A law was made a distant moon ago here:
July and August cannot be too hot,
And there’s a legal limit to the snow here,
In Camelot.

The winter is forbidden ‘til December,
And exits March the second, on the dot.
By order, summer lingers through September,
In Camelot.

Richard Burton sang those lyrics on the stage, Richard Harris sang them in the movie, and my younger son (interestingly, yet another Richard) sang them on the stage at Topeka High School.

It’s an ancient dream, this desire we have to control the weather, to bend nature to our will, to harness the forces that affect our lives so that we like them better and they don’t get in our way so much.

In Camelot, according to the song lyrics, all they had to do was pass a law and the sun and the snow and the rain obeyed. I have to assume Merlyn figured in there somewhere, too.

The Environmental Protection Agency is working on regulations to limit the permissible amount of “fugitive dust” from farms. Yes, “fugitive dust.”

This September 21, 2006, ruling defines fugitive dust as particles lifted into the air by man-made and natural activities such as the movement of soil, vehicles, equipment, livestock, blasting and wind. The bureaucrats at the EPA want to limit dust emissions to 150 micrograms per cubic meter in any 24-hour period. As pointed out in Jim Suber’s column in the October 19, 2006, issue of the Wamego Times, that’s “the rough equivalent of one twenty-eighth of one ounce of water in two Olympic-sized pools.” Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has invited EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to his Iowa farm during harvest. I hope Mr. Johnson accepted.

Now, I’m not a farm person by anyone’s definition. I successfully raised some tomatoes for several summers in a row, and I held a bucket for a sheep to eat out of once. The creature promptly knocked me on my rear, and that ended any illusions I had about my suitability for the farming life.

But I have driven down gravel roads, and I’ve seen the wheat harvest from my car, and I’m trying to form some sort of mental image of this EPA pronouncement being enforced. I envision a business-suited individual standing downwind from the gravel road leading to the home of my friend who lives out in the country. He is holding some kind of contraption that captures, contains, and measures the “fugitive dust” arising in the area. The farmer harvesting his crop on the other side of the road has almost filled the EPA guy’s contraption for this day, and the dust kicked up by my car during my trip down the road pushes it over the limit. I am stopped, arrested, and led away in handcuffs by the Fugitive-Dust Police.

The EPA guy is being paid $45,000* per year, and his contraption costs $170,000*. There’s another guy just like him and another contraption downwind of every farm in Kansas and Iowa and Oklahoma and Nebraska and South Dakota and Missouri and eastern Colorado.

Courtesy of the American taxpayers.

It doesn’t look to me as if there is a distinction made between dust raised by human activity and dust stirred up by excessive wind, tornadoes, volcanoes, or stampeding livestock. A farmer whose cows raised a lot of dust because they were frightened by lightning would just have to postpone harvesting his beans until enough time had passed that he would not go over his Fugitive Dust limit. One small tornado, and nobody in three counties would be able to scuff their feet outside for six months.

The only advantage I can see to this astonishingly ludicrous situation is that it relieves me of the responsibility of dusting my furniture. When friends come over, I can say, with a straight face, “Yes, I know my house is dusty. But here’s the thing — if I dust, and take the duster outside to shake it, they’ll come and get me again. I’m already over my limit for this 24-hour period. I’ve been to the Fugitive Dust prison. And, believe me, I don’t want to go there again!”

*I made that up.

KsSmallBiz.com, November 8, 2006

Posted by Sharon under Libertarianism | 1 Comment »

Once upon a time there was a small, prosperous, self-contained island community of a couple of hundred people. Theirs was a friendly, tropical island with lots of game and fruit and wild vegetables, and life was good for the people.

Some of the people fished and some of them wove baskets and some of them built grass houses and some of them gathered fruits and vegetables and some of them domesticated a few of the native animals, and they traded the results of their special skills among themselves. Some of the people became successful enough that they were able to pay their fellow islanders to herd pigs or weave more baskets or tend their vegetable stands so that they themselves could devote their time to administration. A few of them became so prosperous that they were able to afford grass houses with two or three rooms instead of the typical one.

There was an island council, a small group of elected representatives that met for a couple of hours every full moon and made decisions about issues affecting the whole group. It was a great honor to be chosen to be a member of the council, and the honor was thought to be sufficient compensation. There wasn’t much time involved, and it didn’t interfere with the council members’ other and more productive activities.

Then one day, one of the islanders fell and broke his leg.

There had been accidents on the island before, of course. Sometimes there had even been tragedies. And there were always a few people who, for one reason or another, were unable to care for themselves. But before this the islanders had always, in the way of close-knit communities, voluntarily come to the aid of those who needed help. But this fateful day — maybe because the accident happened while the council was meeting — before the community had time to react, the council decided to step in and help the injured man.

“He’ll need special food and the services of the Medicine Woman,” said one of the council members. “And since he can’t work at his job, his family will need help buying meat and vegetables. His wife will need to tend him, so she’ll have to have someone to come in and help with the children.”

“How will we ever get all that done? We have jobs of our own to attend to, and being a council member isn’t supposed to involve that much time,” said another.

Two of the council members offered to oversee the collection of money from the rest of the community, and see to the necessary purchases to help the injured worker. But, they pointed out, this would now be a full-time job.

The council decided the community would be required to contribute enough money to buy food and medical services for the injured worker, food for his family, and to hire a domestic helper for the worker’s wife. They also authorized the collection of enough money -– by force if necessary — to compensate the two council members for the time spent in this charitable project. They argued long into the night about the new budget and how much each islander would be required to contribute.

The next morning, armed with a list of islanders and institutionally-mandated fairness guidelines, the two council members went to collect the taxes from the community. Most of the people agreed, some more reluctantly than others. But a few of the little businesses, those that had been only marginally successful before, were barely able to afford the payments required of them. In fact, two of them had to fire several of their workers, because the money that had been set aside for wages had been taken as taxes.

At the next meeting of the island council, the fired workers appealed for help, and the council, seeing their plight, agreed to continue collecting taxes to be given to any islander who was out of work because of the taxes.

The additional taxes, of course, forced several more marginal businesses to close their doors. With more taxes to collect, even two full-time tax collectors weren’t enough, so the erstwhile business owners applied to work as their assistants. Since the merchants-turned-bureaucrats were no longer producing anything of real value, the only way to pay for their services was to raise taxes yet again.

Within a short time, more than half of the islanders were either working for the government or receiving unemployment compensation, with the remaining 45% struggling to support them.

Since people smart enough to run successful businesses seldom need a crystal ball, the few remaining merchants packed up their families and their best workers, put them in boats, and rowed to another island, where they established a successful and prosperous society. The first thing they did, after hauling their belongings onto the beach, was agree to learn from past mistakes. Their new government would never be allowed to interfere with anything the people could do better for themselves.

I don’t know what happened to the folks left on the first island.

Maybe they wised up.

Maybe not.

KsSmallBiz.com, November 22, 2006 

Posted by Sharon under Libertarianism | No Comments »

You see an old friend across the street, and start to wave. Just as she sees you, you realize that she’s not the person you thought she was; in fact, you don’t know her at all. Do you

   a) Try to pretend you’re waving at someone else?
   b) Turn your greeting into a cough and bring your hand to your mouth?
   c) Keep on waving, smile broadly, and walk away. Let her spend the rest of the day trying to figure out who you are.

Your office has two restrooms – one for men and one for women. These are one-seaters, with doors that lock. You’re a woman, and you need to go, but the ladies’ room is already occupied. You can’t wait, so you decide to use the men’s room. When you come out, the ladies’ room is empty, and there is a man standing there waiting, not very patiently. He looks at you suspiciously. Do you

   a) Make him stand there, hopping from one foot to the other, while you try to explain?
   b) Claim you can’t read?
   c) Drop your voice an octave, mumble something about cross-dressing, and wish you had put the seat back up?

Posted by Sharon under Laughter | No Comments »

I’ve been paying most of my bills using my bank’s online services for a couple of years now. I like it a lot. The savings in time is not insignificant. And, since I have about a dozen accounts that are paid monthly and another ten or so store accounts that are paid only when I actually charge something, I figure the convenience of banking online saves me five or six dollars in postage every month. That’s not a huge amount, but you also have to figure the time and the inconvenience of stocking up on stamps. And checks aren’t cheap, either.

I have friends who would not touch online banking on a dare. It frightens them. Maybe they’re right – I know there is always the danger of some of the bad guys getting in there and stealing stuff. But, in my case, I’ve decided that the convenience outweighs the risk. Online banking, in my book, is right up there with garage door openers and cell phones.

A few days ago I got a letter from the Topeka Water Department. It was a fill-in-the-blank form letter addressed to “Dear Customer,” so right away I knew the problem it was dealing with was common to more than a couple of water users. It called itself a “friendly reminder,” and asked me, when I make online payments in the future, to make sure my account number has all the numbers in it and that the dash is placed properly. There was a blank where someone had written my account number, complete with the dash (properly placed).

Sure thing, I thought. That’s not too much to ask. I immediately went to my computer and pulled up my account on my bank’s web site. I found the Water Department information, changed the number, and hit the Enter key. “Not so fast,” said my bank via my computer. “The account numbers for the businesses to which you want to send money must be in one of the following formats….,” and there followed a screen full of configurations which my bank’s computer would recognize. Not one of them had a single dash in it.

I called my bank and talked to one of the friendly people who know about those things. Sure enough, their online services will accept only numbers and spaces – no letters, and certainly no dashes.

My next call was to the number listed on the form letter from the Water Department. The woman who helped me confirmed that my online payments could not be properly credited unless the account number contained a properly-placed dash.

“But my bank’s online service doesn’t allow dashes,” I told her.

“You can pay your bill from our web site. We accept credit cards,” she told me.

“I don’t want to put my water payments on a credit card. I want to use my bank’s online service.”

“Well, you just can’t pay your bill that way,” she replied.

“Since I’ve been paying my bill this way for a couple of years now, why am I just now hearing about this?” I wanted to know.

“We just recently changed banks, and the one we’re using now can’t do without the dash.”

Oh, okay.

So what do I do now? Whose fault is this? Whose responsibility is it to make sure that all these technologies line up properly?

As with so many newly-acquired conveniences, we can always go back to whatever it was we were doing before, but it’s painful. It’s like losing the use of the garage door opener in a downpour.

So I guess I will be writing, stamping, and mailing a check to the Topeka Water Department every month now. Or at least until someone figures this out. Once I’ve decided whose fault it is, I plan to let them know they owe me 39 cents every month.

Whoops, make that 41 cents.

TK Magazine, November 2007

Posted by Sharon under Reprints from TK Magazine | No Comments »

A year or two ago, on one of my favorite television programs, the main character deliberately broke his own hand to distract himself from the chronic and unbearable pain in his leg.

One of the other characters, also a doctor, mentioned (obviously for the enlightenment of the medically-untrained viewing audience) that the human brain can register only one pain at a time.

Is it true, I wondered. I called my younger son, who teaches college-level physiology, and he could neither confirm nor deny it. Frankly, that’s all the research I’m willing to do on the subject. (Now you know why I write columns in which I relate personal experiences and give my opinions, rather than do any real reporting.)

In any case, I tend to believe interesting phenomena mentioned on medical shows. I assume that if they were way off base, they would be rudely set upon by the hundreds of thousands of viewers who actually know about this stuff.

In April of this year I had knee replacement surgery. This is one splendid procedure our medical community has come up with. On April 2, I could barely get around without a cane; on August 2, four short months later, I am climbing stairs and walking farther than I have been able to in years, and I do it all with no cane and no limp – and no pain in my new knee. At my final checkup with the surgeon, as I waxed enthusiastic about the American medical establishment in general and his skills in particular, he agreed that this particular surgery has probably made more difference in the quality of more peoples’ lives than just about anything medical science has been able to offer before. I believe it.

But here’s the thing – before the surgery, I didn’t know I had so many other places that hurt.

Yeah, yeah, okay, I’m 63 years old. And more than a little overweight. Either one of those factors would easily account for a few aches and pains. It’s also true that, before the surgery, I was doped up on the maximum dosage of over-the-counter pain relievers a great deal of the time. But even when they wore off, the only pain I remember feeling was my bad knee. I just wasn’t aware of the kink in my other knee and something uncomfortable in the arch of my foot and minor arthritis in my thumbs and occasional twinges in my lower back.

I guess I could go get all these new little annoyances taken care of.

But I’m afraid to find out what else hurts that I don’t know about yet.

TK Magazine, September 2007

Posted by Sharon under Reprints from TK Magazine | No Comments »

I will be a delegate to the Libertarian National Convention May 22-26 in Denver.  If any of you will be there, please come by the Kansas table and say “Hi.”

Posted by Sharon under Libertarianism | No Comments »

I am not particularly afraid of bugs (with the exception of spiders larger than salad plates), and I am well aware of their astonishing survival skills. Killing one or two or five hundred of them doesn’t make a dent in their numbers.

So when one of them makes its way into my house, I take it outside rather than destroy it. It’s not entirely altruistic on my part. Spraying the creature with poison contaminates my air, too; and smashing it makes a real mess on my floor.

While I’m not really afraid of them, I’m also not interested in actually touching them. So I have invented an excellent bug-rescue kit, which I would like to pass along to you at no charge. Some assembly is required.

Equipment required:

• One clear plastic cup, no more than 5 inches high, and as wide at the opening as possible.

• One piece of very thin and very stiff cardboard, large enough to cover the opening of the plastic cup, but no larger than necessary. The back from a 5-by-8-inch tablet works well.

Assembly:

• Place equipment in a drawer handy to all household members.

Instructions for Use:

• Make sure that the intruder bug is on a flat, rigid surface, such as a window or wall. Caution: This will NOT work on draperies. The author knows this from personal experience.

• Sneak up on bug, and place opening of clear plastic cup over the bug, pressing firmly against the flat surface.

• Lift edge of cup very slightly, and slide cardboard between cup and flat surface. You might have to nudge the bug with the inside of the cup to get it to step onto the cardboard. This is where the thinness of the cardboard is important. That bug is going to try hard to get out of there, and if you have to lift the edge of the cup very far, it’s going to be crawling up your arm in a flash. And it’s already mad.

• Holding the cup firmly against the cardboard with one hand, lift the edge of the cardboard and slide other hand under the cardboard. Lift the whole apparatus from the flat surface. It’s probably pretty obvious by now that the rigidity of the cardboard is vital. I mean, if you tried this with a piece of floppy yellow tablet paper, there’s no way you could keep that little fellow in the cup.

• Carry the whole thing to the door. Now you know why I specified the cup had to be no more than 5 inches tall. See, you forgot to open the door before you got the little monster trapped. So if you can’t hold the cup and the cardboard together with just one hand, you’re standing in the middle of the room with one really angry bug with a 3-inch stinger on his butt, and no way to get him outside. You could stand there until your kids get home from school. Or you could try putting the thing down on the floor while you open the door, but plastic cups are pretty light, and bugs can easily lift several times their own weight. So just make sure the cup is short and the cardboard is small enough to be held together with one hand. You might want to practice ahead of time.

• Open the door. Take the whole thing outside, and pick out a new home for the bug. Now you will understand why I told you it had to be a CLEAR plastic cup. You’re getting ready to let the thing go, it’s mad at you, and if the cup is opaque, you wouldn’t know where it is. You would be holding in your hand the entomological equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle – you don’t know where the bug is until you look, and the very act of looking will change where the bug is, because when you lift the cup, that sucker’s gonna MOVE! You might even begin to doubt yourself, and wonder if the bug is actually still back in the house, getting ready to slam the door, lock you out, and get on the phone to call its buddies and tell them you’re out there. Worse yet, it might be poised to jump out and fly at your nose. But if the cup is transparent, you can shake it over to one side, pull the cardboard away, and let it go.

• If the bug is, in fact, a spider larger than a salad plate, I recommend throwing the whole contraption at a bush, running back up on the porch and dancing from foot to foot and flapping your arms around until the fiend has slunk away, then retrieving the kit for future use.

• Yell, “Godspeed, bug!”

• Try to explain yourself to the neighbors.

Posted by Sharon under Laughter | 3 Comments »

I know a couple of people who want to start a commune. Oh, that’s not what they’re calling it, but that’s what it is.

They envision a common living space surrounded by either rooms or small cabins for individuals. They want a garden, where all residents contribute their labor and receive nourishment from the garden in the common dining area. All members would contribute to the common expenses. If any resident falls on hard times, financially or physically, the rest will take care of her. Basically, the residents agree to give up much of their individual liberties in exchange for lifelong security.

It’s not a new idea.

It is not the purpose of this column to explore the obvious questions in depth, but let’s just mention some of them in passing: How do you handle deadbeats who claim to be too sick to work but not too sick to eat? Does everyone contribute equally to the common heating bill, or in proportion to his earnings? If proportionately, what to do with those who could be surgeons but who choose to be janitors, and thus contribute less than they might? If all contribute equally, what to do with the member who heats his cabin to 80 degrees when communal money is tight?

These people believe sincerely that the good of the individual should be subordinate to the good of the community. And, if given the choice, they would turn the entire country into a nation where their beliefs would be the official policy. They consistently promote and vote in favor of legislation that moves our country in that direction.

I understand the historic tendency of humans to clump together. We are, after all, small and weak and slow and hairless. Our claws and fangs are useless for either hunting or defense. We can’t outrun anything we want to eat or anything that wants to eat us. If our ancestors had not clumped together for mutual warmth, protection, and hunting, not one of us would be here today. Our tendency, even in the 21st century, is to gather together with others of our species for companionship and collective bargaining and better rates on health insurance.

Having said that, I will tell you that I believe the individual human being is of primary importance. I believe the only person who should be able to make decisions about the life of any individual adult is that very same individual adult. You must be able to live your own life as you see fit, as long as you do not infringe on someone else’s exercise of that same right. In exchange for that freedom, you will have to live with the results of your mistakes.

Notice, please, that your right to live your own life as you see fit includes the right to voluntarily surrender some of that freedom if you believe that to do so is in your own best interest. You may enter into mutually beneficial agreements and organizations and institutions, and leave them when they no longer suit your needs.

And that brings us to the heart of the matter.

In the society I envision, my friends would be free to establish their commune, as long as participation was voluntary. People who wanted to live that lifestyle would be free to sign up and move in. Meanwhile, I would be living down the road in my own house. I would look at them and think, “Well, good for them. They seem to have found what works well for them, what’s best for all the members of their group. What a great garden!” They would look at me and think, “Well, good for her. She seems to have found what works best for her. I kind of envy her privacy, but I’m happy here.” We would smile and wave at each other every morning on our way to work. We would visit back and forth.

In the society they envision, they would force me to live in their commune, because they know what’s best for me.

KsSmallBiz.com, March 23, 2005

Posted by Sharon under Libertarianism | No Comments »

Not everything that’s a good idea should be compelled by law.

Not everything that’s a bad idea should be forbidden by law.

Posted by Sharon under Libertarianism | 2 Comments »

I have heard this story in several different forms. It is certainly apocryphal, but the point it makes is well worth repeating.

It seems that, many thousands of years ago, humanity lived in small and scattered villages. It was not an easy or peaceful life. Food was hard to come by, and roving hoards of bandits came by on a regular basis to steal what little food, tools, and clothing the people had managed to set aside for the future.

Now, the bandits were not stupid; they had, after all, managed to find a way to provide for themselves without doing any real work. And as long as they rotated their attention among several villages, and as long as they did not steal all the food during any one raid, their victims were able to recover between visits and survive. The problem, from the viewpoint of the thieves, was that there were other groups also stealing from the same villages. That meant that sometimes, when they came to raid one of the settlements, a competitor had been there recently and there was nothing to steal. Their efforts had been wasted.

So the smartest of the thieves came up with a plan. Instead of roaming around stealing from all the villages, they would settle down themselves. They would pick a spot right in the middle of the choicest village. They would convince the villagers that the presence of their erstwhile enemies was, in fact, for the benefit of the village. Their new neighbors would protect them from all those other bandits out there. In exchange for the protection, all the villagers had to do was willingly give their patrons a part of the food they had worked so hard to produce for themselves, and provide them with clothes and housing and tools. These taxes were, in effect, the very same items that the bandits had been stealing from the villagers. But the thieves were able to convince the villagers to give willingly to the thieves what the thieves had been stealing from the villagers, all in exchange for protection that the villagers should not have needed in the first place.

And thus was born government.

Anyone who has ever watched that wonderful classic movie The Magnificent Seven will recognize at least part of the plot. In the movie, the leader of the bandits argues that his band of thugs is not really so bad because they always leave the villagers with enough food to survive.

The big difference between this story and the movie is that, in the movie, the men who came to rescue the village turned into good guys. They taught the villagers to defend themselves, and all but one of the rescuers who did not die during the ensuing battles went back where they came from.

The only rescuer who stayed in the village dropped his guns into the dirt, married the girl, became a farmer, and agreed to produce his own food.

KsSmallBiz.com, April 6, 2005

Posted by Sharon under Libertarianism | No Comments »