Another Average Joe Clueless joins the "Stack"

At the writing of this post, few people who don't know me personally are familiar with my blog, I'm just hoping to get off the ground, so it wouldn't be fair to guess what people might expect ME to think regarding the actions of the disgruntled freelance engineer who flew his small private plane into the Austin, TX IRS building this morning, having posted a rant to his domain prior explaining it as a desperate exclamation point on 3 decades of a fruitless battle against the federal tax system and other large-government antics. But, I can say with relative certainty that people would expect those with strong anti-governmental sentiment to think Joseph Andrew Stack was some kind of hero or martyr for their cause, or at best a victim deserving sympathy; and from what little research I've had time to do, a wave of statements applauding his actions has already swept the internet. However, as usual, with commitment to scientific analysis as opposed to moral judgment, my opinion is that Joseph Andrew Stack was an idiot and a deeply psychiatrically disturbed man, and no educated opponent of excessive government should take him seriously.

Having read his diatribe as soon as I learned of it being available on the internet, I saw in him exactly the kind of disgruntled and partially informed (but unable to process the information) sentiment that tends to fuel overregulation, this man simply turned out emotionally unstable enough to take things to this ridiculous extreme. To make things very clear, his action does not qualify as "rebellion of the hungry," not by a long shot. The details of his financial situation have not been released, and it will probably be months before we learn them completely. But looking at the information available; a guy who owns a house that he is able to set on fire, a domain to post his suicide note to for the world to see, and a private plane to fly into the side of a building does NOT qualify as "hungry" in this sense. Sure, his retirement accounts had apparently fallen victim to economic uncertainty, and sure he'd fought a losing battle with the IRS for decades and now it appears they were about to strike a critical blow. But a simple look at the US Department of Labor website reveals that 100,000s of American families are suffering from similar situations and many of them blame the government or other status quo institutions, yet even the most hysteria-peddling media outlets agreed today that we need not worry about 2 dozen similar kamikaze attacks occurring in the next 2 weeks. Why is this the case? Because foreclosures, bankruptcies, depleted IRA accounts, unemployment lines, and the proverbial cheese sandwich replacing your daily steak and lobster dinners, while certainly anger-inspiring, are NOT motivation enough for people to take whatever weapon is available and go bludgeon the government with it in any kind of mass revolution. The temptation might be there for some fraction of them, but they love their families, they love the small things in life they still have left to enjoy, and going out in a blaze of glory a la Joe Stack cannot outweigh these reasons for living. There is an historical reason that is often overlooked for the trend of real challenges to government monopolies on force being very low-tech, but it is self-explanatory that for large enough groups of people to take to militant, violent opposition that honestly threatens the government, things have to be bad enough in an economic sense that they are lucky to have outdated and illegally acquired firearms rather than their pots and farm machinery for weapons. The fact that the guy who took this route had a private plane in his possession to do it with shows that while the economy is no doubt in the toilet and the government is responsible, things are still not REMOTELY bad enough for the angry upheaval and chaos many have predicted. All of you advocating violent revolution or at the very least saying that if A, B or C don't happen it is a likely scenario are simply ignorant of history. What we consider poverty in the US is looked upon as wealth in 2/3 of the world, and while the Joe Stacks of the US buy into our sense of entitlement to the point of seeing their lives as not worth living without our idea of wealth, most of us are still in touch with our animal nature and will not take on this kill-or-be-killed mindset until we are LITERALLY being killed.

Now then, onto analysis of specific claims made by the late Mr. Stack, and why they hardly represent scientific anti-governmentalism. First of all, 2/3 of his diatribe focuses on the federal government and its corrupt, inefficient, self-serving nature. While I have a hard time believing this is all some well-planned organized conspiracy, Joe would get no argument from me regarding any of those accusations. However, again, judging from things included in the suicide note, Joe has been engaged in legal battles against this system since the early 1980s. So, you'd think that by his mid-50s, a seemingly educated man already familiar with how the system works would be mature enough to accept it. No one says he had to like it, most of us don't for one reason or another. But the impression he gives in the note was that he felt the government repeatedly robbed him of everything he earned. If you were familiar with the tax code and the impossibility of changing it by the time you were 30, Joe, why didn't you adjust your personal business practices to avoid being bankrupted by the age of 53? You were obviously no poor man living paycheck-to-paycheck if you claim your work depended so heavily on travel that 9/11 put a huge dent in your income, most freelancers cannot afford regular airline flights for work. So, if your operation was large enough, why didn't you take the necessary precautions for the possibility of such changes? His laundry-list of victimizing events goes on and on: the .COM bomb in the 1990s, the recent housing crisis, the bank bailout. As a man choosing to work as a freelancer in this economic system which is admittedly not very freelancer-friendly, you would think that in 30+ years Joe would have gotten it through his head that instability and uncertainty are givens and need to be prepared for, even if you feel this is unfair. Rebelling against these things by refusing to take them into consideration and then blaming the world when it catches up with you is a bit like rebelling against gravity by jumping off a skycraper and then claiming the Earth was responsible for your death. Joe was nothing but a professional victim, a rebel without a clue on par with teenage college kids who are pretty well-endowed at identifying the problem, but think that living as if it does not apply to them will somehow fix it and then blaming it when this comes back to bite them in the ass.

And for those of you who believe the Joe Stacks of the world accomplish anything, take a long look around. Do you see dozens of Sessnas flying into government office buildings? Do you see armed revolution marches in the streets that the police are afraid to take on? Do you even see the government over-reacting to his sacrifice in such an intense way that the attack on civil liberties would precipitate further rebellion? These were all things Joe Stack claimed to want to accomplish with his suicide, and he has been dead for 12 hours and the world is already starting to forget about him.

This kind of emotional but misinformed knee-jerk reaction is exactly what precipitates the problems of over-government in the Western world. The 1/100000000 Joe Stack is emotionally unstable enough to give his own life for his ignorance, but most people react to what they perceive as unfair and oppressive with semi-active political behavior that often backfires without them even knowing. This would include voting for a candidate from the opposition party they know NOTHING about simply because they don't like the incumbent, or funding large PACs and lobby organizations convinced that these special interest moguls somehow represent a cause of "freedom" or "fairness." Well-intentioned but undirected political activity is far more dangerous than non-participative apathy, but people are unhappy with the government most of the time, and it is impossible for science with its boring complexity of probabilities to compete with the emotionally charged (and laughably unattainable) promises of utopia peddled by special interests to promote their agendas. And the problem with these isn't that they're unfair or somehow morally questionable - science is not concerned with such attributes, - it is that they destroy economic and political efficiency and make society as a whole poorer, more miserable, and having to work harder for the same amount, often even for the people who first pushed them through in the long run.

One more thing I must mention is that, while it was amusing to see Fox News take a moderate stance and approach Joe Stack from a variety of perspectives in the wake of 8 years of blatant and unapologetic fearmongering hypocrisy that spun every event into an excuse for G.W. Bush's policies, while the liberal networks packaged Joe Stack into wholesale boxes of hysteria and handed him out to people free of charge, calling him a "terrorist" and pointing out the danger of today's economic situation and the need for "swift government solutions" lest more of this happen: everyone saying that this is an indication that anything about the media has changed is another example of dangerous ignorance. Incumbent parties (not just for presidency but the legislature) and their mainstream media pets, particularly in times when the incumbents' popularity is steadily declining, have a noted tendency to spread fear in hopes of garnering at least some short-term support, while major coalitions holding a minority tend to reach out to swing voters and those who may see them as the current "lesser evil," only to betray them for their hardline policies once they've regained the majority. While law enforcement officials are typically not among my most respected professions, the Austin Police Chief earned quite a bit of respect from me when he admonished the mainstream media for "irresponsible journalism" in regard to spreading a sea of speculations about Joe Stack before he was even confirmed as the pilot. For once, John Q. Public can learn from a bureaucrat that is the target of most its criticism the importance of checking facts before they BECOME facts through mind-numbing repetition.