Gumballs and Open Borders

A FaceBook friend of mine pointed to the video Immigration, World Poverty, and Gumballs.

Looking for it later by search engine, I see I am not the only one who saw holes in the reasoning. I'm going to ignore what everyone else has to say and just talk about it from my perspective as a US citizen expatriate (not ex-patriot) married to a Japanese citizen, with children who are effected by the Japanese no-dual-citizenship policies.

The borders of the US have been effectively closed since before I got married. I had to prove that the woman I intended to marry would not become a dependent on the state with all sorts of financial info and family affidavits, etc., just to get her into the states for our marriage and my last year of college.

(What finances? I was a struggling student trying to do what Linus Torvalds was doing at about the same time. I had no finances.)

She got her green card, but it cost me time spent at the local immigrations office that could have been better spent on my studies, at bare minimum. And it didn't exactly give her an image of a country willing to accept her, which was no small part of her motivation to return to her country.

In order to even consider having the family move back to the states where there is much more profitable work available for someone like me, I would have to prove things I can't prove about my own financial stability.

Or we would have to go in for some other purpose than staying, then stay anyway and apply from there.

No, just because the kids would have been free to come and go until they were twenty does not mean that their mother would have been free to come and go.

The borders aren't tight closed against me, but they are effectively closed.
This is not a new situation. The borders have been closed for over twenty years.

Okay. Back to the gumballs.

People are not gumballs. Representing even a million people with one gumball robs the argument of significant meaning.

That said, I will acknowledge that Roy Beck's conclusive proposal to help the impoverished people of the world where they are has some merit -- conditionally. I'll mention some of the conditions a few paragraphs down.

The question of open borders is not strictly an immigration question.

Many of the gumballs people coming into the country do not simply move to the US and stay. They send money back home, which helps their relatives and friends where they are.

Yeah. Where they are.

And not a few get training and experience in living in (relative) freedom in the US and take that training, and a lot of basic technical expertise, back with them when they return to their homelands.

Which helps them where they are.

And this is not largess given from above. This is people using their freedom to find creative solutions to the problems back home. This is the best way to help people where they are, in the same way teaching a man to fish is more help than giving him a fish.

If you want people to be dependent on you, give them fish. If you want them to be friends, but independent, take them fishing, show them how you do it, have fun with them. Give them feel-good experiences that will lead them away from trying to overfish the rivers, away from the tendency to try to take control of the market in fish.

People are not gumballs.

With that introduction, here is what I see has to happen if we really want to help people where they are.

We have to first recognize that the things we do in the States are not all appropriate things to teach other people to do. We export a lot of our cultural baggage, and that just weighs the people in poverty down even further.

I want to be specific about that, to give concrete examples, but many of the examples are hot-button topics in the current US.

Let's just admit that young children under ten feeding themselves by selling their bodies may not be what we intended to export, but that's how our indiscriminate use of money and our sexual revolution is hitting the dirt over there.

(There is nothing unusual about this. Japan also saw some of the same things happening, in the early 1900s. You can see it when you read the works of some of the prominent Japanese novelists of that period, for instance, in a novel called Sound of the Mountain -- 山の音、 Yama no Oto -- by Yasunari Kawabata, the main character talks about seeing a young Japanese boy on the train traveling in the company of an older foreign gentleman, and about his feelings when he assumes the worst.)

Helping people where they are means such things as going over there yourself, living for years as they live. Sharing things you know, sure, but also learning from them.

It does not mean giving them money with expectations. If you want to invest or give them grants, find out what they want to do. Get people who know the country and the culture to help you figure out if it's something you want to support them in. If it is, some conditions about the purpose of the money may be in order, but trying to tell them how to accomplish their plans is questionable help at best. Expectations such as making a certain amount of profit by a certain time are definitely out of order.

Then, after you have invested, keep your hands off, but keep in touch. If they tell you they are having problems, ask how what kind of help they need. Always avoid imposing your solutions on them, even when they think they want you to. Get them to tell you what they need.

And always be ready and willing to learn from them what you can. Letting them tell you what they are doing helps them understand what they are doing. Letting them tell you what their problems are helps them understand those problems. Letting them tell you the solutions they've considered helps them understand the solutions well enough to pick the ones that will work.

Sometimes, it requires bringing them to the States for a few months or years to experience a different way of doing things. If you are really going to help them where they are, you need this option, and it doesn't work if you have to wait six months or two years from the time you decide it's a good idea until the time you can bring them to the States to do the work that they need the experience with. Well, six months may not be too bad, but two years (or more) definitely defeats the purpose.

It's not the money or the ideas or the technology that ultimately helps. It's the opportunity to use their own creativity, and the experience they gain doing so.

Now, back to the question of borders.

You can't do this kind of help when your own borders are closed.  It just doesn't work.

Help is a two-way street, one gumball person at a time, and closed borders prevent that.

Revisiting the Vote -- Voter Fraud

(This is a bit of a different way of thinking about vote fraud.)

I presented An Awkward Proposal for an Amendment to Correct Election Processes some time back.

Re-reading it now, I can find numerous holes in it. Some day I'll re-work the proposal, but today I want to think about voter fraud.

At this point in time, both the major US political parties are accusing each other of voter fraud. Dead voters, multiple voters, non-citizen voters, influencing absentee ballots, cutting voter districts to water down the opposition, ..., ..., ...

Thinking about ways to protect against voter fraud, I realize that most protections would have results worse than the fraud itself.

That is, being a computer scientist, I tend to quickly think of the vulnerabilities induced by electronic voting and by improper use of absentee ballots and such. I also tend to think about safeguarding the processes as they exist, and those tendencies are reflected in the post I link above.

But that does not really get at the source of the problem.

In order to get into the proper frame of mind to consider what to do about voter fraud, we should start with a realization of something I will point out in a few paragraphs. To get there, we should start with an understanding of what a voting process is.

Many times, it is described as a way to get a consensus of opinion from a body of people.

But what people mean by "consensus of opinion" varies widely.

For some, obtaining a consensus means getting support for their side. For them, the election process is a process of influencing opinions.

For others, obtaining a consensus means finding out whose side is supported by the majority. For them, the process is a statistical experiment, and influencing the result is the opposite of what they want to do.

For yet others, obtaining a consensus blends both of these concepts as a way for the members of the body of people to communicate with each other and come to a decision. This is not quite a middle-of-the-road approach, because it still leaves open the question of whether the winners have a responsibility to keep listening to the electorate or not.

Some ancient philosopher said, "Vox populii vox dei." And the Greek politicians tried to incorporate that concept in their government, in spite of the disagreement of many of their philosophers.

So, is the voice of the people the voice of God?

For those who consider the Book of Mormon to have some meaning, there are several salient verses. One reference is Mosiah 29:  26-27:

26 Now it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right; but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right; therefore this shall ye observe and make it your law—to do your business by the voice of the people.

27 And if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you; yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction even as he has hitherto visited this land.

How is this different from vox populii vox dei?

One, it happens that the voice of the people chooses evil on occasion, especially when they are become so corrupt that there really isn't any help for them any more.

(Jonah, who had to have a whale return him to his duty, wanted Nineveh to be so corrupt, but even they weren't quite there yet.)

Two, with all the negatives, it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right leaves a wide range of right possibilities for the people to be in favor of.

That the people usually don't choose the worst option does not mean that the people always choose the best.

You don't have to be a believer in the Book of Mormon to understand that much.

Why do I think this is important?

It demotivates the belief in the magic of winning, and the magic of winning is one of the enemies of freedom and of meaningful consensus politics.

With this emphasis on winning demotivated, perhaps it will be easier to understand the truth.

Statistics tell us that when sampling a population, a difference of a few percent is not likely to be meaningful. In general, 1 or 2% is near-equivalent to a tie.

A good statistical process will guard against biasing the result.

While that means that voter fraud should be guarded against, it would also mean that campaigning poisons the result. People change their votes based on all the argument and other exchange of rhetoric, and people are known to vote against their own opinions for a variety of reason.

Electoral processes have certain statistical natures, therefore 1 to 2% differences just are not meaningful. Ever.

But they are not, and, as long as we are dealing with humans, will never be proper statistical experiments. Therefore, even differences of 5% or more should be considered effective ties, at best.

Also, since any population should have some differences of opinion, large majority results are also indications of too much tampering with the sampling processes.

In plain English, 90% or more of the vote should be indication that something went wrong.

I'm going to stop there, and propose something really bizarre.

Our focus on who wins encourages fraud.

Can I repeat that? Heh. Well, go back and read that last one-sentence paragraph again.

If we had some way of recognizing a tie, we wouldn't be so concerned about things like the hanging chads in Florida in 2000. And if we had some way of reviewing wins by too large a margin, the majority would be demotivated in their attempts to make their majority position unassailable.

So I have a few proposals:

Any election where the difference between the top votes is less than 5% should automatically go back for a run-off. 

The first run-off should be subject to the same rule.

If, in the second run-off, the difference is less than 2%, the top vote getters should be considered to have tied. In the case of an office, the top vote-getters should share the office according to an agreement they work out together. The voters should have another ballot to approve the agreement, and if the ballot fails, the court competent to review the election should review the agreement and make recommendations.

In the case of regulations and laws, etc., the body competent to implement the regulation or law, etc., should review it, seeking a new regulation or law that will more effectively reflect the opinions of the various sides. Then the new regulation or law, etc., should be voted on again, with the same rules of effective tie. After the second effective tie, the competent court should review the question and determine whether further rewriting and election will produce useful results, and, if not, should have power to determine that the question has been rejected.

Any election where the top vote-getter gets more than 80% of the vote should be automatically reviewed for tampering by the court competent to do so. Opposition voices should be heard first and last in the review.

The court would have power to order a new election, if it determined that too much improper influence of any sort had been brought to bear during the election.

In any election where the top vote-getter gets more than 90% of the vote, the court should consider whether the top vote-getter should be disqualified from standing in the subsequent election for reconsideration. Reasons other than fraud may be considered, but the court must make its reasoning public.

In any election where the top vote-getter gets more than 95% of the vote, the top vote-getter should be automatically disqualified from standing in the subsequent election for reconsideration.

These kinds of rules would help to discourage the source of the problems that lead to voter fraud, and would also help to discourage the polarizing debates and voter hate that accompanies bad-faith electioneering.

We Are At War with Ourselves, and Not in a Good Way

I don't like tobacco smoke. It makes me sick. I complain under my breath when someone near me lights up. But I do not pull out a gun to threaten him over it, and I don't go shooting people over it.

I could almost justify myself in doing so. It can make me that sick, sick enough that I can't function, can't think straight, can't stay awake, have trouble getting where I'm going on the train, can't work and put food on the table. (Tobacco smoke was the cause of my losing at least three good jobs, and losing those jobs is part of why I have trouble getting a good job now.)

If I thought it would solve problems, I could almost justify myself.

Instead, I try physically moving myself away from the smoke, or asking the smoker(s), politely, to respect my health if I can't move away. They usually do, these days.

There was a time some would complain, what about their right to smoke? But understanding is much more common now.

Truth about tobacco is winning out. It takes time, and reasoned discussion, and experiments and such, but truth is winning out.

Alcohol has similar issues, but social expectations have shifted.

Japan, for instance, has come from being a world where drinking was quite literally required of most people, to a world in which not drinking is recognized as a reasoned option. Twenty years ago, the social expectations practically required you to participate in office parties and meetings held in bars where, if you wanted to succeed, if you wanted to move ahead in the office, you had to participate in the drinking.

That still exists to a certain extent. It's hard for a new employee to work out his or her place in the pecking order without filling the boss's glass. If the smell itself undoes you, makes it hard to process what's happening around you, you can be at a disadvantage. And you do still stick out.

But the boss now recognizes that abstaining from alcohol is a reasoned and reasonable decision. And many co-workers do, as well, so that the soreheads (Sorry, but that's the most polite way to put it.) who complain about the non-comformist realize that they are putting themselves outside the pale of conformism when they complain about alcohol.

Alcohol is beginning to be recognized as the recreational drug it is.

Japanese society is beginning to discover ways to help each other to natural highs, natural ways to encourage each other, that don't involve fueling the high with drugs.

Beginning.

Prohibition, the way we tried it a hundred years ago in the US, was fuel for organized crime. Abondoning it the way we did back then was also a bad move. It caused violence both ways.

But the truth about alcohol is winning out now, to a large extent, because those who abstain are patiently discussing the problems with those who don't.

We have come to the point where a person can reasonably expect to be able to work in a tobacco-free environment, not by going to war over it, but by talking about it and admitting, socially, that it isn't nice to force others to smoke second hand.

We have come to the point where a person can hope to expect to be able to work on equal footing without having to indulge in beer, wine, whiskey, etc.

I grew up in a town in west Texas that was known at times as the murder capital of the US, and sometimes even the world.

The majority of people worked in the oilfield, and got together for beer to unwind after 72 hour (average) workweeks. It also happened to be on one of the main illicit drug supply routes from Mexico to Chicago and New York.

It was a violent town in many ways. People died on the job if the team was not clicking, and they died in the bars if arguments flared. And they died on the highway, in drug cartel wars.

We did not have KKK issues. The Klan was not approved in general, although there were some soreheads who complained about race instead of other reasons life was hard.

We did have racism in the town. There was an apartheid-like approach that put a lot of effort into getting funding and other help for the south-side schools. But there was separation.

Blacks were welcome in the northside school if they played sports well. Sometimes academically excellent blacks were recognized and got help.

When the courts said it was not enough and closed the south-side high school, resulting in busing students to the central and north-side high schools, there was grumbling, but there were no hangings.

The racial mix in residential areas has improved a lot in the forty-plus years since. There are still huge problems, especially related to football. (Great game, but we still go overboard with it, and good players often don't get the help they need to get balanced academic guidance.)

The town is a much less violent town now, but not because guns were banned. Guns were not the problem, they were just one of the ways the violence expressed itself.

This is what we need to talk about, rather than gun control, and rather than war on drugs. We need to work on solving the root problems.

We have to find a better way than trying to kill or otherwise force the other guy down, when we need a little relief from the stress of living in this world.

We need to quit living in an us-versus-them world.

(Started this about a year ago, when the shootings in the US began to become commonplace. Reminds me a little of the town where I grew up.) 

(And I need to write another post about how no true believer in the right to keep and bear arms is going to be putting his or her weapons on public display at inappropriate places like the discount store, much less spraying bullets around in public places where people die from the explosive expression of violence. But these kinds of posts take time to write reasonably clearly.)

[JMR201909021248: I ranted a bit more, but a bit less cogently on this topic after the late August shootings in and around Odessa: https://reiisi.blogspot.com/2019/09/war-and-where-i-grew-up-west-texas.html.]

"Boys Will Be Boys"?

No. Not all boys will attack girls when inebriated/high at parties they should not be attending.

Too many will, which is one very good reason neither boys nor girls should be attending parties where the purpose is to get drunk and have a time that somebody says is going to be "good" because it's forbidden.

Children will make mistakes. Teenagers will be teenagers. College kids will be college kids.

Elite schools, especially elite private schools do more to foster these kinds of parties and these kinds of mistakes than they should, both historically and presently.

Elite schools are evil, and elite private schools more so.

And politicians will be politicians, which is why political parties are evil. Every one of them.

I'm not in favor of banning private schools. I am in favor of using boycott-style pressure to push all the schools that attempt to be elite to give up on elitism, but I don't expect a lot of people to jump on that bandwagon. There are a lot of ironies in that campaign. And the result could easily be something worse than what we have now, where pretending to be anti-elitist becomes the new black, well, the new elitism.

I am halfway in favor of banning political parties, but I know what such laws would result in -- new organizations that call themselves not-political-parties, but fill the same purpose. They would be good for a year, maybe ten, before they would start going the same road political parties have gone. Fifty years max before they start having all the problems current political parties have.

Drastic solutions tend to have unintended consequences.

(I wish we could require everyone to study enough engineering in school to see why this is so, but the modern standard curriculum is already way overburdened.)

A couple of questions:

Are women less likely to mix power and sex?

Sure. Statistically, yes. At least, there are fewer women than men who resort to force when their advances are refused.

Are women more likely to find it difficult to defend themselves when attacked, or when someone is overly aggressive against them?

Yes. Especially with the social context we have had and now have.

That is, there are many things about our society back in the middle of last century that taught women to drop their defenses at the wrong times. Those elements of the social context had been inherited from way back. And the worst of those elements of our social context have not changed.

Unfortunately, a number of the defenses women used to have are being worn down now, by people who are more interested in their own power than in defending anyone else. But that is not the subject of my present rant.

Brett Kavanaugh. (Did I spell his name right?)

Christine Blasey Ford says he and another guy, whom she names as Mark Judge, cornered her and he tried to force his physical attentions on her. He was on top of her at one point, messing with her clothes.

Uhm, yes, the question, "Why was she there?" is an important question. Not in his defense, but in defending our young women in this present time.

Christine Blasey should not have been there. Neither should Brett Kavanaugh. Nor Mark Judge.

We cannot tell our children that raves are safe places to go -- not at any age. Not even if they are students at elite schools.

It wasn't a rave, but we really can't afford to tell them that dorm parties are particularly safe, either. Although, if they are properly chaperoned, they should be safer than raves.

Relatively safer. If properly chaperoned. Not safe.

We have to teach our children how to defend themselves from the pressure to get high.

We also have to teach our children how to defend themselves from the pressure to engage in sexual play.

(There's a connection, here.)

And we have to teach our children to find an adult who will believe them when they have been attacked, not so much to get revenge, but to help them avoid further danger.

But children go. Get drunk. Do stupid things.

I'm going to suggest that, if it turns out that Mrs. Ford's memories and her account are truthful and accurate, if it turns out that Brett Kavanaugh attacked her when he was drunk, and Mark Judge jumped on them, that Judge might have been trying to get Kavanaugh to back off because he could tell, even drunk, that she was not enjoying the attention -- that she was not participating voluntarily.

And that means I'm suggesting Miss Blasey could not tell at the time what Mr. Judge's intentions were because she was (quite rightly) too scared to stop to ask.

She says she got away, and that's what someone who has found themselves the object of sexual aggression should do.

I'm not saying that I know that Judge was defending her, I'm saying that she would not have been in a position to understand it if he were. And I'm not saying she would be at fault if she misunderstood.

Walk with me a bit longer on this.

Not enjoying the attention? Why should any woman enjoy such attention?

Does anyone you know read romance novels? There are many of those that are effective long sexual assaults against the reader. Some people, of both genders, seem to enjoy them.

How about pop music videos? Does anyone you know watch those?

There is that about our society which teaches both children and adults to expect such attentions to be enjoyed. Or to hope they will be.

There is something about our society that tries to teach us to at least make the attempt, even if the attempt is clumsy, even if we wouldn't do it when sober.

Our society still teaches young men to make passes at young women. Our society still teaches men of every age to be aggressive.

I'm not sure that teaching women to make passes at men they are interested in is a solution, even if balance would be desirable.

No, maybe we should quit trying to teach our children to be aggressive.

But we do generally teach our children who have an interest in politics, business, or management to be aggressive.

We still teach them aggression, that they should assert themselves before questioning whether they themselves are in the right.

Surely we can all understand that is what we are doing.

The next point is one a lot of people still sweep under the rug.

Aggression easily turns sexual.

Not every time, but the human animal does not naturally differentiate all forms of stress. And most people have at least a little sexual response to stress. (So much so, that I have often considered whether the response paraphrased as "Fight or Flight" shouldn't actually be paraphrased, "Fight, Flight, or Sex".)

The aggressor often sees that there is some response other than wanting to flee or resist, and may, all too easily, in the heat of pursuit, misinterpret that as interest.

This leads to social mistakes, and it leads to rape. We are effectively teaching some of our children to rape.

Making social mistakes is a necessary part of learning how to not make social mistakes. At bare minimum, you don't really understand what a social mistake is until you've made a few of your own and watched friends make a few, and seen the consequences of the mistakes.

Being drunk is one such social mistake, and so is trying too hard to be romantic. Trying too hard to be romantic when you're drunk is a really serious social mistake. All too often it ends up being indistinguishable from rape.

(Can I suggest something here? Mutual rape is still not a good thing. Much better to both be in condition to give proper mutual consent before getting physical. Hormonal duress is perhaps less reprehensible a reason than mood-altering and mind-altering substances, but if you don't like the idea when you are sober and rational, you probably shouldn't do it when you are irrational and/or not sober. If you are offended at what I'm suggesting here, sit down and think really carefully about your relationships.)

This is not to excuse attacks. But we are asking way too much of our politicians and government officials if we ask them to never have such incidents in their history.

If there were enough such men and women who were technically qualified, showed the ability to make sound judgements in the course of duty, and had no such history, yes, such would be preferred.

Looking at our present crop, it's going to be hard to find such people, no matter which party they belong to, no matter where they stand on the current hot-button issues, no matter whether you think sound judgement means being aggressively liberal on gender issues or not.

Yes. I am saying that most of the currently sitting judges, especially at the national level, and most of the members of Congress, and most of the top-level bureacrats, show the kind of quirks that I would expect of people who had gone, underage, to parties where alcohol and other mood-altering substances were beng served. Anyone who has done that is going to have a hard time claiming not to have become drunk. And anyone who has become drunk at such a party is going to have a hard time claiming never to have been inappropriately aggressive.

Near as I can tell, it's going to be a very rare politician or bureaucrat who has never been involved as an aggressor in a situation that becomes harassing, and potentially sexually harassing, especially when they were young.

I am not so concerned about what they did when they were young and trying to figure out the rules. I am concerned about what they are doing now.

I am far more concerned about the parties they currently have, where they negotiate laws, regulations, treaties and such under the influence. And too many of them currently engage in inappropriate conduct, both during and after, including forcing their attentions on people who do not want them.

There are no party lines which can isolate the problems of abuse of power.

At this point, Kavanaugh has been tried on this question without witnesses in the court of public opinion and found guilty by certain groups, innocent by others.

This is not a good thing, whether he actually did what Ford says he did or not. We can't really formally press charges and try him on this because the statute of limitations has passed, but we should be waiting to see whether further investigation brings up more recent incidents of this kind of behavior. (I've seen some things that do not look good, but I couldn't find unbiased information on it.)

There is a newer accusation, but it's still more than thirty years ago. If the accusation has any merit, if there is no exaggeration, well, that's not a good indication. But we do know about the pile-on effect. This is another place where we simply shouldn't just take the word of few individuals without witnesses.

But that is really beside the point.

What has he been doing recently? What is his record in court? He is a sitting judge, we can look at his decisions from the last year or so, or even the last ten years. Why aren't they talking about those?

(I'd like to see someone from any party provide a decent summary of his last ten years of decisions.)

The accusation that is being made the most noise over is not about what happened thirty-some-odd years ago. It's not even about the past ten years. It's about the future.

There are certain who say that, because he is being accused he must be guilty because -- since he has been accused, and he was appointed by, of all the evil people, Trump -- they can't trust him not to try to establish some balance between their brand of aggressive liberalism and the more cautious attitudes that the majority seems to currently want.

They are tangling his possible guilt in one thing up in assertions that their agenda is the only correct agenda.

That's bad logic and bad politics -- bad behavior. It's disregard for facts. And it's aggression.

I'm not sure whether the well has not been so poisoned as to undermine trust in Kavanaugh's tenure, even if he were approved.

Questions of fairness aside, where are we going to find candidates that can pass their tests?

They've shown their cavalier disregard for facts already. They have shown that they are quite willing to use any means to taint any person they perceive as an opponent. We assume that they wouldn't try to taint their own candidates, but does that mean we should trust their candidates?

(I really don't like politics that divide the polity into us and them. The vocal victims are not the only victims.)

In the meantime, with all this focus on bad behavior, let's take the opportunity to teach our children not to do things that way. Teach them not to attack each other.

Teach them to get away when attacked if they can, and to tell someone they can trust about it -- not for revenge, for protection.

And teach them that they must prepare to do what they can to clean the government up, because there will always be powermongers trying to use the law for their own agendas.

Who Says Prohibiton Was a Failure?

After a friend told me about the concept that ending prohibition wasn't just a case of the country going belly-up to the bar, I talked it over with my mother.

She told me prohibition was less a failed experiment than a sabotaged experiment. It failed because we, as a country, didn't let it succeed.

Over the course of several years, she helped me identify several groups that actively worked against it.

For a little background, we need to be aware that prohibition did not begin with the 18th amendment. War-time law during the war we call the first world war had the country diverting resources to the war effort that would otherwise have been going to the production and use of drinking alcohol.

The temperance movement used that as an opportunity to discuss a public ban on intoxicating beverages, and the general mood of the country was that of wanting release from the social ills of drinking, and the amendment passed, continuing the bans. And it worked for a couple of years before things came off the rails. The health problems and other moral problems associated with consuming alcohol were, in fact, reduced.

And then, according to the common wisdom, the country fell off the wagon. It was just too hard!

At least that's what people say.

Of course, that's not what really happened. Initially, the laws were not all that strict. The emphasis being on resources, not on moral issues, individual manufacture for private use was mostly ignored.

Did things get stricter with the passage of the 18th amendment? Not really. The amendment did not mandate punishment or define the degree of the crime in any particular case, just gave the state and national legislatures explicitly Constitutional basis for establishing criminality and punishment in a political environment that was not forgiving of such laws.

Essentially, the amendment provided the excuse for letting the war-time laws carry over after the war.

We have to understand that the experiment was not just the question of intoxication and intoxicants, but included the question of government regulation of such things.

Most of the members of the temperance movement weren't thinking about regulation, they were thinking about countering the influence of social pressure to get intoxicated. But politicians were thinking about regulation, because politicians generally find it extremely difficult to do anything about something without regulating it.

Up until the 18th amendment, beverage alcohol was considered a staple -- an essential material for ordinary life. And in many prominent social circles it was considered downright antisocial to refuse an offer of a drink. It would be kind of like refusing to shake hands in our time.

The members of the temperance movement were looking for something really strong to counter the social pressure to drink for people who didn't really care to get high, but didn't feel that refusing was an option in their world.

Initial laws were not strict about private production for personal use for several reasons, not the least of which was simply that candy making and preserving fruits involve similar processes and sometimes ended up with beverage grade alcohol as an intermediate product or by-product. Preventing or punishing individual-level production was considered effectively impossible, and rightly so.

Even after the amendment passed, punishment was focused on volume production and distribution.

Now circular logic is bad argument, but cyclic causality is a feedback loop. So my choice of which group to start with is arbitrary. But I think it will be easier to start with the moonshiners, the people who made bad liquor to fill some apparent need they saw, and the people who disributed it.

Why would they make and distribute bad liquor?

Why not? is the argument they would use.

People who wanted liquor, but didn't want to go to the trouble of making their own in secret, would get themselves in such a desparate state they would take anything, even bad liquor.

And bad liquor was cheaper to make, and easier to make in secret, than good liquor. Higher profits, in the short-sighted point of view.

Now, bad liquor doesn't just taste bad. It can make people sick, often permanently sick. It destroys internal organs much more quickly than alcoholic beverages properly made. It can make people lose their eyesight, and it can kill.

So when people started dying and going blind, bad liquor gave power mongers the excuse they thought they needed to tell everyone it was time to start cracking down -- that it would be impossible to get the desired effects of prohibition without causing people to die from bad liquor, unless they made the laws fair and strict against all production and use. ("Fair" in some sense of the word, we guess.)

Huge leaps of logic, there. Quite incorrect, as well.

Drastic social change never comes free. Part of the cost is lost jobs, lost health, and even lost lives, as the changes cause what people do every day to change. So you have to balance those costs against the cost of continuing in the status quo, and against the cost/possibility of more gradual change.

Every option has people getting sick, and becoming unable to work, and dying. Maybe you could ask which is less costly, but the real question is something more than these costs: which course is going to encourage people to take responsibility for their own actions when there is large-scale social pressure not to?

Do you know what a power monger is? These are the kind of people who not only quite satisfied to decide that they know more about what you should be doing than you do, but are quite happy to try to force you to do what they think you should do. Not just persuade, to force. Make laws. Call in the cops. Start rumors so you lose your friends, your customers, your wages, and entire means of making a living.

And when these people are politicians, they claim that in doing so they have done things. And they use the fact that they have done these things as an excuse to claim that they have done their job. And that they should be re-elected, re-appointed, and stay in their positions of power.

Now many officers have mixed feelings about laws becoming more strict. And they should. Stricter laws may give them more tools to go after the bad guys, but it also gives them more work to do -- deskwork that isn't going after the bad guys. They often get so busy dealing with how the stricter laws impact ordinary people that they don't have time to actually use those tools to try to enforce good behavior from real bad guys.

Maybe good people shouldn't be impacted by the stricter laws. But the police end up with more things to check when the laws get stricter. So they are impacted. And when the police are impacted, everyone else is impacted.

What? Regulations have a cost?

Yes. They do.

Some police, faced with enforcing more regulations than they have resources to enforce, cut corners. They leave their friends alone and focus on their political and social rivals when they go out to enforce regulations. Excessive regulation becomes their excuse to become corrupted.

Members of organized crime see this happen and take the opportunities to apply their usual pressures -- bribes and blackmail and maybe even inducements of other sorts -- for the privilege of being ignored. And the privilege of being involved with production and distribution. For privilege, they sell protection. But you already knew about that, so we don't need to go over that again.

Did the members of the temperance movement want the moonshine to happen? Did they want organized crime to get involved?

There may have been exceptions, power mongers among them, but for the most part, no.

Could the 18th amendment have been worded differently, in a way that would not have left the door open for abuses of power and involvement of organized crime?

Let's have a try at it.

Alternate history version of 18th Amendment.

Section 1

The social ills which are derived from the production, transportation, sale, and consumption of intoxicating liquors having become known, and the delays in considering such questions for the common welfare of the citizens of the United States, it is resolved to recognize that the questions of large-scale production, transportation, and sale of intoxicating liquors for beverage use are within the purvue of the Constitutional authority of Congress and of the legislatures of the several states.

And that's it. Improtation and exportation between states becomes covered, because the States already have the authority to make laws for the common welfare.

How does this differ from what the 18th Amendment provides?

The meaning we, in our modern frame, get from this alternate history version is, as I understand it, what the members of the temperance movement were seeking, and what many thought they thought they were getting.

Many others used the 18th Amendment for other purposes.

How, you ask, does this leave us with a different result from the wording of the 21st Amendment?

Both amendments are on line. Read them carefully. Then read the alternate history version above. I think you'll see that I'm talking about.

(There's an engineering principle: It's always best to try to avoid fixing things that ain't broke, even when they ain't ideal.

And another engineering principle: It's best to keep the centralized control functionality away from individual functions at the local level, as much as possible. If it's at all possible to adequately handle things at the most local level, that's where they should be handled. There are exceptions, but as soon as the exceptional cases have been handled reasonably well, the central control functions should return control to the local functions.

Getting the central control functions involved greatly increases the possibility and the negative impact of bugs and other errors.)

Cleaning Up the US Code Line-by-Line

I want an amendment that allows the president to veto with prejudice -- declare a bill from Congress so badly constructed that they'll have to get the Supreme Court to declare his opinion of the legal problems incorrect, and then try to get the two-thirds margin vote to pass it.

That, of course, won't really work. Therefore, we need to explicitly give the president the line-item veto. Yes, it would hamstring Congress. That's the point. Make the whole Congress, and the president, carefully review every law that gets passed on the national level.

(This is a pet peeve of mine, I guess.)

Too much of our law doesn't say what it is supposed to say.

And too many bills are a patchwork of laws that may (or may not) actually be necessary and laws that benefit no one but special interest groups, at the detriment of the rest of US. The spaghetti law that results makes it impossible for an ordinary citizen to do anything, bad or good, without tripping over the law.

Knee Jerk Gun Control?

I guess I'm getting cantankerous in my old age. I want to solve the real problems, not just the symptoms.

And the spate of "Oh! NO! WE MUST HAVE GUN CONTROL!" posts, articles, letters to the editor, and on and on gets to me.

What has changed?

What will change if we enact gun control legislation? Seriously.

Some kids somewhere whose parents want them to get an early start in flash-mob politics say, "Let's walk out of school! Yeah! That'll fix the problem!"

Actually, it might. Schools are a part of the system that heats the pot that boils over in violence.

(I've got nothing against Armalite shutting down production of the AR-16, by the way, and I have nothing against lots of people asking them to do so. But the guns are not the real source of the problem, they just exarcerbate the problems.)

I was gratified that there were students responding with, "Let's make a real change. Instead of walking out of school, let's remember 17 children who were victims of violence by reaching out to 17 children who need a friend."

That's a better approach.

Remember the 17 children sacrificed to the violent society by reaching out to 17 children who need a friend. Or even just one, if you and all your friends will pick different children to reach out to.

Make new friends. Don't ask them to be the same as you. Don't ask them to play the same games, go to the same parties, were the same clothes, listen to the same songs, put the same posters on their bedroom walls.

Talk to them anyway. Maybe listen to a song they like. Maybe tell them their clothes are just fine. Maybe play their games sometimes.

Remember the victims of violence by reaching out to 17 teenagers who aren't figuring out how to make good enough grades to get into college. Offer to help even one student who's having a problem with a subject you know.

But don't be too proud to make sure your help doesn't just confuse them. It's okay to discover that different schools and different generations sometimes teach to different standards.

Remember the victims of violence by reaching out to 17 adults who are having trouble finding work they can do to support themselves, and any children who depend on them. Talk to the homeless, the unemployed, the hungry, and listen.

Even just one.

If you run a business and make over $100,000 a year, you can forego that new yacht you want to buy, to hire one more employee. Or you might have a friend who knows a friend that could use an employee.

Maybe you have a friend who is good at paiting pictures but not so good at sacking groceries. You could buy one of her pictures and she could put food on the table for a week or a month. And you could get your friends to help, too. The more she sells, the more people know of her work, and the more people can reach out to help her.

Or if you can't find anyone nearby who needs help, go to the crowd-sourcing sites and help fund a project that isn't making it yet.

You don't want people to convert to a radical religion or other philosophy that teaches them to react to hidden oppression with open violence? Those philosophies and religions aren't new. Been around for a long time. What's the problem?

This current society has more people who face problems they can't solve on their own.

So. Reach out.

Find the people who need help. Don't make them be just like you before you help them.

Help them find solutions before the purveyors of crime and violence find them.

That's how to put a real end to the violence.

Burying your own weapons of war is okay.

Forcing others to bury theirs and at the same time refusing to help them feed their families is not.