Why Your Packages May Soon Cost Twice As Much

For the past several months, FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS) have been in an intense legal battle that could shake the entire shipping industry. FedEx, because it ships the majority of its packages via air, is governed under different unionization rules than UPS, which ships the majority of its packages via trucking. As a result, FedEx's labor must have a majority of all its employees voting in favor of organizing in order to unionize, while UPS' labor need only get a majority of the employees who actually vote.

UPS' costs in worker compensation are now over twice those of FedEx.

UPS and the Teamsters are now lobbying Congress to reorganize federal labor laws in a way that will bring more of FedEx's workers into the same designation as UPS' workers and therefore, bring all of FedEx under new labor regulations.

The exorbitant costs that the unionization in UPS has brought are no surprise; for decades unions have exerted enormous power over business and government, lobbying for power, more power. Yet some misunderstand the unions' problems as problems of existence. "If we could just get rid of the unions," they reason, "we could get back down to business again." This, however, ignores the basic reason of why the unions have gained so much power in recent years. In the Industrial Revolution, when unions were just starting to pick up steam, businesses used their political clout to gain benefits from the Federal Government in the area of labor management (case in point: when President Hayes sent federal troops in to put the kibosh on the workers participating in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877). The situation between labor, government, and business was like this:

LABOR --- GOVERNMENT == BUSINESS

In response to the overwhelming power of the alliance between business and government, labor unions began to realize the power of lobbying for themselves and soon, various groups of both labor and big business were vying for government handouts and favorable regulations.

LABOR == GOVERNMENT == BUSINESS

In time, particularly as the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and later FDR gained power, business still received favorable government action such as subsidies and competition-squashing regulations, but lost much of its power in the area of organized labor. Meanwhile, unions gained more and more political power as the Great Depression provided a pretext for the increasing of labor power. This situation has continued to the present day, with this relationship between labor, government, and business:

LABOR == GOVERNMENT --- BUSINESS

Unions can now use the coercive authority of government to force employers into deals that hurt business, consumers, and indeed, non-union workers. As a result, products and services cost far more than they should and these costs are either passed on to consumers or kept within the company until the company fails. Now the economy is in no better a situation than it was when employers held the power to take away workers' rights by using the government as a weapon.

The appropriate solution is one in which government stays out of the dealings between businesses and their workers. Freedom of association is the ideal situation, in which workers can stay in their job if they wish, but also have the liberty to leave if their employer is giving them unfavorable conditions.

LABOR == BUSINESS

Simply abolishing unions and other forms of organized labor will not solve the problems currently faced by employees and their workers. Doing so would simply be a return to the old days in which businesses held complete control over their employees and the working class suffered. Instead, one should look to the root of the problems in modern industry, which is an overbearing, intervening government that has given itself the role of mediator between business and workers, a mediator that nobody wants.

Things to be thankful for...

It's all too easy to be caught up in the gloom and doom of the state of American politics--and indeed world politics--these days. Stories of wars, corruption, economic turmoil, and party divisions dominate the news media today, but often we ignore the bright spots that appear in the cloudy sky. Here are just a few thanks-worthy bits of recent (and not-so-recent) news, info, and thoughts:

• 222 years, 70 days ago, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia ratified the Constitution.
• On January 23, 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order for the closing of Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.
• In 1841, thanks largely to the efforts of President Andrew Jackson, the Second Bank of the United States went bankrupt.
• On November 19, 2009, Congressmen Ron Paul (R-TX) and Alan Grayson (D-FL) successfully added amendments to House Resolution 3996 to allow for increased audit authority over the Federal Reserve.
• On December 2, 1823, the United States adopted the Monroe Doctrine
• In New York's special election for the 23rd congressional district, third-party candidate Doug Hoffman gained 45% of the vote, losing but gaining significant support.

I'm sure you, the reader, can come up with many other things to be thankful for as the year 2009 starts to wind down. Never lose hope, and never, ever give up!

Civilization and its Governments

Philosophers generally hold two clashing views of humanity: one optimistic, the other pessimistic. Each of these viewpoints is often held as an argument to increase the authority of government, whether in economic policies, personal lives, or civil liberties.

The optimistic view of humanity holds that people are inherently good, and indeed are perfectible creatures. All that is needed for a utopian existence is more time for mankind to iron out its faults and get its act together. This view is commonly held by modern liberals, who see government as the ideal "ironing board" to stretch people over and get rid of their problems. The only problem with this is that if people are inherently good, why do they need government to solve all of their problems? People could live in peace with each other without state regulations and taxes and other government functions; they wouldn't need any motivation to help out their fellow man on the street and they would most certainly not attack each other, either personally or militarily.

Clearly, however, this has not happened. Poverty still strikes many. Militaries and insurgents still clash. World peace has not been achieved, world hunger has not been solved. So this philosophy of humanity strikes out. This leaves the pessimistic view of humanity, which states that people are fallen, corrupt creatures with a near-infinite capacity for wrongdoing. This, of course, may be true, as it is the only logical conclusion remaining after the discarding of the optimistic view of humanity; however, this truth is often twisted to provide a false and fallacious view of government's role in society. If humanity is corrupted, one may reason, then it needs a master to keep it in line, right? This view is commonly held by conservatives, who say that mankind's original sin means that government needs to step in and make people do the right things, whatever "right" may be.

However, this view fails to realize that there is no distinction between the corrupt humans of the citizenry and the corrupt humans of the government. If humans are inherently wicked, and governments are comprised of humans, then governments also are wicked. It does not matter whether or not those at the head of the government were democratically elected or seized power in a violent coup; they are just as fallible and prone to mistakes as those they rule.

Both the views lead to an incorrect view of the people; they view people as clay to be molded by a government that is always correct and never falters in its careful control over the citizenry. They both ignore the fact that humans, regardless of election, birth, or status, are all equally prone to evil. The solution to this is to have each man in control of as little of another man's rights and property as possible. Private property must be protected, as must rights and civil liberties, for if any of these things becomes subject to the rule of a privileged few, the only thing that can result is tyranny, oppression, and civilization-wide collapse.

Physics and the Fry Guy

My house, though upwards of forty years old, is a sturdy old place. I could walk out back, do some stretching, maybe a quick warmup, then push with all my might against its walls, but it wouldn't do a thing, no matter how hard or how long I pushed. I could come back inside at the end of the day having pressed against the house's walls from sunup to sundown, but have nothing to show for it except blistered hands and a sore back.

But I don't do this pointless exercise. Why? Well, aside from the fact that I have no interest in demolishing my childhood home, I also happen to know a bit of elementary physics.

The equation Work = Force x Distance explains why all my blood, sweat, and tears won't budge make the slightest difference in my house's end position. Force can be broken down into two separate components, mass and acceleration. Therefore, force represents the mass of the object I am trying to move (my house--several thousand kilograms) multiplied by the amount I want the object to accelerate. Now, I can put as many Newtons (units of force) into the wall as I want, but if the distance doesn't change, no work has been done and the walls of my house thankfully stay put.

Now, let's apply this principle to labor and income.

"Why does my manager get paid so much more than I do? I work just as hard as he does but he gets paid ten times more than I do! And he just sits in an office all day!"

The entry-level employee may put just as much, or even more, work into his job every day, but what is the difference between the results he gets and the results his manager gets? Take a fast-food restaurant as an example. The fry guy probably works as hard or harder than the manager. He stands in a hot kitchen for several hours a day. He deals with irritable fellow employees and downright stupid customers. He probably has a few burns on his hands from handling grease. The manager, on the other hand, deals with paperwork, gets to talk with people who are actually polite, and rarely suffers anything more than a papercut. So the fry guy should get a higher salary, right?

Wrong.

If the fresh-out-of-high-school fry guy is removed from the scene, the restaurant can still function, and will only suffer a slight loss in performance. Training a new employee of his skill level will only take a short amount of time and a small amount of money. If the manager, however, with years of experience and expertise, is taken out of the picture, the restaurant will not be able to function coherently. In all likelihood, the place will not be able to compete with the opposition anymore and will therefore fold like a house of cards.

So who, in the end, achieved more work? The fry guy puts a lot of force into his job, but will likely never create greater profits for the company than the manager does. The manager has earned his position from having patiently gone through many of the same trials of the kitchen when he was just starting out on his new job. While increased effort will likely increase one's salary, results are what employees are paid for in the end.

Six Reasons Why Conservatives Should Support Non-Intervention

While liberals are doing more than their fair share at intervening in other country's affairs, conservatives have generally been the ones promoting a foreign policy of aggression and abrasiveness, all in the name of "national security". Conservatives tend to smear non-interventionism as "isolationism" that amounts to nothing more than "appeasement" and a "Neville Chamberlain"-style foreign policy. But why? As the following points show, foreign intervention is antithetical to everything conservatives claim to stand for.

Let's get started:

1. Non-intervention is good for national defense. Millions of Americans have finally started figuring out what more than a few Saudis and Afghans have been putting into practice for quite some time: you reap what you sow. The actions of terrorists against the United States did not come from nothing; instead they are the inevitable result of constant meddling by the United States in Middle Eastern affairs, such as...

1. Inadvertently spurring on the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic regime in Iran
2. Provoking a Soviet attack on Afghanistan
3. Supporting Israel in its invasion of Lebanon
4. Dealing arms with Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war
5. Dealing arms with Iran in the Iraq-Iran war
6. Invading Iraq
7. Creating no-fly zones over Iraq
8. Slapping down massive, deadly sanctions on Iraq
9. Establishing ties with the oppressive Saudi regime
10. Invading and occupying Afghanistan
11. Invading and occupying Iraq again
12. Supporting an oppressive fundamentalist regime in Pakistan,
13. Launching drone strikes in Pakistan
14. Constantly threatening action as drastic as nuclear attack on nations that have committed no aggressive action against us.

And that's just in the last 30 years.

While this intervention in the outside world by no means absolves foreign aggressors of their actions, if policymakers are serious about protecting the lives of Americans, both military and civilian, they must strongly consider implementing non-interventionism.

2. Non-intervention keeps government small. "Never waste a good crisis," the saying goes, and it's a saying the government has taken to heart quite well. Whenever there is some great crisis that threatens to kill us all, such as global warming, swine flu, or war, government jumps at the opportunity to save the day, as long as you just give it a little bit more power in return.

If you don't believe this, just look at the aforementioned swine flu. People are panicking all around from the swine flu, despite the fact that it only kills just as many people as the regular flu. Yet despite this, the feds are seizing more power to stop the infection. "It'll only be temporary," they tell us. But there is truly nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.

War, of course, is the crisis of crises. Nothing mobilizes a citizenry toward support for its government like military action. Regardless of whether or not the war is actually in self-defense, it always provides both an excuse for the government to increase its authority, and a means for the people to accept it.

3. Non-intervention is pro-life. As seen from point number one, non-intervention does a good job of keeping American lives out of an early grave. But consider that if America stopped pushing its weight around the world, fewer foreigners would die as well. Take a look at the sanctions placed on Iraq from 1990 to 2003 as an example. The purpose of those sanctions was ostensibly good, both for the U.S. and the people of Iraq; they were supposed to dislodge the power structure of Saddam Hussein's brutal Ba'ath government and prevent him from gaining more authority. But something went very, very wrong. Depending on which source you look at, civilian casualties directly resulting from those sanctions range from 170,000 to 227,000, to half a million (please note that these are not even the complete count of civilian casualties--these are the number of casualties of children under five alone). Want to call yourself truly pro-life? Ask your government to discontinue its aggressive foreign policy.

4. Non-intervention is Constitutional. This argument applies in two different contexts. The first is under the idea that it is America's responsibility to defend other nations from attack (see Kuwait) or brutal dictators/genocides (see Darfur). The opening lines of Article I, Section 8 of the United States constitution reads as follows: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States." That last part means "it's none of our business what other countries do."

The second context is that of national security, and the defense against it comes from the same part of the Constitution. It must be absolutely clear that an action, military or otherwise, is for the defense of the American people. While this concept may seem simple, for centuries it has been tossed aside by leaders who essentially say "whatever--we'll find the proof later". However, according to the very Constitution that conservatives say they hold in such high regard, this is completely illegal.

5. Non-intervention is conservative. If you look for past supporters of non-intervention, you will find that they are almost overwhelmingly conservative. Who started the Vietnam War? John F. Kennedy, and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson escalated it. Who withdrew from Vietnam? Republican Richard Nixon. Let's go even further back. Who started the Korean War? Liberal Democrat Harry S. Truman. Who withdrew from Korea? Conservative Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was one of the last great Republicans, one who understood the dangers of an overbearing foreign policy. Yet he was no pot-smoking peacenik; he was the supreme commander of the Allied Forces, a decorated general, and a great hero in American history. Conservatism and non-intervention have a long story together, and it is a story I would rather keep alive.

6. Non-intervention is American.

"Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all."

"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service."

"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."

"Military glory--that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood--that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy..."

These quotes do not come from hippie musicians a la John Lennon or communists a la Noam Chomsky; these came from George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln, respectively. The anti-war cause is not anti-American or unpatriotic, it is quite the opposite. Skepticism about the power of government abroad is truly in line with the intent of the founding fathers of American government.

These six qualities that I have just described are all ideas that resonate deeply with American conservatives. Unneeded war is the enemy of everything they believe in or think they believe in, yet they continually line up to give their support every time their government calls them to "duty" in the name of national defense or human rights. I can only hope this article persuades conservatives to rethink their ideas of the capabilities of government force and the military.

Resignation over Afghanistan

From the Washington Post:

When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.

A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.

But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

As more and more citizens of the United States grow dissatisfied with the war in Afghanistan, whether based on the strategy employed or the purpose of the occupation or some other reason, it seems as though the top officials of the federal government are blind and deaf to the reality of the situation in both the protests at home and the war overseas. Hoh is the first of his kind, the first to actually act on his conscience and his rational view on the Afghan occupation, not simply write later in his memoirs about his "deep reservations" but keep his position out of "loyalty to his commander-in-chief", as so many other have done after the damage is already done.

Hoh is also learning first-hand the devastating nature of blowback against U.S. forces. Continues the article:

But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.

[later]

Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn't want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.

Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him "how localized the insurgency was. I didn't realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away." Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.

"That's really what kind of shook me," he said. "I thought it was more nationalistic. But it's localism. I would call it valley-ism."

By the time Hoh arrived at the U.S. military-run provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in the Zabul capital of Qalat, he said, "I already had a lot of frustration. But I knew at that point, the new administration was . . . going to do things differently. So I thought I'd give it another chance." He read all the books he could get his hands on, from ancient Afghan history, to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, through Taliban rule in the 1990s and the eight years of U.S. military involvement.

[Provincial Governor] Naseri told him that at least 190 local insurgent groups were fighting in the largely rural province, Hoh said. "It was probably exaggerated," he said, "but the truth is that the majority" are residents with "loyalties to their families, villages, valleys and to their financial supporters."

Hoh's doubts increased with Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election, marked by low turnout and widespread fraud. He concluded, he said in his resignation letter, that the war "has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency."

With "multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups," he wrote, the insurgency "is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and Nato presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified."

Hopefully Hoh will be the first of many. He has already become a figurehead of sorts for the anti-war movement, with his story appearing in news media all across the country. The article ends with an ultimatum of sorts for the occupation:

"We want to have some kind of governance there, and we have some obligation for it not to be a bloodbath," Hoh said. "But you have to draw the line somewhere, and say this is their problem to solve."

Equality. Fraternity. Crime.

While there are exceptions to every rule, the typical gun control advocate leans significantly to the left, supporting feminism, welfare, and the like, and generally pushing equality as the highest principle of a civilized society. This typical supporter of gun control does not realize it, but he or she is actually tearing down that central principle of equality in their support for the restriction of firearms.

Take feminism for an example. No matter the cries of the ardent feminists of today, men are physically stronger than women. If a man assaults a woman without a firearm, the terms are decidedly unequal in 9 out of 10 situations. Even if the woman does have a weaker weapon such as pepper spray or a knife, the physical superiority of the man will likely allow him to prevail. Now let firearms enter the picture. If the woman has a firearm and the basic knowledge of its use, no physical strength on the part of the attacker can allow him to somehow dodge the bullets or withstand a hit. Even if both the woman and the man have firearms, the terms are much more even in the situation. The man's advantage in strength will now play no role in the conflict, only shooting skill, and shooting skill is not naturally inclined to favor either sex.

As another example, think of the elderly. The elderly are often incapable of adequately defending themselves without some sort of advantage on their side; the possession of a firearm can clearly mean the difference between life and death. This argument works for the very young as well. While youth possession of firearms is often debated, no one can deny that a responsible young person who is trained in gun usage has a much greater advantage in a situation such as a home invasion than one who hasn't. Once again, guns become the great equalizer for those weaker individuals who are forced to defend themselves.

Now try support for the poor. Leftists decry the possession of firearms as dangerous to the low-income, inner-city residents, but the opposite is actually true. Firearms are a means for the poor to defend themselves against the elite. While there may be varying degrees of quality of firearms, a bullet is a bullet, is a bullet. The damage a cheap, Saturday-special handgun does is just as real as the damage a military-grade weapon does. Making firearms unavailable to the poor by enacting stringent regulations or taxes on their production, sale, or possession means higher crime rates in low-income areas, yet again defiling the social liberal's dream of equality.

Firearms are not some exclusively dangerous hazard to society. Rather, they are a tool that when used unwisely can result in great harm, but when used responsibly can and will bring far greater benefit than cost. Getting rid of them would set society back from decades or even centuries of progress, and would destroy the very principles that their detractors hold so dear.