By Mark Leudtke

It’s a simple law of economics: when government rations a good, it creates a shortage of that good. It doesn’t matter what the good is, the law still applies. The consequences of these shortages are always bad. When government rations alcohol permits, the consequences of the shortage are especially bad.

By rationing alcohol permits, the government funnels more drinkers into fewer places. Zoning laws aggravate this problem by forcing people further from their homes into bar zones like downtown or the Oregon district. The consequences of forcing a bunch of drunks into small areas far from home are pretty obvious: an increase in violence, especially late at night after everybody is lubed up, and an increase in drunk driving. And those are exactly the problems we have in Dayton.

The Dayton police have been playing whack-a-mole with downtown bars. Because the city rations liquor permits, drinkers conglomerate in just a few bars. Some of those bars have lots of trouble, and the police get called there an inordinate number of times. They’ve shut down the 88 Club, the A-List and others, but that doesn’t solve the problem of too few bars. It makes the problem worse. As a result, the problems inevitably move to other bars.

Hammerjax is next on the city’s target list. According to WDTN, “Police say Hammerjax had 62 calls for service and 17 crime reports last year. Just a few weeks ago, a bartender there was shot.” Shutting down Hammerjax will not solve the problem. It will just move the problem to another bar and make it worse.

Liquor permits are euphemistically named to hide their true nature. The name makes it seem like a benevolent government is allowing bar owners to sell liquor, but that’s backwards. In fact, our oppressive government is banning everybody else from exercising their natural right to sell liquor. This is an act of aggression by the government. It is a threat of violence backed by violence. It shouldn’t surprise anybody that this immoral aggression by government produces and causes violence in society.

If government officials really wanted to stop the violence in bars, they would end their own aggression. If people were allowed to exercise their natural right to sell liquor anywhere in the city, the shortage of bars would end. Drinkers would no longer mass in certain bars or in certain districts of the city. Many would walk to bars instead of driving. The violence and the drunk driving would be reduced to almost nothing. We would need far fewer cops, prosecutors, judges and jailers. We could dramatically reduce the giant socialist jobs program that is our misnamed justice system.

But politicians and government agents aren’t interested in public welfare. They want power. They want money without having to do the hard work of providing a quality product in the marketplace. Liquor licenses are a source of revenue for an entire bureaucracy. The crime created by government policy is used as an excuse to steal a tremendous amount of money from the people in the form of taxes, and it funds an entire industry of prisons.

So government agents blame others for the consequences of their coercive policies. The argument is always put forth that these establishments put an inordinate amount of work on Dayton police officers, or somehow threaten the rights of individuals in close vicinity to the establishments. God forbid we legalize selling alcohol for all and the Dayton police have to enter the marketplace and try to earn a living in a system of voluntary exchange.

Leave Hammerjax alone. Government coercion is the problem.

Mark Luedtke is an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Cincinnati and currently works for a Dayton attorney. He can be reached at MarkLuedtke@DaytonCityPaper.com.

A History of Ohio’s Concealed Carry Laws

by Mark Luedtke

In 1987, gun owners in Florida shocked the nation by pushing through a statewide shall-issue — meaning officials can’t deny a permit for arbitrary reasons — concealed carry law. Critics claimed this would transform Florida into killing fields. Proponents claimed it would lead to dramatic reductions in violent crime. The proponents were right. According to the Kentucky Concealed Carry Coalition, “Since adopting CCW (1987), Florida’s homicide rate has fallen 21% while the U.S. rate has risen 12%. From start-up 10/1/87 – 2/28/94 (over 6 years) Florida issued 204,108 permits; only 17 (0.008%) were revoked because permit-holders later committed crimes (not necessarily violent) in which guns were present (not necessarily used).” Because the personal and social benefits from allowing concealed carry were so profound, by 1998, 43 states allowed some form of concealed carry. Ohio was not one of them.

Then in May of 1999, Cincinnati pizza deliveryman Pat Feely was arrested for carrying a handgun in his belt during a late night delivery. The fugitive slave era law, still on the books at that time, required defendants to present an active defense to prove they needed to carry a concealed weapon for defense purposes. Feely did so and was acquitted in May 2000. According to The Gottlieb-Tartaro Report, “Both the judge and the prosecutor said the law should be changed or repealed,” but Governor Taft threatened to veto any concealed carry bill unless it was supported by law enforcement groups.

Former police officer and then private detective Chuck Klein hoped to use the Feely case to change the law, but Feely changed jobs, losing his legal justification for carrying concealed. So Klein assembled Feely’s boss, James Cohen, hairdresser Vernon Ferrier and personal trainer Lea Ann Driscoll, and filed suit against the state. They employed Feely’s lawyer Tim Smith and obtained funding from the Second Amendment Foundation.

After two lower courts ruled in favor of Klein and company, Hamilton County Sheriff Simon Leis and the state of Ohio appealed the case to the Ohio Supreme Court, which heard arguments in April of 2003. Because of Ohio’s prominence, supporters and opponents of concealed carry nationwide got involved. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, “The Ohio Supreme Court — which will hear oral arguments in the Hamilton County case this morning — has received friend-of-the-court briefs from no fewer than 30 groups and individuals. Among them: the National Rifle Association, the Washington-based Violence Prevention Center, Ohio cities and counties, even an interest group for private detectives. All see the case as a key turning point in the political tussle over guns, not only in Ohio but for the entire country.”

The state of Ohio referred to a 1920 Ohio Supreme Court case on the same law in which the Court determined the ban “does not operate as a prohibition against carrying weapons, but as a regulation of the manner of carrying them. The gist of the offense is concealment.” The Columbus Dispatch reported on the argument for overturning the ban, “Opponents of the 83-year-old prohibition say the law is unconstitutionally vague and is even applied to persons openly carrying guns. They cited testimony from police officers who said they are confused about when it is legal to carry a handgun in Ohio.”

In September 2003, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the concealed carry ban. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on the decision, “The problem, critics say, is that this ‘affirmative defense’ clause requires people to first get arrested for breaking the law before they can go to court to prove why they did nothing wrong.”

But the Court opened the door for concealed carry activists’ next step by affirming the people’s right to carry firearms openly, so that’s what supporters of concealed carry did. Immediately after the decision, they organized defense walks all over the state in which firearm owners marched openly displaying their firearms. This political pressure finally broke the logjam in Columbus. Gov. Taft finally got the message and arranged a compromise that enabled the Ohio’s shall-issue concealed carry law to pass on Jan 8, 2004. Officials began issuing concealed carry permits on April 8, 2004. Since the Ohio bill passed, every state in the union has passed some sort of concealed carry law except Illinois. Ohio currently has reciprocity agreements with 23 other states.

But gun owner activists didn’t stop with concealed carry. In 2006 they passed a preemption law that prevents local governments from restricting concealed carry. The Ohio Supreme Court upheld that preemption law 5-2 in 2010, overturning restrictions in Cleveland. Cleveland.com reports, “The 13-page decision written by Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton supports the rationale of lawmakers that the statewide gun law was needed in 2006 to keep gun owners from being at the mercy of ‘a confusing patchwork’ of licensing requirements and possession restrictions.” In 2011 the state legalized carrying firearms in bars.

The battle over firearm freedom continues. Concealed carry is still banned on college campuses in Ohio. Buckeyes for Concealed Carry recently protested this law by displaying empty holsters at a Trayvon Martin vigil at Ohio State University. University police drew their weapons on and arrested organization president Mike Newbern even though he was breaking no law and carrying no weapon. Some policemen are still confused about the law.

Reach DCP freelance writer Mark Luedtke at MarkLuedtke@DaytonCityPaper.com.

By Mark Luedtke

Most Americans don’t yet realize that the state is a predatory institution and the police are its fangs. But many blacks do. It begins with taxes. Taxes are the modern version of tribute conquerors have always demanded from the conquered. They are not voluntary. They are collected under threat of violence backed by violence. But taxes are just the start. Once the people surrender to having their money systematically stolen by government agents, that opens the door to unlimited violence against them.

People tend to think of laws as something to respect, but in fact nearly every law passed in the last two hundred years legalized criminal behavior by government agents. If a band of armed men surrounded your house and demanded you pay them 10 percent of your income or they would storm into your house, assault you and your family members, kill your dog, take their 10 percent and more, then kidnap you and lock you away in a cage, you would rightly recognize them as the barbaric brigands they were.

But our rulers use legislation to legalize that crime and untold others as long as those crimes are carried out by government agents. The police are the instruments of violence the state uses to back up its threats. Police are to government what enforcers are to the mafia. Since most Americans routinely acquiesce to government threats of violence, they never suffer violence from its enforcers.

I know most of you are thinking that police protect you from crime, and there’s some truth to that, just like mafia enforcers protect people who pay protection money. But government’s protection racket is no more legitimate than the mafia’s protection racket. What protection money primarily buys in both cases is protection from the enforcers. Democracy has arguably been the greatest enabler of predatory behavior in history. It has fooled the sheep into thinking the wolves work for them because every couple of years the wolves grant them a token say in determining which wolves lead the pack of predators.

While most Americans never suffer the bite of the police, the same isn’t true for low income urban blacks. Because they’re a disadvantaged minority, they’re easy prey for society’s apex predator. Several laws of aggression enable government predators to feast on them. The government schools they attend make it difficult for them to get a quality education, hindering their employability. Minimum wage laws further restrict under-qualified young blacks from getting jobs other than in the military. As a result, the unemployment rate for black teens is around 50 percent, significantly higher than whites or Hispanics.

Add in the war on drugs, and these young black men hardly stand a chance. Because of predatory policies, one of the few ways they can make a living is by selling drugs. That makes them easy victims for the police. Because the war on drugs legalized theft of property by government agents, all the police have to do is stop and search any group of young black men at night, steal any drugs or plant them trusting that judges always rubber stamp their claims, then prosecute them in front of a white jury. If they do this enough, they get a promotion. The war on drugs has thoroughly corrupted our justice system.

According to Time magazine, “Black youth are arrested for drug crimes at a rate ten times higher than that of whites. But new research shows that young African Americans are actually less likely to use drugs and less likely to develop substance use disorders, compared to whites, Native Americans, Hispanics and people of mixed race.” Government has transformed what should be peaceful transactions between adults — like buying alcohol — into a machine for preying on, locking up and destroying the lives of young black men.

Since blacks have been violently preyed upon by government agents in America for centuries, it was natural that black community leaders were skeptical when police told them about Kylen English’s suicide while in police custody. The story of English busting out of a police cruiser window using his head while handcuffed, then jumping off the Salem Street bridge is enough to make anybody skeptical. But video and audio of the events confirm the story. In addition, the police had nothing to gain from harming English.

After nearly a year, both sides reached an impasse. The police have nothing to apologize for in this case. Black community leaders have no reason to apologize for their skepticism. Both sides were looking for a way to gracefully disengage while allowing each other to save face. So police, community and business leaders signed a declaration of intent to work together to improve their relations.

But wolves and sheep can never have good relations. As long as government has the power of coercion and a monopoly on force, police will continue to prey on blacks because it pays. If government agents really wanted to improve relations and greatly reduce crime, a great first step would be to end their illegitimate war on drugs just like they ended Prohibition, but that’s unlikely to happen any time soon.

Mark Luedtke is an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Cincinnati and currently works for a Dayton attorney. He can be reached at MarkLuedtke@DaytonCityPaper.com.

By Mark Luedtke

On the surface, Gov. Kasich’s plan to retest teachers in failing schools might seem like a good idea. Teachers should know their subjects, so why not retest those in failing schools, right? But that kind of superficial analysis, the kind that makes good sound bites, produces bad policy. Kasich is trying to make teachers into scapegoats for failing schools, but teachers aren’t the problem. The problem is the government’s power of coercion.

The fundamental flaws of government schools are that they are funded by money stolen from taxpayers under threat of violence and that students are forced to attend government schools under threat of violence. Nothing good can come from stealing money and forcing people around at the point of a gun. It can only produce a thoroughly corrupt system.

In addition, teachers are coerced into joining unions against their will. Just as the government exists to enrich our rulers at our expense, coercive unions exist to enrich union leaders and their political patrons at the expense of workers. Unions add another corrupting influence to our socialist school system.

We’ll never solve the problem of government schools until we understand the problem. Government schools do exactly what they are designed to do: tear families apart and supplant the family with the state in the minds of students. This makes them docile subjects, willing tax slaves and ready soldiers as adults. To this end, government schools intentionally mis-educate children about history, economics and the nature of the state. Teachers are forced to follow this corrupt curriculum. In addition they provide a socialist jobs program for coerced teachers and a reliable voting block for Democrats. Contrary to rhetoric, from the point of view of fat cat government officials and union bosses, government schools do an excellent job.

No matter how well trained and dedicated teachers are, and most teachers do a fantastic job under difficult circumstances, they can’t overcome the corrupt system they are forced to work in. The teachers who work in the worst schools have the toughest jobs, and those are the teachers threatened by Kasich’s retesting system.

Of course, not all teachers do a great job, but we have to ask how those teachers got hired in the first place. Because the government school system is corrupt. Parents wouldn’t intentionally hire unqualified teachers — only government does that — but if they accidentally did, they would quickly fire them.

Departments of Education are based on the preposterous idea that bureaucrats on school boards and in capitals know how to educate every individual child better than parents and teachers. That’s beyond absurd. Kasich’s retesting program strengthens that false proposition.

This retesting program also loots more money from taxpayers, making them poorer and less able to educate their own children. The Columbus Dispatch reports, “Statewide, more than 7,000 classroom teachers in 346 charter and traditional public schools would be affected by the provision if it applied this year.” Also, “Ohio uses the Praxis series of exams to test teachers’ knowledge of the subjects they teach. The cost per test ranges from $50 to more than $100, depending on the subject.” That’s at least $700,000 stolen from taxpayers to enrich the politicians and their cronies for a program that will soon be run by union bosses.

Asking the government to fix government schools is like asking the mafia to fix its protection racket. The government is the problem, not the solution. Government regimentation and coercion prevent parents and teachers from cooperating to meet the personal educational needs of each family. The solution to the problem of educating children is to abolish government interference in education to free parents and teachers to work together in a system of voluntary exchange to solve individual educational problems. This will dramatically lower the cost of education and increase the quality. It will also restore healthy families and healthy communities.

Mark Luedtke is an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Cincinnati and currently works for a Dayton attorney. He can be reached at MarkLuedtke@DaytonCityPaper.com.

By Mark Luedtke

Imagine if government passed a law requiring dog owners to enroll their dogs in government training centers seven hours a day, five days a week for nine months. Politicians would declare this a public good and raise taxes to pay for it, making every American poorer. They would require every pet owner to put their dog in a kennel truck every morning, then the kennel truck would bring their dog back every night. If the owner refused, armed agents would seize both the dog and the owner.

Some dogs would kill others. Dogs would come home with scars from fighting. Dogs that had been gentle and fun in the past would become sullen and hostile, some attacking their owners. Government agents would euthanize many “to protect society.” Whenever the postman or other government agent came by, dogs would either run in terror or greet them with joy as if the agent owned them. All dogs and their relationships with their owners would be irreparably damaged.

At first it would be obvious that government training centers turned loving dogs anti-social and violent. But after a few generations, bad dog behavior would be the new normal. Pet owners would mistakenly believe dogs naturally became anti-social and violent as they grew up. They would blame the dogs, themselves, society or God. They would mistakenly believe that government training centers provided a service instead of realizing that they were the root cause of most dog problems. Fewer people would own dogs.

So it is with government’s child training centers, which do immeasurable damage to children, families and society. From the dawn of the human species until the 19th century, children were raised and taught by parents and voluntary agents. Children studied with their siblings and neighbors. Think of the school in Little House on the Prairie. That’s natural and healthy. In the 19th century, the American people were the best-educated people in the world. They were the most productive people in the world. Educated in an environment free from government coercion, they resisted the power of government and as a result built the greatest country the world has ever known.

But predators realized that in order to make more willing soldiers and loot more wealth, they needed to control children in their formative years. The younger, the better. To that end, they implemented the Prussian model of compulsory education, which was specifically designed to break apart families and engender loyalty to the state. The consequences have been catastrophic.

Because government forcibly separates children from parents at a young age, isolates them from their siblings and older friends, then locks them into regimented prison-schools, government schools cripple the natural socialization process and breed violence. If anybody but government agents did this, they would be prosecuted for kidnapping. Student violence is a reflection of the systematic violence imposed upon children by their government kidnappers.

The damage of crippled socialization lasts a lifetime. Government schools have been breaking families and spawning violence for generations, powering a cycle of violence from one damaged generation to the next. Most of the violence occurs at home — government violence has spurred domestic violence for so many generations, many mistakenly consider it natural  — and is generally ignored by society. Violence manifests in crime outside the family. Violence frequently occurs at schools in the form of bullying, fighting and sexual assault. And extremely rarely, the violence manifests in a shooting spree at school.

A 17 year old junior at a school outside of Cleveland recently shot several of his fellow students, killing three. The shooter and his broken family were victims of government schools.  It’s a huge story, but it’s just one teardrop in an ocean of violence spawned by government schools. The press blames most of the damage caused by government policies — poverty, crime, terrorism, etc. — on nebulous social issues, and government-educated Americans consistently fall for it. But government school shootings, because they are such spectacular failures of government that point directly to the root cause of most violence in America — imprisoning generations of children in government schools — force the press to rally aggressively to the defense of government. Reporters demonize shooters, their families and school administrators, and flood news outlets with vague theories covering every conceivable idea people might fall for to hide that root cause. And they always call for more government control of our lives in response to government failure.

The only way to protect children from violence at school is to take them out of government schools. Put them in private schools or home-school them. I know government taxes you to pay for schools, so you want to get some value back, and I know the government has ruined our standard of living, but government schools are damaging your children. They crush the natural joy of learning. They will be damaged for life. And if we want to end not only school shootings but most of the violence in society, we should abolish all government schools. How many more people must die before we end this abominable social engineering experiment?

Mark Luedtke is an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Cincinnati and currently works for a Dayton attorney. He can be reached at MarkLuedtke@DaytonCityPaper.com.

by Mark Luedtke

For six months, many internet users were monitoring and informing everybody they could reach about SOPA and PIPA. The Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) was a draconian House bill that would have given the feds terrible powers to attack the owners of websites ostensibly to combat piracy of copyrighted material. PIPA was the Senate version.

Despite this overwhelmingly negative response from the people, both bills, pushed by giant movie and record corporations, were smoothly sailing to become law. These plutocrats paid big money to Congress-crooks to purchase this legislation. Then a funny thing happened: internet giants revolted. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and dozens of other popular websites blacked themselves out, informed visitors of the dangers of SOPA and PIPA and provided contact information for Representatives. Concerned citizens crashed the email and phone services in the Capitol, and by the end of the day, both bills were dead. The upstart rebels feel flush with power after destroying the copyright Death Star.

But the empire will strike back. Government hates free speech for good reason. As Murray Rothbard explained in Anatomyof the State, “The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively ‘peaceful’ the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society … The State has never been created by a ‘social contract’; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation. There are only two ways to obtain wealth; through production or predation. The government doesn’t want the people to realize it’s a predatory institution – a super-mafia – and can never be anything else.”

You can find Rothbard’s essay, others like it and entire books on economics and liberty for free at mises.org. This is unprecedented in history. Because the internet provides unlimited access to this kind of free information, governments have been working overtime to seize control over it since it was created. Last year the US Congress entertained multiple bills to seize control of the internet including one giving the president a kill switch to arbitrarily shut down the internet under the guise of national security. As Mac Salvo wrote, “SOPA was an attempt to put the power of information back in the hands of an elite few who are rapidly losing the ability to control what the masses are reading, hearing and seeing. Alternative news and ‘extremist’ information was the target (and still is).”

But even as the rebels were destroying the Death Star in Washington, the empire reached around the world to Hong Kong and New Zealand and snuffed out Megaupload Limited, claiming it was dedicated to copyright infringement, and arrested its owner. The data of customers of megaupload.com remains in limbo. This would be like the government shutting down a bank and seizing all the bank accounts because it claimed that criminals sometimes saved money there. Your money may or may not be lost.

This police state attack in the name of copyright enforcement was clearly intended as a threat. Government is using copyright as an excuse to shut down speech it doesn’t like and to intimidate internet companies. Government is god over corporations. It creates them, destroys them and raises them from the dead with the stroke of a pen. You can bet Google and Facebook will think twice before organizing their customers against government’s agenda again.

Corrupt Chris Dodd, the senator from Countrywide turned chief lobbyist for the Hollywood plutocrats, hinted at the empire’s revenge, “It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [these sites] for information and use their services,” Dodd wrote. “It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.” Congress will force the executives of these companies into Congressional show trials to demonize them soon. Then the empire will pass something much like SOPA either quietly or in a fervor related to some phony national security concern.

But Americans shouldn’t be surprised that the government uses copyright to quash speech it doesn’t like. The purpose of copyright from its inception was to give governments control over information. Copyright is not a grant of rights as supporters pretend. It’s a grant of monopoly privilege that makes the producer’s profits beholden to the government. Copyright is a ban on everybody else from sharing information. The same is true for patents and all so-called intellectual property (IP). Government doesn’t fight monopolies. It creates them to control producers.

Copying is not stealing. If you took my bicycle, I wouldn’t have a bicycle anymore. That’s stealing. But if you copy my article, I still have my copy. That’s not stealing. Contrary to the assertion in the forum center, piracy doesn’t cost anything. IP costs consumers billions every year by transferring wealth from consumers to producers, and by hindering the exchange of ideas, impedes the advance of civilization. IP is corporate welfare for the purpose of corporate control.

People are using the internet to expose the fraud of government, and those predatory dinosaurs will do everything in their power to stop them. Fortunately smart people are designing a decentralized internet that can resist government control.

Mark Luedtke is an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Cincinnati and currently works for a Dayton attorney. He can be reached at MarkLuedtke@DaytonCityPaper.com.

Museum Engages More Visitors, More Personally

By Mark Luedtke

2011 was a busy year at the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery, one of the premier interactive museums of nature and natural history in the world. Sound boring? It’s not. Colorful and engaging, Boonshoft has about as much in common with the static natural history museums of the author’s childhood as an iPhone has with a cup and string. Odyssey the Otter greets visitors outside the door, signaling they will have fun inside. Inside, the museum is part exhibition, part study environment and part playhouse.

Odyssey is modeled after the otters exhibited in the museum’s zoo, accredited in 2011. A romp of playful otters entertains children and adults all day. Despite the small area used, the zoo has a surprising number of exhibits and, unlike other zoos, compatible animals are grouped together in the same display areas. Visitors have to observe and think to identify different species, and the interactions of the species make for a more interesting dynamic than a normal zoo.

The Sun Room opened in spring of 2011 and features live images of the sun taken with the heliostat mounted on the museum’s roof. The Sun Room also contains a cloud chamber, which illustrates how cosmic rays seed clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere. It also offers numerous interactive stations that allow visitors to identify subjects they want to know more about and then study them on the spot. Enhancing these self-directed learning stations is a focus of all the upgrades at Boonshoft.

Museum personnel also upgraded the Tree House, an indoor/outdoor exhibit overlooking the woods on the grounds. Staff added heating and air conditioning to the quiet overlook, and they are installing interactive stations for visitors to engage.

The museum added another permanent exhibit called Splash, which teaches visitors about water resources and use in the Miami Valley. The NOAA-funded Science on a Sphere is new too. Explorer’s Crossing added Cassano’s pizza kitchen, a deli and a grocery to teach fractions, money and business.

The museum also added an accredited preschool. Diane Farrell, Vice President of External Relations, wishes her children had had such a cool opportunity, “It is incredible! I would have given anything for my children to attend school each day with access to the assets of the museum. The preschool offers a truly unique learning environment that is designed to meet the special needs of children ages 3 to 6. With a strong emphasis on science, art and practical life skills, the preschool program offers a supportive structure that includes access to the tools children need to develop a healthy curiosity, as well as the skills to explore topics that pique their interest.”

This hard work paid off. The museum set records for attendance and revenue last year. And not just for children. Farrell reports, “The museum saw an increase in the adult to child ratio in attendance, and a corresponding 19% increase in revenue from paid admissions. This may be most attributable to the number of families who visit together, as well as the introduction of exhibits that appeal to adults. Exhibits such as Science On a Sphere, the Sun Room, and even the Discovery Zoo have proved to hold multi-generational appeal, capturing the interest of visitors of all ages.” Maybe Hops over the Moon and The Science of Wine helped too.

The upgrades continue in 2012. Public relations coordinator Kristy Creel announces, “As it enters its third decade, the Caryl D. Philips Space Theater at the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery is getting an infusion of new technology. Tentatively scheduled to open President’s Day weekend, ‘The Dome’ will expand traditional Planetarium and Laser Light Shows to include both full dome films and 3D educational movies.”

Boonshoft is the first institution to implement this new technology. “The 3D technology of the Christie projector is what makes this installation unique. This projection system uses a set of projectors that runs video at twice the normal frame rate, interweaving left and right eye

imagery. Known as “Active Stereo,” this method requires high-end 3D glasses with LCD shutters that blank one eye at a time, with refresh rates up to 120 Hz.” Glasses will be supplied.

Several tantalizing titles are coming soon. “Among the first films to show, Sea Monsters 3D: A Prehistoric Adventure is a 40-minute journey to Earth’s prehistoric oceans from National Geographic Cinema. Visitors will follow two Dolichorhynchops, or Dollies, through this realm as they encounter an assortment of strange and ferocious creatures that fought for survival under the seas that once covered North America. Other initial films will include: Secret Lives of Stars, Seven Wonders, One World, One Sky: Big Bird’s Adventure, and SpacePark360.” There will be a small additional fee charged for movies.

In addition NASA is funding a new exhibit for 2012 called Exo-planet Exploration. The museum will upgrade the Court House, Animal Hospital, and Recycling Center. The traveling exhibition Math Midway begins on Feb. 4.

For those considering joining Boonshoft, Farrell points out another advantage, “There are only 12 institutions in the country that maintain our same accreditations. That gives our members amazing reciprocal privileges. In essence, our members receive not only free admission to Boonshoft, Sunwatch Village and Fort Ancient, but free or reduced admission to hundreds of zoos, aquariums, science centers, children’s museums, and learning facilities around the world.” And Boonshoft is a lot of fun. Visit boonshoftmuseum.org for more information.

Reach freelance writer Mark Luedtke at MarkLuedtke@DaytonCityPaper.com.

By Mark Luedtke

Why People Advocate Socialism

In his book The New Evolution Diet, Paleolithic lifestyle pioneer Art DeVany calls humans lazy over-eaters. “We humans evolved when food was scarce and life was full of arduous physical activity. Hence, our bodies instruct us to eat everything we can lay our hands on and to exert ourselves as little as possible.” Because of the environment our ancestors evolved in, humans are genetically programmed to take the easy route whenever possible.

Proponents of socialism are experts at preying on this human weakness. Vladimir Lenin claimed, “The socialist state can only arise as a net of producing and consuming communes, which conscientiously record their production and consumption, go about their labour economically, uninterruptedly raise their labour productivity and thus attain the possibility of lowering the working day to seven or six hours or even lower.” Humans are instinctively drawn to promises of greater wealth for less, or no, work.

But history exposes this farce. Economist Gary Galles recounts the horrors of early socialist American colonies, “In Jamestown, colonists were indentured servants whose first seven years’ output was to go into a common pool. In Plymouth, all accumulated wealth was to be held in common, against colonists’ objections…. In both places, the fruits of people’s efforts went to others, with disastrous results. Sixty-six of Jamestown’s initial 104 colonists died within six months, most from famine. Only 60 out of 500 arrivals two years later survived that long. The consequences of this ‘starving time’ included cannibalism. Plymouth’s first colonists fared little better, with only about half surviving six months. Some, in desperation, sold their clothes and blankets to, or became servants of, Indians.”

Galles describes how socialism reduced the colonists to a primitive state, driven by instinct, not reason. “Shirking was so severe at Jamestown that Thomas Dale noted that much of the survivors’ time was devoted to playing rather than working, despite the threat of starvation.”

The colonies were saved by adopting free markets. “In Jamestown, each man was given three acres of land, in exchange for a lump-sum tax of two and a half barrels of corn, and communal work was limited to one month (not during planting or harvest). In addition to creating private property, this made the marginal tax rate on most of colonists’ efforts zero, turning indolence into industry. Rather than starving, they became exporters of corn to the Indians.” In Plymouth, “The change from communal- to private-property rights dramatically increased the Pilgrims’ productivity. The beginnings of that productivity led to the bounty celebrated at Plymouth’s famous 1623 Thanksgiving. And as historian Russell Kirk reported, “never again were the Pilgrims short of food.””

The history of socialism is unimaginable mass murder, starvation, torture and imprisonment. Advocates tiptoe through the mass grave of socialist history, conveniently avoiding the hundreds of millions of corpses, in hopes of cherry-picking a case that will appeal to baser human instincts. Unfortunately for the advocates, rational analysis of these examples invariably illustrates their ignorance of both economics and history. This isn’t because socialist advocates are stupid or bad messengers. The reason no socialist makes a rational case for socialism is socialism prohibits rational economic calculation.

Economic Calculation

In 1920 Ludwig von Mises, the dean of the Austrian School of Economics at that time, delivered the most devastating argument against socialism to date. In his essay entitled “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth”, Mises explained that because the value of goods can only be determined through exchange, it’s impossible to perform economic calculation in a socialist society. Mises defines socialism this way, “Under socialism all the means of production are the property of the community.” The community appoints an agent, the state, to manage all production. But since the state owns all production goods, there can be no exchange. There can be no prices. Therefore it’s impossible for its agents to rationally calculate the value of any production good.

The implications are profound. Without prices, accounting is impossible. Rational economic analysis is impossible. There is no rational means to measure whether an activity is worthwhile or not, nor to allocate resources between activities.

Mises explains, “Without economic calculation there can be no economy. Hence, in a socialist state wherein the pursuit of economic calculation is impossible, there can be–in our sense of the term–no economy whatsoever. In trivial and secondary matters rational conduct might still be possible, but in general it would be impossible to speak of rational production any more. There would be no means of determining what was rational, and hence it is obvious that production could never be directed by economic considerations.”

“For a time the remembrance of the experiences gained in a competitive economy, which has obtained for some thousands of years, may provide a check to the complete collapse of the art of economy. The older methods of procedure might be retained not because of their rationality but because they appear to be hallowed by tradition. Actually, they would meanwhile have become irrational, as no longer comporting with the new conditions.” Mises’s 1920 prediction of how production in a socialist society would evolve presciently describes the blighted landscape of primitive factories exposed after the Iron Curtain fell. Mises also predicts the ubiquitous shortages we now know are endemic to all socialist countries.

But Mises’s most profound observation is about rational behavior itself. “Rational conduct would be divorced from the very ground which is its proper domain. Would there, in fact, be any such thing as rational conduct at all, or, indeed, such a thing as rationality and logic in thought itself? Historically, human rationality is a development of economic life. Could it then obtain when divorced therefrom?” Here Mises explains the starvation of early American colonists. Prevented from performing economic calculation and isolated from any economy with prices to emulate, the colonists were stripped of their ability to make rational decisions. Thus they played instead of working. Starvation and cannibalism followed. Only when they adopted markets and were able to perform economic calculation could they become civilized and prosperous again. Even if a socialist society was ruled by super-benevolent super-geniuses, the inability to make rational economic decisions would doom it.

The Worst Rise to the Top

Of course there are no benevolent geniuses in government. As Lord Acton observed, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Since the socialist society has abolished ownership and voluntary exchange of production goods, the only way to allocate them is through violence. Land and capital must be appropriated from private owners through violence, and labor must be allocated under threat of violence backed by violence.

As Mises proved, the allocation of production resources can only be arbitrary and chaotic. Ubiquitous shortages of consumer goods cause chaos and death. Those in power must promote a strongman to protect themselves from the people. In his famous book, The Road to Serfdom, Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek explained why the worst rise to the top of the socialist state, “Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things. The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the supreme rule.”

Because socialist governments cannot meet the variety of demands of individuals, the strongman must appeal to the baser instincts of the masses. He must identify a bogeyman and motivate the masses against that bogeyman to maintain power. Hayek predicts the war, mass murder and secret police common to socialist states.

Socialism also corrupts bureaucrats because since they cannot rationally allocate production goods, they tend to allocate them for the good of themselves and their cronies.

Soft Socialism

It was obvious by 1920 that full socialism destroyed civilizations, so socialists adopted soft socialism. Lenin launched the New Economic Policy, Mussolini spawned fascism, and Hitler implemented National Socialism. Today people use the terms corporatism or crony capitalism. The defining characteristic of soft socialism is government control of the means of production through regulation while allowing nominal ownership of property similar to a capitalist system. Contrary to what socialists claim, this is not capitalism because the state controls all production through regulation.

The advantage of soft socialism is entrepreneurs can perform economic calculation. The price mechanism guides allocation of resources so the economy provides goods, albeit inefficiently, to consumers. All western countries implement soft socialism to some degree.

The problems of full socialism remain in proportion to how extensively the state interferes in the economy. Every regulation strengthens state control of production, increases the cost of production, and distorts prices and economic calculation. Regulations force producers with low margins out of business which reduces competition and further distorts prices. This causes mis-allocation of resources resulting in lower quality goods and higher prices for consumers. The greater the regulations, the worse the mis-allocation of resources and the fewer the producers. Ultimately giant corporate agents of the state dominate all markets.

Because one side of every transaction is money, states create central banks to cartelize banks and monopolize the production of money. The state empowers bankers to create money out of thin air, loan it out, and earn interest. If banks suffer losses, the central bank prints money to bail them out. In return, the banks buy government debt. Every time the central bank prints money, it transfers wealth from those who didn’t receive the new money to those who did.

Governments still cannot perform economic calculation because they don’t engage in voluntary exchange. That corrupts bureaucrats. The worst still rise to the top. As a result, states and their corporate agents enrich those in power by looting those who are not. The laws of economics dictate it can never be any other way.

Decades of massive socialist inflation, regulation, institutionalized theft and corruption, especially in the US, caused the economic crisis of 2008 and the recession that still plagues the world, but proponents of socialism always call for more socialism to correct the problems caused by the current level of socialism.

The Myth of Good Socialist Governments

Socialist advocates often point to Canada as an example of a good socialist country because they fail to understand why the Canadians are doing relatively well. The major reason is Canadians dramatically reduced government spending and regulation during the 1990s. Economist David Lee recounts, “Under the joint leadership of Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Finance Minister Paul Martin, Canada underwent one of the most fiscally responsible periods in its history. … Following a peak deficit of $42 billion in fiscal 1993–1994, the administration managed to reverse the deficit and produce a surplus by 1997–1998, and sustain the surplus over the following two years before posting a historical record of $17.1 billion in budgetary surplus in fiscal 2000–2001.”

Socialist advocates typically ignore the ubiquitous shortages produced by socialized medicine in Canada. Economist Thomas DiLorenzo informs, “All countries that have adopted socialized healthcare have suffered from the disease of price-control-induced shortages. If a Canadian, for instance, suffers third-degree burns in an automobile crash and is in need of reconstructive plastic surgery, the average waiting time for treatment is more than 19 weeks, or nearly five months. The waiting time for orthopaedic surgery is also almost five months; for neurosurgery it’s three full months; and it is even more than a month for heart surgery (see The Fraser Institute publication, Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada). That’s why so many Canadians come to the US for medical care.

Proponents of socialism also frequently point to Sweden as an example of a socialist paradise, but the reality is similar to Canada. Reason magazine reports, “[Economist Andreas] Bergh says that despite popular mythology, Sweden is not a socialist success story but instead owes its economic growth to the lowered tax rates and deregulation of the early 1990s, which allowed innovation and investment to flourish. Bergh also … warns that Americans who are hoping to emulate Swedish success by growing the public sector are learning the wrong lessons from Sweden.”

Economist Per Bylund adds, “Since the mid-1990′s Sweden has had only balanced budgets and even reduced the national debt from just over 80% to under 40% of GDP. The welfare system has also, slowly and step by step so that people would not notice the change, been restructured through adding incentives for people to choose productive labor instead of welfare checks. Many welfare programs have also been changed from the previous never-ending subsidization of laziness to provide limited time only support while adjusting to changes in the market.” It’s ironic that as Swedes and Canadians benefit from moving toward capitalism, socialists point to those countries as models for socialism.

Why Not Capitalism?

Socialism is government control of the means of production. It’s also institutionalized theft. By any objective measure, the US is one of the most socialist governments in the developed world. The federal government seizes nearly $4 trillion in resources from the people every year. It is $15 trillion in debt. That’s not counting state and local governments. No other country comes close.

What resources US governments don’t seize directly, they control through regulation. In 2010, the Federal Register contained 81,405 pages of regulations. Regulators add thousands of pages every year. DiLorenzo adds, “On top of all of this, state and local governments have literally thousands of regulatory agencies and commissions that regulate everything from allergies to zoos. … Then there’s the [Federal Reserve]. In addition to attempting to fix prices (interest rates) and causing perpetual boom-and-bust cycles with its monetary manipulation, the Fed performs dozens of regulatory functions.” The regulatory functions listed are too numerous to print.

US governments gained control of the means of production by corporatizing every sector of the economy via regulation. They have institutionalized theft on a scale unprecedented in history. This socialism is the root of America’s economic problems.

So why not capitalism? Capitalism is an economy without government intervention. Neither politicians nor producers can use government coercion to loot the people. The only way for producers to profit is to satisfy consumers. They continually innovate or go bankrupt. That’s why everywhere in the world economic freedom increases, the standard of living increases, and everywhere economic freedom decreases, the standard of living decreases. There are no exceptions.

For centuries the US was largely a capitalist country. Taxes and regulations were low. There was no central bank. Capitalism empowered Americans to create the greatest country the world has ever known. Unprecedented capital accumulation during that time is why the US remains relatively wealthy despite a century of socialist advance. But now nearly all production in the US is controlled by the state for the benefit of those in power. Meanwhile, other countries, including China, have moved towards capitalism. As a result, the stagnant US economy is rapidly being overtaken.

But as those early colonists learned, overcoming the instinctual appeal of socialism is nearly impossible. Americans continue to expand the socialist state, and other than those with access to the levers of power, Americans suffer more for it every day,

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can chose reason over animal instincts. We can choose cooperation over violence. We can choose compassion over barbarism. If the Canadians, Swedes and Chinese can move toward capitalism and enjoy tremendous benefits, Americans can do the same, but better. If America is to return to a trajectory of greatness, Americans must re-adopt capitalism. Now.

Printable pamphlet informing people of the health and privacy dangers and their rights regarding the nude-scanners at airports.

The reason high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) poisons pretty much every food on the grocery counter is the feed corn subsidy at the top. Feed corn is used to fatten livestock before it’s sold to market. HFCS is the highly purified fattener that’s in every processed food we eat. Is it any wonder Americans are suffering from obesity and diabetes? But the corn lobby pays a tremendous amount of tribute to the aristocrats in Washington, so the aristocrats send them our tax dollars to produce the poison they put in our food supply. In a free country, HFCS wouldn’t exist because it would be expensive to produce and nobody would voluntarily pay the extra health care costs.

Three out of the top four subsides are for grains. The aristocrats steal our money from us at the point of a gun, give our tax dollars to grain farmers, and they use our money to flood the airwaves with commercials about how healthy grain are for us. It’s a lie. Grains are toxic to humans. They increase insulin resistance, leading to diabetes. They cause mineral deficiencies. They puncture our intestinal lining. They’ve been implicated in numerous diseases from asthma to the new digestive diseases nobody ever heard of 20 years ago. And whole grains are worse because they contain more toxins and indigestible material. In a free country, people would eat a lot less grain because it would be more expensive, and they would be a lot healthier because of it.

Government also subsidizes sugar, and we all know how unhealthy sugar is.

Vegetable oils are also unhealthy for us, so government subsidizes them too. Natural fats are healthy, healing fats.

And of course the government steals money from us and gives it to tobacco producers too. Phillip Morris, the giant cigarette company created by the regulations and subsidies from the aristocrats, is laughing all the way to the bank with our tax dollars.

Without government interference, farmers and consumers would reshape our food supply in a cooperative system of voluntary exchange to be much healthier. Of course all subsidies are theft and should be abolished, but they’re part and parcel of the nature of government. Government exists to enrich and empower the aristocrats and their cronies at our expense. Aristocrats are gods to corporations, and corporations are their servants. They can strike them down with the stroke of a pen and raise them from the dead. Think Lehman Brothers and AIG. Anybody who thinks government works in our interest is a fool most likely educated at the point of the government’s gun in government schools.