Some Links

Chateau Heartiste links to someone who takes issue with the open borders concept. Behold, a white supremacist pile-on:

[A]lthough open borders to the world’s riff-raff may bring short-term proximate benefits like cheap strawberries, it also brings longer-term costs in the form of sacrificing ultimate interests, like one’s ethnic genetic continuity.

The more that immigration's opponents make themselves sound like the KKK, the easier it is to make the case for open borders. (Elsewhere, CH is encouraging his readers to insult rather than compliment insecure girls in order to procure sex from them. Class act all the way through!)

Peter Boettke reveals that it is entirely possible to engage in civil debate with one's political "adversaries." I use the term adversary loosely, because a better name for them is "fellow countrymen."

Alex Tabarrok provides some insight into what happens when countries liberalize their economies.

RIP, George Duke. We miss you already.

Finally.

8W: Week 5 / Day 2

Today's workout is 40 minutes of cardio at medium effort.

Sonic Charmer Has Never Immigrated Anywhere

I sincerely believe that if Sonic Charmer actually looked into the real facts about immigration, he would be an open borders advocate. I don't want to keep harping on the guy, but this is just ignorance:

Immigrants don’t, as a rule, have ‘job offers’.

I don't know what else to say, except that it's a shame that someone who has such a strong opinion about immigration knows so little about it. I literally know dozens of people who have immigrated (or emigrated, or both) because they, in fact, had job offers. In fact, I'm a great example.

I also know people who were barred from accepting job offers because the immigration rules were too strict. Probably the most common example of this is an international student who studies at a local university, earns a degree, and then gets a job offer contingent on the employer's ability to obtain the right visa clearance.

Another good example are international employees currently working (legally) in the United States who get job offers from new firms, but who are unable to accept these offers because their visas state that they may only work for their current company. There are tens of thousands of people working on such visas. They live here, they work here, they pay taxes here, they have high-tech skills, and they are all-around good people... who are basically banished to immigration purgatory because of insane rules about not being able to find gainful employment with some other employer, even though they already live and work in the US legally!

The fact that Sonic Charmer is basically ignorant of these common immigration stories - stories you hear all the time when you actually (gasp!) make friends with immigrants and talk to them like equals - belies his inexperience with basic immigration policy.

But more than that, it goes to show you that his opinion is based on limited information. I am confident that if he had more knowledge about immigration laws and the real-world facts involved, he would be every bit the open borders advocate that I am.

Phase 2 Of 8W

Given that today marks the beginning of the second half, or "phase 2," of my 8W shenanigans, I thought I might provide some general thoughts, concepts, etc. on how to approach the next four weeks.

If you've been following this somewhat ambitious set of workouts, you know that we spent the previous four weeks doing a lot of resistance training. What we were trying to do is build muscle mass and strength, in addition to gradually increasing our cardiovascular work load week-by-week. For what it's worth, I gained about 5-10 pounds over the past four weeks, something that I did not manage to do when I was dedicating myself to BodyBuilding.com workouts. Take that for what it's worth - perhaps those workouts are not right for me, or perhaps they had a delayed effect, or perhaps a million other things. What I do know is that the last four weeks have been good to me in terms of muscle mass, tone, and strength. I hope they have also been good to you.

But the pattern of this type of working out tends to be: (a) build your muscles up, followed by (b) "cut," or reduce the amount of fat on your body. Considering that general concept, it should be clear that the previous four weeks were dedicated to (a), and the next four weeks will be dedicated to (b).

While that is the general pattern, the big difference you'll notice with 8W, in contrast to other such workout schedules, is that we'll be cutting for a lot longer on my program. The reason for this is that I don't truly believe in body-building as an approach to fitness. While it's possible to essentially starve/ketosis yourself to a leaner body composition, it isn't suitable as a long-term approach. This is why most body-builders have to deliberately cut, while distance runners like me simply lack body fat without having to think about it.

Rather than employing rabbit starvation techniques for body composition purposes, I've opted to increase the amount of cardiovascular exercise in the program, while emphasizing strength training techniques rooted in calisthenics and plyometrics. What this means is that you'll be running and jumping yourself lean. Your core will develop strength that you didn't have previously.

As you work your way through the cardio, push yourself. If you're not sweating and panting, then you're not burning fat. While all that "research" out there insists that you can burn more fat in a 20-minute HIIT session than you can on a 10-mile run, you might not be getting the whole story. The whole story requires the addition of a single sentence: This research further supports the idea that pushing hard during a workout burns more fat than taking it easy. Of course, that's pretty much a no-brainer, and hardly newsworthy, which is why you never read it. The general idea here is that if you want your 30-minute run to work as well as a 15-minute HIIT session, all you need to do is run faster. Simple.

And even if you find this difficult, my 8W phase 2 has plenty of plyometrics to keep you gasping for air. I even have your HIIT covered, too. It's all there, so just trust in the system... Four more weeks to go!

8W: Week 5 / Day 1

Today's workout is as follows:

Do the following as a "ladder*:"

• Box jump
• Push-up
• Pull-up
• Hanging leg raise

Then do this:

• 30 minutes of cardio

______________

* First do 1 each of everything, then 2 each of everything, then 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. After 7, go back to 6, then 5, 4, 3, 2,1.

Rhesus 19 - Solitude

We're going acoustic today. This one is called "Solitude," for reasons that will become obvious when you hear it.

Enjoy.

8W: Week 4 / Day 7

Time for another rest day. Thus ends Phase 1 of my two-phase, 8-week workout regimen. Tomorrow, we'll begin Phase 2. The workouts will be somewhat different than the previous four weeks, from here on out.

8W: Week 4 / Day 6

Today's workout is 45 minutes of light cardio. Enjoy yourself out there.

Replace It With What?

Sharon Schultz-Elsing opines that the desire to repeal the ACA (aka ObamaCare) is nothing more than partisan obstructionism. Of course, imposing the ACA in the first place was also partisan obstructionism, so I took her to task a bit. Blaming one party for opposing a monstrosity while not simultaneously blaming the other party for originally creating the monstrosity is kind of pointless.

I think Ms. Schultz-Elsing was reaching for a coup de grace by asking me what I would replace ObamaCare with if it were repealed. This question is also a little silly because it assumes that some sort of legislation is required. As I have previously pointed out, the pre-ObamaCare health care industry was actually starting to heal itself by de-coupling from the health insurance industry. So what ObamaCare actually did was lay waste to the very medicine that would have fixed the system.

Oh, well. Let's humor Ms. Schultz-Elsing anyway. Here is what I told her on Google+:

People do not want health insurance. What they want is health care. Insurance is simply a means to an end. How do you decrease health care costs? 

(1) By increasing the number of physicians in the United States. The quickest and easiest way to do this is by eliminating immigration restrictions and importing doctors from India, China, Africa, and Latin America. A secondary means of doing this is by eliminating barriers to becoming a doctor, and YES that does mean we will have to deregulate the industry a bit. 

(2) By decoupling health care practice from health care insurance . The easiest way to do this is simply by shopping around. 

A more relevant way of doing this is by eliminating Medicare. Why would that work? Because Medicare has monopsony power, meaning they are such a large purchaser of health care services that they have become market price setters. While it is a tempting knee-jerk to clutch at any government program and say the poor needs it, when you stop to consider the adverse impact Medicare has had on health care prices, you start to come to remarkably different conclusions. If necessary, we could replace Medicare with a simple transfer payment of cash to the poor. That would at least save us from distorting health care prices while still maintaining the social safety net that [many ACA supporters will not let go of]. 

(3) By eliminating or at least streamlining the FDA. I don't really need to explain this one, but I will anyway. This organization has extended pharmaceutical product lifecycles from maybe 10 years to at least double that, and longer in many cases. This translates into a pure cost increase to medicine manufacturers, who then pass this increase onto the consumers. It takes billions of dollars to produce a product 20 years in advance of its actual marketability - more than the entire GDP of many small countries. Think about that. What if, rather than heaping on additional regulatory hurdles, we cleared some out so that medicine makers could bring their products to market faster, without sustaining a multi-billion-dollar investment decades in advance of any actual profit generation?  

(4) By eliminating medical patents. Completely. Maybe you consider this a radical idea, so let's compromise by agreeing that we should at least shorten the lives of these patents - while simultaneously reducing the FDA-imposed regulatory burden - and allow US citizens to freely import medicine from other countries. 

Start there. That's the low-hanging fruit. None of this can happen, by the way, unless and until the ACA is repealed, nullified, or rendered impotent.

It is simply dishonest to pretend or imply that there aren't other ways of addressing rising health care costs on a national level. Many health care market cost drivers are government-imposed. Imposing more government on the health care market will certainly not result in an alleviation of self-imposed cost-drivers. There are real solutions to this problem if people will but acknowledge that there are more participants in the discussion than Barack Obama and John Boehner.

But, of course, I think Sharon Shulze-Elsing's real point was that Republicans are bad. So why let a pesky thing like good health care market policy get in the way of a good partisan zinger?

8W: Week 4 / Day 5

Today's workout is as follows.

Do This Three Times:

• 10 x military press
• 10 x front raises
• 10 x dumbbell arm circles

Then Do This Three Times:

• 15 x shoulder shrug
• 10 x upright row
• 10 x barbell clean-and-press

1996

Remember when Tyra Banks looked like this?

...and when Oprah Winfrey looked like this?

And isn't it a shame that they now both look identical?

Animals Are Not People

The bizarre insistence with which some people assert that animals should be treated like people simply dumbfounds me.

It's not that I dislike animals. In fact, I love them. I grew up in one of those "zoo families," a family in which trips to the local zoo were an almost monthly phenomenon, and happened throughout the year. We had dearly beloved pets in our household for as long as I can remember. I tend to have a good rapport with most dogs, and especially cats. I have had pet dogs, cats, fish, and rabbits of my own, and can readily attest to the fact that pets bring a lot of joy and love to any household. I find wild animals to be majestic and captivating. I believe in reasonable preservation of animal habitat and species well-being. In short, I am an all-around animal lover.

But animals are not people.

As I previously wrote, I posted an article to my Facebook page recently and stirred up some controversy among my friends and family. The article was about a woman who found that she could not give the same amount of attention to her dog after she had children as she did when she was childless. I liked the article, but many others felt as though the woman was being selfish and negligent. In the end, though, dogs are not children, and the love you have for a child will always outweigh the love your have for a dog. If not, then there might be something wrong with you.

That sounds harsh, so let me explain.

How Widespread Is The Belief That Animals Are People?
In the context of a discussion about natural rights and property rights, John Alexander comments:

If one believes in natural property rights along the line that if I made x through my own labor then I have a right to x, does this right extend to non-human animals that built things through their own labor to improve their living conditions? If it does not, why not? But, if it does, then are we invaders and violating the PNA by destroying non-human natural habitats?

And later, when I asked him whether the rules that govern a flock of pigeons extend to pigeons, he responded:

Why wouldn't they, or at least some of them? Some non-human animals can have families, protect and nurture their young and each other, build structures for safety and security, etc. If I occupy some land and build a house and claim 'ownership and a right to it because I built it, how is this different from the beaver that builds a dam? I think it was Locke who argued that it is thru our labor that we take ownership. Other then knowing that I labor, how is what I do different from what a beaver does? Where do rights enter into the relationship between what I do and what I own?

Consider this blog post by Frances Woolley, which I quote in its entirety:

SatisfactionIt is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism 

I disagree. A human does not know the inner workings the porcine mind, nor can Socrates comprehend the satisfactions of a fool. 

Yet pigs and humans, fools and philosophers, are more alike than people once thought. Me, I would go for the life of the happy pig, frolicking in mud glorious mud.

Of course, we have all heard the many stories of the Auschwitz of poultry and other similar tales told to us by such venerable organizations as PETA and the Animal Liberation Front.

It all adds up to this: that animals are people is a widespread idea. Why is this problematic?

How Far Can We Push The Idea?
If your next-door neighbor defecates on your front lawn whenever he walks by, you can sue him. He might even be arrested on criminal charges. Most people don't see any problem with this, and neither do I. Protecting one's private property from the neighbors' feces is pretty basic and reasonable stuff.

If the neighbor's dog defecates on your front lawn whenever it walks by, you cannot sue the dog. You might, however, be able to sue your neighbor. This makes sense because the neighbor owns the dog. Legally speaking - and philosophically speaking - the neighbor is the dog's warden, caretaker, and guardian. If the dog damages a human being's personal property, that human can seek a legal (or philosophical) remedy by addressing the dog's owner. You might also try reasoning with the dog. (Go ahead, try it.)

Let's consider two additional examples.

First, consider a vacant lot that has been bequeathed to a dog. The dog owns the land, and I assume this is legally valid since there are many examples of cats having become the beneficiaries of estates. Suppose a second dog defecates on the first dog's property. Can the first dog sue the second dog? Don't roll your eyes. If you believe animals are people, then the answer must be yes. Next question: if the second dog cannot pay his debts to the first dog, can the second dog be thrown in debtor's prison? If not, why not? How far can we push the idea?

Second, consider the case of a stray dog who defecates on your property. Can you sue the stray dog? If so, can the stray dog ultimately be put in debtor's prison? If the resolution to all of these issues lies in the fact that the dog has no legal guardian, does this imply that the dog's guardianship falls to the state? If so, does this mean that you can sue the state if a stray dog defecates on your lawn? And if so, does this mean you can also sue the state for any damage that results from the actions of a wild animal, under the argument that the state is the legal guardian of all wild animals?

Don't roll your eyes. I'm being totally serious. The question of animal-personhood is not just an emotional affinity, it has real philosophical and legal implications. If you consider my questions absurd, I assert that they are no less absurd than the whole question of animal-personhood.

Also, I'm not finished yet. Just how far can we push this? Can a dog become the recipient of a human kidney? Never mind the fact that the kidney is of no use to a dog, other than to serve as lunch. If humans as people can be placed on a  kidney donation waiting list, can we also place pet dogs on these lists? Why not? (Note: Your answer must account for the dog's equal rights as a person.)

I understand the emotional sentiment of wanting to treat animals well, but I reiterate: declaring animals as people has serious implications. You are not allowed to simply dodge or ignore these questions because they seem absurd or unpleasant.

Why Animals Are Not People
The family dog can receive love like a child. All animals can receive love like the children many of us like to treat them as. I have no argument with that fact. Animals can certainly be loved like children.

What they cannot do is reciprocate that love. A dog will love you in the sense that dogs feel a canine sort of love. It is the an emotion unique to dogs that has no direct comparison to human emotion because humans and dogs are simply different. The reason your love for a dog is different in kind from your love for a child is not because the love you give it is different, but because the love you get back is different.

This is precisely why pigeons cannot enjoy the benefits of human philosophical, political, or legal institutions. Sure, we can give pigeons human rights, but they cannot exercise those rights. That's because they're not humans.

Going back to the dog example up above: A dog cannot sue another dog or anyone else, but it's not because a property-owning dog has no rights as a property owner. It's because, whether or not we choose to allow dogs to have property rights, a dog does not understand what it means to sue anything. A dog couldn't articulate a desire to sue. A dog cannot give consent to the legal action of suing. Dogs, simply stated, cannot sue.

And it's not just that they can't sue - it's that they can't do anything that involves an understanding of human institutions, because human institutions cannot be conceptualized by a canine brain. Naturally, this is a fact that extends to every other type of animal in existence. It also applies to humans: Humans cannot enjoy canine institutions because we do not really know what is going on in the pack. We can surmise, we can pretend, we can assume, we can behave as dogs; but we can never be dogs. Thus the rules that apply to the dog world do not apply to us. Nor do the rules of the ant colony apply to us, nor the school of fish, nor the gaggle of geese, nor any of the rest of it.

Human institutions are unique to the human brain and human society. To suggest that animals have a place as equals in those institutions is to pretend that there are no cognitive differences among species.

The best possible thing I can say about that statement is that it is childish in an extremely shameful way.

One Final Word
There are those among us who insist on animal personhood and yet simultaneously hold the pro-choice view on human abortion. While I have no special desire to explore the ethics of human abortion on my blog, it's important to consider the implications of the idea that someone would on the one hand believe that animals are people, and on the other hand believe that human fetuses are not.

Really, what it amounts to is the fact that such people believe living animals have more human rights than human fetuses do. That strikes me as being an extremely difficult position to maintain with a clean conscience.

To be clear: It seems consistent to me that someone would be both pro-life and pro-animal-personhood; it also seems consistent that someone would believe neither the pro-life position nor the animal-personhood position. But to believe in animal-personhood and not in human fetus personhood is a remarkable - and indeed shocking - set of beliefs.

Does this imply that being pro-life means one should also be pro-animal-personhood? No. The problem with thinking that animals, but not human fetuses, are people is that one is clearly putting the rights of an animal ahead of the rights of something that has an equivalent level of cognition and that will eventually grow into an actual human being. On the other hand, being pro-life simply means that one considers human fetuses to be human beings; there is no special ranking of animals in that equation, nor need there be for a pro-lifer to maintain ideological consistency. Remember, it's the animal-personhood advocates who are asserting the human rights of non-humans.

Conclusion
Well, I think I've taken this absurd concept about as seriously as I can. I can only conclude by reiterating that the belief that animals are people is, well... childish. Species treat all other species differently. Spiders eat flies; birds eat grasshoppers; fungus grows on trees. And, yes, humans eat fish, capture animals and hold them as pets, cage birds, and so on. The rules and institutions involved in being a human being do not and cannot apply to animals, because animals cannot reciprocate the human relationship or otherwise exercise their rights.

A Necessary Integration

One of the reasons I started blogging is that, beyond the fact that I have an opinion on a wide variety of topics, I feel that my opinions integrate. I may be wrong, but I at least entertain the delusion that mine is an all-encompassing philosophy in which the concepts I discuss today relate to the concepts I discussed yesterday in important, fundamental, systematic, and consistent ways. In turn, the things I discuss tomorrow will also relate to the things I discussed today and yesterday. (Indeed, I am writing this blog post two days in advance of its publication!)

When I wrote about the justification for the institution of property rights, that blog post had context. The "first layer of the contextual onion" was Kevin Vallier's post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, but the longer-range context was an earlier post I wrote here on Stationary Waves about the changing arguments for market intervention. In that post, I offered the conjecture that perhaps one of the reasons why people who believe in market intervention hold this belief is because they feel more comfortable participating in the political process than in the market process.

Consider that conjecture in light of my post about property rights. There, I made the case that any transfer of property ownership must occur either by force or by trade. The parallel here is that "force" corresponds to the political process while "trade" obviously corresponds to the market process.

The ideas I'm conveying across multiple blog posts integrate together. One who feels more comfortable agreeing by committee that a particular course of action is the one we will all follow from here on out will naturally resist the concept of allowing people the freedom to trade to the point that many of us wind up with a disproportionately small allocation of property.

Look at it from the other side, though: Someone who feels uncomfortable in the market process, with all its inherent risks and challenges will feel he would be better off eliminating the risks and challenges by deferring to committee vote. In fact, the more impotent one feels in the face of free market trade, the more one will feel inclined to circumvent that market using an appeal to the political process.

These ideas further integrate into my rules-versus-merit framework. The market process is based almost entirely on merit. One may only gain my possessions by offering something meritorious in exchange. If I recognize the merits of what you're offering, I'll accept the deal.

Those who excel in the marketplace are the entrepreneurs, those clever people who have a knack for seeing value where others do not. People who are uncomfortable in the marketplace inevitably feel as though the entrepreneurs somehow take advantage of or exploit people. The argument is that if the entrepreneurs see $100 of value in an item being sold for $50, then the entrepreneur is morally obligated to pay the full $100. We can imagine an old woman clearing out her attic at a yard sale, unaware of the true value of her son's mint-condition vintage toy collection. Are the buyers exploiting the old woman's ignorance, or merely availing themselves of a speculative opportunity?

On the other hand, those who feel more comfortable in the marketplace find entrepreneurs thrilling and highly admirable. Indeed, they aim to be entrepreneurs themselves, locating a great bargain and reaping the profits of arbitrage. To them, this magical process we call the marketplace is an exciting and grand game; they sense the thrill of the hunt, their hearts beat rapidly when they discover a profit-making opportunity. They don't understand why anyone would want to draft rules that stultify this wonderful free market; rather than making rules, why not join in the fun? You might not always make a profit, but the risk is part of the fun.

Force is clearly unpleasant, but so is loss. It is not at all clear to me that political rules are a superior means for correcting disparity than the meritocratic marketplace. But as to that point, I have some further integration work to do.

8W: Week 4 / Day 4

Today's workout is as follows.

Do This Five Times:

• 15 x jump-and-tucks
• 15 x burpees
• 15 x lunges (each leg)
• 15 x side jumps over a box/platform
• 15 x plyometric push-ups

Then Do This:

• 7 x frog jumps
• 20 x C-clamp crunches