom. However,
after a bit of research, it is instructive to see how well prepared for
independence Britain, France, and the US left their colonies. Did they
leave the country with democratic systems in place and a capable local
ruling class, or did they just suck the country dry and try to prevent
any locals from gaining any capability.

To make this analysis, I have selected a number of each country's
key colonies. Some of the smaller African and island nations have been
left out. I also realize that I left off some of the ex-British middle
eastern colonies, but I am too tired now to add them back in.

I have used two pieces of data to judge an ex-colony's success.
First is GDP per capita, corrected for purchasing power parity, found
in the 2003 CIA fact book via World Facts and Figures. The second is the Freedom index prepared by Freedom House.

The results are striking. When arrayed in order of GDP per
capita, ex-French colonies occupy only 4 of the top 25 spots. And, if
you leave out Louisiana and Quebec, which one can argue are much more
shaped by the US and British, and if you leave out Mexico, where there
is arguably little French influence and none in the last 150+ years,
then ex-French colonies occupy only 2 of the top 25 spots. When arrayed
by the Freedom Index, and again leaving out Quebec, Louisiana and
Mexico, ex-French colonies only occupy one of the top 25 spots! The
ex-French colonies occupy 14 of the bottom 20 poorest slots and 11 of
the bottom 15 least free slots. Finally, one could argue that
none of the ex-French colonies have really grown up into world players,
while British colonies in America, Australia, India, South Africa,
Palestine (Israel) and even Egypt play a significant role on the world
stage.

Continue reading ‘Best of Coyote V’ »

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of
leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off
my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of
my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these
posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to
just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of
getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of
Coyote...

This
post was also from early December, and was my first step in writing about the roots of modern statism.  The post is called "progressives are too conservative to like capitalism".

Many in the left to far-left eschew the liberal title nowadays
(since they consider liberals now to be wimps and too moderate, like
that Clinton guy) in favor of the term "progressive".  This term has
gone in and out of favor for over a century, from the populists of the
early 1900's to the socialists of the more modern era.

Most "progressives" (meaning those on the left to far left who
prefer that term) would freak if they were called conservative, but
what I mean by conservative in this context is not
donate-to-Jesse-Helms capital-C Conservative but fearful of change and
uncomfortable with uncertainty conservative. 

OK, most of you are looking at this askance - aren't progressives
always trying to overthrow the government or something?  Aren't they
out starting riots at G7 talks?  The answer is yes, sure, but what
motivates many of them, at least where it comes to capitalism, is a
deep-seated conservatism. 

Before I continue to support this argument, I must say that on a
number of issues, particularly related to civil liberties and social
issues, I call progressives my allies.  On social issues, progressives,
like I do, generally support an individual's right to make decisions
for themselves, as long as those decisions don't harm others. 

However, when we move to fields such as commerce, progressives stop
trusting individual decision-making.  Progressives who support the
right to a person making unfettered choices in sexual partners don't
trust people to make their own choice on seat belt use.  Progressives
who support the right of fifteen year old girls to make decisions about
abortion without parental notification do not trust these same girls
later in life to make their own investment choices with their Social
Security funds.  And, Progressives who support the right of third
worlders to strap on a backpack of TNT and explode themselves in the
public market don't trust these same third worlders to make the right
decision in choosing to work in the local Nike shoe plant.

Beyond just the concept of individual decision-making, progressives
are hugely uncomfortable with capitalism.  Ironically, though
progressives want to posture as being "dynamic", the fact is that
capitalism is in fact too dynamic for them.  Industries rise and fall,
jobs are won and lost, recessions give way to booms.  Progressives want
comfort and certainty.  They want to lock things down the way they are.
They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and
next decade, and will always pay at least X amount.  That is why, in
the end, progressives are all statists, because, to paraphrase Hayek,
only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and
certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave.

Progressive elements in this country have always tried to freeze
commerce, to lock this country's economy down in its then-current
patterns.  Progressives in the late 19th century were terrified the
American economy was shifting from agriculture to industry.  They
wanted to stop this, to cement in place patterns where 80-90% of
Americans worked on farms.  I, for one, am glad they failed, since for
all of the soft glow we have in this country around our description of
the family farmer, farming was and can still be a brutal, dawn to dusk
endeavor that never really rewards the work people put into it. 

This story of progressives trying to stop history has continued to
repeat itself through the generations.  In the seventies and eighties,
progressives tried to maintain the traditional dominance of heavy
industry like steel and automotive, and to prevent the shift of these
industries overseas in favor of more service-oriented industries.  Just
like the passing of agriculture to industry a century ago inflamed
progressives, so too does the current passing of heavy industry to
services.

In fact, here is a sure fire test for a progressive.  If given a choice between two worlds:

1. A capitalist society where the overall levels of wealth and
   technology continue to increase, though in a pattern that is dynamic,
   chaotic, generally unpredictable, and whose rewards are unevenly
   distributed, or...
2. A "progressive" society where everyone is poorer, but income is
   generally more evenly distributed.  In this society, jobs and pay and
   industries change only very slowly, and people have good assurances
   that they will continue to have what they have today, with little
   downside but also with very little upside.

Progressives will choose #2.  Even if it means everyone is poorer.
Even if it cuts off any future improvements we might gain in technology
or wealth or lifespan or whatever.  They want to take what we have
today, divide it up more equally, and then live to eternity with just
that.   Progressives want #2 today, and they wanted it just as much in
1900 (just think about if they had been successful -- as just one
example, if you are over 44, you would have a 50/50 chance of being
dead now). 

Don't believe that this is what they would answer?  Well, first,
this question has been asked and answered a number of times in surveys,
and it always comes out this way.  Second, just look at any policy
issue today.  Take prescription drugs in the US - isn't it pretty clear
that the progressive position is that they would be willing to pretty
much gut incentives for any future drug innovations in trade for having
a system in place that guaranteed everyone minimum access to what
exists today?  Or take the welfare state in Continental Europe -- isn't
it clear that a generation of workers/voters chose certainty over
growth and improvement?  That workers 30 years ago voted themselves
jobs for life, but at the cost of tremendous unemployment amongst the
succeeding generations?

More recently, progressives have turned their economic attention to
lesser developed nations.  Progressives go nuts on the topic of
Globalization.  Without tight security, G7 and IMF conferences have and
would devolve into riots and destruction at the hands of progressives,
as happened famously in Seattle.  Analyzing the Globalization movement
is a bit hard, as rational discourse is not always a huge part of the
"scene", and what is said is not always logical or internally
consistent.  The one thing I can make of this is that progressives
intensely dislike the change that is occurring rapidly in
third world economies, particularly since these changes are often
driven by commerce and capitalists.

Progressives do not like American factories appearing in third world
countries, paying locals wages progressives feel are too low, and
disrupting agrarian economies with which progressives were more
comfortable.  But these changes are all the sum of actions by
individuals, so it is illustrative to think about what is going on in
these countries at the individual level. 

One morning, a rice farmer in southeast Asia might faces a choice.
He can continue a life of brutal, back-breaking labor from dawn to dusk
for what is essentially subsistence earnings.  He can continue to see a
large number of his children die young from malnutrition and disease.
He can continue a lifestyle so static, so devoid of opportunity for
advancement, that it is nearly identical to the life led by his
ancestors in the same spot a thousand years ago.

Or, he can go to the local Nike factory, work long hours (but
certainly no longer than he worked in the field) for low pay (but
certainly more than he was making subsistence farming) and take a shot
at changing his life.  And you know what, many men (and women) in his
position choose the Nike factory.  And progressives hate this.  They
distrust this choice.  They distrust the change.  And, at its heart,
that is what globalization is all about - a deep seated conservatism
that distrusts the decision-making of individuals and fears change,
change that ironically might finally pull people out of untold
generations of utter poverty.

In fact, over the last 20 or so years, progressives have become
surprisingly mute on repression and totalitarianism the world over.  In
the 1970's, progressives criticized the US (rightly, I think) for not
doing more to challenge the totalitarian impulses of its allies (the
Shah of Iran comes to mind in particular) and not doing enough to end
totalitarianism and repression in other nations (e.g. South Africa,
Guatemala, El Salvador, etc etc) 

Today, progressives have become oddly conservative about challenging
totalitarian nations.  By embracing the "peace at any cost" mantra,
they have essentially said that they can live with anything, reconcile
anything, as long as things remain nominally peaceful (ie, no battles
show up on the network news).  Beyond just a strong anti-Americanism,
the peace movement today reflects a strong conservatism -- they want to
just leave everyone alone, no matter how horrible or repressive, and
hope that they will in turn leave us alone.  They fear any change that
would stir things up.

There are any number of other examples of the strong conservative
streak in the progressive movement.  Here are a few more that come to
mind:

• Despite at least 40 years of failure in the public schools,
  progressives vociferously oppose any radical changes to the public
  education system.  In particular, they resist any program involving
  school choice, as they are totally condescending in their utter lack of
  faith in the average parent's ability to make the right choice for
  their family.
• Progressives refuse to even consider the possibility that
  individuals should be trusted to make their own decisions regarding
  some portion of their Social Security retirement funds.  They can couch
  their opposition in a lot of fear talk about benefit cuts, but at the
  end of the day (and take this from someone who has had this argument
  with numerous liberals and progressives)  the argument always boils
  down to "we don't trust people to make investment decisions that are as
  good as the ones we would make for them".

Well, I have again written too long, and I'm tired.  If you are not
ready to rush to defend the barricades of capitalism, you might read my
post from last week called "60 Second Refutation of Socialism, while Sitting at the Beach".  Most of what I have written here has been said far more eloquently by others.  Of recent writers, Virginia Postrel, in the Future and its Enemies,
has written a whole book on not just capitalism but dynamism and
progress in general, and why people of all political persuasions tend
to be scared by it.  Brink Lindsey addressed many of these same issues
as well in his book Against the Dead Hand.  Of course, the Godfather of individual choice and societal dynamism is Friedrich Hayek.

As a final note, my ultimate statement on this topic is here, called Respecting Individual Decision-Making.

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of
leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off
my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of
my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these
posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to
just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of
getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of
Coyote...

This post was from early December, and commemorated the 60th anniversary of a facinating event in Arizona history.  Many people are familiar with the movie the Great Escape or the TV series Hogans Heroes.  Few know, though, that there was really a great escape ... by German POW's in Arizona!  Here is my post "WWII Great POW Escape -- In Phoenix?"

Many people have seen the Steve McQueen movie "the Great Escape",
about a group of 60 or so prisoners who cleverly dug a tunnel out of a
German POW camp and escaped in various directions across Europe, many
of whom where eventually recaptured.

I don't know if such an event occurred in Europe, but an almost
identical real-life POW escape (tunnel and all) occurred right here in
Phoenix, Arizona almost exactly 60 years ago.

Like many isolated western towns in WWII, Phoenix played host to a
number of German POW's, in our case about 1700 in Papago Park.
Phoenix, and in particular Papago Park, with its arid climate and red rocks, must have been quite a culture shock to the Germans.

Anyway, I won't tell the whole story, but it is fascinating and you can read it all here.  A short excerpt:

The
German prisoners asked their guards for permission to create a
volleyball courtyard. Innocently obliging, the guards provided them
with digging tools. From that point on, two men were digging at all
times during night hours. A cart was rigged up to travel along tracks
to take the dirt out. The men stuffed the dirt in their pants pockets
which had holes in the bottoms, and they shuffled the dirt out along
the ground as they walked around. In addition, they flushed a huge
amount of dirt down the toilets. They labeled their escape route Der Faustball Tunnel (The Volleyball Tunnel).

They
dug a 178 foot tunnel with a diameter of 3 feet. The tunnel went 8 to
14 feet beneath the surface, under the two prison camp fences, a
drainage ditch and a road. The exit was near a power pole in a clump of
brush about 15 feet from the Cross Cut Canal. To disguise their plans,
the men built a square box, filled it with dirt and planted native
weeds in it for the lid to cover the exit. When the lid was on the
tunnel exit, the area looked like undisturbed desert.

There
is some dispute about how many people actually escaped -- official
records say 25.  Others argue that as many as 60 escaped, but since
only 25 were recaptured, 25 was used as the official number to cover up
the fact that German POW's might be roaming about Arizona.

The prisoners who led this escape were clearly daring and inventive,
but unfortunately in Arizona lore they are better known for their one
mistake.  Coming from wet Northern European climes, the prisoners
assumed that the "rivers" marked on their map would actually have
flowing water in them.  Their map showed what looked like the very
substantial Salt River flowing down to the Colorado River and eventual
escape in Mexico.  Unfortunately, the Salt River most of the year (at
least in the Phoenix area) is pretty much a really wide flat body of dirt.  The German expressions as they carried their stolen canoes up to its banks must have been priceless.

It
never occurred to the Germans that in dry Arizona a blue line marked
"river" on a map might be filled with water only occasionally. The
three men with the canoe were disappointed to find the Salt River bed
merely a mud bog from recent rains. Not to be discouraged, they carried
their canoe pieces twenty miles to the confluence with the Gila river,
only to find a series of large puddles. They sat on the river bank, put
their heads in their hands and cried out their frustration.

I
know how they feel every summer when we go to Lake Powell and find the
water lower than the previous year.  Anyway, we shouldn't just make
light of the escapees.  Apparently the prison guards made Sargent Schultz look like Sherlock Holmes:

Although
the men left in the wee hours of Christmas Eve, the camp officials were
blissfully unaware of anything amiss until the escapees began to show
up that evening. The first to return was an enlisted man, Herbert
Fuchs, who decided he had been cold, wet and hungry long enough by
Christmas Eve evening. Thinking about his dry, warm bed and hot meal
that the men in the prison camp were enjoying, he decided his attempt
at freedom had come to an end. The 22-year old U-boat crewman hitched a
ride on East Van Buren Street and asked the driver to take him to the
sheriff's office where he surrendered. Much to the surprise of the
officers at the camp, the sheriff called and told them he had a
prisoner who wanted to return to camp.

One
of the last to be re-captured was U-boat Commander Jürgen Wattenberg,
the leader of the breakout.  Interestingly, Captain Wattenberg hid out
in the hills just a few hundred yards from my current home.

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of
leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off
my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of
my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these
posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to
just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of
getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of
Coyote...

This post was from just after the last election, and was titled "Something Unusual Will Happen in 2008".  This was my first ever Instalanche (though the record books put an asterisk next to this one because it was from one of Glenn's guest bloggers) and I still think it makes an interesting point about the next election.

Assuming Cheney does not want to run for president, which I think is
a given, something will happen in 2008 that has not happened in 56
years since 1952: Neither of the two major-party presidential
candidates will be incumbents of the President or Vice-President jobs.
In 1952 we had Eisenhower vs. Stevenson. Since then we have always had
incumbents running, though not necessarily successfully -
1956: Eisenhower
1960: Nixon
1964: Johnson
1968: Humphrey
1972: Nixon
1976: Ford
1980: Carter
1984: Mondale and Reagan
1988: Bush
1992: Bush
1996: Clinton
2000: Gore
2004: Bush v 1.1

I guess the only exception you could make to this is if you called Hillary an incumbent.  Full list of presidents and VP's here

UPDATE

I didn't just bury the conclusion, but left it out entirely. The
point is that 2008 is likely to be a zoo. Not one but two wide open
nominating battles, plus of course the general election. Can we please,
please before then try to figure out a way to choose our candidates
other than just letting Iowa do it?

UPDATE #2

Welcome Instapundit (guess I need to send a check to my host for
more bandwidth). While you are here, you might check out my latest
roundup on Kyoto and Global Warming, as well as an interesting analysis on the economic and political success of ex-French vs. ex-Anglo/American colonies.  Short answer is that you didn't want the French as masters.

UPDATE #3

Check out the comments section, which has several good posts
handicapping the Republican candidates in 2008. Several people suggest
a Republican strategy to replace Cheney mid-term with their next
candidate. I know that the leadership of both political parties lament
their loss of control, due to the primary system, in selecting their
nominee, and this certainly would be an intriguing way of getting
around that and the Iowa/NH problem. However, the move is so
transparently Machiavellian, and I think unprecedented, that the first
party to try it will probably get punished in the court of public
opinion.

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of Coyote...

This post was from early last December, and is titled "60 Second Refutation of Socialism, While Sitting at the Beach":

Last week, there were several comments in Carnival of the
Capitalists that people would like to see more articles highlighting
the benefits of capitalism.  This got me thinking about a conversation
I had years ago at the beach:

Hanging
out at the beach one day with a distant family member, we got into a
discussion about capitalism and socialism.  In particular, we were
arguing about whether brute labor, as socialism teaches, is the source
of all wealth (which, socialism further argues, is in turn stolen by
the capitalist masters).  The young woman, as were most people her age,
was taught mainly by the socialists who dominate college academia
nowadays.  I was trying to find a way to connect with her, to get her
to question her assumptions, but was struggling because she really had
not been taught many of the fundamental building blocks of either
philosophy or economics, but rather a mish-mash of politically correct
points of view that seem to substitute nowadays for both.

One
of the reasons I took up writing a blog is that I have never been as
snappy or witty in real-time discussions as I would like to be, and I
generally think of the perfect comeback or argument minutes or hours
too late.  I have always done better with writing, where I have time to
think.  However, on this day, I had inspiration from a half-remembered
story I had heard before.  I am sure I stole the following argument
from someone, but to this day I still can't remember from whom.

I
picked up a handful of sand, and said "this is almost pure silicon,
virtually identical to what powers a computer.  Take as much labor as
you want, and build me a computer with it -- the only limitation is you
can only have true manual laborers - no engineers or managers or other
capitalist lackeys".

Yeah, I know
what you're thinking - beach sand is not pure silicon - it is actually
silicon dioxide, SiO2, but if she didn't take any economics she
certainly didn't take any chemistry or geology.

She
replied that my request was BS, that it took a lot of money to build an
electronics plant, and her group of laborers didn't have any and
bankers would never lend them any.

All
too many defenders of capitalism would have stopped here, and said
aha!  So you admit you need more than labor - you need capital too.
But Marx would not have disagreed - he would have said it was the
separation of labor and capital that was bad - only when laborers owned
the capital, rather than being slaves to the ruling class that now
controls the capital, would the world reach nirvana.  So I offered her
just that:

I
told her - assume for our discussion that I have tons of money, and I
will give you and your laborers as much as you need.  The only
restriction I put on it is that you may only buy raw materials - steel,
land, silicon - in their crudest forms.  It is up to you to assemble
these raw materials, with your laborers, to build the factory and make
me my computer.

She thought for a few seconds, and responded "but I can't - I don't know how.  I need someone to tell me how to do it"

And
that is the heart of socialism's failure.  For the true source of
wealth is not brute labor, or even what you might call brute capital,
but the mind.  The mind creates new technologies, new products, new
business models, new productivity enhancements, in short, everything
that creates wealth.  Labor or capital without a mind behind it is
useless.

From the year 1000 to the year 1700, the world's wealth, measured as GDP per capita, was virtually unchanged.
Since 1700, the GDP per capita in places like the US has risen, in real
terms, over 40 fold.  This is a real increase in total wealth - it is
not money stolen or looted or exploited.  Wealthy nations like the US
didn't "take" the wealth from somewhere else - it never even existed
before.  It was created by the minds of human beings.

How?  What changed?  Historians who really study this
stuff would probably point to a jillion things, but in my mind two are
important:

1. There was a philosophical and intellectual
   change where questioning established beliefs and social patterns went
   from being heresy and unthinkable to being acceptable, and even in
   vogue.  In other words, men, at first just the elite but soon everyone,
   were urged to use their mind rather than just relying on established
   beliefs
2. There were social and political changes that greatly increased
   the number of people capable of entrepreneurship.  Before this time,
   the vast vast majority of people were locked into social positions that
   allowed them no flexibility to act on a good idea, even if they had
   one.  By starting to create a large and free middle class, first in the
   Netherlands and England and then in the US, more people had the ability
   to use their mind to create new wealth.  Whereas before, perhaps 1% or
   less of any population really had the freedom to truly act on their
   ideas, after 1700 many more people began to have this freedom. 

So today's wealth, and everything that goes with it (from shorter
work hours to longer life spans) is the result of more people using
their minds more freely.

Look around the world - for any country, ask yourself if the average
person in that country has the open intellectual climate that
encourages people to think for themselves, and the open political and
economic climate that allows people to act on the insights their minds
provide and to keep the fruits of their effort.  Where you can answer
yes to both, you will find wealth and growth.  Where you answer no to
both, you will find poverty and misery. 

UPDATE

While it is not exactly a direct follow-on to this article, see my post Progressives are too Conservative to Like Capitalism
for an analysis of some of capitalism's detractors.  For yet another
way to explain capitalism, at least libertarian philosophy, here is a new-agy approach that is actually pretty good.  Finally, Spontaneous Order
has an interesting post comparing religious creationism in the physical
world with progressives' statism in the economic/social realms.