New Year's Eve.

Well, I spend half a day not getting much done, mostly because I'd just changed projects in midstream and the hardware wasn't allocated and I had no idea what the new parameters were, so just getting my head on took most of the morning. At one point, I had nine test boxes under my jurisdiction, manage to get three of them into an unuseable configuration at which point testing took them away from me. Good, then I don't have to rebuild them by hand, a task that involves cracking them open and stuff. Instead, I drove home to give Omaha a ride to her meeting and then Kouryou-chan and I went home.

She practiced a little on her new bicycle before getting scared of it, then went over to the neighbor's yard and played with the children there. Omaha made it home and we all had a brief nap, then headed over to j5nn5r and Desirae's place for a quiet New Year's Eve celebration.

Dinner was chili and all sorts of snacks. The kids were allowed to watch Charlotte's Web, and then the young ones were put to bed, although the youngest was apparently a terror and didn't want to. Kouryou-chan fell asleep immediately and was a rock the rest of the night.

The adults stayed up and chatted, passing around the champagne at midnight. I tried the Bacardi Razzberry malt beverage, it was pretty good. Most of the crowd got into the hot tub but I wasn't feeling up to it and when I'm feeling that way hot tubs tend to make me nauseous. Instead, I sat in the living room with the eldest child, an eleven-year old, who played Galaga on her GameBoy. "That's not Galaga," I snorted. "This is Galaga", and I popped in my MAME CD on my laptop and pulled up an authentic 1982 Galaga ROM. She thought that was cool.

Eventually, she was shuffled off to bed and the adults sat around watching "XXX", the Vin Diesel spy caper flick, which was a fun exercise in vicarious testosterone, and then Omaha and I went to bed on some floor we'd pulled up. Good thing we brought our sleeping bags.

In the morning, we had scrambled eggs and powerful coffee, then took the kids out to the park for an hour or so until the sun disappeared, then went home and looked blah at each other for the rest of the day.

The Tsunami and "Public Relief"

George Dvorsky at Sentient Development, a socialist-transhumanist blog, is absolutely livid because David Holcberg over at the Ayn Rand institute makes the claim that "The U.S. should not help the tsunami victims" [sic George Dvorsky].

Well, I hate to say it, George, but you're wrong, you did not respond to David's argument with a principled response, and David is right. David was sloppy, but you should be able to distinguish between sloppy and evil. You want David to be evil.

Do you know the difference between a nation and a country? A country is a geographic region administered by a government; a nation is a collective of people with a shared history and identity. The government of the United States raises money by taxation; it is not the executive branch's to give out without congressional authorization, and the $350 million allocated is not within our budgetary limits. Every dollar the U.S. Government gives to alleviate the tsunami victim's suffering is coming out of a deficiet, and our children and our children's children will be paying that debt. And the argument that our debt is in the trillions, what's a few tenths of a percentage more here or there, won't wash: it is this attitude that got us here in the first place.

A government cannot also give charitably. Individuals can, but governments must only give foreign aid as a matter of policy and to acheive foreign objectives. A government is not an individual; it cannot "feel," and it cannot, as a matter of course, claim to know the charity in the hearts of its citizens.

George ends with a comment, trying to shame the U.S. (government) by pointing out that if our government gave as much as the Canadian government, the U.S. would have to shell out $800 million to seem equitably charitable.

Well, I guarantee you that after you add up all of the private contributions by private individuals, the U.S. will still come out even or even ahead of most other nations in the amount of long-term aid rendered to the victims of tsunamis. I have no doubt that some of that aid is targetted-- along with food, get some Christian or Moslem lecturing-- but that's no worse than the U.S. expecting its quid-pro-quo for its "charity." And much of it, having gone around government channels, will be more efficient and more useful.

A country cannot give charitably; a nation, expressed by individual actions in concert, can, does, and will, as only the U.S. can, does, and will. It's a shame that too many people look to one and only one institution to "save us from ourselves."

"People want the government to help them make moral decisions."

Hot on the heels of my article from last night, The Tsunami and "Public Relief", I heard this morning an interview with several people about the obvious dichotomy between the 37% of Americans who view themselves as Evangelical Christians and the 39% of American households which watch Desperate Housewives. The programming director at CBS says there's an obvious overlap between these two groups of people, and also that the show is more popular in those states that had high "moral values" turnouts at the last election. And one of the quotes that a spokesman for the Evangelicals said is, "Well, people understand there's a difference between what they say and what they do. And they frequently want the government's help to be more moral."

Government cannot help you "be more moral."

Being moral and Choosing a moral act are two different things, and they depend mostly on one's tolerance for hipocrisy. Choosing a moral act is what one does in a free society; given an opportunity to do wrong, people nonetheless choose to do right. In the United States, more than any country in the world, we are given these opportunities again and again and, more often than not, we make moral choices. We choose not to steal from our employer, or cheat on our spouses, or lie to our friends. Almost every choice is value-laden, and we often make those choices unconsiously. We are being moral, and if we fail, I don't take that as a horrible mistake; the ocassional failure to live up to one's values is sign that values are hard to live up to. If we never violate our principles, can we really claim to have any?

Every penalty for making "an immoral choice" reduces the freedom one has to make that choice; the more grevious the penalty, the less freedom one has to choose. When you back up the penalty with the force of arms, you have no freedom. To ask for the government's "help to be moral" is to ask for your (and your neighbor's) freedoms to be limited by force of arms. When talking about censorship, as we are in the matter of the FCC, the loss is absolute; since we are forbidden from seeing the material being censored, we cannot make rational or moral choices about it.

Countries that are under theocratic rule often claim that their citizenry is "more moral" than that of the United States, but they have it backwards. We do not live under threat of violence if we make poor choices, yet we do not make poor choices very often. In fact, the freedom to err contributes to our dynamic and vibrant culture.

If the FCC is coerced into reining in the airwaves even further, we will cease to have freedom, and will be subjects of the government's power. That is not for what the Constitution of the United States was written.