Too Big To Exist

During the financial crisis of 2008, we heard a lot about financial institutions that were “too big to fail”. After the crisis, we passed the Dodd-Frank law, and now those banks are even bigger. Own goal!

However, I sometimes wonder if there should be a “too big to exist” rule. When any entity – bank, government, company, individual – gets too big, it starts to have undue influence. At this point, any misstep by that entity can spell misery for millions. Also, they can use their strength to basically take what they want. Maybe there should be a cap on how much money and power one entity may have. Of course, given that governments can also be “too big to exist”, I’m not sure who would enforce such a rule.

The whole idea is problematic. Suppose we limit all companies to $1 billion in annual revenue. Apple sells a million iPhones one year for $1000 each (note that at this rate, it will take 300 years for everyone in the US to get one, and over 7000 years for everyone in the world to get one). Now up walks the one-millionth-and-first customer. The customer wants an iPhone. The Apple salesman would like nothing more than to sell that phone. The price is agreeable to both parties. They make the exchange and – men with guns arrive to lock the salesman up in a cage. It seems a little harsh. As a libertarian, I could not support this kind of violence visited upon someone engaging in non-violent behavior.

However, these huge institutions are scary. The power they have is dangerous. As Lord Acton said, “power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Only a saint could be trusted with that power, and there aren’t many of them (especially at the highest echelons of government and industry). They can crush political opponents, buy off the news media, and basically have their way pretty much anywhere. Power of that magnitude attracts the worst sorts of people, and turns even nice people into power addicts.

This is why I’ve changed my opinion on supra-national institutions, like the UN, the EU, and other trans-national organizations. It’s just too much power. The UK doesn’t actually need the EU to trade with Europe, or anyone else (I’ve always found the argument odd. Politicians are basically saying “force us politicians into the EU so that we politicians don’t put trade barriers up.” As if they just can’t stand the temptation).

I wonder how large these institutions could grow in a totally free market, without coervice government intervention. The Robber Barons of the early 20th century perfected the art of using government force to secure their fortunes in ways they could not do in the market, and it’s been off to the races ever since. In a free economy, the only way to get rich is to make a whole lot of other people very very happy (like Steve Jobs did), not by using government coercion to forceably appropriate other people’s wealth (like Goldman Sachs).

Best Tax Reform Plan of All Time

Disclaimer – I got this entire idea from the Grumpy Economist.  I heard him give a talk and he had the most sensible idea I’ve ever heard.

The idea is how to reform taxes.  At this point, the income tax is a living nightmare, unimaginably complex, full of loopholes, giveaways, and self-contradiction. It requires that some of our best and brightest spend their lives as tax preparers, and corporations spend billions on evading taxes.  This is all time, money, and brainpower that could be spent on making the world a better place.

So his idea is – eliminate it completely. There’s no way to keep this monster tamed, even if there was a “reform” (which is very unlikely) in a couple years the lobbyists would have it back to where it was.

Replace the income tax with a sales tax – a flat 10% or 20% on everything, no exceptions. Simple and neat. Your tax form is “how much did you sell? Multiply by 0.15 and remit.”

If we did this, we could eliminate the IRS. We could eliminate all the tax-planning departments of every corporation in the world. We could free up all the tax-preparers.  All that money and brainpower could go to curing cancer, writing better iPhone apps, or perfecting self-driving cars. Every taxpayer would get hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours back.  Startups could run leaner. All the loopholes created by nasty, greedy lobbyists, gone, poof, never to return.

One big objection might be “OMG, a flat sales tax is regressive!” Yes, that’s true.  But the GE has another good point: we have over 100 federal programs, not to mention state, local, charity, and church programs, to help the poor and “even the playing field.” You don’t need to use the tax code as well, it just muddles two things together. Taxes are for getting money for the government, end of story. If you want to help poor people, use one of the hundred programs we already have.  Send everyone a check who makes under a certain amount.  Whatever.

This plan is so simple, so fair, so obviously vastly superior to what we have, so elegant, so tamper-proof, so low-cost, that I’m pretty sure it hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of ever getting passed.

My Plan

I want to go a step further. Geniuses like Paul Krugman and his ilk keep saying that “debt doesn’t matter.”  Then let’s do this: let’s abolish the income tax, have no national sales tax, and fund all government activities via debt.  What a magical boost to the economy!  Because debt doesn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter what goverment spends. Instead of our paltry $4 trillion annual budget, we could jack it up to $8 or $10 trillion annually.  And it wouldn’t matter!!

Women’s Rights

I saw an article about how women have to deal with unappropriate advances from men at work.  Apparently I’m supposed to be outraged and “something must be done.”

Let’s talk about women’s rights and outrage.  I imagine a panel of women.  They are asked, “what’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

• Afghani woman: I had to use my bare fingers to dig through the rubble that used to be my home, looking for the bodies of my children.
• Yemeni woman: My child died of starvation in my arms, saying “Mommy, I’m hungry” but I had nothing to give her.
• Saudi woman: I went to grocery store by myself, and as a consequence I was gang-raped, arrested, beaten, whipped, and forced to marry my rapist.
• Yeonmi Park: While escaping from North Korea, I saw my mother raped in my place so that we could get to South Korea.
• American woman: a guy at work asked me out inappropriately.

And I suppose my sympathies are supposed to lie with the horrible plight of the American.  I think I’m going to vomit.

Now let’s talk about outrage: every day, money is taken out of my paycheck against my will, and used the fund the first 3 sets of horrors.  Yes, I am the financier of what is happening in the middle east.  So that’s what outrages me.

I have a hard time understanding the mainstream American anymore.  The mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent people, the impoverishment of generations, the destruction of entire countries…”meh”.  What CNN tells me to be outraged about is that Trump made an insensitive tweet.

Maybe my moral compass is off.  Maybe insensitive tweets are the handiwork of the Devil and raining death from the skies is nothing to be concerned about.

Or maybe America is screwed up, demented, and quite literally insane.

Price Gouging

I think I’ve heard so many podcasts about price gouging in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, that I’m sick of the topic.  But I want to tie some of the ideas together.

After a disaster, the demand for goods outpaces supply.  Prices tend to rise. People think it would be better for the goverment to impose price controls, rather than “taking advantage” of the disaster victims.

But economists beg to differ.  Let me compare the effects of the pricing mechanism vs government intervention.

Problem	Rising Prices	Goverment
Allocation – who gets how much of what	As prices rise, the people who really need it will be prepared to pay more. Those who don’t really need it, will wait until the price comes back down.	A committee will decide who gets what (I suppose they will interview each person individually, and come up with a 0-to-17 point scale of “neediness” that will say who needs what). If people take resources they are not entitled to, send men with guns to lock them in a cage.
Rationing – how much do you get	As prices rise, indicating scarceness, people will buy less. “Maybe I can get by with two bottles of water instead of four.” Folks who really really need it will shell out the bucks.	Using the above neediness questionairre, goverment officials will decide how much each family may have. If you try to take more than they decided for you, men with guns will lock you up in a cage. If a shopkeeper tries to delight his customers by selling them what they want, men with guns will take his money and lock him up in a cage.
Conservation	People near and far will tend to use a lot less, because it costs more. That means more on the shelf for the people who really need it.	Rationing will be enforced in the disaster zone and surrounding areas. If you take more than the goverment has deemed necessary, men with guns will lock you up in a cage.
Supply	“Hmm, I have a lot of water in my store. I could load it up in my truck, drive through flooded and possibly dangerous roads, and take it to the disaster area. It’s gotta be worth my while, though. Hey, look the price is high enough to compensate the risk. Load up the trucks!”	Goverment will designate who has to load up their supplies and take them to the disaster area. If you refuse, men with guns will take your stuff and then lock you up in a cage.
Production	Factory owners will see that the price is high, and realize they can make a few bucks by running some extra shifts to make some money.	Goverment will send quotas to factories to tell them how much extra is needed. If the factories don’t produce the required amount – you got it – men with guns will lock them up in cages.

So the market mechanism includes all voluntary actions, while the goverment solution creates criminals out of non-violent citizens and dramatically increases the amount of violence across the region.

Shopkeepers in the disaster area could, and do, donate their “windfall” profits to local reconstruction. Imagine the goodwill a store would get if the owner put up a sign saying “Windfall profits are being donated to rebuild the house of the senior citizens around the corner.”  People would come and beg him to raise prices.

In fact, many companies do not raise prices, even though it has all the above good effects, simply because they want to generate good will among their customers.  Good will is worth it’s weight in gold!  And it lasts a lot longer than windfall profits.

Every single time governments put on price controls, it results in shortages (because all the beneficial mechanisms listed above are thwarted).  So if you support price controls, you are supporting shortages of critical goods.

If you support shortages, then you support hurting and maybe killing people, including children.

So if you support price controls…you are probaby a Nazi!  🙂

Unicorn Governance

Of course, everyone knows that the private sector is vile. It’s populated by greedy, self-interested operators, caring for nothing other than themselves, probably willing to kill babies just to make a small profit. They’d betray their own mother just to get a leg up on the corporate ladder. (Although, I must say, in several decades working in the private sector, I’ve met very few people like this. So I should amend the above to say that my friends are all very nice people. It’s everyone else that is evil. I’m sure you feel the same.)

Luckily, we have government. Government, as we all know, is staffed by Angels of Altruism, Living Boddhisatvas of Selflessness that toil with no expectation of reward, solely for the opportunity to advance the Greater Good. Not theirs to keep up with the Joneses, or covet a new swimming pool, try to get ahead at work. Raises… prestige… influence & authority… a public servant craves not these things. And as selfless, infallible Scientific Philosopher Kings, when they attempt a solution to a problem, the solution always works, no need to follow up. And it never benefits special interests and always works for the benefit of the proverbial Little Guy. Therefore, we should give as much power to the government as they need – they will solve all problems.

Why do we believe fairy tales like this? We believe this even though the private sector and the government are quite often the same individuals! (Goldman Sachs is referred to as “Government Sachs” for it’s revolving doors to Treasury and the Fed; the FDA is sometimes called the public arm of Monsanto and Big Pharma). Somehow we think that when a Wall St. CEO, or a law partner at a big law firm, who clawed their ambitious way to the top, enter the government, they suddenly become saints, unconcerned with their own welfare, working only for others. (Of course, if they leave and return to the private sector, they become vile again. It’s like magic!).

In reality, the same sort of jockeying for position and prestige happens in the public sector. And since budgets are granted by Congress, and since budget is the single largest item of prestige for bureaucrats, the incentive to do almost anything to increase your budget is very strong. That includes “spinning” the facts, exaggerating the need, helping the media spread the word that if your budget is cut everyone is gonna die!

The most entrepreneurial, the most innnovative people behave like the worst bureaucrats or power hungry politicians 6 months after they have taken over the management of a public service institution, particularly if it is a government agency. – Peter Drucker

People identify a problem in reality and then demonstrate how that problem can be “solved” by government. But far too many such demonstrations feature a “then a miracle occurs” step. This step is the assumption that politicians and other government agents are superhuman — that when they are elected or appointed to political office, they are miraculously transformed into beings consistently more altruistic, knowledgeable, and wise than are business executives, consumers, and other people who operate only in the private sector. Source

The same thing happens with policy. As Ryan McMaken said,

A group of politicians get together, declare that they’re going to solve problem X, and then problem X is magically solved, so long as everyone supports the “solution.” Source

We rarely, if ever, go back to see if the policies actually worked. And if they didn’t work, it’s even rarer that we would say “well, that didn’t work, let’s try something else.” We just assume that the policies work as intended.

For example, we see poor people. We say, “we have to do something!” So we set up programs to “help the poor.” Everyone feels good about helping the poor. If it turns out, as appears to be the case (see Mary Ruwart’s book), that many of those policies actually hurt the poor, the people who try to publicize this fact are villified, called hard-hearted, and smeared until they go away. This is where it gets really weird and I don’t quite understand people. I mean, if you really cared about the poor, wouldn’t you want to know if the policies you supported ended up hurting them instead? I’m assuming you don’t want to hurt the poor. Or is it really the case that people don’t actually want to help the poor, they just want to feel good about thinking they helped the poor, and they resent the intrusion of reality into that little fantasy?

The branch of economics that deals with goverment as it is, rather than as we fantasize it to be, is called public choice theory. It’s really worth looking into.

Most goverment policies are ridiculously naive. Society is an incredibly complex mechanism. No one can predict the results of a given intervention. No one can say whether more people will be hurt or helped. The law of unintended consequences reigns supreme. And no one has nearly enough wisdom to say what’s “best” for everyone else. Everybody’s situation and preferences are unique. It takes incredible hubris and naivite to think a one-size-fits-all policy from Our Saviours On The Hill will brilliantly solve all the problems. It takes believing in Unicorn Government to assume that.

An example: in the 1970s someone decides that we were using too much gasoline. Cars didn’t get enough milage. Instead of a gas tax, Congress passed the CAFE standards for fuel efficiency (everyone loves regulations!). And guess what – gas consumption went down! Victory. Except…years later, when they looked, economists realized that society spent 3X to 10X more than necessary to get the amount of gasoline conservation that we got – a gas tax would have been much cheaper. And, because at first the only way carmakers knew to get better mileage was to make cars smaller, tens of thousands of people lost their lives in accidents that would not have died had they kept their old gas-guzzling “tanks.” I wonder what we could have done with that wasted money. And is curbing gasoline use worth the lives of tens of thousands of people?

Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile discusses how complex systems (like society) become highly unstable when centralized control is attempted. Instead, distributed, localized control is needed for stability. I find it somewhat perplexing that so many people can be cheerleaders of Wisdom of Crowds and yet support centralized, one-size-fits-all policies from the irresistable force of central government.

We need to see the world for what it is, not the way we wish it would be. We need to examine the results of policy to judge it, not simply use a priori judgements based on the intent of the policy (“this policy is intended to help the poor, therefore it is good”).

Sorry, but there are no Unicorns.

Science + Public Policy = Disaster

In recent years, we’ve seen more of a marriage between science and public policy. Scientific results are turned into goverment mandates, all for the Greater Good. “The science is settled!!” the Wise thunder from the mountaintop, and us serfs have nothing left but to obey.

However, the history of science in government is pretty horrible. Some good comes out of it, for sure, but the negatives must surely outweigh the positives. Before we get into some pretty nasty examples, we should understand the reasons why.

The act of governing is a political act, that uses political processes – compromise, favor-trading (“log-rolling”), rhetoric, voting, concensus-building, etc. Science is, or at least should be, absolutely nothing like that. Einstein’s theory of relativity isn’t accepted because people traded support for it in return for Einstein’s support for, say, the Germ Theory of disease. Physicists didn’t vote for relativity. Instead, relativity stood the test of time, explaining the data better than any alternate theory. As a counter-example, let’s look at how the goverment’s stance that eating cholesterol causes heart disease started. The evidence was contradictory and weak, and there was a lot of disagreement among scientists. So they held a vote! If I remember properly, the original vote was something like 6-5. Once enshrined as government policy, research into alternative explanations was defunded, disagreeing voices were silenced (after all, you have to stay “on message”), and the public was hoodwinked into thinking “the science is settled.”  Now, it’s accepted that eating cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease.  Whoops, sorry about that.

In politics, once the decision is made, everyone is expected to put aside previous allegiences and fall in behind the decision. Indeed, if lots of people continue to criticize the decision and propose alternatives, the populace would be confused and little progress could be made. In science, the exact opposite is true. When a new theory is put up, it is the duty of everyone to criticize it mercilessly – try to find all the observed phenomena and data that the theory cannot explain. It is these divergences that are key. If the theory can’t adapt elegantly to these gaps, it eventually dies and is replaced by something closer to the truth.

However, when dealing with science that has been infected with public policy, where politicial processes are applied to science, the opposite occurs. Naysayers are demonized. They lose tenure. They are vilified in the press. Their reputations are slandered. They are called “baby killers”, “nazis”, “heretics”, on and on – this kind of ad hominem attack has absolutely no place in a scientific discussion. Many great scientists have had awful personalities, and repugnant political views. This does not invalidate their ideas or their theories. Science should be, must be, impersonal.

It should be acknowledged that in the real world, science is indeed political. The “elders” who control the conferences, journals, and tenure approvals are unlikely to enthusiastically approve grants and promotions for some young upstart who is contradicting the very theories that they built their lives and reputations on. This is why Niels Bohr once said “Science progresses one funeral at a time.” When goverment gets involved, the crushing of dissent rises to a new level, having the force of law behind it.

Why does all this happen? An analysis using the branch of economics known as “public choice theory” from the book Beyond Politics gives a glimpse. Here the author is talking about climate change, but substitute your own favorite branch of science:

A public choice analysis of climate change politics predicts that the necessities of electoral politics will drive the climate change policy debate on the national level. Beaurocrats will use the process to increase budgets and influence, interest groups will seek political rents and use the process to pursue ideological committments having nothing to do with climate, voters will remain generally uninformed but sympathetic to “doing something,” and entrepreneurial politicians will maximize their chances of re-election by catering to both bureaucrats and special interests. It would be suprising if the process operated in any other way.

So climatologists, who otherwise would toil in relative obscurity, become rock stars (they are, after all, saving the world), and they get interviewed on TV, have their budgets increased tremendously, get tenure, and get a seat at the Big Table. Bureaucrats of the newly-formed Department of Saving the Climate get huge budgets (to dump iron sulfate or whatever in the atmosphere) and staffs, job security, and a seat at the Big Table. NGOs get validated, and since their expertise is needed, they get government funding and a seat at the Big Table. If it turns out the theory is wrong, it is in the interests of nobody to admit it (government agencies never want to admit they were wrong, because then they lose their authority with the public), and it is in the interests of everyone to pound their fists and proclaim “the science is settled!” and persecute the slobs with offending beliefs.

An excellent discussion of why science cannot solve public policy problems is discussed in this piece that explains that not supporting public climate change policy does not make you a “denier”.  “Believing” in climate change, and endorsing specific public policies meant to hopefully address it, are two orthogonal things.

For a great discussion of how this works with a particular example (government advice on nutrition), listen to this really thought-provoking interview with Gary Taubes , someone who has studied this problem in detail for years. He talks about how bad policy gets created, the law of unintended consequences, and the built-in reluctance to admit mistakes and inherent bias toward group-think that government bureaucracies inevitably display.

Another big problem is that science often has been, and is, wrong.  To create public policy based on “current science” can be disastrous if it turns out the science was wrong or incomplete, because public policy is incredibly hard to change and the government absolutely hates to admit it’s wrong.

Now let’s look at a couple examples.

Medicine

This is probably where the collusion between government and “science” does the most harm. In Europe, for example, goverment-sanctioned guidelines led to the deaths of around 800,000 people. You can read it here and here. I wonder what would happen if General Electric killed 800,000 people? Think there would be an outcry? But if Big Medicine (which is created, licensed, regulated, funded, protected and empowered by government so much that it might as well be the Department of Medicine) kills that many, no one really bats an eyelid.

The government decides what treatments are to be reimbursed, and what treatments are to be illegal, all on the advice of pharmaceutical lobbyists and doctors’ associations, even though medical practice is hopelessly out-of-date with research . In Australia, they even went so far as to pass a law that basically outlaws

The publication and/or dissemination of false or misleading health related information that may cause general community distrust of, or anxiety toward, accepted medical practice.

In other words, Australia has outlawed the free and open discussion of objective scientific results – IOW, they have outlawed the scientific method (I realize it says “false” information – but who decides if it’s false, especially before it’s been published and discussed!!).  (This happened, by the way, when a journalist decided to write an article on statins, and went and read the original scientific publications rather than the press releases, and was completely underwhelmed by the results). This is a huge giveaway to Big Pharma: once you can get a treatment, by hook or by crook, to be “accepted” according to some “expert witnesses”, it’s now basically illegal to criticise it. The priests who threw Galileo in jail would feel right at home in modern day society.

Nutrition

The government started recommending low-fat diets in the mid-20th century, and at the end of the 1970s created concrete guidelines on nutrition (again, listen to the Gary Taubes interview for details) (through the farm bill, the government also subsidizes overproduction of selected commoditites). Massive shifts in the diet of Americans ensued, leading directly to the obesity epidemic. The government recommended trans-fat based margarine over butter or other fats, and recommended reducing cholesterol in the diet. Recently, however, cholesterol has been removed as a “nutrient of concern” from almost every government’s list (the US was one of the last). New York recently banned trans-fat, and deaths from heart attacks and strokes have declined dramatically. Now, the first evidence against trans-fat was discovered in the 1960s by Dr. Fred Kummerow, and Dr. Mary Enig did extensive research in the 70s and 80s (Dr. Kummerow was ignored; Dr. Enig was villified). A mere 60 years after the first evidence against trans-fats was published, the FDA sprung into action (after all, they are protecting our health, right?) and instituted a voluntary partial ban on trans-fat to provisionally start in a couple years. The ban was so toothless that the Grocery Manufacturers Association (basically the defenders of junk food) sent a letter to it’s members stating “nothing had changed” with the FDA’s action (or rather, non-action). Given the rate of reduction of disease in New York, if it’s really due to the removal of trans-fat (and that conclusion is not “settled”), this means that the goverment’s advice likely killed tens of millions of people over the last half-century. I wonder if we are going to get a “sorry” note?  (How many people must die, do you think, before we get an apology? A hundred million not enough for you?) More likely, the people who try to write about and publicize this scandal will be crushed.

Climate Change

Personally, I really don’t know to what extent climate change is caused by humans, and I’m not here to debate that. But you can hear what happens if you dare challenge the consensus here. If you wonder who could want to crush scientific truth, ask yourself who would be the losers if tomorrow a study came out that completely debunking the entire narrative around global warming. They have the most incentive to keep the narrative going, and therefore the money flowing. This is a classic example of using negotiating, voting, and compromise to create a “scientific consensus” and the evil that comes from that. And you can hear what happens to people who dare to say “I don’t think this is quite correct.”

Don’t Trust the Experts

A bizarre outcome of all this is that you should not trust “experts” who interpret and summarize scientific fields of study.  Almost all of them belong to organizations that have strong conflicts of interest.  For example, in medicine:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. – Dr. Marcia Angell.

And she’s not the only one:

Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry… science has taken a turn towards darkness – Richard Horton, Lancet editor.

and of course

The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.  – Arnold Seymour Relman, Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal

You can read about how the research literature is co-opted and how the data is twisted. And that’s only medicine.  Other fields are similarly corrupted.  And the more money involved and/or the closer to government it is, the more corrupted it is.

To have a chance of understanding, you need to go back to the original research literature. Of course, that’s very time-consuming, so the next best bet is to find someone without conflicts of interest doing it out of their own interest.  It’s hard, but you can’t trust organizations or institutions. You need to find indivuals that you respect.

Summary

The closer we get to human behavior, the dicier this romance between public policy and science gets. For example, suppose someone published some research showing that straight couples are happier than gay couples. Would the goverment then be justified in forceably breaking up gay couples and demanding that they “go straight”? After all, the science is settled, so if you answered no, you are obviously an anti-science zealot.

Just remember, “the science is settled” is code for “this is the political consensus, and we are set to make a ton of money off of this. If you value your career, get with the program.”

You can hear more about fake science driving public policy, and more of the risks for public policy.

Basically, anytime anyone says “I know how you should live better than you do, and you’d better listen to me because I’m smarter than you, and not only that I’ll have you crushed if you don’t obey” you should run the other direction.

The Big Issues

I don’t follow current events that much anymore. Especially now, in 2017, when everything seems designed to provoke a sense of outrage (the circus in bread and circuses), and yet, most of these issues, although not unimportant, are really fleeting issues or are not really the big issues in the grand scheme of things.

So what are the big issues? This is what I wish our media reported on. And what I wish our protestors focused on.

The Drug War

• This is one of the most immoral and evil things going on. It targets the most disadvantaged, disproportionately jailing blacks and other minorities.
• It drives up the cost of drugs, making drug dealing more lucrative. For inner city kids, it seems like an easy way out of poverty.
• It contributes to the militarization of the police, with SWAT raids, doors battered down in the middle of the night, flash grenades, dogs shot on sight. This is not how a republic treats its citizens its suspects of nonviolent crimes. Even the mayors of some towns have had their doors battered down and their dogs shot in front of the children.
• Militaristic behavior drives a wedge between local communities and the police.
• Like Prohibition of alcohol practically created the organized crime syndicates, the drug war has created the drug cartels with their horrific violence.
• It has cost tens of billions of dollars each year, for decades, with essentially no change in the rate of drug usage. The money is completely wasted (unless you count destroying the lives of minority kids as a benefit of the system). Not to mention the cost of the prisons, and the opportunity costs of the money itself as well as the wasted lives.
• The US government’s insistence on military action has destroyed entire countries in Latin and South America.
• In order to make room for (non violent) drug offenders, violent offenders have been paroled.
• The whole system seems set up to destroy the lives of poor people, funnel money from the taxpayer to organized crime, and to cow the populace with violence. This whole thing simply needs to stop.
• The drug war is catalyzing atrocious infringments of our basic civil liberties. See, for example, these podcasts, here and here.

The War on Terror

Trying to end terrorism by killing all the terrorists is like trying to end crime by killing all the criminals. An eternal war, where we continuously kill people that we even suspect might be terrorists, is immoral and counter-productive (as one Yemeni citizen recently remarked in Time magazine, “If you don’t want so many refugees, stop creating them.”). President Obama dropped bombs on someone in the Middle East on every single day of his 8-year administration. President Trump seems determined to up that game.

So here’s a question that I have often asked myself, but I’ve never heard anyone else ask it. Certainly I never saw a big debate in the media on this question. The question is, how many people must die to make us safe? We bomb and bomb, and kill innocents (we call it “collateral damage”, and we don’t count them, and we don’t apologize). All in the name of preventing attacks here, or even “economic disruption” (code for oil supply disruption). And yet we never ask, how many people is it ok to kill to make sure we are safe? 9/11 killed 3000. All the wars we’ve instigated in the Middle East since 2003 have killed millions. Are we even yet? Is it ok to kill 1000 innocent people to prevent an attack in the US? A million? How many of “their” lives are worth one of “ours”? Is it unlimited? Are we justified in killing as many people as we feel necessary to protect ourselves?

The Bush Doctrine goes something like this. The US is a sovereign nation, and as such has a right to protect itself from attack. In order to do that, we can go anywhere in the world if we find groups that threaten us. If there are people in Mosul that hate or threaten us, we can go bomb there. Iraq has no recourse against that action. This is basically what Bush put forth, and Obama reaffirmed and intensified. This is all commonly accepted and is official policy now.

But let’s change a few words around in that statement. China is a sovereign nation, and as such has a right to protect itself from attack. In order to do that, they can go anywhere in the world if they find groups that threaten them. If there are people in Atlanta that hate or threaten them, they can go bomb there. The US has no recourse against that action.

Ok, so how does that feel? Still in agreement? In fact, substitute any two countries in that phrase. If everyone in the world took this as their official policy, we would live in an incredibly violent place. So why is the US singled out with this right? Is it simply a case of Might Makes Right? We can, therefore we do? Or are American lives really more valuable than people in other countries? Should we have an “exchange rate” for how many lives they are worth? If we think a terrorist group exists that might kill 5000 Americans, we are allowed to kill 2,000,000 Iraqis, 4,000,000 Syrians, or 5312 Canadians in order to prevent the attack?

Another thing I wished the media had the guts to do is show the result of this war. If we bomb someone every day, then we should see film of the people we bombed, every day. Don’t tell me that it would make people “feel bad”. You think the parents whose child we just killed don’t feel bad? If we don’t have the guts to look at the results of our actions, we are contemptable.

All of this despite the fact that every intervention in the Middle East has been pretty much a complete disaster. Every country we’ve bombed to “make safe for democracy” is now destabilized, full of terrorists, the economy collapsed, and the ordinary people are suffering. With a record like that, you might be forgiven for daring to think that we should pursue, perhaps, a different path. Yet the people who promote these failed policies keep getting re-appointed. After all, they are experts!

The Surveillance State

Snowden showed us that the goverment was collecting all kinds of data on American citizens – this, of course, after the intelligence chiefs went before Congress and swore they don’t collect data on Americas (This was a bald-face, through-the-teeth, spit-in-your-face lie to Congress. Why are these people not in jail? If I deliberately lied to Congress, I doubt that I’d get a high-level Cabinet job like these jokers). Recent Wikileaks documents on “Vault 7” show that the CIA can use our computers and cell phones to spy on us (remember in the movie The Avengers when Agent Coulson said “anything in the world with a camera becomes eyes and ears for us”? It turns out to be true). Besides the moral argument, and the Constitutional argument against illegal search and seizure, this is simply too dangerous a practice. Lord Acton taught us the power corrupts. Having secretive, unaccountable agencies with nearly omnipotent power is simply a recipe for pure corruption. We cannot depend on the “civic-mindedness” of the intelligence community to protect us. The surveillance state must be arrested and reversed. Very soon (maybe already) it will become so powerful that it is uncontrollable. Just recently, they got some senior politicians fired by selectively and illegally leaking classified intelligence. They can do that to anyone if they collect everything we say and do. That means the intelligence apparatus controls every politician, every businessman, every public figure of any kind. This is insane.

In the last couple days of his final term, Obama issued an executive order that significantly expanded the surviellance state by allowing domestic agencies to share even more raw data, significantly expanding the surveillance state. Where was the media?

The Debt and Financial Excesses

Over these past decades, the Fed has cushioning downturns by preventing excesses from being rung out of the system, and blowing ever bigger bubbles. Sort of how a lot of our national forests were damaged by preventing periodic wildfires. However, now our official public debt is approaching $20 trillion, and add to that entitlements, household debt, student loan debt…we are way up over our head in debt and other financial excesses. And not just us, Europe is arguably in worse shape. And demographics are not on our side, the population is aging and about to claim far more medical benefits and other entitlements. We have little time to act, and little ammunition left. Our fiscal state is parlous, but the media seems to have signed on to the Keynesian goverment position that debt is fine and nothing bad will happen. This, as pension funds are starting to fail across the United States. People who worked their whole lives, planning on living on their pension after retirement, are now having their wealth confiscated to pay for the excesses of the past. As they say, the piper always gets paid.

Dodd-Frank was passed to eliminate the problem of “too big to fail” banks. Predictably, in the aftermath of Dodd-Frank, the big banks have gotten even bigger. I guess you can now call them “way too big to fail.” So when the next crisis comes, it’s completely guaranteed that your money will again be used to bail out Wall Street bankers.

Growth of Executive Power

Since 9/11, and especially under Obama, the Executive branch has claimed for itself extraordinary powers. We are all familiar with the rash of executive orders, the wars unauthorized by Congress (Obama dropped bombs every single day of his two terms, the only US President to do so), and the President’s “Kill List”, whereby the President grants himself the authority to kill anyone, anywhere in the world, with no trial, and no oversight. Extraordinary.

Beyond this, there is just the growth of the Federal government in general. Here’s a graph of the number of pages in the Federal Register.

If you want to see more data, you can go to this website. There was a book written in 2011 called Three Felonies a Day  that claims that just by going about your daily business, the average citizen unwittingly commits three felonies a day. By now (2017), the problem is larger.

The lawbooks now are so huge and complex that no human being can understand them. The Obamacare act alone is 8 times larger than the Bible!  Under these conditions, it’s a given that the rules are contradictory and inconsistent. I heard a story of an accountant that had a tricky tax question. He called the IRS 6 times, got 6 different advisors, and 6 different recommendations. The end result is that no matter how he does the taxes, he can be fined on an audit. It’s a lose-lose. The same thing with the Federal code – when there are so many laws, there is no way to conduct your life to be safe from a felony charge. If you piss them off, they can pick you up and lock you away, legally. There is no way to prevent it.

My question here is, how long can this continue? Can the number of laws double again? And again? How can anyone live under such a regime? Soon, if you want to start a startup company, you can hire one engineer, one designer, and 7 compliance people. I can just feel the innovation bursting out!

James Madison was clear on the effects of too many, or too quickly changing, laws:

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own free choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood: if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes, that no man who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few, over the industrious and uninformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that the laws are made for the few, not for the many. – James Madison

A lot of people don’t like Trump. They bemoan that he has so much power to mess with our lives. But as soon as “their guy” gets in, you can bet that they will agitate for yet more executive power. When the next person you don’t like takes office, they will have even more power to mess things up. They say when things can’t go on forever, they will end. Where does this end?

Fukushima

Radiation issuing from the damaged Fukushima reactor is still immense. Now they say it will take 40-50 years to invent the technology that will allow us to contain Fukushima.  Umm, so, “unimaginable” amounts of radiation will pour unfettered into the Pacific Ocean for the next half-century? Does this strike anyone as a “big issue”?

Summary

If you think these are the big issues, you might agree with Ron Paul that there’s not much difference between Democrats and Republicans. Depending on who’s in power, will the Drug War end? Will we stop killing people in the Middle East? Will we restrain spending? Roll back the growth of government (well, maybe Trump will do something here)? Roll back the surveillance state? Ha!  Good luck with that one.

So while the media titters on with “current events” (what I call The Outrage of the Day), these huge stories are barely covered or even acknowledged. This is why I don’t consider the mainstream media, with its “if it bleeds, it leads” attitude, to be very important in today’s issues.

Big Picture Thinking Wanted

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. – H. L. Mencken

Our culture seems to suffer from an almost pathological inability to think beyond the here and now, to understand the big picture. We seem to walk into a situation, declare “well, this is no good!” and throw a spot solution at what appears to be the issue, and then walk away congratulating ourselves on how we “solved” the problem, without considering the downstream impacts of our actions. Project late? Force everyone to work overtime – problem solved! Kids disobedient? Spank them – problem solved! Too many terrorists? Bomb them – problem solved! Don’t like people taking drugs? Throw ’em in jail – problem solved!

As way of example, re-read Aesop’s fable of The And and the Grasshopper.  Yes, the Grasshopper had no food, but that was because, against the Ant’s advice, he neglected to store anything for the winter. Let’s look at a point solution ending for this fable.

Just then, a Doe from the Goverment appeared. “Oh dear,” she exclaimed, “It’s so unfair that the Ant has more than the Grasshopper!” She calls in the Weasels, who forcefully take (steal) food from the Ant and give it to the Grasshopper. “Now things are more just!” she exclaims.

It looks like a nice clean solution, right? The Ant had more than the Grasshopper, so we redistributed it. Problem solved. This solution ignores the past: the Ant toiled all summer while the Grasshopper partied, then we actually stole the fruits of his labor. That’s immoral. The Grasshopper was warned to store food, but ignored it. That’s irresponsible. Then there are the future implications: the Ant is much less likely to work as hard next summer, as there’s no point if Weasels are going to steal his stuff. And anyway, why should the Grasshopper get to be the only one to enjoy the summer? The Grasshopper, in turn, is way more likely to party again all summer. The end result is that we made the problem much worse.

Actually, this dumb little example is illustrative – the problem was mitigated in the short term, but left unintended consequences emanating out into time (next summer) and space (when the animals in the next field hear of this, they will be less likely to work as well). This seems to me to be a fundamental aspect of how we solve problems today. Mary Ruwart, in her book Healing Our World, documents dozens and dozens of examples, with original research, of how the solutions we put in place to help people often end up hurting them.

Most problems are super complex. In physicists’ terms, they have many degrees of freedom, high and nonlinear coupling, and temporally delayed feedback. These, of course, are the mathematical ingredients for chaos: where the outcome of an action is not only practically unknowable, but actually fundamentally unknowable. It doesn’t help to get a bigger computer, or think harder. You just cannot know.

One person who tried to bring this understanding to business was Peter Senge. In his book The Fifth Discipline  he describes a method for discovering and cataloging the different aspects of a difficult problem and how they interact. The main tool is the so-called Senge Diagram, something like this

The aspects of the problem are listed, as well as their influence on other aspects (increased “risk to supplier” results in increased “supplier demands to be sole source”), to form a network diagram. Inevitably (and crucially), there are feedback loops in the network – both positive feedback (snowball) and negative feedback (see-saw). Note how time delays are also incorporated. The diagram above is very simple; real networks will have dozens of nodes.

One story from the book that really stayed with me is about work he did with some NGOs dealing with world hunger. I am paraphrasing this from (distant) memory so forgive me if I butcher the details. Senge was working with a group of NGOs all trying to solve world hunger. Together, they built a diagram showing the forces keeping people hungry. The diagram was fiendishly complicated, with scores of nodes and hundreds of arrows, and dozens and dozens of interacting feedback loops. On of the activists started sobbing, and when asked why she replied, “I’ve been working on solving hunger all my life. It has always been my belief that if greedy goverments and corporations would just hand over more cash, we could solve the problem once and for all. But look at this diagram – this problem is too difficult to understand, much less to solve!!!”

(By the way, if you are interested in this particular problem of poverty, please watch the film Poverty, Inc. It actually explores many of the factors involved, and even shows some Senge-like network diagrams!!)

My contention is that most societal problems are like this – so ridiculously complex that it is realistically impossible to divine “a solution” that “fixes” it. The number of feedback loops and nonlinear couplings and time delays means that the Law of Unintended Consequences rules supreme. When you implement your top-down “fix”, you don’t have any sense at all of who it is you are going to be hurting, and how badly. It brings me back to this beautiful essay on humility:

I could be wrong about pretty much anything. What I don’t know so outweighs what I do that my actual knowledge appears as little more than a small raft on an ocean of ignorance.

I suffer no shame admitting this unflattering fact, not only because there’s never any shame in acknowledging the truth, but also because everyone else is in the same boat.

Our ignorance — what we don’t know — always and enormously outweighs our knowledge. It’s true of even the smartest and most educated.

– Aaron Ross Powell, in Why Liberty

Another perverse outcome of our “point solution” mentality is that we often measure inputs instead of outputs. For example, people will be up in arms if the budget of a favorite goverment program is cut (poverty assistence, enviromental protection, etc), as if the input (budget allocation) is a proxy for results (actual poor people helped, or environment protected). With massive beaurocracies, this is most definitely not the case (I remember reading that worldwide, effectiveness of schools has absolutely no correlation to per-student budget allocations, yet when schools are bad we shout “increase the budget!”). But it also begs the question – what does it mean for an intervention to be a success? Sticking with the running example of helping the poor, how do you know if the poor are helped or not? If the number of food stamps handed out increases, that’s good, right? It means we are helping more people. Or wait – maybe it means there are just more poor people, that’s bad. If the number decreases, maybe people are pulling themselves out of poverty – that’s good, right? At least the people who get them are helped – unless it makes it harder for them to get a job. That’s bad then. Right? When Clinton reformed welfare in 1996, many people lost their benefits. That’s bad, right? But follow up research showed that within a year or two, the affected groups were better off on nearly every objective measure (income, health, hunger). That’s good, right? So how do we measure success?

I’m not saying no one should ever try to solve a problem. What I’m saying is that in the face of profound, almost complete ignorance, and fundamental confusion about what it even means for such a program to succeed, we should refrain from investing huge, mandatory public resources into such problems. Again, sticking with the example of poverty aid, which seems to have become my running poster child here, I would be in favor of cutting all federal poverty programs, and replacing them with equal-sized (measuring inputs for the sake of argument) programs at the state level. Or devolving them even to the city & county level. Locally, it’s easier to know what the actual needs of the poor are and to get a sense of whether programs are working or not. It’s obvious that different localities, with different cultures, histories, and situations, need different solutions. Devolve the decision-making to the edge of the network – a sort of Wisdom of Crowds solution.

Our sense of history seems also to be completely lacking. For example, when Obama started the “Cash for Clunkers” program, analysts agreed that it was not creating new demand (peopel didn’t upgrade from 2 cars to 3), but rather it pulled future consumption forward.  Meaning, of course, that future demand would be reduced.

I’m not very optimistic about this “spot solution” mentality changing anytime soon. After all, if H. L. Mencken was complaining about it in his day, it’s been around for a long time. And I’m sympathetic – it’s really hard, probably impossible, to know what solution would really work (and what does really work mean?). So it’s “don’t just stand there, do something!” And no matter how much evidence accumulates that the “solutions” are causing unintended consequences, it won’t change people’s behavior. At one job I had, I was the technology lead for a small company. I often would assert “if we do/don’t do X, then Y will/will not happen”. I was ignored, but correct, so often, that it became a running joke. There was another engineer who, when unintended consequence Y occurred, used to turn to me and say “why didn’t you tell us this would happen?” – when in fact I had. I actually kept a spreadsheet for several years of my predictions and the actual results. Even in spite of all this, the company still generally pursued spot solutions to problems, and was surprised by unintended consequences.

So that’s a humorous, and self-aggrandizing, story. But the point is that we are unlikely to develop a larger perspective anytime soon. And when I say we, I suppose I mean “humans”, but more particularly “Americans”. When I lived in Japan, I saw more systems-like thinking, where people could think outward in space and time to the consequences of their decisions. Maybe a little, anyway.

M. Scott Peck once said something like the more perceptive and aware a human being is, the more reluctant they are to act, because they are more able to see the consequences of their actions, and are terrified at the implications of playing God. I just wish we had a little more of that humility and awareness today. We sure need it.

Inflation is Theft – and you are the sucker

Let’s talk about inflation. First, there are a few definitions to get out of the way.

There are two types of inflation we’re going to talk about. Price inflation is the one most people are familiar with. This is when the cost of goods and services increases in terms of dollars. A way of thinking about this is that the worth of the dollar is declining (a single dollar buys less goods and services). The other type is monetary inflation, which refers to an increase in the amount of money in the economy.

The other set of definitions is harder for most people to grasp (and some economists even seem to argue about it). That’s the difference between money and wealth. Wealth consists of real goods and services: cars, houses, clothes, iPhones, massages, etc. Money is essentially a claim check on future wealth, that is, future goods and services. If you are holding a 20 dollar bill, there’s not much you can do with it itself (maybe start a fire?). But you can exchange it for some real wealth, like a nice dinner. But when you are holding the bill, you don’t have the wealth yet – it has to be delivered to you in the future. The amount of money in the economy can be (and often is) increased arbitrarily by the Fed. Wealth, on the other hand, is created by the application of human knowledge via capital and labor. Building an iPhone requires a lot of knowledge, effort by a lot of people, and a bunch of material and machinery. It’s not so easy to increase the store of wealth – you need to increase knowledge (that’s called innovation), the amount of labor (that’s called working harder, or adding more people to the labor force), or the amount of capital (buying better machines that can crank out more iPhone parts).

When the Fed increases the monetary supply, it has no effect on wealth. Therefore you have more dollars running around the economy, claiming the same goods and services. All else being equal (and it rarely is), prices will be bid up to match the new amounts of money.

The title of this piece is provocative. Monetary inflation can be theft – it completely depends on how it’s done.

Folks like me who work in high tech, or anyone interested in investing, can grasp this very simply by thinking about their stock or stock options. If a company is worth $10 million, and there are a million shares out, each share you own is worth $10. The intrinsic worth of the company is the “wealth”, the shares are the “money” or “currency”. Now, if the company splits its shares 2:1, there are now 2 million shares (monetary inflation). However, with a stock split, the new shares are distributed equitably: for every share you had before, you now have two. So even though your shares are now only worth $5 (price inflation), you have twice as many, and you have as much wealth as before.

But there’s another way to generate new shares: dilution. Imagine the company had just announced one day that they created 1 million new shares, and they gave them to the CEO. The share of your wealth is now cut in half – the price of your shares will fall to $5, and the CEO now owns half the company. In a real sense, your wealth (as well as all the other shareholders) was stolen from you and given to the CEO.

So we see that when new currency is created, it is critical how it is distributed, as to whether we are just changing the measuring stick, or actually transferring wealth from one group to another.

Does anyone wonder what happened to all the cash generated by QE? I used to wonder why, if they wanted to inject a trillion dollars into the economy, they didn’t just give every citizen a $3000 tax rebate. Do you get it now? If they had distributed the cash equally, it actually would have represented a transfer of wealth from rich to poor (think of it this way – in a stock split, the more original shares you have, the more new ones you get. If everyone gets the same, those who held the most at the beginning – the rich – get gypped). That’s why all the money was given to the banks – in this way, it resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from the average citizen (don’t know about you, but I did not get a QE check) to the rich Wall St. banks. How wonderful that we Saved The Economy! Saved the bankers’ bonuses is more like it.

Don’t take my word for it. Let’s see what others throughout history have said about inflation.

If the American people ever allow banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the corporation that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their forefathers conquered. – Thomas Jefferson

By a continuous process of inflation, goverments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens…The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner in which not one man a million is able to diagnose. – John Maynard Keynes

I’m not sure if Keynes was advocating for governments to create inflation, or warning the people against it. Knowing him, I’m pretty sure it was the former: “here’s how you can steal their wealth and they will never know it!” No wonder the press has worked so hard to make 2% inflation seem “normal”. And since the Fed creates inflation through the monetary supply, it makes the Fed pretty powerful, eh? Here’s what people said when they first “got it”:

Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its power but the truth is – the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will. – Congressman Louis McFadden chairman, Banking and Currency Committee, 1933

So why didn’t QE monetary inflation results in price inflation (yet)? You can search the web on this, find 100 articles with 117 different explanations. Generally they argue that the money didn’t really get lent out, or that the environment was so deflationary that QE just kept the prices level, etc. You can find charts of, say, M3 monetary supply and see that it actually fell during some parts of QE. Some argue that when (if) interest rates ever rise again, the inflation will start. I’m not an economist, so I start to get lost at this point. Everyone’s explanation seems so reasonable, yet they contradict each other. Hence the moniker, “the dismal science.”

Overall, price inflation slowly transfers wealth from savers (businesses, senior citizens) to debtors (people living high on the hog, the goverment), by reducing the burden of debt (as prices and hence salaries rise) and eroding the value of savings or fixed income streams (as prices rise). Monetary inflation transfers wealth to those who get the money first or disproportionately (generally banks and governments) from pretty much everyone else.

Labelling GMOs

Over the last few years, there’s been a big debate over whether we should label GMO (genetically modified) foods. Around the world, 64 other countries label GMO foods, and several have banned them outright. Here in the US, there were multiple hard-fought state battles, with large pesticide and junk food companies pouring in tens of millions of dollars into the anti-labeling campaigns (sometimes illegally, as in Washington state). In the end, President Obama signed into law a GMO labeling bill. The grassroots community that pushed so hard for labeling calls it the “GMO anti-labeling law”, as it effectively disallows any meaningful labeling, as well tightening the definition of “GMO” to exclude many foods that are actually GMOs.

The labeling opposition generally focused on two arguments. First, it would make grocery bills more expensive – despite the fact that food costs in the 64 countries that do label did not go up; I suppose the US is somehow special in that we are incompetent at labeling. The other argument generally went something like “GMOs have been proven safe, so there’s no reason to label them.” This is a clever argument – there many reasons why someone might want to avoid GMOs. By picking only one point of the opposition’s arguments, and denying it, it makes it sound to the uninitiated that this is the only argument. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There are many reasons why someone might not want to buy GMO foods. Let’s review some here.

• Religious reasons: some people feel that tinkering with DNA is somehow corrupting God’s plan for life on this planet. You may or may not agree with that opinion, but can we all agree that such people should have the option of not supporting something that they feel is sacreligious? If GMOs were labeled, believers would be able to avoid supporting activities that they feel are immoral.
• Philosophical reasons: as a variation on the religious argument, some people may just feel that we should not be mucking about with DNA at all, and for various reasons do not support it. Again, with labeling, these people can avoid supporting activities they feel are ill-advised, just as people once refused to purchase products marketed by companies that supported South African apartheid. If the provenence of those products had been kept secret, boycotts would have been less effective.
• Pollution: Some people genuinely fear genetic pollution of the environment. Trans genes (from other species) have already been documented as crossing over from GMO crops to indigineous plants, so this is already happening. What threat, if any, it presents to the environment is unknown. If you are someone who fears this outcome, with labeling you can choose not to support this kind of pollution – just as if you choose solar power over coal on your power bill.
• Protection of small farmers: Monsanto, the chief producer of GMO seed, is documented as bullying small farmers. You can watch the movie Food, Inc., for example, although the situation is now much worse. Many family farmers live in terror that one day Monsanto will start to harass them. If you don’t want to support a corporation that carries out such harassment, you have to know which products to avoid. That’s what labeling is for (and be very clear, Monsanto does not want you to know which products you buy came from them).
• Distrust of industrial agriculture: GMO agriculture is the lynchpin of the industrial high-yield, low-quality factory food production model. For those who favor slow food, organics, or local food, avoiding supporting factory farms is important. But they can’t tell if the products aren’t labeled.
• Medical reasons: Although there’s little objective clinical data on this, I have seen testimonials by dozens of doctors and farmers who swear that getting their patients (or animals) off of GMO food causes their health to improve. Whether GMOs are inherently unhealthy, or whether there are allergens in them, or whether some people are just sensitive isn’t known, and isn’t really the point. If you are allergic to GMOs, and have to avoid them, it’s damn hard if they aren’t labeled.
• Safety: Some believe that GMO foods are inherently unsafe. I used to not subscribe to this argument; I thought it was a bit silly. The book Altered Genes, Twisted Truth changed my mind on this one. The metabolic machinery of the cell is highly complex, and we barely understand it. Making changes to this machinery will change the output ratios of metabolic products (that’s the point, after all). All plants produce various toxins to fend off predators, etc. Changing the gene expression in an organism will cause an unpredictable change in metabolites, potentially causing it to create toxic compounds. In fact, this was just verified by a report in Nature magazine, which found high levels of putrecine and cadaverine (yum!) in GMO corn, finding it to be “not substantially equivalent” to regular corn. The law requires foods that are not substantially equivalent to undergo extensive testing. Don’t hold your breath.
• Monsanto: Some people just hate Monsanto (the world’s “most hated corporation”) and want to avoid their products. labeling would allow them to do that.
• Glyphosate and Roundup: Something close to 90% of the GMOs sold are “Roundup Ready”, meaning they can withstand applications of Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup. Since GMO crops arrived on the scene, the amount of Roundup (with active ingredient glyphosate) dumped into the environment has increased at least 20X. For years, we were told glyphosate is totally safe. However, like most of Monsanto’s products, it turns out it’s actually fairly toxic. You can read a full report here  and listen to a discussion here. One of the things that startles me is that glyphosate blocks the shikimate metabolic pathway. Humans don’t use this pathway, but our beneficial gut bacteria do. Given the recent research on how critically important that gut microbiome is, and how it’s under attack in today’s environment, it’s scary to me to have anything that damages it. And Roundup is thought to be 250X more toxic than glyphosate alone.

Anyway, there are many reasons people might want to avoid GMO foods. You or I may not agree with every reason, but in a free society people should be allowed to act according to their conscience. If, for whatever reason, someone wishes to avoid something as controversial as GMO foods, it seems reasonable that producers of such foods should be required to label them as such.

Even the UN is unhappy about this.  Read this article here for two reports criticizing our agricultural system.   “According to the World Health Organization… the cost of a polluted environment adds up to the deaths of 1.7 million children every year.” (Not all of this was attributed to GMO agriculture, of course).