Money: The Root of All Evil?

Some ideas and sayings die hard, even when they are demonstrably wrong. In this case, the saying "money is the root of all evil".

To understand what the saying means, we first need to ask, what is money? Essentially, money is nothing more than a medium of exchange. It is a tool or means of allowing people to engage in indirect exchange instead of direct barter. It is usually considered the most commonly exchanged commodity in a society.

As such, money was developed spontaneously in society by people who were having difficulties engaging in direct barter--money solved a difficult exchange problem and made it easier for people to trade with other people in a more convenient form. Commodities like gold and silver were eventually adopted because they were considered most suitable for use as money, given their particular attributes.

Note that money arose spontaneously out of human need--it was not created by governments. Governments only later appropriated the money-making process, which was originally a private function. Only by government appropriation could we have reached our current situation, where debt-backed paper (Federal Reserve Notes) is considered to be "money". Switching back to a commodity-based money supply would currently be difficult and illegal; government would not allow it if they can help it.

So money is a tool that enables the convenient exchange of goods and services between people. To say that money is the root of all evil is to say that voluntary, indirect exchange between people is evil. To a libertarian, and I hope to most other people, this seems like an absurd thing to say. How can it be evil for me to give someone money in exchange for groceries, clothes, books, or other things that I want and need to live my life? Or for people to give me money in exchange for my labor, goods, or services?

Quite simply, voluntary indirect exchange is about as opposite evil as you can get--nothing has improved people's lives as much as the division of labor made possible by indirect exchange through money. It's true that through theft, fraud, or counterfeiting, some people can get money without producing any beneficial good or service in exchange, but that's a small subset of all economic transactions, and doesn't outweigh the benefits of money or change the moral equation.

It's also true that there are serious problems with our current Federal Reserve system and fractional reserve banking, so much so that some consider the Fed itself to be issuing "counterfeit" money. However, this is not fundamental or inevitable to money, but is simply a problem caused by the politics of government taking over the production of money instead of leaving it in the private sector.

In this light, it should be obvious that money is not the root of all evil, coercive power is. The next time someone brings up this old quote to you, perhaps you should ask them what they mean by "money", and maybe they, too, will see the light.

The Plucked Psaltery, Unusual Musical Instruments, part 3

The plucked psaltery is a simple musical instrument with a basic but pleasing sound. It's basically just a piece of wood with strings running across it, fretted at one end, with tuning pins to tune the strings.

While the origins of the psaltery are unknown, it must go back to at least the medievel period, and possibly as far back as Biblical times. Medieval engravings show a 'hog-nosed' version of the psaltery.

It also goes by other names: lap harp, Music Maker, Melody Maker, Melody harp, etc., but "plucked psaltery" seems to me to be the most basic categorical term for it. It belongs to the more generic category of "zither".

The most common version of it is the Melody Maker, a child's musical instrument often made in Russia or other parts of Eastern Europe. It comes in a trapezoidal shape, like a triangle with one tip cut short, and has 15 strings tuned in the key of G for two octaves, and thus is diatonic, not chromatic.

It's fun and easy to play: just pluck the strings with your fingers or with a guitar pick to make a louder sound. You can play familiar melodies, or with trial and error come up with more interesting sounds. Like most things musical, more practice and more understanding of music helps to make better music.

It's not very loud, so if you want to perform or record with it, you'll need to look into pickups or microphones to do so. One simple reason that it sounds so good is that after plucking a string, you just let it ring out until the vibration stops, or until you want to play the same note again. Thus, you get a warm, reverberating, echo-y type sound as you strike new notes while the older notes are still ringing. You can get a nice, swelling sound by playing several notes rapidly in succession.

It's even possible to dampen unwanted strings and play full chords, autoharp-style, although this is a bit difficult to do manually. Or use both hands to play more than one note at the same time.

The children's versions are pretty cheap, for about $40 or less. In fact, I saw that Wal-Mart now carries a version for under $20. However, some folk music instrument makers (like Craggy Mountain Music) make and sell higher quality instruments for more money. You can also occasionally find a decent one on E-Bay.

I'd recommend getting a cheap one to try out, and if you really like it, then go for a more expensive, quality instrument. It's a good instrument for musical beginners (children and adults) and fun even for more advanced musicians.

The Golden Age of Online Comics

This is the golden age of online comics, or comics on the internet. So now that you know, you too can walk around and say, "Gee, I'm living in the Golden Age of online comics!" Heh.

But seriously, there are tons of online comics, with more being created every day, and they're almost all free! Of course, they vary considerably in their quality and style, from very crude to animation-style to cgi. Some strips are even made from photos or recycled, public domain art.

A lot of them are humor strips, and many combine humor with science fiction, fantasy, or some other genre. Curiously, I find very few super hero strips--maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places?

Many of the traditional syndicated strips are available online, as well. Check out comics.com, for example. However, newspaper syndication has always been difficult to break into, and is probably harder now that newspaper circulation is dwindling. Most online comics will never be seen on newsprint, although one revenue source for online comics artists is to sell collections of their strips.

Some online comics aren't done in the "comic strip" format of a few panels, but are done as full pages, like an online comic book, one page at a time. Girl Genius is like this, for example, but then it originally started as a real comic book before going online. And creator Phil Foglio has done quite of bit of comic book work in the past, too.


One thing that bothers me, though, is the creative limits most online comics artists place on themselves. Scott McCloud has already done two books and several online stories and articles of his own that explore the limits of comics on the web.

For one thing, why have panels or borders at all? Why not just a set of borderless pictures loosely separated by space (or in some cases, overlapping pictures for compression of time or action sequences)? Why should they even be in a straight line? Or another possibility is simply that each picture is a separate web page, and you click on the picture to go to the next picture.

There's always the possibility of animation, as in animated gif's, but I think if you do that too much, you really have an animated film, and not a comic, or sequential art.

And there are no practical limits on story content. Sci fi, mystery, romance, suspense, historical, humor, etc. As an online comic artist, you are free to tell the story or stories that you want to tell, without editorial constraint. Even adult material, although one still needs to be a bit more careful with putting it online.

So, just remember, we're living in the Golden Age of Online Comics. Enjoy!

There's only a few online comics I keep up with every day (I do have to get some work done for my employer!), although there are many that I check up on every now and then:

Diesel Sweeties
Sheldon
Sluggy Freelance
Girl Genius
Starslip Crisis
Chainsaw Suit
F Chords
Station V3

Other comics I occasionally check on:

Lost and Found
Fish Tank
Mansion of E
Penguins with Baseball Bats
I Can't Draw Feet
Chronillogical
Zortic
Marooned: A Space Opera in the Wrong Key
Rocket Llama
Z7
Ebb's Children
Silence in the Darkness on Q16
Two Lumps: The Adventures of Ebenezer and Snooch
The Bunny System
General Protection Fault
Emmaverse
Anarchy in Your Head

And I come across other new ones every now and then to check out.

Drug policy and the community

For some time now, it has seemed to me that laws against recreational drugs were an attempt to protect people from themselves. This alone makes the drug laws unwarranted, and an immoral intervention into the personal rights and responsibilities of individuals. Furthermore, if we look at the drug abuse problem, it seems obvious to me that either addiction is real, and drug abusers need medical help, or it's not real, and it really is a matter of personal choice. Addiction might undermine personal responsibility, but neither possibility justifies criminal prohibition.

How will jail time and confiscation of personal property help the drug abuser? And why should such penalties be applied to responsible drug users who do not have an abuse problem? Exactly who is being harmed by these activities? Even if you say friends and families are being "harmed", that still doesn't justify the penalties. After all, does it make any sense that the way to save the "destruction of families" is to do just that: destroy the family?

Furthermore, after spending some time with a drug addict who can't seem to help herself, I'm more convinced than ever that criminal prosecution is a stupid way of dealing with the problem. In an old column (from the 90s, IIRC), George Will once wrote about drugs that it was better to have a localized criminal problem than a generalized social problem. Nice try, George, but the trouble with "localized criminal problems" is that they tend to not stay "localized". Even as a criminal problem, it is still also a social problem, but the criminal laws make it harder to deal with as a social problem. Also, these drug laws are diverting law enforcement efforts away from their legitimate function of protecting individual rights, providing us all with less general protection. Thus, the drug laws themselves are hurting society in general.

One other thought has occurred to me, besides the "friends and family" argument. Given that drug users are perceived as unproductive or underproductive members of society ("slackers"), it may be that the justification for drug laws is the productivity of society, that drug users are harming society by not being more productive. This is more of a communitarian argument, and depends upon the belief that the individual must be subservient to the community as a whole, or at least, that individual rights are no greater than the needs or rights of the community as a whole, and need to be balanced.

Once brought out in the open, this argument is easy to demolish. Wasting law enforcement resources on recreational drug users does nothing to make the community more productive. It also assumes that individual rights and society in general are in conflict, which is itself an unexamined and I think unwarranted assumption: the rights of the individual and the interests of the community are properly complementary to each other, and not necessarily antagonistic--the community is simply a bunch of individuals with certain things in common, like locality or interests. Finally, there are plenty of other unproductive or underproductive people in society, and they are not criminalized. In fact, some of them are "rewarded" for being unproductive: welfare recipients, farmer subsidies, corporate bailouts, etc.

The real problem in dealing with the communitarian argument may be making people aware that they are holding these assumptions in their subconscious, and not recognizing them as assumptions.

Ending drug prohibition (the War on Drugs) won't solve the drug problem by itself, but it will stop creating additional, unintended problems for us, making it harder and more intractable for society to deal with. Ending the assumptions about drugs and drug use is a good place to start towards ending drug prohibition.

Laissez-faire and the Financial Crisis

It's funny how so many people are ready to jump on laissez-faire, the free market, or capitalism as the cause of the financial crisis. Exactly when did we have this glorious economic period, anyway? There are regulations too numerous to mention, and of which people are obviously unaware, to believe "deregulation" was the cause of the crisis. If nothing else, the mere existence of the Federal Reserve should disabuse anyone of that notion.

Laissez-faire no more caused the current crisis than it did the Great Depression of the 1930's. Anyone who thinks Herbert Hoover sat on his hands and did nothing when the Crash occurred needs to read some more history. Hoover did quite a bit in trying to deal with the crash. And Hoover himself was no big fan of laissez-faire, and says so in his book The Challenge to Liberty. When Franklin Roosevelt took office, he did the same basic things that Hoover did, only on a larger scale. Unfortunately, since they were both unwilling to admit how much the Federal Reserve, created in 1913, had to do with the problem, their actions were useless at best, and most likely helped to prolong the Depression, instead of ending it.

The Fed made possible the Roaring 20s, the biggest boom this country had ever seen, but it was unsustainable, created by the Fed's loose money and easy credit policies. Austrian Economics describes this problem as part of their theory on business cycles. The bust we know as the Great Depression necessarily had to follow so that the market could correct the malinvestment created by the Fed's policies.

These same policies have cursed us over the decades since then, giving us continual (although gradual) inflation that has degraded the value of our money and earnings, and created other boom and bust cycles, though not as big as the one of the 20s and 30s.

The dot com bubble of the 90's was one such boom/bust period, and now the housing bubble of the 2000's is just the latest boom and bust that we are experiencing as the financial crisis.

Without understanding the causes of the financial crisis, especially the Fed's part in it, neither Obama nor McCain will be able to fix the problem, any more than Hoover or FDR were able to fix the Depression.

Why do people want to blame laissez-faire, free market capitalism? I can most charitably conclude that it stems from a misunderstanding of laissez-faire. The essential argument they make is that the Fed and the federal regulators allowed the banks and Wall Street too much unregulated freedom to operate, and didn't properly constrain them when they made bad decisions. And yet, even if that were true, they were still protected from the consequences of their bad decisions, as government regulation was still in place to back them up or bail them out.

This freedom without responsibility is license, made possible by government regulations, not the lack of regulation. In a laissez-faire, free market capitalist economy, freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand. Businesses would be free to make decisions, but would suffer the consequences of bad decisions, usually in the form of losses. The losses would tell them to change their policies, or else risk going out of business and letting other businesses take over their assets. They would not be able to socialize their losses as government is allowing them to do now.

Technically, I suppose government license, protection, or subsidy should not be considered government "regulation" the way other government rules and regulations are, but nonetheless, it would not be possible without government policies and power. This crisis could not have occurred in a true laissez-faire, free market capitalist economy, and this is true even if we accept the arguments about "deregulation" leading to the crisis. Governments allowing license or freedom without responsibility is no better than governments requiring burdensome regulation (responsibility) without freedom.

The Melodica - Unusual musical instruments, part 2

The melodica is an interesting musical instrument. A combination wind/keyboard instrument, you select your notes or chords with the keyboard and blow through the mouthpiece to make sound. You generally just hold it up to your mouth, sort of like a trumpet, although they usually come with a long tube you can use so that you can hold it away from you (easier to see the keys you're playing), or set it down on a table to play two-handed instead of with just one hand.

It has a harmonica-type sound, because internally, it has reeds that vibrate from your breath, like a harmonica. With the keyboard, though, you can do more complex things than a harmonica: complex melody lines or unusual chords or clusters.

Since it's a wind instrument, breath is important. It takes more air to play lower notes (thicker reeds?) or chords, so a good lung capacity is helpful--or else plenty of breaks in the music to catch your breath. Since you need to press the keys AND blow air through it, you can do different things with your technique depending upon how you combine the key presses and air blows. Unfortunately, it's hard to do pitch bends. You can kind of fake it with partial key presses, but doing tremolo with your breath is pretty easy.

While the melodica can be fun to play, the reeds frankly give it a cheesy kind of sound. It seems to me that it takes more effort to make it "musical". Still, it never hurts to have another sound you can throw into the mix, or if you need to "fake" a harmonica. I especially like using it as a rhythm instrument with complex chords, but that's just me.

Be sure to check out the link on the title for more information.

An Open Letter to the State of Oklahoma

The general election is getting close, and I thought I should say something about it:

An Open Letter to the State of Oklahoma:

Dear Oklahoma,

Once again, just as in 2004, I am forced to either voter for the lesser of two evils, or abstain from voting. I can vote for Barak Obama of the Democrat party, or for John McCain of the Republican party, but I cannot vote for Libertarian Bob Barr, Independent Ralph Nader, Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, Constitution Party candidate Charles Baldwin, Independent Alan Keyes, nor any of the other, lesser known candidates. No Oklahoman can. In fact, Oklahoma is the only state that will not have any other presidential candidates on the ballot. Oklahoma doesn't even allow write-ins.

I must say, I find this very frustrating. Why am I and others to be denied a candidate who truly represents our views? Other states have eased their ballot access requirements, so why not Oklahoma? Is Oklahoma really such a restrictive and exclusive state when it comes to politics?

I know that you're very zealous of the Two-Party system, but remember that two is only one more than one. As issues like the Iraq war and the financial crisis should make clear, the two major parties really aren't offering us much in the way of policy differences. If democracy is really about the freedom to choose, then why are you restricting our choices so dramatically? Clearly, having the vote isn't nearly as powerful as being able to select who or what the people are allowed to vote for.

As children, we are raised to believe that we live in a free country, but excessive restrictions and regulations do not constitute freedom, no matter how free one is to complain about them. This is never more obvious than when the restrictions apply to the electoral system. The state constitution promises Oklahomans free and open elections, and every election cycle, you break this promise. The pre-1974 restrictions were tolerable, although they were still restrictions on elections. Since 1974, you've deliberately gone out of your way to make it excessively difficult for third parties to gain ballot access. With tremendous efforts, they have sometimes been able to get on the ballot, but the resources wasted on gaining ballot access ensure that they have little left to spread their message to the voters.

This is nothing but a protection scheme for tired, failed policies that offer nothing new to the voters. Have you not wondered why more and more Oklahomans are registering as Indepedents, instead of staying with the "protected" major parties? Voting in a primary election is no big deal unless you actually care about who the candidate is for a particular party.

I like Oklahoma. I was born and raised here, so it has enormous sentimental value to me. It also has a relatively low cost of living without sacrificing too much in the quality of life. But I fear that your restrictive policies are holding us back, and keeping Oklahomans from being all that they can be. There is no good reason for Oklahoma to be the worst state in the union for ballot access. It is too late for this election cycle--2008 is practically history, now. But it is never too late to make improvements for the future.

Food, Digestion, and human waste products

And now, instead of more grumbling about government's handling of the economy, something completely different. I'll try not to get too scatalogical in today's post. The human body is an incredibly sophisticated, complex organism. Humans are omnivores, capable of eating a wide variety of things for food sources. Anything we eat or drink that the body cannot use passes through the body and is exited as either liquid or solid waste. But what if you could eat only food sources that the body could completely use?

If there was no unnecessary food item in your diet, then you would not need to go to the restroom. Is such a food possible? Is it desirable?

To make it possible, you would need to eat the right kind of food products, the kind your body can effectively and efficiently make use of, and you would need to eat the right amount that your body needs. I suppose if you ate more, your body could save some of it as fat instead of getting rid of it, but that's not especially desirable either.

I don't think there are any 'natural' foods that wouldn't produce waste. Certainly, switching to a low carb diet has changed my own waste. So I imagine that we would need to come up with some kind of processed food to be the "perfect", waste-free food. That would entail knowing exactly what the body needs and doesn't need so that we can avoid what we don't need. I don't think the nutrition experts know enough about the human diet to do that. At least not yet. And it would be complicated by the fact that your body needs different things at different times, so it wouldn't just be a static variable every time.

Of course, even if it's possible, there's the question of how desirable it is. It seems pretty obvious to me that we could save time, water, and toilet paper (and have fewer plumbing problems) if we didn't need to go to the restroom. You'd never again be standing in line or waiting somewhere, squirming in discomfort until you were free. That seems pretty desirable to me.

However, what would happen to your body without passing waste products? Think of fiber, for instance. People are encouraged to eat more fiber so that they will be more "regular", but other than that, I don't think the body has much use for fiber. That's why fiber can be subtracted when calculating "net carbs" in a diet--the fiber doesn't count. Of course, if you don't have anything else to pass, then you'd be doing nothing but eating fiber to pass fiber through your body, which seems pointless.

Nonetheless, your intestines, kidneys, etc. might need some occasional waste to process to keep them functioning properly. I'm not sure medical science knows enough to say for sure (or maybe nobody's asked them such a silly question!).

This is just one of those weird ideas I come up with every now and then. I don't have any answers for it. Maybe you do.

Our Next President and the Bailout

Both McCain and Obama voted FOR the financial bailout. Hey, one of these guys is going to be our next president! Which financial genius will it be? And where's the REAL opposition candidate? Oh yeah, ballot access laws are designed to keep them off or drain their funds so that they can't really put up a decent campaign.

Our alleged Two-Party system is looking more and more like One-Party every day. When we have no real choice, will Americans finally wake up and admit that the system itself is not merely broken, but fundamentally flawed?

On the Financial Bailout Vote and Certain Responses

This Reuters article on the bailout vote, Conservatives stand firm on opposition to bailout, gives me mixed feelings. Yes, it's good that they opposed the bailout, but the vote was a little too close for comfort. This part especially troubles me:

"Conservatives strongly oppose the rescue plan proposed last week by U.S. President George W. Bush, arguing that it amounts to government intervention in the free market and would misspend taxpayer money to help big banks."

Uh, yes, it would be misspending taxpayer money, but what La-La Land are these conservative politicians living in if they think we currently have a free market? It's good that conservatives are voting against Bush, but it still seems that they don't really understand the problem in the first place, except for Congressman Ron Paul. It was the previous interventions in the free market that got us into this situation. Remember the Federal Reserve? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Subprime mortgages and fancy financial derivatives?

The article also quotes talk show host Neal Boortz as saying "I'm not particularly distressed that the bailout bill did not pass. I want to see this thing (the bill) flesh itself out a little over a period of days."

Um, what? This alleged "libertarian" simply wants a better bailout bill to be passed? How about "No bailout", Mr. Boortz? How about "Let them fail," Mr. Boortz? Are you one of those so-called "vulgar libertarians" I keep hearing about?

Oh well. If nothing else, it makes for good comedy. I suspect we will need it in the days to come.