Sacred Stew

High teenage unemployment? There's a four-word solution.

2011-01-07T15:11:00.004-07:00

CNN Money reports high unemployment--approaching 25%--among teenagers.

The four-word solution: Eliminate the minimum wage.

There is no economic rationale--zero--for the minimum wage. It exists simply to satisfy those who think it somehow indecent to pay someone below a certain amount--when I entered the workforce, $4.25, but now it's much higher--per hour. But it doesn't merely raise the $5/hour worker's wages, because it doesn't magically increase productivity. Surely, those who keep their positions have higher wages. But as a prohibition on selling one's labor below the minimum, it has been documented to keep low-skilled and low-experience people out of the workforce.

In Arizona, back when voters raised the minimum wage above the Federal rate, it was documented to cause increased unemployment among teenagers and the retarded.

"But would you want to work for below the minimum wage?," advocates of it ask. No, I wouldn't. But of course one wants a high wage. That want cannot be satisfied by fiat; the Left is simply lying when it pretends that there are no tradeoffs. There is no such thing as a "decent" or a "living" wage, only a fair wage, and a fair wage is that which is arrived at by mutual consent. Those who support a high minimum wage--who oppose lowering the minimum wage-- oppose giving people the opportunity to enter or re-enter the workforce and put themselves on the path to a dignified, self-sufficient living.

Must liberals believe in fairy-tales? Dan Klein seems to think so.

2010-12-22T16:38:00.004-07:00

This month's Cato Unbound, centered on Daniel Klein's essay "Against Overlordship", is rather painful to read. The participants began by talking past one another, but that aside, the content verges on the ridiculous.

I could spend a post on social-democrat Matthias Matthijs's seeming naiveté and descent into vulgarity. He writes of compulsory health-insurance in the abstract without any regard for what happened on the ground.

To Matthijs, "social democrats do not believe that you can be truly free – that is, capable of making rational and truly independent choices — without basic health considerations taken out of the picture. Social democrats are the true believers in liberty, real liberty, not the rather thin or limited kind most libertarians advocate. The social democratic concept of liberty is not encumbered by things we cannot control, like pre-existing health conditions or the financial resources of our parents." Forget that this would mean that social democrats do not make a distinction between liberty and capability, but the alternative is unclear. Is Matthijs (or Matthijs's hypothetical social democrat) proposing that humans cease being human and become disease-free? Is "liberty" contingent on being a new disease-free species? We all know that socialized medicine doesn't take away people's pre-existing health conditions, nor does it remove health considerations from the other choices we make in life. For Matthijs to claim otherwise is simply stupid.

It is as though Dworkin never wrote about "Justice in the Distribution of Health Care". Even to a leftist like Dworkin--and one who abuses vail of ignorance arguments--it was evident that the demand for health care, especially at the end of life, is infinite, and a socialized system must balance demand for this good against demand for others. Social democracy, then, does not remove health concerns so that people are somehow more free. It merely moves the choices about balancing away from the individual and towards his supposed betters. Why should the individual _not_ have to take into account his desire for future health care when making educational, business, or other decisions? How is that individual more free if that decision is instead put in the hands of others? That is how social democracy (a form of socialism) works. It is not a magical "abundance button". The individual will get sick, and will not receive infinite treatment. End of story.

Beyond that, Matthijs, even when asked about concretes, fails to acknowledge what Obama and the Democrats did. It is not just a forced purchase of insurance. Obama and the Democrats banned actuarially fair insurance pricing and required "insurance" to be issued for certainties. The bill passed earlier this year did not merely require that actuarially fair insurance policies (with or without riders) be issued to people with pre-existing conditions. It required that risk not play any role whatsoever in determination of the cost of an insurance policy. Perhaps this is what Matthijs (or his hypothetical social democrat) had in mind above. The individual need not worry about the costs of his actions: the "insurance" rates--and "insurance" is only a euphemism now--will be the same.

But it is lead essayist Dan Klein who is the most frustrating, and the most vulgar. Hang out around dilettante libertarians enough and you'll hear someone say (usually in different words) that the state being sovereign, the law being *gasp* changeable, or there being any law whatsoever means you don't "really own" your property, that the state or someone else owns it. This is Klein's position, too.

The left may continue: “There are no natural property rights. Property is a set of permissions, a bundle of rights, determined by the government and delegated to you by the government. When a rearrangement of the bundles would be good, that’s what the government should do. ‘Your’ property rights are simply whatever permissions result from the process.”

Let’s enter into that way of thinking, follow through on it, and surface its presuppositions.

Although they may not be fully conscious of it, progressives and social democrats are saying that everything is owned by the state. Or, perhaps, that the substructure upon which topsoil, buildings, and other things sit is owned by the state. Either way, simply by being in the United States, you voluntarily agree to all government rules.

Does Klein not understand that ownership is not and never has been the same thing as sovereignty? If he is correct about ownership than nobody except despots have ever owned anything.

It gets worse. Later in the essay he writes positively about natural rights, including a natural right to property. How much more stupid can an educated man get, than to presume that property rights--influenced strongly by the English common law--are somehow "natural", or at least a natural substrate to which government has made un-natural modifications. Not only is the history of property in our legal tradition fairly well documented--that something is old does not mean that it is natural--Elinor Ostrom and many others have also made careers studying how different socities meet their respective needs with different property rights. Why Klein's ideal is "natural" but the property rights systems of e.g. American Indians, Inuit, Somalis, and many others is by implication not "natural" is left a mystery.

In light of history, comparative studies, and even the sort of theoretical work done by Cato Unbound participant David Friedman, the "natural rights" approach is intellectually untenable. Indeed it is so ridiculous, involves so much begging the question, that it is shameful. There is no alternative to viewing property rights as transferable bundles of rights whose nature depends on law and social custom. This is simply the result of serious study of what property rights are and have been. Yet Klein, in his stridence, insists that we should see property rights as "natural". It is though he is saying to libertarians that it would be better if we acted as though we were either stupid or ignorant or both, that false advocacy of nonsense on stilts is necessary and that embracing the modern understanding of property (as e.g. Richard Epstein has done) means somehow that we will magically stop owning things and surrender our liberty.

Klein's objection to the "bundle of rights" approach seems to be that property rights can change if the law changes. Why does Klein not argue that the law should never change? This is a corner into which many "libertarians" of the Randist or Rothbardist (or "non-initiation of force") variety--the sort who think that there are closed systems that give all the answers--paint themselves. If you ever want to see one squirm, pin him down on this question: given what he argues, then should the law and thus property rights never change? Bring up interesting hypotheticals and historical problems. If Coasean bargaining is the excuse, pin him down on transaction costs, endowment effects, and other non-satisfaction of the premises of the Coase Theorem. Watch the lols ensue.

Before Will Wilkinson was purged from Cato, this vulgar nonsense would never have made it into Cato Unbound. What is certainly of no use to the cause of liberty is for Dan Klein to insist on a position best left to teenaged Rothbardites and get schooled by a social democrat. His essay makes it appear as though liberalism (libertarianism) depends on belief in fairy tales like natural property rights. That is not so.

Is this an opening against "May Issue" CCW?

2010-07-12T10:20:00.002-07:00

Via Dave Hardy, news that a U.S. District Court judge is requiring that an Iowa sheriff take a basic course on the U.S. Constitution after denying a local activist a CCW permit because his views are unpopular.

This is a paradigm case, one in which the issues are very clear. But the problems Paul Dorr encountered are those of nearly everyone who is denied a CCW permit in a "may issue" state: a sheriff gets to decide, arbitrarily, based on extra-legal factors, whether you, too, can join the privileged few and discreetly carry a firearm. One can hope that legislators and judges in New York and California have taken note of the Dorr case.

Hours before McDonald: Will Chicago Democrats obey the law?

2010-06-28T03:00:00.002-07:00

Chances are that the Supreme Court will apply the 2nd Amendment to the states (via the 14th) and overturn Chicago's handgun ban. Will Daley and the Democratic Party obey the law or will separate enforcement actions be needed? Remember: this is the party and administration that carried out the "terrorist bombing" of Meigs Field in defiance of the Feds, not over some Constitutional dispute or in support of human rights, but rather, to build a park.

Shouldn't the press stop calling the Brady Center for its opinion?

2010-06-21T15:57:00.005-07:00

Read a national-interest news story on firearms law and chances are high that the reporter solicited and quoted the opinion of the "Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence" (formerly Handgun Control, Inc). In the early '90s, when they got the Brady Bill passed and signed into law and stood prepared to destroy American firearms culture and support for RKBA altogether by defining each part of a firearm as a "firearm" and restricting private ownership to 20 such "firearms", or even in 2000, when the group raised over $1.6MM to attempt to influence that year's elections, this made some sense.

Nowadays, it's not too much of a stretch to claim that the Brady Campaign has effectively zero support. To date in the 2010 fiscal year, the Brady Campaign (PAC) has raised only $2,500, putting them in the ballpark of e.g. a typical Prohibition Party presidential campaign or Libertarian Party candidate for anarcho-capitalist dogcatcher.

To be fair, the "Brady Center"--the side of the operation that isn't a PAC or a lobby group, brought in nearly $3 MM in 2008, according to the Better Business Bureau. For a "national" organization, that's pathetic. The ACLU Foundation (the non-lobbying side of that operation), to provide a point of contrast, brought in over $66 MM in 2007 and the National Parks Conservation Association raised $61 MM. Things have gotten so bad for the Brady Bunch that they're having a "fire sale" of sorts, selling a mailing list they previously told members they'd keep private.

The Brady Center's political Brady Campaign has withered away to nothing, and the "educational" Center itself was in 2008 operating on what, for a national organization of its visibility and former prestige, was a shoestring budget. (If the trend in Campaign fundraising correlates to that of the Center, one expects that this year the Center will see far less than $3 MM.) It isn't unfair to say that support for the Brady Campaign is nonexistent and that the Center isn't far behind; only a single donor was willing to pay the Campaign to do what it does, and the Center is able to raise but a minuscule sum.

Phoning Paul Helmke for a quote when writing a firearms-law news article is like giving equal time to a third-party paper candidate when covering local politics or phoning a conspiracist, unscientific crank when writing a piece on climate change. It's false balance. That a group that has faded to nonexistence gets equal time is a sign of bias against RKBA in the press if there ever was one. The Brady Campaign and Brady Center are no longer newsworthy and should not be treated as such.

Hat tip to Alan Korwin for the $2500 number--it took a bit of searching to find the source.

Capitalism and Freedom in 2010.

2010-06-17T16:28:00.003-07:00

Over on Epinions, my review of Capitalism and Freedom is up. There's a bit too much chapter-by-chapter commentary, making it a more tedious read than it should be, but there's so much confusion about what's in this book that it's worth it.

Have a look at the dopey remark and ensuing exchange in the comments section. People who blame Friedman or Chicago School economics for Chile's early 1980s recession are ridiculous: since when did Chicago Schoolers advocate fixed exchange rates and government favortism of industries, in this case, copper. Moreover, it's about time--just as is the case with global warming denialists--that we start calling lies lies and liars liars. Anyone who believes that Friedman was "sent" to Chile, that Friedman advised the Pinochet government in any meaningful sense of the word, or that Pinochet was a Chicago School "True Believer" and that this motivated repression needs to be shamed, as none of these statements have any basis in fact. They were lies when student radicals made them up in the 1970s and they remain lies today. More than 30 years later, there's no excuse for believing them, especially with Wikipedia and dozens of articles setting the facts straight immediately available.

Query about "Austrian Economics": ("Bleg".)

2010-06-02T15:30:00.002-07:00

From the perspective of modern economic science, as opposed to a provincial "Austrian" perspective, what, if any, were the lasting contributions of Ludwig von Mises?

Insight on the "Tea Party" phenomenon.

2010-04-17T03:39:00.003-07:00

From Vishal Ganeshan:

Among Tea Party respondents, the President enjoys a 88% job disapproval rating. Further, 84% of respondents simply have an unfavorable opinion of him. That their overwhelmingly negative opinion of the President is largely divorced from his actual policies is disturbing, but it also brings to light one of the reasons for the GOP’s refusal to cooperate with the President and the Dems on any issue...the recipe for success is saying “no” to the President, regardless of the policy implications.

The whole article is worth reading.

Dumbing down of America, sartorial edition

2010-04-01T00:36:00.003-07:00

While searching for wedding attire, originally deciding on morning dress (before the ceremony was moved to later in the day) I discovered that not a few companies call the morning coat/cutaway coat "Tuxedo Tails", and that they also call the "white tie" tailcoat "Tuxedo Tails".

Moreover, on a somewhat related note, the Homburg hat is sold on the Internet as the "Gangster" or "Godfather" hat. Given how the fedora was named, that almost makes sense.

Jacques Barzun considered the turning away from more prescribed forms of dress a symptom of a broader culture of "emancipation". What does one call "Tuxedo Tails" and "Godfather hat"? That doesn't seem to be the word for it.

A little abuse of the language:

2010-01-27T23:58:00.003-07:00

From a website about scanners:

What do you want to scan?
Only photos: If you only want to scan photos, go for a flat bed scanner that does not provide features for transparent media such as slides and negatives. This will put you in the sub $200 range.

Photos and negatives/slides: Flat bed scanners that have the capability to scan transparent media (slides/negatives) are more expensive since they usually have two detectors (top and bottom). We recommend the EPSON 4490 or the EPSON 4990 for photos, but we recommend the Nikon 5000 ED and Nikon 9000 ED for slide scanning and negative scanning.

"Photo" is not a synonym for print. I had to read that first sentence three times to make sense of it.

There used to be badges to put on websites to signal that one supports free speech, etc. (I think there still are.) We should have a badge saying "I will not participate in the further dumbing-down of America" for websites that refuse to butcher usage in ways like the above.

We don't want them to know the word for what they saw Mommy doing to Daddy...they might tell everyone.

2010-01-27T02:00:00.005-07:00

Via Tyler Cowen: a~~n Arkansas~~ California elementary school removes Webster's Collegiate Dictionary from its library after students do what students have done with dictionaries since time immemorial: look up dirty words.

Read the news piece. Some parents think the school should replace the dictionary with one with more "age-appropriate" words!

Hack or leak?--information emerges about Climategate

2009-12-02T18:07:00.002-07:00

Visit this thread and scroll down to number 13. Gavin Schmidt--a fairly reliable source on the matter--says that his information is that the files were not leaked but taken by a black-hat hack of the backup mailserver.

In other words, not a leak, let alone the "whistleblower" fairytale that emerged in the denialosphere.

Hmm...if anyone did that to Morano, Michaels, and Macintyre, we'd probably learn who was responsible. Not that I advocate black-hat hacking or anything!

Is California limiting speeding through "social engineering"?

2009-11-25T14:19:00.002-07:00

Driving I-5 from LA to the Highway 152 exit for Pacheco Pass/Silicon Valley in the early hours of the morning, I noticed that the near-broke State of California has installed shiny new "radar enforced" signs in the zones that previously were aircraft-only.

The aircraft signs, to some of us, said "If you don't see an airplane, drive a safe, reasonable speed of your choice." I didn't see a single Highway Patrol on my route, but was more reluctant to go more than 9 over than usual. (After going 100 miles without seeing a patrol car, I ceased letting it stop me.)

Was this the point of installing the signs?

Evil, stupid, or neither?

2009-11-24T02:58:00.008-07:00

From his yurt near Ulan Bator, the anonyblogger known as "CLS", who largely posts what could be called "human interest" libertarianism on the Classically Liberal 'blog, put up a post today about a tactic he calls "argument from intimidation," an idea he openly borrows from Ayn Rand.

CLS claims that this is a major and perhaps the primary political argument of today. Rather than try to summarize, I quote it below. From Rand:

There is a certain type of argument which, in fact, is not an argument, but a means of forestalling debate and extorting an opponent’s agreement with one’s undiscussed notions. It is a method of bypassing logic by means of psychological pressure . . . [It] consists of threatening to impeach an opponent’s character by means of his argument, thus impeaching the argument without debate. Example: “Only the immoral can fail to see that Candidate X’s argument is false.” . . . The falsehood of his argument is asserted arbitrarily and offered as proof of his immorality.

and from CLS:

What concerns me is that the Argument from Intimidation is often accompanied by the most dangerous political view around: that those who are the object of one's ridicule must be either stupid or immoral. This sort of black/white fundamentalism, in any field, is implies that all dissent is fundamentally immoral, of at best, the sign of a inferior mind at work. Consider the ramifications of that perspective for a moment.

It is an interesting line of thought, for sure--and almost Hansonian in a backwards way--but it's also something that could easily be invoked too often and out of proper domain of applicability to stifle discussion, dodge criticism, or de-legitimize ridicule. There's a time to be logical and meet another as an equal and there's a time to say "pull your head out of your ass" or "don't bother with that guy's take on 'photons' as he admits to not knowing any quantum mechanics." (That is, by the way, based on a real example.) I cannot say whether or not CLS agrees, but I'm fairly certain the would-be philosopher (or, pace John Hospers, the Continental-style "philosopher"/critical theorist) who divided other thinkers into "mystics of muscle" and "mystics of mind" and was known for browbeating people about their supposed irrationality would agree.

The real danger here is invocation of the term by people who are being either fatuous or wicked. Picture the new wanker tactic: the retort to "X is immoral" becomes "yeah you're just arguing from intimidation." Invocation of "argument from intimidation" can be every bit as much an avoidance tactic as the real thing.

I suspect--there are a few cute hints dropped through the post--that I'm the inspiration for CLS taking up this topic, even though he veers away from my personal habits and towards broader relevance in the final portion. In particular, I've browbeat CLS a bit--perhaps in language that's a bit too strong, but readers of Goldwater State and this 'blog know I don't dress things up--lately about modesty, respect for truth, and intellectual due diligence. I also made a statement someplace quasi-private about not being able to tell whether or not the leaked CRU e-mails, like the Geoclimatic Studies hoax, are a test of honesty or IQ or both, which (also privately) seemed to have irked our yurt-dwelling 1970s-era libertarian. (I'm reminded a bit of the account of Emperor Julian writing a play because his beard was mocked...)

If this isn't the case, then I'm being presumptuous. But if it is the case: What CLS doesn't get--and what separates my behavior and that of the many others (see comments on e.g. RealClimate) who see this the way I do from Ayn Rand's "argument from intimidation"--is that we are considering not the conclusion but how it appears the object of our scorn got there.

The Geoclimatic Studies hoax is perhaps the paradigm case. We had a fake paper in a fake journal, written by nonexistent authors from nonexistent academic departments (albeit at real universities) full of obvious nonsense, including mathematical formulae that were difficult to distinguish from random typesetting of symbols. This fake paper happened to claim that global warming had been completely misattributed and was consequently echoed by hundreds of websites (including Reason Magazine's "Hit and Run" in what must surely be the publication's all-time low) and even a few radio shows.

"Stupid and a bit evil" is a more likely descriptor of the hoax's victims than outright evil. Outright evil would be to know that the paper was nonsense but to promote it anyway, for purposes other than exposing the credulous nature of the self-labeled "skeptics". (Whether or not that, too, is evil is a matter for another time.) "Stupid" is to miss that the hoax article was nonsense. Those pseudo-equations were a dead giveaway. The small evil on top of that is to pass the paper on and make a strong claim for it when one doesn't understand. "I don't understand this, but the part that's in plain English supports my pre-determined position, so I will promote it as though it is true" almost epitomizes intellectual dishonesty. "I don't get it" should be a stop sign, not a green light.

I'll admit presently that I have difficulty sympathizing with "I don't get it" as I suspect others experience it. I can't picture how some common mistakes are made. I understand why students often come into introductory physics believing half-consciously in impetus theories of motion. To discern why impetus theories are wrong from everyday experience--or to apply inertial theories to everyday experience--is a tremendously subtle matter. But why someone would even want a classical theory of the photon, or how someone could confuse global warming and ozone depletion is a mystery to me. There are plenty of things in this world I don't understand (from a certain perspective, most things!) and I avoid voicing--I try to avoid holding!--strong opinions on such matters. If I think I understand and I actually don't, I'd appreciate someone telling me, and if I'm arrogant about it, unlike CLS, I'd actually welcome a (metaphorical) brick to the head like Ignatz Mouse would throw at the oblivious Krazy Kat. The most awkward aspect of my lack of sympathy is an inability to understand what it is like to be incapable of understanding or to not know how to bring myself to understand. Skills and arts are one thing, but science, social science, or ability to comprehend philosophers' arguments is another. There are few things I think I would not be able to bring myself to understand were I to care enough--and I know in most instances where I'd start. But I get the feeling that to many, real papers are as nonsensical as the Geoclimatic Studies article. Perhaps in the context of a liberal "democratic" society it is not reasonable to expect someone who thinks he can't understand something or just plain will never be able to understand something to keep his opinion to himself. That's a question I don't purport to answer.

A second paradigm case is that of Ian Plimer, author of Heaven and Earth, which famously claims that volcanic emission of CO2 dwarfs that of human activity. This time around, "not stupid just evil" comes to mind. Given what Plimer does for a living, and the quality of his previous output, one has a hard time thinking it likely that he confused "million" and "billion". Moreover, given that he wrote an extensively footnoted book, it's hard to believe that he didn't know where to look to find information on relative contributions nor to learn the several different ways in which we know his claim is not so. It's more likely that he made the assertion without having researched it at all--something that,being an academic, he would know is wrong! The real problem with Plimer, however, is that even when corrected, he continued in his position, without explanation. To make a mistake is one thing, but to leave it to stand without acknowledgement shows a simple disregard for truth itself.

Plimer's behavior--neither explain nor acknowledge nor apologize for one's mistakes--is fairly typical among climate contrarians, and if I had to choose the reason they're ordinarily regarded as evil, that would be it. As noted earlier, the reason is behavior and not the position.

Perhaps the second is the behavior known as "denialism". There are a few honest contrarians out there, but many will use bad argument just as well as good if it will convince another that the scientific mainstream is wrong. Ross McKitrick, for example, tried to pretend that the lack of abstract existence proofs for solutions to the Navier-Stokes equation had implications against the scientific consensus. That level of sophistication is not needed: so seemingly random and bizarre are the bad arguments that one gets the impression that the average contrarian 'blogger or commentator will point to a baked potato as evidence against AGW if he thinks it will convince someone, especially if he heard someone else do so as well. To a denialist, no argument is bad enough and as soon as an argument seems OK it's ready to send out. An intellectually honest person doesn't stop when he arrives at a result he wants--he's self-critical: skeptical.

Which brings me back to my beef with "CLS". Recently, in reference to the stolen private CRU e-mails, CLS tried to parlay the ordinary process of recommending referees when one submits a journal article into an active effort to corrupt the review process. Moreover he twisted correspondence between scientists concerning the Climate Research scandal into having evil motivation. Scientists standing up for integrity in the peer review process are, to CLS, scientists trying to suppress dissent--a church or religion! That they were protesting the publication of a paper that made claims in its conclusions that could not be drawn from its body is ignored.

It's possible that CLS didn't know the context of these e-mails. In that case, he should have waited, or perhaps just searched using Google as explanations were up by then. But denialists stop and broadcast when convenient, not when appropriate. In this case it was with no regard for the seriousness of the accusation being made. "Forget that reputations could be harmed unfairly, I'm going to stop here and spread my opinion because this is a convenient place to stop." And like Plimer, CLS didn't acknowledge his mistake even after it was pointed out by at least two different people. The lack of acknowledgement makes it seem less like a sincere (if not honest) mistake than like willful disregard for the truth.

Is it "argument from intimidation" to mention this? I don't think so. Is it "argument from intimidation" to recommend the following to CLS and similar characters?: Pull your head out of your ass--it's your behavior, not your position, that draws our ire.

Which is a pity, really, as he's not ordinarily an evil guy. Neither are the folks at Reason who promoted the Geoclimatic Studies paper. There's something about this issue that brings out the worst in many people.

Silly web-writer tricks.

2009-11-16T16:53:00.002-07:00

Having been a DMOZ editor for over ten years, I've seen plenty of silly schemes webmasters put together in attempts to increase traffic. Mirror sites, "informative" webpages that are pitches for online pet shops (etc), and the like, submitted thinking that someone editing the Open Directory would be stupid enough to take them for "real" webpages, list them, and boost the search engine page rank for whatever listing counts for these days.

Web writers are picking up some of the same habits. Today I rejected for inclusion something apparently put together by Examiner.com's "Raleigh Libertarian Examiner": a "'blog" consisting of nothing except the first couple of hundred words of each of his Examiner articles, followed by a link to the page.

Maybe it'll fool Google, but it's obvious to a human.

A series of tubes, leading to Lake Wobegon

2009-10-13T18:33:00.003-07:00

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, on a five-star scale, the average rating given by a reviewer on the World Wide Web is 4.3. Despite the Web's reputation for rudeness and hostility, the average rating given to goods and services is above average.

Thinking to my experiences as an Epinions.com contributor and ChefMoz editor, 4.3 sounds about right. If people like something, they tend to give it maximum or near maximum rating.

That there's a filtering step keeping most truly lousy products out of the hands of Web reviewers would seem at first to explain this, but it isn't compelling. Yes, consumers--unlike newspaper and magazine writers--tend only to review products they buy, and that they have thus already researched, but this should drive expectations down, certainly not up. Consider that the filtering-by-research means that the average product a savvy customer sees is better than the average product being sold. If we knock all of the one-star products out, the scale we're left with centers on 3.5 stars. If we expect product ratings to follow a Gaussian ("normal") distribution up to the limits posed by the discretization and boundaries, this will bias slightly to the left of 3.5, but the point still stands. Filtering can't explain pervasive overrating.

The U.S. school grading custom, in which scores between 70 and 80 points out of 100 are supposed to be the average, may have something to do with it. Products may start out in people's minds with 5-star ratings, with stars being knocked off for lousiness. That's quite a different thought process than considering 3 stars as average, 2 stars as below average, one star as lousy, etc. Perhaps, as is speculated at the end of the WSJ, the ability to be meaningfully negative--or just to shed Lake Wobegon Syndrome--may come with experience; willingness to give five-star ratings to mediocre goods and services could be simple naivety.

Before adjusting a few Epinions ratings (downward, very slightly), I computed my average rating: 3.18 on a scale from 1-5. That's above 3, probably statistically significantly so, but not by much, and I've been reviewing "great stuff" lately. That the number is close to 3 is reassuring. Then again, when clicking the Haloscan stars on 'blogs, I'm so consistently a downrater that I didn't need much reassurance at all.

If you don't mean to say that something is great--not good, not "great!" like "pizza tonight?--Great!, I want anchovies...", but better than good, one of the best in its area, a real standout, please don't give it five stars.

HT: Mark Stevens

Good cult, bad cult.

2009-09-21T23:16:00.002-07:00

Cults, or "New Religious Movements", are as American as baseball, blues, and apple pie, going back almost to our legally tolerant Republic's founding. A slew of prominent ones come to mind: weird messianic offshoots of Christianity like Oneida or the Shakers, oddball sci-fi groups like the Scientologists or Heaven's Gate, Mormonism and Christian Science that became more or less mainstream, and several, like Trascendentalism and Ayn Randist "Objectivism", the practitioners of which insist aren't even religions. I suspect that there's something about American culture that encourages formation of cults as an expression of religiosity--and even if belonging to one is still weird, I'm confident many readers know someone who is a member of one.

This seems mostly like harmless fun. Consider Arizona's Church of Cognizance, which I first heard of due to a recent state Supreme Court decision. It seems to be a group set up so that members have an excuse for smoking cannabis. Maybe the belief is sincere and maybe it isn't--if it was a mere scheme it was clearly poorly thought out given the results in court. I have to remember to forget my Catholic upbringing and not to intellectualize it. "Pot is the key to enlightenment, and the Avesta rocks because it says so too, here and here and here..." is probably closer to the story than "let's find a religious scripture that maybe supports our smoking, so we have a better case." Cults mostly take weird people and give them a framework for their weirdness. I know a person who thinks lizard men are part of a conspiracy to dominate the government. He's also very much into neo-Vedanta.

"Mostly" is the key. Clara Rose Thornton, a Vermont freelance journalist (and former Chicago South Sider) recently went to live with a group called the Twelve Tribes to learn organic farming and reported that the group maintains that servitude is good and proper for people of African descent.. The whole article is one of the better examples of independent journalism I've seen in a long time--not the non-analytic, flaky, affectedly-breezy stuff usually found in alt-weeklies--and is worth a read from front to back.

Freedom of religion is an interesting thing in a free society. Adults converts will believe what they want to believe and it takes nothing short of psychosurgery to get them to stop. Nothing we can do about it. But teaching children things that go against the very foundations of liberty--such as that some are to be subordinate to others due to the location of their ancestors' homeland--presents a conundrum. The children get no choice in the matter, yet teaching religion to children has always been considered part of the adult's freedom of religion.

I'd like to think it doesn't matter because groups like the Tribes are small, but larger religious groups for a long time promoted the subordination of women and some reasonably socially acceptable ones would have God hating homosexuals and somehow it therefore being OK for Man to abuse them, too. And there's a continuum from harmless beliefs--God loves you and you will even get to live with him because his son, who is God too, was a Jewish man executed by the Romans, or we must all go to Mecca and walk around a big rock within our lifetime if we can, or "Mu...and at that moment grasshopper attained enlightenment--to mostly harmless beliefs--you are one of the Chosen People, or conquer the infidels and tax them if they don't convert, or smoke all the weed you like--to harmful ones like the blessing of Châmites is to be servile.

Maybe we've struck the right balance, but when I consider how many people think that scientists must be wrong about global warming because God would never let that happen I have my doubts.

A little something about the "trigger"...

2009-09-09T18:31:00.001-07:00

...that should have posted a few hours before I did.

If Obama Offers It, Free-Marketeers Should Welcome the "Trigger" to the Health Care Reform Discussion

Empty-head syndrome and Facebook memes.

2009-09-04T00:43:00.005-07:00

Stupid is as stupid does, but what's obnoxious is intelligent people, people one knows to be capable of analytic, critical thought, being willfully stupid, or at least glib, their head emptying out unpredictably when certain topics come up. Given the current public discussion of health care and health insurance reform, it's an everyday occurrence. This isn't the "why are these people ignorant of free market reform proposals to the point where they think people who oppose their scheme support the status quo" gripe. This is worse.

Circulating on Facebook today as a veritable "Internet Meme" is what seems to be a sort of credo in unum deum for supporters of a broadly leftist agenda for health care reform. (Let's get something straight right now: Virtually nobody is "anti-reform"; most opponents of the "public option" plan support fixing the market.) As follows:

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

This sounds nice, but let's think about it for a moment.

"No one should die because they cannot afford health care" ("one...they" is grating to the eyes, but that's not the trouble.) The trouble is that this is unattainable unless we go down really nasty paths. There are a few ways to interpret this statement.

One is as an expression of dissatisfaction with living in a world of finite abundance. Our grandparents are older than molecular biology. Things are getting better and less expensive, but we would always wish them to be better still. This doesn't have any policy implications for health care reform aside from preventing government from thwarting progress by breaking the mechanisms which drive it. It's more of a pro-market than an anti-market sentiment.

The other way to interpret it is as a call for market abolitionism. I'm not saying that the people posting this this are old-time socialists. It's more slouching toward market abolitionism. Everyone should be entitled to all lifesaving treatments. There should be no way of obtaining lifesaving treatment by paying, because that means that some will go without lifesaving treatment because they cannot pay. This entails a ban on paying for new and better care. Rationing, in other words.

And don't be so glib to say "but insurance companies ration already." They don't. An insurance company cannot forbid one from paying for treatment. (I support very drastic insurance reform, which would have us shopping around for policies with less uncertainty in what is covered, but that's neither here nor there. I say it because some jerk will say something stupid, nasty, and bizarre if I do not. Times are strange and ideology clouds minds!)

If you do not support a ban on paying for care, you should not have posted this statement.
"No one should go broke because they get sick." "Fewer people should go broke because they get sick" is something I could sign on to. Get rid of every silly mandate that makes it difficult to purchase cheap health insurance. Mandatory purchase of insurance is something I'm ambivalent about. On the one hand, if someone chooses to not purchase something and assume risk himself, that should be taken seriously. On the other hand, Americans are not going to let people go without basic treatment even if they chose to not hedge against risk, so mandatory purchase may be better than free riders.

But here's something to consider: What if I get sick and I choose to go broke to purchase the newest, best treatment? Should I be forbid from doing that? Should the State step in and subsidize my choice, transferring from others to me to support a luxury?

The lesson? Think hard before making statements about "no one". More often than not they are far too strong and have you committed to things you probably don't support.

My posted response:

No one should die because redistributionism prevented development of care that could have saved his life. Nobody should go without treatment due to rationing intended to prevent bankruptcy of a government monopsony. Nobody should go bankrupt becaus...e the government prevented purchase of affordable insurance. If you understand this--even if you disagree--you are approaching health care reform intelligently.

Not as catchy, but at least one other person picked up on it.

Lying about open carry: if the small lie doesn't work, switch to a big one.

2009-08-25T16:26:00.002-07:00

First there was talk of an "assault rifle", now the popular press is making claims that people have been brandishing firearms at the so-called "town hall" meetings concerning health care reform?

What next? Will the word "discharging" be used for carrying? "He discharged his assault rifle into the crowd"?

There is plenty of footage of most of this open carry, and there have been hundreds of witnesses. So far, neither film nor witness reports show that anyone at these events has brandished a weapon.

An assault rifle is by definition a switchable full automatic. And to brandish one must by definition take the weapon into hand. That's not disputable; these are the common meanings of the terms and to use them any other way is to report falsehoods, that is, to lie. End of story.

The most ridiculous health care protest yet.

2009-08-14T18:46:00.003-07:00

Proponents of the Obama Administration's plan for crowd-out of private health insurance, the "public option", and wacky positions even farther to the left (single-payer, Europe-style price controls with a market veneer, etc.) are now calling for a boycott of Whole Foods. Phoenix "Liberal Examiner" Marlene Phillips has the best Web article on of the subject.

Apparently, they're upset about Whole Foods CEO and co-founder John Mackey's recent Wall Street Journal guest opinion calling for market-based reforms and private generosity instead of the Democrats' crowd-out plan. (Mackey has remarked on the public response, too.)

That Mackey is and has been for a long time what could be called a "libertarian"--of what variety, I don't know--is old news. See, for instance, his exchange with Milton Friedman (in which T.J. Rodgers also participated by foaming at the mouth about Mackey's "collectivism" like your average Libertarian Party meeting nutcase). Note that the exchange is about the social responsibility of business, and that Mackey's position is probably close to that of the boycott proponents.

I suspect that the lefties proposing a boycott feel somehow betrayed, expecting Whole Foods higher-ups to believe the same as they do about politics. The vulgar leftist thinks that his politics are the necessary consequence of his values. If these characters took the time to learn the "whys" of Mackey's position it would do them well. A person with humane values who understands economics tends toward economic liberalism, that is to say, toward support of free markets. That concern for others that has some of the leftists supporting greater government intervention has people like myself and Mackey instead calling for less.

If you would like to just try to make the world better for people, don't learn economics, and don't be surprised if someone like me calls you on confusing righteous intentions with right action. If you would like to learn how to actually help people, learn economics. Figuring out why Mackey supports what he does--a little bit of Google is all it will take--is a good way to start.

Yglesias presents an intelligent libertarianism. There's a problem:...

2009-08-11T15:23:00.005-07:00

In response to a remark by Tyler Cowen, left-"progressive" 'blogger Matthew Yglesias presents an intelligent libertarianism.

It is an intelligent libertarianism, albeit a somewhat loopy one, that has libertarianism as an esoteric doctrine so as to benefit from gains from widespread belief in capitalist meritocracy. It also shows Yglesias to be either much more of a pessimist or much less versed in basic econ. than I suspected.

The trouble is, although it is an intelligent libertarianism, it's not a libertarianism in which any libertarian I can think of believes. Cowen's take on "progressivism", on the other hand, was an idealization of the real "progressive".

Most of the really vocal and obnoxious libertarians (e.g. the Lew Rockwell crowd) do not believe in an intelligent libertarianism, but those whose libertarianism is intelligent believe something quite different than Yglesias's sketch. They do believe that growth makes most concerns about the justice of the current distribution misguided. (Considering the sum of wealth to be static is perhaps the unifying error of left-wing thinkers from Rawls forward.) But they also believe that people can or ought to be able to get ahead by doing well for others--that laws and regulations ought to be ordered to bring this about--not that people merely derive benefit from believing this. Think, for example, of Mises's remark that profit is obtained by doing in the marketplace what others want.

There is, of course, more to any intelligent libertarianism (e.g. Richard Epstein's, Will Wilkinson's) than this, but it's fairly common.

A remark at the beginning of his post is independently worth considering:

It’s initially tempting to respond to that by listing the intelligent points that I’ve heard made by libertarians, and then explain how a sound progressive politics conducts by incorporating those critiques and moving forward to a higher synthesis.

This is also how a sound libertarianism is constructed. We're seeing this happen: the libertarianisms of Will Wilkinson, Tyler Cowen, Richard Epstein, and Brian Holtz (and myself) are all heavily influenced, in different ways, by the left-liberal and left-"progressive" critiques of old libertarianism. This is a major source of conflict in the movement--the old folks don't really know what to make of it. To them modern libertarianism is "watered down"--the young folks really believe exactly as they do but "compromise and conceal" it. To modern libertarians, however, the libertarianism of Dave Nolan or Jacob Hornberger is a degenerate folk-libertarianism full of ignored subtleties and cognitive dissonances. (Don't ask me in what camp to place the aretaic theories of Rasmussen and Den Uyl; I don't know.)

We will go back to the moon.

2009-07-20T11:59:00.001-07:00

I've been extremely busy in the last few weeks, but, strangely, Man's long-term future has occupied many of my idle thoughts--in other words, it's been on my mind--and not because the 20th anniversary of the moon landing has been in the news, either.

We'll go back to the moon as a matter of course. Getting off of Earth and establishing colonies elsewhere is, in the long view, a matter of simple survival. Sol is heating up--and we can move the Earth to compensate, and this is not the cause of short-scale global warming--and will eventually go dim.

But we have to think of it this way: We're a mere sixteen generations, give or take, from the dawn of quantitative science, and only a couple more from nearly universal rule by warlords. Our practical macroscopic theory of electricity and magnetism had its final piece put into place around 1905 and quantum mechanics as we know it is only about eighty years old. We've come a long, long way in a very short time. We're in no rush.

Iran's revolution is poorly reported in the traditional press, but...

2009-06-15T15:35:00.001-07:00

Iran's revolution is being poorly reported in the traditional press (and the newspapers' and television networks' Web sites); turn to the 'blogosphere for coverage.

Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish is a great place to start. He has easily trumped CNN, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times.

Subtlety: something rarely seen on an editoral page.

2009-06-12T22:36:00.003-07:00

"The court in D.C. v. Heller erred in finding an individual right in the Second Amendment, but it would also err in not applying this to the states via Fourteenth Amendment incorporation", goes the argument by the the L.A. Times's editorial writers.

I expect such subtlety from The Economist, perhaps, but not even from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Chicago Tribune; it's thus surprising and somewhat refreshing to see it in the L.A. Times. Its readers would do well to learn from the example: "Is it Constitutional" is a wholly different question from "Do I like the consequences?"

Damon Root, writing for Reason, has given a brief but thorough argument for incorporation. Please point me to law review articles if you find them.

If I pick my own pocket, I have change in my hand.

2009-05-28T02:11:00.002-07:00

From a KGUN 9 (Tucson) report on a health care "town hall" meeting put on by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords:

Rebecca Wilson is a physical therapist. She thinks if we help doctors cover the cost of medical school they won't have to charge such high fees.

"The ones that do go into these kinds of professions that are coming out of school with 100 thousand dollars of debt or more they have to be motivated by money."

They don't require much economics training or analytic thinking in general to be a physical therapist, do they? "Motivated by money" is usually a good thing; we want more people supplying high-priced services, as it makes them cheaper. (Ponder that for a few days, Ms Wilson!)

Moreover, since when was the price of health care--or health insurance, which isn't the same thing--high because med school is expensive? But even if this were the case, it doesn't become cheaper to subsidize medical doctors' tuition fees with taxes, which is presumably what is meant here by "we help". To first approximation, the price of medical services would be offset by the amount of the subsidy. There would be a redistribution from patients to non-patients, a sort of forced insurance-like spreading, but not weighted by risk, which is what these people are calling for anyway, but there'd be no reduction of total cost. When one considers that the med schools will be able to charge more, because more physicians will be able to afford a higher tuition fee once there is a subsidy, it's evident that such a scheme would drive costs up.

Magical thinking abounds. Some people think we can become wealthier by picking our own pockets.

I'm surprised he's still called "Shorty";

2009-04-28T10:31:00.003-07:00

I'm surprised he's still called "Shorty"; I'm not surprised to see him interviewed on cnn.com.

As part of a feature on New Orleans's annual jazz festival, CNN.com has posted an interview with Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, a New Orleans jazz musician who is today what Jason Marsalis was ten years ago when I moved to the city: the wunderkind who seems to be everywhere and working with everyone.

I caught a very early gig of his at the Maple Leaf in the spring of 2002. (It was early enough that at the beginning of the show, the audience consisted myself and of a few of my friends, there on a whim, and "Shorty"'s brother Jason Andrews.) He and his bandmates were quite good for high-school students. The riffs were all hackneyed, and the improvisation less daring than that of older players, but they played tightly and knew how to structure a show. I've seen the name tossed around the Internet in the last few years--it seemed that the kid stuck around--but, having left New Orleans in 2003, I haven't heard any of the music. Everyone talks about how much they love New Orleans-style jazz, but nobody seems to give it any time on the radio. After reading the CNN piece, I'm inclined to look for a recording or two.

Thanks for the idea!

2009-04-13T23:51:00.002-07:00

The quasi-anonymous "CLS", 'blogging on Classically Liberal, reports on a complaint brought to a Neptune, NJ residents' association meeting about "flags being displayed...declaring the occupants' sexual orientation or proclivity — not just the multicolored "gay' striped flags, but also banners indicating fetishes and or other "lifestyle' choices."

No such thing, but I'm reasonably certain that a good marketer could sell them. "Hmm...the frotteurism people don't have a banner yet...and what about the guys who like old-fashioned stockings? And a box of the special lolicon pennants are ready for shipment to Japan!"

Not my line of work, but I wouldn't be surprised to see these appear, thanks to a suggestion from a New Jersey busybody. Ahh, the beauty of the Internet Age!

What Donny Ferguson actually wrote in the 23 February Monday Message.

2009-03-24T18:12:00.002-07:00

Someone named David F. Nolan has thought it alright to change a single word in Libertarian Party Communications Director Donny Ferguson's 23 February "Monday Message" in order to stir up some action to undo the positive reforms made in that organization over the last few years. It's much more convenient to condemn Ferguson if he is advocating pandering to the voters than if he is advocating winning the libertarian vote!

Pasted below, verbatim, is the message that got Nolan's panties so bunched up. Judge for yourself.

Subject: LP Monday Message: Is the LP really an 'alternative?'
Date: Monday 23 February 2009
From: "Libertarian Party"
To: (scratched by BSK)

Feb. 23, 2009

Your Monday Message From the Libertarian Party:

Dear friend,

Backed by a growing swing vote that decides elections and support for its
economic plans, the Libertarian Party is not an "alternative" political
party.

"Alternative" implies something outside the mainstream or an unconventional
choice. The Libertarian Party, with its sensible balance of fiscal
responsibility and social moderation, is, in fact, the nation's only
mainstream political party.

In a nation where a vast swath of the electorate define themselves as
generally fiscally conservative and socially liberal, it is the Democrat,
Republican, Constitution and Green parties that find themselves isolated on
the extreme left and right. Not only are these the voters who decide
elections, poll after poll finds these voters generally agree more with the
Libertarian Party than any other.

In their 2006 study of the American electorate, The Libertarian Vote, Cato
Institute scholars David Boaz and David Kirby find between ten and twenty
percent of the electorate is generally fiscally conservative and socially
liberal -- in other words, libertarian. A 2006 Gallup Governance Survey puts
the "libertarian" vote at 21 percent, tied with the "liberal" vote and behind
only the "conservative" vote at 25 percent.

That growing libertarian vote is getting close to the same percentage as those
describing themselves and liberal or conservative and large enough to
assemble a winning coalition in election races. Many of the "unaffiliated"
or "non-ideological" voters agree more with libertarians than with
conservatives or liberals.

So why haven't Libertarians won more elections than they already have? With a
renewed focus on winning the LP did win 200-plus races in 2008 and increased
its presidential vote total for the second straight election, but there is
room for so much more growth.

Much of the blame lies with ballot access laws placing an intolerable burden
on citizens who wish to vote for something other than Republicans or
Democrats. The Libertarian Party is hard at work in state legislatures
across the country changing those laws.

Right now is a great time to be a Libertarian. Voters cite economic issues
and job growth as their top concerns in poll after poll, both Libertarian
strengths.

Those same polls show majorities support the libertarian solution of reducing
the size and government and expanding regulatory and tax relief for
employers. They know it does more to create jobs and renew faith in the
economy than spending $30 million on the "salt marsh mouse," as Democrats
propose, or spending $700 billion bailing out unsuccessful businesses and
trillions more expanding government, as the past big-spending Republican
administration and Congress did.

They're looking for someone to let them know that, if elected, they'll focus
on their concerns by sticking to proven solutions that create jobs and get
capital flowing. Libertarians are the only ones who agree.

The Libertarian Party is not an "alternative." It is the only mainstream
political party in America. That's why it is up to you and me to listen to
those voters, learn what they want us to do and promote solutions voters
agree on.

With optimism,

Donny Ferguson
Director of Communications
Libertarian Party
Donny.Ferguson@lp.org

Opening a car.

2009-03-17T22:19:00.004-07:00

Losing my keys somewhere on the China Lake Naval Reservation, hundreds of miles from both home and my destination, is no fun, but there was a side benefit: I observed for the first time a locksmith at work.

The object is to obtain a code for the car's key, then to cut a new one. It would seem that this is ordinarily done by a sort of bootstrap procedue. First the interior of the car is opened by slim-jimming the lock if possible. Mine was already open. Then, the trunk is opened from the interior, by pulling the lever next to the driver's seat. That is, unless the trunk is in lockout mode, which mine was.

If the side door is not openable by slim-jim or the trunk is unopenable by lever, the alternative is to make a key by impression. The locksmith wiggles a blank in the lock, leaving impressions where the tumbler pins are. Cuts are made in the blank with a rattail file, and the process is repeated; the pins stop leaving marks when the cuts are of proper height. The door or trunk can be opened with the new key, usually with a bit of wiggling as the fit isn't exact.

What follows is removal of a lock cylinder, on which a code is printed that the locksmith can then look up in a reference manual and use to cut a proper key. Some cars--such as, unfortunately, my 2000 Mitsubishi, require a third step: resetting a code in the computer. Many newer cars have a reprogrammable RFID tag in the key that needs to send the right number to the computer in order for the car to be started. No code, no spark. The locksmith has a device not unlike an engine scanner which can reprogram the computer to match the new key; old keys can be reprogrammed using a less portable device.

Interesting stuff. $300 worth of interesting? Maybe not. The Coso Petroglyphs--the reason I was there in the first place--are worth seeing and, as the American Altamira or Lascaux, less well known than they ought to be. Photos to be posted after everything is processed and scanned: so far only my Fuji Acros is back from the lab.

A worthwhile climate lecturer.

2009-03-17T21:58:00.005-07:00

Paul Kushner of the University of Toronto gives a truly outstanding hour-long introduction to climate modeling for the scientifically literate audience, managing also to slip in some of his current work, for illustrative purposes, near the end.

I got a chance to sit in on it earlier today, while visiting Stanford University. I recommend him highly as a speaker, if you get the chance to invite him.

An Epinions shout-out for Kiva.org

2009-03-11T17:22:00.002-07:00

Epinions's promotion next month will be contributions to a charity to be selected by member voting. I put in a good word for Kiva.org, managing to name-check Julian Simon, Peter Bauer, Milton Friedman, and Manmohan Singh in the process.

If you write for Epinions, it wouldn't hurt for you, too, to write a review in support of Kiva. If you don't write for Epinions, it wouldn't hurt for you so sign up, write a few beer reviews, and then put in a good word for Kiva, either.

Epstein is probably wrong about the Employee Free Choice Act

2009-02-24T00:45:00.004-07:00

Richard Epstein, perhaps the most important legal scholar of our time and certainly the most exciting, has come out strongly against the so-called Employee Free Choice Act, which would establish card-check as a procedure by which labor unions could be recognized.

Epstein studies the law, and I am a physicist, so ordinarily when I disagree with him on law it is because he is right and I am wrong. (Likewise were he to disagree on natural science, it's probably because he is wrong and I am right. To his credit, and unlike many in his region of the political spectrum, he's quiet on the matter.) But this time around, I'll stick my neck out and say that he's probably wrong about the First Amendment implications of the EFCA, although he's right about two important categorical questions: is it harmful, and is it unConstitutional?.

In a recent Wall Street Journal guest opinion, Epstein argues that because employers can currently speak out against unionization, the "clandestine" nature of card-check organizing drives removes their guarantee of free speech. That is ostensibly wrong: one doesn't have a First Amendment right to be heard.

This smells much more like a Due Process matter; employers can find themselves without common law right to contract in the blink of an eye if union salts wage a successful card-check campaign. "Due process" is replaced by no process at all save "we decided and you shall comply."

I find myself wondering if this line of argument would carry any weight in court; I don't recall any cases against the NLRA or agency fees on behalf of either employers or workers who'd rather contract independently in which the Fifth Amendment argument was made. If any readers can point me in the right direction, please do!

Film is dead? Long live Autochrome!

2009-02-19T00:18:00.003-07:00

Before there was Technicolor or Kodachrome, there was Autochrome, an additive, nonlayered process involving dyed starch grains and tar on glass plates and later on film. If you've seen color photos of World War I, they were invariably taken using this process.

Neil Burger chose to emulate the unsaturated, fuzzy, somewhat dreamy look of Autochrome in 2006's The Illusionist, a connection lost on most of the audience including myself at the time. French artist Frédéric Mocellin has gone one better and, using factory notes, duplicated the long-lost Autochrome process, albeit on polyester sheets; the results are posted on his website.

Film is dead, they say, surpassed except in large format by high-end digital. I shoot film--I shoot film exclusively--and hear more and more remarks about being "retro", even more when I mention that I prefer Kodachrome 64 to some technically superior E-films in many situations. The reason is simpler, however: I like the look of film--the analog shoulder, the color balance, the grain. I even prefer what happens when film goes wrong to what happens when a CCD is misexposed. And digital is what I deal with at work; film is for fun!

Why would Mocellin revive Autochrome in the age of medium format Ektar and the 20 megapixel CCD? For the same reason artists didn't abandon paint when the Lumière brothers invented Autochrome. It's yet another medium or method for the artist to express his idea. I'm not very worried about being able to purchase film a few years from now. When paints can no longer be found, then perhaps I'll worry. But if all else fails, I can start dyeing potato starch.

The Noncyclical Asset

2009-02-08T23:10:00.002-07:00

Spending and thrift may come in cycles, but people will turn to product reviews either way and perhaps more when they're pinching pennies; are Epinions reviews a noncyclical asset?

Epstein is at least as impressive in person.

2009-02-05T23:18:00.003-07:00

The Goldwater Institute hosted an all too short lecture by Richard Epstein yesterday, for which I made the nearly two hour drive from Tucson.

It was well worth my while; Epstein is at least as impressive in person as in writing, lecturing off-the-cuff with dexterity and humor. The day's stated topic was "The Coming Constitutional Crisis" but the real topic was the administrative state, the substitution of experts and bureaucracy for functions better kept to the judicial and legislative branches. I took notes so as to write a full summary on Associated Content, but they wandered off while I was asking a question in person afterwards. At least one thesis was that the problem is not a lack of judicial restraint nor a complete abandonment of duty but rather that the courts tend to show restraint when they should intervene and vice versa. The opening thought, that most modern Constitutional lawyers concern themselves with questions of institutional competence, kept creeping in as, of course, did Epstein's revolutionary ideas concerning takings.

Much fun for the audience, and I got more than I expected--and by that I don't mean an autograph in my copy of Skepticism and Freedom, although that was nice, too--in answer to a question afterwards about Cass Sunstein's "libertarian paternalism". I asked whether it was a way to "Brer Rabbit" our way away from the administrative state; Epstein replied by illustrating where the idea works (e.g. pension contributions) and doesn't work (e.g. at-will vs with cause termination) and remarking on "Which Sunstein" he'd like to see in the Obama administration.

Capone and Daschle

2009-02-03T14:05:00.002-07:00

When they finally got Capone, it had to do with tax evasion. While I don't think that disqualifies someone from serving in Cabinet, I'm happy to see Daschle go. A "Federal Health Board" isn't a fix, it's hoke.

Two worthwhile new climate websites.

2009-02-03T13:52:00.002-07:00

The Institute for Environment and Society and the Climate Assessment for the Southwest, both projects of the University of Arizona, have established a website, the Southwest Climate Change Network to better educate the public concerning the effects of climate change, largely tied to global warming, on the Southwestern U.S. and Northern Mexico. It's approachable but with very close connection to rigorous science, something with which we can hit think-tank pseudoscholars over the head when they claim, again, that Global Warming is Totally Made Up, and It's Good for Us, And It's the Sun, Stupid.

But if they remain so obstinate as to not read anything past the third-grade "USA Today" level, send them over to This is Reality, a website devoted to combating the myth of clean coal. No rigor here, at least not on the page, just quotations from publications and a sign-up for mythbusting alerts to be sent when yet another fossil fuel industry whitepaper has the noise machine a-going.

Why the RKBA movement turns off highly-educated urban dwellers.

2008-12-16T03:20:00.004-07:00

A little speculation, spurred on by some of the remarks made at the Bill of Rights Day event held today in Phoenix:

Educated people, even highly educated people, are seemingly more prone to holding crazy positions on two topics more than any others: gun control and anthropogenic global warming. To slander scientists and make silly statements about the state of climatology is nearly a tribal trust signifier among both conservatives and libertarians; among highly educated urban dwellers--especially academics and graduate students--to oppose any and all forms of gun liberalization is a similar shibboleth. Try challenging either on facts, or asking the latter just where passage of shall-issue concealed carry has proved problematic. The answers you get will be amusing.

Both AGW deniers and hoplophobes deserve public and private shaming, as their positions are not rational. But it's worth keeping in mind that they're not rational and tailoring one's rhetoric accordingly. One cannot say that anticapitalists have dominated environmentalism, but they're screaming the loudest. To the uninitiated, that is what environmentalism is: opposition to humanity, liberty, civilization, and markets. This is why it's important to be the visible environmentalist. You want your peers to think of you, and not the unwashed, half-deranged lifestyle-activist, when they think of people who take seriously scientific studies of Man's effect on the climate (or, more generally, his fouling of the nest).

The RKBA movement has its own lifestyle-activists, who signal clearly (if incorrectly) to the uninitiated that people who advocate liberalization of firearms laws are Not Like Us. Do you know the type? Think of the person who believes that the purpose of the right to keep and bear arms is to give a universal heckler's veto over the government by means of murder. Some official isn't following your ab initio interpretation of the Constitution? Shoot him and put his "head on a pike", to borrow the phrase I heard one too many times tonight. A thousand Carl Dregas, that's the ticket. Every man, woman, and child, rightly or wrongly, can draw a line in the sand and shoot officials who cross it. Natural rights all the way!

I propose a rule. You can call it Kalafut's Rule, if you will. If you consider yourself a respectable person, do not hide your beliefs. It is better that your neighbors and colleagues think of you and not the screaming, outlandish bozo when they read of activism concerning this issue or that, or when they hear that a bill that you would support has been introduced at the legislature. If you've taken the only honest position on global warming that isn't "I don't know enough", be the visible supporter of the AGW hypothesis. And if you support RKBA, be the visible RKBA supporter.

The difference between Democrats and the rest of us.

2008-12-08T17:04:00.004-07:00

Democrats, like presumed President-Elect Barack Obama speak of "creating jobs". The rest of us: classical-liberals, conservatives, Libertarians, Republicans, moderates, speak of prosperity and wealth.

If increasing the quantity of "jobs", whatever that even means, is the proper object of economic policy and the route to prosperity, then I recommend that the Federal government fund a major public works program. Create a five hundred foot tall memorial to Franklin Roosevelt, out of Lego (green lego, if you like), atop Mt McKinley. Then coat it with silver and put it into orbit at L2.

Wilkinson's especially astute remark on Naomi Klein

2008-12-04T18:46:00.002-07:00

We all know by now that Naomi Klein writes and speaks about matters she never bothered to study. It's also become evident that, like most of the far-leftists I've encountered who are younger than 75, she's so far from being an analytic thinker as to sound not just dippy but pseudo-insane. And she rarely misses an opportunity to remind us of these two points. Take her recent speech at the University of Chicago, as reported in the New Yorker:

My grandparents were pretty hard-core Marxists, and in the thirties and forties they believed fervently in the dream of egalitarianism that the Soviet Union represented,” Klein told the audience in Chicago. “They had their illusions shattered by the reality of gulags, of extreme repression, hypocrisy, Stalin’s pact with Hitler. . . . The left has been held accountable for the crimes committed in the name of its extreme ideologies, and I believe that’s been a very healthy process. . . . When you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories.

The difference is so elementary I'd expect even the slouching illiterates and grade-beggars taking noncalculus physics at the State Megauniversity from which I've posting this message to spot it: Repression followed from revolutionary socialism as a consequence of the ideology. Repression in a few states that (to Klein, at least) are nominally free-marketeer merely happened in the same place and, to a person who sees time in "eras" and not in minutes and seconds, the same time. It's worth noting that market reforms only came to Chile after several years of the repressive regime. To claim that repression somehow followed from free-marketeer economic advice is, to anyone with a civilized idea of time, absurd. But even in other cases the causal link has not been established, and Klein has not lifted a finger to try to establish it. Guilt-by-association is easier and association-by-error is easier still.

It is clear that Klein is not an intellectual in the narrow sense and that ideas are not driving her writing. Will Wilkinson remarks on what might make her tick:

Klein and her husband, Avi Lewis, come off as so saturated in familial left-wing politics that their ideology, such as it is, seems less a set of propositions that might be true or false than an ethnic identity or tribal commitment that can neither be chosen nor forsaken. Bred-in-the-bone cultural assumptions rarely cohere when articulated; their logic is emotional.

There's more; the whole post is worthwhile.

The strangest thing I've ever been paid to write on the Internet.

2008-11-20T22:14:00.002-07:00

Christmas Gifts for Libertarians, Free-Marketeers, an article for Associated Content. It wasn't even a wildcat submission, either, but rather a response to a request for content, albeit one I didn't expect actually to be accepted: the call was for "Christmas Gifts for _______ Lovers" articles!

Is this, in part, the Obama Recession?

2008-11-20T14:59:00.002-07:00

I cannot say that this is the Obama Recession, but is worry about what will be coming our way post-inauguration exacerbating the crisis? After all, Obama has said he will look to Franklin Roosevelt's do-somethingist empiricism for inspiration.

To many of us, that carries undertones of punitive treatment of business, class warfare, cartelization, and intervention for intervention's sake. Already during Obama's campaign we were treated to health care and health insurance reform proposals the effect of which would be (and the intent of which almost must be) not to fix the market but to destroy it, a plan that would fit right in with the NRA and AAA. We also know these days that uncertainty and fear of Roosevelt and the New Dealers caused businesses to sit on cash instead of re-invest. Is Obama scaring investors? Is he making things worse? Should he already be taking Jonah Goldberg's advice, to stop, back off, and shut up?

Kling explains credit-default swaps, succintly.

2008-11-17T16:43:00.002-07:00

On EconLog today, Arnold Kling provided a clear explanation of the credit-default swap. I've suspected that regulation arbitrage was at work here, and he makes it quite clear what the forbidden alternative is.

The post is worthwhile reading for anyone trying to understand the current troubles in finance.

In the end, Mookie throws a garbage can through the pizzeria window.

2008-11-17T12:44:00.001-07:00

The title of Mike Huckabee's new book: Do The Right Thing.

My question is: will it cause blacks to riot?

I'm OK, you're a shill. (An unsubsidized response to Matthew Yglesias.)

2008-11-14T15:30:00.016-07:00

Matt Yglesias starts out well enough in his contribution to this month's Cato Unbound, but by the end retreats to where those with leftist tendencies tend to go when they have nothing to say: accusations that everyone else is shilling. To quote:

it’s striking to me that on what would seem to me to be the simple and straightforward libertarian case that we should make Social Security benefits less generous, Cato has nothing much to say. Instead, it has an elaborate Project on Social Security Choice aimed at restructuring the program into one of mandatory, privately managed savings accounts. It’s not immediately obvious to me what this proposal has to do with libertarianism, but it would seem to offer some prospect of profits for fund managers. Whether monetary contributions from individuals working in the financial services industry, or else a desire to align more closely with the partisan political agenda of the Republican Party (itself largely dominated by the interests of American business rather than free market principles), or some combination of the two motivate the preference is beyond my ability to say.

Maybe it hasn't occurred to Yglesias that there is libertarianism beyond the "straightforward" Mises Institute schoolboy stuff, but I doubt it, as, if his writings for the Atlantic are indicative, he seems reasonably intelligent and well-read. Perhaps this ridiculous "straightforward libertarian" solution is a consciously created straw man and perhaps it indicates that, however well-read Yglesias is, he still doesn't know much about contemporary, cutting-edge libertarianism.

I similarly doubt that he can only envision two "when did you stop beating your wife" reasons Cato promotes Social Security restructuring rather than making payouts less generous, and instead suspect that the disinginuity was a deliberate attempt to hoodwink sympathetic readers into thinking something unsavory is going on at 1000 Massachusetts Avenue. Two other possibile reasons for Cato's position immediately present themselves:

Cato personnel responsible for the Project on Social Security Choice doubt the American people will accept Yglesias's "straightforward libertarian solution", a Social Security phaseout that reduces payouts to current takers without having given them the decades of notice needed to adequately prepare.
Cato personnel think that it is wrong to phase out Social Security by reducing payouts to those who currently or soon will depend on it and seek a more ethical, intermediate solution.

I cannot speak to whether either of these is the case, nor can I rule out other possibilities, but they are much more plausible than "a group of intellectuals changed their mind because unspecified mutual-fund managers possibly made a contribution to their think-tank."

It goes on:

Similarly, the free-market case for a revenue-neutral carbon pricing scheme seems fairly impeccable to me. But instead of organizing its climate change efforts around seeking to ensure that any future carbon pricing plan be as close to revenue neutral as possible, Cato prefers to steadfastly defend the rights of industry to unload air pollution unimpeded.

Yglesias fails to mention one thing: a considerable portion of the Cato crowd still thinks that, concerning the question of the existence of anthropogenic global warming, there are two sides, on reasonably equal footing, at that! Most of them haven't the background (or the willingness) to read technical papers at the level needed to judge them on their merits and are thus incapable of distinguishing the latest from JGR-Atmospheres from Christopher Monckton's "amateur hour" excursions. I suspect that they are suffering from Ronald Bailey Syndrome, that is, that they have chosen their position not due to honest scientific concerns, but rather because it fits more conveniently with their other, perhaps sounder, beliefs on policy.

This is made worse by two factors. The first being the bizarre apoplexy that flares up in elderly libertarians (even those unaffiliated with Cato) when presented with anything that looks "environmentalist". The second being Patrick Michaels's status as some sort of "Policy Scholar" at the institute. I'd entertain the idea that some AGW denialists are shills. It's not unlikely that Robert Balling, for example, goes on talking to nonscientific audiences (he wouldn't dare make some of his claims before a room full of experts) about how wrong climatologists actually working on global climate change are, despite not working in that subfield in years, because it brings in money to support his more legitimate research. Michaels, however, is probably, like S. Fred Singer, deranged. Consider that he (like Singer) was still going on about how CFCs don't cause ozone depletion as late as 2000. It's more plausible that, hearing Michaels's loud contrarianism, Exxon-Mobil sends money his way, than that his position was caused by the receipt of such funds. Again, most people at Cato, and most people in general, cannot critically evaluate science and probably don't know that they are incapable of doing so, nor what doing so entails. They've had Michaels whispering cute nonsense in their ears, and flattering their political prejudices, too, for well over a decade, and are half-convinced that environmentalism has something to do with leftism, Al Gore, and butterfly scientists' concerns about human population. It is more likely by far that they oppose creation of a carbon market because they believe stupid things about the state of atmospheric science--poke them enough and you can get them to say stupid things!--than that they oppose creation of a carbon market because someone paid them to do so or because they expect to be rewarded later.

Consider the following:

Any think-tank scholar exposed as a shill will be difficult to take seriously ever again, on any topic.
If it were truly possible to pay commentators and scholars to change their minds, wouldn't the money be better spent reversing the positions of environmetalists?

One could say that Yglesias must be taking a payment from the labor unions. After all, why would he put in such a good word for them in his Cato Unbound essay even though they are At Least As Evil As Exxon-Mobil? But that would be stupid. It's more plausible that Yglesias genuinely believes that the unions are a source of good. In order to have any reasonable discussion at all, or even to benefit from reading others' writing, we need to acknowledge that intelligent people can disagree and even, like Patrick Michaels, believe ridiculous things for ridiculous reasons.

I propose a new rule for commentators, the Russell's Teapot rule: Do not attribute someone's opinion to having taken a payment or even insinuate that said opinion might be the result of shilling behavior unless you either have compelling evidence for it or have ruled out all other possibilities. To do otherwise makes you seem foolish, dishonest, or malicious. Mr Yglesias, take note!

Milton Friedman Insitute controversy continues.

2008-11-12T15:28:00.003-07:00

For fellow spectators of the tempest in a teapot at the University of Chicago, a few updates from around the Web:

It appears that the name of the institute has been changed to the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. That doesn't look like much of a change to most of us, but perhaps it will mollify the paranoid sort who thought that the Milton Friedman Institute would be some "right-wing think tank". Nevermind that the Institute was being established for economics research even before the name was extended. Nevermind that Milton Friedman can hardly be considered "right-wing". The complainers' position didn't make sense from the start, so perhaps what is a non-change to sensible people will look like substantiative change to them.

If I could buy stock in silly remarks about the economics profession, it would be a great countercyclical asset. The recent economic downturn has brought out the bozos and resulted in all sorts of strange categorical pronouncements about free markets, the Chicago School, or some special "free market economics" separate from the rest, that nobody knows about. This piece from Al-Jazeera English is representative; search the blogosphere or even the newspapers and you will find many more just like it.

Therein, Robert Lucas says what needs to be said:

...Why don't you ask these guys [critics] what should be done specifically and what should be done now?

People like [Josef] Stiglitz [the US economist and critic of free markets] use name-calling instead of just diagnosing the problem and saying what should be done.

Should there have been regulation to prevent this? Well sure, but what sort of regulation? Let them spell out what regulation we should have in place.

These are the questions any reporter who wishes to be an asset to his profession (Ms. Brown at Al-Jazeera, take note!) must ask. If the Chicago School is to blame, what peculiar normative advice was given that was wrong and resulted in the financial situation we are now facing? Did Milton Friedman and his fellows at the University of Chicago (hardly a single-minded group!) advocate for the peculiar FNMA (Fannie Mae) policies that largely caused the housing bubble? Did they advocate against splitting up "too big to fail" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Did they say that the systemic risk problem didn't exist in the credit-default swaps market or elsewhere? Why blame the house Frank Knight built?

Elsewhere, Gary Becker makes a strong case for naming such a research institution after Friedman the man. Richard Posner addresses the concerns of those who think that the Institue will reflect poorly on the University or produce only servile work in honor of Friedman, and takes a great jab at the "'Free market' econ is dead" set:

If the religion professor who is leading the movement against the naming is right that "Friedman's over"--that the current economic crisis has consigned Friedman, along with Greenspan, to the dustbin of economic history--he should have no fear that the new Institute will be biased in favor of Friedman's views. If a physics institute were named after Albert Einstein, would the institute's researchers reject quantum theory?

Sometimes you just misjudge people.

2008-11-05T13:08:00.001-07:00

There's a reason we have face-to-face meetings even in the Internet age. Some people don't present themselves well in writing.

I helped Laissez Faire Books move in to its new Arizona headquarters last Sunday and joined the principals for dinner. A surprise drop-in, midway through, was gun-book publisher Alan Korwin.

Korwin, as readers of this 'blog may know, has in the past struck me as a hateful, right-wing boor. That's awfully far from the truth. In person the man is affable and polite, with a genuine intellectual curiosity. On top of that, he has a good liberal instinct; he's just coming to this from a different starting point than many of the rest of us.

It doesn't hurt matters, either, that he knows how to pick out a good Cabernet. And yes, this is an apology.

Trite, and in bad taste.

2008-11-01T14:12:00.002-07:00

It is neither witty nor accurate nor fair to refer to economics as "something that we thought was good until a couple of weeks ago", as though the banking crisis reveals some serious flaw in economic science, as though economic scientists were caught by surprise by the systemic risk problem, or as though we can simply start ignoring economists' advice and let ideology hold sway.

A curious use of self-selection at the airport

2008-10-13T22:49:00.002-07:00

At Midway Airport, TSA signage splits passengers entering the terminal into three groups: families and passengers with special needs, "casual travelers", and "expert travelers". The first category needs no explanation, but the demarcation between the latter two--or even what it means to be an "expert" at traveling--is unclear.

Nevertheless, after a few moments of thought, I moved to the "expert" line, which moved more quickly than that for the "casuals". Perhaps there is something to it, or perhaps the line is merely faster because fewer people will self-identify as "expert" anything. One would have to sit at security for a couple hours and count the number of fumblers and nincompoops going through each line, or better still, time each passenger's delay at the metal detector, to be sure.

There was no check for expertise, and no meaningful social sanction--not even a dirty look--for fumbling. Plainclothesed TSA workers didn't watch for "experts" who stood still on Midway's famous "moving walkways" ("Caution, the moving walkway is ending...") We can't rely on people even to not smoke on the sidewalk or in doorways, or to control their conversational volume; can anyone explain why in this situation they should be expected to meaningfully segregate themselves by ability to efficiently pass the security screening?

Things one wouldn't suspect exist.

2008-10-09T13:08:00.002-07:00

In the Biosciences West building at the University of Arizona, there is a refrigerated snack machine stocked with Fermentas brand reagents and standards, the 'Enzymatic' Automatic Freezer.

Yes, Sarah Palin is a "federalist."

2008-10-02T13:42:00.003-07:00

Over at the Daily Kos and elsewhere, fellow amateur pundits are making the claim that because a group historically known as the Federalists supported a stronger central government than their chief rivals, "federalist" is a synonym for "supports stronger central government than one's chief rivals."

That's ridiculous. Not only does it reveal ignorance of a widespread modern movement, it also misses the point: "federalist" describes a position concerning the structure of government. Here the somewhat-educated Palin gets it right and her would-be betters get it wrong.

I explain in livelier terms over at Associated Content.

Fastest lesson in human biology:

2008-09-20T01:54:00.001-07:00

From a new mom, re: her son: "He's just about the coolest thing I've ever seen."

Does official metion of "gouging" do harm or good?

2008-09-14T19:51:00.003-07:00

In a competitive marketplace, such as that for gasoline and other motor fuels in the USA, outside of lifeboat situations (which are few), there is no such thing as "price gouging".

That having been said, the term seems to have lodged permanently in the popular consciousness as slang for "the price is higher than I'd like it to be and I don't understand why."

A conundrum: does use of the term by public officials such as President Bush, including reassurances that the practice--whatever it is--will be "investigated", do good by keeping demand for price controls and other harmful interventions in the marketplace low, or do harm by perpetuating the myth that there is such a thing as "gouging" and that increases in gasoline prices in the wake of a natural disaster may be it?

Scenes from a game of Settlers (2 of 2)

2008-09-11T13:56:00.002-07:00

Last Saturday's Settlers of Catan was between four physicists, an astronomer, and a classical musician. MF is the astronomer, WF is one of the physicists; YHN is "your humble narrator":

MF: There should be a computer program to tell us the prices of the commodities.
YHN: But the value of each is subjective; why would you trust a computer program to value them for you?
MF: It's just supply and demand!
YHN: So you're going to assume the players are rational and devise a utility function for Settlers?
WF: By that point, you might as well let the computer play for you.

"It's supply and demand" is a slogan, not an answer. Should I take it as a good sign, though, that economics has injected something of that sort into the popular consciousness?

Scenes from a game of Settlers (1 of 2)

2008-09-11T13:49:00.004-07:00

...and I'll trade you three sheep if you exchange two through your port for one bricks and then give me the bricks...

It looks obvious now, to trade for use of ports in Settlers of Catan, but last weekend's game was the first time I'd seen it. The rules make no mention of trading for services, but it appears to emerge naturally. The rules of Go don't mention deadly shapes or ko threats, either.

Quotation du jour

2008-09-04T17:09:00.002-07:00

"Democratic politics, in the end, is not about rational deliberation. It is about coalitional signaling. It is about expressive solidarity. It is about identity and emotion. That’s why I have a deep mistrust of democratic politics."

That doesn't at all imply its context; it's from a Will Wilkinson post regarding Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican convention.

Career death penalty for police officers: a modest proposal.

2008-08-29T15:10:00.002-07:00

A thought, as reports of the arrests of Alicia Forrest and Asa Eslocker (neatly summed up by CLS) and others come in.

Police officers who are found to have used unncessary force or made arrests without probable cause should be forbid to work in law enforcement in all jurisdictions, and made to register like sex offenders. Those who obstruct investigations of police misconduct ought be prosecuted a la RICO.

Simple as that: with special privileges should come not only responsibility but rigid accountability.

How many more times do we have to hear this narrative?

2008-08-21T18:31:00.004-07:00

Repeating it over and over won't make it true, nor will it change that it is the product of intellectual laziness and a sign that the commentator is passing on opinions third-hand.

Consider anthropologist Marshall Sahlins's take on Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys", in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education:

Does the university expect us to "disappear" the memory of the Friedman-trained Chicago Boys, who supplied the economic programs for the draconian regimes of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the generals in Argentina? The sacrificial reduction of social values to monetary calculations is the essence of Friedman economics, and helps explain its historic taint as the complement of state terror.

Let's put aside the silliness embodied in the noun "Friedman econcomics" and consider the following:

Augusto Pinochet only became aware of "El Ladrillo", the Harberger- and Friedman-trained "Chicago Boys"' economic whitepaper, after the coup d'etat.
"El Ladrillo" does not call for the repressive policies used by Pinochet and his allies in consolidating their overthrow of the socialist Allende government.
Martinez de Hoz, Argintine Minister of Economy during most of the National Reorganization Process, was Cambridge-educated.
de Hoz's disastrous monetary policy centered on a very tight control of exchange rates. Friedman was an advocate of either "automatic" gold standards or freely floating currencies and quite opposed to manipulation of exchange rates.

The idea that repressive practices of some of the regimes--why doesn't Sahlins mention China, the UK, or the United States under Carter and Reagan?--which received Chicago School advice or put such recommendations into practice have foundation in the thought of Milton Friedman is prima facie ludicrious, and Sahlins doesn't even implicitly reference, let alone make a case for, such a link. A reading of Capitalism and Freedom, a very "thin" book well-suited for airplane rides or the café, would reveal to Sahlins that Friedman was quite the advocate of free political institutions and an open society, and that he advocated liberal economic policy in part because it makes the first more likely and reneders the second possible.

Perhaps among left-wing academics, Milton Friedman is a mythical catch-all bogeyman, a folk demon. Can we get an anthropologist on the case?

Bad Netizenship

2008-08-13T13:26:00.003-07:00

Rule number aleph-null: If you would like to unsubscribe from an e-mail list to which you have opted in, follow the instructions you were sent when you subscribed and which are mailed to you periodically, often at the bottom of each message. Do not click "This is spam" in a webmail client, especially if your e-mail service provider is Yahoo, Gmail, or some similar broadly-subscribed national service.

One too many boorish dummkopfs (yahoos?) using Yahoo mail told their client that Randy Cassingham's This Is True was spam instead of unsubscribing properly. As a result, tens of thousands of subscribers--many of them subscribers to the paid "premium" version--did not receive their newsletter for several weeks.

In the last newsletter, Cassingham reported that after a lot of back-and-forth with Yahoo support, his e-mails are now reaching subscribers and customers. However, there's no doubt that losing 15% of his subscribers for several weeks hurt Cassingham's business.

The lessons: Internet users should take spam reporting seriously, and service providers should ask "are you sure this isn't an opt-in list?" before accepting the user's click. This sort of thing has happened before. I was webmaster for an aquarium club, using the free Crosswinds service as host, when the site was blackholed because a spammer faked a Crosswinds origin for the e-mail, meaning members couldn't access the site for weeks. If the reporters had checked the headers, as is good practice, they'd have found that it was sent from an open relay elsewhere.

Terroirisme

2008-07-24T23:51:00.003-07:00

I've written a few wine reviews attributing flinty or chalky "minerals" in wines to the soil in which they are grown, but the scientist in me has always puzzled over how the grapes do that.

The answer is, quite simply, that they don't. Weather, soil chemistry, and soil structure, of course do play a role in gene expression and thus in the sensory qualities of wine, but the idea that the vines slurp up aroma-of-rock and excrete it in grapes is pure fancy.

Randall Graham a winemaker at Bonny Doon, reportedly experimented with adding rock to wine the way some add oak chips. Results were somewhat amusing, with the rocks buffering the pH and drastically altering both the taste and mouthfeel.

Harold McGee and Daniel Patterson, writing in the New York Times magazine attribute terroir more to the local winemaking traditions than to the soil. I find the argument rather convincing, that it is the winemaker and not the dirt that is steely or chalky, but I'm not as completely sold on it as Patterson and McGee. Yes, the grapes are not expressing the taste of the dirt, but topography, rainfall, soil structure, and composition play more than minimal roles in determining character. Some of the lesser-known "cult" wineries and upstarts will bring out pours of unblended wine from different vineyards to more enthusiastic tasters.

I recall a very proud owner-operator in Livermore giving me a sip of this and a sip of that (supposedly vinified the same way), then pouring three Zinfandels blended largely from the vineyards. All Zin, and all quite different. Granted, they could be from different clones; I didn't think to ask.

Terroir is still a mystery. What is genetic, what is environmental, and what is winemaker has yet to be pinned down. Even the question of what we mean by "minerals" in the wine--it isn't a higher salt concentration!--remains unanswered. Some might like the mystery to remain, but as for me, these investigations enhance my enjoyment.

Three negatives in a row.

2008-07-24T03:13:00.002-07:00

My July posts consist of two hits and a link to a hit. Next post will be "positive", I promise!

'CLS' to farmers: "To a gas chamber, go!"

2008-07-23T23:22:00.004-07:00

As Whittaker Chambers said of Ayn Rand in his famous (and hilarious) review of Atlas Shrugged, I dislike much of what 'CLS' the anonymous (by request) 'blogger at Classically Liberal dislikes, quite as heartily as he does.

Nonetheless, much as I didn't have the stomach for Atlas Shrugged's painfully bad dialogue and Saturday-morning cartoon moral landscape, never finishing the book and having no desire to do so, I'm finding that, although I promoted CLS's 'blog back when it was getting started, his recent posts' moralistic turn makes my eyes cross and my brain hurt. Ordinarily speaking I have no trouble reading those with whom I disagree, but when the modesty of a true intellectual is set aside in favor of the cheap certainty of an ideologue, it becomes difficult to not dismiss the passage literally by reflex. The eyes--my eyes, anyway--have a tendency, on finding that a writer hasn't thought things through, has no intention of thinking things through, and doesn't even appreciate that the matter at hand is of sufficient subtlety to require being thought through, to skip to the next sentence or paragraph, as if not to spend more time processing an author's mistake than the author spent writing it.

So it is with a recent post about the effects of a change in ethanol blending mandates, wherein farmers who planted their crops expecting mandates to continue as is at least until the end of the season are treated much as the sociology professors, schoolteachers, and playwrights (etc.) who perished in the Taggart Tunnel. To quote:

One farmer said: “We bought fertilizer and corn seed, decide our crop mix on the basis of ethanol being where it was. To change the mandate in the middle of our growing season, that’s really not right.” He apparently never worried if the mandate was right in the first place.

I would like to be able to attribute the post to the casual libertarian's (usually somewhat willful) lack of appreciation for stickiness, but CLS goes on to accuse the quoted farmer and many others of theft and looting and to actually gloat over the farmers' losses.

Bailing out people who benefited from previous government policies is not libertarian. Their failure, if anything is a bit of justice. It returns some of the booty that they stole back to the productive economy.

CLS has perhaps forgotten that he and nearly everyone else is a beneficiary of government policies, as he lives and does business under rule of law. This does not make him a thief unless all men are thieves. If the law should change in a way to hurt his livelihood, as he is not profiting from slavery or some other malum in se conduct, I would want the change to be done in such a way as to smooth the transition.

It would seem, however, that in CLS's newly twisted moral landscape, those who respond to price signals that happen to be perturbed by government policies with which one does not agree are "stealing" and their profits are "booty". Forget that the ethanol mandate, however poorly thought out, had a legitimate purpose, that being moving toward carbon neutrality. (I don't think it's relevant here that CLS dismisses the work of climatologists for reasons that amount to "just because".) Forget that that purpose is not mystically erased if farmers happened to have lobbied for the mandate's passage. It is the duty of everyone to not only anticipate all possible changes in the law, but also to pretend, as actors in the marketplace, that the law does not exist if CLS does not think it should exist. To do otherwise is to be a thief, to steal, to not participate in the "productive economy".

CLS claims that to advocate for bailouts and smoothed transitions is not libertarian. Apparently his bookstore didn't carry Epstein's Takings and the passage, largely by libertarians, of regulatory takings laws in Oregon and Arizona eluded him while he was out of the country. I'm not saying that changing what is essentially a crop-use mandate mid-season is a takings, but it does sit on a continuum with regulatory takings, and I can see how one could argue that it is. I suspect that despite his stance on this particular matter, CLS would like for the filthy polluting pigs or those profiting from habitat destruction to be compensated when sensible environmental regluations are passed. (Life is full of shades-of-grey, of naturally diffuse "drop in the ocean" harms, and the like; that's one of the reasons we have markets.)

Why, in CLS's mind, should bailouts and smoothed transitions not occur? It puts us on a slippery slope to socialism. Ridiculous! Moving on to something with at least a semblance of merit, we find that CLS argues that the government should not "bail out" those negatively affected by a change in its policies lest it subsidize everyone all the time. Reductio ad absurdum has its uses, but this isn't one. The claim that laws can either be changed on an abrupt timescale and without compensation to those harmed, irrespective of the consequences, or all businesses must be subsidized forever whenever the law changes is sloppy. The quoted farmer himself presents middle ground, written right between the lines. When crops are in the field is not the time to change policy. Therefore, a fair transition would be to lower, or better still, to end the mandates on a timetable such that next year's crop mix is determined based on a market in which there is no ethanol blending mandate.

I'd say that I don't understand how this could have eluded CLS, but that would be a lie. I understand how it eluded him. The peculiar self-lobotomy of the moralist or ideologue creates a mental "blind spot" that nearly always obscures the middle ground.

The extremes are ruled out, yes. Keeping the subsidy for all time is fairly clearly wrong, and cutting it off immediately, mid-season, is just as bad albeit for different reasons. Considering Man as a member of society, an actor in the marketplace, and a limited being, CLS's policy prescription is faulty. Perhaps, pace Chambers, this is to be expected: we should not "place much confidence in the diagnosis of a doctor who supposes that the Hippocratic Oath is a kind of curse."

The more interesting questions remain:

How can we best, given the moral and practical concerns surrounding the matter, eliminate the ethanol blending mandate?
What policy can better satisfy its legitimate purposes?

These are questions of the sort to which ideologues and moralists do not have answers. That is my accusation and in many ways their boast.

Joe Horn, Texas, Alan Korwin give Castle Doctrine a bad name

2008-07-17T14:48:00.005-07:00

UPDATE: Korwin ain't so bad.

A runaway jury in Texas refused to indict Joe Horn ("I'm gonna kill 'em!...Move, yer dead!") on any criminal charges whatsoever related to his murder of two men burglarizing his neighbor's home. Grand jury proceedings in Texas are sealed, so we do not and likely will never know the reasoning, but the matter is already being linked in the popular press (one example) to Castle Doctrine laws removing the duty to retreat during a criminal invasion of one's home or business, no doubt in part because Horn himself mentioned the change in the law to the 911 operator.

This despite Horn's actions (even according to the law's author) not falling under castle doctrine protection. The letter of the law is clear: the Castle Doctrine bill creates a presumption that a person breaking into one's home or business is there to cause, primarily or incidentially, bodily harm, and clarifies (as the Supreme Court affirmed for Federal case law, way back in 1895) that there is no duty to retreat.

What it does not do is allow a man, in a fit of stupid machismo or for any other reason, on witnessing a crime in which others are not in iminent danger, to load his firearm, shout "Move yer dead!", seek out trouble, and shoot the culprits in the back. The Castle Doctrine only applies if trouble comes to the shooter! Nevertheless, that the Castle Doctrine gives semi-literate rubes like Horn or W.C. Frosch even the idea that they have a right to shoot people not invading their homes or businesses--in Frosch's case, a kid cutting across his lawn--will make it all the more difficult to get Castle bills passed in states which impose a statutory duty to retreat.

Alan Korwin, publisher of Gun Laws of the United States, isn't making the situation any better. From his 17 July 2007 "Page Nine" e-newsletter:

News reports generally failed to mention that the two dead criminals, caught red-handed burglarizing Horn's neighbor's house, were in the country illegally. News media policy is to ignore or avoid the illegal immigration aspects of crimes when possible, because they believe it might expose a stereotype, create a stereotype, or is not important, though nearly everyone who reads their tripe believes it is very important. Reasons for the difference in opinion are unclear.

Texas has robust "Castle Doctrine" laws protecting homeowners and the innocent, and making things tough on home invaders even if they aren't illegal aliens committing crimes here. Horn said on tape that he knew of those laws, and the officer on the other end of the line acknowledged the laws were in place, but tried in many ways to convince Horn to do absolutely nothing and let the burglars rob his neighbor.

Korwin may publish books on the law, but he's no lawyer, and it shows. That Hown knows of the Castle Doctrine law does not justify--legally or morally--his actions when the Castle Doctrine simply does not apply. Yet nevertheless Korwin is taken, popularly, to be an authority on firearms law. His invocation of the Castle Doctrine will make it more difficult, at the margin, for us to get these laws passed elsewhere.

As will, of course, his stressing of the burglars' immigration status. To imply that their status is a mitigating factor for Horn is vile, moreover, even a half-wit understands that Horn could not have possibly known the burglars were unlawfully in the country when he shot them in the back. To answer Korwin's question, the reason newsmen didn't report the burglars' immigration status is because, legally, it doesn't matter, and morally, it doesn't matter. That "illegals have no rights" is a right-wing myth, the product of Mugabe-like or Hitler-like imaginations. "If you shoot someone in the back, and it turns out that they don't have a government permission slip, that makes it OK." The press, better educated than the plebs, understand that immigration is irrelevant and have no obligation to report on it simply because morons and bigots think it's important.

Korwin is reminding me in some ways of Jack "Pal" Smurch from Thurber's classic The Greatest Man In The World. What kind of self-respecting, thoughtful human being thinks immigration status of the victim is relevant to the question of whether or not someone should be indicted for murder? The same sort of childish lout who writes of a "lamestream media" and who believes Oregon Petition hype about anthropogenic global warming. Flying around the world didn't make Smurch anything but the boor he was, and likewise publishing success hasn't transformed Korwin into Eugene Volokh or Dave Hardy. A boor can become successful in business, he can be dressed up in a suit, given awards, receive ass-kissing admiration from better men, but he remains a boor. Class doesn't follow success.

Lack of class has hurt the pro-RKBA movement in the past and, at the margin, will continue to hurt it. Unfortunately, there's no good way to even induce the classless to clean up.

Best. 'Blog Smackdown. Ever.

2008-07-16T14:51:00.003-07:00

What Megan McArdle had to say about University of Chicago humanities faculty's letter protesting the creation of the Milton Friedman Institute:

...their assessment of the effects of the "neoliberal global order" is forehead slapping, head shaking, did-they-really-say that? stupid. I haven't heard such transparently wishful claptrap since my fifteen-year-old boyfriend tried to convince me that sex provided unparalleled aerobic exercise.

Speaking as an aspiring academic, it's about damn time the stupids are called stupid. More and harder, please!

Giving credit where credit is not due, or CNN's dumbed-down reporting.

2008-06-26T10:14:00.004-07:00

From cnn.com's coverage of today's DC vs Heller ruling:

The National Rifle Association said the high court had given it the ammunition to challenge other cities' gun-control measures.

and

After the ruling, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA said his organization would immediately file court challenges to the bans in Chicago and San Francisco.

This might lead the casual reader to think that the NRA brought the Parker challenge (which metamorphosed to Heller). On the contrary, up until the time the case was granted cert, they fought to derail the effort, fearing a bad ruling.

But what can we expect; CNN and many other lowbrow outlets don't deal well with cases that violate the rules. The rules are:

There are legitimately two sides to every issue.
There are none but two sides to every issue.
Each of these sides is a solid camp, with a leader or a leading organization.
The opinion of the leader or leading organization is an accurate and thorough summary of the views of the camp.
A reporter must thus seek "quotes" from two sources: a representative of the leadership of the one camp, and a representative of the leadership of the other.

This is false balance's dual, and it's equally obnoxious. How sloppy, to not so much as mention the Cato Institute or Bob Levy in a standard news piece on Heller!

College does not imply middle-class values

2008-06-25T17:43:00.004-07:00

While I was tutoring a local community college student in the basement of the University's main library, the boys--and I can't call them anything else--in the next glass-enclosed study room over were playing techno music, occasionally shouting/braying to each other (in between mumbles), and belching loudly and deliberately after guzzling their Cokes.

Chewing-tobacco containers and Burger King bags littered the floor. Barzun would call it "emancipation", and it not only debases the academic enterprise, but also devalues the degree of the more serious students. A college degree, especially from a "we have to take just about everyone" state university, no longer almost necessarily implies middle-class values.

Kids, that's why, right or wrong, college degrees are almost always required to get the "good jobs".

IQ 126? Make him chief!

2008-06-12T16:24:00.003-07:00

The city of New London is in the news again, or at least (oddly, as the incident is nine years old) getting hammered in the blogosphere, this time for refusing to hire a man because he scored too high on the Wonderlic Test of intelligence. His score was a 33, which corresponds approximately to an IQ of 126. Not bad, but not genius level, either; it puts him in the same league as your average MD.

One would think that police departments would fall over themselves to hire this man. He's educated, he's ~~not a career thug~~ worked in other fields, and he's purportedly in it out of a desire to protect and serve (rather than to kick some ass.) Supposedly he'll get bored with being a patrolman and quit. Put him in charge of something.

Better supervision of the common policeman will go along way. Just ask the Dickson City, PA city council a year or two from now, when they're shelling out hundreds of thousands to settle a 28 USC § 1983 suit brought about by their Keystone Kops harassing and arresting people for legal behavior and legal refusal to present identifying papers

Smart cops save money, lives, and liberty in the long run.

The Sketchy Continent

2008-06-09T14:13:00.002-07:00

I often find that happenings in Africa are strange beyond what reasonable people could imagine. Something posted today on Marginal Revolution really "takes the cake": albino Tanzanians are being maimed and killed so hucksters can sell their body parts as good-luck charms and folk medicine.

Things I didn't imagine existed.

2008-06-08T03:36:00.003-07:00

In Mississippi, cucumber pickles are now being pickled a second time in double-strength Kool-Aid.

And from a a website selling canning supplies, the remark "Douche alum is not food grade." Douche alum? Ouch! Why? I put alum on my face to stop bleeding when I cut myself shaving. I can't imagine doing that, voluntarily, to mucous membranes.

What happens when soixante-huitards go senile?

2008-06-05T14:06:00.003-07:00

What happens when soixante-huitards start to go senile? If the case of Diane Craig, of Danville, CA is indicative, they burn gas stations--and Starbucks, too--to "take a stand."

"I'll have none of this, these so-called 'laws' of 'economics', and commodification of mostly-good coffee!"

As can be expected, the poor old dingbat didn't even do a good job getting the fires started. A fireplace log makes a lousy accelerant. Where's Chesa Boudin to clue her in?

Why Will Wilkinson rocks my socks.

2008-06-02T15:11:00.003-07:00

Wilkinson, of the Cato Institute, is well on the way to establishing himself as one of this generation's most thoughtful commentators.

Last Friday he put forth a positive description of modern classical liberalism and the place of libertarianism in the post-socialist world, that should be required reading.

No, that's the sound of a gathering in a Big Tent!

2008-05-25T01:22:00.003-07:00

Unable to attend the LP convention, I am getting a sense of it from weblogs such as Brian Holtz's Libertarian Intelligence and Reason Hit and Run. 2008 will go down as the year LP Libertarians decided to act like a political party, when those who truly desire to use the political process to move policy in a more libertarian direction stood up to the village anarchists and gave the ideologues their comeuppance for insults ranging from the 1983 convention to the bait-and-switch tactic to relentless attempts at "internal education" whereby those who don't accept "natural rights theory"--usually because they are well-educated and well-read enough to know better!--get slandered as "statist" and "socialist" and stabbed in the back during their campaigns.

The delegates in convention today adopted a unity platform, one that does not undermine registration efforts and political campaigns, as it represents what thinking Libertarians believe, not what a few loutish sophomores would rather us believe.

Alone, regardless of who wins the nomination for President, this restores my faith in the Party, giving me reason to give it a second chance, or an Nth chance, for another few years.

The anonymous-by-request author of Classically Liberal, with affected nineteenth-century bombast, decries the Reform Caucus effort and this new platform as wanting to "dim the libertarian torch or make the battle cry an "uncertain sound". Nonsense. The Reform platform is the sight and sound of a Big Tent. Political victories are won by bringing people to the cause, not driving them out because they won't mouth filoque clauses about total ends to taxation or privatizing national parks. Disagreement is a sign of health in such an organization.

Torches? Biblical horns? Who would listen? Who does listen? Anyone who believes in a Libertarian priesthood, that the voter will treat the Libertarian as his conscience or treat him as his better needs his head examined. (Anyone who thinks that I should recognize Rothbardites as my better doesn't even need the exam, as he is certifiably nuts.) Political parties that cannot be even a credible threat at the polls are non-entities. Chasing off people who disagree on bits of the agenda is a step away from being a credible threat. Unlike membership in a single-issue organization, which is binary (do you support the abolition of slavery or do you not?), membership in a political party is a matter of shades of grey: libertarianism is not a unified whole or a package deal. "Do these people and me share enough of a common policy direction to justify collaboration?" If the Party were Dave Nolan and Eric Garris: no. Those gentlemen plus Brian Holtz and Tim West and Tom Stevens and the like? Yes.

I presume that the author of Classically Liberal understands the difference between a single-issue organization and a coalition. Perhaps, in the fit of bombast, he simply forgot. Purism of a certain sort makes a single-issue group strong and a political party weak. How many members will a political party have if made up only of people who agree on everything? A "village anarchists'" club cannot be a stronger political force than a real libertarian political party. There aren't enough villages!

Bernie Sanders, move over for Maxine Waters!

2008-05-23T16:16:00.002-07:00

Senator Sanders, Ms. Waters is now seated to your left.

"This liberal will be all about socializing...basically...taking over, and the government running all of your companies.”

Will the voters have good enough sense to throw her out of office in 2010? Do we have a PAC devoted to sending Reds back home to find honest work? If we don't, we should. Anti-liberal sentiments have no place in American public discourse, let alone Congress.

Stochastic Gain Medium

2008-05-22T00:55:00.003-07:00

As though I didn't have enough 'blogs already, I've started a science weblog: Stochastic Gain Medium.

A Platform worthy of activists and candidates.

2008-05-20T13:06:00.002-07:00

They're at it again. Those statist, socialist, nerf-core asshats of the Libertarian Reform Caucus, disguised as a legitimate Platform Committee, are presenting to the delegates at this week's LP Convention (which I am not attending, for professional reasons) what could be the Party's first respectable Platform since long before I joined up in '96.

Gone are the bizarre extremism of Murray Rothbard, Williamson Evers, and co. Gone are explicitly anarchist/nihilist clauses calling for a total end to taxation, an individual right to secession, and the like. Gone also is the bizarre four-part format which necessitated sloppy plank writing, encouraged sloppy thinking, and made dragged out, knock-down fights between the ideologues and the casuists inevitable.

If the delegates do not decide to take a step backwards and "Restore '04"--a good possibility given the outright veneration some give to Dave Nolan--the Party will have for the first time since the ideologues ruined it in the early 1980s a platform worthy of its activists. The committee's proposal is a platform candidates can stand on, a platform which won't make reporters think we're all anarcho-nihilists, a platform that won't turn people off to the party before they even encounter an active member, and a platform street-level organizers, like myself, won't have to explain away. ("No candidate in his right mind would advocate such a policy; that thing is flypaper for the ideologues and dunces!")

Jacob Hornberger, of course, will foam at the mouth due to paranoid fantasies of "compromise and concealment", as though we all really secretly believe in legal animal sex, a torts-only approach to environmental law, a total end to taxation, individual secession, and man-boy love. Just pat ol' "Bumper" on the head and recommend he submit an amendment.

Blog of Rights

2008-05-20T12:54:00.002-07:00

The ACLU's national office has today officially announced its weblog on the topic of civil liberties. To date, its focus has been on Federal matters.

Writing quality is rather high; they've recruited Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com and Daniel Larison of American Conservative to supplement their staffers' contributions. This is worth a daily "hit", and I've added it to my blogroll.

U. Chicago announces Friedman Institute; Norberg demolishes Naomi Klein

2008-05-15T17:28:00.002-07:00

It would be an exaggeration to claim that Milton Friedman singlehandedly restored to economic liberalism a sound intellectual footing, but he nevertheless was both the towering giant of postwar economics and the US's foremost defender of liberty in the latter half of the 20th Century.

Today the University of Chicago announced that, to honor his contributions (and, of course, to attract contributions and entrench its prestige), it will establish the Milton Friedman Institute.

Explains Gary Becker, in the University's announcement:

The Institute will build on this important tradition by focusing on research questions that support development of economic models grounded in economic theory and empirical evidence and designed to evaluate a variety of questions related to economic policy.

Nearly as soon as Milton Friedman slipped in the tub, those whose ideologies are incompatible with Friedman's intellectual legacy began to attack it, sometimes with a savage dishonesty that could not have been brought to bear were he here to defend himself. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, is the prime example.

That Klein distorted history and failed to fulfil the affirmative duties of the scholar is already well-known. Tyler Cowen summed up the trouble with her book in his review. Earlier this week, the Cato Institute released a more extensive, and damning, rebuttal, penned by Johan Norberg. Were Klein an academic, I could say she was headed for ruin, Michael Bellesiles-style. Since she's merely a more industrious version of the common Che Guevara t-shirt wearing, "people before profits"-screaming lout, nothing of the sort will happen, although thinking people will be less likely to take her claims at face value in the future. Joseph Stiglitz is, of course, excepted.

This week's score: 2 for respect for the dead, zero for the radical Left.

But more seriously: one can still mess with airport security!

2008-05-13T23:29:00.007-07:00

Airport security is very good at putting on a show for the rubes--"we make you take off your shoes so stupid people feel safer"--but when it comes to novel situations, anything goes.

Last night, on the way from San Jose to Tucson, the through count in Las Vegas had one passenger too many. After letting some passengers on the plane, the stewardess, list in hand, asked the passengers who originated in San Jose to raise our hands. Twelve people answered, each of whom was on the list. Puzzled by this result, the process was repeated. I spoke up: "If I were a stowaway wanting a free flight to Tucson, I wouldn't raise my hand."

Were I wearing an untucked T-shirt and a baseball cap indoors, or black, or perhaps not reading Susan Jacoby's (mediocre) Age of American Unreason, or not flying Southwest, I might have been harassed, reported to security, or bounced from the flight. But instead my interjection elicited a laugh from the other passengers and the stewardess not in charge of the count, a nervous giggle from the counter, and little more.

The raised-hand name check was attempted once more, with the same result. The rest of the passengers boarded and, other than a 45-minute delay due to dangerous wind conditions, the flight proceeded as planned. Somebody who knows the routes got a discounted flight!

I now have one more reason to fly Southwest: they take being relaxed seriously. Code Orange? Is that a techno band?

Downing an airliner, part III

2008-05-13T21:50:00.004-07:00

For quite some time, the Chinese, with a large vegetarian subculture, have been able to make passable meat-substitutes out of wheat gluten.

I'm not an expert in explosives chemistry, but it would seem as though if one can make gluten into duck, one can make explosive or poison-gas precursors into paper, to be torn out and thrown in the toilet or mixed with the $4 mini-bottle of Jim Beam. It shouldn't be much more difficult than disguising them as instant soup.

Tuesdays with Morrie? So bland, it's suspect; if you were a terrorist, isn't that the book would you choose to look innocent? You certainly wouldn't pick something like the Koran or the Anarchist Cookbook, right? And that gloss on the pages of Maxim may not be what you think it is!

Airline magazines and Sky Mall are it from now on!

Classier than a Che Guevara t-shirt, and it's got electrolytes.

2008-05-08T01:21:00.002-07:00

If you couldn't figure out with what to wash down that Extra Big-Ass Taco, now with more molecules, take heart in knowing that one can now purchase Brawndo without use of a Time Masheen.

Buying a product primarily to make some sort of statement used to be confined primarily to greeting cards. (Please don't beat me over the head with The Substance of Style; I know I'm being coarse.) Ready-made blatant signaling has apparently moved from the Hallmark aisle ("glad you were there for me after you ran over my dog...") and t-shirts to the beverage aisle. Unlike the Che t-shirt ("I'm spiteful and ignorant, and I vote!"), this one's a little more of a nerd in-joke, but from a certain perspective, it still falls into the category of things trite people can purchase to make a statement against "consumerism", whatever that is.

Putting my snobbery aside for a moment, however, this one's more interesting than the usual. I can't recall any other independently proposed and developed movie knockoff being produced with the studio's blessing. Given our culture's shift away from a top-down "television" model with clear demarcation between performers/producers and consumers towards a more distributed, amateurist "internet" model, it was bound to happen sometime, but to date the studios have been firmly opposed.

For those with particularly acute electrolyte cravings, Amazon is selling single cans.

Machine guns and all that.

2008-04-06T00:05:00.003-07:00

It's been an interesting (lunar) month for me, in that I've had my mind changed about two matters of policy by some method other than study. First Joe Cobb has me thinking that free banking is sensible even most of its advocates like it for merely ideological reasons, now today, after having, thanks to a very classy RKBA enthusiast at the Tucson Rifle Club who hosted a group from the University, fired a full automatic, I have changed my mind in a sense, having formed opinions about the matter.

Federal regulation of full automatics is working, but needs some liberalization.

Opponents of the right to keep and bear arms love to point out when a pro-RKBA line of thought would allow for ownership of "machine guns", or even to ask RKBA proponents if people should be allowed to own full automatics. People already own full automatics, and it hasn't been a problem. The answer should not be "no", the answer should be "yes, they already do, and it hasn't been a problem." Why ban something that hasn't been a problem. That was my position already, but I add to it a corollary: firearms regulation is largely about matters of degree, but the amount of mischief one could carry out with a submachine gun like the MP5 is not so much greater than that of an ordinary pistol to justify moving to an outright ban. Likewise the switch from AR-15 to M-16 gives but a marginal advantage. Keep pulling that trigger, and one can empty a clip quite quickly.

What sort of liberalization do I have in mind? Allowing the three-shot burst version of the M-16 (currently in use by the military, as leadership found full auto to be troublesome!) would make sense; from one shot to three, as opposed to the spraying that keeps hoplophobes up at night, is a matter of nearly infinitesimal degree, yet it restores the civilian parity with the military that is such an important part of American tradition. More importantly, lower the cost of all full autos by allowing some new ones on the market. The high cost of a full auto resulting from the ban on sale of any manufactured after 1986 is almost surely one of the reasons legally owned machine guns are just about the least likely firearms to be used in crime. People who own full autos tend to be characterized by affluence, not anomie. But the cost is also surely keeping most responsible shooters out of the market unnecessarily, threatening the very concept of a well regulated militia and perhaps making the notion that there is no legitimate civilian use of a fully automatic weapon a self-fulfilling claim. $2000 is a good enough barrier to entry; $12000 is excessive.
The police should not have fully automatic weapons, or at the very least should be prohibited from using them except when engaging criminals with fully automatic weapons.

The difference between a fully automatic and a semiautomatic weapon is largely a matter of degree, yes, but the difference is important in some situations. Favored by the militaristic SWAT teams which have become common without enough citizen protest or discussion, submachine guns like the MP5, especially when equipped with high-tech "red dot sights", are so comfortable and easy to use that they make killing the target like playing a videogame. To a maniac hell-bent on murder, it doesn't make a difference, but the delay, the necessity to pull a semi-automatic weapon's trigger once per shot, may very well keep testosterone-pumped, three-quarter-witted "peace officers" from making deadly mistakes, especially during the no-knock, military-style raids which should be illegal in the first place.

Understanding your local europhile.

2008-03-19T14:51:00.002-07:00

The local Europhiles--you know the sort: affluent social-democrats, the sort who advocate big-government while being educated enough to know it doesn't work--may be easier to understand due to Stuff White People Like.

Some of the information may also deepen your appreciation of overeducated snobs like me. Caveat lector!

The Poll: Libertarian presidential hopefuls

2008-03-05T01:21:00.006-07:00

At this point, were I someone who participated in prediction markets, I wouldn't put my money on the LP's presidential candidate getting more than 5% in the November general election. Yet, for reasons I can't understand, there are between eight and fifteen people seeking the Party's nomination.

Stephen Gordon of Third Party Watch is conducting a poll on the matter, including a rank-ordering of the candidates. My response is as follows:

Bob Barr. Bob Barr isn't actually in the running, but if he were, he'd be the most qualified candidate. An eminently decent ex-Congressman and collaborator with the ACLU, Barr has drifted toward a (pragmatic) libertarian position since the LP targeted him, then a notorious drug warrior, as a demonstration of the spoiler effect.

That isn't to say that his record in Congress wasn't, from a libertarian's perspective, respectable. While not as purely liberal as Ron Paul, Barr, who understands the meaning of compromise, accomplished a great deal more.
George Phillies. George is un-charismatic, even for a physicist, and he and I disagree on several policy questions, most notably immigration, but I recognize and appreciate his thoughtful, cautious approach to most issues. Moreover, alone among the candidates, he seems to understand what it takes to conduct a campaign. Whether or not he wins the nomination, his privately-conducted polls will do the party good.
Steve Kubby. Steve Kubby has a solid record as an activist and mounted respectable third-party candidacies in California. His ability to raise funds--like every candidate lower on the list--should be cause for embarassment. He's made up for it by calling in his connections in the libertarian movement and putting together a bit of a brain trust, including maverick Chicago School economist Joe Cobb.

Kubby's endorsement of Ron Paul was a statement that, as the LP's candidate, he'd under certain circumstances commit a gross impropriety. Likewise, rolling around in the mud with born-again purist Christine Smith is not to his credit. With Paul out of the running, his respectability has been restored by events out of his control. I suspect that, on the issues, I am more in agreement with him than with Phillies, but Phillies so far has run a more solid campaign.
Mary Ruwart. Ruwart is not actually seeking the nomination, although there are rumors that she will jump in, Jacob Hornberger-style, at the last minute. That's tawdry, but I'll forgive it, as, unlike Hornberger, and despite her role in driving my sort of libertarian out of the Party in the '80s (read up on the history of the Bergland nomination!) she is not a willful idiot worried about the effects of "compromise and concealment"--Hornberger's term for taking thoughtful positions on policy matters rather than always talking about the Best of All Possible Worlds--on her immortal soul.

Ruwart has somewhat of a broad appeal in the libertarian movement, although in my 12 years as spectator and minor participant I can't say I've ever been a "fan". Said appeal stems largely from style, and it isn't the "macho flash" style which usually wins a libertarian street-cred. Her training as a biophysicist, even though most of her publications are about rat guts, wins additional points with this 'blogger.

Like Phillies and Kubby, Ruwart would, despite her lack of political experience, be a respectable candidate and an asset to the Party. Too bad she's not running!
Bob Jackson. Jackson's approach to the issues is solidly libertarian and solidly sane. His campaign, however, has not gotten off the ground and it's not clear that he even remotely understands what it takes to win the nomination, let alone be a player in the general election. Nobody without any experience in government really belongs in the race (sorry George, Steve, and Mary!), but Jackson is the only one of the three people listed so far actually seeking the nomination who seems to be running for dog-catcher.
Wayne Allyn Root. Talk about opportunity lost! Root is a zillionaire and a minor celebrity. His libertarian credentials are a bit lacking--he emphasizes being an ex-Republican and a "conservative" more than anything else--but his policy views are broadly libertarian. However, his campaign has been about as serious as Bob Jackson's.
Robert Milnes. Milnes is among the nobodys, or at least the "people nonexistent in the movement until they decided they could run for President. He proposes a Libertarian-Green alliance. Given the ideological climate of both groups, with Libertarians largely hostile to both environmentalism and soft-communitarianism and Greens having tolerance or even affection for market abolitionism, Parecon, and other totalitarian schemes, that'll happen soon after pigs learn to Use the Force. Not a bad idea, however, for reasons I may discuss some other time.
Michael Jingozian. Is Jingozian a Milnes clone, or vice-versa. From my perspective, the answer is "yes." Ranking these two was a toss-up, and done randomly.
Daniel Williams. Demerits go to Williams for basing his whole website around video. If I wanted TV, I'd buy a TV. Video works at its own pace; creating a video means you expect the audience to sit and take as much time as you would have them take. Especially when you're a "nobody", that's unacceptable. Williams is ostensibly the author of The Naked Truth About Drugs and, like your humble narrator, a low-level LP activist. He's done very little to even let the community know where he stands on the issues, and hasn't been campaigning.

Note that this implies that I'd take a libertarian who I don't know much about over the rest of the candidates!
Jim Libertarian Burns. That's his real name, by the way; Burns's record of party activity goes back to the '70s. Of late--you can call it his retirement--he's taken to running for the Presidential nomination every four years, to tell us all that the LP candidate won't win so policy questions are irrelevant.
Alden Link. Link is the inventor of the wheatgrass juicer, and one of the first candidates to declare. His campaign never picked up much steam, despite his having been taken under the wing of prominent New York-area activist Tom Stevens. Perhaps it has something to do with his cluelessness about the libertarian approach to the issues.

Worth noting, however, is that Link stands as evidence that the rhetoric of liberty and prosperity can attract people to the movement who don't care the slightest about ideas.
Mike Gravel. Gravel is in Gordon's poll due to a statement made during a campaign stop in Alaska about running on the Libertarian ticket, which came to nothing. He shows up at this point in my list as my way of saying, "I'd rather have Mike Gravel than any of the candidates ranked lower."

Insert "Hillary Clinton"--who I'd rather have than Mike Gravel--and my point becomes more clear.
Christine Smith. Smith was yet another newcomer to the movement who decided she could run for President. Unlike most in that mold, she brought a background as an organizer and raiser-of-money for humanitarian causes. Like Alden Link, she was a bit soft on Libertarian ideas, but seemed promising for quite a while.

In the past few months, she's taken to opposing much-needed reform of the LP and has joined--with some wild, off-the-deep-end, Hornberger-esque releases--the "purist" camp. For those unfamiliar with the internal culture of the libertarian movement, a "purist" is not someone who believes the same thing the rest of us do but is just more honest about it. Rather, a "purist" is someone who believes in many ridiculous things, has trouble with prioritization and shades-of-gray, and insists that if others agree, they must be evil. The libertarian calling you a "socialist", a "central planner", or a "fascist" because you believe in cap-and-trade or school vouchers is a purist.

Such a person clearly has no business running for President. If we needed any further confirmation of Smith's lack of suitability, her recent temper-tantrum shows her true colors. The Libertarian Leadership Forum, held in Las Vegas, charged candidates for the Presidential nomination $500 to participate in the debate. The debate cost money to put on (more on this later), moreover, with anywhere between eight and a dozen candidates in the running, there needed to be some way of filtering. To a respectable campaign, $500 is a peppercorn fee. To the bozos, it's steep. Smith refused to pay, then sent messages to every contact list she could find condemning the practice and confirming her place among the bozos.

Even Jim L Burns paid the fee. Smith would rather have been a free-rider. She's new to the libertarian movement and her positions have been evolving. I wonder if she's heard or read the term "free rider" before. Most don't get that far.
Barry Hess. Outwardly a perfectly respectable Hadacol salesman turned Jesus Junk salesman turned currency speculator, Hess is a profoundly vain man. As such, he has more in common with most Presidents than the other Libertarian contenders do--see what Greenspan had to say!--but I nonetheless maintain that he is of insufficiently sound moral character to carry the Party's standard.

In Arizona, Hess is the man who Runs For Things. Not local offices, mind you, but the top. Always the top. He ran for Senate in 2000, coming in last behind an independent and a Green, and for Governor twice, receiving about 2% of the vote and coming in last each time. Reasons why are manifold. Hess has no background in government, nor in public policy. His credentials as a man-of-the-community are limited to his church. He comes off as not understanding the issues.

Worse still, he's unmanageable, and doesn't know how to take advice or criticism in stride. He's told me, repeatedly, to "watch and learn"--insisting that the things winners do to win are all wrong--and and even had the gall to tell me I should admire him. Why should I learn about success from a repeat failure who's been an embarrassment to his Party and refuses to learn from his mistakes?
Ron Paul. I don't care what his ideological roots are, and I don't care what sort of mold his followers would like to fit him in. Ron Paul, of the candidates in Gordon's list, is the only one who would be antagonistic to liberty, were he elected, with his veto pen, with court nominations, and with administration-authored legislation.

Paul talks a lot about the Constitution, but isn't properly a Constitutionalist. He believes strange things about said document, not supported by legal scholarship, and has introduced several bills--google the "We The People Act"--threatening to de-fund the courts if they deviate from his creative re-interpretation. The most insidiously Christian Dominionist and anti-gay member of Congress, Paul wouldn't actively oppress, rather, he'd remove Federal protections and nominate judges who would remove Federal protections, knowing that localities would establish religion or move to punish gays for being who they are.

Paul's record in Congress is unimpressive. Being "Doctor No" has meant that the Doctor has not advanced his agenda, whatever it may be. I cannot think of another Congressman of Paul's seniority who has accomplished so little. Jeff Flake and Tom Coburn, only one of whom is libertarian, provide useful comparisons. Aside from Barr, Paul, who is not seeking the LP's nomination, is the most likely on Gordon's list to actually win the Presidency were he nominated. A man who does not understand how to compromise and prioritize cannot serve as President, and a man with Paul's absolutism may very well wreck the country to show us.

No matter: George Phillies got this one right. Paul may be a small government man, but he's a homophobic bigot. He thus would not deserve the nomination of a party that represents a movement in which gays have played a role akin to that Jews played for socialism.
Dave Hollist. There may be something profoundly wrong with Barry Hess, but the real nutcases begin here. Hollist doesn't want to be President, he wants to sell us "contract insurance". An interesting idea, straight out of Rothbard's book, but not the role of a President as defined in the Constitution. Hollist doesn't seem to understand why he runs for the nomination, every four years, since (at least) 1996, and I don't, either. If he wants to bring about the anarchists' Age of Aquarius, surely there's a way that at least begins to make sense. This is not it.
Daniel Imperato. Imperato is certainly an interesting character, but the issues he cares about don't make it clear, any more than Hollist's, that he understands what the President does, why he is running, what the concerns of the day even are, or what the Libertarian Party is all about. Combine the information in the Wikipedia article with some of the emotional, nonsequitur-filled communications he's sent around, and you get the impression that Imperato is a certifiable nut, albeit a high-functioning one.
John Finan. Speaking of nonsequiturs, have a look at Finan's website. Someone is off his meds.

Don't get the impression that I like to pick on the mentally ill. I have a couple of sad cases in the family, and I don't take the topic lightly. However, what is one to say when nutcases run for the US's highest office? Sometimes you have to call them as you see them.

Buckley on Rothbard.

2008-03-04T17:56:00.004-07:00

I'm too young for Bill Buckley to have been an acquaintance. The best I can say is that he was a friend of a friend of a friend. Such distance does not preclude admiration, at least not of a man's clear strengths.

Buckley, or at least the public Buckley, was at his best when looking for the faults of others. Consider his 1995 National Review obituary of Murray Rothbard, a balanced piece with two real zingers:

Murray couldn't handle moral priorities.

It was a great pity, but his problem ought not to be thought of as tracing to the seamless integrity of libertarian principles. In Murray's case, much of what drove him was a contrarian spirit, the deranging scrupulosity that caused him to disdain such as Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and--yes--Newt Gingrich, while huffing and puffing in the little cloister whose walls he labored so strenuously to contract, leaving him, in the end, not as the father of a swelling movement that "rous[ed] the masses from their slumber," as he once stated his ambition, but with about as many disciples as David Koresh had in his little redoubt in Waco. Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God.

One has trouble finding a more astute criticism of Rothbard-style libertarianism (not to be confused with Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism), this "purism" which consists of inventing bumper-sticker scruples, then throwing a fit when reality, sense, or ethics causes one to deviate from the last moment's invention by some tiny epsilon, or worse still, to reject the scruple but not the underlying values. Believe that pressing the "button" to get rid of all government overnight would be disastrous and even morally wrong? You're a socialist, no better than Hitler or Stalin: out you go! Believe that "self-ownership" is sophist's hooey? You're even worse. The guru's own weirdness, of course, gets a free pass.

This is the "libertarianism" of LP chair candidate Ernest Hancock, of presidential candidates Christine Smith and Barry Hess, and of numerous lumpen activists in the movement and the Party, including quite a few involved in the center of downmarket libertarianism down at Auburn. (Lincoln apologist? Must be a socialist!) To Hancock and the rest, Buckley's words still apply today.

A new solution to the Cuba Question?

2008-02-26T22:13:00.007-07:00

The USA embargoes Cuba ostensibly for three reasons:

To prevent the fencing of American property stolen in post-revolutionary expropriations and give Cuba an incentive to give full compensation.
To punish Cuba for the attack on unarmed airplanes in international airspace.
To induce the Cuban people to overthrow the socialist regime.

Perhaps 2 and 3 are the same. Regardless, the embargo has been ineffective on all counts. It has not induced Cuba to compensate victims of the expropriation, nor has it induced regime change. One may argue that it has strengthened the socialist state, by giving it an alibi for its own failings. Consider the Castroist line the newest version of "Socialism is great in theory, it just hasn't been properly done yet.": "It isn't socialism that is causing mass deprivations, but rather the Yanqui bloqueado". Stupid, yes, but even a US Congressman, Jose Serrano from the Bronx, NY, has bought it. (Any Congressman mistaking the embargo for a blockade is not thinking critically and possibly taking his talking points from the Cuban socialists, leaving him unfit for office either way.)

Reasons for failure are complex; Europe's lack of solidarity, Cuban authoritarianism, and simple poverty are all possibilities.

The US has since learned that trade can subvert authoritarianism and socialism itself, as has been done in China, Vietnam, and (arguably) the social-democracies of Europe. Reform, be it democratizing or merely liberalising, does not change the fact that the Cuban government stole something, or rather billions of dollars worth of somethings.

Everyone in the world would be owed compensation by everyone else were all historic wrongs to be righted by transfer from one group of descendants to another. It would be ridiculous to require Mongolia to pay reparations to anyone who had ancestors in Poland, Hungary, or Damascus in the 1200s, or even for the USA to pay the descendants of United Empire Loyalists or descendants of slaveholders to pay descendants of slaves. Such claims are anhistorical inventions, in the case of slavery reparations, rediscovered generations later by those with a victim complex, and in the case of the Godfrey-Milliken Bill, childish jokes.

Claims that have been consistently pursued through the decades, with the struggle carried on--not invented--by heirs are a different matter, as are claims made by living victims. The call for a right of return and compensation for property expropriated under the Absentee Property Law from Arabs who fled fearing atrocities at the hands of militant Jewish nationalists is essentially legitimate and cannot be made otherwise by stalling tactics.

Inconsistency concerning Israel aside, this is the position of the United States, even toward Native American bands, like the Sioux, who have kept up the legal fight continuously. It is an extension of the common law rights of heirs to continue to pursue the civil claims of the decedent, and it is the policy of peace. Just as thieves must never be allowed to keep their gains, so too must conquest, by outside aggressors or socialist guerillas, never be allowed to yield permanent material gain.

Compensation to victims of expropriation is not currently being collected. Cuba refuses to even discuss the matter. Trade provides a means to collect: a surcharge of 20% on purchases of American goods or services made by the Cuban government (or its straw buyers) and 5% on purchases by Cuban private enterprise could be levied until victims are compensated with interest. The rate disparity is to shift the burden to the real perpetrators and to incentivize development of capitalism. Surely, Cuba can also trade with Europe, Mexico, Brazil, and others not imposing such a surcharge--as is already possible--but given its objection to the embargo, and that the USA is currently its primary food source, it's unlikely that it will completely forgo trade with the US. Note that any trade at all is an improvement from the status quo.

There's one catch: Article I Section 9 of the US Constitution prohibits export duties. Could a useful fiction (a la "socialism with Chinese characteristics" or the penumbra of an inkling of a whiff of a Constitutional right to privacy) be created to circumvent this? "This isn't an export duty, it's collection of restitution from Cuba."

Thinking of those pesky Europeans, lifting the embargo might just shut them up twice over. They could no longer blame the US for the misery of the Cuban, and might even become shamed by the truth; unlike the European's, the American's prejudices (Michael Moore excepted) will not lead him to be duped by Potemkin hospitals and hotels and silly UN metrics designed to reward countries with socialized healthcare. Strange as it seems, what would at first appear to be a softening might lead to long overdue international pressure on the socialists to liberalize, or at least to allow elections. Even if mere democratization is the result, Cuba is so socialist that votes can only take it in one direction.

Text-bite: George Phillies on anti-environmentalists

2008-01-30T01:50:00.000-07:00

From his campaign's statement on energy and the environment:

Attacks on scientific global warming observations have substantially passed their time. Many attacks are a political waste product, resulting from 1970s feuds between Republicans and environmentalists over air and water pollution. The feuds are so ingrained that they are being recycled.

I've felt for several years like a lone-gunman in the libertarian movement. Many old libertarians have had Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer whispering in their ears for so long that they come from a different planet, where climatologists are so incompetent as to neglect solar effects, concern for the environment is a socialist ploy, and the anthropogenic global warming thesis simply Must Be Wrong: liberty depends on it. One, of late, said that talk of biodiversity loss was "eco-theology".

How can I even have an intelligent discussion with someone so ignorant, who has had at least eighteen years to learn why scientists and the educated public find such things of concern, but simply hasn't bothered? Worse still, the man's a PhD economist!

Thanks to one of the frontrunners in the LP race, or at least a well-informed campaign staffer, for easing my burnout, if only momentarily.

Have you heard the one about Big Government and the Gold Standard?

2008-01-09T00:14:00.000-07:00

(Proof that even dull 'blogs can inspire interesting questions:)

Ron Paul has popularized it of late, but it is an opinion long current among downmarket libertarians, that going off the gold standard enabled the Federal government to grow to its current size and that going back on the gold standard is a sensible route to decreasing the size and scope of government.

There may even be a kernel of truth to it: going off the gold standard meant that the US as a nation could run up a current account defecit without provoking an attack on the dollar, doing away with Triffin's Dilemma, carrying with it two side effects, the first being that private business was free to import according to market prices, without a need for quotas in order to prevent a major depression, and that the government, too, was free to spend more on foreign aid and defense. The balance of payments was no longer a make-or-break issue; the dollar's peg to gold, which to a modern eye looks artificial and superstitious, no longer unnecessarily complicated everyday economic activity.

That isn't what vulgar libertarians have in mind, though, when they denounce the Federal Reserve and call for a return to a gold standard. Triffin's Dilemma is also resolved when the US Dollar is no longer the base currency for the rest of the world, but massive government interference in the marketplace, in the form of export subsidies, high tariffs, and import quotas, would nonetheless be necessary to prevent an attack on the dollar, deflationary spiral, and depression. I doubt that even Ron Paul would give up free trade to get gold.

The argument instead is that the "government can and does Just Print Money to finance Wars, Welfare, and All That." Translating crass ignorance of the money creation process out of that statement, the libertarian gold bugs' allegation is that the Federal Reserve is a major enabler of defecit spending.

Is that so? The numbers don't bear the story out. As of the seventh of January, 2008, according to the Treasury Dept's Bureau of Public Debt, the total US public debt was $9,199,557,987,743.58, of which $4,083,366,539,555.28 is intragovernmental (owed by the government to itself: think "Social Security Trust Fund") and $5,116,191,448,188.30 is held by the public, including by the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve, as of October 2007 held $775,000,000,000 of the public debt. That amounts to roughly 8% of the total, or 15% of the portion held by the public.

The Federal Reserve thus enables about eight percent of Federal defecit spending. Is taking a purchaser of eight percent of the debt out of the picture really worth going back to the days when imports and exports were a political issue, or worse still, to the era of Great Depressions and even greater Panics of 1873, of cyclical depressions and deflationary spirals?

My America, Yours, and John Edwards's

2008-01-03T23:46:00.000-07:00

John Edwards, the far-left candidate for the Democrats' presidential nomination, once said there are "Two Americas", one for the powerful and the other for everyone else. Tonight, in his speech delivered after Obama won the Iowa caucus, it became clear that there are two: one in his head and the other in which the rest of us live.

In Edwards' America, the 47 million people without health insurance "beg" for treatment at the emergency room. The emergency room in Edwards' America is also apparently where people go to get anti-cancer chemotherapy, which sounds like much speedier treatment than we must deal with in real life. Apparently there's something called "health care coverage" one must buy to get such a speedy course of treatment. I don't have it, thus if I was diagnosed with cancer tomorrow I'd have to see a few specialists, including an oncologist, and suffer through several weeks of chemotherapy, none in the emergency room.

And in Edwards' America, wealthy personal injury lawyers with twenty-six million dollar homes can't open their wallets to pay for cleft palate surgery for downtrodden coal miners. The rest of us must be soaked.

Edwards has taken to being the sob-sister and poverty prostitute of the '08 campaign. (He's also possibly the cocktail-party socialist Lew Rockwell is looking for...) The matters he brings up: poverty, the flawed health-care system, relocation of manufacturers, could all be helped by careful examination of extant public policy. Health care, especially, has been broken by a flawed tax code coupled with government mandates that constitute for many people an effective ban on cheap insurance. Otherwise they're social issues, suited more for the church pulpit or the civic fraternity fundraiser than the campaign stump. That such matters get brought up in the context of a political campaign should have us afraid, and Edwards's manner of doing so should have us shaking in our boots. Edwards is such a simpleton he makes Tom Tancredo look nuanced and such a formulaic ideologue that Ron Paul is a casuist by comparison. He seems to believe that real life is described by same sort of victim/villain narratives he told in the courtroom. Who's a villain? Anyone who's not a victim. Work, save, be entrepreneurial, be responsible, take care of yourself and your own, and you become the target of Edwards's class warfare.

Under an Edwards presidency, if he had his way--and the bad ones always do, separation of powers be damned!--we can look forward to any of the following three scenaria:

Companies like Maytag are forced to keep US plants open until bankruptcy, so as not to "send jobs overseas",
A privileged class is created, of Maytag shareholders, who are paid a subsidy by the rest of us so as not to go bankrupt when forced to keep US plants open by the Federal government,
A tariff, or even an embargo on imported washing machines, is put into place to wipe out other countries' comparative advantage, driving up the price and making something our grandmothers considered a luxury once again less affordable at the margin.

It's not just washing machines that are at stake. Automobiles, microwaves, food, clothing, and health care will all become luxury goods that many of us wouldn't be able to afford without government transfer payments were Edwards to become president. The pool of successful people to be shook-down, soaked, mugged, or otherwise robbed, will also diminish. Fighting poverty the Edwards way will only make us poor and increasingly dependent on men like himself for our basic necessities. Iowans ought be ashamed such a man even received thirty percent in their caucuses!

Is Rockwell a "creative anachronist"?

2008-01-03T16:28:00.000-07:00

It must be a slow week, as Lew Rockwell, the Dean of Downmarket Libertarianism, had time to put together fifteen hundred words of trite bombast about "socialism", particularly the increasingly rare and comical cocktail-party socialist.

I wasn't able to spot any new insight, nor was the exposition particularly fresh, but I did learn a couple of things about Lew Rockwell: he doesn't get away from his fellow ideologues enough, and he hasn't taken Tyler Cowen's advice to heart.

Rockwell tells us neither who these cocktail-party socialists are nor why he concludes socialism is still "fashionable". Contra Cowen, we're told none of the author's personal anthropological experience with the people in question. I spend most of my time around academics and generally progressive-minded folk, I've dated quite a few left-leaning women and am marrying an ex-leftist, and for a few years until recently was rather highly involved with the ACLU at the local and state levels. I have found (and it would surprise the teenaged me) that social-democracy, let alone real socialism, is on the wane on the American left. Most leftists one encounters, at cocktail parties and elsewhere, believe that markets, in general, are desirable, and get hung up on specific instances, having never developed the intellectual capacity to devise a solution to either a market failure or a social problem that doesn't involve permanent government intervention. Lack of imagination, lack of exposure to the alternatives, and a certain lack of confidence, not a secretly believed far-left ideology, is what tends to make the leftist a leftist. If one wants concrete evidence of the shift, witness the support of many left-leading folk for carbon trading!

One could say that socialism is about as fashionable as Ben-Gay and Geritol: the major group exception to the above observation is the soixante-huitard academics and associated movement New Leftists over 60 years old. The others are trivial: maladjusted European ex-pats and angry, pathological youngsters of the sort who like to wear black, chant slogans, and pretend they're going to "drive out the Bush Regime".

Holed up with like-minded ideologues at Auburn, isolated by choice and personality even from mainstream libertarians, let alone the current political discussion, Rockwell has no way of knowing that, in the USA, parlor socialism has gone the way of Freudianism: a one-time intellectual fad now reserved to fools and the deranged.

Unlike the modern left: economic interventionists, "capabilities" theorists like Martha Nussbaum, and utilitarian soft or single-issue social-democrats, socialism is an easy target for the Austrian ideologue. Just as he fancies himself an "economist", he deludes himself into thinking that one of his own predicted--"precisely", in Rockwell's words--the mechanism of socialism's downfall. But the astute observer of Austrianism will note that, since Austrians reject quantitative work, they could not possibly have predicted such a thing, as they have no way of saying whether difficulty of economic calculation, as opposed to the socialist system's numerous other problems, would be its downfall. Moreover, historians will note that calculation was not the downfall of any of the 20th Century's socialist regimes, nor even the driver of reform in the social-democracies. Austrians may have predicted that socialism would fail, but their guess is akin to that of a kook who predicts anthropogenic global warming to be primarily caused by the cattle industry, if not to a stopped clock's twice-daily accurate time.

Easy target, indeed. Haven't we heard this same line before from the Austrians? "Socialism is stupid. It failed in Russia and the Warsaw Pact. It failed in India. Von Mises wrote a book called Socialism. He said it would fail. We like Von Mises." Does Rockwell have a program on his computer that automatically denounces either of socialism or Keynesianism? Does his target audience read these essays or merely scan them for key-words and conclude that Rockwell is still one of theirs?

I'm not a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, but if I were, I'd nominate Lew Rockwell to be its president. He's fighting yesteryear's battle, with gusto, even accurately preserving the errors of his chosen side!

A decisive victory in the war on terror.

2007-12-15T21:26:00.000-07:00

If you were worried that La Migra was so focused on keeping you from having to press 1 for English that they'd let any old terrorist come in across the 5,522 mile border with Canada, rest easy knowing that Uncle Sam has it all under control.

Yes, you can rest easy, knowing that the US will put the lives of Americans first. Keeping Paco from stealing jobs at Chrysler or Hodgie from blowing up the Renaissance center is worth delaying a mere Canadian's life-saving angioplasty.

And you can rest easy knowing that your Border Patrol is too smart to fall for dirty tricks like terrorists dressing up as firemen. Business owners counting on foreigners to put out fires must respond to the will of the people, despite long-standing local sanctuary "cross-border aid" policies.

Your tax dollars are hard at work, sending a message to Al Qaeda of Canada that we, in America, will never forget "9/11", and are always at the ready.

Nota Bene: I found out about the Anchorage Hotel fire from Randy Cassingham's This Is True, a listserv to which I've subscribed since the late '90s.

¡Por una Venezuela libre!

2007-12-03T12:27:00.000-07:00

Few things are more irritating than foreigners with ill-informed opinions about one's homeland's domestic policy, for example, Europeans who look down their noses at Americans for not being sufficiently socialist, despite our better overall outcomes.

I'll risk hypocrisy in congratulating the people of Venezuela for standing up to socialist tyrant Hugo Chavez, overcoming the usual threats of reprisals to reject the constitutional amendments that would expand his control of the economy and make him President for Life.

Sorry Hugo, 51% of your people decided to have no bananas today. On the bright side, this means that in just a few years, you can retire to the paradise known as Cuba.

The Sokal'd "climate skeptics" show their true colors.

2007-11-29T22:17:00.000-07:00

For a while I've maintained that:

Most climate skeptics are convinced that Man's activities are causing global waming.
"Skeptic" is not a mere synonym for "doubter"; most of those who fancy themselves to be "climate skeptics" are not approaching the topic in a skeptical fashion.
Of that number, many are merely parroting each other, without critically evaluating the arguments.

Like Schumpeter's enemies of capitalism, the "climate skeptics", or denialists, already know the verdict against the theory of anthropogenic global warming: what changes is the indictment. First the earth is not, in fact, warming, then the warming is a Milkanovitch cycle, or of solar origin, or a rebound from the (nonexistent) worldwide Little Ice Age. Climate models are not to be trusted, because they don't fit the data with an R^2 value of zero, because they don't predict next week's weather, because they're missing this feedback or that. Uncertainty means that a 5% chance becomes categorical doubt. We've all seen the game played before: it's foolishness, the scientific illiterates being willingly defrauded by the scientific illiterate, court-room flim-flam thrown up against physics, convincing to people who can't tell the difference.

At much risk to his reputation, Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey admitted that his approach has been less than honest. Bailey "hoped that the scientific evidence would lead to the conclusion that global warming would not be much of a problem, so that humanity could avoid the messy and highly politicized process of deciding what to do about it," (emphasis mine), and he let that hope cloud his judgement, to the point where he totally discounted computer simulations (how else can we tell what climatological theories predict?), instead of approaching the scientific question with a frank attitude and an open mind.

The boiler rooms, 'blogs, and talk-radio shows chugged on long after Bailey's admission, but they've been relatively quiet for the past month, having been caught with their pants down. Rush Limbaugh, Neil Craig and hundreds of other 'bloggers, and even Reason Magazine, promoted patent nonsense as a damning argument against the theory of anthropogenic global warming. The journal, "Journal of Geoclimatic Studies", was fake, its home university, Okinawa University, doesn't exist, moreover, there is no Department of Climatology at the University of Arizona. I work in the building that houses the closest thing, the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and I can tell you that there's no Dan Klein, either.

If that wasn't enough to alert the authors to the hoax, the text of the paper itself is a dead giveaway. Like Alan Sokal's foray into "cultural studies", it's nonsense interspersed with passages to flatter the prejudices of the targets. In this case, that means symbols strung together meaninglessly in place of formulas, and technolalia--for example, "concretised diachronic invariance"--that would make a Star Trek writer blush. The graphs are smooth curves where they should be of data points and error bars, and their scales are hilarious; just what does a sine curve mean on a semilog plot? A comparison between benthic bacterial mass and temperature is clearly the same hand-drawn squiggle translated and drawn on a different color on the same plot. Strong correlation, indeed! This was no subtle hoax and the denialists can't say they were tricked; the authors went out of their way to make the paper look bogus!

It was already doubtful that the denialists read scientific papers, and even more so that they read them critically. The discussion section, with its firm rebuttal of AGW, its gratuitous scare quotes around "consensus" and its portrayal of scientists as cowering in fear of funding agencies, was enough. We're left to conclude either that the denialists don't bother to check arguments for scientific merit (plausible, since they repeat debunked claims over and over) or that they can't distinguish between science and nonsense.

Regardless, they're on their heels. Score one for the Good Guys. Can we get to talking about solutions?

This happens all the time, and it usually doesn't make the papers.

2007-11-20T13:40:00.000-07:00

Gunmen break into homes, demanding pot, sometimes murdering the occupants. Worse still, fighting back is a virtual death sentence.

Usually these goons wear bulletproof vests and blue shirts with yellow letters spelling out DEA. Sometimes they're anti-social characters from that same gang that harasses, intimidates, and even threatens to make up charges on the spot.

Today in Tucson, it may have been another group, although it's hard to tell from the story. Expect a manhunt; the government hates competition!

How to bring down an airliner II

2007-10-29T23:44:00.000-07:00

I didn't try bringing a boxful on board today, but it may be possible to smuggle explosive or poison-gas precursors onboard using bouillon cubes, without requiring the participation of a dozen others as in the full bladder scheme.

The only major terrorist bombing of an airliner was carried out using a full pound of plastic explosive, set off by a barometric fuse, hidden in a fully functional tape deck. Accordingly, the TSA makes us take off our belts and shoes, regards breast milk with high suspicion, and forbids carrying on full bottles of contact-lens cleaner. If we were thinking of bringing explosive or poison precursors onboard as shampoo and conditioner, perhaps to be mixed on the suicide attackers head, it's not going to work. Gel colloids that can be squished out of a tube are out, but firmer gels that look like they're made from salt, hydrogenated oil, and autolyzed yeast extract may just make they cut; they seem solid to most people.

Barring that, bring on something that appears solid, with the chemicals micro-encapsulated inside (like scratch-and-sniff stickers). A plastic cube, a cell-phone case, a foam pillow, all could be insidious when combined with the complementary glass of water or when thrown in the toilet.

In order to keep us safe, TSA is going to have to rule out carry-ons altogether. Banning one phase of matter isn't enough; two others, and an infinite array of colloids, remain.

Those familiar with Frank Herbert's Dune may be worrying even more; not only can liquids be concealed in solids, but gases can perhaps be hidden in tissue. Prepare to get your teeth pulled if you want to fly!

Confusion or bias?

2007-10-23T16:43:00.000-07:00

Hostility to foreign trade and worry about trade defecits is cited by Bryan Caplan in his Myth of the Rational Voter as evidence of the "anti-foreign bias". While I don't doubt that such a bias exists, I'm not convinced that this particular case can't be explained at least in part as mere confusion.

Many of today's voters came of age when the Bretton Woods system was still in place, thus in a time when the balance of payments was a serious political issue, and not something that would be smoothed out by the invisible hand of the market. Surely some of them--including commentators--haven't realized that trade defecits are nothing to worry about, and they've perhaps passed their concern down to a younger generation, which worries about trade defecits simply because they don't understand but see other people are worried. Could part of many of the biases cateogrized by Caplan be accounted for by a sort of instinctual, ignorance-driven groupthink, as opposed to innate statist preference?

Is David Horowitz hypersensitive about campus bias?

2007-10-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

Education gadfly David Horowitz takes issue in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education with the assertion, contained in the American Association of University Professors's Freedom in the Classroom report, that "It is not indoctrination for professors to expect students to comprehend ideas and apply knowledge that is accepted as true within a relevant discipline."

That's so in fields like physics, chemistry, or climatology, but as Horowitz recognizes, it's not cleanly applicable to the humanities and social sciences. The AAUP goes on to say that "Students must remain free to question generally accepted beliefs if they can do so, in the words of the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and
Academic Tenure, using "a scholar's method and . . . in a scholar's spirit.""

This is ignored by Horowitz, who goes on to find the former statement "deeply troubling", bringing up Women's Studies as an example of what can go wrong and concluding that

If, as the AAUP contends, the assumptions of a certain discipline provide the criteria for what is academically "true," then intelligent-design advocates have only to establish a field of intelligent-design studies in order to teach their theories as truth — and astrologers, Republicans, or communists likewise. Indeed, if the attitude now enshrined in the new AAUP report should become an academic standard, it will spell the end of the modern research university as we know it.

Bombast! Applying the principles of the AAUP report, one must conclude that disciplines such as Women's Studies, based neither on the scientist's concept of truth nor the analytic philosopher's, have no place at the Academy. Disciplines founded on ideology meet the AAUP's narrow criterion for indoctrination

Indoctrination occurs only when instructors dogmatically insist on the truth of such propositions by refusing to accord their students the opportunity to contest them.

That Women's Studies and most other "studies" departments ought to be liquidated, their faculty merged into legitimate academic departments like sociology, history, and philosophy and judged by those disciplines' more rigorous standards, is a conclusion surely unpalatable to many; there is an unspoken gentlemans' agreement between academic departments that they not attack or interfere with each other. Accordingly, the AAUP report does not explicitly recommend shutting down problem departments.

One who follows Horowitz's work gets the impression that he takes primary issue with the faculty's pronounced leftist tendency. (The report on which the Inside Higher Education article is based relies on self-reporting and the archaic, often ridiculous "liberal-conservative" dimension, but its results give at least a crude impression of the faculty's political tendencies.) As usual, he's missing the heart of the problem. This isn't so much about student freedom as it is about the intellectual integrity of the academy when faced with organized third-rate scholars. As astutely noted by Jacques Barzun, ideologues don't do scholarship, they merely lay a sieve on a problem and see what comes through. We need to quit being "nice" to such sham-scholars, even if they have PhDs and even if they flatter our prejudices. Austrians don't belong in economics departments, Randist Objectivists have no place in academic philosophy, feminist or Marxist critics aren't really critics at all, and Women's Studies needs to die.

Cobden Press

2007-10-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

I missed the announcement, but found out this morning in a sort of roundabout way that Cobden Press, which in the past brought hard-to-find books of interest to libertarians, ranging from von Mises's Liberalism to Tuccille's It usually begins with Ayn Rand back into print.

In its new incarnation, it is actively seeking original work.

Wrongheadedness: Nature or nurture?

2007-09-28T15:02:00.000-07:00

Here's something to think about between two posts about people victimized by loutish government officials who were brought into the picture by panicky, foolish citizens: are people innately stupid or are they taught things that stifle critical thought?

It would seem as though the answer is "yes" to both: man has rather nasty instincts left over from our days spent in tribal societies with nearly zero-sum economies, and children are taught strange things about the history of the world around them which happen to be easier to process than the truth, due to better compatability with those caveman urges.

Here's one example from a popular children's book, If You Lived 100 Years Ago:

Not all rich people were selfish. Many cared about the poor. A newspaper reporter, Jacob Riis, wrote a book called How the Other Half Lives. Riis's photographs showed people living and working in miserable conditions. Men and women who cared about the way the poor lived began to work for changes.

They started settlement houses where poor people had classes in health and education. The poor could even take baths in bathtubs! They could listen to music and see paintings.

In the 1900s, laws were finally passed to protect children. New laws said all children under the age of fourteen had to go to school. They were laws that called for better housing, safer foods and medicines, shorter working hours, and improved public schools. Things began to look up for many people.

Today on EconLog, Bryan Caplan asks a salient question: can reality, which is much more interesting but more complicated than salvation-by-strongman, also be explained in a such a way that an intelligent five-year-old can understand. Co-blogger Arnold Kling takes the next logical step: can journalists learn a thing or two about the market, to keep from perpetuating myths through poor framing and subtle editorializing.

I'd like to think the answer to both questions is "yes". We can teach the caveman bigotry, vindictiveness, and bloodlust out of five-year-olds, and we teach more and more in each successive generation, by the time they're 18, that magical thinking is foolhardy, because nature can be understood--quantitatively!--through application of the principles of biology, chemistry, and physics. There's room for economics and sociology in there. How does one teach a substantial number of children something most adults don't understand, and even actively contradict? We can't teach all the voters, but steps can be taken to ensure that tomorrow's leaders are less brutish than their predecessors.

Journalists may be a hopeless case. I suspect that the Logan Airport worker who got antsy at the sight of a breadboard still thinks it was a (real or fake) bomb, and I suspect that, even when presented with evidence, most adults will prefer their own prejudices to economic science.