Most political systems seek to work for the betterment of society. Most include a claim to a goal of protecting the weak.

As an analogy let’s consider how different political ideologies would handle the case of an endangered wild species like “a lion”. These wild animals are “the weak” in the sense that they are completely subject to the whim of man. They are unable to defend themselves in a world dominated by humans. Hence, they are weak, and as benevolent stewards of the world it is our noble responsibility to protect the individuals of this beautiful species. The question which the various ideologies differ on is “how”?

The communist would decide that in order to protect the lion is to provide for its every need. To guard against starvation, he will provide food for the lion served in a dish. To guard against the ravages of nature, he will provide shelter for the lion. No more will the lion want for food or fear the cold rain. Their every need will be provided for. And in order to protect the lion from his inability to know what’s best for him, he will enclose the shelter in a cage. That way the lion will be protected completely from enemies, nature, and himself.

For simplicity’s sake we’ll just say that the communist solution for protecting the lion is to place him in a zoo.

On the other end of the political spectrum we have the laissez faire capitalists. They are also concerned with protecting the lion, but they sneer at the communist solution, seeing that, while preserving the lion’s existence, it would strip the lion of everything it means to be a lion. Lion’s are hunters, and by God, they should be allowed to hunt for their food and provide their own shelter. In the capitalist’s mind, the best way to help the lion is to not help the lion. A lion who fends for himself and decides his own future will be a stronger, more successful lion – and will produce stronger, and more successful offspring.

A slight complication comes into play when lions get too strong and numerous. A weak, lone lion, when faced with human development in his back yard, will have no choice but to retreat to other uninhabited areas. A pride of strong, and successful lions, however may pose problems to their benevolent capitalist dictators, however, if they refuse to move – but rather use their instinctive predatory skills developed through the generations to defend their homes. When it comes to this, the capitalist must work swiftly to ensure the safety and security of the society as a whole. It becomes an imperative to constrain the lions. Relocation to a different area works only for a while, but these persistent lions keep on finding their way back to the contested territories.

The benevolent capitalist knows that the lion who stays near a human settlement is a danger to the people – and will ultimately end up being shot. So he enacts policies to protect both the lion and the people. Any lion found near a settlement will be tranquilized, tagged, and sent to a safe place where they can no longer trouble humans.

This policy works for a while, but as settlements grow, encounters with lions become more frequent – and even inevitable. In order to avert any future confrontations with lions, the only logical solution is to seek out all lions – even the ones residing far from the human settlements – and relocate them also into captivity. This preemptive doctrine makes sense to the prominent thinkers of society as it seems to address all of the security needs of society. But it creates a logistical problem since there aren’t enough cages built to house all of the lions. What’s more, it turns out that they don’t have the resources to feed all of the lions once captured.

In the face of a potential massacre, some of the leaders go to the people and request a small tax increase in order to pay for the care and handling of the lions. The request makes some headway until it is pointed out that taking care of all of the lions in zoos is exactly what the communists and socialists do with their lions. The mere thought of sharing any characteristics with a communist regime is too much for this right-wing society to handle so the proposal is rejected.

But the problem still remains: what to do with all of these lions. They don’t have the resources to cage them, and since the mandate of this society fancies itself as a defender of the weak, a massacre is out of the question. So they decide to relocate all of the lions into a desolate island in the north. Due to the climate and a previous nuclear disaster, this island is undesirable to the humans of society. This coupled with the fact that lions can’t swim would ensure that lions would pose no more threat to humans.

This solution has the virtue of following good, old-fashioned conservative principles. The future of the lions is left in their own hands. The strong will survive and the weak will abide by the blessed laws of natural selection and cease to survive of their own free will. Society is able to move on in peace and security.

However, when it is reported 10 years later that the population of lions has dwindled to endangered levels due to lack of food supply, inhospitable conditions, and disease caused by the contaminated terrain, society decides to act fast to try to preserve the species. So they send an expedition to the island of Elba to collect a sampling of lions and transport them to a safe place, known as a zoo. There their needs are met for the purpose of preserving their existence for future generations to enjoy.

So, for simplicity’s sake we’ll just say that the capitalist solution for protecting the lion is to place him in a zoo.

I saw Donald Trump on Pierce Morgan last night where he declared his possible candidacy for President in 2012. Wow, does he ever have his finger on the pulse of the American people – at least those from the red states. He has clearly calculated his message to speak to “red” America in his hope to fill the leadership void that currently haunts the GOP. A paraphrase of a few of his panderous statements:

1. China is the enemy
2. If he were President he would enact a 25% tax on all Chinese goods – because they aren’t playing fair.
3. Too much money is spent on education at the federal level. Education should be handled locally.
4. He’s a military man. He would increase military spending if he were president.
5. America has become a joke internationally, and he would restore its honor in the world (he seemed to be hinting at doing that with the military).
6. He would stick it to OPEC. He’d go over there with the military at his back and dictate the terms under which they would provide the US with oil.
7. He would assign tough wall street negotiators to handle negotiations with other countries… not the diplomats.
8. The US should be charging South Korea for the protection they receive from the US.
9. He loves Sarah Palin. He just thinks she can’t win a national election.

Now some of these positions, I’m sure, are genuinely his. But it looks to me like these statements have been carefully crafted to appeal to the right. I’m sure that, over the next several weeks, he’ll be testing the waters with these ideas so he can assess his chances of winning an election.

I suspected this step was coming. Since Apple is making a push to get people into its new App Store for OS X, it is shutting down its download section. This is decidedly bad news and depending on how it affects the market, it may mark the end of my development for the Mac platform. We’ll have to wait and see.

Why not just add my apps to the app store then?

I use Java for much of my development

I really do prefer to work with Java vs using an old language like Objective-C that is limited in so many ways. Apple has cut off access for developers like me who don’t want to use their “approved” APIs.

Apple Takes a 30% cut

This commission seems a little high… Of course it depends if the app store generates more sales to make up for the commission.

I don’t want ALL of my upgrades and transactions going through the app store

Apple dictates that all updates and license keys must be managed through their store using their API. This ensures that apple gets their cut of any transaction….

I still want to be able to distribute my apps to Windows and Linux users

I don’t have the man power to rewrite all of my apps from the ground up for every platform. Mac’s Approved APIs don’t lend themselves easily to distribution on Windows and Linux where many of my users reside. This is, of course, a business decision by Apple to try to lock users in to ensure that most software is “Mac Only”.

I am extremely disheartened by the direction that Apple is taking with OS X. I truely hope that the App store is a failure so that the market, if nothing else, can reign them in.

I just finished reading “You are not a Gadget – A manifesto” by Jaron Lanier, and I do recommend it for anyone who is interested in the future of our society and how it will include technology. The real meat of this book lies in its middle section where Lanier discusses the challenges that the new Web 2.0 culture (aka the “hive mind”) is imposing on us. Lanier believes that our shift toward aggregation of creative content is destroying the personal creative aspect of our culture which is central to our personhood. In certain sections of this book it almost seems like Lanier is just a Luddite who is afraid of technological change, but the first and last sections of the book are there to remind us that he is far from it – as he is one of the pioneers of virtual reality and still working on the bleeding edge of computational research and development. He is not a luddite – just a creative person who is concerned by the direction that our world is taking – one that marginalizes individual creativity in favor of a hive-mind utopia.

I tend to agree with many of Lanier’s concerns. I am greatly concerned with the culture of “free”, where people believe that they should be able to get everything (digital at least) for free. This is a road to little or no creative development and, ultimately, to the socialization of all creative endeavors (which I believe is a bad thing …. let me know if you need me to connect the dots).

Anyways… I strongly recommend this book. It’s a good read – and a relatively easy one.

I had a recent discussion with a friend who holds some radical views on certain topics. I address 3 specific claims that he made during our discussion.

Claim 1: Roads are completely funded by gas taxes

This claim is really neither here nor there. I believe claims such as this one are made as part of the larger claim that we shouldn’t have to pay income tax.

Now often this claim is not made in reference to any particular country, state, or province, so it it hard to address (because different countries will have different policies on things like this).

Based on the following links it appears that in the United States most of the Fuel tax is applied to the development of roads, but it is not clear whether or not this covers *all* road infrastructure. I have also included 2 links to the BC government website which show that the PST does contribute to the fund to pay for roads in addition to the motor fuel tax.

Since roads are built out of the general budget, it is very hard to track down exactly which monies have been applied to building roads. I consider the point moot as it doesn’t really matter whether the money for our roads come from income tax or gas taxes or both. They come from taxes one way or the other. Of course conservatives who are philosophically opposed to income tax might (certainly would) take a different position on the importance of this point.

http://www.sbr.gov.bc.ca/business/Consumer_Taxes/Provincial_Sales_Tax/about.htm
“… an important source of funding which is used to support British Columbia’s roads, schools, hospitals and other community services.”

http://www.sbr.gov.bc.ca/business/Consumer_Taxes/Motor_Fuel_Tax/mft.htm
“British Columbia’s Motor Fuel Tax is made up of two components: provincial and dedicated taxes. The provincial portion goes to general revenue and helps pay for a wide range of government programs, such as health care and education. The dedicated portion goes to the BC Transportation and Financing Authority, Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority and the BC Transportation Authority
to help finance transportation projects in various parts of the province.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax
“In the United States, the fuel tax receipts are often dedicated or hypothecated to transportation projects so that the fuel tax is considered by many a user fee. In other countries, the fuel tax is a source of general revenue.”

http://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2009/05/do-roads-pay-for-themselves.html
“State motor fuel tax is collected from all over the state and goes into a single pool of revenue—about one quarter of which goes to fund education, and about three-quarters of which goes to the state’s highway fund, where it is spent on transportation uses and some non-transportation functions of government.

Then the state receives federal funds as the state’s share of the federal fuel tax; about 70 cents of every gas tax dollar Texans send to Washington comes back for road use.”

Claim 2: Income Tax Unconstitutional

I’ve heard this one a few different times from a few different people so I thought it might actually have legs. If you do a search on Google you’ll surely run across this short essay by a man who is convinced of the unconstitutionality of income tax:

http://www.prolognet.qc.ca/clyde/tax.htm
This author argues that income tax is unconstitutional and thus is illegal in Canada. He cites sections of the BNA (British North America Act) which he claims prohibits the fedreal government from imposing direct taxation on its individuals. He also cites the case of a deceased Manitoba resident named Gerry Hart, who allegedly avoided paying income tax for 50 years and won all of his 22 court cases against revenue Canada when they attempted to retrieve the money.

When I decided to look into the case of Gerry Hart, I found this page:

http://www.ownlife.com/tax/cases.htm

This page lists a number of court cases in Canadian history where individuals have attempted to fight income tax. In all cases, the courts upheld that the federal government CAN indeed charge income tax. In addition this page addressed the claims about Gerry Hart:

“the legend appeared in the Michael Journal, a somewhat religious newspaper produced in Quebec and distributed, for free, throughout Canada.

No case has been published which involved the making, by Gerry Hart or his company (Hart Electronics Limited), of a successful argument that the federal Income Tax Act is unconstitutional.”

So this claim appears to be a myth.

Claim 3: You don’t need a driver’s license or insurance to drive a car.

When the claim was made, the claimant did not know whether this was limited to a particular jurisdiction or if it was for any jurisdiction in the British Commonwealth. A little bit of Google searching has answered the question:

1. This is a debatable issue in the United States.
2. In Canada there is no debate.

In Canada it is clear that there no such “right to travel”. Driving is a privilege, NOT a right (http://fightyourtickets.ca/law/right-to-drive/): “Section 31. Driving a privilege:”

The United States situation is far more convoluted and it owes to its tumultuous history.

If you do a search on Google for “Right to travel” you’ll discover a slough of websites that are run by “patiots” and “freedom fighters”. You’ll almost always find that these sites are linked to, or contain information about, conspiracy theories such as the NWO or FEMA death camps. All of these sites are showing the same information and citing the same sources to argue that Driving is a right that is protected under the constitution of the United states (under the section of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness) as a right and not a privilege. They all cite a number of court cases to support their point, but the main court case that gives this position legs is the supreme court case Thompson vs. Smith, 154 SE 579 where they quote:
“The Right of the Citizen to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, either by horse drawn carriage or by automobile, is not a mere privilege which a city can prohibit or permit at will, but a common Right which he has under the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

If you dig you can even find a pre-filled afidavit on which you can fill in your name and state to present to the court to declare that you don’t need to have a driver’s license in order to drive. (http://wgns.net/LegalResearch/PDF/AFFIDAVITS/Aff-RighttoTravel.pdf)

Now this has not been tested in court recently (as far as I can tell in the past 60 years) so I would suspect that these arguments would hold any water in a court these days. There was a case in 1986 where someone tried to argue similarly and lost (http://www.stormfront.org/forum/sitemap/index.php/t-18216.html – 03/27/86 The City of Spokane, v. Julie Anne Port), but the ameteur commentators insist that she simply made mistakes in her arguments.

I could not find any reputable sources that even commented on the issue. This yahoo answers thread (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080825104610AA0HxeH) contained a decent response:

“This question gets asked and asked and asked here. There are also many many many court opionions that have addressed what you have asked. The Constitution does not address flying planes without a license or hacking into someone’s computer. Doesn’t mean you can though. The Constitution is a guideline that is continually interpreted by the Supreme Court.

You have a legal right to drive. On the cases you list, you gloss over statements the court makes like may not prohibit AT WILL or WITHOUT DUE PROCESS. State and federal government cannot deprive you of the right to drive “just becase”. They can, however, enact laws that protect the rights of every driver on the road – like making sure a 5 year old isn’t behind the wheel, or that someone who is legally blind is not behind the wheel, or requiring licenses and registrations so that if you are in an accident there is a way for you to seek reimbursement, to put up toll booths to pay for road construction, to ensure that cars being driven have passed inspection so that wheels don’t come flying off cars, to put up traffic signals so there is order to traffic flow, etc.

As you present in Boggs – “statutes that violate…..common right and common reason are null and void”. It is obviously common right and common reason to set up a system to regulate traffic and drivers. It is not a violation of this right to require that you stop at stop signs, drive at reasonable speeds, lose your license for driving while intoxicated, etc. If states did not require this, other people on the road would be deprived of “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.”

Any reasonable person must realize that licenses are important for public safety. This is one major reason for the disagreements between the left and the right in the states. Many from the south are fixated on individual rights to the exclusion of consideration to how those rights affect others. That is where these types of bogus arguments come from. I mean, really!

Refernces:
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/39244

http://www.landrights.com/The%20Charles%20Sprinkler%20File.htm

http://wgns.net/LegalResearch/PDF/AFFIDAVITS/Aff-RighttoTravel.pdf
This one is particularly entertaining:

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/sitemap/index.php/t-18216.html
(03/27/86 The City of Spokane, v. Julie Anne Port)

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080825104610AA0HxeH
“This question gets asked and asked and asked here. There are also many many many court opionions that have addressed what you have asked. The Constitution does not address flying planes without a license or hacking into someone’s computer. Doesn’t mean you can though. The Constitution is a guideline that is continually interpreted by the Supreme Court.

You have a legal right to drive. On the cases you list, you gloss over statements the court makes like may not prohibit AT WILL or WITHOUT DUE PROCESS. State and federal government cannot deprive you of the right to drive “just becase”. They can, however, enact laws that protect the rights of every driver on the road – like making sure a 5 year old isn’t behind the wheel, or that someone who is legally blind is not behind the wheel, or requiring licenses and registrations so that if you are in an accident there is a way for you to seek reimbursement, to put up toll booths to pay for road construction, to ensure that cars being driven have passed inspection so that wheels don’t come flying off cars, to put up traffic signals so there is order to traffic flow, etc.

As you present in Boggs – “statutes that violate…..common right and common reason are null and void”. It is obviously common right and common reason to set up a system to regulate traffic and drivers. It is not a violation of this right to require that you stop at stop signs, drive at reasonable speeds, lose your license for driving while intoxicated, etc. If states did not require this, other people on the road would be deprived of “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.”

http://www.uslawbooks.com/travel/travelcites.htm

http://www.bcrevolution.ca/bc_court_of_appeal.htm
http://fightyourtickets.ca/law/right-to-drive/

I decided to take a look at the local candidates for my riding in the provincial election. Their websites are:
(Harry Bloy – Liberal)
(Jaynie Clark – NDP)
(Helen Chang – Green)

First impressions:
Harry Bloy needs a better website (notice that I pasted his webpage from the BC legislature site – because HarryBloy.com has no information about who Harry Bloy is). Jaynie Clark looks pretty qualified with her committee and legal experience. Helen Chang apparently only stands for one issue: ESL/immigration.

Right off the bat I won’t be voting for Ms. Chang as it doesn’t look like she would be interested in representing me. She appears to only want to represent ESL people. I think ESL is important, but it is not in my top 3 issues, so it wouldn’t make too much sense to vote for someone where ESL is their one and only issue.

Between Harry Bloy and Jaynie Clark, it really comes down to whether I want the government run like a business or a bureaucracy. These two candidates seem to be quite accurate personifications of the parties that they represent. Bloy has lots of business experience (and 2 terms MLA experience); Clark has experience with the labour movement (BCGEU, Labour Relationships Board, Industrial Relations Association).

So really it comes down to the party. Liberal or NDP. Numbers get thrown around everywhere arguing under which government we had a stronger economy. I’m not sure even if the provincial government can have that much effect over an economy that is so dependent upon the ups and downs of the world’s economy. I will say that under the liberals there have been lots of visible signs of positive progress (Canada Line, Golden Ears Bridge, Port Mann Bridge, the Olympics), and it seems like the NDP has been opposing this progress at every turn. The NDP portrays the attitude that we shouldn’t be embarking on any major projects while there are still homeless people in the down-town east side. They have been critical of nearly every major project, with part of the reason being that “we shouldn’t be spending XXX dollars on YYY when we should be spending that money on the homeless”.

I am personally of the mind that we should treat homelessness seriously, however, the simplistic solutions offered by advocates of the homeless (throw money at the homeless) is naive and would likely result in more homelessness. I don’t want to get the homelessness issue here because it is too complex say anything meaningful in this short space. I just have the feeling that had the NDP been in power for the past eight years we wouldn’t have the olympics, or the port mann, or the canada line – and we would still have homeless littering the streets, but the NDP would be boasting about the amount of money they have added to fight homelessness and would be happy that despite a dramatic increase in the number of homeless, there are two or three times as many homeless now housed and off the streets on the government’s dime.

I watched the news reports yesterday covering Carole James’ visit to some of the struggling logging towns in the interior. She was ranting and raving about how the logging industry has been ravaged while Gordon Campbell has been in power. She grand-stands there to draw attention to the grief that “Gordon Campbell’s arrogance” has caused.

… BUT I didn’t see her offer any solutions to the problem. She pretends like there is something that the provincial government could magically do to increase global demand for wood. I think that the Green party leader Jane Sturk had it right when, in the leaders’ radio debate, she dismissed James’ use of the lumber woes as disingenuous as it’s unrealistic to think that Gordon Campbell (or any provincial government) could have any control over the soft-wood industry because it is subject to global market forces that are beyond the control of our tiny province.

Since James has not proposed any solutions to the Lumber industry, I assume she is promising these communities moral support. Either that or she will be surprising the rest of us by putting up big money to subsidize these industries.

All that said, I think that Gordon Campbell should join toastmasters to help him overcome is anxiety about public speaking. He looked terribly nervous during the TV debate and I would wager that George W. Bush would have bested him on that night. At least W has a little swagger and charisma to help connect to the audience. Campbell just looked nervous and dim-witted.

So I guess I’ll vote liberal because I’d rather have the olympics and the port mann than not. If I believed that NOT spending money on those projects could solve homelessness and help us socially, I would obviously prefer to spend money on those social goods, but I just have little faith in the well-intentioned left’s ability to convert money into results. No, if we DIDN’t spend the money on these infrastructure projects (and the olympics) I’m sure that it would have just been poured into the black hole of good intentions and dubious results.

Hopefully at the end of the next term, there will be a bonified scandal with the liberal’s finger prints on it that will leave us no choice but to change. Hopefully during the next term, the NDP will provide a more constructive opposition voice – one that doesn’t take their position as the “opposition” to mean that they should oppose every idea and every project to get the province moving. Hopefully next time we will be using the proposed Single Transferable Vote and we have a few more good options to vote for on the ballot.

Until then….