I have posted on political ideology being correlated with happiness. A story in the economist has this to say.

In 2004 Americans who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” were nearly twice as likely to tell pollsters they were “very happy” as those who considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” (44% versus 25%). One might think this was because liberals were made wretched by George Bush. But the data show that American conservatives have been consistently happier than liberals for at least 35 years.

Perhaps more interesting though is the explanation one ‘expert’ gives:

Why should this be so? Mr Brooks proposes that whatever their repective merits, the conservative world view is more conducive to happiness than the liberal one (in the American sense of both words). American conservatives tend to believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed. This makes them more optimistic than liberals, more likely to feel in control of their lives and therefore happier. American liberals, at their most pessimistic, stress the injustice of the economic system, the crushing impersonal forces that keep the little guy down and what David Mamet, a playwright, recently summed up as the belief that “everything is always wrong”. Emphasising victimhood was noble during the 1950s and 1960s, says Mr Brooks. By overturning Jim Crow laws, liberals gave the victims of foul injustice greater control over their lives. But in as much as the American left is now a coalition of groups that define themselves as the victims of social and economic forces, and in as much as its leaders encourage people to feel helpless and aggrieved, he thinks they make America a glummer place.

I actually think there is a great deal of merit to this. It seems to me that regardless of humans actually being determined, we have been biologically wired to operate optimally in a free will frame of mind. Those that have experiences that push towards determinism can generate resentment and a general unhappiness. I speak from personal experience in this regard. Having been continually rejected from prestigious graduate programs for a score on a standardized test that I can’t control has made me angry, bitter and unhappy. A large reason for my anger is my perception that I can’t control whether I get into these prestigious programs.

When you consider how other governments and economic systems work it becomes more clear just how important it is to design systems that sync with our biological need to perceive choice. Communism failed because it takes to much perception of volition from it’s people. Socialism’s failures most likely can be traced back to the same problem. Monarchies, despots, oligarchies, they all exceed a threshold in causing it’s people to perceive determinism in the outcome of their actions. Free markets and democracies on the other hand, to the extent that a state entity can facilitate the perception of volition, do the best job of doing so. Democracies give citizen a choice in what kind of laws should be applied to themselves while free markets gives consumers the maximal choice in determining what material things to populate their world with. Such choices bring about perception in volition and in turn allow our biology to run optimally.

I actually think the assertion that the biology of man is performs optimally in a free market democracy is a testable hypothesis. That is to say, one can probably show higher incidents of biological inefficiency in people living in a non-democracy. Along these lines, one could then make an argument that policy which reduces choice and increases determinism leads to institutional operation comes out of sync with our biological makeup. Passing universal health care at the federal level would push the citizenry’s perception of health care outcomes as being even more deterministic. Over time this would breed resentment and unhappiness as people biology operates in efficiently in a overly deterministic system.

Better to minimize federal policy. By its very nature it must violate human biology.

Venezuela has been going down the road of socialism for a while. This will only make things worse.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is planning a government takeover of his country’s cement industry, his latest effort to impose state control over key sectors of an economy battered by shortages and inflation.

I have absolutely no doubt that government will make this all better. It always does.

can do to a country.

Once the breadbasket of southern Africa, Zimbabwe now needs to import maize. The U.N. agricultural production index for Zimbabwe fell from nearly 107 in 2000 to just over 74 in 2005.

Exports of goods and services as a percentage of GDP averaged 33.5 percent in 1997-2001. UBS forecast this would decline to 9.9 percent in 2007

Lets all hope that the citizens of Zimbabwe vote out the current socialist Mugabe, err, I mean that this magical variable that has ruined the country will leave shortly.

I feel there is a much truth to this characterization.

Environmentalism has become the political lifeboat into which the survivors of the socialist shipwreck have crammed themselves. The need to “manage the climate” became the new foundation on which to base regulatory structures, impositions, and taxes which were formerly justified by the imperative to manage the “commanding heights of the economy.” Kyoto was the highest expression of the program to “manage the climate” and provided the same new basis for socialistic policies that Marxism once did. As such, Kyoto was too politically useful to discard. But like its socialist predecessor it suffered from the problem that it wouldn’t work. That weakness would be artfully concealed by superseding it with a successor agreement to be drafted in Bali. But delegates who came to Indonesia already knew that Kyoto’s key weakness was mandating “carbon emission” reductions. Reducing “carbon emissions” really meant reducing economic output in a world where poverty is a major problem.

Converting from democracy to socialism or tyranny to democracy. Unsurprisingly converting to democracy comes out ahead.

Iraq’s and Venezuela’s populations are roughly comparable: 27.5 million versus 27.7 million. In the last three months, there have been 1498 civilian fatalities in Iraq. During this same time, roughly 3000 Venezuelans have been murdered.

For the last three months of 2007, a Venezuelan was twice as likely to lose his life to violence as an Iraqi. It looks like its time for Hugo to put more attention on his abysmal security situation and less attention on Hollywood.

It almost like people don’t want to kill you when you want to give them rights and freedom. For some reason they do when you want to take them away. I realize this common sense is to general for the subtle nuance of most of my readers but it’s nice to see a rough comparison yield data supporting the obvious.

Alan Krueger, a professor of economics, makes an observation about terrorism.

One set of factors that I examined did consis­tently raise the likelihood that people from a given country will participate in terrorism—namely, the suppression of civil liberties and political rights, including freedom of the press, the freedom to assemble, and democratic rights. Using data from the Freedom House Index, for example, I found that countries with low levels of civil liberties are more likely to be the countries of origin of the perpetra­tors of terrorist attacks. In addition, terrorists tend to attack nearby targets. Even international terror­ism tends to be motivated by local concerns.

So let me get this straight. Those willing to shed other’s blood are less likely to do so when the state they find themselves in respects liberal values. Some of my readers have led me to believe that liberal values hold the same propensity for violence as do other values. Huh. So it turns out that liberal values reduce a citizens willingness to commit violence.

Incidentally this piece is about how poverty is not a very good predictor of terrorism. Even though he has much empirical data, you can color me skeptical. I would like to see how poverty and terrorism was calculated in the studies showing no correlation.

The author notes:

Additional support for these conclusions comes from research I conducted on the nationalities of foreign insurgents in Iraq. Specifically, I studied 311 combatants, representing 27 countries, who were captured in Iraq. Although the vast majority of insurgents are native Iraqis, motivated by domestic issues, foreigners are alleged to have been involved in several significant attacks. I looked at the char­acteristics of the countries insurgents came from, and, importantly, of the countries with no citizens captured in Iraq. It turned out that countries with a higher GDP per capita were actually more likely to have their citizens involved in the insurgency than were poorer countries.

While it’s true that Saudi Arabia has high GDP it not entirely clear how well distributed that wealth is among the citizens. If I had to guess, given that Saudi Arabia is a Monarchy (The old fashion term for socialism) wealth distribution must not be very great. If the other studies that show no correlation between terrorism and poverty are based on GDP I would argue thats the reason.

The author embraces the notion that liberal values reduces terrorism. However, invariably, liberal values lead to wealthier nations which should have improved wealth distribution. I wonder if studies have been done to see if there is a correlation between wealth and liberal values. The data would probably show a relationship giving indirect evidence for poverty at least partly playing a role in terrorism.

One final thing of interest. The author states:

Support turned out to be stronger among those with a higher level of education. For exam­ple, while 26 percent of illiterates and 18 per­cent of those with only an elementary education opposed or strongly opposed armed attacks, the figure for those with a high school education was just 12 percent. The least supportive group turned out to be the unemployed, 74 percent of whom said they support or strongly back armed attacks. By comparison, the support level for merchants and professionals was 87 percent.

This has been my experience working in Academy. So called educated people are really good at apologizing for human butchers. It’s even present on my blog when the most educated of my readers refuse to agree to the proposition that on the whole killing innocent people is a bad thing. Its interesting that the more educated one becomes the less able they are to discern between good and bad. No doubt this is because such thinking is heavily vilified for its lack of nuance. This leads to perverse outcomes like supporting those that intentionally kill innocent civilians and advocating for presidents of oppressive regimes killing our soldiers be allowed to speak.

There is wisdom in good and bad. One must be wise in how it’s used.

Even this extremely lame flash animation understands that socialism revolutions must destroy.

Dan responds incompetently to my remarks on socialism:

So it’s okay to gun civilians down, as long as you are doing it in the name of an unpopular war. Gotcha

How do you want me to respond to that? It bares no resemblance to what I said. If I were to assert that I like apples you would respond with incoherently claiming I say its okay to like things that are red.

I don’t see how this helps you. No change in government will make everyone happy.

My argument was actually:

First many socialisms have started with this kind of barbarism. Arguably it’s a requirement since socialism raises the ire of those that embrace classic liberal values.

My argument is that socialism requires this kind of barbarism as a means to eliminate the dissenting liberals. You aim to eliminate that distinction by arguing, extremely poorly, that every single revolution has masked men going around murdering dissenters. Bizarrely your fictional example fails to illustrate your point. Your friend’s ancestor was not even murdered by masked men sympathetic to the regime.

To prove you wrong I only need to mention one revolution in which masked men did not go around killing dissenters. The first one that comes to my mind is the Russian revolution of 1989. Of course this was the revolution that resulted in the dismantling of socialist values to be replaced with what else but liberal values.

I have easily shown you poor argument to be wrong. Some revolutions do not involve bloodshed while others do. This prompts the following question. Since we know that some revolutions do not require bloodshed can we show a correlation between the revolutionary ideology and the amount of bloodshed? Since you are all about taking things out of context we need to be very careful with out language here. There is no doubt that liberal revolutions have resulted in bloodshed. The question becomes is there a higher amount of bloodshed associated with socialistic revolutions when compared to a liberal revolutions?

Pretty clearly the answer is yes. Really I don’t think it matters how you measure the death but sure as the sun will come up socialistic revolutions will always result in more bloodshed then liberal revolutions. More to the point; I would argue that all actual revolutions of a socialism ideology must result in bloodshed.

Why should this be? This answer should be obvious. Liberal values hold in highest esteem the right to property. People are allowed to own things. Socialism bans private property. People are not allowed to have things. Now I don’t know if you noticed but people are really partial to their things. A very easy way to get someone to punch you is by taking their stuff from them.

Now if your ideology is in the business of redistribution you have the very real problem of having to forcibly take wealth away from people that will kill to stop you. Thus socialism must get very violent very quickly it it’s going to implement it’s ideology. Until socialists figure out a way to get people to not like owning things implementation of their ideology will require bloodshed. It is a necessary requirement.

Just for fun let’s look at a liberal revolution. It says you now enjoy legal protections on the stuff you own. Furthermore, state actions are now going to be determined by every single person that is directly affected by its actions through vote. Plus everyone gets a standard set of rights that the state is forbidden from interfering with. A proper liberal revolution gives these rights to everyone including the people running the current regime reducing even further the likelihood that bloodshed will result.

Oh I’m afraid your wrong. You are wrong on a very basic and profound level. By definition socialistic revolutions must kill people. Liberal revolutions do not need to kill people and the is very often the case.

What do you think those Venezuelan dissenters are protesting? That they don’t like the tie Hugo Chavez wore last week? They are protesting having the socialistic revolution take away their liberal rights putatively for the good of all. People will die safeguarding their liberal rights and this is most assuredly a fate Hugo Chavez’s socialism has chosen for them. A decision you have incompetently argued in favor of.

A recent post mocked socialisms use of barbaric methods to oppress liberal protesters. For reason beyond me Darwin responds with:

More deaths than Kent State… I guess that means we’re better?

Dan has an equally asinine response:

Injury of protesters by police is hardly exclusive to socialist countries.

So it’s unclear as to what your point is? That our government is no better than Venezuela’s? Neither of you could be that naive. The most charitable interpretation of your position is that masked men shooting at anti-Chavez protesters reveals nothing about socialism.

This seems to be a strange argument for two reasons.

First many socialisms have started with this kind of barbarism. Arguably it’s a requirement since socialism raises the ire of those that embrace classic liberal values. For socialism to become the prevailing political/economic power structure it must first oppress classic liberals.

The second reason is that if you consider the broader political context of Venezuela you can easily see that this incident fits nicely into the progressive push Chavez has been on to turn his country into a socialism. The Kent state massacre can not be understood in the context of the Nixon administration attempting to install a socialism in America.

This is much more analysis then necessary. This post was simply intended to point out how Chavez’s attempt to fully socialize Venezuela is slipping into a tyranny. Instead of arguing against this obvious observation why not join me in mocking what it means? On some level one can’t help but think you are sympathetic to Chavez’s action given your antagonism of my derision towards the use of power to oppress classic liberal virtues.

Once and for all settle this ambiguity. Do you support classic liberal values or socialistic values?

I suspect you both support classic liberal values so why not defend liberalism rather than socialism?

Gunmen opened fire on students returning from a march Wednesday in which 80,000 people denounced President Hugo Chavez’s attempts to expand his power. At least eight people were injured, including one by gunfire, officials said.

Nothing like redistributing the wealth with bullets.