I was in Boston recently, and the many monuments to the American Revolution got me thinking about another revolutionary conflict, one that, had it succeeded, would probably be known as the Confederate Revolution. What follows is a contrarian approach to that war.

The American Civil War has always seemed an odd duck: it wasn’t a conflict between factions battling for control of the central government, but rather was an attempt by part of the country to break away from that government. And a remarkably successful attempt it was: making a new country is hard work, but the Confederate States of America did it, with a capital, President, and legislature, an army, and a Constitution that in many ways surpassed the original. Indeed, the Confederate Constitution corrected many defects that modern libertarians would identify in the original Constitution, including the imposition of presidential term limits, a weaker central government, a requirement that laws be simple, and specific language designed to discourage pork-barrel spending and the formation of special interest groups.

Of course, all this ignores the elephant in the room: slavery. It’s hard to overstate the importance of slavery to the historical (and continued) vilification of the Confederacy. The justification for virtually the entire mythology of the virtuous North, led by the righteous Abraham Lincoln, heroically preserving the Union, ultimately derives from a single fact: the Civil War precipitated the end of slavery in the United States. Strangely, though, this mythology conflates the entirely separate subjects of slavery and secession. Moreover, it ignores an inconvenient fact, which is that slavery remained legal in the United States throughout the Civil War—the Emancipation Proclamation freed only slaves in the Confederacy, which at the time had essentially all the appearances of a sovereign nation not subject to the decrees of a foreign president. Lincoln’s reputation as the Great Emancipator seems particularly odd; to my eye his most famous executive order seems like a pragmatic act intended to win a war rather than a noble gesture setting a people free.

What might have happened had the Confederacy simply been allowed to secede? Slavery would no doubt have persisted in the CSA—and probably in the USA as well—for several more decades, but it seems unlikely that it could have lasted very long. I find it hard to imagine slavery in the Northern Hemisphere in 1940, or even 1900. This is partially because slavery is not economically efficient, and works well only for the most menial tasks. The rise of industrialization would likely have shattered the economic model of labor-intensive cotton and tobacco farming then prevalent in the South. The global trends are also clear, with institutionalized slavery falling out of favor and eventually disappearing by mid-twentieth century. It seems unlikely that the USA and CSA would have been the only exceptions.

Of course, those extra years of slavery would have exacted a terrible toll in terms of injustice and human suffering, but it’s important to weigh that against the millions of dollars in damage and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the Civil War. Moreover, breaking up the United States into two, weaker powers, while simultaneously establishing the precedent that states can secede, would have had great value for the cause of liberty.

Ultimately, I find myself wishing that the North had seceded instead of the South. If, instead of the (slave-holding) Confederate states, the free states had been the ones to secede, the separate issues of secession and slavery would have stayed separate. In this case, the question of slavery would still persist, but in a more honest form: should the recently seceded Free States of America invade the (slave-holding) United States—a sovereign nation—in order to free the slaves? Perhaps the answer would still be ‘yes’, but at least the underlying issues would be clear.

It has only slowly dawned on me that basically everything online is forever. Every blog post, message board post, social news comment—everything I’ve ever “published” on the Web (whether wittingly or un-) will live forever on the servers at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, and God knows where else. Methinks it will be wise to be careful what I say.

Any comments? ;-)

A few weeks ago I read a reference to the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed more than 100,000 people—indeed over 200,000. Because of my physics background, I think in orders of magnitude, so the number that stuck was 100,000. Before I could stop it, a thought entered my head: Sure, 100,000 people died, but at least they weren’t very important people.

This is a heretical thought, of course. You’re not supposed to think that some people might be worth more than others. But I find it fascinating, especially given where it led me. My next thought was to ask, how bad would it be if 100,000 random people died? Apart from the rather selfish realization that one of the hundred thousand might be me or someone I care about, I concluded that it probably wouldn’t be much worse. Then the most interesting thought occurred: What if you could choose the hundred thousand?

It’s this question that reveals just how wrong it is to assume that everyone is “equal”. If you could choose the hundred thousand, just imagine how much you could damage the world. A committee of top thinkers could probably come up with the best list (first rule: no one on the committee gets put on the list!), but even a list off the top of my head would be so vastly worse than 100,000 people dying in Indonesia, it’s truly awe-inspiring.

You could start by wiping out the United States federal government. Regardless of what you might think about the Bush administration, at least everyone agrees that they’re in charge, but it wouldn’t require burning more than a hundredth of our 100,000 to kill everyone in the line of succession to the presidency, and then some. While we’re at it, we should wipe out the heads of Europe, China, Japan. We could use a few hundred more to wipe out everyone who knows how to run Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, and a few thousand more to off the CEOs of the Fortune 500 and all of their plausible successors. We could destroy the top of the chain of command of most of the world’s armies with just a few tens of thousands at most, and it probably wouldn’t take more than a few thousand to bring the global oil infrastructure to its knees.

In short, if you could choose the hundred thousand, it would result in total and utter chaos. Trillions of dollars of value would be wiped off the world’s stock exchanges overnight. In the aftermath, there would be famine, disease, war—with an eventual death toll dwarfing the original 100,000. It would probably take decades or centuries to recover.

All this recalls Ayn Rand’s view that there are only a very few people who really move the world. Of course, many people on the list wouldn’t count as Randian prime movers—Lord knows W. isn’t one—but it’s amazing to think just how few people you need to ax before the whole system comes to a grinding halt.

What do you think? Who should be on the list of the hundred thousand?

I recently commented on Hacker News that one advantage of being an older startup founder is that you can bill at a much higher rate on your side jobs—say, $100–$125/hr.—which goes a long way if you’re willing to live like a grad student; a 23-year-old recent college grad usually doesn’t have the same luxury. Someone asked what I do that I can charge so much, and this is my answer. (This started as a comment there, but got too long and mutated into a blog post.)

The misleading answer is to say that I mostly do web development and some consulting. But that doesn’t explain how I can charge probably ~2–3 times more than a 23-year-old doing basically the same work. Am I really that much better?

The answer (for Hacker News readers, at least) is no. How, then, can I charge so much more? For one, many people and organizations are willing to pay a premium to get things done right the first time. I get some gigs from personal referrals, which have a hight trust factor, and I also look great on paper (physics Ph.D., Rails book author), so people who hire me figure I can’t suck too much. Referrals often come from relationships that can take years to build, though, and building a strong resume also takes time. Advantage: oldster.

But that’s not all, and I can’t emphasize this enough: I get $100/hr. because I’m willing to ask for it. It takes time to build up the confidence to take a “reasonable” rate and double it, but I think the smart 23-year-old hackers out there would do well to give it a try. I have a friend who trades energy for D. E. Shaw (the largest hedge fund), and his girlfriend charges $180/hr. for IT consulting. (They live in London, which is unbelievably expensive, but still…) He spends all day trying to find the right price for things, so he knows what he’s talking about, and he thinks that she and I both charge too little. He says, “If, when you tell them your rate, half the people don’t say ‘Fuck you’, you aren’t charging enough.”

I’m not sure I want people telling me “Fuck you” half the time, but I can relate this anecdote in a similar vein. I last saw my friend when I visited London on a random physics consulting gig this past summer. The people who flew me there needed me for literally one day (though I stayed for four). When negotiating my fee, at first I thought I’d ask for maybe $3000, but I was trying to work on my psychology to be able to charge absurd rates. The ridiculous number that popped into my head was $5000 (plus expenses!). My friend told me to double it, but I just couldn’t bring myself to, so I asked for $7500 (plus expenses) instead.

Their response: “Your fee is fine.”

I should have asked for ten…