In endorsing Barack Obama, Colin Powell made several comments on McCain’s campaign and on taxes.

I admire Powell very much. Along with Condoleezza Rice, they are some of the few people in Washington who, from my view, are non-partisan patriots in the true sense of the word — they love their country without bias, and when it errs, are not afraid to recognize and try to fix the problem.

His comments on McCain’s negative campaign are true enough. McCain’s intent was to run a honorable and dignified campaign, but I think his advisors won out on hitting Obama on the rather trivial Bill Ayers issue.

Powell’s discussion of taxes, however, is not as spot on. Powell said that all taxes are “redistribution of money,” and that most of it is “redistributed” back to the people who paid them through benefits — roads, schools, police, et cetera. Thus, taxes are justified and we should not be angry when taxes increase.

On both counts Powell is correct, but the implication, which is that because the people paying taxes see a benefit from it taxes are justified, is false. Taxes, which is the forcible taking of wealth from individuals by the government, is by its very nature wrong. It is not hard to understand why; taxing entails taking wealth from someone who does not consent to it, but must because of the government’s threat to jail them. It is stealing.

Seeing a benefit does not justify something that is itself wrong. For example, if I take your Mac without your consent, sell it and use the capital raised to plant a beautiful garden in your neighborhood, you will see a benefit from my taking your Mac. You will be able to enjoy the wonderful new garden I designed and planted, but I don’t think you would say that justifies my taking your Mac.

Of course, there are two replies. The first is that it isn’t stealing because people tacitly agree to pay taxes by living in society. Perhaps this is true, but the problem with a tacit agreement argument is this: if, by living in a society I tacitly agree to the government’s rules and laws, then all actions the government takes becomes justified. The government could ban free speech, require segregation, and any other noxious action that most would be hard-pressed to support.

If this seems absurd on face, that is because it is. Government is not bound just by what the people have agreed to, but by preexisting, a priori, natural rights the individual has. Hence we have a Constitution which defines what and what not the government can do. The government cannot abridge free speech or freedom of the press, because it is wrong to do so.

So we see that there are preexisting rules which government must follow.

The second reply is that while taxes are wrong, they are necessary to support the government, and people will not pay them voluntarily. I wonder, though, if we are receiving an equal return on our taxes (e.g., however much roads and education are worth to the individual is equal to, or greater than, the amount paid in taxes, which is what Powell’s statement presumes), which on infrastructure I would tend to say is true, why wouldn’t people voluntarily pay to support the government? Why must taxes then be involuntary?

The reply to this is that even if the return is equal or greater than their payment to the government, people still will not pay them because people do not like paying taxes. Remember, embedded in this argument, is still the presumption that taxes are wrong. So even if this is true, taxes are necessary, then they should still be minimized as much as possible.

It doesn’t follow, then, because taxes are necessary (but not moral), that we should not complain when a candidate’s tax proposal plans to increase tax rates. It means that we should do all that we can to keep them as low as possible, through more efficient government and eliminating wasteful and/or unjust spending. Increasing taxes is not the default answer when government spending is higher than its “revenue” — it is a last resort. At best.

Cowen writes:

The end result was that both markets and governments failed miserably — at the same time and on the same issues. With hindsight, it is easy to argue that regulation should have done more, but in most countries, governments were happy about rising real estate and asset prices and didn’t seek to slow down those basic trends. (You’ll note that greed doesn’t play an independent role in this explanation because greed, like gravity, is pretty much always there.)

Threats, bribes, and shameless corruption. The Washington Post has a long-ranging story on Fannie Mae’s business — securing special favors and winks and nods from government oblivious, or all too knowing, of the monster it created.

This is what happens when government is allowed to intervene in the economy to further its goals:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enjoyed the nearest thing to a license to print money. The companies borrowed money at below-market interest rates based on the perception that the government guaranteed repayment, and then they used the money to buy mortgages that paid market interest rates. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called the difference between the interest rates a “big, fat gap.” The budget office study found that it was worth $3.9 billion in 1995. By 2004, the office would estimate it was worth $20 billion.

As a result, the great risk to the profitability of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was not the movement of interest rates or defaults by borrowers, the concerns of a normal financial institution. Fannie Mae’s risk was political, the concern that the government would end its special status.

So the companies increasingly used their windfall for a massive campaign to protect that status.

The company is not subject to market forces, because the government will bail them out. Instead of focusing on sound business, they focused on receiving special favors from the government. The Clinton administration allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to become this corrupt because they provided affordable loans, which fulfilled Clinton’s agenda of increasing home ownership, even if it meant complete and utter corruption in Fannie Mae and government.

The Bush administration fell into the same trap with their “Ownership Society” goal. The ends for both administrations justified the means, and now we are seeing the results. This is what happens when government is allowed to intervene in the market so forcefully.

Crooked Timber writes on perhaps the most dangerous effect of this financial crisis – the discrediting of free-markets, even if they are not to blame:

Very roughly speaking, when a crisis occurs that is difficult or impossible for the prevailing wisdom to explain or deal with, intellectual entrepreneurs have an opportunity to create a new (partly self-reinforcing) collective wisdom. We’re most likely in just such a crisis now. Which set of intellectual entrepreneurs are going to succeed in reshaping a new collective wisdom – economic nationalists like Sarkozy and Putin, social democratic globalizers like Dani Rodrik, or some other crowd entirely – I have no idea.”

Unfortunately, whether the free market is to blame or not (and in this case, although partially at fault, companies were encouraged by law to give risky loans, and interest rates were too high in 2003), it tends to receive all of the blame. Even if government involvement played a large part in crises, people tend to respond that we need more government power, effectively calling for more poison that lead to the sickness.

The New York Post is reporting that while meeting with Iraqi officials, Obama tried to convince the Iraqis to delay the withdrawal agreement, and said the Iraqis should negotiate with Congress rather than the President because he is weak and politically confused:

‘He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,’ Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops – and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its ‘state of weakness and political confusion.’”

If this report is true, this goes beyond election politics — he is directly undermining a sitting president’s negotiations with an ally during wartime, and may be a violation of the Logan Act. Whether you agree with the President’s policies or not, acting to diminish the president’s — and thus the U.S.’s — negotiating power is beyond words.

I hope that this is false. I strongly disagree with Obama’s domestic policies, but tend to agree with his stated foreign policy, and I think he is a good man. But if this is true, this is quite close to sedition. If it is true, Obama in no way deserves to be president, or serve in any office at all.

Update: Obama’s campaign has denied the report.

John Stuart Mill, ostensibly a proponent of individual freedom, wrote in Principles of Political Economy:

But it is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively can do with them as they like. They can place them at the disposal of whomsoever they please, and on whatever terms. Further, in the social state, in every state except total solitude, any disposal whatever of them can only take place by the consent of society, or rather of those who dispose of its active force. Even what a person has produced by his individual toil, unaided by anyone, he cannot keep, unless by the permission of society. Not only can society take it from him, but individuals could and would take it from him, if society only remained passive; if it did not either interfere en masse, or employ and pay people for the purpose of preventing him from being disturbed in the possession. The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society. The rules by which it is determined are what the opinions and feelings of the ruling portion of the community make them, and are very different in different ages and countries; and might be still more different, if mankind so chose.

Mill argues that, because an individual’s keeping of their property depends on government protection, then the decision-making power of who has wealth and who does not, and to what degree, lies with the government, or for Mill, a majority decision of the people.

This is false. First, an individual does not rely upon the government to protect them from a thief — they can defend themselves if they choose. They depend first on themselves, just as they depended upon themselves to create the property in question, or earn the capital to obtain it.

But second, Mill has this relationship backward. Humans, individuals, exist before government or society. They can create without it. Government is as man-made a tool as any other, and like all tools, was created to serve a purpose — and that purpose is the protection of the individual’s rights.

Why do we have rights? Because humans are rational beings, which exist and succeed only through our ability to use our minds.

Some claim that this is false, because man is not rational, but an emotional animal, one that feels rather than thinks, holds deluded wishes and flails blindly when they are not met. They point to examples of people committing terrible atrocities — murder, genocide, holocaust, robbery — and argue that no rational being could do that.

Others claim that man is all too rational, that reason leads to these atrocities, and if only man felt more, the world would be a much better place.

But see the inherent contradiction in the first claim. If one claims that man is irrational, and then attempts to justify it with evidence — they are using reason, they are thinking. Their very thought that man is irrational, as wrong as it is, makes it impossible for it to be true.

The second claims that harming others for your own gain is rational, and thus reason is our problem. Is it rational to rob someone? To murder them?

Reason — and by its extension, self-interest — is quite simple. At its base, reason is the recognition that one thing is itself. A tree is a tree, and not a dog; that A is A, that reality exists. Reason is to recognize this, and apply it.

The first objection is partly correct — no rational being could commit those acts. Reason is not a state humans are locked in — reason is a choice. They have chosen to deny reality.

Reason, rationality, is a choice, and it is man’s means of survival. Humans cannot live through blind struggle — they can only live through thought. Fire was not discovered by unthinking beasts, but by individuals observing, learning, and creating. But it is by choice.

Humans can either choose to live, or choose to die — that is their choice. But their life is their purpose. I exist to live, reason is my means, happiness my measure.

Individuals cannot live without recognizing reality. I will die if I claim and believe that I do not require food and water to live. No matter how faithful I am in this belief, no matter how strongly I deny I require food and water, it can only lead to death.

For any human which wants to live, and succeed, their life is their value. To hold your life as your value is also, if one is honest, to grant that other people’s lives hold the same value. If you value your life, you must value the lives of others, which means you cannot harm theirs. You must deal with them through voluntary choice, just as you would want them to do unto you.

To value their own life, and make happiness their purpose, the rational man creates a guiding rule for them: they will always recognize reality.

If I mean to write a great novel, but rather than write it I steal someone else’s work and publish it as my own, I have gained nothing. My novel, even if it is a financial and critical success, is a fraud — I still did not write it. I have only tried to deny the reality that I did no real work and the novel is not my genius. I gain no happiness — just the sadness, shame and guilt of defrauding myself and others. What is wealth and recognition worth when I have gained it through stealing? Nothing.

To value one’s life, then, is to live for real achievement. Real achievement cannot come from defrauding others — it is only derived from productive work, thought, and mutual consent of others where they are involved.

This is where rights are derived. Because people properly value their life, and with it (because they are inseparable) their liberty and property, they form, or accept, government. Government comes after the individual. It is created to protect their rights from violation, and that is its only proper purpose.

In this way, Mill has his relationship backward; he states that the individual can only retain his property because of government, but in reality, government can only exist to protect the individual’s rights and still be moral.

The “distribution of wealth” in society depends on the voluntary arrangement of individuals, not the laws and customs of society. How wealth is “distributed” properly depends as much on “laws and customs” as it does robbery, but it is an unjustifiable distribution. Any law which requires the taking of an individual’s property is robbery, a violation of his rights, and thus a violation of the government’s reason to exist. Any government which does so is illegitimate.

Fareed Zakaria argues that Russia’s invasion of Georgia is more akin to Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 than their invasion of Hungary in 1956, a strategic blunder rather than a sign of Russia’s assertiveness and future.

He makes a decent point: Russia’s invasion of Georgia has driven the Ukraine and Poland into the open arms of the West, and isolated Russia from their traditional supporters against the West — former Soviet central asian states, and China.

But I think he misreads Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Zakaria states that Russia invaded Georgia and all it has to show for it is a lousy t-shirt, err, south Ossetia.

During the invasion, Russia attempted to bomb a central oil pipeline running through Georgia and into Turkey. This was not a mistake. Russia targeted the pipeline to show the West, and Europe particularly, who controls their oil. Europe depends on Russian natural gas running through the Ukraine, and has shut it off before.

Zakaria reads the invasion as a re-assertive Russia attempting to re-take a former sphere of influence and state while it is rich with oil wealth, and failing because the globalized world does not look favorably upon Russia’s ambitions. Not completely inaccurate, but it misses the big picture.

Putin, still firmly in control of Russia in his Prime Minister position, has re-created Russian autocracy, and is now showing Russia’s power in all senses — military, with Georgia; economic, with Georgia and Russian oil flowing to Europe through the Ukraine oil pipeline; diplomatic, through their alliance with Iran, Venezuela, et al.; and espionage through their assassinations and attempted assassinations in the Ukraine and Europe.

Ubiquity for Firefox

Mozilla Labs has released a video of something they are working on called Ubiquity, and the best way to describe it is it’s Quicksilver for the web.

Ubiquity is a great idea in the general sense. The idea is that we have all of these great services already — Google Maps, Craigslist, Twitter, GMail, et cetera, and most of them have APIs which allow developers to connect them and make them even more valuable; but why should we rely on developers to create these connections?

That’s where Ubiquity comes in. It is a browser-based, command-controlled and extensible tool which allows you to connect different services and do some really cool things, like highlight a list of apartments on Craigslist, invoke Ubiquity, type in “map it” (or whatever the command is), and it does it — it takes the location data of the apartments and maps it in Google Maps.

It is also extensible, so others can write plugins for Ubiquity and connect even more services together or create new functionality.

This is all great (and I don’t mean that sarcastically — it really is. I love that Mozilla Labs is pushing forward the idea of a web browser), but this makes me wonder a bit, should this all be within a web browser, or should web APIs be better extended to support al kinds of desktop and web applications?

Rather than Ubiquity, I think we need an all-encompassing framework which allows web service developers, and application developers, to easily connect with each other. For example, the framework should build in micro-formats so they are easy to build in to your service, and it is easy for, say, a desktop collaboration app to, using standard calls in this framework, easily find whatever kind of data the user is looking for.

Basically, we need an end-to-end web framework for services and apps to build in, so all sorts of applications can develop, rather than just develop plugins for a web browser.

Many feared that the iPhone factory worker who had her picture taken with an iPhone while on the job would be fired, but apparently Foxconn has no intention of firing her.

Foxconn has described it as a “beautiful mistake,” and that is accurate in more ways than one.

While Chinese factories have been maligned as inhumane, the photos show a clean, modern work area and a worker having fun. It is perfect publicity for Foxconn — an attractive female worker’s photos end up on an iPhone, and the photos are spread online virally. The brilliant part is that the positive work environment aspect of the photos is not the focus of them. It is a background thing that is being mentioned as an aside, which means free good publicity without any debate over working conditions in Foxconn factories — just the background message to people that Foxconn factories are quite nice.

This is publicity that companies cannot generate on their own, and it would be ludicrous for Foxconn to punish the girl, because that would turn public goodwill into condemnation.

Derek Punsalan writes about his vacation trip to Vietnam, Thailand, and Korea. Some wonderful photos and an altogether jealousy-inspiring piece. Sounds like an excellent trip.

I have been hoping to visit Vietnam for a while, and this only enflames that desire.

China to issue bank notes without Mao Zedong.

China will soon issue 10-Yuan bank notes without Mao Zedong’s image on them, which currently covers all of China’s currency.

What is most telling about this, though, is what is replacing Mao on the currency. In his place will be the bird’s nest stadium in Beijing on the front, the single most well-known symbol of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and Greek statue of a discus thrower on the back.

The symbolism, I think, is not only clear, but also intentional: this is the new China, connected with the world and a part of it. This is what the Olympics means for the Chinese — a break from two centuries of suffering and chaos, a bright future where anything is possible.

BBC: Baghdad sees tentative rebirth

Perhaps not so dramatic, but an Iraqi’s thoughts:

He told me that three years ago, when he and his wife had their first child, he felt there was very little hope for the future.

But now, very slowly, things are changing.

He believes his new daughter has been born into a country which, finally, has something better to look forward to.

Myths about the Developing World

Video of Hans Rosling, co-founder of Gapminder, presentation at TED.

An innumerable amount of blogs and websites exist to cover everything tech related, but there are not many good ones. I only have a few sites that are must-reads in my feed reader, and it is unfortunate there are so few. My hope is that this site will become a must-read for you.

Today, Andrew Min and I are announcing a new site, Dawning Valley. Dawning Valley is a small team of dedicated writers whose goal is to write great content about things they care about. We will not be writing about everything that happens in the tech world — only the stuff we are genuinely interested in.

Our philosophy is different than most other sites. Rather than post a lot of articles each day to pump up page views, most of them meaningless and not worth reading, we will only be posting a few articles per week.

I love following tech companies for one primary reason: people working in tech startups, and even established companies, believe in what they are doing, and want to do something great for themselves and the world. I love these kinds of people and businesses, because these are the people who really do change the world for the better.

And that is why we named it Dawning Valley. We believe that businesses genuinely dedicated to doing great things for the world is how we should approach our lives as well, and signals a radically-new potential where profit, social benefit, and personal fulfillment all intersect to create an unimaginably-great future. It is the dawn of a new age, and it began in the valley. Dawning Valley.

Our goal is to bring this same philosophy and enthusiasm to Dawning Valley. We want to provide really great commentary on anything happening in tech that we are interested in, and we hope that you are interested in reading it.

Today, we have two articles for you, and we will have a new article Thursday and Friday as well.

We hope you enjoy Dawning Valley.

http://dawningvalley.com

Why we skip Photoshop – (37signals)

You can’t click a Photoshop mockup. This is probably the number one reason we skip static mockups. They aren’t real. Paper isn’t real either, but paper doesn’t have that expectation. A Photoshop mockup is on your screen. If it’s on your screen it should work. You can’t pull down menus in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t enter text into a field in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t click a link in a Photoshop mockup. HTML/CSS, on the other hand, is the real experience.

While I sympathize (I don’t even own Photoshop), I am not sure sketching it on paper and then going straight to HTML and CSS would work for me. I mockup new projects in OmniGraffle, which is simple and makes the process quick. This allows me to see the design and figure out what works and what doesn’t, much more effectively than sketching it does.

This saves time and effort while coding the page because I don’t have to make comparably-significant changes. I can iterate quickly, rather than focusing on little CSS/HTML problems.